The Lake House

by Kate Morton

  Afterwards he bought a bag of peanuts and they walked from cage to cage, reaching through the bars, unfurling their palms to receive a raspy licking. There was a man selling sweets from a cheery caravan and Alice pulled at her father’s arm until he consented. With toffee apples in hand, filled with the warm and weary sense of pleasure spent, they headed for the exit, where they came across a man with wooden stumps for legs and a piece of metal covering half his face. Alice stared, thinking him another fairground attraction like the bearded lady or the dwarf clown with his top hat and sad painted face, but then her father surprised her by kneeling beside the man and speaking quietly with him. Time drew out and Alice became bored, kicking about in the dust and eating her apple down to its tacky stick.

  They walked home along the cliffs, the sea crashing far below and daisies shifting in the fields, and their father explained that the man with the metal mask had been a soldier just like him; that not everyone had been lucky enough to return to a wonderful home like theirs, to a beautiful wife and children; that there were many who’d left a part of themselves in the mud of France. “But not you,” Alice said boldly, proud of her father for returning unscathed, for retaining both sides of his handsome face. Whatever Anthony might have said in answer was lost when Alice, balancing along the tightrope of jagged rocks, slipped and fell, tearing a great gash in her knee. The pain was immediate and metallic and she cried hot spiteful tears of rage against the rock that had leapt into her way and tripped her. Her father mended her knee with his handkerchief, speaking gentle words that took her pain away, before scooping her onto his back and carrying her home.

  “Your daddy knows how to fix things,” her mother told her later, when they’d arrived back with their sunburned faces and high spirits, been bathed, brushed and fed boiled eggs in the nursery. “Before you were born, he went to a grand university where only the very brightest people in England can go. That’s where he was learning how to make people better. That’s where he was learning how to be a doctor.”

  Alice frowned, considering this new information before shaking her head at her mother’s mistake. “My daddy isn’t a doctor,” she said. “He isn’t at all like Dr Gibbons.” (Dr Gibbons had cold fingers and savoury breath.) “My daddy’s a magician.”

  Eleanor smiled, and then she gathered Alice onto her lap and whispered, “Did I ever tell you that your daddy saved my life?” and Alice settled in for the story that would become one of her favourites, her mother’s retelling so vivid that Alice could smell the mix of exhaust fumes and manure, see the Marylebone street bustling with buses and motorcars and trams, feel her mother’s fear as she glanced up and saw the lipton’s tea advertisement bearing down on her.

  “Alice?”

  She blinked. It was Peter, her assistant. He was hovering. “Won’t be long now,” he said.

  She glanced at her watch. “Perhaps. Though very few people are punctual, Peter. You and I remain exceptions.” She was trying not to let her nerves sound in her voice but his kind smile told her she had failed.

  “Is there anything you’d like me to do,” he said, “when she’s here? I could take notes, or make tea?”

  Just be here, she wanted to say, so there are two of us and only one of her. So I won’t feel so unsteady. “Not that I can think of,” she said airily. “If the detective’s still here after fifteen minutes you may want to offer tea. It won’t take me longer than that to establish whether or not she’s a time-waster. In the meantime, you might as well get on with other things.”

  He took her at her word and left for the kitchen, where he’d been working all morning on that blasted website. In his absence, the room was suddenly thick again with stubborn memories. Alice sighed. All families were a composite of stories and yet her own, it seemed, comprised more layers of tellings and retellings than most. There were so many of them, for one thing, and they all liked to talk and write and wonder. Living as they had at Loeanneth, a house rich with its own history, it was inevitable that they’d constructed their lives as a series of stories. But it seemed there’d been one very important chapter that was never told. A truth so important, so central, that her parents had made a life’s work of keeping it secret. Alice had been wrong that day at the circus, when she’d pitied the man with the stumps and tin face as she skipped along beside her father and gloried in his wholeness. Her father had also lost part of himself in France.

  “Mother told me just after VE day,” Deborah had said on Tuesday, as they sat together in her front room sipping tea, her inexplicable mea culpa still hanging in the air between them. “We were in the midst of setting up for the celebration party and Daddy was resting upstairs. He was very near the end, and I caught her in a reflective mood, I suppose. I said something banal about it being wonderful that the war had finally ended, that all the young men could come home and get on with their lives, and she didn’t answer. She was on a stepladder pinning a Union Jack in the window and her back was to me. I thought she mustn’t have heard. It was only as I repeated myself that I saw her shoulders shaking and realised she was weeping. That’s when she told me about Daddy, about how he’d suffered. How they’d both suffered after the first war.”

  Alice, perched on the settee with a fine bone china teacup in her hand, was completely baffled. By the fact of her father’s shell shock, but more than that, by Deborah’s choice to disclose it now, on the day they’d met to talk about Theo. She said, “There was never any indication he suffered with shock. They lived in London during the Blitz, for goodness’ sake. I saw them many times and never once did he cower from the noise.”

  “It wasn’t like that, Mother said. His memory wasn’t as good as it had been, and his hands shook due to nerve gas exposure—he wasn’t able to finish his training and work as a surgeon, which made him very depressed. But the real problem was something rather more specific, something that happened over there for which he couldn’t forgive himself.”

  “What was it?”

  “She wouldn’t say. I’m not entirely convinced she knew, and he refused to talk to doctors, but whatever it was he did or saw caused him nightmares all his life, and when he was in the grip of a terror he wasn’t himself anymore.”

  “I don’t believe it. I never saw any sign.”

  “They had an arrangement. Mother told me they were very careful to keep it hidden from us, from everyone. Daddy was determined that we shouldn’t know. There’d been too much sacrifice, he said, for him to fail in his role as father. I felt very sorry for her when she told me; I glimpsed how lonely she’d been. I’d always thought of them as self-sufficient, exclusive by choice, but it suddenly occurred to me that she’d withdrawn as a consequence of Daddy’s condition. Caring for someone ill is difficult enough, but keeping their condition secret means cutting ties with friends and family, always maintaining oneself at a remove. She had no one to confide in all that time. I was one of the first people she’d told since 1919. Almost thirty years!”

  Alice had glanced at the ledge above Deborah’s fireplace, where there stood a framed photograph of her parents on their wedding day, impossibly young and happy. The inviolability of Eleanor and Anthony’s marriage had been a given in the Edevane family’s mythology for as long as Alice could remember. To learn that the two of them had been keeping a secret all that time was to look at a touchstone and see it suddenly for a fake. Compounding the matter, and adding to Alice’s indignation, was the fact that Deborah had known for near on sixty years while she, Alice, had been kept in the dark. It was not the way of things; she was the family sleuth, the one who knew things she shouldn’t. Alice set her chin. “Why the secrecy? Daddy was a war hero, there’s no shame in that. We would have understood. We could have helped.”

  “I quite agree, but evidently she’d made him a promise soon after he returned, and you know how she felt about those. There’d been some sort of incident I gather, and afterwards she promised that no one would ever know. He nev
er had to worry about frightening us, she simply wouldn’t allow it. They came to recognise the signs of an impending spell, and she made sure to keep us from him until it passed.”

  “Promise or not, surely we’d have known.”

  “I was dubious too, but then I started to remember things. Hundreds of tiny, partial fears and thoughts and observations came back, and I realised that in some way I’d already known. I’d always known.”

  “Well, I certainly didn’t know and I make a habit of preparedness.”

  “I know you do. You’re the original pre-emptive coper. But you were younger.”

  “Only by a couple of years.”

  “A vital couple. And you were off in your own world much of the time, whereas I watched the adults, eager to join them in the rarefied air up there.” Deborah smiled, but the gesture was devoid of cheer. “I saw things, Alice.”

  “What sorts of things?”

  “Doors being quickly closed when I came near them, raised voices that were suddenly silenced, a look on Mother’s face, a particular blend of concern and love when Daddy had gone off to the woods and she was waiting for him to return. All those hours he spent alone in his study and Mother’s insistence that we mustn’t trouble him, those interminable trips into town to collect parcels. On one occasion I sneaked up there and discovered the door locked.”

  Alice waved a dismissive hand. “He wanted privacy. If I had children, I’d lock my study door, too.”

  “It was locked from the outside, Alice. And when I mentioned the fact to Mother, all those years later, when she finally told me about his shell shock, she said it had been at his insistence, that when he felt a turn coming on, especially when it felt like it was going to be a rage, there were no lengths to which he wouldn’t go to spare us from harm.”

  “Harm!” Alice scoffed. “Our father never would have harmed us.” Not only was the suggestion ridiculous, Alice was at a loss as to why her sister was even raising it. They were supposed to be talking about Theo, about what happened to him. As far as Alice could see, her father’s shell shock had nothing to do with Benjamin Munro and the kidnapping she’d scripted for him. She said again, “He never would have harmed us.”

  “Not intentionally, no,” said Deborah. “And mother was very clear that his rage was always directed at himself. But he wasn’t always in control.”

  Now, like a draught through the window, cold realisation came to Alice. They were talking about Theo. “You think Daddy harmed Theo?”

  “More than harmed.”

  Alice felt her mouth open and a small soft puff of air escape. Things previously implied became clear. Deborah believed their father had killed Theo. Daddy. That he’d suffered some sort of shell-shock-induced traumatic rage. That he’d accidentally killed their baby brother.

  But no, Alice knew that wasn’t what had happened. It was Ben who’d taken Theo. He’d followed the plan she’d outlined in her manuscript, intending to send a ransom, to blackmail her parents for the money he needed to help Flo, his friend in London who’d fallen on hard times. And although that might seem far-fetched, Alice wasn’t relying on a hunch. She’d seen him in the woods of Loeanneth that night.

  The alternative Deborah suggested was preposterous. Daddy was the gentlest man she knew, the kindest. He could never have done such a thing, not even in the grip of a terrible rage. The prospect was harrowing. It wasn’t possible. “I don’t believe it,” she said. “Not for a minute. If, for argument’s sake, Daddy did as you say, then what happened to Theo? To his body, I mean.”

  “I think he was buried at Loeanneth. Hidden, perhaps, until the police were gone, and then buried.” Despite the awful scenario she was describing, Deborah sounded preternaturally calm, as if she were somehow gathering steam from Alice’s indignation.

  “No,” Alice said. “Violence aside, our father wasn’t capable of that sort of deception. He and Mother loved one another. That was real. People remarked upon their closeness. No. Not only do I find it impossible to imagine Daddy capable of such a heinous act, I can’t accept that he’d have kept that sort of secret from Mother. Burying Theo, for God’s sake, while she was going out of her mind with worry as to his whereabouts.”

  “That’s not what I said.”

  “Then—?”

  “I’ve thought about it, Alice. I’ve thought about it until I fear it will drive me mad. Remember the way they were afterwards? Tremendously close at first, so that you never saw one without the other, but by the time we left Loeanneth and went back to London that strange distance had settled between them. Not so that anyone who didn’t know them would notice, just a subtle shift. It was almost like they were play-acting, being very careful with each other. Still outwardly loving in their conversation and behaviour, but with a new stiffness, as if they were working very hard to do something that was once natural. And the way I saw her looking at him sometimes: concern, affection, but something else, too, something darker. I think she knew what he’d done and covered for him.”

  “But why would she have done such a thing?”

  “Because she loved him. And because she owed it to him.”

  Alice racked her brain, struggling, again, to grasp the connection. It was an unfamiliar experience. She didn’t like it. She felt cast back into the role of little sister for the first time in decades. “Because of the way they met? Mother’s idea that he saved her life on the day of the tigers, and that he’d then saved Loeanneth for her?”

  “That, yes, but there was something else. It’s what I’ve been trying to tell you, Alice. It’s all to do with what Clemmie saw through the boathouse window.”

  Heat was instant. Alice stood up, fanning herself.

  “Alice?”

  They were going to talk about Benjamin Munro after all. The memory came flooding back to Alice, the way she’d offered herself up to him that afternoon in the boathouse, only to be rejected, so kindly, so gently, that she’d wanted to crawl into a dark hole and lie there until she turned to soil and could no longer feel the agony and shame of having been so stupid, so unlovable, such a child. You’re a great kid, Alice, he’d said. I’ve never met anyone with a mind as clever as yours. You’re going to grow up and go places and meet people and you won’t even remember me.

  “Are you all right?” Deborah’s face was full of concern.

  “Yes. Yes, sorry, I just had a sudden . . .” There’s someone else, isn’t there? she’d spat at him, as all the great wronged romantic heroines must. She hadn’t believed it for a minute, it had just been something to say, but then he didn’t answer, and his face filled with sympathy, and she’d realised suddenly she was right. “A sudden . . .”

  “It’s a lot to take in.”

  “Yes.” Alice sat down again on Deborah’s linen settee and an expression came to her, something she’d heard one woman say to another on the tube and jotted down for use in a novel: I told myself to put on my big-girl pants and get on with doing what had to be done. Alice was tired of obfuscating. It was high time she put on her big-girl pants and confronted the past. “You were talking about Clemmie,” she said. “I gather she told you what she saw through the boathouse window.”

  “Yes, and it’s the reason I’ll never be able to forgive myself,” Deborah said. “I told Daddy, you see. I’m the one who tipped him into a rage that day.”

  Alice frowned. “I really can’t see how the two things relate?”

  “You know what Clemmie saw?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Then you know how confusing it must have been for her. She came straight to see me and I told her I’d take care of it. Telling Daddy was the furthest thing from my mind at the time, but in the end I felt so sorry for him and so mad with her. I was naive and foolish. I should have kept my mouth shut.”

  Alice was utterly confused. Him, her, mad with whom? Clemmie? How on earth had what happened between Ali
ce and Ben in the boathouse enraged their father enough for Deborah to believe him capable of causing harm to Theo of all people! With an exasperated sigh, Alice held up her palms. “Deborah, stop, please. It’s been a very long day and my head is spinning.”

  “Yes, of course, poor dear. Would you like another tea?”

  “No, I would not like another tea. I’d like you to backtrack a little, and tell me exactly what it was Clemmie saw.”

  * * *

  And so Deborah had told her, and when she’d finished Alice had wanted to get up and leave that lovely morning room, to be alone, to sit very quietly in a place where no one could bother her and she could concentrate. Call to memory every meeting she’d had with him, every conversation, every smile they’d exchanged. She needed to understand how she’d been so blind. Because it turned out she’d been wrong all this time. Clemmie hadn’t seen Alice through the window, and Deborah knew nothing of Alice’s crush on Ben Munro. She certainly hadn’t suspected Alice of aiding him to kidnap Theo. She’d had her own personal reason for remembering the gardener’s name after all this time.

  Alice hadn’t stayed much longer. She’d pleaded weariness and promised Deborah they would meet again soon, and then she’d left. On the tube she’d sat motionless, a slew of emotions fighting for supremacy as she turned over the new information.

  She couldn’t believe what a self-involved little fool she’d been. Such a desperate, longing child, so caught up in her own world she hadn’t seen what was really going on. Clemmie had known, though, and she’d tried to tell Alice that dark night during the Blitz, but even then, almost ten years later when they were grown women and war had revealed to them the world’s ills, Alice had been too stupid to listen. Too wrapped up in her own misguided view. Worried that Clemmie had seen her with Ben and could therefore link her to a kidnapper. But Clemmie hadn’t seen Alice and Ben together. Alice had been wrong about that. Was it possible she’d been wrong about what happened to Theo, too?