The Lake House

by Kate Morton

  She woke abruptly and realised she was being shaken. “Mother! Wake up, Mother!”

  “What is it?” It was no longer bright. Great, dark clouds were gathering in the west and the wind had picked up. Eleanor sat up quickly, glancing around to count her children. “Clementine?”

  “She’s fine. It’s Edwina we’re worried about. She ran off after a rabbit half an hour ago and hasn’t come back, and now it’s going to rain.”

  “Half an hour—but how long have I been sleeping?” Eleanor checked her watch. It was almost three. “Which way did she go?”

  Deborah pointed towards a distant copse and Eleanor stared, as if by scanning the trees with enough intent she might will Edwina into view.

  The sky was mulberry. Eleanor could smell the coming storm, heat and moisture combined. It was going to rain, heavily and soon, but they couldn’t just leave Edwina, not this far from home. She was old and partly blind, and with her joints as stiff as they were she wouldn’t be able to get herself out of trouble.

  “I’ll go after her,” said Eleanor decisively, stacking the picnic items back into the basket. “She won’t have gone too far.”

  “Shall we wait?”

  Eleanor considered briefly before shaking her head. “There’s no point all of us getting wet. You take the others home. Make sure Clemmie stays out of the rain.”

  After seeing off the girls with stern instructions not to dawdle, Eleanor started towards the copse. She called for Edwina, but the wind was strong and her words were whipped away. She walked quickly, stopping every so often to survey the horizon, to call and listen, but there came no bark of reply.

  It was becoming very dark, very quickly, and with each minute that passed, Eleanor’s anxiety grew. Edwina would be frightened, she knew. At home, when it rained, the old dog flew straight for her bed behind the curtain in the library, tail between her legs and paws over her eyes as she waited out the worst.

  An enormous detonation of thunder filled the valley and Eleanor realised the storm clouds were right above her now. The last patch of light sky had been absorbed by the tumultuous gloom, and without hesitation, she climbed through the kissing gate and started across the next field. A great swirl of wind encircled her and lightning tore open the sky. As the first fat drops began to fall, Eleanor cupped her hands and called again, “Edwina!” but her voice was swept up into the storm and there came no reply.

  Thunder rolled across the plain and Eleanor was drenched within minutes. The fabric of her dress slapped against her legs and she had to squint to see through the sheen of heavy rain. There was a tremendous crack as a shard of lightning hit nearby, and despite her fear for Edwina, Eleanor felt a surge of curious excitement. The storm, its danger, the driving rain, all combined to wash away the veneer of Mother. She was Eleanor again out here, Eleanor the Adventuress. Free.

  She reached the top of a hill and there at the bottom, standing on the edge of the stream, was a small gypsy caravan, burgundy in colour, with faded yellow wheels. She knew whose it was and went towards it with a shiver of recognition. The caravan was empty now, faded curtains drawn across the windows. It was in a state of some disrepair, but beneath the peeling paint she made out a trace of the old floral design that must once have adorned it. She wondered vaguely where he was now. What it must be like to live one’s life in such a way. Free to travel, to explore, to flee. She envied him for enjoying such liberty, and it expressed itself in that moment as a curious anger with him. Madness, because of course he owed her nothing. It was the only the strength of her imaginings that fuelled her sense she’d been betrayed.

  Eleanor had almost reached the stream and was debating whether to follow it towards Loeanneth or cross to the other side, when she glanced at the caravan and stopped in her tracks. A set of rudimentary wooden stairs led up to a landing and there, as dry as could be, was Edwina. Eleanor burst out laughing. “Why, you clever old girl! Fancy you sitting up there, nice and dry, when I’m completely drenched.”

  Relief was instant and immense. She raced up the stairs, kneeling to cup the old retriever’s dear face in her hands. “You gave me such a scare,” she said. “I thought you must’ve been stuck somewhere. Are you hurt?” She checked the dog’s legs for injuries and then, with wonder, took in more of the precarious narrow landing. “But how on earth did you get yourself up here?”

  She didn’t notice the caravan door opening. The first she knew he was there was his voice. “I helped her,” he said. “I heard her fretting beneath the caravan when the storm started and thought she’d be more comfortable up here.” His dark tangle of hair was wet and he was wearing only an undershirt with his trousers. “I invited her in but she wanted to stay outside. I suspect she was watching for you.”

  Eleanor could think of nothing to say. It was the shock of seeing him. He wasn’t supposed to be here anymore. He was supposed to have moved on, to be working elsewhere. His post, those letters from the people he cared enough to know, was meant to be finding him somewhere new. And yet, it was more than that, too. A sensation similar to déjà vu but far more potent. An inexplicable impression, encouraged perhaps by the wild weather, the strangeness of the day, that he was here because she had conjured him. That there was an inevitability to this moment, this meeting here and now, that everything had always been leading to this. She didn’t know what to do, what to say. She glanced over her shoulder. The weather was still foul. A tempest in the field. She felt herself in no-man’s-land, neither fully here nor there, perched on a narrow bridge between two worlds. And then he spoke again and the bridge crumbled beneath her. “I was just about to light the fire,” he said. “Would you like to come inside and wait for the storm to pass?”

  Twenty-six

  London, 2003

  Sometime after Sadie Sparrow had left, the key to Loeanneth tucked safely in her bag, Alice went out into the back garden. It was coming on for dusk, and a melancholy stillness had fallen with the shade. She followed the overgrown brick path, noting odd jobs that would need to be undertaken in the coming weeks. There were a lot of them. Alice preferred a garden with personality, but there was a difference between character and chaos. The problem was, she didn’t get out into the garden nearly often enough. She used to love being outdoors, back in the time of before.

  A tangle of star jasmine spilled across the path and Alice knelt to pluck a sprig, holding it beneath her nose and breathing in the scent of captured sunshine. On a whim, she unlaced her shoes. A delicate iron chair stood in a nook beside the camellia, and she sat, slipping her feet free and peeling off her socks, wiggling her toes in the surprise of the balmy air. A late butterfly hovered at a nearby rose bush, and Alice thought, as always, of her father. All her life he’d been a devoted amateur scientist; never had she imagined he’d wished for anything other than that which he’d had. She’d known that once, in the long-ago past, he’d trained and aspired to practise medicine, but that, like all the dreams and desires belonging to one’s parents, existed in a realm far less real than the bright, bold present in which she moved. Now, though, she glimpsed how much the war had stolen from him. Snatches of conversation came back to her, mumblings and curses about his unsteady hands, his difficulty focusing, the memory games he’d used to play so keenly, trying to keep his thoughts in order.

  Alice shifted the soles of her feet against the warm bricks, aware of each pebble, each spent flower beneath them. Her skin was sensitive these days, not at all like the play-hardened feet of her childhood. During the long summers at Loeanneth they’d gone weeks without shoes, having to scurry to find them when Mother announced a trip into town. The mad dash around the house, crouching to check under beds, behind doors, beneath stairs, and then the final, triumphant discovery. The memory was so vivid Alice could almost touch it.

  She sighed heavily. Giving Sadie Sparrow the key to Loeanneth had awakened in her a long-repressed sadness. When her mother died and she inherited the hou
se, Alice had tucked that key away and promised herself she’d never go back. A small part of her, though, had known the promise to be temporary, had known that of course she must change her mind; Loeanneth was home, her beloved home.

  But she hadn’t changed her mind, and now it looked as if she never would. She had given the key and the task of sorting through her family’s secrets to somebody else, a young detective who was keen but detachedly so, her interest in the crime’s solution purely academic. It seemed somehow an ending, an admission that she, Alice, would never go back herself.

  “Fancy a G & T?”

  It was Peter, a crystal jug in one hand, two glasses in the other. Ice cubes clinking like a prop from a Noël Coward play.

  Alice smiled with more relief than either she intended or he expected. “I can’t imagine anything I’d fancy more.”

  They sat together at the wrought-iron table and he poured them each a gin. Citric, astringent and icy cold, it was just what Alice needed. They made conversation about the garden and exchanged pleasant amiable chatter, which proved a welcome departure from her recent ruminations. If Peter noticed her bare feet and thought it an alarming break with protocol, he was too polite to say so. When he’d finished, he stood and tucked his chair back into place.

  “I suppose it’s time I headed for home,” he said. “Unless there’s anything else you’d like me to do?”

  “Nothing I can think of now.”

  He nodded but didn’t leave, and it occurred to Alice that an expression of gratitude wouldn’t go astray. “Thank you for today, Peter. For organising the meeting with DC Sparrow, for keeping the wheels turning while she was here.”

  “Of course, don’t mention it.” He grabbed at an errant tendril of ivy and turned the leaf back and forth in his fingers. “The meeting was fruitful, I hope?”

  “I think it was.”

  “Good,” he said. “That’s good news.” Still, he didn’t leave.

  “Peter?”

  “Alice.”

  “You’re still here.”

  He sighed determinedly. “I’m just going to say it.”

  “Please.”

  “Now that the website’s finished, I wonder if I might have some time off, if you might be able to spare me from my usual tasks for a while.”

  Alice was taken aback. Peter had never asked for time off before and her instinct was to refuse the request. She didn’t want to spare him. She was used to him. She liked having him around. “I see.”

  “There’s something important—something I’d like very much to do.”

  Alice looked at his face and was struck by a sudden flash of self-awareness. The poor boy had never asked for anything, he did everything she asked without complaint, he boiled her eggs precisely as she liked them, and here she was making things difficult for him. What a crosspatch she’d become. How had this happened to her? She, who had once been filled with boundless joy, who had looked at the world as a place of unlimited possibilities? Was this what had happened to Eleanor? Alice swallowed and said, “How long do you think you’ll need?”

  He smiled, his relief an indictment. “I imagine three or four days should do it, including the weekend.”

  It was on the tip of her tongue to snap, Should do what? but Alice caught the words in time. She forced her face into the most pleasant smile she could manage. “Four days it is. I’ll see you back here Wednesday.”

  “Actually . . .”

  “Peter?”

  “I was hoping you might come with me.”

  Her eyes widened. “On a holiday?”

  Peter laughed. “Not exactly. I think we should go to Cornwall, to Loeanneth. Not to get underfoot while DC Sparrow is carrying out her investigation, just to be there. You could oversee, and I could help with the diaries and letters. Reading between the lines, textual analysis—that’s what I do.”

  He was watching her keenly, waiting for a reaction. An hour before she’d have said no, definitely not, but now the words wouldn’t come. While they’d been drinking their gin and talking, there’d come on the afternoon breeze a familiar garden smell of sodden dirt and mushroom, and Alice had experienced an unexpected jolt of memory and longing. There was something at Loeanneth that she wanted, she realised, an emblem of the girl she’d used to be, of the guilt and shame she’d felt for all these years, and suddenly she needed it more than anything she’d needed in a very long time. She had a sense that if she were even to begin putting things behind her, she would have to get it back.

  And yet. To return to Loeanneth. She’d promised herself she wouldn’t . . .

  She simply couldn’t decide. That fact in and of itself was disturbing: Alice Edevane did not suffer indecision. She couldn’t help but feel that things were starting to unravel, that she was losing her grasp on the weave; moreover, that relinquishing her grip might not be such a bad thing.

  Peter was still standing there.

  “I don’t know,” Alice said at last. “I just don’t know.”

  * * *

  Alice stayed in the garden for another hour after Peter left. She drank a second gin, and then a third, and listened as her neighbours went about the reassuring business of their evening routines, as the traffic built and then began to thin on the street beyond, as the last of the day’s fraternising birds sought shelter. It was one of those perfect summery evenings, when everything was at its zenith. One of nature’s tipping points. The air was heady with fragrance, the sky was graded from pink to mauve to navy, and despite the things she’d learned in recent days, Alice was visited by a sense of enormous peace.

  When she did finally venture inside, she saw that Peter had left her dinner on the stove. The table was laid with her favourite setting and a note with instructions on how to heat the soup had been propped against the utensil holder by the cooker. Apparently Alice had given a very convincing impression of ineptitude. She wasn’t hungry yet, and decided to read for a time instead. In the sitting room, though, she found herself holding the photograph of her family enjoying that long-ago picnic at Loeanneth. Just before everything broke. Though of course, she reminded herself, it had already been broken by then.

  She studied her mother’s face. Eleanor had been thirtyeight years old in 1933, ancient to the mind of a sixteen-year-old, but from where Alice sat now a mere child. She had been beautiful, her features striking, but Alice wondered how she’d missed the sadness in her mother’s expression. Looking back with knowledge of the decade-long trial Eleanor had suffered as she looked after Daddy, kept his condition to herself, absorbed his disappointments as her own, Alice could see it clearly. In a way it made her mother even more attractive. There was a guardedness in her pose, a haunting aspect to her penetrating gaze, and a weight in her brow, of endurance or perhaps defiance. She was fragile and strong and bewitching. Little wonder Ben had fallen in love with her.

  Alice set down the photograph. Clemmie had been distraught when she told Deborah what she’d seen. “She was twelve and a half,” Deborah said, “but young for her age. Loath to leave childhood behind her. And, of course, it was Mother.” Alice could just picture her little sister climbing onto the wooden porch of the boathouse, pressing her arm up hard against the glass, leaning her forehead on the back of her hand as she looked through the window. How confused she must have been to see Mother and Ben together like that. And how devastated Daddy must have been when he found out. Deborah, too. “I thought I’d hate Mother forever after Clemmie told me,” she’d agreed, when Alice said as much.

  “But you didn’t.”

  “How could I after what happened to Theo? His loss rather dwarfed her infidelity, wouldn’t you say? I suppose I felt she’d been punished enough and my sympathy outweighed my anger. Besides, she recommitted herself to Daddy after it all happened. I figured if he could forgive her, then I could, too.”

  “What about Clemmie?”

 
Deborah shook her head. “It was never easy to know what Clemmie thought. We didn’t discuss it again. I tried once or twice but she looked at me as if I were speaking gibberish. She was so devoted to her flying. It sometimes seemed she managed to soar above the ordinary human tangles that ensnared the rest of us.”

  Had she, though? Suddenly the ongoing distance between Clemmie and their mother was cast in a new light. Alice had always presumed it simply an aspect of Clemmie’s rebellious, loner nature; she’d never guessed, not even for a moment, that something so specific, so traumatic, laid beneath.

  And what about me? Alice managed not to say. Instead, rather more lightly than she felt, “I have to wonder why you didn’t tell me earlier? Not about the affair, I don’t mean that, I mean all of it. Daddy, his shell shock, Theo.”

  Deborah’s lips quivered in their firm line. “We all loved Daddy, but you, Alice—you idolised him. I didn’t want to be the one to take that from you.” She tried to laugh but the sound was tinny. “Goodness, that makes it sound as if my decision were noble and it wasn’t. It wasn’t that at all.” She sighed. “I didn’t tell you, Alice, because I knew you’d blame me for triggering Daddy’s rage. I knew you’d blame me, I knew you’d be right and I just couldn’t bear it.”

  She’d wept then, guilt and grief combined, admitting that she’d wondered sometimes whether her own trouble conceiving had been punishment for what she’d done, but Alice had reassured her. For one thing, the cosmos did not work that way, for another, her reaction was entirely understandable. She’d felt a burning loyalty to Daddy and a fierce anger towards Mother. She couldn’t have known the terrible events she’d set in train.