The Lake House

by Kate Morton

  He’d gone back. The fact was unnerving and Eleanor hid her disquiet beneath an inspection of the caravan. “You’re living here?” she said.

  “For the time being. It belongs to the farmer who employees me.”

  “I thought you’d finished working for Mr Nicolson.” She cursed herself. Now he would know she’d asked about him. He didn’t react and she quickly changed the subject. “There’s no running water or electricity.”

  “I don’t need those things.”

  “Where do you cook?”

  He nodded at the fire.

  “Where do you bathe?”

  He inclined his head towards the stream.

  Eleanor raised her eyebrows.

  He laughed. “I find it peaceful here.”

  “Peaceful?”

  “Haven’t you ever wanted to drop out of the world?”

  Eleanor thought of the rigours of being Mother, the hatred she felt when her own mother nodded approvingly, the constant watching that had made her bones stiffen and the cogs of her mind tighten as if elastic bands were holding them rigid. “No,” she said, in that approximation of a light voice she’d perfected over the years, “I can’t say I have.”

  “I suppose it’s not for everybody,” he said with a shrug. “Would you like a cup of tea while your things dry?”

  Eleanor’s glance followed his gesturing arm to a saucepan on the stovetop. “Well,” she said. It was cold, after all, and her shoes were still wet. “Perhaps just while I wait for the rain to stop.”

  He brewed the tea and she asked about the saucepan and he laughed and told her he didn’t have a kettle but it seemed to do the trick.

  “You don’t like kettles?”

  “I like them well enough; I just don’t own one.”

  “Not even at home?”

  “This is my home; at least it is for now.”

  “But where do you go when you leave?”

  “To the next place. I have itchy feet,” he explained. “I don’t stay anywhere for long.”

  “I don’t think I could bear not to have a home.”

  “People are my home, the ones I love.”

  Eleanor smiled, bittersweet. She could remember saying something very similar, many years, a lifetime, ago.

  “You don’t agree?”

  “People change, don’t they?” She hadn’t meant to sound so tart. “A house, though—a house with walls and a floor and a roof on top; with rooms full of special things; with memories in the shadows—well, it’s dependable. Safe and real and . . .”

  “Honest?” He handed her a cup of steaming tea and sat in the chair beside her.

  “Yes,” Eleanor said. “Yes, that’s it exactly. Honest and good and true.” She smiled, embarrassed suddenly to have expressed such a vehement opinion. She felt exposed, and odd—what kind of person felt such things about a house? But he smiled, too, and she glimpsed that although he disagreed he understood.

  It had been a long time since Eleanor had met someone new, since she’d been able to relax enough to enquire and listen and respond. She let down her guard, and spoke with him, asking him questions about his life. He’d grown up in the Far East, his father an archaeologist and his mother an avid traveller; they’d encouraged him to make his own life and not to be bound by society’s expectations of him. Sentiments Eleanor could almost remember feeling herself.

  Time passed in a strange unnatural way, as if the atmosphere inside the caravan existed outside the ebbs and flows of the wider world. The fabric of reality had dissolved so it was just the two of them. Eleanor had observed over the years that even without a watch she was able to tell the time accurately to within five minutes, but here she lost track completely. It wasn’t until she chanced to see a small clock standing on the windowsill that she realised two hours had passed.

  “I have to go,” she gasped, handing him her empty teacup as she stood. Such carelessness was unprecedented. It was unthinkable. The girls, Anthony, Mother . . . what would they be saying?

  He stood, too, but neither of them moved. That same strange current passed between them, the one she’d noticed on the train, and Eleanor felt a compulsion to stay, to hide, never to leave that room. She should have said, “Goodbye,” but what she said instead was, “I still have your handkerchief.”

  “From the train?” He laughed. “I told you: it’s yours.”

  “I can’t. It was one thing before, I had no way of returning it to you, but now . . .”

  “Now?”

  “Well, now I know where you are.”

  “Yes,” he said. “You do.”

  Eleanor felt a chill travel down her spine. He hadn’t touched her but she realised that she wanted him to. She had a sense of herself at the edge of a precipice, and in that moment she wanted to fall. Later she would realise that she already had.

  * * *

  “You’ve certainly got a spring in your step,” her mother noted later that afternoon. “It’s a wonder what being caught out in the rain can do for one’s spirits.”

  And that night, when Eleanor climbed into bed beside Anthony, when she reached for him and he patted her hand before rolling away, she lay very still in the dark, tracing the lines on the ceiling, listening as her husband’s breathing steadied and deepened, trying to remember when she’d become so isolated, and seeing in her mind’s eye the young man from the train, the man whose first name, she realised only now, she still didn’t know; who’d made her laugh and think and soften, and who was only a walk away.

  * * *

  At first it was simply about feeling alive after so many years. Eleanor hadn’t noticed she was turning into stone. She knew she’d changed over the decade or so since Anthony had returned from the war, but she hadn’t realised just how great a toll her determination to look after him, to protect and make him well, to keep the girls from being hurt, had taken. And there was Ben, so free and light and good-humoured. The affair offered escape and closeness and selfish pleasure, and it was easy enough to tell herself he was merely an addiction, a temporary balm.

  * * *

  But the symptoms of addiction—the obsessive thoughts, the disturbed sleep, the exquisite pleasure derived from the scribbling of someone else’s name on a fresh sheet of paper, of seeing it written there, a thought made real—are remarkably similar to those of falling in love, and Eleanor didn’t realise at once what was happening. Then again, she’d never imagined it was possible to love two people at once. She was shocked when she caught herself humming one day, an old ballet melody she hadn’t thought of in an age, and realised that being with Ben made her feel just as she had when she first met Anthony, as if the world were suddenly, startlingly, brighter than it had been before.

  She was in love with him.

  The words in her head were astonishing and yet they rang with truth. She’d forgotten love could be like that, simple and easy and joyous. The love she felt for Anthony had deepened over the decades, and it had changed; life had thrown the pair of them challenges and love had adapted to meet them. Love had come to mean putting someone else first, sacrificing, keeping the patched-up ship from sinking in the storms. With Ben, though, love was a little rowboat in which one floated calm above it all.

  * * *

  When she fell pregnant, Eleanor knew at once whose baby it was. Even so, she made a point of counting back over the weeks, just to make sure. It would have been so much easier had the baby been Anthony’s.

  Eleanor never considered lying to Ben, and yet she didn’t tell him at once. The human brain has a knack for tackling complex problems with denial and Eleanor simply focused on her joy: there was going to be a baby, she’d always dreamed of having another, a baby would make Anthony happy. More than that, another child would make him well. This idea had been part of her thinking for so long it didn’t occur to Eleanor to question it.

 
; The knotty issue of the baby’s paternity, she refused at first to acknowledge. Even as her belly began to harden and she felt the flutter of small movements, Eleanor nursed her secret to herself. At four months, though, having broken the wonderful news to Anthony and the girls, she knew that it was time to talk to Ben. She was starting to show. It had happened earlier than she’d expected.

  As she considered how to tell him, Eleanor realised she was dreading it, but not because she feared Ben would make things difficult. Ever since the first day in the caravan, she’d been waiting for him to disappear, anticipating bleakly the day she’d turn up and he’d be gone. Each time she’d walked along the stream to meet him, she’d held her breath, preparing for the worst. She’d certainly never spoken the word “love’ out loud. The thought of losing him had been agony, but Eleanor continued to remind herself that he was a drifter, and that she’d known it from the start. It had been part of the attraction and the reason she’d allowed herself to become involved at all. His temporariness had seemed the very antithesis to the burden she carried. One day he would leave, she’d told herself, and it would be over. No ties; no regrets; no real harm done.

  But she’d been fooling herself, and now Eleanor saw just how false and blustering her casual attitude had been. Faced with delivering the news that was bound to make him run, her bohemian love, a man who didn’t even have a kettle to his name, she realised how deeply she’d come to depend upon him: his comfort and humour, his kind and gentle ways. She loved him, and despite the practical solution his leaving would provide, she didn’t want him to go.

  Even as she thought it, though, Eleanor cursed herself for entertaining naive hopes. Of course things couldn’t stay the same. She was going to have a baby. She was married to Anthony. He was her husband and she loved him, she always would. The only thing for it was to tell Ben he was going to be a father, and watch him back his bags.

  * * *

  She hadn’t counted on biology. She hadn’t counted on love.

  A baby, he’d said with wonderment when she told him. A baby.

  There was an unusual look on his face, a smile of joy and pleasure, but, more than that, of awe. Even before Theo was born, Ben had fallen in love with him.

  We’ve made a little person, he said, he who had shied away from responsibility and commitment all his life. I never imagined it would be like this. I feel connected to the baby, and to you; the tie is unbreakable. Do you feel it too?

  What could she say? She did feel it too. The baby tied Eleanor to Ben in a way that was quite separate from the love she felt for Anthony, the future she envisaged for her family at Loeanneth.

  Ben’s excitement over the next few months, his optimism and refusal to countenance even the slightest suggestion that their baby’s conception was anything other than perfect and desired, was contagious.

  Ben was so convinced things would fall into place—“They always do,” he’d said, “I’ve lived my entire life letting things happen as they must”—that Eleanor started to believe him. Why couldn’t things continue as they had, she and the baby at Loeanneth and Ben here? It had worked so far.

  But Ben had different ideas, and in the summer time, as her due date drew near, he told her he was leaving the caravan. She’d thought at first he meant to move on from Cornwall, and the sudden change of heart burned, but then he pushed a strand of her hair behind her ear and said, “I need to be closer. I’ve taken a new position I saw advertised in the local paper. Mr Harris said that I could start next week. There’s a boathouse, apparently, where garden staff sometimes stay?”

  Perhaps Eleanor’s worry showed on her face, for he went on quickly,

  “I won’t make things difficult, I promise.” He placed both hands gently on her firm, round belly. “But I have to be closer, Eleanor. I need to be with you both. You and the baby, you’re my home.”

  * * *

  Ben started work at Loeanneth in the late summer of 1932. He walked up the driveway one afternoon, in the middle of a hot spell, looking for all the world as if he knew nothing of the estate except that a position on the garden staff had been advertised. Even then, Eleanor convinced herself that things would all work out. Ben had a secure position from which to watch his baby grow; she would be able to see him whenever it pleased her; and Anthony, dear Anthony, need never know the truth.

  She was living in a fool’s paradise, of course. Love, her excitement about the baby’s impending arrival, the long stretch of summer—all had blinded her to reality, but it didn’t take long for paradise to lose its sheen. Ben’s proximity made the whole affair real. He had existed for Eleanor previously in a different realm, but now, here, he was transplanted into the life she shared with her family, and Eleanor’s guilt, long-suppressed, began to stir.

  She’d been wrong to betray Anthony. Eleanor saw it so clearly now, she couldn’t imagine what she’d been thinking. What had come over her? Anthony was her dear love. She saw his bright young face on her mind’s eye—that morning so long ago when he’d rescued her from the path of the omnibus, their wedding day when he’d smiled and squeezed her hand and she’d glimpsed their future stretching ahead of them, the afternoon at the railway station when he’d gone off to war, so eager to be useful—and it made her want to curl up and die from shame.

  Eleanor began to avoid the garden. It was a fitting punishment; the garden had always been her favourite part of Loeanneth, a place of comfort and solace, and she deserved to lose it. But there was another reason she stayed away. Her guilt had nurtured a neurotic fear that she would accidentally reveal herself, that there’d be an encounter with Ben and somehow she’d give up her secret. She couldn’t risk it: the consequences for Anthony would be devastating. She turned away quickly from the window if she ever caught a glimpse of Ben striding across the grounds, and she began to lie awake at night, worrying about what would happen if he decided he wanted more of their baby than she was willing to give him.

  But no matter how she berated herself, no matter how contrite she felt, Eleanor could never wholly regret the affair. How could she, when her actions had given her Theo? She’d loved the little boy specially from the moment she knew she was carrying him, but after he was born she cherished him. It wasn’t that she loved him more than she’d loved her infant daughters, rather that she was a different woman now to the one she’d been back then. Life had changed her. She was older, sadder, in greater need of comfort. She was able to love this baby with a liberating selflessness. Best of all, with Theo, when it was just the two of them, she could be Eleanor. Mother was gone.

  * * *

  Never, not once, amongst all the scenarios she’d imagined and worried about, had Eleanor considered the fact that Anthony’s condition might get worse, rather than better, after Theo’s birth. She’d come to believe so firmly over the years that a new baby—a son!—was just what he needed to get well, that there was room for no alternative in her mind. But she’d been wrong. The trouble started almost immediately, when Theo was only a few weeks old.

  Anthony adored him, cradling him gently, staring with wonder into his small, perfect face, but his joy was often tinged with melancholy, a bitter shame that his life should be so perfect when others had suffered such privations. Worse than that, sometimes when the baby cried, a look would settle on his face, a blank expression, as if he were distracted by other things, secret things, playing out inside his head.

  It was those nights when the bad dreams came—the fearful shaking, the instructions to “Stop the baby crying’ to “Keep him quiet’, and Eleanor had to use all her strength to stop him charging down the hall to do it himself—that she wondered what on earth she’d done.

  And then on Clementine’s twelfth birthday they gave her the glider. It had been Anthony’s idea, and a good one, but Eleanor’s hopes of avoiding the garden were shot. They’d already had their lunch when Clemmie unwrapped the gift and ran outside, so it was only the tea
and cake course left before the formal part of the day was over. Eleanor told herself that no harm could come in so short a time, and issued weary instructions to the maid to bring the tray into the garden.

  The weather was beautiful, one of those crisp, sunny autumn afternoons during which a daring person might still swim. Everybody had entered into the celebratory spirit of the day, larking about on the lawn, tossing the glider, laughing when it almost took a scalp; but Eleanor was tense. She was aware that Ben was working down by the lake, anxious that her family shouldn’t see the two of them together, worried that Ben would notice Theo’s basket and find a reason to make his way up to the lawn to join the party.

  He wouldn’t do that; he’d promised her he wouldn’t. But fear makes a person think crazy things and she just wanted the day to be over, for them to have their cake and tea and return again to the safety of the house. Clementine, however, had other ideas. It felt, in fact, as if the whole family was involved in a conspiracy against her. No one wanted tea, they waved aside offers of cake, and she was stuck playing Mother, when all she wanted was to be alone.

  And then Clemmie, who seemed to have a knack for choosing precisely the worst moments to exercise her natural recklessness, began climbing the great sycamore. Eleanor’s heart was in her mouth, her nerves already jangling, she didn’t think that she could bear it. She stood beneath the tree, focused intently on her youngest daughter as she scaled it, feet bare, skirts tucked, knees scraped, determined that if Clemmie were to fall, she, Eleanor, was going to catch her.

  Which was how she missed it when it happened. Nanny Rose was the first to notice; she gasped and reached to clutch Eleanor’s hand. “Quick,” she whispered. “The baby.”

  The words were chilling. The world seemed to tilt on its axis as Eleanor glanced over her shoulder and saw Anthony heading towards Theo’s basket. The little one was crying and she could see from Anthony’s stiff and awkward stance that he wasn’t himself.