The Lake House

by Kate Morton

  “His life,” Peter corrected.

  “His life,” echoed Sadie.

  “How pragmatic you are, DC Sparrow.” Alice lifted a single eyebrow. “Perhaps it’s only the writer in me that presumes all parents who give up children must hold on to a small kernel of hope that one day, somehow, their paths will cross again.”

  Sadie was still dodging Bertie’s gaze. “There might be cases where the parent feels the child will be disappointed in who they are. Angry and hurt that they were given up in the first place.”

  “I expect so,” said Alice, taking up the newspaper article from Sadie’s file, gazing at the portrait of Eleanor taken beneath the tree at Loeanneth, with three little girls in summer dresses gathered round her. “But my mother always had the courage of her convictions. I’ve no doubt that having given him up for what she thought were the best possible reasons, she’d have been brave enough to weather the possibility that he resented her decision.”

  “Oh my!”

  They all looked up at Bertie, hovering behind the table with a plate of pear cake in one hand and a teacup in the other.

  “Granddad?”

  Peter was fastest, leaping up to take the cake and tea before they fell. He ushered Bertie into a seat.

  “Granddad, are you all right?”

  “Yes, I, it’s just such a—Well, no, it’s not a coincidence at all, people often use that word incorrectly, don’t they? They mean something is a remarkable concurrence of events but they forget, as I did, that there’s a causal link. Not a coincidence at all, just a surprise, a huge surprise.”

  He’d become flustered, he was babbling, and Sadie experienced a sudden rush of worry that the day had been too much for him, that he was on the verge of a stroke. Love and fear combined to express as doggedness. “Granddad?” she said sternly. “What are you talking about?”

  “This woman,” he said, tapping at the picture of Eleanor in Alice’s newspaper article. “I’ve met her before, when I was a boy working in my mum and dad’s shop, during the war.”

  “You met my mother?” said Alice, just as Sadie said, “You met Eleanor Edevane?”

  “Yes on both counts. A number of times. Though I didn’t know her name. She used to come into the shop in Hackney when she was doing her volunteering.”

  “Yes.” Alice was delighted. “She worked in the East End during the war. She helped children who were bombed out of their homes.”

  “I know.” Bertie was smiling widely now, too. “She was very kind. One of our most reliable customers. She used to come in and buy a few odds and ends, things she certainly didn’t need, and I’d make her a cup of tea.”

  “Well, that is a coincidence,” said Peter.

  “No,” said Bertie, “that’s what I’m trying to say.” He laughed. “It’s certainly a surprise to see her picture after all this time and realise she’s connected to the business at the Lake House that’s had my granddaughter so caught up, but it’s not as random as you might think.”

  “Granddad?”

  “She’s the reason I moved here, to Cornwall, she’s the one who put the idea in my head in the first place. We used to have a picture hanging by the cash register, it was a postcard from my uncle, a photograph of a small wooden door set into a brick garden wall, covered in ivy and ferns, and she saw it once and told me about the gardens in Cornwall. I asked her, I think—I had a book set in Cornwall and the place had always seemed magical to me. She talked about the Gulf Stream and the exotic species that could be grown here. I never forgot it. She even mentioned Loeanneth, now I think about it, though not by name. She told me she was born and grew up on an estate that was famed for its great lake and gardens.”

  “Incredible,” Peter said. “And to think all these years later your granddaughter would discover her abandoned house and become obsessed with the case.”

  “Not obsessed, exactly,” Sadie corrected. “Interested.”

  Bertie ignored the interruption, caught up in his memory of the long-ago conversations he’d shared with Eleanor Edevane about Loeanneth. “She made it sound like a magical place, the salt and sea, smugglers’ tunnels and fairy folk. She said there was even a miniature garden, a perfect, tranquil spot with a goldfish pond at its centre.”

  “There was,” said Alice. “Ben Munro built it.”

  “Ben Munro?”

  “One of the gardeners at Loeanneth.”

  “Well now . . .” Bertie tilted his head. “That is peculiar. That was my uncle’s name, my favourite uncle who died in the Second World War.”

  Alice frowned, as Peter said, “Your uncle used to work at Loeanneth?”

  “I’m not sure. It’s possible, I suppose. He did all kinds of work. He wasn’t the sort to stay put for long. He knew a lot about plants.”

  Everyone looked at one another and Alice’s frown deepened. “It must be a different Benjamin Munro. The Ben we knew at Loeanneth couldn’t have been anyone’s uncle; he was an only child.”

  “So was Uncle Ben. He wasn’t my biological uncle. He was a good friend of my mother’s. They grew up together and remained as thick as thieves. They both had archaeologist parents who travelled with their work. Ben and Mum met when their families were stationed in Japan.”

  Everyone fell silent and the air around them seemed charged with static. The quiet was broken by an enormous crack and then the fizz of the first Midsummer firework being shot into the sky above the harbour.

  “Where were you born, Bertie?” Alice’s voice was light.

  “Granddad was adopted as a baby,” said Sadie, remembering. He’d told her all about his mother and the troubles she’d had getting pregnant, how glad she was when he finally came along, how much he’d loved and been loved by her. It had been back when Sadie came to live with them, and had helped her to feel easier about her own decision to give up her baby. Only afterwards, the fact had faded from her memory. It had been such a confusing time, there’d been so many thoughts and feelings jostling for attention, and Bertie had spoken about his parents often over the years, with such love and warmth, that she’d simply forgotten that they weren’t his biological family.

  Bertie was still talking about his mother, Flo, and his Uncle Ben, unaware that Alice had stood very quietly and was making her way around the table to where he sat. She took his face between her shaking hands. Wordlessly, her eyes moved over his features, studying each one. A cry caught in her throat and Peter reached to steady her.

  “Granddad,” Sadie said again, a note of awe in her voice.

  “Bertie,” said Peter.

  “Theo,” said Alice.

  * * *

  They were still sitting in the courtyard of Seaview Cottage when the stars began to fade and the promise of daylight cast a ribbon along the horizon. “He used to write to me,” said Bertie, opening the wooden box he’d brought down from the attic. He took out a pile of letters. The earliest were dated 1934. “Long before I could read, but my mum and dad used to read them to me. Sometimes they came with little gifts, or little origami animals he’d folded to amuse me. Whenever he travelled for work, and when he went away to war, he’d write. I told you, he was my favourite uncle. I always felt close to him. A kinship, I guess you could say.”

  “I know just what you mean,” said Alice again. It had become a mantra. “I felt the same connection when we met this morning. A familiarity. As if I recognised you in some way.”

  Bertie smiled at her and nodded, his eyes glazing afresh.

  “What else is in the box, Granddad?” Sadie said gently, sensing he could use the distraction.

  “Oh, bits and bobs,” he said. “Childhood mementoes.” He took out a bedraggled toy puppy dog, an old book, and a small romper suit. Sadie noticed it was missing a button and gasped. She reached into the pocket of her jeans and pulled out the round cupid she’d found at Loeanneth. A perfect match.

&
nbsp; “Did your mother and father ever tell you about your biological parents?” Peter asked.

  Bertie smiled. “They used to tell me a story, about a tiger and a pearl. As a little fellow, I was more than happy to believe I’d been brought back from Africa in the form of an enchanted jewel; that I’d been born in the woods, weaned by fairies and then left on my parents’ doorstep.” He took a necklace from the box, a tiger’s-tooth pendant suspended on it, and ran his thumb over the dull ivory surface. “Uncle Ben gave this to me, and as far as I was concerned, it was proof that the story was true. As I got older, I stopped asking. I would have liked to know who they were, of course, but my parents loved me—I couldn’t have asked to grow up in a happier family—and so I made peace with the not knowing.” He glanced again at Alice, his eyes shining with a lifetime of emotion. “What about you?” he said, nodding at the metal box that stood on the table in front of her, still covered in dirt. “I showed you mine.”

  She took the key from her purse and unlocked the filigree box, lifting the lid to reveal two identical piles of paper. Bye Baby Bunting, read the title on top, by Alice Edevane.

  “They’re manuscripts,” he said.

  “Yes,” Alice agreed. “The only existing copies of the first novel I ever finished.”

  “What are they doing in the box?”

  “A writer never destroys her work,” said Alice.

  “But what were they doing in the ground?”

  “Now that’s a long story.”

  “Maybe you’ll tell me sometime?”

  “Maybe I will.”

  Bertie crossed his arms in mock castigation, and for a split second Sadie glimpsed Alice in the gesture. “At least tell us what it’s about,” he said. “Is it a mystery?”

  Alice laughed. The first open, unguarded laugh Sadie had heard from her. A musical, youthful sound. “Oh, Bertie,” she said. “Theo. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  Thirty-four

  London, 1941

  She’d come as soon as she heard where the bombs had landed in the night. It had been two years since she’d received the letter, containing very little other than the news that he’d enlisted and an address in Hackney. To this point Eleanor had managed to stay away. Her war work took her close enough that when she saw children in the streets, watched them playing knuckles or running errands in their grey shorts and scuffed shoes, she could convince herself that one of them was him; but when she read about the bombings in the newspapers, when she reported for work that morning and was given the list of ravaged streets to visit, she’d turned on her heel and run.

  Debris of stones and bricks and broken furniture littered the pockmarked road but Eleanor picked her way through quickly. A fireman nodded a greeting and she returned it politely. Her fingers were crossed—silly and childish, but helpful somehow—and her throat constricted a little more with each shell of a house she passed.

  They hadn’t counted on another war. When she made Ben promise never to get in touch, insisted that she mustn’t know where Theo had been taken, she hadn’t imagined a future like this one. She’d told herself it would be enough, it would have to be enough, to know he was with people Ben loved; that her child—her beautiful baby—would grow up happy and safe. But she hadn’t counted on another war. It changed things.

  Eleanor wasn’t going to tell Anthony she’d come today. There was no point. She was only going to check the house hadn’t been hit; she wasn’t going to go inside. She certainly had no plans to see Theo. All the same, she felt the chill of the illicit. Eleanor didn’t like keeping secrets, not anymore—their secrets, hers and Anthony’s, had almost been their undoing.

  She’d thought learning of the affair would destroy him, but it hadn’t. He’d come to her calmly in the days afterwards and urged her to leave him. He’d realised by then that Theo wasn’t his son and he said he wanted her to have another chance at happiness. He was tired of being a burden, inflicting damage on the people he loved most in the world.

  But how could she have done that? Gone away with Ben and Theo, started again. She would never have left her girls and she couldn’t take them away from Anthony. Besides, she loved her husband. She always had. She loved both of them, Anthony and Ben, and she cherished Theo; but life wasn’t a fairy tale and there were instances when one couldn’t have everything one wanted, not at the same time.

  As for Anthony, learning of her affair with Ben seemed to lighten his load in some way. He said it made his life less perfect; that he had paid a price, gone some of the way towards restitution.

  “Restitution for what?” she’d said, wondering if he was finally going to be honest with her.

  “For everything. For surviving. For coming home to all of this.”

  She’d known of course that there was more to it, that he was talking, however cryptically, about the great shadow that stalked him, and when Theo was safe, far away from Loeanneth, she’d finally asked him about Howard. He’d been angry at first, and more upset than she’d ever seen him, but eventually, with time and much coaxing, he’d confirmed the story she’d already uncovered. He told her everything, about Howard and Sophie, and baby Louis, too; the night in the barn when he’d almost helped his friend escape; the terrible line he’d nearly crossed. “But you didn’t,” Eleanor said at last, as he wept on her shoulder.

  “I wanted to; I wished I had. I still wish it sometimes.”

  “You wanted to save Howard. You loved him.”

  “I should have saved him.”

  “He wouldn’t have wanted you to, not like that. He loved Sophie and baby Louis. He considered himself Louis’s father, and a parent will always sacrifice themselves before their child.”

  “But if there’d been another way.”

  “There wasn’t. I know you: you’d have found it if there were.”

  Anthony had glanced at her then and she’d glimpsed the tiniest light of hope in his eyes that she was right.

  She continued, “If you’d done anything differently you’d have both been shot. Howard was right; he saw things clearly.”

  “He sacrificed himself for me.”

  “You tried to help him. You took a great risk to help him.”

  “I failed.”

  There’d been nothing she could say to that. She’d simply sat with him as he grieved for his lost friend. Finally, she’d squeezed his hand firmly and whispered, “You didn’t fail me. You made me a promise. You said you wouldn’t let anything stop you coming home.”

  There was only one other secret she still kept from him and that was the truth about what happened to Daffyd. Anthony had loved him and never would have borne knowing what Constance had done. But Eleanor had found the empty bottle of sleeping pills in her mother’s room and she’d known. Her mother didn’t bother to deny it. “It was the only way,” she said. “The only hope I had for renewal.”

  Constance and Eleanor’s relationship, never good, was untenable after that. There was no question of the old woman moving with them to London, but she couldn’t be abandoned either. Not entirely. Eleanor searched all over before she finally found Seawall. It was expensive, but worth every penny. “There’s no better nursing home in England. Such a wonderful position,” the matron had said as she gave Eleanor a tour, “immediately on the sea front. Not a room in the building from which one can’t hear the ocean rolling in and out, in and out.”

  “It’s just right,” Eleanor had said, signing the admission forms. And it was. Just and right. The unrelenting sound of the ocean for the rest of her days had been precisely what Constance deserved.

  * * *

  Eleanor turned into the street, almost colliding with a stern-looking policeman on a bicycle. Her gaze ran along the houses until it reached the grocery store. Her breaths lightened when she saw the cheery sign out front: More Open Than Usual!

  Relief was instant. It hadn’t bee
n hit.

  Eleanor decided it was just as well while she was here to take a look at the shopfront. She continued walking until she stood close enough to peer through the taped front window. She took in the name of the shop painted proudly at the top of the glass, and the neat display of tins on the shelf inside. There were two levels to the brick house above, matching curtains in each window. This was a nice place. Comfortable. Eleanor could imagine the effort it took to keep the awning and the glass so clean during the air raids.

  The bell tinkled softly when she pushed open the door. It was a small shop, but surprisingly well stocked given the shortages. Someone had gone to a lot of effort to make sure there were interesting items to offer war-weary customers. Ben had said his friend, Flo, was a force to be reckoned with—“She never does anything by halves.” It had been one of the things, along with his assurance that his friend was kind and good and true, that had helped Eleanor warm to this woman she’d never met, to whom she was going to entrust so much of her heart.

  The shop was very still. It smelled of fresh tea-leaves and powdered milk. There was no one behind the counter and Eleanor told herself it was a sign. She had seen what she’d come to see and now it was time to go.

  But a door in the wall at the back of the shop was ajar and it struck her that it must lead into the house. The place where he slept at night and ate his meals, and laughed and cried and leapt and sang, the home in which he lived.

  Her heart was beating quickly now. She wondered whether she dared peek behind the door? Eleanor glanced over her shoulder and saw a woman with a black perambulator trundling along the street outside. There was no one else in the shop. All she had to do was slip through the opening. She drew a deep steadying breath and then startled when a noise came from behind her. She spun around in time to see a boy appear from behind the shop counter.