The Secret by the Lake

by Louise Douglas

  I went back into the cottage. Julia and Daniel were sitting in the kitchen. The gin bottle was open on the table between them. I went to Daniel and put my hand on his arm. ‘Thank you for coming and for opening the trunk. Thank you for everything you’ve done. I know this must have been hard for you. Only I think it would be best if you went now. Julia and I need to talk.’

  ‘Will you be OK?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I’m so sorry you had to see that, Daniel,’ Julia said. ‘After all you’ve gone through already because of my sister.’

  ‘Caroline didn’t do anything to hurt Daniel,’ I said.

  Julia frowned at me.

  ‘Caroline didn’t kill your mother, Daniel,’ I said. ‘She didn’t kill anybody. What happened on the dam was an accident.’

  ‘Amy, please!’ Julia put her hand on my arm. ‘You don’t know anything about it.’

  ‘I can’t let this go on. It’s not fair. It’s wrong. Caroline was there, on the dam, but she never laid a finger on Jean Aldridge.’

  ‘Stop,’ Julia said. ‘Stop now.’

  ‘Jean’s death was an accident,’ I said, ‘for which Caroline was blamed.’

  There was a silence. Daniel and Julia were both looking at me with shock, and something else – a kind of revulsion. I felt the weight of their confusion: it was crushing, but also I felt a lightness. After all these years of lying dormant, the seed of the truth had been exposed and there was an exhilaration that came with that.

  ‘How can you know?’ Julia asked.

  ‘I spoke to someone who was there.’

  ‘Nobody was there,’ Daniel said coldly. ‘Only Mrs Pettigrew saw what happened.’

  I shook my head. ‘It’s all a lie.’

  ‘A lie?’

  ‘Yes. Mrs Pettigrew wasn’t even there.’

  Julia gave a brittle laugh. ‘I’m sorry, Daniel, I don’t know what’s come over Amy.’ She scowled at me. Shut up! she mouthed.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Daniel said, frowning. ‘Why would the vicar’s wife lie?’

  ‘Why would anyone lie?’ Julia asked, throwing her hands up in the air. ‘Why would anyone say it was murder if it was an accident?’

  ‘I don’t know!’ I said.

  Daniel took hold of my arms. ‘Who was it?’ he asked. ‘Who told you all this?’

  I could not mention Sam Shrubsole without mentioning Susan Pettigrew. I stood hopelessly silent while they both gazed at me with the same expression, shock, confusion, horror. Then Daniel let go of my arms and turned from me. He picked up the cutters. ‘I’ll be off then,’ he said.

  I reached out for him. ‘I’ll come with you to the door.’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘I’ll see myself out.’

  ‘Daniel …’

  He shrugged off my hand and walked away from me.

  ‘Daniel, please …’

  ‘You should have talked to me first,’ he said. ‘You had no right … It wasn’t your mother, it’s not your family. This has nothing to do with you.’

  ‘I thought you’d want to know the truth.’

  He turned. His face was suddenly furious. ‘Do you think my father would have lied to me about something like that?’ he said. ‘Do you really think he would have lied about my mother’s death? It’s not the kind of thing anyone lies about, Amy!’

  ‘What if they lied to him too?’

  ‘They? Who were they?’

  Mrs Pettigrew, I thought, and the others who were at Fairlawn that day. The vicar, the doctor, Jean’s parents.

  ‘Leave it, Amy. Just leave it.’

  I followed him to the front door. He pushed it open violently. ‘I’ll leave the paint by the gate,’ he said, and he was gone.

  I leaned against the wall and caught my breath. The fog came in through the open door and dissipated in the hallway. I heard Daniel banging about for a few moments and then the sound of the engine of the jeep starting and being driven angrily away. I dug my fingernails into my palms.

  I wanted to cry but I was too angry, still, for tears.

  I went back into the kitchen. Julia was pale. She was staring down at one of the perfect little matinée jackets, running her fingernail along the ribboned seam.

  ‘Oh congratulations, Amy,’ she said, without looking at me. ‘Well done. Ten out of ten. You timed that perfectly. Couldn’t you have dropped that bombshell on him at a different time? When he hadn’t just been rummaging through a trunk full of bloody sheets? When he wasn’t still recovering from being battered by his father?’

  ‘I thought you of all people would want to know the truth about Caroline.’

  ‘I don’t know what to think any more. I feel sorry for Daniel.’ She pushed away the baby clothes and raked her fingers through her hair. ‘At least that’s the end of it.’

  ‘No, that’s not the end of it,’ I said. ‘It’s worse than you think.’

  ‘For God’s sake, how can it be worse?’

  ‘Robert Aldridge was the father of Caroline’s baby.’

  Silence. I could feel Julia’s anger. The tension in the room was white-hot.

  ‘I don’t know for sure,’ I said, tentative now, afraid that Julia might explode, ‘but she definitely had a crush on Robert. She definitely liked him. She drew a heart on the bedroom wall with both their names inside.’

  ‘Robert Aldridge took advantage of my sister?’ Julia demanded.

  ‘I think so. Daniel showed me the room where she used to stay when she was working at Fairlawn. I imagine … well, it would have been possible for the two of them to meet there. Robert and Jean had separate bedrooms, you see. Or perhaps they met in the hollow by the lake. I don’t know. But it could have happened easily enough.’

  ‘God.’ Julia shook her head. ‘I always thought he hated us because Caroline killed his wife. Yet, if what you’re telling me is true, she didn’t. Are you sure, Amy? Are you sure that my sister didn’t kill Jean Aldridge?’

  ‘I’m as sure as I can be.’

  ‘Does Robert Aldridge know the truth?’

  ‘It’s possible that he doesn’t.’

  Julia was silent for a moment. ‘All these years,’ she said softly. ‘It’s taken all these years for me to find out what really happened.’ She held her hand to her cheek. ‘All those years of shame for my family: my father going early to his grave and my mother sending me to ballet school, keeping me distant because she wanted me to be free of the weight of being a Cummings, of having a sister who murdered. And I’ve done what my mother did, haven’t I, Amy? I’ve come back and hidden myself away because I didn’t have the courage to face the villagers. Thirty years have gone by but I still didn’t want to see the looks on their faces, to know what was going through their minds.’

  Julia slid her fingers down the side of her face. ‘And then there’s Caroline,’ she said. ‘Imagine how she must have suffered. Imagine how frightened she must have been, seventeen, pregnant, living in Blackwater.’

  ‘I’ve thought of little else.’

  She smiled at me ruefully.

  ‘And now you’re seeing Robert’s son?’

  ‘Do you mind?’

  ‘It would be unfair to blame him for any of this. But it’s frightening, Amy, isn’t it, once the stone is thrown into the water, how far the ripples spread.’

  There was white spirit in the cupboard beneath the sink. I left Julia with the gin bottle and her thoughts and took the white spirit upstairs to the empty bedroom. It had been difficult before, but now it was impossible to see it merely as an abandoned room. Now I could slip back through time, back into the room as Caroline lay on the bed, a terrified seventeen year old, sweat sticking her hair to her skull, the terrible pain deep down in her belly, blood soaking through the sheets and the windows closed despite the August heat in case Caroline should scream and somebody walking down the lane might wonder what was going on. And who was with her? Her mother? Was her mother holding her hand, pressing a cool flannel to her brow, reassuring her? Dr Crouch
er had been there. Mrs Croucher had told me he’d stayed with Caroline after he’d brought her back from the dam. He would have been at the foot of the bed, his sleeves rolled up to the elbows, a basin of hot water at his side, towels, disinfectant, the smell of blood. Caroline hated the doctor and yet, when she was at her weakest, her most vulnerable, he was there with her, examining her, pressing her thighs apart.

  There would have been no pain relief for Caroline. No sympathy for the girl. No consideration of her feelings or her modesty.

  Was the doctor’s the last face she saw?

  Was his the last voice she heard?

  I shuddered.

  So Caroline had died in childbirth and the doctor had agreed to say it was a fever, to preserve what little was left of her reputation, to make things easier for her parents – or perhaps to protect Robert Aldridge. Yes, that was more likely. It was to keep Sir George and Lady Debeger’s widowed son-in-law out of the limelight. The bastard.

  I understood now that the history of the room accounted for all the odd things that had happened inside it. All the sadness and fear that had seeped into the brickwork was gradually being released as the paper that had sealed it in the fabric of the building, like a secret, was peeled away. Tomorrow I would open the window wide and give the room a proper airing. And I’d paint the walls, paint over the past and then I’d scrub the floorboards and fill the room with light and flowers. Once that was done, then Daniel could come in and open up the fireplace. We could put an electric fire in the opening, that would make the room feel more modern. The estate agent could come and take his photographs. And I’d carry some flowers to Caroline’s grave, flowers for Caroline and the baby.

  I tied my apron about my waist, unscrewed the cap and poured white spirit on to my cloth. I dabbed it in the middle of the last patch of wallpaper. The smell was awful and my eyes stung but I persisted, dabbing a wider area. And as I did so, so the wallpaper lost its opacity. It became transparent.

  I watched as the vile yellow faded and the pattern disappeared; the paper became like tracing paper, and what was beneath it suddenly, after thirty years, became visible. The writing appeared, faint at first but then clearer.

  At last I saw what Caroline had written on the wall behind the chimney breast.

  Dear baby, I read. You were born in this room on the 23rd of August 1931.

  My first thought was that that couldn’t be right. Caroline had died on the 31st of August. How could her baby have been born more than a week earlier?

  I read on.

  Dr Croucher told me you were stillborn but I heard you cry outside my window as he took you away. I will find you. And in the meantime wherever I am and whatever …

  My heart was thumping. I tipped more liquid on to the cloth, put it on to the paper, waited for the paper to become invisible.

  … becomes of me, even if I am in the asylum, know that I am your mother and I …

  I poured some more liquid on to the paper, directly from the bottle.

  … am not the wicked person they tell you I am. I wanted to keep you, I tried, but I was …

  Dab, dab, dab on the paper.

  … not strong enough to hold on to you.

  I love you.

  Though we are apart, I will be beside you, always.

  I stepped back.

  ‘Oh Caroline!’ I said.

  I closed my eyes.

  I was in the same place as she had been.

  We were separated only by time.

  I am Caroline now. I am lying in the bed. The mattress is soaked, with sweat and blood and with the waters that broke when I went into labour. I’m so hot, the room is like a furnace. I’d begged to have the window open but the doctor had refused. If I cry out, or make any kind of noise, he threatens me with his pad of chloroform. There is such pain inside me, pain as if the bottom half of me has been macerated, ripped to shreds. And I feel empty. For weeks I’ve had the company of the secret baby growing inside me, I’ve felt its movements, day and night, the little flutters and kicks, the tapping of its fingers, the push against my abdomen as it turned in the womb. People had started to notice I was growing thicker round the waist. Madam knew. I overheard her talking to the doctor. She told her parents too, Sir George and Lady Debeger. I was all ready for the questions, all ready to be given my marching orders, but nothing happened. I thought everything was going to plan for me and Robert and our precious baby. I thought we were going to be fine. But now the doctor has taken the baby and I am alone. My nightdress is stuck to me, plastered to my sore, heavy breasts and my stomach. The bloody sheets are kicked off all over the floor. It wasn’t meant to be like this. Robert has gone to Scotland. He has rented a little house where we can live together, in a place where nobody knows us. He will work on the estate, managing the fish, and I will stay at home with our baby. We are going to be happy. Everything is going to be fine.

  Only it wasn’t supposed to happen like this. Our baby came early. It should have been born the second week of September, and by then we would have been in Scotland, but I couldn’t help the labour. I couldn’t stop it. And now the baby is born and I’ve heard Dr Croucher talking to my parents: I’ve heard him say the best place for me is the asylum. He said I can go there for a few years until I am rehabilitated. I shall refuse to go. I shall put up such a fight. I shall run away. Robert will be back soon and he will save me, he will sort out this mess. Somehow. He will make everything all right.

  What is it? I ask. Is it a boy or a girl? Where is it? Where’s my baby?

  My mother is here now, beside me, wiping my face with a flannel, holding my hand. She is talking about blood, about the tears in my flesh, about the afterbirth. My mother is crying.

  Where is my baby? I plead with her. Mother, dear Mother, tell me, where is my baby?

  The doctor is in the room. He has a basin in his hand. The basin is covered over with a cloth. His wicked face is severe, serious. He is speaking but I don’t hear him.

  Caroline, listen to me. You are a very lucky young woman. The baby is deformed. He was stillborn and it’s a blessing.

  No!

  It wasn’t supposed to be like this. I was supposed to have the baby in hospital. Robert was going to pay for me to have a private room in a hospital in Scotland, a room with its own private nurse. The room was going to be full of flowers and sunshine.

  ‘It will be all right, my love,’ he had told me. ‘You’ll have the best room and I’ll make sure you have the best doctors, the best care. I want everything in our child’s life to be perfect from the moment it opens its eyes and takes its first breath.’

  He promised he would wait outside while the baby was being born, and the moment he heard its cry he would come into the room straight away, and be with me. He was never going to leave me. We were going to be a family – together, always.

  The doctor is speaking again. He’s talking to my mother.

  It often happens when a young woman has a baby out of wedlock that the baby’s development is corrupted and it is born deformed. It is nature’s way. It’s kinder in the long run for the mother and the child.

  My mother is crying.

  I am screaming. Where is my baby?

  And there’s that sickening sweet smell again, those ice-cold vapours, and the doctor’s pad is over my mouth and nose and the pain is receding and the room is spinning.

  I’m so hot.

  I am burning up.

  I open my eyes. I am alone in the room. I am so hot.

  I climb out of the bed and throw open the window. I gulp in the cool air, great lungfuls of it, the fresh August air, the smell of hay from the meadows and a yellowy evening falling – and down below there is the doctor, putting something on the back seat of his car: a small, swaddled bundle, a bundle that is waving tiny pink fists, a bundle that is crying its little heart out.

  I went back downstairs. Julia looked at my face.

  ‘What now?’ she asked.

  ‘Caroline’s baby wasn’t stillborn,’
I said. ‘And it wasn’t born the day she died but eight days earlier. They took him from her and they gave him to Jean Aldridge.’

  Julia sat perfectly still and silent for a moment while she considered this.

  Then: ‘No,’ she said. ‘No. That would have been too cruel! My mother would never have agreed to that.’

  ‘Your mother didn’t know about it. She was told the baby was stillborn.’

  Julia sighed lengthily. ‘But Amy, it’s all conjecture. We will never know the truth. Caroline is gone and we can hardly go demanding answers from Robert Aldridge. Nobody can tell us what happened all those years ago.’

  I reached behind to untie my apron. ‘One person can,’ I said. ‘Dr Croucher. He was there. He knows exactly what happened.’

  CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

  I PUT ON my shoes and coat and went out into the fog, but I had only taken a few steps when Julia called out to me: ‘Wait! I’m coming with you.’

  ‘What about Vivi?’ I asked.

  ‘She’s at Sunnyvale,’ Julia replied. ‘We can collect her and she can come back with us.’

  ‘Are you sure? It’s quite a way.’

  Julia was pulling on her coat awkwardly, balancing on her stick. Her breathing was quick.

  ‘I want to hear every word the doctor has to say,’ she said. ‘I want to hear it from his own mouth.’

  I put my arm around Julia’s waist and she held on to the back of my coat and the two of us set off along the lane in the direction of the lake. Within moments we were enclosed by the fog, and we could see nothing but the bony fingers of leafless trees reaching out through the gloom. Julia was soon out of breath and every few steps she slipped on the damp surface. She slowed me down yet I was so glad we were together. Julia’s weight leaning on me did not feel like a burden, rather the opposite.