The Lake House (13 page)

Anthony laughed. “I don't know about that, but I do count myself lucky to be the third.”

“Oh?” Constance's chill tone lowered the room's temperature by degrees. “And why, pray tell, is that?”

“My father already has an heir and a spare, which leaves me free to do as I please.”

“And what exactly is that, Mr Edevane?”

“I'm going to be a doctor.”

Eleanor started to explain that Anthony was, in fact, studying to be a surgeon, that he'd committed his life to helping people less fortunate, that he'd won all sorts of important academic prizes, but such details were lost on Constance, who promptly interrupted her daughter. “Surely a man of your class needn't work for a living. I wouldn't have thought your father would approve of that.”

Anthony looked at her and the strength of his gaze was such that all remaining warmth was sucked from the room. The air was charged. Eleanor had never seen anyone stand up to her mother and she held her breath, waiting to see what he would say.

“My father, Mrs deShiel, has seen, as have I, what becomes of bored, privileged men who've been spared the effort of wage-earning. I don't plan to spend my days sitting around looking for ways to fill the stretch of time. I want to help people. I intend to be useful.” And then he turned to Eleanor, as if they were the only people in the room, and said, “What about you, Miss deShiel? What do you want from life?”

Something changed in that moment. It was a small shift but a decisive one. He was dazzling, and it became clear to Eleanor that their meeting that morning had been fated. The tie between them was so strong she could almost see it. There was so much to tell him, and yet at the same time, she knew with a strange but clarifying certainty that she didn't have to tell him anything at all. She could see it in his eyes, the way he looked at her. He already
knew
what she wanted from life. That she had no intention of becoming one of those women who sat around playing bridge and gossiping and waiting for their drivers to take them out in carriages; that she wanted so much else and more, far too much to put into words now. And so she said only, “I want to see those tigers.”

He laughed and a beatific smile spread across his face as he held his palms outstretched. “Well, that's not difficult to arrange. Rest your head this afternoon and I'll take you tomorrow.” He turned to Eleanor's mother and added, “If you have no objections, Mrs deShiel.”

It was clear to all who knew her that Constance was brimming with objections, itching to say no, to forbid this overconfident youth—this third son!—from taking her daughter anywhere. Eleanor wasn't sure she'd ever seen her mother dislike anyone so much, but there was very little Constance could do. He came from a good family, he had saved her daughter's life, he was offering to take her to the very place she'd just professed a deep desire to visit. It would have been bad form to say no. Constance planted a sour smile on her face and managed a small noise of assent. It was merely a formality. Everyone in the room could feel that the power balance had tilted, and from that moment on Constance was to play very little part in her daughter's courtship.

Eleanor walked the two boys to the door after tea. Howard said warmly, “I hope to see you again soon, Miss deShiel,” before glancing at Anthony with a knowing smile. “I might just go and get the Ghost warmed up.”

Anthony and Eleanor, left alone, were both suddenly lost for words.

“So,” he said.

“So.”

“The zoo. Tomorrow.”

“Yes.”

“Promise me you won't step in front of a bus before then?”

She laughed. “I promise.”

A light frown settled on his brow.

“What is it?” she said, suddenly self-conscious.

“Nothing. It's nothing. Only, I like your hair.”

“This?” Her hand went to touch the mop, at its wildest after the day's unexpected excitement.

He smiled, and deep inside her something quivered. “That. I like it. A lot.”

And then he said goodbye and she watched him go, and when she went inside and closed the door behind her, Eleanor knew, quite simply and clearly, that
everything
had changed.

* * *

It would be wrong to say they fell in love over the next couple of weeks, for they were already in love that first day. And over the following fortnight, with cousin Beatrice proving a benevolently lax chaperone, they were hardly apart. They went to the zoo, where Eleanor finally saw the tigers, they lost entire days in Hampstead, discovering hidden green pockets of the heath and learning each other's secrets, they explored the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Natural History Museum, and saw the visiting Imperial Ballet perform eight times. Eleanor attended no more balls unless Anthony was going to be there, too. Instead, they walked along the Thames, talking and laughing as if they'd known one another forever.

At the end of his holidays, on the morning he was due to return to Cambridge, he made a detour to see her. He didn't wait until they went inside but said to her, there on the doorstep, “I came with the idea of asking you to wait for me.”

Eleanor's heart had begun to pound beneath her dress but her breath caught when he added, “And then I realised it wasn't right.”

“You did? It isn't?”

“No, I could hardly think of asking you to do something I wouldn't do myself.”

“I
can
wait—”

“Well, I
can't
, not for another day. I can't live without you, Eleanor. I have to ask—do you think—will you marry me?”

Eleanor grinned. She didn't need to think twice. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, a thousand times! Of course I will!”

Anthony swept her off her feet and spun her around, kissing her as he set her back to right. “I will never love anyone but you,” he said, smoothing her hair back from her face. He said it with a certainty that made something inside her shiver. The sky was blue, north opposed south, and he, Anthony Edevane, would love only her.

She promised him the same and he smiled, pleased, but not surprised, as if he'd already known it was true.

“You know, I'm not a wealthy man,” he said. “I'll never be rich.”

“I don't care.”

“I can't give you a home like this one.” He gestured at Aunt Vera's grand house.

Indignant. “You
know
I don't care about those things.”

“Or a home like the one you grew up in, Loeanneth.”

“I don't need that,” she said, and for the first time she believed it. “You're my home now.”

* * *

They were happy in Cambridge. Anthony's digs were small but clean, and Eleanor made them homely. Anthony was in the final years of his degree and sat hunched over his texts most nights after dinner; Eleanor drew and wrote. His intelligence, his goodness, were apparent even in the way he frowned at the books, his hands moving sometimes as he read about the best way to perform a certain operation. They were clever hands, gentle and deft. “He was always able to build and make and fix things,” his mother had told Eleanor the first time they met. “As a little boy, he liked nothing better than to take apart my husband's heirloom clock. Lucky for us—and him!—he was always able to put it back to rights.”

Their life together was not elaborate; they didn't attend big society parties, but entertained their nearest and dearest in small, intimate gatherings. Howard came often to share a meal, staying long into the night to talk and laugh and argue over a bottle of wine; Anthony's parents paid occasional visits, perplexed but too polite to comment on the straitened circumstances in which their youngest and his new wife chose to live; and Mr Llewellyn was a regular guest. With his wisdom and good humour, and his evident fatherly love for Eleanor, he soon became a treasured friend to Anthony, too; the bond was further strengthened when Anthony learned that long before his gift for storytelling made him an accidental literary star, the older man had also trained in medicine (though as a physician and not a surgeon). “Did you never long to go back and practise?” Anthony asked more than once, unable to fathom what could possibly keep a man from his calling. But Mr Llewellyn always smiled and shook his head. “I found something to which I was more suited. Better that I leave such matters to able men like you whose blood burns with the need to help and heal.” When Anthony graduated from his pre-clinical training with first-class honours and a university medal, it was Mr Llewellyn he invited to sit beside Eleanor and his parents to watch him receive his degree. When the vice chancellor delivered his rousing speech about manhood and duty—“If a man cannot be useful to his country, he is better dead”—Mr Llewellyn leaned to whisper wryly in Eleanor's ear, “What a jolly fellow—he reminds me rather of your mother,” and she had to stifle a laugh. But the older man's eyes glistened with pride as he watched his young friend graduate.

Anthony meant it when he said money held no interest for him, as did Eleanor, but life could be devious and it turned out they were soon to be very rich indeed. They'd been married for nine months when they stood together on the Southampton docks and bade farewell to his parents and older brothers, who were leaving together for New York.

“Do you wish we were going?” Anthony said over the noise of the cheering crowd.

There'd been talk of travelling with the family, but Anthony's budget wouldn't stretch to cover the tickets and he'd baulked at letting his parents foot the bill. He felt badly, she knew, embarrassed that he couldn't afford such luxuries. Eleanor couldn't have cared less. She shrugged. “I get seasick.”

“New York's an incredible city.”

She squeezed his hand. “I don't mind where I am, so long as it's with you.”

He shot her a smile so filled with love that her breath caught. As they both turned back to wave, Eleanor wondered whether it was possible to be too happy. Seagulls dipped and dived and boys in cloth hats ran along beside the departing ship, leaping over each and every obstacle. “Unsinkable,” said Anthony, shaking his head as the great ship pulled away. “Just think of that.”

* * *

On their second wedding anniversary, Anthony suggested they go away for the weekend to a little seaside place he knew. After months spent mourning the loss of his parents and brothers to the icy cold Atlantic Ocean, at last they had something momentous to celebrate. “A
baby
,” he'd said when she told him, a look of profound amazement on his face. “Imagine! A tiny mix of you and me.”

They caught an early train from Cambridge to London and then changed at Paddington. The journey was long but Eleanor had packed a picnic and they ate lunch along the way, filling the hours with chatting and reading, the latest spirited game of cards in an ongoing contest, and periods of sitting contentedly, side by side, holding hands and watching through the window as the fields fled by.

When at last they reached their station a driver was waiting and Anthony helped Eleanor into the motorcar. They set off along a narrow, winding road and in the warm enclosure of the vehicle the day's travel finally caught up with her. She yawned and leaned her head back against the car seat. “Are you all right?” Anthony asked gently, and when Eleanor said that she was she meant it. She hadn't been sure, when he first mentioned the trip, how it would feel to skirt so close to the place of her childhood; whether she'd endure the loss of her father and her home anew. Now, though, she realised that of course she would, but while there was no escaping the fact that there'd been sadness in the past, the future was still hers—theirs—to seize. “I'm glad we've come here,” she said, resting her palm on her gently-rounded belly as the road tapered to follow the line of the ocean. “It's been such a long time since I saw the sea.”

Anthony smiled beside her and reached across to hold her hand. She looked at his hand over hers, large over small, and wondered how she could possibly be so happy.

It was in the company of such memories that she fell asleep. It happened easily now that she was pregnant; she'd never been so tired. The motorcar's engine continued to thrum, Anthony's hand remained warm on hers, and the smell of salt infused the air. Eleanor wasn't sure how much time passed before he nudged her and said, “Wake up, Sleeping Beauty.”

She sat and stretched, blinking into the blue light of the warm day and letting the world take shape again before her eyes.

Eleanor drew breath.

For there was Loeanneth, her dear, beloved, lost home. The gardens were becoming overgrown, the house was more rundown than she remembered, and yet it was perfection.

“Welcome home,” Anthony said, lifting her hand to kiss it. “Happy birthday, happy anniversary, happy start of everything.”

* * *

Sound came before sight. An insect was buzzing against a glass windowpane, short, fierce bursts of static anxiety followed by momentary quiet, and another noise sat behind it, softer but more insistent, a ceaseless scratching Eleanor recognised but could not name. She opened her eyes to find herself in a place that was dark except for a dazzling slice of light between drawn curtains. The smells were familiar, of a room closed against the heat of summer, of thick brocade drapes and shadowy cool skirting boards, of stale sunlight. It was her bedroom, she realised, the one she shared with Anthony. Loeanneth.

Eleanor closed her eyes again. Her head was swimming. She was groggy, and it was awfully hot. It had been hot like this the summer they arrived together, in 1913. The pair of them, little more than children, had lived for a glorious time without the wider world and its rhythms. The house had been in dire need of repairs so they'd set up camp in the boathouse, the cherished play site of her childhood. The accommodation was primitive—a bed, a table, basic kitchen facilities and a little washroom—but they were young and in love and used to living on next to nothing. For years afterwards, when Anthony was away at war and she missed him, whenever she felt sad or alone or overwhelmed, she would take herself down to the boathouse, bringing with her the love letters he'd written home to her, and there, more than anywhere else, she'd be able to touch the happiness and truth she'd felt that summer before the war came along to spoil their paradise.