The Lake House (19 page)

While Deborah continued to fiddle with her phone, shifting it further away and then close again, muttering as she tried to read the display, Alice took a sip of tea.

Deborah frowned and pressed a key. “Maybe if I . . . ?”

Alice set down her cup. “I've been thinking lately of Loeanneth.”

Deborah expressed only the faintest flicker of surprise. “Oh?”

Carefully
, Alice reminded herself,
go carefully
. “When Daddy came back from the war, do you remember how excited Mother was? The room upstairs she filled with all his favourite things: the microscope and specimen boxes, the rows of books, his old gramophone and dance records. We used to sneak upstairs to spy through the keyhole at the tall, handsome stranger in our midst.”

Deborah put down her phone and regarded Alice through slightly narrowed eyes. “Goodness,” she said at length. “We are nostalgic today.”

Alice ignored the implied question as to why that might be. “Not nostalgic,” she said. “I don't long romantically for the past. I'm simply raising the topic for discussion.”

“You and your semantics.” Deborah shook her head, amused. “Well, if you say so. God forbid anyone accuse you of sentimentality! And yes, for the record, I do remember. They used to dance up there and you and I tried to do the same. Of course you had two left feet . . .” Deborah smiled.

“She was saving him.”

“Whatever do you mean by that?”

“Only that he must have been exhausted—the war, all those years away—and she cherished him back to his old self.”

“I suppose she did.”

“He did the same for her, later, didn't he? After Theo.” Alice strove for nonchalance. “They were lucky to have one another. The loss of a child, the not knowing. Not many marriages would survive it.”

“That's true.” Deborah spoke cautiously, no doubt wondering why Alice was dragging the conversation in a direction they'd tacitly agreed never to go. But Alice couldn't afford to stop now. She was preparing her next question when Deborah said, “The night before my wedding she came to my bedroom and delivered a little pep talk. She quoted One Corinthians.”

“
Love is patient, love is kind
?”

“
Love keeps no record of wrongs
.”

“That's rather grim. Whatever did she mean?”

“I can't imagine.”

“You didn't ask her?”

“I did not.” An old acerbity had crept into Deborah's voice, though she tried valiantly to mask it, and Alice remembered something she'd forgotten. Her mother and sister had been at odds in the lead-up to Deborah's wedding, snapping at each other and inflicting long periods of silence on the rest of the household. The Edevane family had returned to London by then. Deborah's wedding to Tom had taken place only five months after Theo's disappearance and family life at Loeanneth was over. It would never resume, though none of them knew that at the time; the police case had been wound down but they still clung to hope. There'd been talk of postponing the wedding, but Deborah and Eleanor had both been adamant that it should go ahead as planned. It had been the one thing they'd agreed on at the time.

“Top up?” said Alice, lifting the teapot. Deborah's mention of their mother's pre-wedding visit was unanticipated. She hadn't intended to revive old grievances and was anxious that the misstep shouldn't prevent her from achieving her ends.

Deborah slid her cup and saucer across the table.

“We had good times there, didn't we?” Alice continued, tea gurgling from the pot's spout. “Before Theo.”

“We did, though I always preferred London. That lovely house in Cadogan Square, Mr Allan bringing round the Daimler, the ballrooms and dresses and nightclubs. The country didn't hold enough excitement for me.”

“It was beautiful, though. The woods, the lake, all those picnics. The gardens.” Lightly did it. “Of course, it should have been beautiful. Mother had a team of gardeners working round the clock.”

Deborah laughed. “Those were the days. I'm hard-pressed finding someone to dust my mantelpiece now.”

“Old Mr Harris, wasn't it, the fellow in charge, and his son, the one who'd come back from the Somme with that dreadful brain injury.”

“Adam, poor soul.”

“Adam, yes, and there was another fellow, I'm sure there was. He came in on contract.” Alice could hear her own heartbeat thumping in her ears. The cafe noise seemed far away, as if she were speaking from within the glass vacuum tube on an old radio. She said, “Benjamin something?”

Deborah frowned, straining to remember, and then shook her head. “It doesn't ring any bells with me, I'm afraid—but then it was a long time ago, and there were so many who came and went. One can't be expected to remember them all.”

“Quite.” Alice smiled agreement and hid behind a sip of cooling tea. She hadn't realised she was holding her breath. Relief flowed, but with it came a strange deflation. For a split second she'd been fully prepared to hear Deborah say, “Munro. His name was Benjamin Munro,” and the expectation had been thrilling. She fought a sudden temptation to push further, to force Deborah to remember him, as if in some way her sister's collusion would conjure him back to life, allow her to talk about him and therefore feel again the way she had back then. But it was a foolish urge, a madness, and she extinguished it. She had learned what she needed to: Deborah had no memory of Ben, and Alice was safe. The wisest thing now was to move the conversation swiftly on to safer ground. She buttered a scone and said, “What news of Linda?”

Alice only half listened as Deborah picked up the well-worn topic. The tedious story of The Errant Granddaughter mattered to Alice only insofar as she was planning to leave Loeannth to Linda. She hadn't much choice in the matter. The house was entailed and she had no descendants of her own; those she might have had were little more than ghosts on the end of the bed on nights when she couldn't sleep, and to sell the house was unthinkable.

“Pippa's beside herself, of course—” Deborah was saying, “that was her on her voicemail before—and one can hardly blame her. They call it a gap year, but Linda's been gone almost five.”

“Well, she's young, and exploring runs in the blood.”

“Yes, and we both know what happened to Great-Grandfather Horace.”

“I don't think there are Carib tribes in Australia. She's far more likely to lose herself to Sydney's beaches than cannibalism.”

“That's cold comfort for Pippa, I'm afraid.”

“Linda will find her way home eventually.”
When her allowance runs out
, Alice thought tartly, though she refrained from saying so. They'd never discussed the matter candidly, but Alice held grave reservations about Linda's character. She was quite sure Deborah felt the same way, but one didn't criticise one's sister's only granddaughter, not openly, it was bad manners. Besides, Deborah's difficulty conceiving had conferred the status of royalty onto her meagre issue. “You'll see, she'll arrive back a new woman, a
better
woman, for the experience.”

“I hope you're right.”

As did Alice. The Lake House had been in the deShiel family for centuries and Alice had no intention of being the one to let it go.

It had been a shock when the house came to her in the aftermath of Eleanor's death. But then their mother's death itself had been a shock. It was 1946 and the war was over. After all that dying and destruction it had seemed scandalous that a person might step out onto the street and have her life extinguished by a bus en route from Kilburn to Kensington. Especially a person like Eleanor. It just wasn't the sort of death one expected for a woman like her.

The bus driver had suffered dreadfully. At the inquest he'd broken down and wept. He'd noticed Eleanor, he said, standing on the pavement, and he'd thought what a dignified lady she looked in her smart suit, carrying that leather briefcase. He'd wondered where she might be going. There was something about her expression, he said, as if she were lost in thought, but then a child at the back of his bus had begun screaming and he'd looked away from the road, only briefly, only for the merest second, you understand, and the next thing he knew,
thump
. That was the word he used.
Thump
. Alice could still hear him when she closed her eyes.

She hadn't wanted the house, Loeanneth, none of them had wanted it, but their mother's reasoning had seemed clear: Deborah was wealthy, Clemmie was dead, which left only Alice. Alice, however, knew Eleanor better than that; she understood that there was more to the legacy than met the eye. There were nights afterwards, when the darkness closed in around her, when Alice was already feeling sorry for herself, drinking too much at the bare table in the bleak flat, her thoughts too loud in the peacetime quiet, when the walls she'd built against the past began to tremble. It had been back in her other life, just before she started writing, before Diggory Brent gave her somewhere to funnel her fears and regrets. Those nights, it would be clear to Alice that her mother had been punishing her with the Loeanneth legacy. That Eleanor had always blamed her for Theo's loss, even if she'd never said it in as many words. And what an exquisite punishment it was, how
right
, to be given possession of a place she loved more than any other in the world but that the past rendered out of bounds.

T
hirteen

Alice caught the tube home to Hampstead. An announcement advised of a person under a train at Goodge Street station so she took the Piccadilly line all the way to King's Cross. A pair of lovers travelled in the carriage with her, pressed together at the end amongst other people's suitcases. The girl was leaning against the boy, laughing a little as he whispered in her ear.

Alice met the eye of a pompous-looking man opposite. He raised his brows sniffily at the pair, but Alice refused to ally herself with him and looked away. She remembered love, all-encompassing, young-people love, even though it had been a long time since she'd felt it. There was beauty in love like that, just as certainly as there was danger. Love like that made the rest of the world disappear; it had the power to make even the most sensible person take leave of her senses.

Had Benjamin Munro asked Alice to die for him that summer she was quite certain she'd have done so. He hadn't, of course, he'd asked very little of her as it turned out. But then, he hadn't needed to ask; she'd gladly given him everything he wanted.

Alice had thought at the time she'd been so secretive. Silly child. She'd thought herself so clever and grown-up. But she'd been blind, love had blinded her to faults, both her own and his, just as William Blake had said it must. Love made people lawless, winged and unconfined; it made them careless. And they had been seen together, she and Ben. Deborah might not have known about them, but someone else had.

As the tube rattled along, two long-ago voices came back to her as if from an old wireless, transmitting across the decades. It had been a winter's night in 1940, the height of the Blitz, and Clemmie had been in London briefly on unexpected leave, bunking in Alice's tiny flat. They'd been exchanging war stories over a bottle of gin. Clemmie's work with the Air Transport Auxiliary, Alice's tales of bomb-site recovery, and, as the hour got later, the bottle emptier and the sisters more sentimental, talk had turned to their father and the Great War, the horrors he must have seen and that they were only now beginning to grasp.

“He hid it well, didn't he?” Clemmie said.

“He wouldn't have wanted to burden us.”

“But he never said a
word
. Not one. I can't imagine living through all this, only to set it aside completely and absolutely when the war ends. I can see myself boring my grandchildren to tears when I'm an old, old lady, talking their ears off with stories of the war and my part in it. But not Daddy. I never would've guessed he'd been through the trenches. The mud and the rats and the hell of watching his men die. Did he ever talk about it with you?”

Alice shook her head. “I do remember him saying he was glad he'd had daughters, that no child of his would have to fight if another war came along.” She raised her glass to Clemmie's uniform and half smiled. “I guess no one's right all the time.”

“Not even Daddy,” Clemmie agreed. “And no matter what he said, he did want a son.”

“All men do, according to Grandmother deShiel.” Alice didn't add that the noxious old woman had made her pronouncement in October 1920, directly after Clemmie was born, chiding their mother that a third daughter was no way to welcome her husband home from the war.

“Anyway, he got one in the end,” Clemmie said. “He got his son in the end.”

They'd sat in silence then, conversation having brought them to their childhood and the great taboo subject of their brother, each lost in her own gin-soaked memories of the past. The baby in the flat upstairs had begun to cry, a siren sounded in a distant part of London, and Alice stood, the room tilting as she gathered their empty glasses with one hand, carrying them between her fingers to the butler sink beneath the small, sooty window crisscrossed with tape. Her back was turned when Clemmie said, “I saw that man on his way to France, the gardener who worked for a time at Loeanneth.”

The word crackled like a struck match in the chilly room. Alice balled her hands inside the sleeves of her knitted jumper. Steeling herself, she turned to face her sister and heard herself say, “Which gardener?”

Clemmie was staring at the wooden tabletop, tracing its grain with her short fingernail. She didn't answer, knowing, of course, that there was no need, they both knew who she meant. “Allie,” she said, the childhood nickname making Alice shiver, “there's something I need to—that I've been meaning to . . . Something I saw, back when we were kids.”

Alice's heart thumped like the hammer on a clock. She braced herself, one part of her wanting to close the conversation down, the other part, the drunk part, tired of running from the past, cavalier in this time of ever-present death and danger, almost inviting it. Frightening, the way alcohol took the restraints off confession.

“It was that summer, the last summer. We'd been to the air show a few months before and I was obsessed with planes. I used to run around the house, remember, pretending I was flying.”

Alice nodded, her throat was dry.

“I'd been down to the base, the one beyond Jack Martin's farm. I used to go there sometimes, just to watch the planes taking off and landing, imagining what it would be like to fly them myself one day. I was late coming home so I cut back through the woods, along the river. I wound up at the old boathouse.”

Alice's vision blurred and she blinked at a painting on the wall, something left by the flat's previous occupant, a ship in a stormy sea. That ship was moving now. Alice watched, mildly surprised, as it listed from side to side.

“I wouldn't have stopped, I was hungry and in a hurry to get home, but I heard a voice inside, a man's voice.”

Alice closed her eyes. For years she'd dreaded this moment, envisaged different scenarios, rehearsed explanations and excuses in her mind; now it was upon her she couldn't think of anything to say.

“I knew it wasn't Daddy or Mr Llewellyn and I was curious. I went to the window. I couldn't help it. I climbed up on the upturned boat and I saw, Alice, I didn't mean to but I did. That man, the gardener—”

“Look out!” Alice interrupted, leaping to grab the gin bottle from the table, knocking it over in the process. Glass smashed and Clemmie jumped from her seat. She brushed at her clothes, startled by the sudden clatter, the cold liquor.

“I'm so sorry,” Alice said, “your elbow—the bottle was about to drop. I tried to catch it.” She hurried to the sink and brought back a cloth, dripping water everywhere.

“Alice, stop it.”

“God, you're soaking wet. Let me fetch you another shirt.”

Clemmie protested but Alice insisted, and by the time clothes had been changed and the spill cleaned up, the mood for disclosure was gone. Next morning, Clemmie was gone, too. The space on the floor where she'd rolled out her kit was empty and all trace of her removed.

Alice had felt a swell of relief so great it rendered her light-headed. Even the note on the table couldn't put a dent in her spirits:
Had to go, early flight scheduled. See you when I'm back. Need to talk. Important. C.

She'd scrunched that piece of notepaper into a tight ball and thanked God for the reprieve.

It turned out God could be cruel. Two days later, Clemmie was shot down over the ocean, four miles from the English coast. Her plane washed up but her body was never found.
The pilot is presumed to have ejected
, the report read,
immediately before the plane was hit
. Just one more loss in a world that had decided life was cheap. Alice was not self-absorbed enough to believe that other people's fates were lived out in service to her own life's lessons; she abhorred the expression “everything happens for a reason.” Certainly there were consequences to everything that happened, but that was an entirely different prospect. So, she chose to see it as an instance of simple coincidence, that the death of one sibling had spared her implication in the death of another.

Alice still saw her sister when she least expected it. On summer's days, when she glanced towards the pulsing sun and her vision starred; a black speck shooting through the sky, turning a graceful arc, falling silently into the sea; that little girl who'd run circles in the fields, arms outstretched; the second of Alice's siblings to disappear.
Oh that I had wings like a dove! for then would I fly away, and be at rest.

The train slid into King's Cross and the lovers hopped off, heading towards the exit. Alice fought an urge to follow them; just to remain, for a brief time, on the periphery of their heady infatuation.

She didn't, of course. She switched to the Northern line and travelled to Hampstead where she finally took the lift to the surface. She hadn't time for wistfulness or nostalgia; she had to get back, to see Peter and set repairs in motion. It was a lovely afternoon up top. The day's heat had slid away, the sun had lost its dazzle, and Alice walked the familiar path home.

* * *

Peter took up a yellow highlighter and drew it neatly over the lines. It was the end of a long day, and he allowed himself a moment of silent celebration. Alice's publisher wanted the website up in a month's time and he'd been tasked with providing the text—a job made rather more difficult than it might have been by the ardent refusal of the site's subject to involve herself in its preparation.

It wasn't anything so simple or clichéd as an octogenarian's refusal to admit the new-fangled; indeed, Alice made it a point of pride to keep up-to-date with technology. The internet had made a huge difference to policing practices during Diggory's lifetime and Alice was stringent about maintaining realism in her books. Where she took umbrage was with the “insidious infringement' of the public sphere into the private. Marketing was all well and good, she said, but when the author became more important than the books the world had surely tipped off kilter. Only with the fiftieth anniversary upcoming, and a personal plea from the head of the publishing company, had she been induced to accede, and only on one condition: “I don't want to know about it, Peter. Just make it happen, will you?”

Peter had promised that he would and proceeded gingerly, careful to avoid all mention of words like “online' and “platform' in her hearing. The author bio had been easy enough—they already had a standard document he kept updated for press releases—and Peter was rather proud of the special page he'd put together from the perspective of Diggory Brent himself, but he was working now on the Frequently Asked Questions section and things were progressing slowly. The problem was, the job necessarily relied on Alice's responses. Without her cooperation he was stuck hunting through the archives for articles from which he might pluck answers.

He had focused on the subject of writing and process, partly because he knew it would please Alice and partly because it made life easier. Alice didn't grant a lot of interviews these days, and those she did were conducted under the strict condition that she would only talk about her work. She guarded her privacy with a fervour Peter worried sometimes (quietly, to himself and never where she might intuit his concern) was verging on the neurotic.

He had, however, included a few personal questions out of deference to Alice's publicist, who'd sent through a “short list' of thirty suggestions, and in order to find answers he'd needed to go back decades. Alice's own archives were less than ordered. There'd been some interesting and varied filing systems implemented over the years, and the task was more complicated than it might have been.

But here, finally, success. In an interview with the
Yorkshire Post
from August 1956, he'd found a quote from Alice that, with a little massaging, could be made to fit one of the problematic personal questions:

Q: What kind of child were you? Were you a writer even then?

Peter looked back over the lines he'd just highlighted.

I was always a scribbler, the sort of child told off for writing on walls, or carving my name into furniture. I was fortunate to be given great encouragement by a family friend, a published writer who never seemed to tire of indulging a child in her flights of fancy. One of the greatest gifts I ever received was my first journal. My father gave it to me. How I treasured that book! I carried it with me everywhere and developed a predilection for notebooks I've never lost. My father gave me a new one every year. I wrote an entire mystery novel, my first, in the notebook I received for my fifteenth birthday.

It would do perfectly. Humming to himself, Peter scrolled down the document on his computer screen, hunting for the blank space awaiting an answer. Warm afternoon light spilled across the keyboard. A bus sighed to a stop on the road outside, a woman with laughter in her voice called for someone to “Hurry up!”, and down on the High Street a busker played Led Zeppelin on an electric guitar.

Peter was already mentally packing his bags, envisaging the long bus ride home with Pip and Abel Magwitch for company, when another question in the document caught his attention. Or, more properly, the answer he'd typed below it.

Q:
In the Blink of an Eye
was your first published Diggory Brent novel, but was it the first manuscript you ever completed?

A: It was. I'm one of those rare, lucky authors who never had to contend with a rejection notice.

Peter stopped humming. He glanced again at the highlighted lines.

The two answers didn't exactly contradict each other. There was a difference between completing a manuscript and writing a novel in a teenage journal, yet something tugged at Peter's memory.

He scrabbled back through the pile of photocopies on the desk, seeking the pages from which he'd taken the second Q&A. He found it in a 1996 interview with the
Paris Review
and read on.

INTERVIEWER:
In the Blink of an Eye
was the first manuscript you completed, but surely not the first you'd started?