The Lake House (20 page)

EDEVANE: In fact it was.

INTERVIEWER: You'd never set pen to paper to write fiction before beginning
In the Blink of an Eye
?

EDEVANE: Never. It hadn't crossed my mind to write a story, let alone a mystery, until after the war. The character of Diggory Brent came to me in a dream one night and the next morning I started writing. He's an archetype, of course, though any series writer who tells you their character doesn't share his or her preoccupations and interests is lying.

Peter heard the clock on the mantelpiece ticking. He stood up, stretched, finished his glass of water, then went to the window. It didn't matter how he tried to twist it, the two interviews were in direct contradiction.

He went back to stand behind the desk, his cursor was blinking by the word “lying.”

Alice was not a liar. Indeed, she was scrupulously honest; honest to the point of causing offence in many cases.

The discrepancy was a mistake then. Forty years had passed between the first and second answers being given, in which time she'd forgotten. Alice was eighty-six years old. There were parts of Peter's childhood he couldn't remember with any certainty and he was only thirty.

Still, he wasn't about to put anything on the web that risked Alice being called out. It wasn't easy to get away with untruths or disparities anymore. Everything was instantly verifiable. Discrepancies were caught like insects in the web. It was no longer possible to be forgotten.

Peter reached down to tap the keyboard idly with one finger. Not a big deal, just an irritation. He couldn't exactly ask Alice directly which interview was accurate. He'd promised to make the website happen without bothering her and he valued his life too much to risk insinuating she'd told a fib.

His eyes drifted again to the screen.

It hadn't crossed my mind to write a story, let alone a mystery, until after the war . . . How I treasured that book! I carried it with me everywhere and developed a habit for notebooks I've never been able to break . . . I wrote an entire mystery novel, my first, in the notebook I received for my fifteenth birthday.

Footfalls scuffed on the steps outside, and Peter looked at the clock. The front door opened and he heard Alice in the hall.

“Peter?”

“In the library,” he called, hitting the shutdown button so his page reduced to a single electronic speck. “I was just finishing up. Cup of tea before I go?”

“Yes, please.” Alice appeared at the door. “I've a few matters I'd like to discuss with you.” She looked tired, more fragile than he was accustomed to seeing her. She seemed to be wearing the day's warmth in the creases of her clothes, her skin, her manner. “Any messages?” she said, sitting down to remove her shoes.

“Jane called about the new novel, Cynthia wants to talk about publicity, and there was a call from Deborah.”

“Deborah?” Alice looked up sharply.

“Only half an hour ago.”

“But I just saw her. Is she all right? Did she leave a message?”

“Yes.” Peter shifted interview files aside to find his note. “It's here somewhere. I wrote it down so I wouldn't forget.” He found the piece of paper and frowned at his own scrawl. Deborah was always formal on the phone, but today she'd been unusually circumspect, insisting that he repeat her message to Alice verbatim, that it was important. “She said to tell you that she
did
remember him, and that his name was Benjamin Munro.”

F
ourteen

Cornwall, 23 June 1933

On his last morning at Loeanneth, Theo Edevane woke with the birds. He was only eleven months old and far too young to understand about time, let alone to be able to tell it, but if he had and he could, he'd have known that the hands on the big nursery clock had just gone to six minutes past five. Theo only knew that he liked the way the morning light caught the silver arrowheads of the hands and made them shine.

With his thumb stuck in his mouth, and Puppy warm beneath his arm, he rolled contentedly onto his side and gazed through the half-light to where his nanny was asleep on the single bed within the nook. Her spectacles were not on her nose and without their metal arms to hold things together, her face had collapsed against the pillow, a series of lines and creases and soft saggy pockets.

Theo wondered where his other nanny was, Nanny Rose. He missed her (though the details of what it was he missed were already fading). This new one was older and stiffer with a smell that made his nose tickle. She kept a damp handkerchief tucked inside her black cotton sleeve and a bottle of castor oil on the window ledge. She often said “there's no such word as can't' and “self-praise is no recommendation', and liked to sit him in the big black perambulator and wheel him up and down the bumpy driveway. Theo didn't like sitting in the baby carriage, not now that he could walk; he'd tried to tell her so, but he hadn't many words and Nanny Bruen had only said, “Quiet, Master Theodore. We did not ask Mr Rude along.”

Theo was listening to the birds outside his window, watching the dawn creep along his ceiling, when the sound of the nursery door opening made him roll onto his tummy and peer eagerly through the cot rails.

There, peeking back at him in the gap between the door and its jamb, was his big sister, the one with the long brown braids and freckles all over her cheeks, and Theo felt excitement and love explode inside him. He scrambled to his feet and grinned, slapping his hands on the edge of his cot so the brass knobs on the corners rang.

Theo had three big sisters and he loved them all, but this one was his favourite. The others smiled at him and cooed and told him he was a sweet baby, but they couldn't be counted on in quite the same way. Deborah put him down if he got too excited and clutched at her hair or clothes, and Alice could be laughing one minute, playing a tremendous game of peek-a-boo, when suddenly she'd get a funny look in her eyes, as if she could no longer see him, and with no explanation she'd be on her feet, way up high in the distance where the grown-ups lived, stabbing at her notebook with a pen instead.

This one, though, Clemmie, never tired of tickling him and pulling funny faces and blowing big, wet raspberries on his belly. She carried him places, her warm, skinny arms wrapped tightly around his middle; and when she finally plonked him down, she didn't stop him, as the others did, just as he'd found something really interesting to explore. She never used words like
dirty
and
dangerous
and
no!
, and when she came for him first thing in the morning, like she had today, she always took him through the kitchen where there were warm loaves of fresh bread cooling on the racks, and pots of lumpy strawberry jam in the larder.

Theo snatched up Puppy in anticipation and lifted his arms high, wriggling his body as if he might somehow free himself from his cot if he just tried hard enough. He waved his hands, stretched his fingers out wide in joy, and his big sister smiled so that her eyes lit up and her freckles danced, and just as he'd
known
she would, she reached into the cot and dragged him over the edge.

As she carried him joltingly towards the door, and Nanny Bruen snuffled a snore into her pillow, exhilaration made a star of Theo's body.

“Come on, Chubby Wubby,” his sister said, smudging kisses on the top of his head, “let's go and look at the planes.”

They started down the stairs together and Theo beamed at the red carpet runner and thought of warm bread with butter
and
jam spread on it, and ducks by the stream and the treasures he would find in the mud, and his sister's arms out wide as she pretended they were flying; and, as they crossed the hall, he clucked laughter round his warm, wet thumb just for the joy of being happy and loved and here and now.

* * *

Eleanor heard the squeak on the stairs, but her sleeping mind took it for fodder, stirring it into a piquant dream in which she was the ringmaster in charge of a large, chaotic circus. Tigers who wouldn't be tamed, trapeze artists whose feet kept slipping, a monkey who couldn't be found. When she woke finally to the reality of her bedroom, the noise was already a distant memory, lost in the dark cavernous void with all the other night-time detritus that was shed in the crossover.

Light, solidity, morning at last. After months of planning, midsummer had arrived, but Eleanor did not leap with alacrity from bed. The night had been interminable and her head felt like a wet sponge. She'd woken in the dark and lain for hours, her mind full and the room hot. Each sheep she'd counted had turned into a job on the list of things to be done today, and not until dawn had she finally fallen back into tumultuous sleep.

She rubbed her eyes and stretched, and then collected her father's old watch from the bedside table, squinting at its loyal, round face. Not even seven and it was stinking hot already! Eleanor collapsed back against her pillows. If this were any other day, she'd have put on her bathing suit and gone down to the stream for a dip before breakfast, before the others woke up and she had to be Mother. She'd always loved to swim, the silken water against her skin, the clarity of light on the rippling surface, the way sound thickened when her ears dipped beneath the surface. As a child, she'd had a favourite spot, particularly deep, down near the boathouse where verbena grew wild on the steep banks and the air was sweet and rotten. The water was wonderfully cold there, as she disappeared beneath the surface, twirling her body lower and lower till she was nestled among the slippery reeds. The days had been much longer then.

Eleanor reached out, brushing an arm against the sheet beside her. Anthony wasn't there. He must've risen early and was probably upstairs, avoiding the turmoil he knew from experience the day would bring. Until recently, she'd have worried to discover him gone already, tied herself in knots until she found him, alone; but no longer. She'd fixed things, and that particular fear could be laid to rest.

A mower started up outside and Eleanor let go of a sigh she hadn't realised she was holding. A mower meant the weather was fine, and thank God for that; it was one less thing to worry about. Rain would have been a disaster. There'd been thunder in the night, that's what had first woken her, and she'd rushed to the window and pulled aside the curtains, dreading the wet world she knew she'd see outside. But the storm had been far away, sheet lightning and not the jagged sort that hurled down rain; the garden had been dry and moonlit, eerie in its stillness.

In her relief, Eleanor had stood for a time in the darkened room, watching the faint undulations on the lake, silver-rimmed clouds being drawn across the pewter sky, nursing the uncanny sense of being the only person on earth awake. The feeling was not unfamiliar, it made her think of those nights when her children were babies and she'd fed them herself, much to her own mother's distaste, curled up in the armchair by the nursery window. Little animal squeaks of satisfaction, tiny velvet hands on the moon of her swollen breast, the vast, still quietness of the world beyond.

Eleanor had been fed as a baby in the same room, though under vastly different conditions. Her mother had not held with such “vampiric' tendencies in infants, instructing Nanny Bruen—younger then, but no less ancient in attitude—to prepare sterilised cow's milk for “the little stranger', in one of the teated glass bottles that had been ordered specially from Harrods. To this day, Eleanor couldn't smell rubber without experiencing a peaky wave of nausea and isolation. Nanny Bruen, naturally, had approved wholeheartedly of the regime and the bottles had been produced with military precision at intervals dictated by the cold-faced nursery clock, regardless of the rumblings of Eleanor's small stomach. It was just as well, the two women had agreed, that the child should begin her education in matters of “order and punctuality.” How else was she to become a proper subordinate, taking her place gladly at the bottom of the family pile? Those were the bland, blancmange days before Eleanor's father came and rescued her from her Victorian childhood. He'd stepped in when talk turned to the hiring of a governess, declaring there to be no need, he would teach his daughter himself. He was one of the cleverest people she'd ever met—not formally educated, like Anthony or Mr Llewellyn, but a great gentleman scholar with a mind that remembered everything it read and heard, that cogitated constantly, fitting pieces of knowledge together, questing for more.

She propped herself against the pillows, strapping on the beloved watch, and a memory came of sitting on his lap before the fire in the library while he read aloud from his William Morris and A.J. Wyatt translation of
Beowulf
. She'd been young, too young to comprehend fully the meaning of the old English words, and she'd been drowsy. Her head had been resting against his chest and she'd listened to the burr of his voice from the inside out, a warm, echo-y hum that was everywhere all at once. She'd been mesmerised by the flicker of orange flames reflected in the glass of his watch and in that moment the object had become an emblem for the feeling of absolute safety and contentment that had enveloped her. There, with him, in the eye of the storm, the centre of the spinning universe.

Perhaps fathers and their daughters were always tied? Anthony was certainly a hero to their girls. He had been since his return from the war. At first they'd been awed, two little faces peering curiously from behind the door of his study, wide-eyed and whispering, but in no time at all they were smitten. Little wonder. He'd camped with them in the meadows, shown them how to weave boats from grass, listened patiently to all their tears and tales. A houseguest had once turned to Eleanor over mint juleps on the lawn, as Anthony played leapfrog with Deborah and Alice, as tiny tottering Clementine took her turn and he suddenly became a horse, galloping round the garden while all three girls dissolved with laughter; the houseguest had asked, mischief disguised as sympathy, whether it bothered her that her husband was so clearly the favourite. Eleanor had answered that of course it didn't.

It had almost been true. After the privations of the war, five long years during which the two of them had been forced to live apart, to grow up and take on new responsibilities, having him back where he belonged and seeing the unadulterated love and wonder on his face as he watched the children they shared was a panacea. It was like having her very own time machine, travelling back to an age of innocence.

Eleanor took up the photograph she kept beside the bed, the two of them in the kitchen garden in 1913, Anthony in his straw hat, brand-new then. He was staring directly at the photographer, his smile lopsided as if he'd just made a joke; she was looking at him with adoration, a scarf tying up her hair; they were both holding shovels. It was the day they'd dug out the strawberry patch and made a complete mess of it. Howard Mann had been behind the camera. He'd arrived in his Silver Ghost one day, anxious “to see that the two of you hadn't fallen off the edge of the earth', and had ended up staying all week. They'd laughed and teased and argued fiercely about politics, people and poetry, just as they had in the Cambridge years, and when finally he returned to London, it was with reluctance and promises to come back soon, and a car boot filled with leftovers from their first harvest. Looking at the photograph now, remembering the two of them back then, Eleanor felt the gulf of time keenly. She felt humbled by those young, happy people. So sure, so whole, so untouched by life . . .

She clicked her tongue, impatient with herself. It was lack of sleep making her nostalgic, the tumult of the past few months, the weight of the day ahead. Carefully, she put the frame back on the table. The sun was gaining strength now, a dazzling constellation of pinpricks had appeared in the brocade curtains. Eleanor knew it was time to get up and yet a part of her resisted, clinging to the irrational notion that by staying in bed she might somehow stop the countdown from starting. Keep the wave from crashing.
There's no way to hold back the tide
. Her father's voice. The two of them watching the sea down by Miller's Point, waves collapsing on the rocks at the base of the cliff before relenting and being dragged back out again.
It's as inevitable as day following night.
It was the morning he'd told her he was ill and made her promise she would remember who she was when he was gone,
remember to remain good and brave and true
. The old, much-loved line from
Eleanor's Magic Doorway
.

Eleanor blotted out the memory and focused. The first guests would arrive at eight o'clock that night, which meant she needed to be robed and ready, with a stiff drink under her belt, by half past seven. Oh, but there was still so much to do! The girls would have to be pressed into service. To Alice she would give the simple (some would say pleasurable, though not, she knew, for Alice) task of filling the guest-room vases with flowers. Deborah would do a superior job, but she'd been in a foul mood lately, petulant and opinionated, filled with the child's naive faith that she was going to do everything better than her parents, and Eleanor wasn't in the mood for an argument. As for Clemmie, poor child, it was enough that she stay out from underfoot. Dear Clemmie, already the most unusual of Eleanor's children, and now stuck in that awkward foal-like phase, toothy and long-limbed, refusing to leave her childhood behind.