The Lake House (42 page)

It was the first in what proved to be series of letters to a series of doctors, each outlining Anthony's symptoms and asking for help in polite sentences that didn't quite manage to conceal her desperation. Eleanor's descriptions of his plight were poignant, the eager young man whose life's promise had been stripped from him by his service to his country, who'd tried over the course of years since his return to recover and regain his past abilities. Sadie was moved, but there was no time now to lament the horrors of war. There was only one horror she was interested in proving today, and to that end she had to stay focused on her search for references to Anthony's potential for violence, his condition leading up to 23 June.

If there was something guarded about the letters Eleanor wrote to the doctors in London, those to Daffyd Llewellyn—and there were lots of them—were far more personal in tone. They still addressed Anthony's medical condition—Sadie had forgotten that Llewellyn trained as a physician before throwing it all in to become a writer—but, freed from having to couch her descriptions in terms that upheld her husband's dignity and privacy in the eyes of a distant medical practitioner, Eleanor was able to describe his condition and her despair honestly:
I fear sometimes that he will never be free, that this search of mine has all been in vain . . . I would give up anything to make him well, but how can I help when he has lost the will to help himself?
There were some lines in particular that persuaded Sadie she was on the right path:
It happened again the other night. He woke with a howl, shouting again about the dog and the baby, insisting that they must get out now, and I had to hold him down with all my might to prevent him charging from the room. The poor love, when he gets like that, thrashing and shaking, he doesn't even realise that it's me . . . He's
so remorseful in the morning. I find myself lying to him sometimes, pretending that I injured myself rushing about. I know your feelings on such matters, and I agree, in principle, that honesty with sensitivity is the best approach, but it would do him such great harm to know the truth. He would never knowingly hurt a fly. I couldn't bear to see him shamed so . . . Now you must not worry! I would never have told you if I'd thought it would cause you to suffer so dreadfully. I assure you I'm all right. Physical wounds heal; damage to one's spirit is so much worse . . . I made Anthony a promise and promises must be kept. You're the one who taught me that . . .

As she read, it became clear to Sadie that Llewellyn was also privy to Eleanor's affair with Benjamin Munro.
My friend, as you insist on quaintly (coyly!) calling him, is well . . . Of course I am racked with guilt. It is very kind of you to point out differences between my mother and me, but beneath your generous words, I know our actions are not so dissimilar . . . In my own defence, if I might be allowed to make one, I love him, differently to Anthony of course, but I know now it is possible for the human heart to love in two places . . .
And then, in the final letter:
You are quite right, Anthony must never know. Far more than a setback, it would destroy him . . .

The last letter was dated April 1933 and the book contained no others. Sadie remembered that Daffyd Llewellyn's habit was to live at Loeanneth through the summer months, which explained why there'd been no further written correspondence between them. She glanced again at the line,
You are quite right, Anthony must never know . . . it would destroy him
. It wasn't exactly proof, but it was interesting. Judging by Eleanor's response, Llewellyn had been very worried about how Anthony might react if he learned of the affair. Sadie wondered whether his anxieties had even contributed to the depression that led him to suicide. She wasn't an expert, but it didn't seem impossible. It certainly helped to explain the timing, which still niggled in the back corner of her brain.

Sadie brightened. Alice had said her mother stored the letters she received in the drawers on either side of her desk. With any luck, those from Daffyd Llewellyn would be there. She could see exactly what he'd feared—and how much—written in his own words. Sadie unlocked both drawers. Hundreds of envelopes, raggedy where they'd been opened, had been bound into groups and tied with coloured ribbon. All were addressed to Mrs A. Edevane, some typed officially, others handwritten. Sadie riffled through, bundle by bundle, hunting for those from Daffyd Llewellyn.

She was still empty-handed when she came across a batch, unusual for the top envelope having neither an address nor a stamp on it. Perplexed, Sadie scanned through the rest. There were one or two that had arrived officially through the post, but the rest were as blank as the first. And then it dawned on her. The soft red ribbon, the faint powdery hint of perfume. They were love letters.

Not strictly what she'd set out to find, but Sadie was overcome with a frisson of curiosity. Besides, there was a chance Eleanor had shared with her lover the fears she harboured about Anthony's condition. She pulled at the red ribbon, so eager to open the bundle that she sent them scattering to the floor around her. She was cursing herself for having got them out of order when something caught her eye. Something that didn't belong in this bundle at all.

She recognised the stationery at once, the woven pattern of deep green ivy tendrils snaking around the margins, the handwriting, the pen: it was a perfect match. This was the first half of the letter she'd found when she was exploring the boathouse, the letter Eleanor had written to Anthony when he was away at war. Sadie's heart was thumping even as she smoothed out the sheet of paper. Later, it would seem to her as if she'd experienced a presentiment of what she was about to discover, because as she started to read, a missing piece of the puzzle, a clue she hadn't even realised she was looking for, fell right into her lap.

“Sadie?”

She looked up with a start. It was Clive, standing in the doorway, a leather-bound notebook in his hand, an enlivened expression on his face.

“Ah, there you are,” he said.

“Here I am,” she parroted, her mind still racing with the implications of what she'd just uncovered.

“I think I've got it,” he said excitedly, walking as quickly as his old legs would allow him to sit on the edge of the bed near Sadie. “In Anthony's journal from 1933. Alice was right, he was a prolific diarist. There's one for each year, filled mostly with observations of the natural world and memory exercises. I recognised them from my early days with the police, back when I was trying to teach myself to remember every detail from a crime scene. But there were diary entries, too, in the form of letters to a fellow called Howard. A friend, I gather, who'd been killed in the first war. That's where I found it. In June 1933, Anthony seems to enter a new dark patch. He tells his mate he'd felt himself declining over the past year, that something had changed, he just hadn't known what it was, and that the birth of his son hadn't made things better. In fact, when I looked over old entries, he mentioned a few times that the sound of the little fellow crying brought back memories of an experience he calls ‘the incident', something that happened during the war. In his last entry before Midsummer, he writes that his eldest daughter, Deborah, had come to see him, and that she'd told him something that changed everything, explaining his feeling of something amiss and ‘shattering the illusion' of his perfect life.”

“The affair,” Sadie said, thinking of Daffyd Llewellyn's concerns.

“It has to be.”

Anthony had learned of the affair just before Midsummer. It was enough, surely, to tip him over the edge. Daffyd Llewellyn had certainly been worried about that. Now, though, in light of what she'd just read, Sadie wondered if that was all he'd discovered.

“How about you?” Clive nodded at the envelopes still scattered over the carpet. “Anything of interest?”

“You could say that.”

“Well?”

She filled him in quickly on the partial letter she'd found at the boathouse, the letter from Eleanor to Anthony, written when he was away at the war and she was alone at home, pregnant with Alice and wondering how she was going to manage without him.

“And?” Clive urged.

“I just found the other half, the first half. Here, amongst Eleanor's other correspondence.”

“Is that it?” He nodded at the leaf of paper in Sadie's hand. “May I?”

She passed it to Clive, who skimmed the contents, his eyebrows lifting. “Goodness.”

“Yes.”

“It's passionate.”

“Yes.”

“But it isn't addressed to Anthony at all. It says,
Dearest Ben
.”

“That's right,” Sadie said. “And it's dated May 1932. Which means the unborn baby she's writing about isn't Alice. It's Theo.”

“But that means . . .”

“Exactly. Theo Edevane wasn't Anthony's son. He was Ben's.”

T
wenty-nine

Cornwall, 1932

Eleanor hadn't meant to fall pregnant, not to Ben, but she didn't regret it for a second. She'd known almost as soon as it happened. Ten years had passed since she'd fallen with Clementine, but she hadn't forgotten. She'd felt immediate and immense love for the little person growing inside her. Anthony had sometimes shown her the view through his microscope, so she knew about cells and building blocks and the fabric of life. Her love for the baby was cellular. They were one and the same and she couldn't imagine life without the tiny being.

So intense, so personal was her love, that it was easy to forget the baby had a father, that she hadn't somehow brought him into being by strength of will alone—particularly when the promised child was so small, so safely tucked away. He remained her secret (she was sure the baby was a boy), and Eleanor was good at keeping secrets. She'd had a lot of practice. She'd kept Anthony's secret for years, and her own since meeting Ben.

Ben. In the beginning, Eleanor had told herself he was simply an addiction. Once, when she was a little girl, Eleanor's father had given her a kite, a special kite shipped all the way from the Far East, and he'd taught her to fly it. Eleanor had loved that kite with a passion, the tremendous coloured tails, the strength of the quivering strings in her hands, the strange and wonderful writing on the kite's side that was more like an illustration than a language.

Together she and her father had scoured the fields of Loeanneth, looking for the best place to launch the kite, the finest winds to fly it. Eleanor became obsessed. She kept flight notes in a book, she drew copious diagrams and plans for design adjustments, and she found herself waking suddenly in the night, sitting up in bed going through the motions of letting out the anchor system, her hands winding the reel of a ghost kite as if she were still out in the field.

“You've developed an addiction,” Nanny Bruen had said with a look of stern distaste, before taking the kite from the nursery and hiding it. “An addiction is a devil, and the devil goes away when he finds the door shut firm against him.”

Eleanor had developed an addiction to Ben, or so she told herself, but now she was an adult, in charge of her own destiny. There was no Nanny Bruen to burn the kite and shut the door and so she was free to walk right through.

* * *

“I was just about to light the fire,” he'd said, the day she came upon him in the caravan. “Would you like to come inside and wait for the storm to pass?”

It was still pouring with rain and without the hunt for Edwina to fuel her, Eleanor realised how cold she was, how drenched. She could see beyond him into a small sitting room that seemed suddenly the height of comfort and warmth. Behind her, the rain was pounding and Edwina, solid at her feet, had clearly made up her mind to stay. Eleanor couldn't see that she had much choice in the matter. She thanked him, took a breath, and went inside.

The man followed, closing the door behind him, and immediately the noise of teeming rain reduced. He handed her a towel and then busied himself lighting a fire in a small cast-iron stove in the middle of the caravan. Eleanor took the opportunity as she patted her hair dry to look around.

The caravan was comfortable, but not plush. Just enough had been done to make it homely. On the windowsill, she noticed, were more of those delicate paper cranes she'd seen him folding on the train.

“Please, sit down,” he said. “I'll have this lit in a moment. It's a little temperamental but we've been on good terms lately.”

Eleanor pushed aside a whisper of misgiving. She was aware that his bed, the place he slept, was visible behind the drawn curtain at the other end of the caravan. She averted her gaze, laid the towel across a cane chair and sat. Rain fell softly now and it occurred to her, not for the first time, that it was one of the best sounds she knew. To be inside, with the hope of soon being warm and dry, while rain fell outside, was a splendid, simple joy.

Flames leapt and the fire began to crackle and he stood up. He tossed a spent match into the fire and closed the grate. “I do know you,” he said. “The train, the full train from London to Cornwall some months ago. You were in my carriage.”

“As I remember it, you were in mine.”

He smiled and her heart gave a dangerous, unexpected flutter. “I can't argue with that. I was lucky to get a ticket at all.” He dusted soot from his hands onto his trousers. “I remembered you as soon as we parted at the post office. I went back, but you'd already left.”

He'd gone back. The fact was unnerving and Eleanor hid her disquiet beneath an inspection of the caravan. “You're living here?” she said.

“For the time being. It belongs to the farmer who employees me.”

“I thought you'd finished working for Mr Nicolson.” She cursed herself. Now he would know she'd asked about him. He didn't react and she quickly changed the subject. “There's no running water or electricity.”

“I don't need those things.”

“Where do you cook?”

He nodded at the fire.

“Where do you bathe?”

He inclined his head towards the stream.

Eleanor raised her eyebrows.

He laughed. “I find it peaceful here.”

“Peaceful?”

“Haven't you ever wanted to drop out of the world?”

Eleanor thought of the rigours of being Mother, the hatred she felt when her own mother nodded approvingly, the constant watching that had made her bones stiffen and the cogs of her mind tighten as if elastic bands were holding them rigid. “No,” she said, in that approximation of a light voice she'd perfected over the years, “I can't say I have.”

“I suppose it's not for everybody,” he said with a shrug. “Would you like a cup of tea while your things dry?”

Eleanor's glance followed his gesturing arm to a saucepan on the stovetop. “Well,” she said. It was cold, after all, and her shoes were still wet. “Perhaps just while I wait for the rain to stop.”

He brewed the tea and she asked about the saucepan and he laughed and told her he didn't have a kettle but it seemed to do the trick.

“You don't like kettles?”

“I like them well enough; I just don't own one.”

“Not even at home?”

“This is my home; at least it is for now.”

“But where do you go when you leave?”

“To the next place. I have itchy feet,” he explained. “I don't stay anywhere for long.”

“I don't think I could bear not to have a home.”

“People are my home, the ones I love.”

Eleanor smiled, bittersweet. She could remember saying something very similar, many years, a lifetime, ago.

“You don't agree?”

“People change, don't they?” She hadn't meant to sound so tart. “A house, though—a house with walls and a floor and a roof on top; with rooms full of special things; with memories in the shadows—well, it's dependable. Safe and real and . . .”

“Honest?” He handed her a cup of steaming tea and sat in the chair beside her.

“Yes,” Eleanor said. “Yes, that's it exactly. Honest and good and true.” She smiled, embarrassed suddenly to have expressed such a vehement opinion. She felt exposed, and odd—what kind of person felt such things about a house? But he smiled, too, and she glimpsed that although he disagreed he understood.

It had been a long time since Eleanor had met someone new, since she'd been able to relax enough to enquire and listen and respond. She let down her guard, and spoke with him, asking him questions about his life. He'd grown up in the Far East, his father an archaeologist and his mother an avid traveller; they'd encouraged him to make his own life and not to be bound by society's expectations of him. Sentiments Eleanor could almost remember feeling herself.

Time passed in a strange unnatural way, as if the atmosphere inside the caravan existed outside the ebbs and flows of the wider world. The fabric of reality had dissolved so it was just the two of them. Eleanor had observed over the years that even without a watch she was able to tell the time accurately to within five minutes, but here she lost track completely. It wasn't until she chanced to see a small clock standing on the windowsill that she realised two hours had passed.

“I have to go,” she gasped, handing him her empty teacup as she stood. Such carelessness was unprecedented. It was unthinkable. The girls, Anthony, Mother . . . what would they be saying?

He stood, too, but neither of them moved. That same strange current passed between them, the one she'd noticed on the train, and Eleanor felt a compulsion to stay, to hide, never to leave that room. She should have said, “Goodbye,” but what she said instead was, “I still have your handkerchief.”

“From the train?” He laughed. “I told you: it's yours.”

“I can't. It was one thing before, I had no way of returning it to you, but now . . .”

“Now?”

“Well, now I know where you are.”

“Yes,” he said. “You do.”

Eleanor felt a chill travel down her spine. He hadn't touched her but she realised that she wanted him to. She had a sense of herself at the edge of a precipice, and in that moment she wanted to fall. Later she would realise that she already had.

* * *

“You've certainly got a spring in your step,” her mother noted later that afternoon. “It's a wonder what being caught out in the rain can do for one's spirits.”

And that night, when Eleanor climbed into bed beside Anthony, when she reached for him and he patted her hand before rolling away, she lay very still in the dark, tracing the lines on the ceiling, listening as her husband's breathing steadied and deepened, trying to remember when she'd become so isolated, and seeing in her mind's eye the young man from the train, the man whose first name, she realised only now, she still didn't know; who'd made her laugh and think and soften, and who was only a walk away.

* * *

At first it was simply about feeling alive after so many years. Eleanor hadn't noticed she was turning into stone. She knew she'd changed over the decade or so since Anthony had returned from the war, but she hadn't realised just how great a toll her determination to look after him, to protect and make him well, to keep the girls from being hurt, had taken. And there was Ben, so free and light and good-humoured. The affair offered escape and closeness and selfish pleasure, and it was easy enough to tell herself he was merely an addiction, a temporary balm.

* * *

But the symptoms of addiction—the obsessive thoughts, the disturbed sleep, the exquisite pleasure derived from the scribbling of someone else's name on a fresh sheet of paper, of seeing it written there, a thought made real—are remarkably similar to those of falling in love, and Eleanor didn't realise at once what was happening. Then again, she'd never imagined it was possible to love two people at once. She was shocked when she caught herself humming one day, an old ballet melody she hadn't thought of in an age, and realised that being with Ben made her feel just as she had when she first met Anthony, as if the world were suddenly, startlingly, brighter than it had been before.

She was in love with him.

The words in her head were astonishing and yet they rang with truth. She'd forgotten love could be like that, simple and easy and joyous. The love she felt for Anthony had deepened over the decades, and it had changed; life had thrown the pair of them challenges and love had adapted to meet them. Love had come to mean putting someone else first, sacrificing, keeping the patched-up ship from sinking in the storms. With Ben, though, love was a little rowboat in which one floated calm above it all.

* * *

When she fell pregnant, Eleanor knew at once whose baby it was. Even so, she made a point of counting back over the weeks, just to make sure. It would have been so much easier had the baby been Anthony's.

Eleanor never considered lying to Ben, and yet she didn't tell him at once. The human brain has a knack for tackling complex problems with denial and Eleanor simply focused on her joy: there was going to be a baby, she'd always dreamed of having another, a baby would make Anthony happy. More than that, another child would make him well. This idea had been part of her thinking for so long it didn't occur to Eleanor to question it.

The knotty issue of the baby's paternity, she refused at first to acknowledge. Even as her belly began to harden and she felt the flutter of small movements, Eleanor nursed her secret to herself. At four months, though, having broken the wonderful news to Anthony and the girls, she knew that it was time to talk to Ben. She was starting to show. It had happened earlier than she'd expected.

As she considered how to tell him, Eleanor realised she was dreading it, but not because she feared Ben would make things difficult. Ever since the first day in the caravan, she'd been waiting for him to disappear, anticipating bleakly the day she'd turn up and he'd be gone. Each time she'd walked along the stream to meet him, she'd held her breath, preparing for the worst. She'd certainly never spoken the word “love' out loud. The thought of losing him had been agony, but Eleanor continued to remind herself that he was a drifter, and that she'd known it from the start. It had been part of the attraction and the reason she'd allowed herself to become involved at all. His temporariness had seemed the very antithesis to the burden she carried. One day he would leave, she'd told herself, and it would be over. No ties; no regrets; no real harm done.

But she'd been fooling herself, and now Eleanor saw just how false and blustering her casual attitude had been. Faced with delivering the news that was bound to make him run, her bohemian love, a man who didn't even have a kettle to his name, she realised how deeply she'd come to depend upon him: his comfort and humour, his kind and gentle ways. She loved him, and despite the practical solution his leaving would provide, she didn't want him to go.