The Lake House (10 page)

Alice nodded as Peter set a plate in front of her, a boiled egg on toast. Alice had eaten the same lunch every day for the past two decades—though not, of course, on occasions when she dined out. She appreciated the efficiency of routine but she wasn't a slave to it, not like Diggory Brent, who'd been known to instruct waitresses on the precise method of his preferred egg preparation. She spooned the almost-hard yolk onto her piece of toast and cut it into quarters, watching as Peter continued to sort the mail.

He was not an overly conversational fellow, a fact that was greatly to his credit. Exasperating when she sought to draw him out on a subject, but preferable to the more loquacious assistants she'd had in the past. She decided she liked his hair that little bit longer. With his lanky limbs and dark-brown eyes, it made him look like one of those Brit Pop musicians, though perhaps it was only the unusually formal clothing he was wearing today, the dark velvet suit, that made her think so. And then Alice remembered. He'd been at his old friend's funeral, the librarian's, that's why he was late for work. She felt somewhat cheered, eager to have his report. Alice had been struck when he told her about the woman, his mentor. Her mind had been cast back to Mr Llewellyn. She didn't think of the old man often—her feelings for him were so bound up with that awful summer she made a point not to—but when Peter told her about his Miss Talbot, the lasting impression she had made on him, the interest she'd taken in his younger self, Alice had been beset with unusually visceral memories: the smell of damp river mud, and the plink of water bugs all around them as they drifted downstream in the old rowing boat, discussing their favourite stories. Alice was quite sure she'd not felt such perfect contentment since.

She took another sip of tea, blotting out unwelcome thoughts of the past. “You saw off your friend then?” It was his first funeral, he'd said, and Alice had told him there'd be plenty more to come. “Was it as you expected?”

“I suppose so. Sad, but interesting in a way, too.”

“In what way?”

Peter considered. “I only ever knew her as Miss Talbot. Hearing other people speak, though—her husband, her son . . . it was moving.” He shifted his fringe from his eyes. “That sounds stupid, doesn't it? A cliché . . .” He tried again: “There was more to her than I knew and I enjoyed hearing it. People are fascinating, aren't they, the closer you get to knowing what makes them tick?”

Alice gave a slight, satisfied smile of agreement. She had found there were very few genuinely dull people; the trick was to ask them the right questions. It was a technique she employed when she was creating characters. Everybody knew the best guilty characters were those the reader didn't suspect, but motive was key. It was all very well to surprise people with a murderous granny, but the rationale must be watertight. Love, hate, envy, each was as plausible as the other; it was all a matter of passion. Discover what excited a person's passions and the rest would follow.

“Here's something a bit different.” Peter had returned to his work, opening reader letters, and his dark brows drew together in a frown as he scanned the one in hand.

Alice's tea was suddenly bitter. One was never entirely inured to criticism. “One of those, is it?”

“It's from a police officer, Detective Constable Sparrow.”

“Ah, one of
those
.” In Alice's experience there were two types of police officer: those who could be relied upon to help with matters of procedure during the creative process, and the other blights who liked to read the books and point out problems
after
publication. “And what pearl of procedural wisdom does DC Sparrow have to share with us?”

“No, it's nothing like that, she's not a reader. She's writing to you about a real-life case, a disappearance.”

“Let me guess. She's stumbled upon a Great Idea and thought if I wrote it we might go halves on the profits?”

“A missing child,” he continued, “back in the 1930s. An estate in Cornwall, a case that was never solved.”

And to her dying day Alice would never be able to say for sure whether the room grew cold right then, a sudden breeze off the heath, or whether it was her own internal thermostat, the wash of real life, the past hitting her like a wave that had drawn back a long time ago and been waiting for the tide to turn. For of course she knew exactly what the letter was about, and that it had nothing at all to do with the neat made-up mysteries she put inside her books.

Such an ordinary piece of paper, Alice noticed, flimsy and cheap, not at all the sort readers usually chose when they wrote to her, certainly not the type with which she'd have furnished a character in one of her novels, charged with delivering such a potent detonation from the past.

Peter was reading aloud now, and although Alice would have liked him not to, the words to say so had dried up. She listened as he delivered an efficient summary of the known circumstances surrounding the long-ago case. Sourced from the newspaper files, Alice supposed, or that deplorable book by that Pickering fellow. And there was nothing to stop people from accessing public records, from sending letters out of the blue to those they'd never met, from bringing the pernicious past to the lunch table of a person who'd done everything she could to avoid ever going back to that place, that time.

“She seems to think you'll know what she's talking about?”

Images fell inside her mind, one after the other, like cards being dealt from a pack: searchers knee-deep in the glistening lake; that fat policeman sweating in the fetid heat of the library, his green young deputy taking notes; her father and mother, ashen-faced, as they fronted the local news photographer. She could almost feel herself pressed against the French doors watching them, sick with the secret she hadn't been able to make herself tell, the guilt she'd nursed deep inside ever since.

Alice noticed that her hand was shaking very slightly and urged herself to remember the fact for when she next needed to depict the bodily effects of shock, its ice wash hitting a person who had, over a lifetime, schooled herself in the appearance of composure. She moved her treacherous hands into her lap, pressing one firmly over the other, and said with an imperious jut of the chin, “Put it in the bin.” Her tone was surprisingly even; there were very few people left alive who'd have marked the faint note of underlying tension.

“You don't want me to do anything? Not even to write back?”

“No point, is there?” Alice kept her gaze direct. “I'm afraid this Sadie Sparrow's made a mistake. She has me confused with someone else.”

S
even

Cornwall, 25 June 1933

The man was talking. His mouth was moving, words were swarming, but Eleanor couldn't catch them, not in a way that made sense. Just one here and another there: missing . . . wandered . . . lost . . . Her mind was a fog, a blessed fog, Dr Gibbons had seen to that.

A trickle of perspiration slipped beneath her collar, finding its way between her shoulder blades. The cool of it made her shiver, and Anthony, sitting beside her, strengthened his gentle hold. His hand rested on hers, large upon small, eminently familiar and yet today rendered foreign by the nightmarish turn of events. There were features she'd never noticed before, hairs and lines and pale-blue veins, like roads on a map beneath his skin.

The heat had held. The overnight storm that threatened had never come. The thunder had rumbled all night before rolling out to sea. Just as well, the policeman had said, for rain would have washed away the clues. The same policeman, the younger one, had told them speaking to the newspaper would help. “We'll have a thousand pairs of eyes that way, all on the lookout for your boy.”

Eleanor was sick with worry, immobilised by fear; it was a relief that Anthony was answering the reporter's questions. She could hear his voice, as if from a great distance. Yes, the boy was young, not quite eleven months, but he'd walked early—all the Edevane children had walked early. He was a bonny child, strong and healthy . . . his hair was blond and his eyes were blue . . . of course they'd be able to supply a photograph.

Through the window, Eleanor could see all the way across the sunny garden to the lake. There were men there, policemen in their uniforms, and others, too, men she didn't know. Most were standing together on the grassy bank but some were out on the water. The lake was as smooth as glass today, a great silver mirror with a dull impression of the sky rippling on it. The ducks had fled the water, but a man in a black diving suit and mask had been searching from a small rowing boat all morning. They did that before they used the hooks, Eleanor had heard someone say.

When she was a girl, she'd had a little boat all of her own. Her father had bought it for her and painted her name on the side. It had a set of wooden oars and a hand-fashioned white sail and she'd taken it out most mornings. Mr Llewellyn had called her Eleanor the Adventuress, waving from behind his sketchpad on the overgrown bank as she sailed past him, inventing stories about her travels that he told them over lunch, making Eleanor clap and her father laugh and her mother smile with grim impatience.

Mother despised Mr Llewellyn and his stories. She hated any sort of softness in a person, “weakness of character' she called it, and he was certainly a far gentler soul than she. He'd had a breakdown when they were younger and still suffered bouts of melancholy; Constance greeted such occasions with contempt. She also loathed what she saw as the “unhealthy attention' her husband lavished on their daughter. Such focus, she insisted, couldn't help but spoil a child, particularly one already in possession of “a worrying spirit of mutiny.” Besides, there were better things, surely, that he could have spent his money on? This was a common refrain between them, money or the lack thereof, the disparity between the life they led and that which Eleanor's mother wished them to lead. Many nights Eleanor heard them arguing in the library, her mother's sharp tone and her father's soft, placatory replies. She wondered sometimes how he stood the constant criticism. “Love,” Mr Llewellyn had said when she ventured as much to him. “We do not always have a choice in where and how and who, and love gives us the courage to withstand that which we never thought we could.”

“Mrs Edevane?”

Eleanor opened her eyes and found herself inside the library. She was on the sofa, Anthony beside her, his large hand still protectively over hers. She was briefly surprised to see a man sitting across from them with a small spiral-ringed notepad in hand and a pen behind his ear. Reality came funnelling back.

He was a reporter. Here to talk about Theo.

Her arms were suddenly heavy with her baby's absence. She remembered that first night when it had been just the two of them. He'd been the only one of her four children to arrive early, and she could feel his heels moving against her hand as she cradled him, the same little marble joints she'd felt only days before through the skin of her belly. She'd whispered to him in the dark, promised she would always keep him safe—

“Mrs Edevane?”

With Theo it was different from the start. Eleanor had loved all her babies—not perhaps, if she were honest, at first sight, but certainly by the time they took their first steps—but with Theo it was more than love. She
cherished
him. After his birth she'd taken him into her bed, swaddled in his blanket, and she'd looked into his eyes and seen there all the wisdom babies were born with before it slips away. He stared back, trying to tell her the secrets of the cosmos, his little mouth opening and closing around words he didn't yet know, or perhaps no longer remembered. It reminded her of when her father died. He'd done the same thing, staring at her with bottomless eyes, filled with all the things he'd never now have the chance to say.

“Mrs Edevane, the photographer is going to take your picture.” Eleanor blinked. The reporter. His notepad made her think of Alice. Where was she? And where were Deborah and Clemmie, for that matter? Someone, presumably, was taking care of the girls. Not her mother, but Mr Llewellyn, perhaps? That would explain why she hadn't seen him yet this morning: he must've stepped in to help with the girls, keeping them out of trouble's path just as she'd asked him to do in the past.

“Right then, Mr and Mrs Edevane.” A second man, portly, red with heat, waved a hand from behind his tripod. “Look this way, if you wouldn't mind.”

Eleanor was used to having her picture taken—she was the little girl from the fairy tale and had been painted, sketched and photographed all her life—but now she flinched. She wanted to lie down in the dark and close her eyes, to stay that way and talk to no one until things were right again. She was tired, unthinkably tired.

“Come, my love.” Anthony's voice, kind and quiet by her ear. “Let's get this over with. I have your hand.”

“It's so hot,” she whispered in reply. The silk of her blouse was sticking to her back; her skirt worried at her waist where the seams gathered.

“Look this way, Mrs Edevane.”

“I can't breathe, Anthony. I need—”

“I'm here, I'm with you. I'll always be here with you.”

“Ready, and . . .” The photographer's flash burst with white light, and as Eleanor's sight starred, she thought she saw a figure by the French doors. Alice, she was sure of it, standing very still, watching.

“Alice,” she said, blinking her dazzled vision clear. “Alice?”

But then a cry came from the lake, a man's voice, loud and sharp, and the reporter leapt from his chair and hurried to the window. Anthony stood and Eleanor did the same, stumbling on legs that were suddenly weak, waiting, waiting, as time seemed to stand still, until finally the young reporter turned and shook his head.

“False alarm,” he said, excitement giving way to disappointment as he took out a handkerchief to wipe his brow. “Just an old boot, not a body at all.”

Eleanor's knees threatened to give way. She turned back towards the French doors, but Alice was no longer there. She caught, instead, the eyes of her own reflection in the mirror by the mantelpiece. She almost didn't recognise herself. The careful poise of “Mother' was gone and instead she found herself face to face with a girl who used to live in this house a long time ago, unmannered, wild, exposed; a girl she'd almost forgotten.

“That's enough.” Anthony's voice came sharply, suddenly. Her love, her saviour. “Have some pity, man, my wife is in shock, her child is gone. This interview is over.”

* * *

Eleanor was floating.

“I assure you, Mr Edevane, they're very powerful barbiturates. Just one will be enough to keep her sleeping all afternoon.”

“Thank you, Doctor. She's been beside herself.”

She knew that voice; it was Anthony's.

And now the other one again, the doctor: “I'm not surprised. Terrible business, just terrible.”

“The police are doing everything they can.”

“They're confident they'll find him?”

“We must stay positive and trust they will do their best.”

Her husband's hand was on her forehead now, warm, firm, smoothing her hair. Eleanor tried to speak, but her mouth was lazy and the words wouldn't come.

He hushed her. “There, my love. Sleep now.”

His voice was everywhere, all around her like the voice of God. Her body was heavy but slow, as if she were sinking through clouds. Falling, falling, backwards through the layers of her life. Before she became Mother, before she came home to Loeanneth, through the summer she met Anthony, back beyond the loss of her father, and into the long, boundless stretch of her childhood. She had a vague sense that something was lost and she ought to be looking for it, but her brain was sluggish and she couldn't grasp the thing. It was eluding her, like a tiger, a yellow-and-black tiger, slinking away from her through the long strands of the meadow. It was the Loeanneth meadow, the woods dark and glistening in the distance, and Eleanor reached out her hands to brush the tips of the grass.

* * *

There was a tiger in Eleanor's bedroom when she was a girl. His name was Zephyr and he lived beneath her bed. He'd come with them from the big house, smuggled down in the move, a little the worse for wear, his proud coat reeking of smoke. Her father's father, Horace, had captured him in Africa, in the great time of before. Eleanor had heard about the time of before, stories that her father told her from when the estate was large and the deShiels lived in a grand house with twenty-eight bedrooms and a coach house filled not with pumpkins but with real coaches, some of them decorated with gold. Not much was left now, only the burned shell of the house, too far away from Loeanneth to be seen. But it was Mr Llewellyn who'd told her the story of the tiger and pearl.

When she was smaller, Eleanor had completely believed the tale. That Zephyr brought her back from Africa with him, a pearl that he'd swallowed, that had remained hidden deep within his jaw when he was shot, skinned, sold and shipped, during the decades his pelt was put on proud display at the big house and through his subsequent repair to reduced circumstances at the Lake House. It was there, one day, when the tiger's head was tilted just so, that the pearl rolled out of his lifeless mouth and became lost in the long weave of the library carpet. It was trodden on, bypassed and all but forgotten, until one dark night, while the household slept, it was found by fairies on a mission of theft. They took the pearl deep into the woods, where it was laid on a bed of leaves, studied and pondered and tentatively stroked, before being stolen by a bird, who mistook it for an egg.

High in the treetops, the pearl began to grow and grow and grow, until the bird became frightened her own eggs would be crushed and she rolled the argent orb back down the side of the tree, where it landed with a soft thud on a bed of leaf-fall. There, in the light of the full moon, surrounded by curious fairy folk, the egg began to hatch and a baby emerged. The fairies gathered nectar to feed her and took turns rocking the babe to sleep, but soon no amount of nectar was enough, and even fairy magic could not keep the child content. A meeting was held and it was decided the woods were no place for a human child and she must be returned to the house, laid on the doorstep in a wrap of woven leaves.

As far as Eleanor was concerned, it explained everything: why she felt such an affinity with the woods, why she'd always been able to glimpse the fairies in the meadows where other people saw only grass, why birds had gathered on the ledge outside the nursery window when she was an infant. It also explained the fierce tiger rage that welled up inside her at times, that made her spit and scream and stomp, so that Nanny Bruen hissed and told her she'd come to no good if she didn't learn to control herself. Mr Llewellyn, on the other hand, said there were worse things in life than a temper, that it only proved one had an opinion. And a pulse, he added, the alternative to which was dire! He said a girl like Eleanor would do well to keep the coals of her impudence warm, for society would seek to cool them soon enough. Eleanor put a lot of stock in the things Mr Llewellyn said. He wasn't like the other grown-ups.

* * *

Eleanor did not make a habit of telling people the story of her birth—unlike
Eleanor's Magic Doorway
, which had been turned into a book for children everywhere, “The Tiger and the Pearl' was hers and hers alone—but when she was eight years old her cousin Beatrice came with her parents on a visit to Loeanneth. This was not usual. Eleanor's mother, Constance, did not, as a rule, get on with her sister Vera. With eleven months between them, the two had always been competitive, their entire lives comprising a tournament of minor sibling battles, the culmination of one leading necessarily to the commencement of another. Constance's marriage to Henri deShiel, a seeming triumph at its start, had been tarnished irreparably when her sister (younger!) made a vastly superior match with a newly minted Scottish earl who'd dug a fortune out of the ground in Africa. The sisters had not spoken for five years afterwards, but now, it seemed, a shaky truce had been achieved.

One rainy day, the girls had been sent to the nursery, where Eleanor was trying to read Edmund Spenser's
The Faerie Queene
(it was Mr Llewellyn's favourite and she wanted to impress him) and Beatrice was finishing her latest tapestry. Eleanor had been away with her thoughts, when a terrified squeal made her lose her rhythm altogether. Beatrice was standing bolt upright, pointing beneath the bed with tears lacquering her blotched face. “A monster . . . my needle . . . I dropped . . . and there's . . . I saw . . . a
monster
!” Eleanor realised at once what had happened and pulled Zephyr from beneath her bed, explaining that he was her treasure, kept concealed only so he might be saved from Mother's wrath. Beatrice, still gulping and sniffing, was so pink-eyed and snotty that Eleanor felt sorry for her. The rain was drumming against the window, the world outside was cold and grey, the perfect conditions for storytelling. And so she encouraged her cousin to sit beside her on the bed and explained all about the pearl and the woods and her unusual arrival at Loeanneth. Beatrice had laughed when she finished and said that it was a fun tale and well told, but surely she must know she came from inside her mother's stomach. It had been Eleanor's turn then to laugh, in delight, but more than that surprise. Beatrice was a doughy, ordinary sort of girl with a penchant for lace and ribbons, resolutely simple, not given to fancy or storytelling. To think that she could concoct such a wild and wonderful tale! Her mother's stomach indeed! Eleanor's mother was tall and lean, cinched and winched each morning into dresses that never wrinkled and certainly didn't stretch. It was unthinkable that anything could possibly have grown inside her. Not a pearl, and certainly not Eleanor.