The Lake House (11 page)

The story made Eleanor warm to Beatrice and despite their differences the two girls started to become friends. Eleanor didn't have many friends, only her father and Mr Llewellyn, and the novelty of a girl of her own age to play with was enormous. She showed her cousin all her favourite places. The trout stream in the woods, the bend in it where the water suddenly deepened, the tallest tree from which, if one climbed all the way to the top, the burned shell of the big house could be glimpsed in the distance. She even gave Beatrice a tour of the old boathouse, beloved scene of all her best and most important games. She had thought they were having a grand time, until one night, lying in their twin beds, her cousin said, “But you must get so
lonely
here, just you, by yourself, in the middle of nowhere with nothing to do.” Eleanor had been struck by the wrong-headedness of the description. How could Beatrice say such a thing when there was so
much
to do at Loeanneth? Clearly, it was time to introduce her cousin to her favourite and most secret game.

Before daybreak the next morning, she shook Beatrice awake, signalled to her to be quiet, and then led her down to the lake where the trees grew wild and the eels slithered in the shadowy depths. There, she initiated her cousin into the ongoing game of The Adventures of Grandfather Horace. The great man's diaries were upstairs in the study, tied together with a yellow ribbon. She wasn't supposed to know they were there, but Eleanor was always in trouble for going places that were out of bounds, for listening to things she ought not to hear, and she knew them all by heart. She re-enacted the ones he'd described, his trips through Peru and Africa and over the ice in northern Canada, and others she made up. Now, with the help of Zephyr, she performed for Beatrice's edification and entertainment her pièce de résistance, the old man's grisly death, as detailed in the letter addressed to “whom it may concern' and tucked inside the back cover of the final, unfinished diary. Beatrice looked on wide-eyed, and then clapped and laughed, and said with cheerful admiration, “No wonder your mother says you're a little savage.”

“Does she?” Eleanor blinked, surprised and rather pleased by the unexpectedness of the description.

“She told my mother she despaired of ever having you fit for London.”

“London?” Eleanor wrinkled her nose. “But I'm not going to London.” She'd heard the word before—London, rhymes with “undone.” Whenever her parents argued, the word was parried like a sword. “I'm fading away in this godforsaken place,” Eleanor's mother would say. “I want to go to London. I know that frightens you, Henri, but it's where I belong. I should be mixing with the right sort of people. Don't forget I was invited to the palace once when I was young!”

Eleanor had heard
that
particular story a thousand times and so paid it no heed. She had been curious, though: she'd never known her father to be frightened of anything, and imagined London the home of lawlessness and mayhem. “It's a big city,” he'd said when she asked him, “full of motorcars and omnibuses and people.”

Eleanor had sensed the unspoken shadow behind his answer. “And temptations?”

He'd looked up swiftly, his eyes searching hers. “Now where did you hear a thing like that?”

Eleanor had shrugged artlessly. The word had come from her father's own lips, when he and Mr Llewellyn were talking by the boathouse and she was stealing wild strawberries from the bushes beside the stream.

He'd sighed. “For some. Yes. A place of temptations.”

And he'd looked so sad that Eleanor put her small hand in his and said vehemently, “I'm never going there. I'm never leaving Loeanneth.”

She said the same thing now to cousin Beatrice, who smiled at her in much the same fond, pitying way her father had. “Well, of course you will, silly. How are you ever going to find a husband living in a place like this?”

* * *

Eleanor didn't want to go to London and she didn't want to find a husband, but in 1911, when she was sixteen years old, she did both. She hadn't meant to. Her father was dead, Loeanneth had been placed in the hands of an estate agent, and her mother had taken her to London in order to marry her off to the highest bidder. In her fury and impotence, Eleanor had steadfastly promised herself
not
to fall in love. They were staying with Constance's sister in a large house on the fringe of Mayfair. It had been decided Beatrice and Eleanor should take part in the Season together and, predictably enough for Constance and Vera, the sibling battlelines had been drawn around the marriage prospects of their respective daughters.

So it was, on a fine afternoon in late June, in a secondstorey London bedroom, with a summer's day turning to haze outside the window, a lady's maid with perspiration beading on her brow pulled at her recalcitrant subject's bodice and said, “Stand still, Miss Eleanor. I'll never give you a bosom if you don't jolly well stand still.”

None of the maids enjoyed dressing Eleanor, she knew this for a fact. There was a nook in the library with a vent behind it connecting to the cupboard where the housemaids went to avoid the butler. Eleanor had overheard them when she was doing her own bit of hiding from her mother. Accompanied by a faint waft of cigarette smoke, she'd heard the following: “Never stands still . . .”; “Stains on her clothes!”; “With a bit of effort . . .”; “If she'd only try . . .”; “But dearie me, that hair!”

Eleanor stared now at her reflection. Her hair
was
wild, it always had been, a mess of dark brown ripples that resisted all attempts to tame it. The effect, in combination with stubbornly lean limbs and a habit of studious wide-eyed focus, was resolutely uncoquettish. Her nature, she'd been given to understand, was similarly defective. Nanny Bruen had been fond of clicking her tongue and lamenting aloud “the sparing of rod' and “unfettered feeding of a wicked passion' that had allowed the child to develop into “a disappointment to Mother' and, worse, “to God!” God's feelings remained a mystery, but Eleanor's mother's disappointment was written all over her face.

Speak of the devil, Constance deShiel arrived at the bedroom door dressed in her finest, her hair (neat, blonde, smooth) piled on top of her head in elaborate curls, jewels dripping from her neck. Eleanor bared her teeth. The sale of jewels like this would have saved Loeanneth. Her mother waved the maid aside and took over lacing Eleanor's stays. She pulled with enough vigour to make Eleanor gasp, and launched directly into a recitation of the eligible young men who'd be at the Rothschild dance that night. It was difficult to believe this was the same person who'd resolutely refused to answer Father's questions about extravagant purchases, claiming airily, “You know I haven't a head for details.” The summary was exhaustive, no feature of any prospective suitor deemed too petty for inclusion.

No doubt there were some mothers and daughters for whom this routine would have proved enjoyable; Eleanor and Constance deShiel, however, were not among them. Her mother was a stranger to Eleanor, a cold, distant figure who'd never liked her. Eleanor wasn't sure why
exactly
(there'd been whispers between the servants at Loeanneth that the mistress had always wanted a son) and she didn't particularly care. The feeling was mutual. There was a manic edge to Constance's enthusiasm today. Cousin Beatrice (who, in the intervening years, had developed a buxom figure and an unhealthy addiction to Elinor Glyn novels) had been mentioned in the most recent Court Circular and suddenly the contest had become a great deal more urgent.

“. . . the eldest son of a viscount,” Constance was saying. “His grandfather made a fortune in some sort of deal with the East India Trading Company . . . fabulously wealthy . . . stocks and bonds . . . American interests . . .”

Eleanor frowned at her own reflection, hating the way these conversations implied collusion. These words, these clothes, these expectations were constraints from which she longed to escape. She didn't belong here in this London of stucco and paving stones; of morning dress fittings at Madame Lucille in Hanover Square and afternoon carriages delivering white appointment cards arranging yet another round of tea and chatter. She cared not a jot for the fervent advice doled out by
The Lady
magazine on servant management, home decoration and what to do with superfluous nasal hair.

Her hand went to the chain she wore around her neck, the pendant she kept concealed beneath her clothing—not a locket, but a tiger's tooth set in silver, a gift from her father. Caressing its familiar smooth edges, she let her vision glaze so she no longer saw herself, only a vaguely human shape. As her outline wavered, so did her concentration. Her mother's voice became a faint background drone, until suddenly she was no longer in this room in London, but at home, her real home, Loeanneth, sitting by the stream with her father and Mr Llewellyn, everything right with the world.

* * *

That night, Eleanor stood on the edge of the dance floor watching her mother twirl by. It was grotesque the way Constance gambolled around the ballroom, lips large and red, bosom heaving, jewels twinkling as she waltzed and laughed with one pink-faced partner after another. Why couldn't she be like all the other dutiful dowagers? Take her place on a seat against the wall and admire the garlands of lilies, while secretly nursing a desire to be home in a warm bath, her bed turned down and her hot-water bottle waiting for her. Her current dance partner spoke close to her ear and when Constance laughed and her hand leapt to her bare neck, things came back to Eleanor: whispers that had passed between the servants when she was a girl, footsteps in the hallway at dawn, strange men in their stockinged feet slinking back to their own rooms. Every tiny muscle in Eleanor's own face tightened and a tiger's rage flared hot inside her. As far as she was concerned, there was no sin greater than disloyalty. The worst thing a person could do was to break a promise.

“Eleanor! Look!” Beatrice was breathing quickly beside her, excitement expressing itself, as always, in the form of mild respiratory distress. Eleanor followed her cousin's gaze and saw a boisterous young man with a spotty chin approaching in the flickering candlelight. She felt an emotion similar to despair. Was this love? This transaction? The dressing in one's best clothing, the painting of a mask on one's face, the dance of learned steps, of scripted questions and replies? “Of course it is!” Beatrice exclaimed.

“But shouldn't there be more to it? Shouldn't there be an element of recognition?”

“Oh, Eleanor, you're such an ingénue! Life isn't a fairy tale, you know. That's all very well in books, but there's no such thing as magic.”

Not for the first time since her swift removal to London, Eleanor ached for Mr Llewellyn's company. Ordinarily she was a devotee of written correspondence, treasuring every letter she received and keeping copies of those she wrote in special books of triplicate, but there were some occasions where only the immediacy of a real, proper conversation with an understanding soul would do. What she'd have given for the fundamental comfort of knowing herself understood! She wasn't talking about magic. She was talking about an essential truth. Love as a fait accompli, a matter of fact, rather than a mutually beneficial arrangement between two suitable parties. She was debating whether to say so when Beatrice sang through the teeth of her most charming smile, “Now come along, dear one, do put on a happy face and let's see how many glances we can win.”

Eleanor deflated. It was hopeless. She had no interest in procuring glances from men for whom she cared nothing; pampered men leading bland lives of selfish pleasure. Her father had once said that the poor might suffer poverty, but the rich had to contend with uselessness and there was nothing like idleness to eat away at a person's soul. When Beatrice was otherwise engaged, Eleanor slipped through the crowd towards the exit.

She went up the stairs, flight by flight, with no destination in mind, content so long as the music was fading behind her. It had become her routine, to leave the ballroom at the earliest moment and then to explore the house in which the dance was being held. She was good at it; she'd had practice, sneaking through the woods of Loeanneth with the ghost of grandfather Horace, making herself invisible. She reached a landing where one door stood ajar and decided it was as good a place as any to start.

It was dark inside the room, but moonlight spilled through the window like mercury and Eleanor could see that it was a study of some kind. The far wall was lined with bookshelves and a large desk stood on a carpet in the middle. She went to sit behind the desk. Perhaps it was the leathery smell, perhaps it was simply that he was never far from her thoughts, but Eleanor pictured her father, the study at Loeanneth in which she'd often found him towards the end, head bent over a list of figures as he grappled with the family's debts. He'd weakened in his final months and was no longer able to roam with her as he once had across the meadows and through the woods. Eleanor had set herself the task of bringing his beloved natural world to him, collecting objects in the early morning and then carrying them back to show him, recounting all the things she'd seen and heard and smelled. One day she'd been rabbiting on about the changing weather when he'd held up his hand to stop her. He told her that he'd spoken to his solicitor. “I'm no longer a wealthy man, my lovely girl, but this house is safe. I've made a provision so that Loeanneth can't be sold and you will never be without your home.” When the time came, though, the documents had disappeared and Eleanor's mother denied all knowledge of them. “He spoke a lot of nonsense at the end,” she said.

With a glance at the shut door, Eleanor turned on the desk lamp and a broad rectangle of yellow light appeared on the table's surface. She tapped her fingertips on the desk as she considered the accoutrements. A carved wooden pen-holder, an ink blotter, a cotton-bound journal. A newspaper was open and she began idly to flick through its pages. Later, the whole sequence of events would be folded into the story of How They Met and acquire an air of reverence and inevitability. At the time, though, Eleanor was simply escaping the predictability and boredom of the dance below. She had no idea when she read the headline
pair of tigers from far east arrive at london zoo
that a door had opened. She knew only that Zephyr's tooth was suddenly warm against her skin and that she had to see those tigers for herself.