The Secret by the Lake (15 page)

There was a movement inside Reservoir Cottage. We watched as a figure came to the living-room window, reached up and drew first one curtain, then the other.

I tried not to look at the window of the empty bedroom above. I was afraid I might see something there.

Instead I turned to Daniel and slipped my arms around his neck. I kissed his mouth, taking care not to touch the sore part of his face. He kissed me back. It was even lovelier than before and the feeling inside me grew and became stronger. I welcomed it. I think I knew already then what it was, and that it was part of me now, and that it would never go away.

THE NEXT MORNING,
it being a Saturday and there being no school, we had a cup of tea and what was left of Mrs Croucher’s fruit cake for breakfast. Then I cleared the kitchen table and sat with Viviane and Kitty making paperchains and decorations. By lunchtime the kitchen was strewn with paper and glitter and paint and glue, and a cheerful, festive mood had descended on the cottage. One of Kitty’s brothers arrived to pick her up before lunch. I went to meet him at the door, and he said: ‘Have you seen this? It looks like the Spirit of Christmas Present has been to visit!’

Viviane pushed past me and I followed her out. Leaning against the wall was a Christmas tree already set in a metal pail and lavishly decorated with ribboned bows and an elaborate string of coloured fairy lights. There was also a huge bunch of mistletoe, and a wreath of holly and ivy.

‘Did you bring these?’ Viviane asked Kitty’s brother.

‘Did I heck! They were there when I got here. Looks like Father Christmas came early to you.’

‘It must have been Daniel,’ I said, and I could not hide my smile.

Kitty’s brother helped us bring the decorations in and set them up in the living room. The lights, when they were plugged in, twinkled beautifully. Even Julia smiled and held her hands together over her heart, the pale skin of her face reflecting patches of red and green and yellow. ‘Lovely,’ she said. ‘Perfectly lovely!’

Kitty’s brother invited Viviane to come back to the farm for the afternoon, promising to return her to Reservoir Cottage before dark. She was eager to go and I thought of the food she would be fed there, and was pleased to send her away. The young people disappeared and the cottage was quiet again.

Julia sighed. ‘We ought to unplug the lights to save the electricity,’ she said.

‘They use barely anything,’ I said, thinking that a few extra pence on the bill would make little difference to our situation. Julia shrugged. She pulled Alain’s sweater on over her dress and returned to his notebook. I went back upstairs, back to the wallpaper in the empty bedroom. I felt better that day, after spending time with Daniel, and I was determined not to allow myself to be spooked by my own imagination.

I left the door open and Bess lay on the landing as I chipped away at the paper. It was hard work. Mr Cummings and Dr Croucher had not pasted, but glued the paper to the wall in places; that was why it was so difficult to remove. The glue and the wet paper stank and the patch of exposed distemper beneath the paper grew terribly slowly like a wound that was not healing, but expanding – green-coloured flesh uncovered beneath peeling skin.

VIVIANE WAS UP
early on Sunday. I heard her footsteps on the stairs. Bess turned a circle on my bed, sighed and lay warm in the hollow of my legs. I snuggled further under the blankets where it was cosy and tried to fall back to sleep but I couldn’t. Instead I thought of my Daniel and his kindness and his easy ways, but that was no comfort to me because the spectre of his mother’s death and his father’s violence cast shadows over my thoughts.

Daniel should have left his father, I thought. He should have gone away from Blackwater, far away, and made a new life for himself. I had found the strength to leave my father, and he wasn’t a cruel man; his only vice was his bitterness, his refusal to forgive my mother for not loving him enough to stay.

But that wasn’t her fault. You can’t make yourself love a person, any more than you can make that person love you. Love is not a matter of choice.

Thinking of my father was making me feel guilty. I had posted him a Christmas card, but that was all I’d done. I turned over. Bess grumbled and turned too.

Those of us who are bound by love, not by responsibility, are the lucky ones, I thought and I remembered the children in the home where I’d worked for such a short time, the little ones who were entirely alone, and that thought almost broke my heart.

After a while, weary with sleeplessness, I climbed out of bed and went downstairs, my mood lifted by the smell of pine resin coming from the living room. I plugged in the fairy lights – because their cheerfulness outshone the gloom, no matter how hard the gloom fought back – and went into the kitchen. Viviane was already there, sitting at the table making more decorations.

‘Good morning,’ I said. Viviane did not look up from the paper angel she was making.

I lifted the kettle to test its weight. ‘How about a drink?’ I asked. ‘Cup of tea?’

‘No, thanks,’ said Viviane.

I sat opposite the child with my chin in my hands, while I waited for the kettle to boil. Vivi had lined up the angels and was painting faces on them with care and precision.

‘They’re beautiful,’ I said.

‘I’m making them for Kitty’s dad. He said nobody ever makes angels for pig farmers.’

‘That’s sad.’

‘Mmm. He said just because he smells like you-know-what, it doesn’t mean he can’t appreciate something pretty.’

‘He sounds a nice man.’

‘He is.’ Vivi looked up then. ‘Oh Amy, I miss Papa so much.’

‘I know you do, darling.’

‘Everything was better when he was alive.’

‘I know.’

Viviane sucked her lower lip, then dipped her brush into the little pool of red in the lid of her paint box. ‘Remember the decorations we used to have in the apartment in France? It used to take us a whole day to put them up, and you would make a jug of hot chocolate to keep us going. Remember the glass birds with the real feathers in their tails that we clipped on to the blinds?’

‘I remember.’

‘And those baubles Mummy bought from the shop in the Champs Elysées? If you held them up to your eye and looked through them towards the light, you could see hundreds of different colours like magic. What happened to those baubles, Amy? Who has them now?’

‘I don’t know.’

Viviane dipped the brush in a jam jar half-full of water and twirled it round to clean the bristles. A smudge of red paint drifted in the water. I reached out and ran my fingers along the back of her wrist.

‘Next year you can start again, Vivi. You can start a new collection of decorations.’

‘They won’t be the same, though, will they?’

‘No, they won’t be the same but that doesn’t mean they’ll be worse, just different, that’s all.’

‘Why do things have to change?’

‘I don’t know, my darling.’ I took hold of the child’s hand and I kissed it.

Viviane paused. ‘Amy?’

‘Yes?’

‘Do you believe in hell?’

I took a deep breath. ‘I don’t know. I don’t think so.’

‘So even if you did something really bad, even if you for example killed someone, you wouldn’t go to hell?’

‘I’m not planning on killing anyone.’ I laughed. ‘Why do you ask?’

‘In the Bible it says that people who do bad things go to hell.’

‘Not everything in the Bible is true.’

Vivi shrugged. She was concentrating very hard on her painting. There was something about her demeanour that made me uneasy.

‘Is there anything you want to talk to me about, Vivi?’ I asked. ‘Has someone said something to upset you?’

She still did not look up but she shook her head. I decided not to press her.

I took my tea upstairs and returned to work in the empty bedroom. The stripped area seemed to have grown smaller while I was absent, as if the wallpaper was alive and was trying to repair the damage I had inflicted. Already it seemed an endless task and one I half-wished I had never begun. There was something repulsive about the wallpaper, something more than the bilious colour, the sickly pattern. Perhaps it was the awful smell of the decades-old glue, perhaps it was its obstinacy.

Perhaps it was something else altogether.

THERE HAD BEEN
no mention of Viviane’s imaginary friend for a while. Caroline had not disturbed Vivi’s sleep; all her talk was of the new friends she had made at school and nothing out of the ordinary had happened in the house. I had stopped worrying so much about Viviane and Julia and I was so buoyed by my feelings for Daniel that I was less anxious at home. Superficially at least, things were improving inside the cottage. Then, just a few days before Christmas, the mirror broke.

It was a Tuesday, a better day, a bright, sunshiny day. I had already walked the dog and was upstairs changing when the telephone rang. Julia picked up the receiver in the living room and I could hear that she was speaking to the estate agent. Suddenly there was a crash and Julia screamed.

I ran down the stairs. Julia was standing on the rug in the centre of the dark wooden floorboards with the receiver still in her hand, and all around her were shards of glass. Fragments glinted, reflecting the colours of the fairy lights. The big, convex mirror that had hung above the fireplace had fallen out of its fancy, sunburst frame, hit the edge of the hearth as it fell, and exploded. The frame, empty now, was still on the wall, with nothing inside it. Anxious bleats were coming from the telephone.

‘Don’t move, Julia,’ I said. ‘Keep still.’

Julia was as white as a ghost. She dropped the receiver. It bounced once and then lay on the floor beneath the table, on the end of its cord. She was staring at the mirror frame in horror.

I pulled on my shoes and pushed the dog back, away from the broken glass. I then went into the living room, glass crunching beneath my soles, and picked up the telephone receiver. ‘Mrs Laurent will call you back presently,’ I said and I replaced the receiver into its cradle.

Julia raised a shaky finger and pointed at the place where the mirror had been. ‘I saw Caroline,’ she said.

‘It must have been a trick of the light,’ I said gently.

‘It wasn’t. I saw her as clearly as anything. It was as if she was watching me through the mirror!’

‘It was your own reflection distorted in some way, that’s all it was, honestly. Here are your shoes. Put them on, darling.’

‘My mother stood in front of that mirror every morning,’ Julia said. ‘She used to stand there and put her lipstick on, like this.’ She pursed her lips and mimed the act of drawing on lipstick. Then she turned to me. ‘And I was thinking about that. I was on the telephone, thinking about my mother putting on her lipstick and when I looked up, there was Caroline, looking out of the mirror.’

‘You can’t have seen Caroline—’

‘I know! I know I can’t have, but I did! Oh Amy, what’s happening to me? Am I going completely mad? First I hear her voice, then I see her face in the mirror!’

‘It’s because you’re here and you’re thinking about her, that’s all.’

Julia crouched with difficulty to gather up the pieces of broken glass.

‘Please don’t do that,’ I begged, ‘you’ll cut yourself. Leave it to me.’

‘It was my mother’s mirror and now it’s broken. If we collect all the shards, we can take them to a restorer!’

‘You can’t repair a broken mirror, Julia. Some things just can’t be put back to how they were.’

‘Everything I care about is broken!’ Julia cried. She clenched her fingers over the fragments and at once blood began to seep from her hand.

I dropped to my knees, put my arms around her and held her. ‘Let go of the pieces,’ I pleaded. ‘Let them go, Julia. Don’t hurt your hands for nothing.’

‘I saw Caroline,’ Julia whispered. ‘She was watching me.’

This time, I didn’t contradict her. I gently forced her fingers open, took the bloodied shards from her and then held her, rocking her as if she were a baby. As I did so, I had the sensation of something moving past, a draught. I glanced over my shoulder and I saw the feathery strands of the tinsel on the tree lift and waft like hair in the wind.

I HEARD THE
creaking of the chains of the swing, rhythmic as a heartbeat, reminiscent of the creaking of the floorboards in the back room beneath the runners of Julia’s rocking chair. I looked through the window and saw Viviane in the garden, in her school clothes, sitting on the swing in the gloaming. She had taken off her coat and hooked it over the black branch of one of the overgrown apple trees and she was lying back with her legs stretched out, her body almost a straight line, as the swing swung backwards and forwards and back again.

I went outside. The fishing boats were out on the lake, their lamps spots of light in the blackness of the valley. The air smelled of dead leaves and woodsmoke, of damp and of winter. In the house, the light shone dully through the back-room window out into the garden. I couldn’t see Julia but I knew she was there. The thought of what else was inside the house was like a chill settling on my shoulders.

Viviane swung and I went over to the shed. I tried the door once again, as if it might have somehow freed itself from the padlock. It would not budge, so I went to the window and put my fingers beneath the wood hammered over it and pulled at the planks, trying to prise one loose, but all I did was make my fingers sore. I leaned back against the shed wall and imagined it being filled with fire. I imagined the child Julia watching from next door’s window as her beloved hideaway went up in smoke, Mrs Croucher whispering comforting words into her hair. I imagined Julia’s father and Dr Croucher frantically throwing spadefuls of soil into the shed, trying to extinguish the flames. I imagined what Caroline must have felt like, standing a little apart, watching, feeling the heat of the fire, every now and then being engulfed by the smoke. Why had she done that? Was she so jealous of her little sister that she was compelled to destroy the child’s sanctuary?