The Secret by the Lake (20 page)

‘Are you sure?’

‘Well, I could possibly manage something.’

‘Toast?’

‘If you’re having some.’

He made several rounds of toast and politely looked out of the window as I spread as much butter and jam as I could on to mine and then wolfed the slices down, wiping the delicious grease from my lips with the back of my hand.

He waited until I had finished and then he took my plate from me and kissed me. ‘I like to see a girl with an appetite,’ he said.

‘You’re with the right girl then,’ I said.

We drank our coffee and then he took me into a large, light sitting room with tall windows framed by faded yellow- and rose-coloured curtains, tatty old sofas, dog blankets, bookcases. It was the sort of room that would make me want to stay inside it for ever, curled up with a book. There was a grand fireplace with the remains of a fire, a pile of ash and a half-burned log, in the grate.

‘I want to show you something,’ Daniel said. He led me to an alcove, tucked away at the back of the room, and drew back a curtain. Behind was a portrait of a woman, painted in the naive style that was so popular in the late 1920s. ‘This is my mother, Jean Aldridge.’

I stood in front of the picture and looked at it closely. The painting, full of colour as it was, was more revealing about Jean’s personality than the photographs Daniel had shown me before. Jean was slender, like Daniel, blonde and small-featured, with a neat mouth and pale-lashed eyes. In this picture, she was wearing a watery-green sweater and a blue glass necklace and holding a ginger cat in her arms. She was standing in the garden at Fairlawn with an apple tree to one side, a pear tree to the other and the lake behind her. The trees were full of birds. She was not quite smiling.

She had been through so much and she finally had what she’d always wanted.

‘Father had that painted for my mother for her fortieth birthday,’ Daniel said, ‘a year before I was born. She didn’t like it apparently. She thought it made her look old.’

‘She doesn’t look old.’

‘She was sensitive about the age difference between herself and my father.’

‘I’m sure she had no need to be. She’s very beautiful. Why is the painting hidden away?’

‘Father can’t bear to look at it. He doesn’t like to be reminded of her.’

‘Oh dear.’

I reached out and took hold of Daniel’s hand. It was unnerving to stare into the eyes of his mother, knowing that she would be dead within two years of this picture being painted and knowing that she did not know this. It felt intrusive. I looked away.

‘It’s such a shame,’ I said, ‘that she never got to know you.’

‘I was with her, you know, when it happened,’ Daniel said.

‘You said that you were. So how come … I mean … why didn’t you drown too?’

‘She’d parked my pram on the dam while she went down to the water’s edge with her binoculars.’

‘And she slipped and fell in?’

Daniel did not answer this. He drew the curtain over the picture and walked back into the main part of the room. His shoulders were hunched.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘That was dreadful of me to ask about your mother so bluntly.’

‘I don’t like to talk of it.’

‘No, of course you don’t. I’m so sorry, Daniel. Can you forgive me?’

‘Let’s change the subject?’

‘Yes, let’s do that. Tell me about this picture.’ I pointed to a small, framed drawing, depicting a dark-faced duck, surrounded by ripples of water. ‘It’s cute. What is it?’

‘It’s a very rare Lesser Scaup, the bird that brought my parents together.’

‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen one of those before.’

‘Well, you wouldn’t have, would you? They’re very rare.’

I laughed and then leaned in to look at the duck.

‘Your father must have loved your mother very much.’

‘He would have done anything for her,’ Daniel said. ‘Anything. When he gets drunk he tells me he’d give up everything he has – the house, the land, his money – for just one more day with her, another chance to hold her. He says he has never known another woman like her, someone so honest and courageous and loyal. He says he doesn’t know how his heart can continue beating without her around. He’s telling the truth. You can see it in his eyes.’

His voice was quiet and low. I glanced towards him and saw that his face had become sad. I did not know what to say to console him so instead I wandered across the room to the large, mullioned window. The view beyond was peaceful, the lake lying in the valley and the hills above, the birds flying over, the skeleton trees drawn on to the hillside and the grass behind them a dull, wintry yellow.

I looked across the water and I let my mind drift alongside Mr Aldridge’s boat. I thought of him bobbing on the little waves and watching the light on the water and thinking of the woman he loved. I felt sorry for the man. Because if she had been everything to him, and she was gone, then what was left?

Daniel’s hand was on my shoulder. I reached up and covered it with mine.

Daniel kissed each of my knuckles in turn. ‘Would you like to see the rest of the house?’ he asked.

‘Yes, please.’

I followed him up the stairs, up three half-flights to a grand landing. At the top was a large board with a crest on it, like a coat-of-arms with a brightly coloured, symbolized animal at each point of a compass in the middle. A painted banner beneath read:
Blackwater Village Club.

‘That’s all that’s left of the original village club,’ Daniel said. ‘It used to be on the land where the doctors’ surgery is now.’

‘What happened to it?’

‘It was bombed in the war. And afterwards they built the new hall.’

‘Oh, right. What are these animals?’

‘They’re supposed to represent the cornerstones of a balanced community. The lion is for leadership, the ape is for education, the lamb is for religion and the gryphon is for caring and health.’

‘That’s a lamb? It’s hideous.’

‘It’s in the heraldic tradition of a lamb.’

‘Hmm,’ I said. ‘So why does your father have this monstrosity hanging on his landing?’

‘Out of respect for my mother’s family. When the club was running there were always four committee members, all equal and each representing a key element of the village. My maternal grandfather was the area MP so he took the lion’s role.’

‘I see,’ I said. ‘And was Dr Croucher the caring gryphon?’

‘Yes. Reverend Pettigrew was the lamb, obviously, and the village school’s headmaster was the ape. He died in the war.’

‘What about your grandfather?’

‘He’s passed away too. The village club committee was disbanded after the war.’

‘The vicar and the doctor are still friends. I’ve seen them at Sunnyvale.’

‘They go back a long way, the two old codgers.’

I took hold of his hand, relieved that the mood had, at last, lightened. ‘So tell me, young Mr Aldridge, which of these hundreds of rooms used to be your old bedroom?’

‘There are only eight bedrooms, Amy, you do exaggerate. It’s the last door down there, on the left.’

‘Who slept in all the others?’

‘My father and mother had separate rooms and another had been converted into a nursery for the baby – me – when I came along. This one here was her sewing room and then there are three guest rooms. They’re quite impressive.’

‘And this one?’

‘That’s only a small room. It’s of no interest.’

‘Can’t I look?’

He took a breath. ‘Really, there’s nothing in there.’

I turned the handle and opened the door anyway. I stepped inside. The room was cold and obviously rarely used; it had the closed-off atmosphere of a place that has been abandoned. There was a bedframe, some stacked-up furniture covered over with a dustsheet, a couple of suitcases. The paintwork was brown and dull and the room lacked all the charm and cosiness of the rest of the house. I shivered and wrapped my arms around me.

‘Who slept here?’ I asked Daniel.

‘The maid,’ Daniel said. He had not come into the room.

The maid. That had been Caroline.

I walked across the room to the window, my heels clicking on the floorboards, and looked out at the view of the lake beyond. I had that strange feeling of losing myself, of slipping, for a heartbeat, into Caroline’s skin. I turned, to check that everything was as it had been and that I had not gone back in time, and there was Daniel, silhouetted in the doorframe, watching me. With the light behind him like that, with the glare of the sunlight in my eyes, he could have been somebody else; he could have been his father.

Everywhere I go, I thought, Caroline has already been. Everything I see, she has already seen.

There was a single picture hung on the wall in the room – an old Victorian photograph, sepia-coloured, with the borders faded away. A man and a woman were posing beside a window, a large aspidistra in a pot on a plant-stand beside them. The woman was seated, wearing a long dress with a nipped-in waist and a full skirt; the man stood behind her, one hand on her shoulder.

‘Who are they?’ I asked. My voice was thin in the dusty air of this closed-off room.

‘Those are my maternal grandparents,’ Daniel said. ‘That’s the Right Honourable George Debeger MP and his wife, Lady Matilda.’

‘They look very grand.’

‘They were.’

I stepped closer to the photograph. I stared at the necklace around the woman’s throat. I knew it well. It was a narrow gold chain with a heart-shaped pendant – a ruby surrounded by diamonds – and the gems were framed by a pair of clasped hands, joined at the top of the heart.

WHEN I RETURNED
to the cottage that evening, pleasantly weary after an afternoon’s lovemaking in the lodge, I looked up and saw that the light was on in the empty bedroom and somebody was moving around in there. I found Julia writing at the table in the back room.

‘Vivi’s in the empty room,’ I told her.

‘It’s all right. I’ve cleaned away the drawing. There’s nothing in there she can’t see.’

‘Is she OK?’ I asked.

‘She’s quiet. Will you have a talk with her, Amy? She doesn’t seem to want to talk to me.’

I said that I would and went into the kitchen to make a start on supper. Before I had so much as emptied the vegetables into the sink, there was a scream from upstairs. Julia and I bumped into one another in the hallway in our rush to see what was wrong. I helped her up the stairs, both of us going as fast as we could and Bess trailing behind.

Viviane was standing in the empty bedroom pointing to a cup on the mantelpiece. ‘The cup just moved!’ she said.

We peered at the cup. Very slowly, almost imperceptibly, it rocked on its base. I glanced at Julia to see if she had seen it too and I could tell from her pallor that she had.

‘My God!’ she breathed. She clasped her hands together and held them to her lips.

Then Vivi cried: ‘Stop it, Mummy! Make it stop.’

‘Amy,’ Julia whispered, ‘you pick it up.’

I reached out my hand to still the cup but I could not bear to touch it. The three of us stared, horrified but fascinated, as the cup revolved desperately slowly on the rim of its base, making a soft, scraping sound as the china grated against the tiled surface of the mantelpiece.

‘It’s Caroline,’ Viviane told us. ‘She’s here!’

‘No, no, darling, of course she isn’t,’ Julia said but her voice was shaky and to my ears her words lacked conviction.

‘But what if it
is
her? What if she’s come back?’ Vivi’s voice was rising. I put my arm around her and the child pressed her face into my side.

As Julia looked around desperately for something she could use to stop the cup, I felt Vivi release her grip on me. Her knees buckled beneath her, and I caught her at the exact same moment the cup fell from the mantelpiece and broke on the floor.

‘Vivi!’ Julia cried. ‘Oh my darling, my darling!’

We carried her across the landing into my bedroom and laid her down on the bed. Julia sat beside her and rubbed her daughter’s cold hands until the colour seeped slowly back into Vivi’s cheeks and her eyelids flickered.

The moment she came out of the faint, she began to cry. Tears tumbled from her eyes, one after the other as they had done when she was a tiny child, inconsolable over some perceived injustice.

‘There, there,’ Julia crooned, ‘my poor baby. Just let the tears come. You’ll feel better after a little cry.’

Viviane spoke through her sobs. ‘It was her,’ she said. ‘It was Caroline.
She
was moving the cup!’

‘No, darling, no. It was a draught that was coming through a crack in the brickwork of the chimney, or—’

‘It was her! I know it was. She said she’d do something to prove that she’s still here.’

Julia glanced at me for help. I stroked Viviane’s hand. ‘Vivi, it’s really important that we don’t let our imaginations get the better of us. Strange things – things we can’t easily explain – sometimes happen. That’s just life.’

‘I know what happened, Mummy.’ Viviane sat up and wiped her cheeks, calmer now. ‘I heard you talking about me with Mrs Croucher. I heard you both saying horrible things about Caroline and you said you didn’t like me having her as my friend and I didn’t want you to be upset so I stopped talking about her and you thought she’d gone away and that I’d forgotten her. But I hadn’t forgotten, I was only pretending and she never went away. She’s been here all the time. She’s here now.’

Viviane looked from her mother to me, and back again; her face was tense and urgent.

‘What did you hear us say?’ Julia asked. There was a strange tone to her voice.

‘I heard you say …’ Vivi glanced from her mother to me, and then down at her hands ‘… that Caroline was wicked and that she should have been locked away when she was a child.’

‘You shouldn’t have been listening, Vivi.’

‘I’m sorry, Mummy, but I couldn’t help it. I knew you were sad and I wanted to listen so that I could try to help make you better.’

Julia kissed her daughter’s forehead. ‘You are a dear child.’

Viviane looked up again. Her eyes were wide and sincere. ‘You do believe me, don’t you?’ she asked. ‘You have to believe me or else Caroline will find another way to show you that she’s here. She won’t go away, you know. She’s not going anywhere.’