The Secret by the Lake (23 page)

It suddenly occurred to me that perhaps Mrs Botham and my father were more than neighbours to one another. I glanced at the woman sideways.

No, surely not. She could hardly be less like my mother if she tried.

‘It was good of you to let me know about my father, Mrs Botham,’ I said.

‘There’s no need to stand on ceremony. You’re to call me Eileen. After all, I’ve known you since you were knee-high. You used to play in my yard. Do you remember?’

‘No.’

‘Well, you did. You were a shy little thing but very polite.’ Mrs Botham took hold of my arm, and we walked towards the exit together.

‘How is my father?’

‘He’s being stoic. There’s not many as survives a heart attack, but he did. He’s on painkillers and he’ll be in hospital for a couple of days. After that, he’s to come home and rest. The doctors said we should treat it as a shot across the bows.’

We?

‘Where is he?’

‘He’s in the General and he’s in good hands. He’s been told he’s to stop smoking.’

‘Dad will never stop smoking.’

‘Oh, he will if I have anything to do with it!’

I glanced at Mrs Botham again. This time, the older woman noticed the look and she flushed. She cleared her throat. ‘I’ve been keeping an eye on him,’ she said. ‘Somebody has to.’

‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘Absolutely.’

We had reached a small patch of grass outside the station. Bess sniffed it suspiciously and then, satisfied at last that it was safe, circled three times and squatted, holding her tail out straight behind her with a self-conscious expression on her face. Once done she looked at me expectantly and I told her she was a clever girl.

‘Can I see my father now?’ I asked Mrs Botham.

‘No, pet. They’re very strict with the visiting hours. And you must be tired. We’ll go home and get us something to eat and then we’ll be ready to see him in the morning.’

Back at the house that had once belonged to my grandmother I sat at the table squashed into one end of the kitchen and politely drank the tea and ate the pie and chips Mrs Botham had warmed for me while she took Bess outside and saw to the pigeons. The kitchen was tiny and old but it was warmer and more comfortable than I remembered. Mrs Botham had clearly been at work. Some home comforts had been introduced. After I’d eaten, I washed the dishes. The water was piping hot, delivered directly from a newly installed boiler, and the towel I used to dry my hands was soft and fluffy and smelled of flowers. Granny’s towels had been uniformly hard and stiff and smelled of old washing-up.

Before she left me that evening, Mrs Botham asked if there was anything else I wanted, hesitated as if unsure as to whether or not she should kiss me, saw the expression on my face, decided against the kiss, and bade me goodnight. I waited until I heard her footsteps going up her own stairs, through the wall that separated the two houses, and then I telephoned Reservoir Cottage. Julia answered at once. She said everything was fine. Mrs Croucher had brought round a lamb stew and a treacle tart for their supper, Vivi was doing her homework and – dropping her voice – there’d been no mention of
you know who
. We spoke for a few minutes, then Julia, anxious about running up my father’s telephone bill, urged me to end the call.

‘We’ll speak again tomorrow,’ she promised.

After that, I called Daniel. We talked about my father, my journey, Daniel’s day, and then I told him about Mrs Botham.

‘She’s taken over,’ I said. ‘She’s still living next door – well, at least while I’m here she is – but she’s as good as moved in. Her pinny is hung on the hook in the kitchen, there’s a bar of lavender soap in the privy, there’s even a pair of her slippers by the front door.’

‘At least they’re not under the bed.’

‘Oh don’t!’

Daniel laughed. ‘Isn’t it a good thing that she’s so involved?’

‘How is it good?’

‘Because you know somebody is looking after your father, that he’s not lonely, that he has somebody else in his life besides you, someone he can talk to.’

‘He’s not the kind of person who needs other people.’

‘Everybody needs other people,’ Daniel replied.

‘But not her.’

‘Wasn’t it Mrs Botham who called the ambulance when your father had the heart attack?’

‘Yes.’

‘And didn’t she go with him to the hospital?’

‘Yes.’

‘And did she wait with him while he was examined? Did she talk to the doctors? Did she find out what was going on?’

‘All right,’ I said. ‘I see your point.’

He was right. When the doctors said my father must stay in hospital for a few days, it was Mrs Botham who caught the bus home, packed up his pyjamas, his toothbrush and his cigarettes, and then caught another bus back to the hospital to deliver them to him. It was she who caught a third bus back to his house after that, who went to the trouble of finding the Reservoir Cottage telephone number and leaving a message for me. And she must have spoken to Julia a second time, some time during the day just passed, to find out which train she should meet at the station after she had prepared a meal for me and made up the bed.

I sighed, leaned my head against the wall and closed my eyes.

‘I wish you were here with me, Daniel. You make me a better person.’

‘There is not a single thing wrong with you as you are,’ he said.

When I went to bed, I found Mrs Botham had put a hot water bottle between the sheets. There was a note on the bedside table.

Sleep well, pet. Anything you need, just knock on the wall. Yours, Eileen.

I fell asleep counting the cigarette cards in their frames that were hung on the bedroom walls, Loretta Young smiling down at me with her knowing, ageless smile.

WHEN I WOKE
the next morning it was already light. The bedroom door was open and Bess was gone. I put on my father’s dressing gown and went downstairs. The dog was in the kitchen lapping scrambled eggs from a bowl on the floor. She wagged her tail between her legs when I came into the room but did not stop eating.

Mrs Botham looked up from the stove; her eyes were anxious.

‘I hope you don’t mind me giving the doggie her breakfast.’

‘Of course not. It’s very good of you.’

‘Sit yourself down, Amy, the kettle’s on.’

Now Daniel had made me look at things from a different point of view, I realized it was very relaxing to be told what to do. It was nice that somebody else was up first to light the fire and heat the water; it made a pleasant change for somebody else to be in charge.

Mrs Botham put a plate of egg on toast on the table in front of me. ‘I’m ever so glad you came,’ she said. ‘Your father said he wasn’t sure you’d come but I knew you would. He misses you terribly, you know.’

‘He has a funny way of showing it.’

‘It’s not your father’s way to say how he’s feeling out loud,’ Mrs Botham said. ‘It doesn’t mean that he’s not feeling anything.’

‘He talks to the pigeons.’

‘And you know why that is. It’s because he knows they’re not going to run away and leave him. They always come back. There’s a reason why they’re called homing pigeons, you know. There’s a reason why he’s so fond of them.’

In due course, we caught the bus back into town, queued up at the hospital entrance with the other visitors, and then trooped into the men’s ward. My father had the bed closest to the door. He was sleeping when we arrived. He lay on his back with his mouth open, his head making a dent in the centre of the pillow and his hands crossed tidily on top of the overblanket. I stood helplessly beside him, trying to reconcile how he was now with how he always had been before.

‘You mustn’t worry, Amy,’ Mrs Botham said. ‘He’s going to be fine.’

She moved the ashtray on the table at the side of the bed to make room for the cake tin she’d brought. Then she took off her gloves, perched on the side of the bed and patted Dad’s hand.

‘Don,’ she whispered. ‘Don, wake up, you’ve got a visitor.’

My father’s eyes flickered open, he gave a little panicked snort, remembered where he was and said, ‘Oh,’ in a disappointed tone of voice, as if he had hoped to find himself back at home. Then his eyes fell on me. He blinked, and reached out for his spectacles. Mrs Botham passed them to him, and he put them on. He hitched himself up the pillows, squinting into the light.

‘Birdie?’ he asked quietly. ‘Is that you?’

‘Yep,’ I said.

‘You came home?’

‘Just like a pigeon.’

Mrs Botham went off to find a doctor. It was kind of her to give us some time alone together. Mostly we were quiet. There didn’t seem to be the need for either of us to say anything and for the first time in my life I realized this was not a bad thing. When the bell rang to signify the end of visiting hours, I stood reluctantly and kissed my father’s cheek.

‘I’ll be back tomorrow,’ I said.

‘There’s no need.’

‘I’ll be back anyway.’

The afternoon was bitterly cold, wind washing the rain off the moors, sending it sideways into the streets, down the rooftops, over the areas of the city, devastated by the war, that were being cleared to build new roads and flats, great swathes of rubble heaped behind hoardings. Mrs Botham and I sat side by side on the bus, sharing a bag of Mintoes as the windows steamed over.

‘When we get back,’ said Mrs Botham, speaking awkwardly around the sweet in her mouth, ‘you wrap up warm and take that dog for a quick walk and I’ll make us some dinner. Would you fancy some chips?’

It would be the third day running that I had eaten chips. I said that I would fancy them very much.

‘You’ll stay and eat them with me, won’t you?’ I asked.

Mrs Botham said that she would.

That evening, the two of us sat together and worked on a jigsaw puzzle that Mrs Botham had given my father as a Christmas present. I found myself so engrossed that it was gone eight o’clock by the time I remembered to call Reservoir Cottage. The phone rang out, but nobody answered.

I pressed my fingers down on the cradle and redialled, but the same thing happened again.

Mrs Botham looked up from the jigsaw. ‘Perhaps they’ve popped out for a breath of fresh air,’ she said. I didn’t want to burden her with my worries so I smiled and agreed that perhaps they had. Mrs Botham wasn’t to know that Julia never popped out for anything now.

I didn’t sleep well that night. I was safe and warm in my lovely bed with the hot water bottle and the ironed sheets, but my heart couldn’t settle. It kept returning to Reservoir Cottage, rattling around those cold, dark rooms, searching for whatever it was that had kept Julia and Vivi from answering the telephone.

The next day, at the hospital, my father seemed brighter. He was sitting up when we arrived, his hair had been combed and there was a little colour in his cheeks. Mrs Botham made her excuses and scurried off again, and I poured Dad a glass of lemon barley water. He asked for his cigarettes. I picked up the packet, and then put it down again. I said: ‘Really, Dad, you must stop. Smoking is no good for your heart.’

‘I didn’t know you cared about my heart,’ he said.

I took hold of his hand and I raised it to my lips. I kissed the back of it, the dry skin, scarred by a thousand small burns.

When Mrs Botham and I got back that evening, I called Reservoir Cottage every hour, on the hour, but nobody answered the telephone.

I sat at the table in the kitchen while Mrs Botham worked on the jigsaw in the front room and I wondered if I should call Daniel and ask him to drive up to the cottage to check that everything was all right. Each time I was on the point of telephoning, I talked myself out of it. What could he do? Julia would be alarmed if he turned up on the doorstep out of the blue – she hadn’t been at all happy when I’d invited him in to look in the loft. Most likely, there was nothing wrong. If I sent him to investigate, it would look as if I didn’t trust Julia, and she might end up being rude to him. Perhaps my absence had forced her to leave the cottage. Maybe she’d snapped out of her inertia and taken Vivi into Weston-super-Mare to the pictures. Maybe they’d gone down to the village club or for a walk, or perhaps they were eating with Mrs Croucher. The fact that they weren’t answering the phone didn’t mean that anything was wrong.

I was up early the next morning. At eight o’clock, the time when Viviane should have been getting ready to leave for school, I telephoned Reservoir Cottage again, and again there was no answer. I called the operator and asked her to see if there was a fault on the line. She checked and said there wasn’t. I put my coat on over my father’s dressing gown and paced up and down the scrubland at the end of the road while Bess sniffed at the feet of the privet hedges and the night’s darkness faded over the moors, bleached away by a cold dawn. The key to the empty bedroom was in my coat pocket. I turned it over between my fingers. My mind spun the different threads of my anxiety together; I couldn’t think logically.

When Mrs Botham came, I tried to explain but it was difficult because she didn’t know all that had happened before; she had no understanding of the context of my fear.

‘I shouldn’t worry, pet,’ she said. ‘If anything bad had happened, you’d have heard by now. Somebody would have contacted you.’

But would they? What if something
really
awful had happened and Viviane and Julia were in the cottage and nobody realized they were there? Mrs Croucher might notice if something was wrong, but she might not. She was used to not seeing Julia. Not seeing Julia was normal to Mrs Croucher.

‘I have to go back to Somerset,’ I said.

Mrs Botham looked up from the frying pan.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Really I am. But I daren’t leave it any longer. I have to go back. Viviane needs me and Julia doesn’t have anyone else.’

The fat in the pan spat. Mrs Botham moved two rashers of bacon around with her fork. There were two rosy circles in the middle of her cheeks.

‘What about your dad?’ she asked.

I went over to her and put my arms about her waist. ‘Eileen,’ I said, ‘he’s the lucky one. He has you.’