The Secret by the Lake (35 page)

‘Did she know where the baby had gone?’

‘She guessed.’

‘Ahh,’ said Julia. She patted Susan’s hand, but I saw that her own hand was shaking.

‘Caroline knew they were going to put her in the asylum and that would be the end of everything. She would never see her baby again so she had to do something straight away. I helped her get up and I helped her get dressed and I helped her walk down to Fairlawn – but when we got close, we saw Mrs Aldridge on the dam. I was too scared to go on the dam, but Caroline went and she picked the baby up out of his pram. She didn’t mean for the pram to go into the water. She never even noticed. She picked the baby up and she started walking back. I went to meet her. I said: “Let me take him for a while, Caroline,” but she said: “No,” and I said, “But you’re ever so pale,” and she said: “I am never going to let him go again.” She was walking very slowly, very shaky and there was blood all down the back of her dress. I could see the blood but I didn’t want to say anything to frighten her. She was holding the baby and she was saying: “Isn’t he beautiful? Isn’t he the most perfect thing ever?” And I said that he was. Then she said: “Oh Susan, I feel so strange!” And she sort of sat down and then she laid down. She was still holding on to the baby. I sat with her and I stroked her hair until the doctor came to fetch her. Lady Debeger took the baby and the doctor took Caroline. He told me I had to find a pail and clear up the blood that was on the road.’

A tear ran down Susan’s face. She wiped it away with a handkerchief. ‘I fetched a pail from the pumping station and I filled it up with water and I washed away the blood. And Sam Shrubsole helped me. And then the other people came to shut the sluice-gate and get Mrs Aldridge out of the lake.’

‘And we know the rest,’ Julia whispered.

‘I don’t know what they said to Mr Aldridge when he came back from Scotland,’ Susan said, ‘but he still loves Caroline.’ She nodded her head for emphasis. ‘He still goes up to her grave. I see him there, on his own, talking to her.’

‘Thank you, Susan,’ Julia said. Her voice was very calm. ‘Thank you for explaining all this to Amy and me. There is only one more thing I want to ask. Can I ask you one more question? Would you mind terribly?’

Susan nodded. Julia breathed in deeply, and then exhaled shakily.

‘We know about the teacher, and the doctor. What about your father, Susan? Is he a good man, or a bad one?’

The woman screwed the handkerchief up and stuffed it back up her sleeve. She said nothing. But she moved her head. She tilted it slightly towards the door that led to the dining room.

I REACHED THE
door first. I turned the handle and pushed the door open. It made no sound. There were two men in the room, Dr Croucher in his wheelchair and Reverend Pettigrew. The vicar was standing in the shadows, by the far wall. I could not see what he was doing. The doctor was sitting in his wheelchair in a circle of yellow lamplight cast by a tassel-fringed standard lamp. Kitty Dowler was sitting on his lap. The doctor had one arm around her waist, the other was hidden behind Kitty. His face was in her hair. He was groaning softly.

I had been angry before. I had been angry when my mother walked out on me, I had been angry when I’d caught street boys tormenting cats outside the Paris apartment, I’d been angry when I’d seen the wounds on Daniel Aldridge’s face.

I’d been angry for Caroline and for Susan.

But I had never,
never
, been as angry as I was in that moment. And neither had Julia. Julia was across the room in an instant; in an instant she had grabbed Kitty’s arm and snatched her away from the doctor, in the next she had hit the doctor across the shoulders with her stick and then, before he even realized what was happening, she walloped the vicar in the stomach.

‘Fuck you both!’ she cried. ‘I’m going to make you pay for this!’

She pulled Kitty from the room, murmuring under her breath: ‘Bastards, you bastards!’ and I followed in her wake, shocked and horrified and full of admiration for her. After that, we acted as one. We collected Susan, and hurried her and Kitty back along the corridor to the reception desk where the middle-aged nurse was still sitting, yawning over a cup of Camp coffee. Kitty was sobbing as she stumbled along with us. She thought she was in trouble and so did Susan. We kept having to reassure them that the opposite was true.

The nurse looked up. ‘What’s happened?’ she asked.

‘You’ll find out soon enough,’ Julia said.

We hastened outside with Susan and Kitty. And afterwards, I could not understand why it took her so long to ask the question, but as we walked back along the drive, away from Sunnyvale, me holding Kitty safe, trying to comfort her, and Susan holding Julia’s arm and helping her along, Julia suddenly asked: ‘Where’s Vivi?’

‘The minibus will have dropped her at the cottage by now,’ I said.

‘No,’ said Kitty. ‘Mr Leeson’s taking us both home in his car.’

‘Mr Leeson? Then where is he?’

‘He was going to come back and pick me up,’ Kitty said, ‘after …’

‘After what?’

Kitty looked down at the ground.

‘After what, Kitty?’ I asked again, gently.

‘After I’d had my special time with Dr Croucher.’

‘Mr Leeson knows about the … the “special time”?’

‘Yes.’

‘Him too?’ Julia asked. ‘He is part of it too?’

‘Like his father,’ I whispered. I crouched down to Kitty’s eye-level and wiped a tear from the child’s cheek with the back of my finger. ‘So where is Viviane?’ I asked.

‘With Mr Leeson.’

‘With Mr Leeson where, sweetheart?’ My voice trembled.

‘In his car.’ Kitty sniffed. ‘They’re having special time too.’

Julia screamed. Her scream disappeared into the fog and then it came back, an echo from the lake, another scream and then another behind it and another; myriad screams rushing across the water, through the mist, zithering this way and that, tiny zephyrs rippling the lake’s surface, and the density of the millions of gallons of water beneath changing, an alchemy as the screams returned and ricocheted, bounced from the walls of the old asylum into the cold air, the bone-cracking cold of that night. The scream went back into time; it zig-zagged through the water as Jean Aldridge dropped down towards the sluice-gate; it pushed the base of the pram as the pram floated away from the dam. It cut through time.

I let go of Kitty’s warm hand and I ran.

I felt the road beneath the soles of my shoes, I felt the earth beneath the road, I felt the world beneath the earth, and the night and the fog, and I heard my own heartbeat and the in and out of my breath, and I felt the strength in my bones and the contraction and extension of the muscles in my legs as I ran. I ran beneath the Sunnyvale archway and I turned left and ran along the dam and I saw the car’s yellow headlights blurred by the fog in the middle of the dam, where I had known it would be, because the headmaster couldn’t have stayed in the car park – and where else could he have taken the child? I ran towards the lights, and the closer I came to the car the brighter the lights were in my eyes, the more they blinded me. I tried to call out Vivi’s name as I ran but I couldn’t make a sound; my lungs were too full of the damp night air, too full of anger.

It was anger for Caroline and Susan, for Kitty and Viviane, for all the girls and boys, all the children who had been playthings for the village committee and those other people, those men and women who did things to children because the children had neither the vocabulary, nor the voice to tell what was being done to them. It was anger for the cynical way these children were chosen, the quiet ones, the damaged ones, the less loved, unloved, difficult to love ones, the vulnerable ones, those who were desperate for attention; those who craved affection and believed that was what they were being given.

I reached Mr Leeson’s Jaguar and slammed my hand on the bonnet. The bonnet was still warm, the engine still running. I ran around the side of the car and only when I was out of the immediate glare of the headlights did I see that both the front doors were open, the driver’s door and the passenger door. The radio was playing in the car, ‘Moon River’, and the heater was pumping out hot air; the key was still in the ignition, the front passenger seat had been pushed back but the car was empty.

I bent over double for a moment, put my arms around my stomach, panted, panted, caught my breath. Then I stood up and looked around but all I could see was the fog, weaving and twisting like thick currents of water, like weed caught in a slipstream, like hair blowing in the wind. ‘Vivi!’ I called, but my voice disappeared into the fog; it was muffled by it, as if the fog were a thick scarf pulled around the lake. To my left was the grassy slope leading down to the water; I was close to the spot where Jean Aldridge had drowned, close to the spot where Caroline had fallen. I could not see the water for the fog, but I knew it was there. And ahead, further on, was the spillway. I could not see that either, but I could hear the sound of the water falling, splashing over the wall, falling into the stone canal below. There had been so much rain recently, rain pouring down from the Mendip Hills, bubbling up through countless little springs in the fields and woodland, finding courses through the limestone, making its way downhill, down the valley, into the reservoir. The reservoir was holding all the water it could and what it could not hold was rushing through the sluice-gate and over the spillway, rushing back to the sea.

‘Vivi!’ I called again, frantic now, desperate, and I walked slowly towards the spillway. The fog was dense, dense as a nightmare. I held my hands out in front of me, feeling my way. I trod carefully, keeping to the road, afraid of tripping, of rolling down the grassy slope and tumbling into the water, into Jean Aldridge’s grave.

‘Vivi!’ I called. ‘I’m coming, darling, I’m coming.’

And the closer I came to the spillway the louder the sound of the water, until it was no longer a whisper but a tumultuous roar, until I could feel the icy spray of the displaced water in the air with the fog, so it was like walking through rain that was falling upwards, towards the sky, in contravention of the laws of nature. Dizzied by this sensation, deafened by the noise, I crept forward.

And then I saw them.

I SAW TWO
figures silhouetted against the fog – indistinct, but I knew the smaller figure was Viviane because I loved Viviane and I would have known her anywhere; in a crowd of a million people, I would have picked out my beloved girl. She was standing on the spillway wall, water rushing around her ankles, and her arms were outstretched for balance. She must have walked along the top of the wall, over mossy stones smoothed by a hundred years’ worth of water-flow to the consistency of glass, walked along the wall to escape her teacher. And he was just a few feet along the wall, water rushing around his ankles too and the flaps of his jacket hanging loose as he called to her.

‘Viviane, come back. Come back to me now and you won’t be in any trouble.’ He was holding on to the bank with one hand, too afraid to let go, too afraid to follow the child right out on to the wall. He stood there, hunched and spider-like with his long arms and his long, bent legs, and his back arched like a toad’s back – and I wanted to kill him.

But I did nothing. I stood perfectly still. I was terrified. I did not dare call to Viviane, did not dare do anything to distract the girl in case she lost her concentration and her balance. Vivi stood on the wall and the water gushed past her ankles, over her socks and shoes and she stood there, arms outstretched, swaying … and it would take the tiniest push, a puff of air, a fraction of a second’s loss of concentration to tip her over, down with the gushing water on to the flat stone slab of the canal bed below.

Mr Leeson had not noticed me. He was scared and he was losing patience. ‘Viviane!’ he called. ‘This is ridiculous!
You’re
being ridiculous. Listen to me! You must come back to me now. Now, right this second! Walk towards me, Viviane – come towards me. There’ll be no trouble if you come now. I won’t tell your mother how badly you’ve behaved. I won’t say anything to anyone if you come now.’

He took a tentative step sideways, closer to Viviane. His feet were bigger than hers. It was harder for him to balance. And he did not have Vivi’s natural grace or athleticism. But he was still close to the edge, close enough to jump to safety if he needed to, his fingertips still touching the bank. He was in a far less precarious position than Viviane, who was yards away with the lake behind her and the canal deep down in front of her and the darkness and fog and the water spray all around her.

I began to cry. I did not know how to reach Viviane. I did not know how to help her. I started to walk towards the spillway, slowly, carefully, terrified to take my eyes from the girl, terrified to look at her in case I saw the fall, when it came. Even if I reached the spillway wall, even then I did not know if I had the strength, or the courage, to go forward or how I would get past the teacher. I did not know if I could save Viviane. Tears ran down my cheeks.

‘Help her!’ I cried. ‘Oh please, please, somebody help her!’

And the water gushed and the fog closed in and the lake lay still and quiet behind.

And help came.

Afterwards I could not explain it.

I tried, but there are no words for what happened, no reference for me to use – but it was Caroline, I know it was Caroline who came.

She came out of the fog, like the wind, a rush of ice-cold air, a force of nature, so fast she came. She knocked past Mr Leeson, brushed past him and he lost his balance. He tipped backwards and his arms waved like windmills for a second or two as he struggled to regain his footing but his flat-soled shoes were useless and his jacket was too tight across the shoulders and he could not save himself. He fell backwards into the water, and he disappeared at once, dragged down towards the sluice-gates, following Jean Aldridge, separated only by time. And in the same instant, the same rush of wind seemed to snatch up Viviane from the spillway wall and whisk her back to the safety of the dam, back on to the roadway, and set her down beside me.