The Secret by the Lake (7 page)

‘Am I allowed to ask you for help?’ I asked. ‘Is it permitted under the terms of the family feud?’

‘I daresay we could come to some arrangement.’

‘Good,’ I said. ‘In that case, some animal or other is getting into one of the upstairs bedrooms in the cottage. It disturbs us and Julia’s nerves aren’t good. I don’t know what to do about it.’

Daniel gave me an uncertain smile. He looked up at the cottage.

‘It’s probably squirrels,’ he said. ‘They build their nests for winter round about this time of year.’

‘I hope that’s all it is,’ I said, and then I felt foolish, because of course it would be squirrels. What else could it possibly be? ‘Would you take a look for us?’

He hesitated again, and then seemed to come to some resolution in his mind. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I’ll have a look in the loft. Chances are that’s where they’re coming in. I’ll finish off here and then I’ll be over.’

‘Thank you.’

I nodded, and then I turned on my heel and went into the cottage. Vivi was in the back room with Julia, describing the dresses she had seen in the department store in Bristol. Neither of them noticed me. I ran upstairs into my room and wished the light bulb was brighter as I hastily drew on eyeliner and dabbed on a little lipstick. I nipped into Julia’s room to puff
Memoire Cherie
on to my wrists and throat. Then I smoothed my hair with my hands and trotted downstairs again. I popped my head round the door to the back room.

‘Daniel Aldridge is doing some work next door. He’s going to check the roof for holes,’ I said.

Julia looked up. ‘Daniel Aldridge?’

‘Yes.’

‘He’s coming in here?’

‘Yes. It’s OK, you don’t have to do anything. He’s just going to look into the loft.’

Julia put her fingers to her forehead. ‘Amy, I wish you wouldn’t do things like that without asking me. We don’t need anybody to look in our loft.’

‘He’ll only be a few minutes. I’ll shut the door if you like. You don’t have to talk to him.’

‘All right,’ she said. ‘You do that.’ She closed her eyes and rubbed her brow with her fingers. ‘I don’t want to see him.’

She then turned her attention back to Vivi. I closed the door before I left the room.

When Daniel came, I showed him upstairs. There was a drop-down ladder tucked into the hatch on the landing and I held the torch and watched as his legs and feet disappeared through the hole into the darkness. I passed the torch up to him and heard him moving around.

‘The only living things up here are spiders,’ he called down. ‘I can’t see any daylight at all. There’s nowhere obvious that anything is getting in.’

I did not know if I should be relieved or disappointed by this news. I waited until Daniel dropped down again through the hatch. His hair was garlanded with cobwebs. He handed me an old leather satchel. It felt icy cold. ‘I found this hidden away behind the chimney stack,’ he said. He shook his head and dust drifted around him and floated in the air. ‘As far as I can tell, nobody’s been up there for years. I’ll have a look outside, see if there are any holes in the brickwork. Where are you hearing the noises?’

‘In there.’ I indicated the empty bedroom. Daniel went as far as the door, reached out his hand to open it, and then paused. I couldn’t be sure if he had sensed something strange, as I had, or if it was reading the name on the plaque that had stopped him.

‘I don’t need to go in,’ he said and his voice was slightly different, slightly cold.

‘Is something wrong?’ I asked.

‘No, no.’

He turned around and went back downstairs. I followed him outside, holding the satchel close, and stood at the foot of the ladder propped against the wall while he climbed up to look for holes in the brickwork, pulling away fingers of ivy and poking at wood that hadn’t been painted for years.

‘It seems pretty solid,’ he said. ‘I can’t see how anything could be getting in.’

‘Well, thanks for looking.’

He came down and stood beside me in the front garden, making a fuss of Bess.

‘Maybe whatever it was has been and gone,’ he said, ‘but if you have any more problems, you can always give me a call.’ He passed me a card and our fingers touched. The gesture was so innocent that any intimacy I felt must have been imagined. Still I felt myself blush. ‘That’s my number and the one above is my father’s,’ said Daniel. ‘If you can’t reach me, leave a message with him, and I’ll get back to you.’

‘OK.’

‘Only if you do that, it’s probably best if you don’t say who you are. Say you’re calling about the squirrels and I’ll know it’s you.’

‘All right.’

We walked together to the jeep. He opened the door and climbed inside. ‘It was nice to meet you properly,’ he said.

‘You too.’

‘I daresay I’ll see you about the village.’

‘I expect you will.’

I watched as he leaned forward over the steering wheel, pulled out the throttle, started the engine.

Oh please, I thought, say something else. Don’t just drive away – make it so that there is something more between us.

Daniel put the vehicle into reverse and turned it carefully. I stood and watched, holding Bess’s collar. When the jeep was pointing in the correct direction, he wound down the window and leaned out. ‘Amy?’

‘Yes?’

‘Perhaps we could go for a drink one evening.’

‘Yes, that’s a good idea.’

‘OK. Will you call me?’

‘Yes.’

I watched as he drove away down the lane, relieved and happy that he had reached out to me, that there was potential for us ahead. But as the vehicle disappeared I felt a rush of loneliness so cold it was as if the temperature of the very air had dropped a couple of degrees. With a heavy heart, I turned back to the cottage. There was the lake beyond, fading to black in response to the gloaming sky, shadows creeping over its surface and God knows what beneath, weaving through weed that drifted like hair, coiling through the coming darkness.

I WENT UP
into my room and sat on the bed, holding the satchel. The leather was stiff and dark, mummified almost, although in the creases I could see the pale fawn colour it had once been. The letters
CC
had been neatly incised into the front flap, perhaps with the point of a compass. They stood out darker than the rest of the leather, black where the dust had engrained itself. I followed the twin curls of the letters with the tip of my finger, imagining the young Caroline sitting in the room beside mine, making her mark. I wondered how it was the satchel had found its way into the loft. Daniel said it had been hidden. What had he meant by that?

‘Did you put it there, Caroline?’ I whispered. ‘Did you put it there out of sight in the hope that one day it would be found?’

I didn’t expect to hear a reply, of course, but still the silence that hung in the room was deafening. I had the sensation of being watched, of something waiting.

I forced stiff leather straps through the buckles that secured the flap and opened the satchel. A spider scuttled from the darkness inside, long legs fingering. I cried out, jumped away and watched as the spider, followed by its shadow, disappeared down the side of the bed. I pushed the satchel a couple of times to see if anything else was inside and when nothing emerged, I lifted it by its corners and tipped the rest of its contents on to the bed.

There were ancient pencils, an eraser so old and dry it was crumbling, a sketchpad and a school exercise book. On the front, in elaborate, old-fashioned handwriting was the name
Caroline Anne Cummings
and above it a stamp saying
Blackwater Village School
. I flicked through. The book was full of exercises marked and commented upon in red ink.
Not good enough. Where is the rest of your work? A poor and lazy attempt. See me. Stay behind. Detention. Slipper.

Slipper?

Oh, that was how it was in many schools, not just then but now, I knew that. There were, and probably always would be, teachers who believed that children could be bullied into learning, punished into submission. I found it barbaric that anyone of the slightest intelligence could believe that fragile young minds could be improved by such treatment; it was as mad as thinking seedlings would do better thrown out on rough ground at the mercy of the elements than they would being nurtured in a warm greenhouse.

‘Poor old you,’ I murmured to the child Caroline, whose worst crime appeared to have been failing to understand long division.

Next, I looked through the sketchpad and it was obvious that art was where Caroline’s talent lay. There were drawings of the lake, individual water birds and animals, sheep grazing, a duck surrounded by ripples of water, pheasants, a sleeping dog. Caroline had returned several times to the same place, a view over the lake that was framed by the leaves of trees, as if she were looking at it through a picture window. The view was vaguely familiar to me. I too had seen the lake from that spot – it was the hollow with the fallen tree. Caroline had captured some of the moods of the water in the texture of its surface; a moorhen amongst the reeds on a peaceful day; spray caught in the wind above waves shaped like bared teeth on a different occasion. She had drawn for her own pleasure. These pictures might never have been seen by anyone else. This thought unsettled me. I alone was connected to her through time, through the pencil-marks on the paper, through that outlook over the water.

Something else lay on the bed: a Swan Vesta matchbox. I laid down the sketchpad and picked up the box, pressed open the cardboard drawer. Inside was a piece of lint, browned by age, and wrapped inside the lint was treasure: a gold chain, very fine, with a golden pendant – a heart-shaped ruby surrounded by little diamonds set into the gold. The gems were framed by a pair of clasped hands joined at the top of the heart.

I held the necklace up to the light. I closed one eye and, with the other, stared into the ruby. I had never seen anything so beautiful. I lost myself in its colour.

‘Oh Caroline,’ I said in awe. ‘This is lovely. Where did you get this?’

I listened but still there was no answer, no sound at all.

THAT NIGHT, I
could not sleep – and it wasn’t only because I was worried about the spider crawling up to seek me out. My dreams were disturbed and when I woke, I heard whispers from the empty bedroom. I imagined the window open, a draught blowing through, moon shadows dancing on the walls. I closed my eyes and I saw the colour red, the inside of the ruby; I saw a dark stain spreading slowly across the floorboards in the empty bedroom. I saw the shape of a young girl standing by the window … and then the girl turned slowly to confront me and her face was white and glassy like ice and her eyes were dark as death. She held out one hand towards me and as I watched, the flesh fell from her like ash and her hair floated away like dandelion seed. All that was left was the darkness where she had been; she was described by her absence and I woke with a scream in my throat. Cold and shaky, I at last dropped into a patchy, shallow unconsciousness and was woken almost at once by Viviane, who had come creeping into my room. I was so pleased to see her. I lifted the covers and she slipped into the bed beside me. Her feet, on my legs, were icy and her teeth were chattering. I held her close.

‘What is it, darling?’ I whispered. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘It’s Caroline,’ Vivi said. ‘She doesn’t want me to sleep.’

‘What do you mean by that? Why doesn’t she want you to sleep?’

‘Because when I’m sleeping, she is all alone. She’s been so lonely for so long. She keeps saying: “Don’t leave me, Vivi.”’

I kissed her head. ‘How about if I tell you a story, like I used to when you were a little girl?’

Viviane said: ‘Mmm.’ I felt her relax in my arms. ‘Tell us about the Pigeon Princess,’ she breathed. ‘Caroline would like that very much.’

This sounded to me more like the imaginary friend of the past – dear, non-existent Emily – who articulated Vivi’s hopes and dreams, who said, through Viviane, the things that Viviane herself did not want to say. I told myself to relax. The child’s breath was hot and damp, a shaky vibrato against my clavicle. I smoothed her hair. We had curled up together, like this, a thousand times.

‘Once upon a time,’ I began, ‘there was a little pigeon who lived in a hole in the factory wall …’

The next day, the anxiety about Vivi’s imaginary friend returned. I told myself it was the simple fact that I was overtired that distorted my thinking and my reasoning. If I weren’t so exhausted, then I’d be able to rationalize the situation. But I was tired, and I couldn’t seem to think straight. I went outside for some fresh air and glanced at the lake, amenable that morning – pastel-blue and white, a flock of white birds feeding at its edges. I walked around the garden three times with Bess, trying to think of a good reason not to telephone Daniel Aldridge – it was too soon, he would think me neurotic, I didn’t know him well enough to confide in him – but I knew in my heart that none of these reasons was valid. I went inside and I called him. He sounded pleased to hear from me but we were both tongue-tied. We tried, and failed, to make small talk. He offered to take me out for a drink, to the pictures, even to the dancehall in Weston-super-Mare, but I was not in the mood for dancing. I asked if, instead, we could go for a drive.

‘I need someone to listen to me,’ I told him, ‘to tell me if I’m going crazy.’

‘I’m told I am a very good listener.’

‘Then you are the man I need.’

He came as soon as he could, picked me up in the jeep and we drove though the Mendip lanes, across the top of the hills, bare and yellow now for winter, patches of grey striated rock breaking the dying grass and acres of dead bracken and the tough little wild goats grazing the cliffs above the gorge. We parked at the top of a long, winding lane, and gazed out at the sky and the clouds and the colours of the sunlight on the fields, the drystone walls. From this vantage we could only see a small section of the lake, a tiny, distant line of blue amongst the browns and greys. Up here, woolly cattle turned their backs to the wind and the jeep rocked, buffeted by gusts. A goshawk perched on a fence-post and stared at the undergrowth. I imagined the little creatures running through the limp grass below, the voles and mice careering through their tiny tunnels, their feet pitter-pattering above the frozen ground, their minute little hearts pumping away. I pulled my coat tight about me and I looked through the window while I told Daniel about Vivi and about her imaginary friends, first Emily and now Caroline – the aunt who had died as a teenager brought back to life. Daniel was very quiet as he listened. He was looking out of the window and hardly seemed to be breathing.