The Secret by the Lake (8 page)

‘I know a little about psychology,’ I said, ‘and I’m aware that imaginary friends, like toys, are a device children use to play out scenarios that frighten or confuse them. So it might be that Vivi is using Caroline as a kind of basket into which she can transfer her anxiety about losing her father.’

‘That seems logical,’ Daniel said.

‘It doesn’t
feel
right, though. I’m worried I should be doing something – that if I don’t, something awful will happen.’

‘Something awful has already happened. Her father has died. That’s what’s at the root of all this.’

‘I know. But … you’ll think I’m being stupid, Daniel, but Julia has told me things about the real Caroline.’

He stiffened. ‘What things?’

‘Well, she’s intimated more than actually said. But I know Caroline was a difficult person, that she had few friends. Julia changes when she speaks of her. She has no affection for her. I suspect things were very bad between the two of them.’

‘Oh.’

‘Yes. And even though I know it’s not really dead Caroline talking to Vivi, if Vivi finds out or even senses some of her mother’s feelings, I fear she may start to incorporate them into her imaginary conversations. She may start to give imaginary Caroline the attributes of the real Caroline. She’s only ten, Daniel. I can’t bear the thought of her being tainted by all this.’

Daniel pressed the palms of his hands against the steering wheel and stretched his arms. ‘Would you like a drink?’

I smiled. ‘You brought something to drink?’

He took a hip flask from the pocket in the side of the car door and passed it to me.

‘You’ll have to drink straight from the flask, I’m afraid.’

‘What is it?’

‘Apple brandy. It cures everything from blocked drains to broken hearts, or so my father tells me.’

I took a sip, and the heat went to my cheeks at once. I drank some more, then wiped my lips and returned the flask to Daniel. ‘Lovely!’ I said.

He took a drink and considered his words. Eventually he said: ‘I think the less fuss you make of this, the quicker it will pass.’ He turned his face from me, looked out of the window again. ‘I’ll tell you something about me,’ he said. ‘It’s something that’s difficult for me to talk about. My mother died when I was a baby.’

‘Oh Daniel, how terrible! I’m sorry, I didn’t know.’

‘You don’t need to be sorry; how could you have known? Obviously it didn’t affect me at the time. I was less than a week old. I didn’t know any different. But when I was old enough to understand something of what death meant, it used to haunt me.’ He looked down at his hand, scratched at a scab at the base of his finger. ‘I was there when she died, physically there. And I used to think that somehow it was my fault.’

‘You were a few days old. How could you be to blame?’

‘I know, I know, it’s irrational. But a child’s mind isn’t rational.’

‘No, I don’t suppose it is.’

He picked at the scab. Any moment now, it would begin to bleed. I couldn’t bear it. I covered his hand with mine. Still he wouldn’t look at me.

‘I thought about my mother so much, that she started to become real to me. I knew other people couldn’t see her, I knew
they
thought she was dead, but I really believed she was with me.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘If I was lonely, she would take my hand; if I was afraid, she’d wrap herself around me and make me feel safe. At night, as I was falling asleep, I’d hear her whisper in my ear.’

‘What did she say?’

‘That she loved me, that she was sorry she’d let me go but that she’d always be there with me; that even when I was sleeping she was watching over me. I can still hear her voice in my mind.’

He took another drink from the flask. I watched his throat move as he swallowed.

‘My father couldn’t bear it. It used to drive him mad. But the more he tried to stop me being with her, the more I wanted to be with her. We fought all the time.’

‘What happened?’

‘Father hired a psychiatrist who recommended I be sent to boarding school. He believed cold showers, discipline and a rigorous exercise regime would sort me out.’

‘Oh. And did they?’

‘They taught me to keep my secrets to myself.’

I put one hand on Daniel’s arm. He was still staring through the window. ‘My father thought he was acting in my best interests,’ he said. ‘Suffice to say, that was the last time I confided anything to him.’

‘Perhaps you bringing your mother back to life, so to speak, was your way of compensating for the guilt you felt over her death,’ I suggested.

‘Yes, I thought of that too. I blamed myself for her dying, and the only way to put it right was to make her live again.’

I followed his eyes. The hawk was hunting now, flying low and concentrated over the dead heather and gorse, tipping and dodging the gusts of wind. In the distance, I glimpsed the white bob-tail of a running deer.

‘All I’m trying to say is that children’s minds don’t work the same as ours,’ he said. ‘You don’t know what Viviane is feeling and she probably can’t tell you, or is afraid to.’

‘What should I do then?’ I asked. ‘How can I help her?’

‘Keep talking to her. Talk about her father. Don’t force her to hide her feelings. Try to make her understand that death is a natural process, even when it is brought about through violence. Being less afraid of it helped me. It brought me a kind of peace.’

I looked at Daniel’s face, still in profile. It was a beautiful face and, despite being so new, it was becoming very dear to me.

He turned and smiled at me. ‘There,’ he said. ‘You know everything there is to know about me now.’

‘Not everything.’

‘The most important thing. Does it change your opinion of me?’

‘Not at all,’ I said.

I wished that he would kiss me and when he made no move to do so, I, emboldened by the apple brandy, kissed him instead. And it was lovely.

He asked for my number before we parted and he found an old pencil in his bag and I wrote the number on a scrap of paper. He told me he would call me soon.

I DIDN’T MENTION
any of that conversation to Julia. I didn’t even tell her that I’d spoken to Daniel Aldridge but I did tell her that I was thinking of taking Vivi up to the churchyard to put some flowers on her grandparents’ grave. I said I thought it might help to demystify death and be a starting point for conversations about Alain.

‘Vivi needs to be encouraged to talk about her feelings,’ I said, with some confidence.

Julia was unconvinced. She did not want to accompany us because the cold weather was exacerbating the pain in her hip and she said she could not even contemplate the walk uphill. However, she did not oppose the idea. I suggested the outing casually to Viviane who thought it over for a while, and then agreed.

We cut some holly and ivy for the grave, took the dog with us and walked in silence through the woods past a line of silver birch where little spade-shaped leaves of pale green and yellow were fallen like confetti and heaped wetly around the feet of the trunks. Viviane peeled a strip of bark the colour of mother-of-pearl and then broke it into smaller pieces which she dropped behind her, as if she were a child in a story who might need to find her way home. I tried a couple of times to persuade her to talk about her father, but she would not humour me.

When we reached the churchyard, I hooked Bess’s lead over the gatepost and Viviane and I wandered in, through nettles browned and dead, all caught with threads of spider silk that shimmered in the grey light. The ground was hard beneath our feet. Beyond, the lake shone green and glassy, perfectly still save for where the waterbirds rippled at its edges, frilling the surface.

Caroline must have known this path; she must have seen the lake in all its myriad moods, and Daniel’s mother must have done so too. All the people who came and went to the church, who were born and lived and died in Blackwater – they must have felt what I was feeling now; they must have known their time would be measured but the lake would remain, changing all the time but always there.

I looked back. Viviane was trailing behind me with her hands in the pocket of her duffel coat.

I went back to her. ‘It’s all right, sweetheart,’ I said. ‘Really it is. There’s nothing to fear in graveyards. See how peaceful it is here? Listen – how quiet it is. How calm. It will be the same where your papa lies.’

‘It’s not the same,’ Vivi said. ‘Where he is, there are buildings all around, and traffic and people cutting through the pathways to get to the station. People go into the cemetery to eat their lunch. They walk their dogs and meet their girlfriends and do business and have arguments. It’s not quiet at all. And don’t,’ she said angrily, ‘tell me next that that’s good because Papa didn’t like being on his own. Don’t keep trying to say things to make it better because nothing can make it better!’

I reached out to take her hand but she stalked past me, went ahead around some ancient, tilting headstones. I looked up towards the church tower and then felt dizzy, as if there was too much oxygen in my blood. The tower loomed above me and for a moment the ground seemed to shift and tilt. I felt a rush of panic. Viviane had stopped ahead of me. She was staring down at a grave. I walked over to where she stood. The headstone, plain and modest, marked the final resting-place of Julia’s parents,
Beinon Cummings, loving husband of Cora and father of Julia. Also Cora, his devoted wife.
An urn full of carnations sat in the centre of the chippings. I crouched down to place the holly and ivy on the grave.

Viviane ran her finger around the letters carved into the stone.

‘Who put the flowers on the grave?’ she asked.

‘I’ve seen Mrs Croucher walking this way with flowers in her basket.’

‘Do you think anyone is putting flowers on Papa’s grave?’

‘Of course! He has so many friends.’

‘Had,’ said Vivi. ‘He
had
friends. When he was alive.’ She picked a flower out of the urn and pulled the petals out one by one. I didn’t ask her to stop. ‘Why isn’t Caroline’s name on the headstone?’

‘I don’t know, sweetheart.’

Julia would know, but it wasn’t the kind of thing I could ask her at present.

I moved away from Viviane, reading other inscriptions. There was the grave of Thomas Sale, killed in Normandy in the Second World War, and brothers Harry and Jack Burridge who had lost their lives in the First. Mary, Violet and Herbert Jamieson, aged two, three and six had been taken by the angels within three weeks of one another in 1867. I found a cluster of Aldridge gravestones, far grander than the others and in more prominent positions – look-at-me graves with urns and railings and statuary, even an angel with an outstretched arm holding a rose. I wasn’t thinking about where I was going, but I found myself on the far side of the church, in its shadow, out of the sun, where the ground was frozen amongst the brambles and the weeds. That was where I found Caroline’s grave, alone and almost hidden.

Her gravestone was a small, plain one, set away from the others. There was no stone urn, no marble slab or monument or memorial. Just the headstone amongst the frost-blackened weeds and brambles with the name Caroline Anne Cummings and the dates of her birth, in April 1914, and her death, aged seventeen, on the last day of August 1931.

A single yellow rose lay on the grave, the edges of its petals frilled with pink. The rose was fading but it was not dead, despite the frost on the ground and the cold on this side of the church. Somebody had been to visit Caroline that morning, somebody had brought her the flower.

A cloud moved over the face of the sun and Bess, at the gate, suddenly began to bark, a throaty, warning bark. I could see neither the dog, nor Viviane.

‘Vivi!’ I called. ‘Where are you?’ I pushed myself up and began to stumble back around the church. There was no path and the icy ground was uneven, lumpy with ancient, unmarked graves and rabbit holes, brambles that caught around my ankles. ‘Vivi!’

She came slowly round the corner, looking terribly sad and small and vulnerable.

‘What’s wrong?’ she asked.

I felt foolish. ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Nothing.’

I put my arm around Vivi’s shoulder and led her back towards the footpath and the sunlight and Bess. I held her very close, keeping up a stream of reassurances and endearments, wishing that love alone was enough to make the child less sad and confused. I told her that nobody ever really dies, because they live on in the memories and hearts of all the people who loved them.

‘What about people who aren’t loved?’ Vivi asked. ‘What about them?’

I looked at her hopelessly. I did not know how to answer that. Viviane pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes, trying to push the tears back.

By this time we had returned to the grave of Cora and Beinon Cummings. The flowers that had been so carefully arranged had been taken out of the little metal urn, torn into pieces, and scattered about the grave. The holly and ivy was kicked and scattered.

Viviane looked at me through her tears and I did not have the heart to tell her off.

We walked to the gate, unhooked Bess’s lead and walked out into the fields where sheep were grazing the sparse winter grass and tiny grey moths fluttered amongst the arms of the old apple trees, bare of leaves now but heavy with boulders of black mistletoe in their crooks and frost-silvered on one side. Beside me, Viviane was pale and broken, a lost and frightened little girl in mourning for her father. I held on to her. I was determined that I would not let her suffer. I would rescue her from her loneliness and bring her back to the place where she knew she was safe and loved. I would help her come to terms with Alain’s death. I would hold on to her, I would not let her drift away.

And the lake shone green and still as it had shone when Caroline had been alive, and the robin sang on the bough and everything was peaceful and quiet.

ON THE MORNING
of Viviane’s first day at Hailswood School, I walked with her to the place where the bus would pick her up. Viviane looked very young in her new uniform, the dark green tunic and the long grey socks held up with elastic garters, the clumpy brown shoes, the coat, the hat. Everything was too big for her. She seemed to me about six years old and I was terribly worried about letting her go off somewhere new, where she knew nobody, on her own. I held tightly to her hand and kept up a steady stream of cheerful conversation so that neither of us would have the chance to dwell on the hours that lay ahead.