The House on Sunset Lake

by Tasmina Perry

  ‘Lunch, then,’ he said, knocking on the window, hoping that she could hear him.

  She nodded and smiled, a big, wide-open smile, and he wasn’t sure if it was spots of rain on the window or whether her eyes had a sparkle.

  As the taxi moved off into traffic, he stood and watched until she disappeared from sight, knowing in a closed-off corner of his heart that he had just unlocked a Pandora’s box that should never have been opened.

  Chapter Seven

  1994

  The taxi stopped outside the white pillars of Casa D’Or and the driver took a minute to stare up at its grandeur.

  ‘Great place,’ he whistled through his teeth, turning off the engine and getting out for a closer look. ‘Is this a hotel or something?’

  ‘It’s a house,’ said Jennifer, fumbling around in her purse for a twenty-dollar bill, feeling a suddenly flurry of nerves.

  She stepped out of the taxi and waited on the front steps as the driver popped the trunk and lugged out her two heavy suitcases.

  ‘You have a nice day now,’ he grinned as she pushed the money into his palm, adding an extra five dollars. Taxis expected a good tip when they turned up at Casa D’Or.

  Jennifer released a small sigh as her own gaze locked on the house, its tall white pillars and seven chimneys that stretched into the cloudless blue sky. As she inhaled slowly, the smell of the glorious gardens just feet away from her filled her lungs, the scent of antique roses and delphiniums as sweet as it was heady.

  ‘Home sweet home,’ she whispered, but as she closed her eyes, a knot of anxiety tightened in her belly.

  Catching a plane to Savannah had seemed such a good idea twenty-four hours earlier. She’d had enough of New York: the city, the Hamptons, where she’d spent a weekend squashed into a three-bedroom beachfront cottage with fourteen other girls. It had not been the summer idyll she had imagined, the one that had been sold to her by her college room-mate, Amanda. Instead Manhattan had been hot and hectic, and Long Island had been no better.

  She’d been lying on her camp bed, trying to ignore the smell of weed, the music and the screams of her friends flirting with the boys from the house next door, when she’d had the radical thought that she didn’t need to stay there.

  A standby ticket had cost her two hundred bucks, the flight had taken just a couple of hours, and the noise and pace of the metropolis had been left behind her for the more simple life she’d never even known she craved. If only it was that easy, she thought, pushing her key into the lock and walking into the grand wood-panelled hall.

  Her mother was coming down the sweeping staircase that took centre-stage in the entrance at the exact moment of her arrival.

  ‘Jennifer. What on earth . . . ?’ said Sylvia Wyatt, her delicate features betraying no sign of disbelief except for a slight widening of her eyes.

  ‘Surprise,’ grinned Jennifer, dropping her suitcases on the walnut floor, hoping to raise some reaction from her mother. She did not expect an embrace – her mother had never been anything other than brittle and cool – but as Sylvia Wyatt stood motionless at the bottom of her stairs, back straight, one hand resting on the curve of the banister, even Jennifer was surprised at the coldness of her response. If she was glad to see her recently graduated daughter back from college and the city, she certainly didn’t look it.

  ‘You were supposed to be in New York till the twentieth,’ she said crisply, her eyes noting the two suitcases by Jennifer’s feet.

  ‘I know. I just thought, why be there when I could be here . . .’

  ‘You could have let us know.’

  ‘It was a spur-of-the-moment decision,’ said Jennifer, feeling herself curl under the heat of the late Southern afternoon and her mother’s expression of being inconvenienced.

  ‘Your father will be pleased to see you,’ Sylvia replied finally.

  ‘Is he home?’

  ‘Just now. He’s on the terrace.’

  Jennifer felt her spirits perk up. She ran through the house, past the dining room, the kitchen and the sun-filled solarium, and saw the familiar figure of her father standing on the back terrace overlooking the lake.

  He turned and saw her, and his face broke into a grin and he held his arms open for her to run into.

  ‘What’s this?’ he laughed as they gave each other a tight hug.

  ‘I’m back.’

  ‘So I see,’ he said, pulling away and throwing his arm around her shoulder. ‘What is it? A flying visit? How long have we got you for? You know, I think we have some celebration cake left over from the Fourth of July. Sylvia, find Marion. See what treats we have for our daughter.’

  ‘I missed you,’ said Jennifer honestly, perching on a chair.

  ‘You mean Connor’s back from the Caribbean,’ he winked, taking off his panama hat.

  Her boyfriend had spent the past three weeks sailing around the British Virgin Islands. It was pretty much Jennifer’s dream vacation – sailing was what had bonded her and Connor in the first place – but it was to be a boys’ trip after his graduation from Harvard, and she had not been invited.

  ‘Yes, he got back a couple of days ago, but that’s not why I’m here.’

  ‘You can admit it,’ scoffed her father. ‘These are your glory days.’

  ‘What glory days?’

  ‘Love, romance.’

  ‘I can’t believe I’m discussing relationships with my dad,’ she grinned, enjoying the gentle teasing from her father. David Wyatt had been a fairly absent figure during her childhood; his job – heading up a collection of businesses including a paper mill and a food packaging company – meant that he left the house early and worked late. But when he was at Casa D’Or, his very presence warmed the house like a log fire.

  ‘So how’s work? The gallery?’

  Jennifer did not want to have this discussion, not yet, and was grateful to hear the distracting sounds of a tray behind them. She looked up as Marion, their housekeeper, put an assortment of cold drinks, along with a plate of cookies and muffins, on the table.

  ‘I just pulled a few bits and pieces together,’ she said, smiling warmly.

  ‘Thanks. You didn’t need to,’ said Jennifer, enjoying the sound of Marion’s syrupy Southern accent. The sound of home.

  Her eyes drifted across the lake to the house on the other shore. It was a smaller property than Casa D’Or, with a jetty and a boathouse that jutted out into the water. There were two types of homeowner in Savannah: families like the Wyatts who lived in the city all year round, and others for whom the area was just a temporary home, a pit stop to escape the winter months and cold, snowy weather of the north. The Lake House belonged to one of the latter, the Sittenfields, a New York family whom the locals referred to as the snow birds, on account of their seasonal migration.

  ‘Is someone staying at the Sittenfields’ house? I think there’s someone in the boathouse,’ she said, squinting through the heat shimmering over the water.

  ‘Old habits die hard,’ replied her father. When she was a kid, the neighbours used to give her a fistful of dollars for watching the house over the summer. She’d treated her responsibility very seriously and taken up her sentry point on the pontoon, with a good book and a soda for company.

  ‘Yes. Some family from England,’ he said as her mother appeared on the terrace.

  Sylvia looked different from a few minutes earlier, as if she had brushed her hair and refastened the cream silk scarf that was tied around her neck.

  ‘Are we talking about the people in the Lake House?’ she said as she took a chair under the shade of the parasol.

  ‘Who are they?’ asked Jennifer, taking a welcome sip of iced tea.

  ‘You can find out later,’ replied David. ‘I met them yesterday and invited them round.’

  ‘Invited them round?’ asked Sylvia, looking alarmed. ‘When?’

  ‘Tonight. Just for drinks,’ said David casually. ‘He’s a writer, here with his wife. There’s a son, too, about your age, Jen.
’

  ‘It’s Jennifer’s first night home . . .’

  ‘I didn’t know that,’ snorted David.

  ‘You should have asked me before inviting strangers over.’ Sylvia was making her displeasure obvious.

  ‘Then why don’t we make it sociable? Get Connor to come too, his parents. Have a little drinks party. A welcome home for our daughter.’

  Sylvia gave a sigh but looked mollified at the suggestion of expanding the event, although Jennifer could think of nothing worse. In fact she knew that the shit was going to hit the fan.

  She went upstairs to her room at the back of the house. Nothing had changed in the three months since she had last visited home. The window seat was still lined with the assortment of cuddly toys from her childhood that she had never been able to throw out. A pile of books sat by her bed where she had left them; some loose revision notes were still on her desk, along with an exam timetable and a handful of pens stuffed into an old jam jar. She remembered how anxious she’d been, about to return to college for her final semester, but looking back, she couldn’t understand what she’d been so worried about. They’d been simpler times. Much simpler, she thought, unpacking her case and putting her clothes in neat piles on the candy-striped duvet: the smart black skirts, the silk blouses, the clear-lensed black-framed glasses. The art gallerist’s wardrobe she would no longer be needing.

  She showered, dried her short brown hair and changed into her favourite gingham sundress, then picked up the phone to call Connor. There was no escaping the conversation, not when her mother had already called his parents and invited them round. She rehearsed some dialogue in her head as her hand cradled the receiver, disturbed only by a deep baritone, smooth, well-spoken, British, from the hall.

  She frowned as the voice called again.

  ‘Hello. Is anyone there?’

  She could not hear any footsteps coming to greet their caller, so she went downstairs and saw three people collected in the hall. An older but attractive man, notable by his sheer size – at least six foot three tall, and broad, extending his hand as Jennifer reached the bottom of the stairs.

  ‘Bryn Johnson. My wife Elizabeth and son James. Your father’s expecting us. The door was open.’

  He had a bullish confidence, but he was the sort of man who could get away with it. Jennifer thought her mother would dislike him on sight.

  ‘Yes, of course. You’re at the Lake House. It’s nice to meet you. Come through,’ she replied, guiding them to the back of the house.

  The terrace had been transformed, as if someone had waved a magic wand since she had last been here an hour earlier. The garden lights had been turned on so that cones of soft yellow twinkled across the lawns. The table had been set with a starched white tablecloth and the best cutlery. A huge vase of creamy hydrangeas sat proudly in the middle, alongside two softly glowing hurricane lanterns. She knew their guests would be impressed, although for her mother this was little more than a picnic.

  ‘Bryn. Good to see you again,’ said David, hurrying to greet them. ‘How’s the writing going?’

  The group made polite conversation that largely consisted of David telling the Johnsons about the history of the house. How it had been in the Wyatt family since the 1940s although it had been built a hundred years before that, when a wealthy family from Pennsylvania came to exploit the rich farmland and the legalised slavery in Georgia. The plantation had over two thousand acres of land in those days, with peach orchards, pecan groves, and fields of rice and cotton that stretched for miles around, although the Wyatts only owned two hundred acres now.

  ‘Do you still have the peach orchards?’ asked Elizabeth Johnson, almost swooning.

  ‘Not any more,’ said David, shaking his head. ‘Most of the farming crops are gone, but we’ve got the woods, the paddocks and the swamps. The tidal creek over there runs into the Wilmington. And you’ve seen the lake.’

  Jennifer glanced at her watch. The Gilberts had said they would be here at eight; it was close to that now. To distract herself, she listened to Bryn Johnson wax lyrical about his writing career.

  ‘I consider myself to be in exile,’ he said expansively, eager to insert his own narrative into the conversation. ‘All the greats did it. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Neruda, although the only thing we’re escaping from is the British weather,’ he added with a rich laugh.

  ‘How are you enjoying Savannah?’ said Jennifer, turning to the son.

  ‘We’ve only just got here,’ he said with a casual shrug of the shoulders.

  ‘Jim would rather be bar-hopping with friends around Europe round now,’ interrupted Bryn.

  ‘Interrailing,’ corrected Jim Johnson.

  Bryn scoffed. ‘I love the way young people make it sound like a cultural endeavour, when really all they want is to score cheap girls and cheaper booze in the sunshine.’

  ‘Savannah might not be Europe, but it has its own charms,’ smiled David, noticing the younger man scowl.

  Marion brought drinks and canapés on to the terrace and the group made small talk. The sun was beginning to set, turning the lake a glorious liquid bronze and daubing the back of the house in the soft golden light that had inspired its name.

  Her parents drifted down the lawn to show Bryn and Elizabeth their prize azaleas, leaving Jennifer alone with Jim Johnson. She took a few moments to observe him. The younger man was less obviously handsome than his father. His mouth had a slight downturned moodiness. His hair was a couple of shades lighter than Bryn’s jet-black crown; a long fringe fell fashionably to one side of his face. There was stubble on his chin and his hands were thrust in the pockets of his jeans as he slouched in his chair. She’d seen these sorts of boys before at college, the tortured artists who lured girls into bed with promises of poems and song lyrics in their honour but rarely delivered anything beyond unreliability and eventual heartbreak.

  ‘So you don’t want to be here?’ she said, trying to make conversation but suspecting it might be tricky.

  ‘Not really,’ he said sullenly.

  ‘Have you ever been to Greece?’

  ‘No. Have you?’

  ‘I did a tour of Europe the summer before college,’ she nodded.

  ‘Of course you did,’ he grunted.

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ She frowned back. ‘That’s what girls like you do, isn’t it,’ he replied with a shrug. ‘Grand Tour, study art history, work in a smart little gallery . . .’

  His handful of words had infuriated her.

  ‘I didn’t realise I was so predictable,’ she said, putting her glass of iced tea down.

  ‘Am I right?’

  She wasn’t sure, but she swore she saw a faint smile pull at his lips.

  ‘I was interning in a gallery in New York, but I left. Happy now?’ she said with as much dignity as she could manage.

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘I didn’t like it,’ she said slowly.

  ‘Good.’

  ‘What’s wrong with art galleries?’ she said, suddenly defensive of the career she had rejected.

  ‘They’re the ultimate conjuring trick. Rich people selling stuff to other rich people. I thought it would be perfect for you.’

  She felt her back straighten even more.

  ‘I went to work in a gallery because I majored in art history.’

  ‘And here’s me thinking that university was supposed to expand our horizons, not limit us to the choices we made at eighteen.’

  She resisted the urge to shake her head. It would have been nice having someone her own age living next door, but Jim Johnson was pompous and insufferable.

  She was almost looking forward to the Gilberts’ arrival, when her wish was granted and she heard movement behind her.

  Carolyn Gilbert appeared first on the terrace. She was a classic trophy wife, a former caterer who had landed one of her clients, Robert Gilbert, one of the city’s richest financiers. Everyone pretended not to remember her celebrity as a local beauty queen.
Today, in a blue patterned tunic, flanked by her handsome husband and son, the one-time Miss Southern Dream looked like the ultimate WASP.

  Connor smiled when he saw Jennifer, but she noticed there was a tightness to his expression. She regretted not having got round to a telephone conversation earlier, but hoped that the presence of the Johnsons might stop any sort of confrontation. Mr and Mrs Gilbert were far too polite for that.

  ‘Sweetheart,’ he said, kissing her formally on the cheek. Aware of Jim Johnson watching them, she wished that Connor had behaved a bit more demonstratively, so she took her boyfriend’s hand and did not let it go as she said hello to his mother and father.

  Sylvia almost ran up the lawn when she saw them, and ordered Marion to bring the food to the table.

  ‘I’m so glad you could come over. It’s just something casual, a little finger buffet, but I thought it would be nice to get everyone together now the kids are back. One last summer before they fly the coop, right?’

  Robert Gilbert glanced at Jennifer and she didn’t miss his look of disapproval. Oh God, she thought, feeling her heart hammer, knowing what was coming, knowing she needed a glass of that Cabernet Sauvignon that had just been brought out in a large, tempting carafe.

  It was another hour before the subject was brought up, although she suspected that her mother, who had seated herself next to Robert during supper, had been discussing it with him throughout the meal. Every now and then Sylvia would glance across towards her daughter, her mouth disappearing into an even thinner and tighter line as she huddled back into her conversation.

  ‘Can we have a word, Jennifer?’ asked Robert as the supper dissolved into drinks and people stood up from the table.

  Connor’s father was a tall man; in any circumstances he always seemed to be looking down at people, but Jennifer knew she was in for a telling-off.

  ‘I spoke to Lucian at the gallery this afternoon, after we heard that you’d come back to Savannah. He said it hadn’t worked out between you.’

  The heat of the day had dissipated, but Jennifer felt suddenly warm.

  ‘It didn’t, no,’ she said, taking a fortifying swig of wine. If she was totally honest, she was surprised her resignation from her internship at one of the most prestigious galleries in New York, a position Robert had secured through his network of contacts, had taken so long to be made known.