The Secret by the Lake

by Louise Douglas

  Daniel kissed my shoulder then he reached over and turned the page.

  ‘That’s my favourite picture of my mother.’

  ‘By the reservoir?’

  ‘Yes, she’s standing on the dam, between the pumping station and the spillway. She used to sit on the grass bank and look out over the water. It’s the best place for birdwatching because you can see the whole lake. I go there often myself. There’s never anyone else there.’

  ‘Why ever not?’

  ‘Because it’s the only part of the reservoir that’s dangerous. Everywhere else the ground slopes away shallowly beneath the water. There, it’s like a cliff.’

  ‘Is that where she drowned?’ I asked gently.

  Daniel nodded. Then he took the photograph album and closed it. He leaned down and put the album back under the bed. I wondered if I had asked too many questions but he sat again, kissed me and wound my hair around his wrist.

  ‘I hate to do this,’ he said, ‘but I’ll have to be back at Fairlawn in time to walk with Father up to midnight mass or else he’ll come looking for me. He likes us to attend these village events together, to put on a united front. You could stay here, if you like. You could wait for me.’

  I shook my head. ‘I have to get back to the cottage. I need to be there when Viviane wakes in the morning.’

  ‘It would be nice if you were here when I wake in the morning.’

  ‘Another time, maybe.’

  We got out of the bed and dressed quickly and quietly; the mood had changed. Now I felt awkward and a little embarrassed being naked in front of Daniel, pulling on my underwear, reaching behind my back to fasten my bra, conscious of the way the suspender belt pinched into the flesh of my stomach. I hoped I had not been too forward. I hoped he would not regret what we had done.

  I went into the small bathroom, dropped the two used johnnies into the little bin, washed my hands and face and borrowed Daniel’s comb to tidy my hair. The make-up I’d put on earlier was smudged; I looked tired and vulnerable and I felt, suddenly, lonely and hopeless. I did not want to walk up that hill alone, back to that miserable cottage, back to that narrow little bed and the empty bedroom next door to mine, to all that unhappiness. I did not want to have to be strong for Julia and Vivi, to struggle to do my best to turn what meagre food we had into something that approximated to a Christmas dinner, to spend the next day jollying the pair of them along. I did not want to think of Caroline dying in the room next door to mine.

  I put the comb down and leaned on the basin and gazed at my bedraggled reflection.

  Stop this, I told myself. Self-pity is neither attractive nor useful.

  My eyes filled with tears.

  I sat down on the edge of the bath and pressed my hands into my eyes.

  ‘Amy?’ Daniel called, after several minutes had passed. ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘I’m coming.’

  I didn’t look him in the eye as he helped me into my coat and I slipped on my shoes. He opened the door for me and led me outside, and now the air was stinging cold and a fog was spreading out from the lake, creeping around the lodge, insinuating white strands of dampness through the skeleton branches of the trees, hiding the ground. I rubbed my hands together to keep them warm while Daniel sat on the step and tied the laces on his boots. I was watching him and he was looking down at his feet and neither of us noticed Mr Aldridge coming through the fog, not until he was upon us. He was a big man, tall and broad, yet he had crept up quietly, soft-footed – or maybe I was just too lost in my thoughts to hear him. I started when I saw him, and then I composed myself. I would not be intimidated by the man.

  ‘Hello, Mr Aldridge,’ I said, to alert Daniel to his father’s presence.

  Mr Aldridge came up close to me, too close, so I could smell the heat of him and he said: ‘What’s going on here? Having your own little party, are you, Daniel?’ He swayed on his feet and his words were slurred as if his tongue was too big for his mouth.

  ‘I asked Daniel to show me where he lived,’ I said.

  ‘You asked him to show you where he lived, did you? And what else did he show you, eh?’

  ‘Father, please.’

  Mr Aldridge leaned towards me. His breath reeked of cigars and faintly of something rotten. I did not give any ground. I tried to see beyond the fleshy face, the watery eyes, I tried to see back to the good-looking, proud man I had viewed in the photograph. I reminded myself that it was grief that had turned Mr Aldridge into the pathetic bully he was now and I couldn’t hate him, I couldn’t, not when I could see Daniel so clearly in his features, not when he had the same eyes as his son, the same jawline, the same cowlick on his forehead.

  I didn’t hate him, but I didn’t like him, not at all. Not when he was so rude, so aggressive, not when he hit and hurt his son.

  The feeling was mutual. He didn’t like me one bit either. He jabbed his finger towards me. ‘I’m warning you to stay away from my son,’ he snarled. ‘I don’t want gold-diggers like you sniffing around him.’

  ‘Don’t talk to Amy like that,’ Daniel said.

  ‘I’ll talk to her any way I want. I know that you and your employer don’t have two pennies to rub together,’ he said to me. ‘I’ve heard how you’re always setting up tabs, asking for credit. I know the child’s education is being given gratis, out of pity.’ He turned to his son. ‘Why do you think this girl’s interested in you, Danny, eh? What do you think it is? Do you really think it’s your good looks that attract her? Your charisma? Your personality?’

  ‘I won’t have you talking like that,’ Daniel replied calmly.

  ‘It’s all right, Daniel,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t bother me. I’m going now anyway.’

  ‘Wait,’ he said. ‘I’ll walk you back.’

  ‘What about mass?’ Mr Aldridge slurred. ‘It’s almost time for mass!’

  ‘I’ll meet you at the church,’ Daniel said. He took hold of my arm and we walked briskly back to the footpath, heading uphill, Robert Aldridge’s curses ringing in our ears. ‘I’m sorry,’ Daniel said. ‘Father’s had too much to drink and it makes him emotional. He doesn’t mean any of it. Please slow down.’

  ‘I don’t know why you make excuses for him.’

  ‘He’s not all bad. You’ve only seen the worst of him.’

  ‘Is there a good side to him?’

  The walk uphill was steep, and even after we climbed above the fog, the air was cold in our lungs and talking was difficult. When we turned into the lane towards Reservoir Cottage, the church bells stopped ringing and the silence was overwhelming. Daniel took me in his arms. I held back for a moment and then pressed myself against him. I did not want to be separated from him.

  ‘You’d better go,’ I said, because the prospect of goodbye distressed me so badly that I had to have it over and done with. ‘Go to mass. Let me get back to Julia.’

  Daniel tried to kiss me but I turned away. I couldn’t bear this.

  ‘Happy Christmas, darling Amy,’ Daniel said.

  ‘Please go. You’re going to be late.’

  I did not watch him walk away. I never wanted to watch him leave me again.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  THE PREVIOUS CHRISTMAS, I had spent with the Laurent family in Paris. Viviane had woken early and brought her stocking into my bedroom. She had climbed into the bed beside me as she had done every year since she could climb out of the cot herself, switched on the lamp and, slowly and methodically, had taken everything out of the stocking and laid it on the coverlet. There was always a coin and an orange, always a handful of sweets, and a bauble in a box, one for every year that Viviane had been born, bought from the special shop on the Champs Elysées. Viviane always saved the bauble to open last. First she opened the little presents. That year there had been a woollen hat (hand-knitted by me), a diamanté hair clip in the shape of a butterfly, a snowglobe with two children building a snowman inside, a box of coloured pencils and a French storybook, a small jigsaw and a miniat
ure pram for her doll’s house, together with a tiny baby doll.

  We had stayed in bed together until dawn, when I washed and dressed and padded through the beautiful apartment to the tiny kitchen, where I made coffee and eggs benedict and laid out a tray for Julia and Alain’s breakfast. I took the tray into the couple’s bedroom, left it on the table by the window as directed, wished them both Joyeux Noel and returned to the kitchen to start preparing the vegetables for the Christmas lunch.

  Friends had come over for the lunch and it had been a lavish meal that lasted from noon until dusk, but in the late afternoon I took Viviane out, just the two of us, and we went ice-skating in the Tuileries, holding hands, falling over, laughing as we skated amongst the others on the lake that afternoon in a Paris silver with cold, the pavements glowing in the pools of gold made by the streetlights. I loved that city. I had felt the blade of my skates cutting into the ice, I heard the scoring as I moved forward, the air icy against my face, and I turned to look at Viviane – and she was laughing, her cheeks rosy, her nose red and her eyes bright. The raspberry-coloured hat I’d knitted for her was pulled down low over her ears.

  We wandered back to the 7th arrondissement after dark, back along the beautiful, wide streets, beneath the Christmas lights and the city all aglow; we took the lift up to the top floor, went back into the apartment. The table had been cleared of the plates and cutlery but Alain and Julia and their friends were still sitting around it, eating bread and cold meat, drinking Pastis now, chins in their hands, listening to music on the record player. They had lit candles around the room and they were merry and loud, arguing about politics, about de Gaulle ‘the great asparagus’. They looked up and greeted me and Vivi when we came in and then they carried on talking. After I’d washed up, and put Vivi to bed, I’d gone and sat with them. I had never felt happier.

  Nobody could have predicted how drastically things would have changed in one year. That Christmas in Reservoir Cottage, Julia and I filled a stocking for Viviane who, bless her heart, did her best to look surprised and pleased with the meagre gifts we’d scratched together. We ate potatoes, mince and onion for lunch. Julia drank gin from the time she woke until the moment she fell asleep on the settee after lunch, and Vivi and I walked down to the lake and threw pebbles into the water, each one a wish for the coming year.

  I think we were all glad when it was over.

  But nothing was better afterwards. In fact, everything was about to become a great deal worse.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  AFTER CHRISTMAS, THE house went on the market, the weather became bleaker and so did Julia’s despair. She had no appetite, no enthusiasm for anything, and nothing Vivi or I said or did seemed to make any difference. All she wanted to do was sit quietly on her own, deciphering the shorthand in Alain’s notebooks – or pretending that was what she was doing. Often she simply sat and rocked with the sweater on her lap. She had become very sensitive to noise and did not like to be disturbed by Bess, by Viviane, by anyone.

  Viviane herself was growing quieter and more introverted with every day that passed. I phoned her class teacher, who assured me that Vivi seemed happy enough when she was at school, but when she came home she spent hours alone in her bedroom, her lips moving as she carried on long, intense conversations with the imaginary friend who was not there. She had fallen out with Kitty over something Kitty had said to her. She would not tell me what it was. This troubled me, because if Vivi was trying to protect me from knowing what had been said, then it must have been something really bad.

  There was some happiness in my life because Daniel was in my life. The happy times were like bright, scented bubbles of pleasure in a bath full of cold, dirty water. They could not compensate for the fact that I was desperately worried about both Julia and Viviane, and about our lack of money. Daniel would have helped us, of course he would, but how could I ask to borrow money after all his father had said about me? When Mr Aldridge was convinced my heart was set not on Daniel, but on the contents of his bank account? How could I casually say, ‘Any chance you could lend me fifty pounds, darling, just to keep the wolf from the door?’ I knew I couldn’t.

  Everything depended on Julia selling the cottage.

  A week went by and nobody came to look at it. Julia said she would not let the estate agent know how desperate she was but then I heard her pleading with him on the phone. He told her again that it was the wrong time of year to sell, nobody wanted to move immediately after Christmas, and that to generate interest he needed to advertise the cottage in the local newspaper. For this he would need photographs of both the interior and exterior. Julia urged me to hurry up with the stripping of the wallpaper so that the empty bedroom could be decorated. She couldn’t show the room to anyone who came to view the property, not with its half-stripped walls. Because it was proving such an arduous task, she joined in herself to help, despite the pain in her hip and her exhaustion. And it was Julia who found the drawing on the wall.

  I’d been to the village store to negotiate yet another tab with the shopkeeper, which I promised to pay off at the end of the month. The shopkeeper had seen the For Sale sign outside the cottage and understood our predicament. Fortunately, she was a kindly woman, a relative newcomer to the village who, I think, understood how I felt, being an outsider. She had agreed to keep supplying us with the basics for the next few weeks and even slipped a small bar of chocolate into my pocket, ‘for the little’un’, as I left. My gratitude knew no bounds.

  As I walked back to the cottage, my mind was drawn to the ruby pendant. That had to be worth a small fortune. I knew that really, it wasn’t mine to sell, but Caroline – if it ever had belonged to her – certainly had no use for it any more, and in many ways, it would be a relief to be rid of the thing. Nobody knew about it, it had been lost for at least thirty years, forgotten in its matchbox in the satchel in the loft. If Daniel hadn’t gone up to look for holes in the roof it could well have stayed lost for many more years. If it didn’t belong to Caroline, but had been – heaven forbid – stolen by her, then drawing attention to it would only open up scars that were barely healed. I couldn’t bring myself to show it to Julia, proof of yet another of Caroline’s wrongdoings, and although selling it would be morally wrong, keeping it seemed almost worse. It was like a guilty secret eating away at the back of my mind. I could sell it. I should sell it. Putting food on our plates was more important than any niggling scruples I might have.

  I had more or less made up my mind by the time I was back. I let myself into the cottage through the front door and leaned down to unhook Bess’s lead.

  ‘Amy?’ Julia called. ‘Is that you? Come up here quickly!’

  I kicked off my boots and trotted up the stairs in my socks. Julia was standing at the door to the empty bedroom, and the light was behind her so her face was in shadow.

  ‘What is it?’

  Julia leaned on her stick with one hand, and with the other, took hold of my hand. Hers was cold as ice. She led me into the room, the stick tapping on the floorboards, and we stood in front of the wall to the left of the chimney breast, a patch of the exposed wall about the size of a dinner plate stripped of its paper.

  ‘Look,’ she whispered.

  I was already looking.

  On the wall was a crude depiction of a man hanging from a beam, like a drawing from a game of Hangman – only this dead man was characterized by his tongue hanging from his mouth, by the awful lolling of his head and by the girl standing with her hands on her hips staring up at him, smiling. The image had been drawn so furiously that the tip of the pencil had scored holes in the plaster. I covered my mouth with my hands. It was horrible.

  ‘That’s the reason for the wallpaper,’ Julia said. ‘They wanted to cover up the drawing.’

  ‘No wonder.’ I shuddered.

  ‘It’s Dr Croucher,’ Julia said.

  ‘How can you tell?’

  ‘I just can. It has the look of him when he was younger.’

  I fe
lt cold suddenly – uneasy. I sensed a movement on the skin of my neck, as if somebody had breathed into my collar. I turned and nobody was there – but as I turned, the necklace I was wearing broke. The tiny beads bounced and scattered on the floor, disappearing between the cracks in the floorboards. I dropped at once to my hands and knees to gather up as many as I could and Julia crouched down to help. Our heads were close together, the ends of Julia’s hair skimming the top of my hands.

  ‘I’ll scrub it off,’ I said, panting as I gathered the beads. ‘I’ll go at it with the wire brush.’

  ‘We have to do it now, Amy. At once! Vivi mustn’t see it. Bloody Caroline! She won’t leave me alone. Still spreading misery, still causing pain.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  Julia and I looked up. Viviane was standing at the door in her grey socks and her olive-green school tunic, the grey cardigan, the brown ribbon that had held back her hair loose now, falling beside her face. She had not stepped into the room, and so she was only half-lit, and in that mid-way gloom she seemed as ephemeral as a whisper.

  ‘What aren’t I allowed to see?’ she asked.

  I stood up and backed towards the wall, to hide the drawing behind my body. ‘Nothing,’ I said.

  ‘Why aren’t you at school?’ Julia asked.

  ‘We’ve got choir practice in the church. We came home early to get ready. I told you.’

  ‘I’m sure you didn’t, Vivi.’

  Viviane came further into the room. I backed closer to the wall, until I was almost leaning against it.

  ‘You were talking about Caroline?’ said Vivi.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yes, you were. Why? What’s she done?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘She has done something. You just said she had. You said “Bloody Caroline”.’

  ‘It’s not your business, Vivi.’

  ‘What did she do?’

  ‘It was a long time ago and it’s not important now, sweetheart,’ I said. ‘Let’s go and find you a snack.’