The Lake House (39 page)

Neither was Alice jealous that Ben had chosen Eleanor instead of her. How could she envy her mother, who had suffered and lost so much? Who'd been so much younger then than Alice was now, who'd been dead herself almost six decades. It would be like envying one's own child, or the character in a book one read a long time ago. No, Alice wasn't jealous, she was sad. Not nostalgic; there was nothing general or inexplicable about her emotion. She was sad that her mother had borne it alone. It occurred to Alice now, as she stared at her mother's long-ago face, that perhaps that had been the attraction. Ben was a kind man, gentle, engaging, and free from the ties of responsibility that must have seemed at times to Eleanor an unendurable burden.

Alice's focus shifted to her father, sitting on the edge of the picnic blanket at the back of the group. There was a stone wall behind him and it struck Alice as she looked at the photograph that her father had always seemed as sure and stable to her as those ancient stone walls that crossed the fields of Loeanneth. Deborah had said Alice idolised him. She'd certainly loved him specially, and she'd wanted him to love her in return. But then they all had, they'd all competed for his affection.

Now, she took in every detail of his familiar face, trying to see beyond the beloved features to the secrets beneath. Alice knew a little about shell shock, the same things everybody knew, about tremors and bad dreams and damaged men who cowered when they heard loud noises. But Deborah had said it wasn't like that for Daddy. His ability to concentrate had suffered, and his hands had shaken sometimes, too much to resume his training as a surgeon; however it was something else that plagued him, one particular experience rather than a general weight of horrors. A battlefield ordeal that had, in turn, had devastating consequences for their peacetime family.

Alice's gaze fell then, as it must, to Theo. Sitting at Mother's feet, a beguiling smile lighting his face as he reached an arm towards Clemmie. His toy puppy dangled from his hand, and to the uninitiated it might have looked as if he were making a gift of it to his sister. But Theo never would have given Puppy away, not willingly. What had happened to the little toy? Puppy's whereabouts were of little consequence really in the grand scheme of things, but still Alice wondered. It was the novelist in her, she supposed, always seeking to square away the smallest details. Larger questions remained, too. From the most basic—How had it happened? When did Daddy realise what he'd done? How did Mother find out?—to the most pressing, as far as Alice was concerned: What on earth had happened to her father to make him react in such a way? Alice would have given anything to go back to talk to her mother and father, to ask them plainly, but all that remained was to hope that answers lay in the papers at Loeanneth.

She had entrusted Sadie Sparrow to find them, but it seemed clear to Alice now that she couldn't just sit idly by. She had made a promise to herself never to go back to Loeanneth, but suddenly it was the very thing she wanted more than anything else in the world. She stood abruptly, paced across the library, fanned her warm face. Go back to Loeanneth . . . Peter had said she only needed to call and say the word . . . Was she really going to allow herself to be held to a commitment made in the full heat of youth and uncertainty and fear?

Alice glanced at the phone and her hand quivered.

T
wenty-seven

Cornwall, 1932

He led a blessed life. That's what made it so much worse. He had a wife whom he loved, three daughters whose innocence and goodness brought light into his life, and now there was going to be another baby. He lived in a beautiful house with a rambling garden, on the edge of a great, lush wood. Birds sang in his trees and squirrels built their stores and trout grew fat in his stream. It was so much more than he deserved. Millions of men had lost their chance of a normal life, had died in the mud and the madness; men who would have given everything for what he had. But while they were dead and forgotten, Anthony's blessings kept rolling in.

He rounded the lake and stopped when the boathouse came into view. It would always be a special place. Such simple days back then before the war, when the house was being restored and he and Eleanor had camped by the stream. He wasn't sure he'd ever been as happy since. Things had been so certain. He'd had purpose and ability and the confidence that came with being young and whole, untested. He thought he could honestly say he'd been a
good
man, then. Life had seemed like a straight road that lay ahead, just waiting for them to walk it.

When the war ended and he came home, Anthony had spent a great deal of time down at the boathouse: sometimes he'd just sat and watched the stream, other times he'd read over old letters; there were days when he'd simply slept. He'd been so tired. Sometimes he thought he'd never wake; plenty of days he'd have been happy not to; but he did, time and again he did, and with Eleanor's help he set up his study in the attic of the house, and the boathouse passed to the girls. It had become a child's place for play and adventure, and now it served as accommodation for staff. The thought pleased him; Anthony pictured layers of time and usage, yesterday's ghosts making way for today's players. Buildings were so much bigger than one man's life and wasn't that a happy thing? It was what he liked most about the woods and fields of Loeanneth. Generations of human beings had walked them, worked them and been buried beneath them. There was much solace to be gained from the permanence of nature. Even the woods at Menin would be grown back now. Hard to imagine, but it must be so. Did flowers grow on Howard's grave?

He thought sometimes of the people they'd met in France. He tried not to, but they appeared in his mind's eye of their own accord, the villagers and farmers whose homes had sat in the midst of war. Were they still there, he wondered, M. Durand and Mme Fournier, the countless others who'd billeted them, happily or otherwise, along the way? When the armistice was signed and the guns were put away, did the people whose lives they'd disrupted, whose homes and farms they'd destroyed, begin the long, slow process of repair? He supposed they must have. Where else would they have gone?

Anthony skirted around the hedge and set off towards the woods. Alice had wanted to come with him today, but Eleanor had told her no and invented a task to keep her busy instead. His wife had become expert over the years at reading his moods; there were times when it seemed she knew him better than he knew himself. Lately, though, things were slipping. Ever since Eleanor told him about the new baby, things had been getting worse. It worried him. She'd thought the news would make him happy, and in some ways it did; but more and more often, he found his thoughts drawn to that barn on Mme Fournier's farm. He heard phantom crying in the night, a child's cries, and every time the dog barked he had to stand very still and quiet and tell himself that everything was all right, that it was only in his head. As if that made things better.

A flock of birds cut swift across the sky and Anthony shivered. For a split second he was there on the ground behind the milking shed in France, his shoulder smarting from where Howard had punched him. He screwed his eyes tight shut and counted five breaths before opening them a crack and letting the light flood back in. He concentrated on seeing only the wide, open fields of Loeanneth, Alice's swing, the last gate that led from the meadows to the woods. Slowly, determinedly, he started walking towards it.

It was just as well he'd come alone today. Eleanor had been right. He was becoming unpredictable. He was worried about what he might do without realising it, what the girls might see or hear. And they mustn't know what he'd done, what he was; he couldn't bear for them to know that. Even worse, if they were ever to glimpse the thing he'd
almost
done, the monstrous line he'd nearly crossed.

The other night he'd been woken by a noise in the dark of the bedroom he shared with Eleanor; he'd sat up in bed and realised there was something in the shadowy corner near the curtains. Some
one
. Anthony's heart had been racing. “What is it?” he'd hissed. “What do you want?”

The man had walked slowly towards him and when he stepped through a spill of moonlight, Anthony had seen that it was Howard.

“I'm going to be a father,” he was saying. “I'm going to be a father, Anthony, just like you.”

Anthony had screwed his eyes shut and blocked his ears so that his hands shook against his temples. The next thing he knew Eleanor was awake and holding him and the bedside lamp was on and Howard was gone.

He would be back, though; he always came back. And now, with a new baby on the way, there was no chance Anthony could keep him at bay.

* * *

They'd been at war for two and a half years. Fighting had ground down at the front and they'd been rotating in a seemingly endless shuffle of frontline hostility followed by billeting back from the line. They knew the town of Warloy-Baillon and her people well, and had become as comfortable as was possible in their trench warfare limbo. Word had passed down the line, though, that they were readying for a big push and Anthony was glad; the sooner they won this bloody thing, the sooner they could all go home.

He was just coming off his last day away from the trenches and was sitting at the oak farm table in the kitchen of their reluctant billet, M. Durand, enjoying a final cup of tea from porcelain instead of tin as he reread Eleanor's latest letter. She'd sent a photograph of Deborah and the new baby, Alice, a dear, fat little thing with a surprisingly fierce and determined air about her. After one last look he tucked the photo carefully in his jacket pocket.

The letter, written on the ivy-rimmed paper he'd given her, was exactly what he'd asked for: story after story of a life he was beginning to feel had only ever existed in fiction. Was there really a house called Loeanneth, a lake with ducks and an island in its centre, and a stream that tripped and swirled through the bottom gardens? Did two little English girls called Deborah and Alice spend their mornings in a kitchen garden planted by their parents, making themselves ill eating far too many strawberries?
They were both rather poorly afterwards,
Eleanor had written,
but what is one to do? They're a couple of little sneaks when it comes to their garden raids. Deborah keeps them in her pockets and feeds them to Alice when I'm not watching. I don't know whether to be proud or cross! And even when I do suspect, I haven
't the heart to stop them. Is there anything better than to pick fresh strawberries from the vine? To gobble them up and feel oneself dissolve beneath their sweetness? Oh my, but the nursery, Anthony—those sticky little fingers—it smelled like warm jam for days afterwards!

Anthony looked up to see Howard at the kitchen door. Caught in a private, weak moment, he folded the letter quickly and slipped it away with the photograph. “Ready when you are,” he said, collecting his hat and straightening it into position.

Howard sat at the rustic chair on the other side of the table.

“You're not ready,” said Anthony.

“I'm not going.”

“Not going where?”

“Back to the front.”

Anthony frowned, perplexed. “Are you joking? Are you ill?”

“Neither. I'm leaving, deserting, call it what you will. I'm going away with Sophie.”

Anthony was not often speechless but now words failed him. He had known Howard was sweet on M. Durand's housekeeper. The poor girl had lost her husband in the first weeks of the war. She was only eighteen and had a baby son, Louis, to care for, no relatives or friends left in the village. He hadn't realised how far things had progressed.

“We're in love,” Howard said. “I know it sounds ridiculous at a time like this, but there you have it.”

The guns were never quiet here, always thumping in the background. They'd become used to the way the earth shook and cups and saucers rattled across the tabletop. They were good now at ignoring the fact that each rumble meant the death of more men.

Anthony stilled his teacup now and watched as the surface of the remaining liquid quivered. “Love,” he repeated. It was such an odd word to hear spoken when they were all much more used to talking about rats and mud and bloodied limbs.

“I'm not a fighting man, Anthony.”

“We're all fighting men now.”

“Not me. I've been lucky, but my luck's going to run out.”

“We need to finish what we started. If a man cannot be useful to his country, he is better dead.”

“That's rubbish. I don't know that I ever believed it. What good am I to England? I'm of far more use to Sophie and Louis than I am to England.”

He pointed vaguely towards the window, and Anthony saw that Sophie and the baby were sitting on a garden seat on the other side of the courtyard. She was cooing to the child—a lovely child, with big liquid brown eyes and a dimple in each cheek—who was laughing and reaching up with his little plump hand to stroke his mother's face.

Anthony lowered his voice. “Look. I can arrange some leave. You can go back to England for a few weeks. Get yourself sorted out.”

Howard shook his head. “I'm not going back.”

“You don't have a choice.”

“There's always a choice. I'm leaving tonight. We're leaving.”

“You're coming back with me now—that's an order.”

“I want to be with her. I want a shot at a normal life. To be a father. To be a husband.”

“You can be all those things, you
will
; but you have to do it properly. You can't just walk away.”

“I wouldn't have told you, but you're more than a friend. You're a brother.”

“I can't let you do this.”

“You have to.”

“We both know what happens to deserters.”

“They'd have to catch me first.”

“They will.”

Howard smiled sadly. “Anthony, old friend, I'm dead already out there. My soul is dead, and my body will soon catch up.” He stood, pushing his chair in slowly, carefully. He left the farmhouse kitchen, whistling a song that Anthony hadn't heard in years, a dance song from their university days.

The whistle, that tune, the casual way in which his friend was signing his own death warrant . . . All the ghastly things they'd seen and done together, the relentlessness of the whole undertaking, everything Anthony had suppressed to make it this far—the wretched intensity with which he missed Eleanor and his girls, his baby Alice whom he'd never even met—now threatened to overwhelm him.

His thoughts blurred and he stood abruptly. He hurried out of the kitchen, across the grassed area, along the paths between the farm buildings. He caught up with Howard in the alleyway that ran behind the next-door neighbour's milking shed. His friend was at the far end and Anthony shouted, “Hey. Stop there.”

Howard didn't stop; he called instead over his shoulder, “You're not my commanding officer anymore.”

Anthony felt fear and helplessness and anger rise up inside him like a black wave that wouldn't be held at bay. He couldn't let this happen; he had to stop it somehow.

He began to run. He'd never been a violent man—he was training to be a doctor, a healer—but now his heart pounded and blood surged through his veins and every bit of rage and sorrow and frustration he'd felt over the past few years pulsed beneath his skin. He leapt when he got close to Howard and pulled him down onto the ground.

The two men rolled together, wrestling and scuffling, each trying to land a deciding punch on the other, neither quite managing it. Howard was the first to make contact, pushing himself back to gain sufficient distance before swinging a left hook. Anthony felt a blaze of liquid pain dart through his chest and shoulder.

Howard had been right, he wasn't a fighting man, and neither was Anthony, and the fracas was surprisingly exhausting. The two men let one another go, falling apart, backs flat on the ground, chests rising and falling as each struggled to catch his breath. The momentary madness over.

“Oh, God,” Howard said at last. “I'm sorry. Are you hurt?”

Anthony shook his head. He stared up at the sky, more dazzling somehow for his lack of breath. “Bloody hell, Howard.”

“I told you, I'm sorry.”

“You've got no food, no supplies . . . what are you thinking?”

“Sophie and I—we've got enough. We've got each other.”

Anthony closed his eyes and laid a hand across his chest. The sun made his cheeks burn pleasantly and turned the inside of his eyelids orange. “You know I have to stop you.”

“You're going to have to shoot me to do it.”

Anthony blinked into the brightness. An arrowhead of birds flew black against the brilliant blue of the sky. He watched them and as he did his certainties seemed to crumble. This day, this sunshine, the birds, all of it was outside the sphere of war. It was as if a different reality was taking place just up there, if they could only get high enough to escape this place they called the world.

Howard was sitting now with his back against the brick wall, inspecting his bruised hand. Anthony went to sit beside him. His ribs hurt.