The Secret by the Lake (13 page)

Julia stood beside me, leaning on her stick.

‘She won’t get it open,’ she said. ‘After Father died my mother and I tried. We couldn’t find the key to the padlock and the window is so well sealed it’s bombproof.’

Julia filled a glass with water from the tap, took a sip, then held it in her hand, gazing out. ‘I used to play in that shed. It used to be my hideaway.’

‘Did your father build it?’

‘No, it belonged to the reservoir superintendent, who lived here before we did. There’s a plaque inside that says
Bristol Water Company
. Father used to show it to people who came asking about the history of the lake. He never used it. He kept his tools in the garage so he turned the shed into a playhouse for me. Mother trained a climbing rose up around the door and I put a rug in there, a little table, cushions, blankets and curtains at the window. I cut out pictures from magazines to decorate the walls. It was where I went when I was lonely or unhappy. I loved it. I had tea parties for my toys. It was my favourite place until …’

Her voice fell away. I looked at her. Her eyes were full of sadness. She smiled at me.

‘I feel as if I’m always telling tales on her.’

‘Caroline?’

‘Yes, Caroline.’

‘What did she do this time?’

‘She set fire to the shed. It wasn’t long after the pocket-watch incident. Father used to store petrol in the garage. One day, Caroline came home from work and she took a can, went into the shed and doused everything that was inside, with petrol. I was next door with Dr Croucher – I had earache, I think. We heard my mother’s screams. He ran out to see what was going on, but before he could stop her, Caroline lit a match and threw it into the shed and she stood there and watched it burn, all my toys, the blankets, everything.’

Julia finished the water and put the empty glass back in the sink. Outside, Viviane tugged at the shed door handle, rattled it and then, frustrated, kicked it. She put her hands in the pockets of her coat and walked around the building, looking for weaknesses.

‘It was a proper blazing fire,’ Julia said. ‘Dr Croucher and my father tried to put it out, but Caroline had been thorough. Nothing inside could be saved. The structure was sound but all the toys and furnishings were ruined. Mrs Croucher wouldn’t let me go outside. We watched from her kitchen window. I was crying. She had her arms around my waist and her chin on my shoulder and she was rocking me. “There, there,” she was saying, “never mind.” Father was scuttling around like a lunatic, trying to douse the flames with spadefuls of soil and Dr Croucher was helping but they couldn’t do anything really. In the end they gave up and waited for the fire to burn itself out. Caroline was just standing there, where Vivi is now, watching. I could see her face – it was glowing in the light of the flames and sometimes the smoke blew towards her and she’d disappear for a moment. I couldn’t understand her. I could not, for the life of me, work out why she would do such a thing.’ Julia sighed and crossed her arms about herself. ‘I never played in the shed again. Father sealed up the window and put a padlock on the door. I don’t believe anyone has been inside since.’

‘Where did she work?’

‘Hmm?’

‘You said Caroline had come home from work.’

‘Oh yes. Yes. She used to be a housemaid for the Aldridges. She stayed there during the week but came home at weekends.’

‘Daniel’s parents?’

‘Yes.’

Viviane came back into the kitchen, her cheeks rosy with cold.

‘No luck, Vivi?’ I asked.

‘I can’t make it budge at all.’

‘The decorations wouldn’t be in there anyway,’ Julia said. ‘My mother wasn’t much of a one for Christmas. She must have thrown them away.’

Viviane didn’t say anything else, but I could feel her disappointment. Somehow or other, I promised myself, I’d find a way to decorate the cottage for Christmas.

That evening, Julia took a sleeping pill and went to bed early. I sat downstairs, in the back room beneath the master bedroom because I couldn’t bear to sit alone in the living room, beneath the empty bedroom, even though the living room was the only warm place, the only room with a fire. I wrapped myself up in jumpers and a scarf with socks over my stockings and tried to read my book, but my mind wouldn’t settle. Instead, I started to make a list of the things I needed to buy before Christmas, substituting cheaper alternatives for expensive items, but my heart wasn’t in that task either. I was sick of potato and onion soup; I was cold and I was bored and I was lonely.

I decided to telephone Daniel. We would see each other tomorrow evening anyway, in the pub, but if he was free, perhaps he would drive up and come to sit with me and talk for a while. Perhaps he would bring some of his father’s apple brandy. I went into the living room, doing my best to avoid eye contact with Jesus on the wall, and dialled Daniel’s number, but there was no answer. My disappointment was crushing. I stood beside the telephone table with the receiver in my hand, the darkness of the room gathered around me, the only sound the pattering of raindrops on the window and the wind, desolate, in the chimney. There was nobody else I could call. My father would be at work by now, the Sheffield house would be empty. I would try Daniel’s number again.

I held the receiver to my ear. Now there was no dial tone. I jabbed the cradle a few times with my finger but still nothing. I depressed the cradle one last time and something changed: now I could hear a voice on the line through the earpiece. It had the otherworldly, disconnected sound of a call being made a long way away: a crossed line.

I tried to disconnect the other call, but I couldn’t. The woman – it was a female voice – was still there. The tone and pitch of her voice had become higher and more urgent; she sounded distressed. I put the handset back in the cradle and wandered around the room, pacing its four walls. I did not want to talk to the woman, but what if she was in serious trouble? What if nobody else could hear her?

I picked up the phone again.

‘Is someone there?’ the voice called. ‘Are you there? Can you hear me?’

‘Hello?’ I replied. ‘Hello?’

‘They’re watching,’ the woman called, distant as if she were on the other side of the world.

‘Who is watching?’

‘They pretend they’re not looking but they’re watching all the time.’

‘Who is this?’ I asked. ‘What’s your name? Where are you?’

‘They’re still there!’ the woman cried. ‘They never went away.’

The line, suddenly, went dead.

FRIDAY BEGAN AS
a miserable day. The sky was surly, with the early darkness that presages the worst of winter, and the storm that had set in the day before had not blown itself out. Rain came down in torrents, shrouding the valley and the reservoir, drumming relentlessly on roofs and windows, whipped about by a fractious wind. The cottage felt more isolated than ever. When the coalman came, creaking in his oilskins and dragging his sacks to the bunker at the back of the cottage, he said some of the lower lanes were already flooded, that the old Bristol Road was impassable.

I wrapped up well and walked through the wind to the village store where I used the dregs of my money to buy an exercise book for Julia to transcribe Alain’s notes, and some glue, a tube of glitter, cardboard and cotton wool. None of this cost much, but it was money that could have been used for food and the extravagance made me feel guilty. Before I went into the cottage, I knocked on Mrs Croucher’s door and explained that I would be going out for a couple of hours that evening.

‘Would you mind coming round to sit with Julia and Viviane while I’m out?’ I asked.

Mrs Croucher’s face lit up with pleasure. ‘Oh, there’s nothing I’d like more,’ she said. ‘I’ll make a fruit cake and we can play cards. Perhaps little Viviane could join in?’

‘I’m sure she’d love that,’ I said. In my mind I was thanking God for the gift of Mrs Croucher’s cake, a treat that wouldn’t cost us a penny. It was so long since I’d tasted something rich and sweet that my stomach almost growled with anticipation.

Inside Reservoir Cottage, Julia was in a restless mood, pacing the kitchen with a letter in her hand, her face tensed into a frown.

‘It’s from the bank in France,’ she said, slapping the letter down on to the kitchen table. ‘They say I’ll have to go to court to challenge the legality of freezing Alain’s assets. It could take months, years even, to sort it out. And it will cost money to hire the lawyers I’ll need and I
have
no money. I am stuck, Amy. What am I to do?’

I put down the shopping bag, and took hold of Julia’s cold hands.

‘We’ll be OK.’

‘We won’t be OK. We can’t survive on fresh air. What will we eat? How will we manage? We can’t expect the school to keep educating Viviane for free. We can’t pay the telephone bill or the rates. I can’t even pay the coalman. What are we going to do?’

‘I could find paid work in Bristol perhaps, something to see us through.’

‘Amy, you are a sweetheart, but I can’t ask you to do that. You, work to support Vivi and me, when you’re already doing so much for us out of the goodness of your heart? No.’ She let go of my hands and paced the room. ‘What we must do is sell the cottage, as quickly as we can. We’ll need to tidy it up a bit, decorate the empty bedroom. The wallpaper in that room is hideous. We’ll strip the wallpaper, Amy, you and I, and then we’ll put up something new. Something bright and modern. There are a few tools and paintbrushes in the garage. Let’s see what we can find.’

We found what we needed, a metal bucket and a wallpaper scraper. As I rinsed off the dust and cobwebs at the kitchen sink, I could hear Julia in the living room, talking on the telephone.

‘Yes, I understand,’ she said. ‘I know winter’s not a good time to sell.’

I took an old cloth from the cupboard under the sink and carried the bucket upstairs, slopping water on the bare floorboards. Bess padded after me. The storm had set in now, closing around the cottage. I unlocked the door into the empty bedroom and pushed it open with my foot. The room was gloomy and icy cold and it still had its strange, pervasive smell, not mice, not damp but something old and organic, something unhealthy.

Perhaps it still smelled of Caroline’s death.

No
, I told myself firmly.
Don’t be so silly.

I set the bucket on the floor, went into Viviane’s room, fetched her transistor radio and set it up on the window ledge. Bess stood at the door whining.

‘Come on,’ I called, patting my knees. ‘Come on in, Bess,’ but the dog wouldn’t move.

I switched on the radio, pulled out the aerial and found some music playing – ‘Walk Right Back’, a cheerful song that I liked. Satisfied, I crossed to the chimney wall and began scoring lines in the dark yellow wallpaper with the blade of the scraper. Then I dipped the cloth in the bucket and slapped water on to the paper, working it into the slashes I’d made, trying not to think how the colour of the yellow paper reminded me of diseased skin, and how the cuts were like wounds. As I did this, the music coming from the radio faded, to be replaced by a buzzing, static hum.

Annoyed, I dropped the cloth back into the bucket and returned to the radio. As soon as I picked it up, the song returned. Pleased it was working, I set it down again and got back to work with the scraper, chipping away at the cuts in the paper and then working more water underneath, trying to drench the backing paper so that it would come easily away from the wall. But within moments, the radio reverted to the hum. This time I could hear voices in the fog of sound. More specifically, I could hear a female voice, a distressed whisper fading in and out of the distortion. The voice was horribly familiar. It sounded like the voice I’d heard on the crossed line of the telephone.

You are being ridiculous
, I told myself. I dried my hands and went back to the radio. I picked it up and moved the dial with my thumb, and the noise became louder and quieter as the transistor moved through the airwaves, picking up voices and sounds, all distorted, all crackled but I couldn’t seem to lose the voice in the static. No matter which wavelength I turned to, I could hear the woman’s voice coming through. I tried to turn the radio off, but I couldn’t. I turned it over and prised the cover to the battery compartment off with my thumb. I took out the batteries but there must have been some vestigial energy stored in the radio because the static was still there, and the voice amongst it.

In the end, I threw the radio into the bucket of water where the sound gurgled and died as it sank to the bottom. I stared at it, staring back at me, the odd bubble freeing itself and rising to the surface.

‘Damn!’ I said. Why had I done that? Why had I been so stupid?

I left the room. Bess lay waiting on the landing, her chin on her paws, watching me with wise eyes. I pulled the door shut behind me and the two of us went back down the stairs.

Julia was rocking in her chair in the back room, cradling Alain’s sweater. I leaned against the wall with my eyes closed until I had composed myself.

‘Amy?’ Julia called. ‘Is that you?’

‘I’m making tea,’ I replied. ‘Would you like some?’

‘The estate agent said it’s too close to Christmas to put the cottage up for sale,’ Julia replied. ‘He said he’ll come and put a board up on the twenty-seventh. Apparently the market’s not good at the moment.’

‘No?’ I stood at the doorway to the room.

‘No. He said it might take a while. After that, I called the bank. I spoke to the manager and asked for a loan.’

‘What did he say?’

‘That he would never lend money to a woman without a husband no matter what the circumstances.’

‘Oh, Julia.’

She looked to me and smiled sadly.

‘It’s as if all my worth as a person was taken by the same bullet that shot Alain.’ She stroked Alain’s sweater, absentmindedly, as if it were a cat. ‘We shall have to make every effort to sell the cottage as quickly as we can. It’s our only option. You’re very pale, Amy dear. Did you make a start on the wallpaper?’

‘I started, yes, but I didn’t get much done. I’ll carry on later.’