The Secret by the Lake (18 page)

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.

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 felt 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.’

‘You said she was spreading misery and causing pain. How do you know that? How do you know what she was trying to do?’

‘I was her sister,’ Julia said. ‘I was close to her.’

‘No, you weren’t!’ Viviane said. ‘You were Goody Two Shoes so busy running round in circles trying to please all the grown-ups and be a good little girl that you never noticed Caroline. You had no idea about her life!’

‘Vivi, stop it now,’ I said.

‘You weren’t there, Vivi, you know nothing about any of it,’ said Julia.

‘I
do
know – I
do
! Caroline was trying to protect you, Mummy!’

‘She was trying to protect me? Caroline didn’t
protect
, Vivi, Caroline
damaged.
She hurt people. She stole and she lied and she—’ Julia stopped herself. Her face was white but her cheeks were flushed. ‘She did some terrible things,’ she finished.

‘No,’ Vivi cried, ‘she didn’t! You’re not listening!’

‘I don’t want to hear any more.’

‘You didn’t listen then and you’re not listening now!’

‘Get out of here, Vivi!’ Julia said. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’

I stepped forward and tried to hold Vivi but she shook my hands off and leaned towards her mother, crying and shouting at the same time.

‘You’re a bitch!’ she screamed. ‘No wonder Papa preferred to go to meet the Algerians than be at home with you! No wonder he’d rather be
dead
!’

Julia raised her hand and slapped her daughter’s face. She hit her so hard that Vivi stumbled and the noise was absolutely shocking. It seemed to bounce from the walls of that awful room. For a moment Vivi was still, crouched on the floor holding one hand to her cheek. Then she pushed herself up and ran from the room. We heard her feet thumping down the stairs and seconds afterwards, the slam of the back door.

‘Christ!’ said Julia. ‘Oh Christ, what have I done? I’ve never laid a finger on her before! What’s happening to me, Amy?’

‘She’ll be OK,’ I said as calmly as I could, trying to stop my voice from shaking.

‘I’m turning into a monster!’

‘You’re not. I’ll go after her. I’ll take her up to the church for her choir practice and after that it’ll all be forgotten.’

‘Oh, I don’t think so. She’s old enough now to resent me for that for ever.’

‘It was one slap, Julia, delivered in the heat of the moment. You mustn’t make too much of it.’

Julia covered her face with her hands. ‘Everything is so horrid today, the cold, this room, that terrible drawing, Vivi’s mood … oh God, and me. What is to become of me, Amy? Where will this all end?’

‘You’re a good mother, Julia,’ I said. ‘Vivi pushed you too far, that’s all. You’re only human. It’ll be all right. You’ll get through this. You will.’

‘Not without Alain. I can’t do it without him.’

‘You will have to,’ I said – and then I went down after Viviane.

I WALKED AROUND
the churchyard while I waited for Vivi to come out of choir practice. I could hear the singing inside the church and the sound was magical, Viviane’s voice following the descant tune above the others. My mother, before she left, once took me on an outing to a model village. I had especially loved the church because when I knelt down beside it and put my ear close to the little building, I could hear organ music coming from inside, and singing. I found it miraculous.

‘But who were the little people singing inside the church, Mum?’ I had asked for ages afterwards. ‘Who
were
they?’

I knew who was inside the church at Blackwater – Viviane and eleven other girls from Hailswood School, most of them older than her, some of them experienced and talented singers. When I’d walked up to the church with Vivi an hour earlier, the girl had been subdued and yet proud. The slap had humiliated her but at the same time her anger had solidified from something vague and amorphous into a nugget of pure rage.

I sincerely hoped the singing would put her in a better mood and in some way compensate for the argument earlier.

I went to the Aldridge section of the graveyard and looked for Daniel’s mother’s grave. It was the most ostentatious of them all, the one with the angel with the outstretched arm. The headstone informed me that she had died only three days before Caroline. It commemorated the final resting-place of Jean Matilda Aldridge:
A wonderful and loving wife to Robert and mother to Daniel, taken from us so tragically, on August 28th 1931, gone but never forgotten and always remembered in our hearts with the very greatest affection, respect and devotion.

Too much, I thought. Too many words. It was almost as if Robert, if it was he who had composed the inscription, had been trying to compensate for something. Was it grief that made him so verbose, or regret maybe?

I walked on round to the back of the church, to where Caroline was buried. Her grave was as dark, inconspicuous and overgrown as before, but somebody had placed a pot of snowdrops on it. I felt a shiver of pity for the flowers, which would never survive in this cold, dark place, and for Caroline. She and Jean Aldridge had died so close together in this small village and had been treated so very differently. I tugged at the ivy fingering its way over the modest little stone, then jumped at the sound of a throat being cleared behind me. I turned guiltily, feeling altogether as if I’d been caught doing something I shouldn’t have been doing.