The Secret by the Lake (2 page)

TWO DAYS LATER,
I arrived back at the family home, a steelworker’s two-up two-down in Sheffield, the house my grandmother shared with her son, my father, and her black Labrador dog, Bess. Nothing much had changed in all the years I’d been away. I tried not to notice how dark and cramped and uncomfortable it all was and threw myself into the task of caring for Granny.

She and I had never been close and my genuine, heartfelt pity for her was tempered by knowing what I’d given up in order to come home to care for her. When I was a child, she had rarely shown me affection, even when I’d desperately needed it. And now she needed me and I’d had to leave the family I loved with all my heart to come back to her.

I had been nine years old and the war was still raging when my beautiful mother, the mother I adored, kissed me for the last time, told me she was going out to buy cigarettes, tied her headscarf beneath her chin, buttoned up the fox-fur collar of her coat, left and never returned. That night I cried for her. The next day I knelt on the bed to look out of the front window, waiting for her to turn the corner and come down the street, all clippy in her heels with her skirt-hem swinging, but she did not appear. I asked the neighbours but nobody had seen her. I couldn’t understand why neither my father nor my grandmother was concerned about her whereabouts. What if a bomb had fallen close to where she was? What if she was trapped, somewhere, in the rubble, and nobody was looking for her? I couldn’t understand why they didn’t miss her as much as I did.

Dad ignored my tears and my questions. Granny was made of sterner stuff.

‘Be quiet,’ she said as I sat sobbing at the tea-table, ‘or I’ll give you something to really cry about.’

‘Oh please, Granny,’ I begged, ‘please make my mummy come home.’

‘It would be best if you didn’t think about her,’ Granny said – which was, I suppose, a gentle way of letting me know that my mother was gone for good.

A few days – maybe a fortnight – after my mother had left, we moved into Granny’s house, Dad and I, and a new family moved into ours. Dad continued to refuse to talk about my mother at all and Granny frowned upon any public mention, forever after referring to her absent daughter-in-law as ‘that piece’. My mother was demoted from the centre of my universe to someone so peripheral she could not even be named. I wrote her name, Daisy, in the dust on the floorboards, I scratched it into the window ledge, I picked a hundred daisies and made her name out of flowers. I tried to bring her back to me by force of will. It didn’t work.

My father left my upbringing to his mother as he had previously left it to his wife. He spent his nights at his important war work in the foundry and his days, when he was not sleeping, tending to his pigeons, or racing them, all the time with an expression on his face that implied he had expected little from life, and had not been disappointed.

I learned early on to keep my love for my mother, and my anxiety, to myself. I don’t think I was a particularly difficult child. I did my best to please my grandmother, until the day it dawned on me that perhaps such a thing was impossible. After that, I simply stayed out of her way as much as I could. I left school and home at fifteen, paying my way through nanny college by taking cleaning and waitressing jobs in the evenings and at weekends. As soon as I qualified, I moved to France to live with the Laurents – Viviane, Julia and Alain. Julia had been a professional ballet dancer, but had injured her hip badly in a fall. Pregnancy and childbirth had debilitated her further. She needed somebody to help her care for her baby daughter and fortunately, from all the candidates who applied for the role, she chose me. I was officially an employee but I felt, from the start, like one of the family. I’d come to understand what it meant to receive affection, to be trusted. I had found myself cared for and valued, and for the first time since my mother went away, I felt I belonged. In return, I’d given my heart and soul to the Laurents. I would have done anything for them; anything.

But my grandmother was dying and there was nobody else to look after her; I had no choice but to return to Sheffield in the spring of 1961 and it was difficult. Twelve years had elapsed since I’d last lived at home. It wasn’t easy to adjust to being back in the cramped old house, walking the old streets with the dog, seeing the old faces, but I did my best. The harder I worked, the less time there was to think about what I had left behind. And I tried not to think about France and the Laurents, really I tried, because I could hardly bear the anguish of missing them when I did.

I nursed Granny as kindly and patiently as I could, and somewhere amongst the spoonfuls of warm broth I held to her lips and the cool flannels I used to soothe her forehead, the two of us achieved a kind of peace. I made her as comfortable as I could and did my best to alleviate her loneliness and fear. I tried to talk to her. I wanted to forge a bond with her, but she was so frail it seemed unkind to speak of anything of consequence. The past had been painful for us both and I didn’t want to dredge up bad memories in her last days. So I chatted instead of mundane things: the weather, the buildings they were knocking down in the city centre, the flowers I’d picked from the allotment and put in a vase on the window ledge. Granny blinked at me through milky, pale blue eyes. I couldn’t be sure if she heard me or not, or if she understood. Often, she drifted off to sleep while I was talking; she rarely said a word to me, pointing if she wanted me to pass something to her. Yet she watched me and I sensed that she was glad I was there.

One afternoon, she asked for a drink of ginger wine.

‘We don’t have any, I’m afraid,’ I told her. ‘I didn’t even know you liked it. Shall I pour you a glass of sherry instead?’

‘Please,’ she whispered. ‘I have a craving for ginger wine.’

‘All right,’ I said. ‘Not to worry, Granny. I’ll go out and get you some.’

I went next door and asked the neighbour, Mrs Botham, to sit with my grandmother while I was out and Mrs Botham wiped her hands on her apron and said it would be no bother at all.

I hurried down to the Black Horse. The landlord knew my father and by the time we’d exchanged a few words and I’d hastened back to the house, my grandmother had slipped away.

‘She went ever so peacefully,’ Mrs Botham said. Her eyes were puffy and her nostrils were red. ‘One minute she was telling me how good you’d been with her and the next she was gone.’

‘I should have been with her,’ I said.

‘I reckon she sent you out on purpose because she knew her time had come and wanted to spare you the ordeal,’ said Mrs Botham. She took hold of my hand and squeezed it. ‘Your granny was right proud of you, Amy. She might not have said it to your face, but she was.’

I thought it was kind of her to say that, but I didn’t really believe her.

After Granny’s funeral, I found myself lonelier than ever, drifting. My father hardly spoke to me. His routine had not changed in all the years I’d been away: he worked, he slept, he saw to his birds. And the pigeons still cooed in their loft out the back, calling to him. I looked through the kitchen window while I was washing the dishes and saw him cradling his favourite up to his cheek, stroking the soft feathers on the back of its head with his knuckle, his lips moving close as he whispered endearments through the blue wisps of his cigarette smoke. I bit back my hurt as I wondered, as I had done many times before, what it was about me that made it impossible for my father to treat me with a fraction of the tenderness he showed to his birds. The same thing, I supposed, that had driven my mother to leave me without a word of explanation, without a backwards glance. I took the bottle of ginger wine from the pantry shelf, and poured myself a drink.

I wrote to Alain and Julia asking if I could return to them. Julia wrote back to say that Alain’s old aunt Audrine had moved in to help with Viviane, in my absence. ‘It’s clear that she was terribly lonely before she came to us, so I can’t ask her to leave,’ Julia wrote. ‘I’m so sorry, dear Amy, but we’ll do everything we can to help you find another job.’ And they did. They put me in touch with an old friend of theirs, the manager of St Theresa’s, a children’s home on the other side of Sheffield. Bridget Adams was looking for a level-headed young woman to work as a matron to the younger children. It was a live-in position. I wrote a letter of application enclosing a reference written by Alain, and received one by return informing me I had been appointed to the post. It would be helpful if I could take up the role at the earliest opportunity.

That evening I made my father liver and onions for his tea before he went off to work the night shift at the foundry. When he’d finished eating, I cleared away his plate and told him I would be moving out. His surprise caught me offguard.

‘I thought you’d be stopping awhile,’ he said. He took his cigarettes out of his waistcoat pocket and tapped one from the packet, avoiding my eye.

‘If you need me, Dad, if you want me to stay, then I will,’ I said.

He put the cigarette between his lips, and I passed him the matchbox. A memory assaulted me: he and I sorting cigarette cards after we’d moved into Granny’s house. We were arranging the cards on a board that Dad would eventually frame and hang on the wall of the bedroom we shared, me sleeping in the bed at night, him during the day. I remembered us sitting together, head to head, at the kitchen table, close to the stove where it was warmest. I recalled the smell of his hair oil and the warmth of his body, the myriad tiny burn scabs on his forearms beneath the covering of black hairs, the feel of the cards, stiff between my fingers, each one a mini-masterpiece.

‘Which one’s your favourite, Birdie?’ he had asked. He always used to call me ‘Birdie’.

‘That one!’ I pointed to Loretta Young. I grinned and swung my legs beneath the table.

‘That’s my favourite too,’ my father had replied, bumping his shoulder companionably against mine, and I’d been so proud that we shared the same opinion.

Now he struck the match, narrowing his eyes as he drew the flame to the end of the cigarette.

‘What about the dog?’ he asked, without looking at me. ‘I don’t have the time for her. What’ll happen to her?’

‘I’ll take her with me,’ I said, ‘they said that I could.’

He said: ‘Right.’

I tried once more, for the sake of the memory, to restore the connection between us. ‘I don’t want you to be lonely here on your own, Dad, after I’ve left. I’ll be able to pop back at weekends. I can still do your washing and shopping if you’d like me to.’

‘There’ll be no need for that,’ my father said. ‘I can manage.’ And he flicked the match into the sink, stood up and went outside, through the back door into the yard. I heard him calling to the pigeons. ‘Come on, my beauties, where are you? Where are you, eh?’

I watched him for a moment, but my eyes were stinging. I went upstairs to pack.

I HAD BEEN
at the children’s home for four months and the summer of 1961 was turning into autumn. My work was often exhausting and the hours were long. The home was under-staffed and under-funded. It relied on charitable donations for everything other than the absolute basics, and the children were dressed in hand-me-downs and had few toys and no books. The staff did their best with what they had. I was terribly fond of the children in my care; some of them, poor dears, had been through so much in their lives already. Although we had very little to work with, we still managed to have fun. We were forever organizing games of rounders or French cricket, activities of which the children never seemed to tire. It was so different to how my life had been when I worked for the Laurents – I’d never had to deal with nits, or worms, or scabies before, let alone malnourished children, children who had had polio or rickets, children who had never learned to eat with a knife and fork. It was different and sometimes it was very difficult, but I loved the work. I loved the small progresses that were made every day. There was nothing more rewarding than the moment when a traumatized child finally held her hand out to me, or when a teenager beaten black and blue by his stepfather gave a belly laugh for the first time.

I still missed the Laurents dreadfully, but I exchanged letters with Julia every week and Viviane always wrote a few lines for me too, while Alain sometimes enclosed a postcard. The three of them had, by that time, moved from the beach house at Les Aubépines back to the Paris apartment where they always spent the winter months. I knew the family, their homes and their routines so very well that it was easy for me to imagine what they were doing, which restaurants they were frequenting, how they were spending their days. They had invited me to come for Christmas, but I wanted to help give the children in the home the best Christmas possible so we’d agreed, instead, that I would fly out to Paris in the New Year when I had arranged a few days off.

I was really looking forward to my holiday, saving up for my plane ticket and planning the gifts I would give to Julia and Alain and the places I would go to with Viviane – the parks and museums, the markets at the side of the Seine, her favourite cafés. I imagined the two of us walking together as we used to, she swinging my hand in her mittened one, our breaths cloudy in the freezing air and beautiful Paris with its long avenues, its elegant, blond stonework, the bridge where we liked to stand and watch the boats chugging along the river with Notre Dame behind us, the smell of coffee and frying crêpe batter, the tall houses with their curlicued balconies, the pretty lights in the shops, the music and the seasonal decorations: I could hardly wait.

Then the letter came.

I recognized Julia’s handwriting, but was distracted that morning because the education inspector was due to visit St Theresa’s and I was anxious that everything should be just right. It didn’t register with me that the letter was inside an ordinary envelope and not written, as all the others had been, on blue airmail paper. I didn’t notice the British stamp. I simply tore the envelope open and took out the single sheet of paper folded inside. The writing, normally bold and confident, was spidery and faint. I took a deep breath, and I read: