The Secret by the Lake (4 page)

‘This will be perfect,’ I said as cheerily as I could. I smiled, to show that I meant it, and put my bag on the narrow bed.

We went back out on to the landing. The other door was closed and there was a key in the lock. A small wooden plaque had been slotted into the woodwork. It was a plain oval with eight letters inscribed on it in black:
Caroline
. Around the plaque were marks, as if someone had tried, but failed, to gouge it out.

I looked at the plaque, and then at Viviane. She was picking at her nails.

‘Was this Mummy’s sister’s room?’ I asked.

Vivi nodded.

‘Shall we look inside?’

Vivi shrugged.

I turned the key and reached for the door handle. As my fingers drew close I felt repulsed as if I were reaching out to touch something long-dead. Viviane was watching me now and I sensed that she understood what I was feeling, that she had felt it too.

‘We think there are mice in there,’ she said quietly. ‘We hear them sometimes.’

‘Mice are nothing to be afraid of,’ I said. I turned the handle and pushed and, with a groan, the door scraped open.

I pressed the light switch and, in the centre of the room, a weak bulb flickered. The room was icy cold.

Superficially, it was like the other rooms in the cottage, plain and square. The door was panelled, with a dark, Bakelite handle, and the skirting boards were deep and bevelled. But this room was different in that it was wallpapered beneath the picture rail rather than painted. The paper was an unpleasant yellow colour, narrow vertical stripes with a yellow-brown design twisting up through the columns between the stripes. Cobwebs hovered in the corners. Caroline’s old room seemed unloved. It must have been empty for years.

‘Let’s go down again,’ Vivi whispered. She pulled at my arm.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Let’s.’

That first evening, I made the best dinner I could from what little there was in the pantry cupboard and the three of us ate together at the kitchen table. Julia looked down into her soup as it cooled but I never saw her raise the spoon to her lips. We sat in silence, the only sounds the quiet clink of cutlery on crockery and the ticking of the clock. When it chimed the half-hour, we all flinched.

Afterwards, Vivi and I took the dog out for a short walk. A light shone from behind the closed curtains of the front window of the house next door. I glimpsed a movement behind the curtains; somebody was watching us.

‘Who lives there?’ I asked Vivi.

‘Mrs Croucher. The doctor’s wife.’

‘So the old man in the nursing home used to be a doctor?’

Vivi nodded. ‘Yep.’

‘Is his wife nice?’

‘She made some jam tarts and did some shopping for us.’

‘That was kind.’

‘Mmm,’ said Vivi.

We walked on down the lane. Bess sniffed at the bottom of the hedgerows. The moon cast a good light but in the shadows it was very dark. I kept looking to my left, over towards the lake – almost completely hidden now by the mist that had become more substantial and lay over the water like a mask. I pulled up the collar on my coat. Viviane’s hand reached out and found mine. Her fingers were cold.

‘I’ve missed you so much,’ she said.

‘My darling girl, I’ve missed you too.’

‘I’m so glad you’ve come back.’ Viviane paused for a heartbeat. Then she added: ‘And Caroline says she’s glad too.’

‘Caroline?’

Vivi indicated the empty space beside her. ‘I left Emily in Paris. Caroline is my new friend.’

I TOLD MYSELF
that I would feel better in the morning, when I’d had a chance to give the box room a good clean and make it my own, but that first night was interminable. The mattress was thin and lumpy; it smelled of damp, and every time I turned, the metal bedframe rattled. I was cold and uncomfortable, but what kept me awake was more than that.

The desolation of the cottage, the quiet outside and the reservoir lying beyond like something waiting, ate into me. I was exhausted but wide awake. I’d brought the dog up to my room, pretending it was for Bess’s sake but really because I craved the company. My mind kept drifting back to Les Aubépines, the house by the sea. It was a big house, much larger than this one, but I’d never felt lonely or afraid there. Everything about that house had been warm and sunny and welcoming. I remembered how we used to spend our summers in the garden, or on the beach. Whole days were spent in the sunshine: picnics on the beach, collecting shells with Vivi, building sandcastles and then going back to the house hungry and a little sunburned, my skin taut with salt and sand, to prepare the evening meal while the Laurents showered and changed. They were such happy times. I had thought they would last for ever.

I had been so wrong.

I pulled the blanket over my shoulder and made a pillow of my arms. Cold came up through the floorboards and deathwatch beetles knocked in the woodwork. Each time sleep crept close, I imagined a footstep or a whisper on the landing. My mind played tricks on me. Once I thought I heard Viviane cry out and I left my bed to check but she was fast asleep.

Julia had swallowed a sleeping tablet with a large glass of gin earlier and the snoring from her bedroom, combined with Bess’s breathing, made a lullaby. Eventually I did drift into unconsciousness but once the immediate tiredness had been assuaged, there was nothing to anchor me in sleep. Towards dawn, something disturbed me. I opened my eyes but could see nothing but the weird shadows of the branches of the trees in the front garden waving on the ceiling. I experienced a panicky discomfort; for several moments I did not know where I was or why I was there. Then I remembered and with each heartbeat I felt wider awake until I reached a point where I knew it was hopeless trying to sleep again. I uncurled myself, slipped my legs out of the bed, and rose carefully to my feet.

‘Come on,’ I whispered to the dog.

I walked slowly down the stairs, keeping one hand against the wall, trying not to make a sound. The wood was cold beneath the soles of my bare feet. I went into the kitchen and switched on the light. The gin bottle was on the counter. I took an upturned glass from the drainer, rinsed it under the cold tap, set it down beside the bottle, unscrewed the cap and half-filled the glass. I took a mouthful. The burn in my throat and stomach was scorching but comforting. I drank some more. Then I picked up the glass and took it into the front living room. Bess followed like a shadow.

I tucked myself up on the sofa. Bess jumped up and lay beside me with her chin on my thigh. She sighed. I stroked her head, gently pulled her silky ears. I drank another mouthful of gin. Jesus looked down reproachfully from the wall.

‘Sorry,’ I said to Him. ‘But You haven’t been much help to this family so far, have You?’

My eyes drifted to the sampler. Why make a child work on that particular Bible verse? Weren’t there hundreds of beautiful, positive words to choose from, more appropriate passages even for a child who was being punished? Words that might have taught her something good about life? Caroline must have
hated
sewing that sampler, I thought. Every stitch must have pained her. Her anger and frustration were clear in the untidiness of the work. I wondered if she had sewed it here in this room, perhaps sitting where I was sitting now. I tried to imagine her, tried to bring her to life. And then …

It began with a chill that raced through me, completely unexpectedly, starting in my core and then pumping in a single heartbeat through every vein and capillary in my body, making the hairs on my arms stand on end. For a moment I could not identify the source of the fear, and then I noticed that Bess was looking up towards the ceiling and I heard a sound, a dull shuffling above.

Something was moving in the empty bedroom.

Bess growled, a low, warning growl, and the hackles rolled up along her back and her ears were low and flat against her head.

‘Shhh,’ I whispered. ‘Shhh.’

Above us, something dragged, or was dragged, across the floor, terribly slowly.

I held my breath. My blood ran to ice. I was rigid, looking up to the ceiling, listening to whatever it was moving across the floor – and then suddenly the noise stopped, directly above me. For a moment there was silence, and then a loud thump, like something being dropped.

Oh God!

I listened, but there was only silence now, and in a way that was worse.

No mouse had made those sounds, no rat or squirrel.

I stayed absolutely still, hardly daring to breathe, my hand on the dog’s collar. Time went by and I became colder and colder but still I did not move. I stayed where I was until the moon had disappeared and the sun was rising over the reservoir. I stayed until the sky had turned the blue-white colour of milk and the first birds were singing in the trees. Only then, at last, did I dare to creep from the room and go back up the stairs.

The door to the empty bedroom beside mine had been closed when I came downstairs, the key turned in the lock. Now it was slightly ajar. I hurried past, back into my own room, keeping hold of Bess the whole time. I shut the door and pushed the chest of drawers up against it. And then I got back into the bed and I pulled the sheets up to my face and lay there with my arms around Bess, so grateful for her company, while Bess stared at the door and growled low in her throat.

A FEW DAYS
passed. Still Reservoir Cottage did not feel like a home. At least there were a few provisions in the pantry, provided by Mrs Croucher. The kindly neighbour had also arranged for deliveries of milk, bread and coal and even had the telephone reconnected, at her own expense, in case of emergency. I couldn’t do anything about the old-fashioned furniture or the dark paintwork, but I spread the few pretty things Julia and Viviane had brought with them around the cottage to soften its austerity. I draped one of Julia’s gauzy scarves over the picture of the Crucifixion and I hung Viviane’s bright blue duffel coat on the rail at the bottom of the stairs, beside my brown one. I paired our shoes up by the front door. I tried to impose some of the Laurents’ personality on the house, but I had little to work with and the house had a strong and stubborn personality of its own. Cleaning, I thought, might help. The cottage was not dirty exactly, but there was a peculiar thin and greasy layer of brown dust over everything. As soon as a surface was polished, it seemed to become dusty again.

Viviane was keen to be involved with whatever I was doing. I suspected that before my arrival the poor child had done little more than drift around the house, lonely and sad and too afraid of disturbing or upsetting her mother to do anything that drew attention to her own unhappiness. We found an old vacuum cleaner in the cupboard under the stairs. It was a huge unwieldy thing that probably dated back to the 1940s, but we located a spare bag and managed to fit it into the machine. I gave Viviane the job of cleaning up the dust and she was content to do this until Julia complained that the noise was giving her a headache.

We went out into the garden so that Julia could rest undisturbed. The day was bright and windy. The trees dipped and swayed; starlings swooped in a sky that was one minute grey and threatening and the next sunny and blue, its character always reflected back by the lake that lay below it. We found an ancient metal swing and the remains of a bench that had collapsed, and an old chicken-house that was falling in on itself. At the bottom of the garden, by the fence, was the large brick shed that I’d seen from Vivi’s bedroom window. Planks had been hammered over its window and the door was bolted shut, the bolt held in place by a thick padlock fastened to a chain. I tried but I couldn’t shift the chain or the door at all.

The fencing at the bottom of the garden was rotten, but there was a gate at the far end that opened out into the field that led down to the lake. On the other side of the fence, in the field, was an old, abandoned settee.

‘We could sit on this and watch the sun go down over the lake,’ I suggested.

‘It’s hideous.’

‘It’s a settee and there’s a view.’ I smiled at her, then added, ‘Why do you keep looking over your shoulder, Vivi?’

‘She’s watching us.’

‘Who is?’

‘Mrs Croucher from next door. She’s peeping out from behind her curtains. She’s always spying on us.’

‘Us? But I’ve only just arrived.’

‘Me and Caroline, I mean.’

‘Oh.’

‘Caroline says she’s obsessed.’

‘I expect she’s just lonely.’ I looked over my own shoulder and saw the shape of the old woman at her back-room window, very still. ‘It
is
a bit unnerving, though, her standing there like that.’

‘Caroline says she wants to know everything about us.’

I laughed at this. ‘Your new friend Caroline has an awful lot to say for herself, Vivi.’

I tried to make it into a joke, but even I could hear the hint of anxiety in my voice and I knew Viviane was intuitive enough to hear it too. I found it difficult to even say the name
Caroline
in a light-hearted way, knowing that it was also the name of Julia’s dead sister.

Viviane shrugged and kicked at a rock in the soil. ‘Caroline knows everything,’ she said quietly.

‘Oh she does, does she?’ I raised my eyebrows high, and tipped my head to one side so that Vivi would know where this conversation was heading. ‘Does she know that Mrs Croucher is just a harmless old woman with too much time on her hands? Hmm? And does she know that I’m going to chase you, and when I catch you I’m going to tickle you until you beg for mercy?’ I wriggled my fingers towards Vivi and the child squealed and ran away, and for a while the two of us laughed and chased one another like we used to do on the beach in France, with the dog, relieved that we were at last having some fun, barking at our heels.

THE FOLLOWING SATURDAY,
I put Bess on the lead and Vivi and I walked together along the footpath that curled up through the woodland making a shortcut to Blackwater village. There wasn’t much to it: a couple of pubs, a small general store, a Post Office, a few shops and a doctor’s surgery.