The Lake House (32 page)

“
I
need you. There are other doctors, men with clinical experience.”

He smiled softly. “You must know there's nowhere else I'd rather be than here, with you, but who would I be if I didn't go? How could I live with myself if I didn't help? How would you look at me if I didn't do my bit? If a man cannot be useful to his country, he is better dead.”

She knew then that there was nothing she could say to change his mind and the knowledge burned. It tasted like ash in her mouth.

“Promise me you'll come back,” she said, throwing her arms around him and burying her face in his chest, holding on as if he were a rock in a raging sea.

“Of course I'll come back.” Not the merest shadow of doubt. “Nothing will stop me. I won't let it.”

They walked together to the station the day he left and she sat with him in the carriage as other young soldiers in fresh new uniforms climbed aboard; he kissed her and she thought for a moment she wasn't going to be able to let him go, and then the whistle sounded and she was on the platform again, without him, and the train was moving, away, away. The house, when she got back to it, was warm and still. The fire in the library was burning low in the grate, just as it had been when they left.

It was so quiet.

A photograph of the two of them stood on the desk below the window, and as she looked at his laughing face, Eleanor tried to convince herself that he was upstairs, or outside by the lake, and that he'd be back any minute, calling to her from the hall to come and join him. But his absence told everywhere, and Eleanor glimpsed, suddenly, how long the coming days, weeks, months were going to be, how unbearably long.

Thank God for her baby, for Deborah, who gave her somewhere to focus her attention. It was not so easy to wallow in the heat of electric fear when one was being watched by wide trusting eyes, a little person who wanted to smile and was reading her mother's expression, looking for the signal that it was all right to do so. But behind the cheerful expression Eleanor forced, beneath the nursery rhymes she sang and the stories she told, she hardly dared to breathe. Every knock on the door shot a prickling flare throughout her body. Every story from the village of another soldier's death was a wrench and, later, a secret reprieve because it wasn't Anthony. The relief at finding a letter and not a black-rimmed telegram was short-lived when she read the date at its top and realised he'd posted it days before and anything might have happened since.

The letters themselves gave nothing away, not at first. There were mentions of being shelled, of course, and of zeppelins being destroyed nearby, but his accounts made them sound like small inconveniences. When he had his first experience with German gas, it was “under the most ideal circumstances', as they happened to have a fellow around showing them how “effective the preventative measures were.” Eleanor knew he was obfuscating and it mollified and infuriated her in equal measure.

He had a weekend of leave in London and she met him, beside herself with nervous excitement, unable to settle to anything on the train, her book lying unopened on her lap the whole way. She'd dressed carefully but when she saw him she felt ashamed of her efforts, because it was Anthony, her heart's own love, and her anxiety, her focus on such trivialities as which frock suited her best, seemed somehow to mark a lack of faith in them, in what really mattered.

They both spoke at once when they met. “Shall we—” “I suppose—” and then, after an agonising hesitation in which it seemed for a moment as if everything they'd used to be had turned to dust, they both began to laugh, and they couldn't stop, and were still being set off by the least trigger while they sat in the refreshments lounge drinking tea. After that they were themselves again, Anthony-and-Eleanor, and she insisted that he tell her all about it. “Everything,” she'd said, “no softening things,” desperate to get beyond the polite, inadequate surface of his letters home.

And so he told her. About the mud, and the bones men broke trying to drag themselves through it, and the men whom it swallowed whole. He called the Somme a mincing machine and said that war itself was intolerable. He described the agony of failing “his men.” They were dying, he said, one after the other after the other.

The letters home changed after that visit and she wasn't sure she was glad. It crossed her mind that she ought to have been more careful what she wished for. The censor removed the worst bits, but enough remained for her to know that things continued grim, that war asked men to do horrific things and that it did horrific things to them in return.

When Howard was killed, the tone of the letters changed again. There were no more references to “his men', and he never mentioned another friend by name. Most chilling of all, where his letters had always been filled with questions about home, hungry for the merest detail about Deborah and the new little baby, Alice—
I wish I were there, too. I ache to be so far away from all of you. Be strong, my love, and in the meantime, won't you send me a lock of my baby's hair?
—now they were little more than cool, statistical accounts of what was happening at the Front. They might have been written by, and for, anyone. And so Eleanor had to wrestle at once with the twin griefs of Howard's death—the shock of the news, its impossible finality; and the subsequent loss of her husband, who was already so far away, behind a wall of impenetrable politeness.

On the day he returned for good, the twelfth of December 1918, Eleanor brought the two little ones to London to watch his train come in. There was an orchestra set up on the station, violins playing Christmas carols. “How will we know it's Daddy?” Deborah had asked her. She was intensely curious about this person she knew only from the studio photograph in the frame beside her Mummy's bed.

“We'll know,” Eleanor told her.

Smoke filled the station as the train arrived, and by the time it cleared, servicemen were climbing down onto the platform. When she finally saw him, in the split second before his eyes found hers, she felt the four and a half years keenly. Anxieties crowded like moths around a flame. Would they still know one another? Would it be as it was? Had too much come to pass?

“You're hurting my hand, Mummy,” Alice had said. Not even two, and already filled with an admirable talent for forthrightness.

“I'm sorry, Pumpkin. I'm sorry.”

And then he'd looked directly at her and briefly she'd seen something in his eyes, a shadow in the shape of Howard and all the others like him, and then it was gone, and he smiled, and he was Anthony,
her
Anthony, home again at last.

* * *

The whistle blew outside. The train was about to leave and not a moment too soon. Through the window, Eleanor watched the soot-blackened tracks. It had been so wonderful to have him home. The girls couldn't get enough of him. Loeanneth was brighter for him being there, things were clearer, as if someone had sharpened the focus on a camera. Life was to go on, just as he'd promised it would. Four and a half years had passed but the war was won and they would make up for lost time. And if sometimes his hands shook a bit, if he broke off mid-sentence and had to collect his thoughts before resuming, if occasionally he woke with a bad dream and refused ever to talk about Howard, well, they were understandable problems and would surely sort themselves out.

Or so she'd thought.

The first time it happened, they were outside in the garden. The girls had been chasing ducks and Nanny had shepherded them inside for supper. It was a glorious evening, the sun seeming to hesitate in the process of setting, as if it couldn't bear to end the day. It was teetering on the horizon, throwing ribbons of pink and mauve across the sky like life ropes, and the air was sweet with jasmine. They'd brought the white cane chairs down from the house, and Anthony, having spent the afternoon entertaining the girls, had finally opened the newspaper he'd brought with him only to fall into a doze behind it.

Edwina, the new puppy, was leaping about at Eleanor's feet, pouncing on a ball the girls had found for her, and Eleanor was rolling it gently along the cooling lawn, laughing fondly as the puppy tripped over her ears to fetch it back. She was teasing the little dog, lifting the ball just out of reach for the pleasure of seeing her balance on her hind legs, cycle her little paws in the air, and then snap at it with her teeth. They were sharp teeth. The puppy had already managed to tear holes in most of Eleanor's stockings. Darling little menace, she had a sixth sense for rooting out the things she shouldn't have, but it was impossible to be cross with her. She only had to look up with those big brown eyes and cock her head just so and Eleanor melted. She'd wanted a dog when she was girl, but her mother had declared them “filthy beasts' and that was that.

Eleanor pulled back on the ball and Edwina, who loved nothing more than a bout of play wrestling, sank her teeth further into the rubber. Everything was perfect. Eleanor laughed, and Edwina growled excitedly at the ball before breaking into a rousing ruction with a duck, and the sun shimmered orange in the sky, and then suddenly Anthony was upon them with a mighty holler. In one swift movement, he'd grabbed the little dog and was holding her down, his hands around her neck. “Be quiet,” he was hissing, “be quiet.”

Edwina yelped and howled, the duck fled, and Eleanor, shocked, jumped to her feet.

“Anthony! No! Stop!”

She was so frightened; she had no idea what was happening.

“Anthony, please.”

It was as if he couldn't hear her, as if she weren't there at all. Only when she ran to his side, fell down beside him and seized his shoulders, did he glance her way. He shrugged off her grip and for a split second she thought he was going to pounce on her, too. His eyes were wide, and she glimpsed that shadow again, the one she'd seen briefly at the train station when they welcomed him home.

“Anthony,” she said again, “please. Let go of her.”

He was breathing hard, his chest rising and falling, his expression shifting from anger to fear to confusion. At some point he loosened his hold on Edwina for the little pup wriggled free, emitting a small yelp of self-pity as she tore off to the safety of Eleanor's chair to lick her wounds.

Neither of them moved. It seemed to Eleanor later they were frozen by a shared sense, an unspoken agreement, that by remaining still they might somehow stop the egg from cracking further. But then she realised he was shivering and on instinct Eleanor took him in her arms and held him tightly. He was freezing. “There now,” she heard herself saying, “there now,” over and over again, just as she might had one of the girls scraped a knee or woken with a bad dream.

Later, they sat together in the moonlit night, both of them silent and shocked by what had happened. “I'm sorry,” he said. “For a moment I thought . . . I could have sworn I saw . . .”

But he never did tell her what he'd imagined he saw. In the years since, Eleanor had read reports and spoken with doctors and learned enough to know that Anthony must have been reliving a wartime trauma when he attacked Edwina, but he never would speak about the things that moved in the shadows. And they came again, those ghosts. She would be speaking to him and then catch him staring into the distance, his jaw tightening, at first in fear, later in resolution. She gathered over time that it was something to do with Howard, about the way he'd died, but Anthony refused to talk about it so she couldn't be sure of the details.

She told herself it didn't matter, that he would get past it. Everyone had lost someone in the war, it would all be better with time. When his hands settled down he'd go back to his training; that would make a world of difference. He would be a doctor, just like he always planned—a surgeon; he had a calling.

But his hands didn't settle down, and things didn't get better with time. They got worse. Eleanor and Anthony merely got better, together, at hiding the truth. There were terrible nightmares, too, from which he'd wake howling or shaking, urging them to move quickly, to leave, to make the dog stop barking. He wasn't often violent, and it was never his fault when he was, Eleanor knew that. His great drive in life had always been to help and to heal; he would never knowingly harm another. Fear that he might, though, plagued him. “If the girls,” he began, “if it had been one of them . . .”

“Shhh.” Eleanor wouldn't let him speak the preposterous thought out loud. “It won't happen.”

“It could.”

“It won't. I won't let it. I promise.”

“You can't promise that.”

“I can. I do.”

There'd been so much fear in his face, and his hands as they clutched hers were shaking. “Promise me, if you ever have to make a choice, you'll save them from me. Save me from myself. I couldn't live with myself if—”

She pressed her fingers against his lips to stop him from saying the terrible words. She kissed him and then held him tightly as he shook against her body. Eleanor knew what he was asking of her, and she knew she'd do whatever she had to in order to keep her promise.

T
wenty-one

London, 2003

Sadie's flat looked and smelled like the sort of place she was used to being sent out to on call. “You can tell a lot about a person by the home they keep,” Donald had told her once, in a prim sort of way, quite out of character with his usual burly self and rather rich coming from a man whose wife did all his cleaning. She picked up the scattered layers of junk mail and bills from the mat and closed the door with her foot. The weather had come over grey, but when she switched on the light only one bulb of three complied.

Just over two weeks away and a layer of dust had already settled on every surface. The room's odour was sour and neglected, and Sadie's furniture, never lovely, had become sullen and reproachful in her absence, more tattered, too, than she remembered. Further adding to the air of ill-kempt, unloved, couldn't-give-a-damnness was the pot plant on her kitchen sink. “Oh, my,” said Sadie, dropping her bag and tossing the mail onto the sofa as she approached the poor, sad carcass. “What's become of you?” She'd picked it up from the local nursery school Easter fete a couple of months before in a fit of domestic aspiration, rebuke to the man she'd been sort of seeing whose parting shot had echoed down the stairwell as he left: “You're so used to being alone you couldn't even care for a pot plant.” Sadie crunched the dry, curled leaves onto the stainless-steel sink. She'd shown him.

Noise outside, traffic and voices, made the room seem unnaturally quiet. Sadie found the remote and clicked on the television. Stephen Fry was on, being clever and funny about something, and Sadie lowered the volume to a hum and checked the fridge. It was a further disaster site. Almost empty except for a couple of insipid, whiskery carrots and a container of orange juice. She checked the use-by date on the juice and decided six days past was fine, they were always overly cautious with these things. She poured a glassful and went to her desk.

While the computer booted up, Sadie plugged in her phone to charge and then dug the Edevane file from her bag. She took a sip of piquant juice and sat wincingly through the anxious squeal of the dial-up modem connecting to the internet. All the way home she'd gone over the interview with Margot Sinclair in her mind. Sadie had been so convinced Rose Waters and Anthony Edevane were engaged in a love affair and that Theo was Rose's son, not Eleanor's, that she was having a hard time processing the new information. The pieces of puzzle had fit together so well it took an enormous act of will to pull them apart and start again. Perhaps that was why she clung to her hunch that Anthony Edevane was important. When the search engine home page appeared she typed in
shell shock
.

A list of sites appeared on her screen and she skimmed through the options until she found an entry from a site called firstworldwar.com which seemed reputable. Sadie clicked and started reading the definition.
A term used to describe psychological trauma . . . intensity of artillery battles . . . neurotic cracks in otherwise mentally stable soldiers.
There was a black-and-white photograph of a uniformed man staring at the camera with a wistful half-smile, his body angled so that the right side of his face was concealed by shadow. The article continued:
Soldiers came to recognise the symptoms but recognition by military authority was slower to develop . . . panic attacks, mental and physical paralysis, fearful headaches, terrifying dreams . . . many continued to feel its effects for years afterwards . . . treatment was primitive at best, dangerous at worse . . .

There was a link at the bottom of the page to a paper delivered by a Dr W.H.R. Rivers in which he outlined his theories based on observations of injured soldiers at a hospital called Craiglockhart between the years 1915 and 1917. Much of the article was spent explaining the process of repression, Dr Rivers suggesting that returned soldiers who spent most of the day trying to forget their fears and memories were far more likely to fall victim during the silence and isolation of night when sleep weakened their self-control and made them susceptible to the creep of ghastly thoughts.

It made sense. In Sadie's experience most things were more intense at night. That was certainly when her own dark thoughts escaped their bounds and turned into dreams to haunt her. She kept skimming. According to Dr Rivers, repression made the negative thoughts accumulate energy, resulting in vivid or even painful dream imagery and horrors that raced violently through the mind. Sadie jotted the line in her notebook, considered it and then circled the word
violently
. The doctor was referring to the passage of thoughts in the soldier's brain, but the word, especially in the context of Theo Edevane's mysterious fate, gave Sadie an uneasy feeling. She'd known all along there was a third grisly possibility, that the boy might not have wandered or been taken but had met instead with a violent end. When she'd talked with Clive she'd wondered whether Clementine Edevane could have been involved in her brother's death, accidentally or otherwise. But what if it had been Anthony? What if it had been Theo's father, all along?

Sadie flicked back through her notes to those she'd taken during her interview with Clive. Anthony and Eleanor had provided alibis for each other. Eleanor had been grief-stricken during interviews and needed sedation over the course of the week. Clive had noted that Anthony was particularly caring and attentive and that he'd been fiercely protective of his wife.
He was so careful with her
, Clive had said,
gentle and protective, making sure she rested, stopping her from tearing outside to join the search. He barely let her out of his sight
. Sadie stood up and stretched. When she wrote those things, she'd accepted Clive's observation as evidence of the Edevanes' strong bond, their love for one another, the natural actions of a couple experiencing the unimaginable; she certainly hadn't suspected anything untoward. But now, viewed through the lens of her developing theory (and that's all it was, she reminded herself, one hunch built upon another), the behaviour took on a more sinister tint. Was it possible that Eleanor knew what her husband had done and was covering for him? Would a mother do that? Would a wife? Had Anthony been placating her, standing guard so that she couldn't reveal to police what she knew? No, it was ridiculous.

Sadie glanced at the digital clock in the corner of her screen. She'd decided on the drive back from Oxford that tonight was as good a night as any to catch up with Donald. She ought to be getting her head in the right space to convince him she was ready to come back to work, not chasing ghosts around the internet. She should switch off now and return to the website later. She should put her notebook away and shower. Nothing said “ready to be professional' like observing the basics in personal grooming. But a scribbled note further down the page caught her eye—Clive's account of Eleanor's annual visits to Loeanneth—and she kept reading. Clive had said that Eleanor returned each year in the hope her son might somehow find his way home, but that had been supposition. Eleanor hadn't told Clive that was her expectation; it had been his reading of her actions. What if she hadn't been expecting Theo to return because she already knew that he was dead? What if her annual visit wasn't a vigil but a memorial, in the same way people made regular pilgrimages to the gravestones of those they'd lost?

Sadie drummed her pen on the notepad. She was presuming a lot. Nowhere in any of the interviews had anyone used the word “violent' in relation to Anthony Edevane, and Dr Rivers wrote about dissociation, depression, confusion, a soldier's sense that his “light' had gone out, but again made no mention of violent tendencies. She sat down and surfed through a few more webpages, scanning and clicking until she came across a quote from a war correspondent called Philip Gibbs, writing about the return of soldiers to their lives after war:

Something was wrong. They put on civilian clothes again and looked to their mothers and wives very much like the young men who had gone to business in the peaceful days before August 1914. But they had not come back the same men. Something had altered in them. They were subject to sudden moods and queer tempers, fits of profound depression alternating with a restless desire for pleasure. Many were easily moved to passion where they lost control of themselves, many were bitter in their speech, violent in opinion, frightening.

Sadie sucked in her lips and reread the passage.
Sudden moods . . . queer tempers . . . lost control . . . violent in opinion . . . frightening
. Conditions that could certainly lead a person to make a terrible mistake, commit a heinous act they would never be capable of when they were in their right mind.

There followed an article about trench conditions on the Western Front, descriptions of the horrific lack of sanitation, the rats and the mud and the fungal decay of trench foot, the lice that sucked off rotting flesh. Sadie was completely absorbed by what she was reading and when the home phone rang it jolted her back to the present so rapidly she could almost see images of the mud and the slaughter fading around her.

She took up the handset. “Hello?”

It was Bertie, his warm homely voice a welcome balm. “Just calling to see that you made it back to London all right. I couldn't get an answer on your mobile. You were going to ring me when you got there.”

“Oh, Granddad, I'm sorry!”
I'm a hopeless excuse for a granddaughter who doesn't deserve someone like you.
“My phone's flat. I stopped a few times along the way, and traffic on the M40 was a nightmare. I've only just come in.” She pictured him in the kitchen in Cornwall, the dogs asleep beneath the table, and felt a physical pull of longing in her chest. “How's the day? How are my lads?”

“Missing you. I went to put my shoes on and they gathered expectantly at my heels, ready for their run.”

“Well, you know what you have to do. They'll show you the way.”

He chortled. “I can just imagine how much they'd enjoy a run with yours truly. More like a limping lope!”

Regret came in a sudden wave. “Look, Granddad, about the other night—”

“Water under the bridge.”

“I was insensitive.”

“You miss Ruth.”

“I was snarky.”

“You snark because you care.”

“I like Louise, she seems kind.”

“She's been a good friend. I need friends. I'm not trying to replace your grandmother. Now tell me, how was your meeting with Rose's great-niece?”

“A dead end, sort of.”

“The baby wasn't the nanny's?”

“It would appear not.” Sadie gave him a potted summary of her conversation with Margot Sinclair, the disappointment that her theory appeared defunct, finishing with the unexpected news about Anthony Edevane's shell shock. “I don't know that it's relevant, but I've been doing a bit of reading and it's hard to imagine a man going through all that without it impacting his life afterwards.” As she spoke she'd wandered over to the window and stood now looking down into the street where a woman was remonstrating with a child who refused to get into his buggy. “Did any of our family go to the First World War, Granddad?”

“My mother's cousin fought on the Somme, but he lived up north so I never knew him, and my favourite uncle fought in the second war.”

“Was he different when he came back?”

“He didn't come back, he was killed in France. Terrible loss; my mother never got over it. Our next-door neighbour, though, Mr Rogers, came back from the First World War in a dreadful condition.”

“Dreadful how?”

“He'd been buried under the earth for eighteen hours after an explosion. Eighteen hours! Can you imagine? He was out in the middle of no-man's-land and his mates couldn't get to him for all the shelling. When they finally managed to dig him out he was in a catatonic state of shock. He was shipped back home and treated at one of those hospitals they set up in country houses, but he was never the same according to my parents.”

“What was he like?”

“His face was fixed in a permanent expression of horror. He used to have nightmares where he couldn't breathe, and he'd wake up gasping for air. Other nights we'd be woken by a godawful wailing that travelled right through the walls into our house. Poor man. The neighbourhood children were all frightened of him; they used to take dares to see who was brave enough to walk up to his door and knock before running away and hiding.”

“But not you.”

“No, well, my mother would have tanned my hide if she'd even suspected I was capable of that sort of childish cruelty. Besides, it was personal with Mr Rogers. Ma had taken him under her wing. She cooked an extra plate of supper every night, brought in his washing, made sure his house was kept clean. She was like that, the kindest of hearts, never as happy as when she was helping someone less fortunate.”

“I wish I'd known her.”

“I wish you had, too.”

“She sounds a lot like Ruth.” Sadie remembered how willingly Ruth had welcomed her into their home when she had nowhere else to go.

“Funny you should say that. After Ma died and we took over the shop, Ruth took over with Mr Rogers, too. She was adamant that we couldn't just leave him in the lurch.”

“I can just hear her saying that.”

Bertie laughed and then sighed, and Sadie knew he'd be climbing the stairs to the attic when they finished their phone call, digging through his boxes for some small reminder of Ruth. He didn't mention her again, though, changing the subject to more immediate, tangible and solvable concerns. “You all right for dinner?”

Sadie felt a crumpling of emotion. That was love right there, wasn't it? Someone in your life who cared that your next meal was coming to you. She opened the fridge and wrinkled her nose. “Just dandy,” she said, pushing the door shut. “I'm heading out to meet a friend.”