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Authors: Louise Douglas

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BOOK: The Secret by the Lake
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Dear Amy
,

 

I don’t know how to begin to write this letter to you because I know it will hurt you. I don’t want to do that, but I have to tell you here and now because there’s no other way.

Alain is dead.

How can he be gone? How can Alain be gone and the world still keep turning? You know he was my love, my life, my reason for living. He was my everything.

But Amy, he is gone.

I have no husband. Viviane has no father. There is no money, no choice but to return to England, to my parents’ old cottage in Blackwater, the place where I grew up. And that’s where we are, Amy, here in Somerset, in limbo. We are falling apart. I need you, Viviane needs you. I am struggling to cope with my own grief, I cannot cope with hers as well.

 

You know us better than anyone. Please come back to us. Please come and help us. We cannot manage without you.

 

Yours always, in love and sorrow
,

Julia

 

Bridget, the manageress of the children’s home, was shocked to hear of Alain’s death, but could not have been more kind. She told me that of course I must go to Julia and Viviane, at once. She kissed me and assured me that she, unlike Julia, would manage without me. I promised to return one day. I said goodbye to the children, although it was terribly hard, and explained why I had to go. The little ones cried when they heard that the dog, Bess, would be leaving with me and I had to promise that I wouldn’t let her forget them. And then I packed my bag and I left, again. I felt like a leaf being blown about by the wind, incapable of taking charge of my destiny, but reacting, all the time, to circumstance, running from one crisis to another.

 

After a seemingly endless journey, I was the only person who alighted the train at Blackwater, a small remote stop – the end of the line. I had been travelling for most of the day with Bess for company and I was bone tired, overwhelmed by the need to be with Julia and Viviane, to look after them and help them, and an equally strong fear of how I would find them and how they would be.

I was sad too, for myself, in my own right. I had loved Alain for the man that he was, a campaigning journalist with a heart the size of the sun whose every working moment was driven by integrity, and the search for truth and justice. My sorrow weighed me down, adding to the burden of regret I’d felt after my grandmother’s death.

I stepped off the train, heaving my bag behind me. The train driver walked past me, bade me goodnight and disappeared into the darkness. I followed him down the platform lit only by a single, dim yellow lamp, and out of a gate on to a lane that only went one way. It was eerily quiet and the isolation of the place was unsettling. There was something in the atmosphere that I did not recognize at first – a heavy silence, a chill in the air. I walked along the lane, spooked by the hooting of an owl hunting in the woodland beyond, and my own footsteps, Bess walking close to my heel.

After a short while, the lane rose sharply uphill before opening out on to another road and here the temperature dropped a couple of degrees. It was then I recognized what had been causing the strange coldness, the muffling quiet. I found myself standing on a dam that crossed one end of a long, wide lake – a reservoir. The lake was stretched before me, dark and immense, a vaporous mist floating like steam above its surface. I could not see the moon as it was hidden by clouds, but its silvery brightness permeated the mist and the water beneath it – and all of it together, the light in the darkness and the smell of the water, the space … made me feel odd, as if I were in a dream. As if I were not myself, but somebody else altogether.

CHAPTER FOUR
 

I FOLLOWED JULIA’S
directions and walked uphill, past a grand house set behind walls and gates, taking the road that led up to the village, before turning into the lane where she had lived, as a child, and where she now lived again. The clouds had uncovered the moon and I could clearly see Reservoir Cottage, one of a pair of semi-detached houses standing alone on a rise of land. Behind, in the valley, the moonlight shimmered on the water and upon the ghostly mist, and I had a strong sensation that the lake was calling to me. My eyes were drawn to it and it was hard to look away. I gazed at it for a moment longer, then looked back to the cottage.

It was the mirror image of its adjoining neighbour with a gable over the top front window and a garage to one side. The front garden was overgrown and unkempt. I pushed open a small wooden gate almost hidden beneath the fingery black fronds of an overhanging yew and walked down the path. Logs were stacked haphazardly by the garage, and ivy crept over the path and the walls, up the trunks of the trees. Bess held back, reluctant to approach the house. She growled anxiously.

‘Don’t be silly,’ I told her, ‘there’s nothing to be afraid of here.’

I knocked at the door. When nobody came to let me in, I turned the handle and pushed the door open. A light bulb swung slowly on the end of a wire beneath a yellowing lampshade, casting shadows over a narrow wooden staircase with lines of paint on either side and a bare strip in the centre of each step where a carpet had once lain. I could hear a clock ticking somewhere in the house, but apart from that it was silent.

‘Hello!’ I called. ‘Is anyone there?’

There was movement in a room to my left; a door creaked open and Viviane emerged from the shadows. She was pale and thin, the spirit gone from her, but the moment I saw her dear face, my heart leaped. She ran to me, her arms outstretched like a baby’s, tears spilling from her eyes.

‘Oh Vivi!’ I whispered. ‘Oh my darling!’

I held the child in my arms, rocking her against me, holding her as tightly as I could. She was taller than she’d been the last time I saw her, and her hair had been cut into a bob, which made her seem older, but she was still the same, still my own, dear Viviane, my beloved girl. We clung on to one another.

‘You came back,’ she sobbed.

‘Oh sweetheart, of course I came! I came as soon as I found out what had happened. My poor girl, you poor, dear thing.’

I held on to Viviane, held her close and smoothed her hair and the side of her face, and I breathed in the scent of her while her tears soaked into my coat. I whispered, ‘Shhh,’ and, ‘There, there,’ and, ‘It’s all right, darling, I’m here now. I’m here,’ until her crying subsided. Then I dried her cheeks with my handkerchief and kissed her face. Eventually she calmed enough to give me a brave little smile. The smile grew stronger when I told her that Bess would be part of the family now too. There was no sign of Julia. By then, I had been inside the house for a good five minutes and Vivi had been crying all that time, yet her mother had not come looking for her.

‘Where is Mummy, sweetheart?’ I asked. ‘Is she sleeping?’

Viviane wound the handkerchief around her fingers. ‘No, she’s in the back room.’

‘What about your great-aunt Audrine?’ I asked. ‘Where is she?’

‘She didn’t want to come to England. We left her behind in France.’

‘Oh. OK. Will you take me to see Mummy?’

Viviane nodded.

I followed her down the hallway and into a narrow, dark room, lit only by the dull glow of an old-fashioned standard lamp. Julia was sitting in a chair in the middle of the room, rocking it slowly backwards and forwards, the runners grating a mournful rhythm on the floorboards. A blanket was wrapped over her knees and a shawl around her shoulders. Her face was strangely shadowed, but expressionless; so still it might have been made of stone. Bundled on her knees was Alain’s favourite sweater, the cream cotton Fair Isle he always wore draped over his shoulders. Her walking stick lay on the floor beside her.

Viviane hesitated at the doorway, holding on to Bess’s collar. I walked slowly towards Julia. She did not look up to me. She did not stop rocking. She gave no indication that she knew I was there. I stood in front of her and then I crouched down so that my eyes were on a level with hers. She finally looked at me and the sadness I saw in her face was so all-encompassing that I had to fight back my own, reciprocal tears.

I took her hand.

‘Julia, dear Julia,’ I said softly. ‘I’m here now to help. I’m here for as long as you want me to be here.’

Julia held on to my hand, as if there were nothing else left in the world that she could hold, as if every other hand she had tried to hold had let her go.

‘He’s gone,’ she whispered.

‘Darling, I know.’

‘Do you know how he died?’

I shook my head.

‘The police shot him.’

‘The police?’

‘He was in a café with a group of Algerians and was caught up in a raid. They shot him and now they’ve frozen his assets pending an investigation. We have no money, Amy.’

‘We’ll manage.’

‘The apartment in Paris is gone and the house on the coast. This is all that is left. If I hadn’t inherited this cottage, I don’t know what we would have done.’

‘I thought the cottage was tenanted.’

‘It was supposed to be,’ Julia said. ‘The agents do their best, but the tenants never stay. I suppose we were lucky the place was empty when we needed it.’

I reached over to kiss Julia’s cheek. Her skin was cold and soft.

‘We’ll be all right, I promise.’

‘I can’t pay you,’ she said. ‘I have nothing to give you.’

‘It doesn’t matter. That’s not important. I’m not here to work for you, but because I love you both.’

‘Oh, Amy!’

I smoothed Julia’s cheek with my hand.

I said: ‘When you feel stronger, you can tell me what you want me to do. But for the time being, I’ll take care of everything. You mustn’t worry about a thing. We are together, the three of us. We will be all right.’ Even as I said them, the words sounded hollow.

CHAPTER FIVE
 

LEAVING JULIA IN
her rocking chair, I set to looking around the house with Vivi leading me by the hand. The cottage was Victorian and, although it was large, the passageways were narrow with awkward angles and there was an over-abundance of cornicing and dark paintwork. The rooms were of a reasonable size, high-ceilinged, but they weren’t beautiful rooms; there was far too much wood and the decor was dated. The carpets that had once covered the hall and stairs had been lifted, but in the living room there was an ancient rug that did not quite meet the walls. It must have been of good quality originally, but the fussy pattern was morbid and unpleasant. On the wall opposite the door was a large mirror and a painting of Jesus on the Cross in a home-made frame. There was a second picture in the living room, a framed piece of fabric worked in cross-stitch. The words inside the sampler read:
For the living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing and the memory of them is forgotten. Ecclesiastes 9:5.
The work was dated 1928.

I stood in front of it, holding Viviane’s hand. It was a miserable thing, the stitching untidy, done without care.

‘Did Mummy make this?’ I asked.

Viviane shook her head. ‘It was Mummy’s sister. She had to do it as a punishment.’

‘I didn’t know Mummy had a sister.’

‘She died a long time ago.’

‘Oh, how sad!’ I glanced at Vivi. She wasn’t looking at me, she was watching Bess who was lying beside us, all dog-eyed melancholy, with her chin on her paws.

‘So will you show me where I can sleep?’ I asked, trying to sound a little more cheerful.

Viviane nodded and took me upstairs. The landing floorboards creaked beneath our feet. A daddy-long-legs bumped at the landing window, up and down against the dirty glass, the colour faded from the old curtains and dust on the ledge. I caught a glimpse of the lake beyond: its clean, silvery stillness took my breath away.

I had a quick look around. The master bedroom was at the back, overlooking the garden and the lake. The bed was strewn with Julia’s clothes and the dressing table with her cosmetics and creams, but the pretty little pots and bottles did nothing to alleviate its gloom, the shadows in the corners or the domination of a huge wardrobe that loomed from the wall opposite the bed.

Viviane’s was a much smaller but well-proportioned room beside it, with a single bed and a wardrobe taking up most of the space.

‘This used to be Mummy’s bedroom when she was a little girl. There’s a bigger bedroom at the front,’ said Viviane. ‘But I wanted to be next door to Mummy.’

‘Of course you did.’

I was drawn, again, to the window. The moon was higher in the sky now and sketchy clouds were drifting by like waifs. The back garden sloped downhill. There was a largish outbuilding, some kind of shed, silhouetted black against the perimeter fence, and beyond the fence was a large field leading down to the reservoir, with its fringe of trees. I could just make out the lights of the big house that I’d passed on my way up, and the line of the road on top of the dam. On the other side of the lake, in the distance, were a number of single-storey buildings bunched together, lights shining brightly from some of the windows.

‘What is that place?’ I asked Viviane.

‘Mummy said it used to be an asylum but now it’s a nursing home for old people. The man from next door lives there.’

‘You’ve met him?’

‘No, his wife told us. She’s popped round a few times. Come on, we haven’t finished.’

The bathroom was at the side of the house and at the front were two more doors. The first opened into a box room, empty save for an ugly, metal-framed bed and a small chest of drawers. Viviane looked up at me.

‘You can sleep here,’ she said, an apology in her voice. Both of us were thinking of the beautiful bedroom we had shared in the Paris apartment, with its floor-to-ceiling windows, its linen curtains, the gorgeously deep beds, the chandelier, the woollen rugs so thick that our feet sank into them, and everything smelling of the lemony wax polish the cleaner used on the wood and the fresh, scented flowers that always, somehow, seemed to be in the silver vases.

BOOK: The Secret by the Lake
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