The Lake House Read Free Page A

for a long time that she fell so far short of her mother’s expectations. She’d looked in the mirror and despaired of her too-tall body, her unobliging mouse-brown hair, her preference for the company of made-up people over real ones.
    But not anymore. Alice smiled as Ben hoisted another log onto what was fast becoming a towering pyre. She might not be charming like Deborah, and she’d certainly never been immortalised, like Mother had, as the subject of a much-loved children’s book, but it didn’t matter. She was something else entirely. “You’re a storyteller, Alice Edevane,” Ben had told her late one afternoon, as the river tripped coolly by and the pigeons came home to roost. “I’ve never met a person with such a clever imagination, such good ideas.” His voice had been gentle and his gaze intense; Alice had seen herself then through his eyes and she’d liked what she saw.
    Mother’s voice flew past the bathroom door, something further about flowers, before disappearing around a corner. “Yes, Mother dearest,” Alice muttered, with delicious condescension. “No need to get your knickers all in a tangle.” There was a glorious sacrilege in acknowledging the fact of Eleanor Edevane’s underwear and Alice had to clamp her lips to keep from laughing.
    With a final glance towards the lake Alice left the bathroom, tiptoeing quickly along the hall to her bedroom to liberate the precious folder from beneath her mattress. Managing not to trip in her haste on a tatty patch of the red Baluch carpet runner Great-grandfather Horace had sent back from his adventures in the Middle East, Alice took the stairs two by two, seized a basket from the middle of the hall table, and leapt outside into the brand-new day.
    * * *
    And it had to be said the weather was perfect. Alice couldn’t help humming to herself as she made her way along the flag-stone path. The basket was almost half filled and she hadn’t even been near the wildflower meadows yet; the prettiest blooms grew there, the unexpected ones as opposed to the usual tame, showy suspects, but Alice had been biding her time. She’d spent the morning avoiding her mother, waiting until Mr Harris took his lunch break so she could catch Ben alone.
    The last time she saw him he’d said he had something for her and Alice had laughed. He’d offered her that half-smile of his then, the one that made her weak at the knees, and asked, “What’s so funny?” And Alice had drawn herself up to her full height and told him it just so happened she had something to give him, too.
    She stopped behind the largest yew tree at the end of the stone path. It had been neatly hedged for the party, its leaves tight and freshly cut, and Alice peered around it. Ben was still out on the island, and Mr Harris was all the way down at the far end of the lake helping his son Adam ready logs to be boated across. Poor Adam. Alice watched as he scratched behind his ear. He’d been the pride of his family once, according to Mrs Stevenson, strong and strapping and bright, until a flying piece of shrapnel at Passchendaele lodged in the side of his head and left him simple. War was a dreadful thing, the cook liked to opine, pounding her rolling pin into a blameless lump of dough on the kitchen table, “taking a boy like that, so full o’ promise, chewing ’im up and spitting ’im out a dull broken version of his old self.”
    The one blessing, according to Mrs Stevenson, was that Adam himself seemed not to notice the change, seemed almost lightened by it. “That’s not the norm,” she always added, lest she betray the deep Scottish pessimism at her core. “There’s plenty more come back with all the laughter hollowed out of ’em.” It was Daddy who’d insisted on employing Adam on the estate. “He’s got a job here for life,” she’d overheard him