Chapter 33
Jake opened the bedroom door and poked his head out into the hall. There was no sign of Marcus. That was good. He shut the door behind him, feeling fresh and revived after taking a shower and putting on a clean set of clothes. Showering had taken longer than he had envisaged. He’d had to wrap his hands in disposable plastic shower hats, which Gayle had thoughtfully provided. It had looked ridiculous but at least it had meant he could shower without getting his bandages wet. He hastily tucked in his shirt. He’d still had trouble buttoning up his shirt with his bandaged hands, but he’d managed. He put on his jacket and walked down the stairs with the car key to hand.
The kitchen door down the hall was ajar. Jake could hear voices as he stepped off the bottom stair. He identified Gayle, then Marcus. Another man’s voice punctuated the conversation. Jake guessed it was Mr Addison, the man with the clipboard from the forest, and the owner of the yellow hard hat that was perched on the rear parcel shelf of the grey Ford parked outside.
Jake didn’t feel hungry, and he didn’t feel like company. He walked straight past the kitchen without glancing in, hoping his presence would go unnoticed.
It didn’t.
‘Jake, is that you?’ Gayle called from the kitchen.
He’d made it to the front door – just. ‘Yes.’
‘Aren’t you having any breakfast?’
‘Not right now.’ Jake opened the door. ‘There’s something I need to do first.’ He stepped out and hesitated. Did he really want to do this? He wasn’t sure. Maybe if he walked? He shook his head as he glanced at his watch; he would rather get a move on so he could get rid of Marcus on the next available flight to London. Jake had no qualms about depositing him back at the airport that day.
He had originally intended that they spend two nights at Lark Lodge, thinking that Marcus would need that time to recover. But the methadone had worked wonders. Marcus looked bright and breezy, and the picture of health; almost like his old self – the Marcus Jake remembered from before Christmas.
Perhaps I should take some too , thought Jake, rubbing his forehead. He had a headache and felt groggy with tiredness. He dismissed the idea instantly. The last thing he wanted was to end up in hospital because he’d taken something he shouldn’t. Jake didn’t have a drug problem – thank god.
He started towards his car. It was then that he noticed his rental car was wedged in between the Ford and the Bentley. He was positive he hadn’t parked like that the previous night; he would have remembered climbing over the passenger seat to get out. Mr Addison must have shifted his car. Jake looked back at the house. He had the impulse to march in and interrupt their cosy little breakfast by hauling Mr Addison out of the kitchen to shift his car. Jake sighed. He could simply climb over the passenger seat to get in.
He did neither; slipping his keys back in his coat pocket, he decided to walk after all.
Strolling out of the gates and down the road, he stopped briefly under a streetlamp. The lamp was still lit, but the sharp morning light had faded its fierceness to a soft yellow glow. He turned down a narrow lane between Gayle’s house and the next. He knew where it led. The previous evening, he had been tempted to leave the car and take this cut-through to the grounds of The Lake House behind Lark Lodge. Luckily, he hadn’t. When he’d found Marcus, he’d been in no state to walk back.
Marcus could have walked it now with no problem, but Jake didn’t want his company on this visit. He strolled towards the gate, hoping it was unlocked. The lane was overgrown. He couldn’t imagine that anybody used the lane, or even knew where it led, although he did notice that the grass underfoot was trodden down as though someone had indeed used it – and in the recent past. Jake frowned, wondering who that someone was.
Jake stopped at the old gate, as tall as the wall. He took the round iron handle and turned it clockwise. The door creaked open. Jake breathed a sigh of relief. That meant he didn’t have to return to Lark Lodge to collect the car and face the possibility of Marcus asking him where he was going.
Jake stepped into the grounds of The Lake House and stood for a moment in the warm sunshine.
Whoever had said that things always looked better in the morning was right; daylight had chased away the dark shadows that had been feeding Jake’s imagination. All that remained were neatly pruned privet hedges, a lush green lawn shimmering with morning dew, and beautiful flowered borders.
Jake scratched his head. The beautifully maintained garden was totally at odds with what he had seen of the house last night; it didn’t make sense. Jake kept walking.
Perhaps last night in the dark they had got things a little out of proportion; perhaps the house was going to look better in the morning. Jake slowed his pace when the house, in all its dilapidated glory, came into view. Like the gardens, it was stunning, but for all the wrong reasons.
It looked smaller than Jake remembered, which would have been understandable if he had last seen it as a kid, rather than a few months earlier. The grey brickwork seemed greyer, the row of windows – long, elegant Georgian sash windows sitting proudly either side of the front door, matched by equally spaced, equally grand windows on the first floor – were all in need of re-painting. The row of small dormer windows in the roof – servants’ quarters in years gone by – had fared little better. One of the shutters that had become dislodged from the wall swung in the breeze, a strong gust threatening to rip it off its hinges or worse, send it crashing through the window it was designed to protect.
As he stood staring at the house, an image came to mind; an image that this house reminded him of. It was the strangest thing; this house, with its grey hue and shrunken appearance, reminded Jake of Eleanor’s father William. Since the accident, that once vibrant businessman had physically shrivelled into a grey shadow of his former self. His child, his only daughter, was gone. And the house’s reason for being – the family, and the Christmas get-togethers – had vanished. Marcus had asked the previous night if a house could deteriorate like that in under a year. Jake could answer that now. They had neglected the house; it was no longer a part of anyone’s life. It was unwanted, discarded, overlooked. William had cast off his connection to the house along with his old life. That was why he now spent so much time on the golf course instead of in the boardroom.
Jake shook himself, trying to shake off his irrational thoughts. It was just a goddamn building – it didn’t think, feel, love and pine. And it had deteriorated because they had abandoned it, refusing to get involved in sending in cleaners and decorators to look after the place in their absence, which was foolish, because it was going to cost more to put it right. But it was also understandable – Eleanor had loved the place and without her, nobody had had the heart to return.
Lost in thought, Jake drifted towards the house, arriving at the gap in the hedge, finding himself standing in the same spot as the previous night. Reluctant to enter at first, Jake hovered in the gap, looking in on the hidden garden. Unlike the house and grounds, nothing there had changed. Except that Jake knew this wasn’t true at all. If nothing had changed, if no one had come, then the outer ring of lawn would be overgrown and the carpet of flowers would be riddled with weeds – choking, dying, dead. Jake decided it had changed after all – the lawn was lusher, the flowers were more vibrant, the garden was more alive than he remembered.
He entered. Staying on the grass close to the hedging, he circled the small garden, arriving back where he had started without finding what he was looking for – six stepping-stones leading to the centre. He retraced his steps. At the edge of the grass, he knelt and parted a spray of flowers, revealing a stepping-stone. Not wanting to trample the flowers, but desperate to reach the centre of the garden, Jake attempted to part the flowers a little with his foot as he tentatively took one step at a time, feeling the hard stone beneath his shoe and scattering brightly coloured petals in his wake.
Jake had just found the last stepping-stone when a sound startled him. He opened his eyes and stepped sideways, flattening more flowers. It sounded like a knife being sharpened on stone – a scraping that made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up and his nerves bristle. Jake looked around the garden, but he was completely alone.
A piece of hedge fell to the ground. Jake looked up and saw a young man standing with his head and shoulders visible above the seven-foot hedge. Jake watched as he made short quick clippings on the top of the hedge with a pair of shears, his light orange hair waved in front of his eyes as he cut, a freckled nose screwed up in earnest concentration. Now things made sense; someone had hired a gardener to take care of the place. Aubrey came straight to mind. He always took care of things. But if that were true, then why stop at the gardens? Why not employ people to look after the house? At this point, Jake really didn’t care. He closed his eyes and made another wish: that the young man would go away and leave him in peace.
A moment later, the scraping sound stopped. Jake opened his eyes. The young man was gone. But the peace Jake wished for did not last long. It was interrupted by a young man’s surprised voice, ‘Hey, you scared me! I didn’t think anybody was here.’
Jake turned to see the young man with the wavy orange hair standing in the gap between the hedges, the shears dangling from his right hand and a pair of step ladders awkwardly balanced on his right shoulder. He was staring at Jake wide-eyed.
Then his gaze shifted, and the look of surprise turned to one of dismay.
Jake followed his gaze and looked down at the patch of trampled flowers underfoot. He looked up, unrepentant. ‘I came to visit my wife,’ he said.
Jake watched the young man slowly turn around, the ladders balanced awkwardly on his shoulder, and walk back through the gap in the hedging. Jake followed him and stood like a sentry, guarding the entrance for several minutes, ensuring he would not return, ensuring he would be left alone. Satisfied that the young man was not coming back, Jake returned to the centre and cast his eyes down to the small white oval memorial stone that was engraved simply with the words: Eleanor, Chosen, 25 th December.
They were Jake’s words and Jake’s comfort.
Chosen ; a single word, yet the full meaning, a true understanding, eluded Jake. He had felt that this simple word spelled a deeply cherished hope that she had to have been chosen for a reason, because it just hadn’t been her time. How could it be anyone’s time at the age of twenty-six?
Jake held out his hands and touched the two other memorial stones – those for his parents – weathered with age, standing solemnly side by side. It hadn’t been their time either.
Jake retraced his steps through the gap in the hedge, back into the main gardens. He stopped just beyond the hedge and looked around the garden; there was no sign of the lad with the stepladders and shears. Jake breathed a sigh of relief and walked back across the gardens towards the gate. He was in no mood to apologise, no matter how much trouble the gardener had gone to over the flowers. He felt that his lost family were there, and no pretty flower display was going to change that fact.
Jake paused and closed his eyes, remembering the house with its brilliant white windows and blazing green shutters sitting majestically in the centre of the grounds. All was as it always had been – in his memory. This was still his house, and this had briefly been his childhood home until fate had dealt the cruellest of hands.
He had come to them late in life – a son – when they had all but resigned themselves to remaining childless. His father, an army officer, had intended to spend his retirement with his wife and young son in the peace and tranquillity of his beloved Scotland. But, a month before his early retirement, their plans had been cruelly cut short by a road accident. Fortunately, Jake had not been with his parents at the time, otherwise he would have perished too.
They had left behind a confused and lonely little boy with no relatives and an uncertain future – until William had stepped in.
They had bumped into each other, literally – Jake’s father and William – on the ski slopes beyond the house when Jake’s father had been on leave, not long after Jake was born. They had both become fathers for the first time late in life, and something had clicked; they had become firm friends. It was during one of Jake’s parents’ Christmas parties at The Lake House, when he’d invited William and his family, that Jake’s father had confided in William, out of earshot of his wife of course, his fears for his newborn son. What if something should happen on his final commission?
How prophetic.
Of course, William had reassured him that he would always be there to advise Jake if need be, little realising how great those needs would become. But William was stoical; he had barely known the man for four years, yet he had taken care of his son without a second thought and had welcomed him into the family fold. Further, he had ensured that Jake never lost touch with his roots by making it a tradition that all the family spent each Christmas at his house, The Lake House, so that Jake could ‘visit’ his parents. It was an arrangement that had worked surprisingly well. So well, in fact, that even as adults, wherever they might be, they had descended without fail on the house at Christmas.
The house was cursed.
Jake opened his eyes. Of course, that wasn’t true. There had been many, many good times and an abundance of fond memories, but Jake recognised that it was all it held for him now – memories. There was no future there for him. The question he was now asking himself was what to do with the house. It was such a waste, this beautiful old house standing alone, forlorn, forgotten. It needed people; children running around its lawns, laughter in its corridors.
Jake looked in the direction of the hidden garden. It had been William’s idea to have Jake’s parents buried in the grounds of their beloved house. But William could not have foreseen the events that would lead Jake to contemplate the future of the house – the future without Eleanor.