Free The Secret by the Lake by Louise Douglas

terrible! I’m sorry, I didn’t know.’
    ‘You don’t need to be sorry; how could you have known? Obviously it didn’t affect me at the time. I was less than a week old. I didn’t know any different. But when I was old enough to understand something of what death meant, it used to haunt me.’ He looked down at his hand, scratched at a scab at the base of his finger. ‘I was there when she died, physically there. And I used to think that somehow it was my fault.’
    ‘You were a few days old. How could you be to blame?’
    ‘I know, I know, it’s irrational. But a child’s mind isn’t rational.’
    ‘No, I don’t suppose it is.’
    He picked at the scab. Any moment now, it would begin to bleed. I couldn’t bear it. I covered his hand with mine. Still he wouldn’t look at me.
    ‘I thought about my mother so much, that she started to become real to me. I knew other people couldn’t see her, I knew
they
thought she was dead, but I really believed she was with me.’
    ‘How do you mean?’
    ‘If I was lonely, she would take my hand; if I was afraid, she’d wrap herself around me and make me feel safe. At night, as I was falling asleep, I’d hear her whisper in my ear.’
    ‘What did she say?’
    ‘That she loved me, that she was sorry she’d let me go but that she’d always be there with me; that even when I was sleeping she was watching over me. I can still hear her voice in my mind.’
    He took another drink from the flask. I watched his throat move as he swallowed.
    ‘My father couldn’t bear it. It used to drive him mad. But the more he tried to stop me being with her, the more I wanted to be with her. We fought all the time.’
    ‘What happened?’
    ‘Father hired a psychiatrist who recommended I be sent to boarding school. He believed cold showers, discipline and a rigorous exercise regime would sort me out.’
    ‘Oh. And did they?’
    ‘They taught me to keep my secrets to myself.’
    I put one hand on Daniel’s arm. He was still staring through the window. ‘My father thought he was acting in my best interests,’ he said. ‘Suffice to say, that was the last time I confided anything to him.’
    ‘Perhaps you bringing your mother back to life, so to speak, was your way of compensating for the guilt you felt over her death,’ I suggested.
    ‘Yes, I thought of that too. I blamed myself for her dying, and the only way to put it right was to make her live again.’
    I followed his eyes. The hawk was hunting now, flying low and concentrated over the dead heather and gorse, tipping and dodging the gusts of wind. In the distance, I glimpsed the white bob-tail of a running deer.
    ‘All I’m trying to say is that children’s minds don’t work the same as ours,’ he said. ‘You don’t know what Viviane is feeling and she probably can’t tell you, or is afraid to.’
    ‘What should I do then?’ I asked. ‘How can I help her?’
    ‘Keep talking to her. Talk about her father. Don’t force her to hide her feelings. Try to make her understand that death is a natural process, even when it is brought about through violence. Being less afraid of it helped me. It brought me a kind of peace.’
    I looked at Daniel’s face, still in profile. It was a beautiful face and, despite being so new, it was becoming very dear to me.
    He turned and smiled at me. ‘There,’ he said. ‘You know everything there is to know about me now.’
    ‘Not everything.’
    ‘The most important thing. Does it change your opinion of me?’
    ‘Not at all,’ I said.
    I wished that he would kiss me and when he made no move to do so, I, emboldened by the apple brandy, kissed him instead. And it was lovely.
    He asked for my number before we parted and he found an old pencil in his bag and I wrote the number on a scrap of paper. He told me he would call me soon.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN
     
    I DIDN’T MENTION any of that conversation to Julia. I didn’t even tell her that I’d spoken to Daniel Aldridge but I did tell her