‘You’re in love with her,’ his mother had teased.
‘I think I am,’ he’d smiled, wanting to get back to the Isle of Hope as quickly as possible.
Everything had taken for ever. The drive into town, the queue in the travel agent’s, where they had eventually confirmed Jim’s suspicions that he would just have to buy a fresh ticket if he wanted to postpone his trip back home. His mother hadn’t met him at the time she’d said she would, and then she wanted to stop on the way back for one last slice of her favourite key lime pie from a bakery on Abercorn Street.
Jim had got back to the Lake House at around four o’clock. Their bags were already packed and his father was upstairs, apparently pulling together his notes to show his agent in New York. It was the lazy time of the day, when Jim would usually sit on the pontoon with a book or his guitar, but his mother had asked him to help do a final tidy of the house. He’d been grateful for the opportunity to keep busy. He was anticipating a knock on the door, or the ring of the telephone in his room. He was waiting for Jennifer to get back in touch, and he didn’t quite believe it when he didn’t hear a peep.
He remembered, quite clearly, calling Casa D’Or, only to be told by Sylvia in crisp and certain terms that her daughter wasn’t at home. She’d sounded upset, even pee
ved, and at the time Jim thought it was because she absolutely hated him. But now, armed with the knowledge of Bryn and Sylvia’s affair, he suspected other reasons.
He imagined his father typing his Dear John letter to Sylvia. Imagined it being left under a stone or in the pavilion, like a Cold War drop of secret intelligence, perhaps even brazenly slotted into the Casa D’Or mailbox itself. He imagined Sylvia watching the Lake House from a window at Casa D’Or. Imagined her seeing Jennifer disappear inside the boathouse and not come out for thirty minutes or more, and speculating what had happened. Jim did not know how long Bryn and Sylvia’s affair had been going on, but judging from the dated letters he had found, it had been at least a month, and knowing how intensely he himself had felt about Jennifer after just a few short weeks, he had a good idea of how hurt Sylvia had been by it all.
It was quite easy for Jim to imagine everything, except what had gone on in the boathouse. He could not let himself accept the version of events that Jennifer had told him, even though the voice in his head told him it was all true.
He squeezed his eyes tightly closed to help him think more clearly, and when he opened them, he could see the shadow of someone standing by the door to the pavilion.
‘Mum,’ he said after a moment.
‘It was always the quietest and most lovely spot out here,’ Elizabeth said.
He groaned silently, feeling sickened at the thought that she might have overheard his conversation with Jennifer.
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t realise you two were down here,’ she added, almost apologetically.
He didn’t reply, and the silence seemed to stretch on for ever.
‘So that’s what happened. That day in the boathouse,’ she said at last with crisp resignation.
He glanced across at her, noting the look on her face. Firm, stoical – the army officer’s daughter that she had been brought up to be.
‘She’s emotional,’ he muttered, looking away.
‘So you don’t believe her?’
‘I don’t know what to believe any more.’
Another silence that seemed to make the night air vibrate between them.
‘I do,’ said Elizabeth eventually, stepping out into the moonlight. ‘I believe her.’
‘What?’ whispered Jim incredulously.
His mother’s face had paled so that it looked ghoulish.
‘I remember that day,’ she said, moving towards him. ‘It was hot, sticky. We’d come back from Savannah and your father was in the shower. At four o’clock in the afternoon.’
Jim didn’t remember that detail.
‘You said it yourself. It was hot . . .’
‘Your father was a man of routine,’ she replied, shaking her head. ‘A glass of claret, a bath, a cigar in his dressing gown . . . Not a shower in the afternoon.’
She paused and looked out towards the inky lake.
‘I’d suspected him of seeing someone for weeks. He was different, pleased with himself. I knew it wasn’t the work, his book. I’d seen his notes, and believe me, there wasn’t much of it. I wondered if it was Sylvia Wyatt, but then I knew how much she disliked us. Or perhaps the housekeeper, Marion. She was certainly appealing. So I went down to the boathouse. I don’t know what I was looking for – a sign, a smell, a clue, something . . . and then I saw it.’
‘What?’