The Lake by Jo Bardsley

If Radclyffe hadn’t had to be put down at the same time Hatton had been nominated for Conservationist of the Year for the lake, Alice probably would never have considered arson. Or at least not seriously. She certainly would not have rifled through recycling bins looking for fancy pop bottles with screw tops. Radclyffe had been a solemn mutt, with rough grey hair, rather like her own. They had come together in Alice’s first autumn on the road, when the leaves added a crisp rustle to the thud of her boots on the tarmac and she’d just started to wonder if the cold would drive her back to the city. Radclyffe’s grizzled warmth was just enough to stay out and stay moving, which was the important thing, after all. 

       Alice started walking when the last notes died away at Mira’s funeral. She crunched her way down the crematorium path. There was a hard, silent hollow behind Alice’s collar bone which marked Mira’s absence. 

       She avoided lakes, of course, like a lapsed Christian avoids churches. Even so, the lake haunted her in a hundred different ways: grey clouds reflecting mackerel silver in a puddle; the self conscious slang of teenagers; the persistent memory of a bream caught one morning, greenish grey and shining. Mira stayed quiet in Alice’s throat. It was the lake which would not be still.

       They’d come to the lake when Alice’s great aunt went into a nursing home. Lord Hatton’s agents were happy enough to transfer the lease on the cottage to Alice and Mira, who had just retired from teaching. The lake in those days was just a large stagnant pond, solid with algae which rippled queasily when the wind blew. The old people in the sad little pub talked about eeleries and harvesting reeds for thatch in their grandparents’ time, but the lake gave nothing now except an icebox effect in the winter and a dank, rotted stench in the summer.

       ‘Why doesn’t the water board do something about it?’ asked Mira.

       ‘Not up to them,’ said Oliver, one of the garrulous old-timers, foam from his pint glinting on his grey, bristly lip. ‘All this belongs to Lord Hatton.’

       Alice was surprised and offended by the idea that someone could own a whole lake. Water was too unstable, too liquid to be owned. 

       ‘Well why doesn’t he do something about it?’ asked Mira, who had never accepted no in her life.

       ‘Who knows,’ said Oliver. ‘We’ve all tried. It was even in the papers when all the lake flies died. They said that the lake was a dead zone. Hatton doesn’t care.’

       ‘Fuck him then,’ said Mira, ‘Let’s sort it ourselves.’ 

       Oliver laughed.

       ‘She’s not joking,’ said Alice, ‘She was a geography teacher. She knows this kind of thing.’

       ‘It’s all about biofilm,’ said Mira. And that was how it started.

That first year was when they did the hard work. Alice and Mira’s kitchen was covered in maps and diagrams. Mira went to the local high school and came back with an awkward and cripplingly shy crew of Duke of Edinburgh award kids, who stumbled around in the reed beds, cutting back old growth and hauling up shopping trolleys. Some of the pensioners from the pub helped out, ageing muscles remembering tasks they had done in their youth. Together they made dozens of floating islands out of anything which came to hand; old foam, tyres, plastic milk bottles in nets, and planted them with reeds and meadowsweet. And then they waited for the mucilaginous creep of Mira’s precious biofilm to coat the floating roots and begin to clean the water.

       It didn’t happen all at once. That fish, that dinner plate bream with its silly little head, that had been their first sign. Then Mira left the kitchen light on one summer night and in the morning the ceiling was covered in lake flies. An abandoned eelery was found to be teeming with velvety black eels. Alice rowed Mira out onto the lake and kissed her in the clear moonlight.

       Just as the lake returned to life, so did the villages on its shores. Family boats and crayfish pots got mended. A thatcher paid some of the local lads to harvest reeds. One of them got the first honest paycheck of his life and proposed to his girl on the spot. They held the wedding on the lake shore and ate wild watercress salad with freshwater crayfish, all collected from the living lake.

       But Hatton’s agent blew in one October afternoon, a skinny, trout mouthed woman in an expensive skirt suit. She threatened the reed harvesters with jail for theft, said that the eelery lacked a fishing licence and that whoever was responsible for the floating islands could be sued for environmental damage. 

       But the final blow came in buff envelopes, delivered to every home along the lake’s edge: eviction notices.

       And that was how it ended. All of them scattered like old bulrush seeds, gone to homes of multiple occupancy and caravan parks, the cold and dank places where poor people end up when rich people move in. For Alice and Mira, it was a mouldy one bedroom in a grey Northern town, until Mira was diagnosed, then it was hospitals and waiting rooms, then a hospice, then just Alice with her tent and her dog. Then just Alice.

Hatton won conservationist of the year. Desperately missing Radclyffe’s patient weight against her leg, Alice looked it up on a library computer. Profile articles praised his ‘foresight, dedication and commitment to best environmental practice’ demonstrated in the restoration of the lake. ‘The work of the Hatton estate on this waterway will serve as a blueprint for future projects’ enthused the World Wildlife Fund. His acceptance speech was brief; ‘You see, it’s all about the biofilm.’ The sullenly smouldering coal of Alice’s anger roared to life. 

       Suddenly she didn’t need the numbing rhythm of her boots, she needed vengeance.

       ‘Fuck him,’ she said, and a faint glow of accord lit up beneath her breast bone.

       She thought of the casual way he had slung them all out of their homes. Could she take his home from him? He probably had dozens of homes all over the world; smart city flats, ski chalets, rustic cabins. But there was just one which carried the Hatton family pride, which housed the family history.

       ‘Hatton House has been the main seat of the Hatton family for nearly nine hundred years. The original castle was erected by the first Lord Hatton on land gifted to him by Henry II for his services in the royal treasury; he was, essentially, Henry’s favourite accountant. The house is now managed by the National Trust, but it remains the property of the Hatton family.’ The thin, elderly man peered at her to make sure she was following. Alice nodded in an encouraging and, she hoped, entirely respectable way. It was typical of Hatton, he still owned the house, but everyone else paid to look after it. 

       Satisfied, the elderly man, ‘Call me Tommy’, carried on. ‘Now as a National Trust volunteer, you are expected to be ah, conversant,’ again he peered to see if she had understood the word, ‘with the history of the house, its contents, and the family, of course. Especially Lord Hatton.

       ‘Really? Just as a volunteer cleaner?’ 

       ‘You never know when you will encounter a member of the public. It’s best to be prepared. For instance, y’see those bream there in the case? The one on the left was caught by the tenth earl in 1852, but the one on right was caught by the present Lord Hatton from his own lake. A member of the public would want to know that.’ The dead fish stared mournfully from artfully arranged reeds.

       ‘What a lot to remember,’ Alice murmured.

       ‘Have a guide book,’ Tommy said, ‘It’ll get you started. And here is Lord Hatton’s autobiography, The Lord of the Lake. You can pay at the till on your way out.’

       So, for the price of a six pound guide book, a twenty pound autobiography and a little light simpering, Alice was in. 

       She ingratiated herself with Tommy, accompanying him on his rounds to crinkle her eyes at him and chuckle appropriately at his cricketing jokes. In return, he showed her the priest’s hole, a secret cupboard hidden in the minstrel’s gallery and let her hold a gilded chamber pot ‘last used by James I, don’t you know’. She wondered what it would feel like to own such things, to possess something so old. Probably a bit like owning a lake, she thought. 

       Everything was ready. All that remained was a dentist appointment. But that afternoon Tommy called her into the volunteer office. ‘We know what you are up to,’ he said, severely. Alice kept her eyes on him and her face still. They looked at each other. Tommy sighed. 

       ‘Yes, we’ve known for some time that you are,’ he paused, evidently trying to find an appropriate word. She wondered if he had already called the police. Should she try to brain him with a paperweight? ‘You are itinerant. Although I must say that you are amazingly clean for someone who does not have a home. One would hardly guess … However, Lord Hatton’s policy is that no camping is permitted on the grounds and that does include volunteers.’ He suddenly dived under the desk and emerged, white hair ruffled, holding Alice’s little tent.  Alice was dizzy with relief.

       ‘I’ll not do it again,’ she promised, taking the nylon bag from him. ‘Actually, I’ve got a dentist appointment today, so I need to go early.’

       Alice left the estate very publicly, carrying her tent. She pushed it under a fallen log at the end of the long and twisting drive, retrieved a small backpack then crept back through the park. The backpack clinked softly, although she had cleaned and wrapped the ginger beer bottles carefully after she filled them. She eased herself through the gift shop, not exactly crouching, but staying out of sight of Maureen at the till before padding quietly upstairs to the minstrel’s gallery and closing herself in the priest hole.

       The rooms outside quieted, Maureen went round calling that the house was closing in ten minutes. Stillness from the room beyond the hidden door. Alice’s heart thumped loudly. Footsteps. Tommy was doing his rounds.

       It had to be done while Tommy was still locking the doors, before he set the alarm. She pushed open the door a fraction. It moved silently on hinges she had oiled the week before. Tommy’s footsteps sounded on the stone flags of the lower hall.

       Now was the time. Lightly, as lightly as a deer coming to drink from the lake, she skimmed the carpet, then took a bottle from her pack. The liquid gurgled softly, glinting in the last light from the windows as she poured a thin glaze over a small Sargent and a brownish Picasso, bringing a trail to the door of the room, then she tiptoed to the top of the great staircase, leaving a pungent dribble with each step. Back she went, emptying a third bottle over the ebony minstrel’s gallery. Up again, Queen Elizabeth’s bedroom, the fourposter covered in a thick layer of embroidered linen. She put the prized James I chamberpot in the middle of the bed, doused the lot and went back to the stairs. The last bottle to soak those poor, sad, stuffed bream and now the lighter.

       For a moment the flame wavered in Alice’s hand. So much beauty, so much history. Was it really hers to destroy? No, it was not hers. It was Hatton’s, like the lake. In the hard cold place behind her breast bone, Mira shifted, Alice felt her move, felt the movement of Mira’s head, heard Mira’s voice; ‘Fuck him then.’ Alice tossed the lighter.