The House on the Lake

When Isabelle came to take possession of the house she’d inherited, she had the eerie feeling that it was already inhabited. She kept waking in the middle of the night to sounds that could have been the scraping of a chair or footsteps in the hallway or across a room. Her heart pounding, she would get up to investigate, creeping along the wall outside her bedroom to listen, afraid she might actually come upon an intruder. She found no such evidence, but she was not appeased. Could someone have crept in and kept hidden during the daylight hours and become an elusive presence at night? Was the house pregnant with memories that wouldn’t sleep? Or was it simply her nerves?

Everything about the house seemed unreal, most of all the way it had come into her possession. She’d seen Andre, her stepfather, in a hospital in Lausanne just before he died—shrunken, skeletal, embittered over the way life had treated him as he’d knocked about from pillar to post. Cheated, in other words. No mention of a house. Then, a year or so later, she’d been summoned to a lawyer’s office in Geneva to receive the deed to a house she’d inherited from her father. But it wasn’t Andre’s name on the deed, nor that of her real father, whom she hadn’t seen in some years—a distant figure of her youth who’d sent her money while she was at the Sorbonne. He had helped her during a difficult period, and there had been a few intermittent phone calls and letters, but they had rarely seen one another. She stared at the signature of her benefactor and levied a barrage of questions. But the lawyer patiently repeated that her father had given instructions that she was to have the house. She was handed a deed, keys, directions, and the phone number of the caretaker.

From the moment she arrived, Isabelle experienced, first, astonishment: Who could have built such a dwelling? Could it be that Andre’s mining ventures in Bolivia or Peru or Zimbabwe— wherever he’d been lured by the promise of instant wealth—had panned out? Was it his closely held secret—a wish to surprise and mystify her—in keeping with his sense of irony? But he was too much of an egoist not to want to parade his largesse. When her astonishment had subsided, she felt something close to anguish. It was too much, far too much. More than she deserved, or perhaps more than she’d bargained for. She’d arrived to take possession—of what exactly? What sort of life could she live here, grafted onto what she saw as hopelessly twisted branches? The view of the lake, Lago Maggiori, near the Italian border—how could she quarrel with this sheer beauty? The house itself was a stunning marriage of location and design, wealth and imagination. It would be all she could do to keep it up and pay the taxes.

She opened the gate to a garden at its peak. One bed held roses of every hue and description. In others were flowers that ranged from the palest blue to deepest purple, a vine of passionflowers clinging to the wall. Palm trees, so unexpected in that alpine region, as well as agaves, one in perfect bloom, rose above the color below. The granddaddy of prickly pears claimed both corners of the wall leading up to the doorway. Elephant ears and birds of paradise. It was not just variety and the explosion of color that took her eye, but the little walks and steps that took you to different prospects of lake and garden. Sculptures that you could walk through and around, columns and shapes, a little bridge that children would have delighted in. Not only a sense of beauty had been at work, but a kind of playfulness. Some of the forms had been left unfinished, as if they required further inspiration. A little maze led to the pond in the center, shaped like an eye, orange captured in a ring...