Some Old Lover's Ghost (14 page)

‘There’s really no need—’

‘Come on,’ he repeated impatiently, and she rose to her feet.

They went to a nearby café where Max ordered bacon and eggs and sausage and tomatoes for two. ‘Toast or fried bread, sir?’ asked the waitress, and Max, glancing at Tilda, answered, ‘Both.’

He waited until she was wiping up her egg yolk with a piece of bread, and then he said, ‘Where have you looked for work?’

‘Oh – everywhere!’

‘What can you do?’

‘Shorthand and typing. And I can cook … and sew … and milk cows …’

Max’s lips twitched as he stirred sugar in his tea. ‘People come to London thinking the streets are paved with gold, but they’re really just lined with a thousand other poor devils looking for work. You probably ought to go home – go back to wherever it is you came from. You’ve family there presumably.’

Tilda shook her head. ‘I’ve no-one – no-one at all.’

She had an aunt who had betrayed her, and a half-sister she had never spoken to, who had married the only man she would ever love. Tilda rose and extended her hand.

‘Thank you so much, Max, for buying me breakfast. I promise that I’ll repay you as soon as possible.’ She shook Max’s hand, and left the restaurant.

That afternoon Anna visited Max in his attic. She brought with her the parrot, and chocolates wrapped in silver paper, and a box of little black cigars. Max and Anna smoked the cigars; the parrot ate the chocolates. Music issued from Max’s wireless.

‘Bach-always Bach,’ said Anna, disgusted. ‘A mathematician’s music – there is no passion, Max!’

Max grinned, but said nothing. He was seated at the table, a piece of paper spouting from his typewriter.

‘Have I interrupted you, darling?’

He shook his head. ‘I’ve ground to a halt. I’ve written so much that I’ve forgotten how to spell.’

‘Germany?’ enquired Anna, glancing at the heap of typescript.

He nodded. ‘Munich and Berlin.’

‘Berlin! Berlin is wonderful – I was there in the early Twenties.’

‘It’s changed, I’m afraid, Anna. They’ve let loose the wolves.’ Max ground his cigar out in a saucer.

‘You should not take all the troubles of the world upon your shoulders, Max darling.’

‘I don’t. I take them in, chew them about, spit them out again. As you said, Anna – I have no passion.’

She smiled, and caressed the parrot’s bent neck. Then she said curiously, ‘What do you think of our little Tilda?’

He opened the window to let out the cigar smoke, and said, his back to Anna, ‘Your little Tilda passed out in the kitchen this morning through hunger, the silly girl.’

‘You should be kind to Tilda,’ said Anna reprovingly. ‘She has a broken heart.’

‘Broken heart?’ Max looked scathing. ‘She doesn’t look old enough to break anything more than her dolls. Anyway, she has no work and no money, and refuses to go home. Apparently she can type and do shorthand, and she seems quite – um –
organized.’
He had noticed months ago the transformation of the green dress that Christine had made fun of. ‘Apparently,’ added Max, ‘she’s hardly been to school.’

‘I never went to school, Max. One didn’t. I had a governess, a delightful Frenchwoman.’

Max grinned. ‘I think Tilda’s education was a little more down to earth. Roland tells me that she and her aunt used to do farm work. I assume the aunt’s dead.’

Anna said, ‘More tea, darling?’ and poured hot water into a pot. ‘Are you attracted to her, Max?’

He laughed. ‘Of course not. But she’s interesting. Rather an oddity.’

‘And very pretty.’

‘I suppose so. But very young, and unbelievably naive. You
know that I prefer sophisticated women, Anna. That’s why I adore you.’

She smiled, but did not respond. She said shrewdly, ‘You court a certain type of woman, my dear Max, because you know that there is not the slightest danger that you will fall in love with them, or that they will fall in love with you. You know that you can keep them at arms’ length – emotionally, if not physically.’

‘Perhaps.’ Max changed the subject. ‘Anyway, I wondered if you could think of anything for Tilda.’

Anna tapped her teeth with a long, painted fingernail, and thought carefully.

Three days later, Tilda started to work for Professor Leonard Hastings. Anna had found her the job. ‘Leo is my dear, dear friend, and he is terribly famous and terribly eminent and if I invite him to dine he arrives a week late, and if he did not have the most wonderful cook then he would die of hunger because he would forget to eat. When we last went to a concert, I telephoned him to remind him to catch the train, and at the concert hall, when he took off his coat, I saw that he was wearing his pyjama jacket under his evening dress. He needs a secretary, my dear – someone to tell him what to do, where to go.’

Tilda had each day to travel to Twickenham, where Professor Hastings lived. He was unmarried, his house a treasure cave of books and journals and collections of strange, beautiful things like fossils and volcanic rocks and meteorites. His subject was physics, about which Tilda knew nothing. She was beginning to realize that there were a lot of things she knew nothing about.

She typed Professor Hastings’ letters, kept his diary, and persuaded him out of the house when it was time for his lectures and committees. She learned, in a muttered conversation with the cook-housekeeper, that she had had many predecessors, all of whom had given in their notice, or had been fired by the professor. She learned when to hold her tongue, and when discreetly to ignore the professor’s less rational requests. She fathomed the system with which he catalogued his books: utterly arcane and
hugely complicated, it had reduced several of her predecessors to tears. She touched the books reverently, enjoying the smell of their leather bindings, the look of the closely printed words.

She took the minutes at a meeting of a subcommittee of the Academic Assistance Council, chaired by Professor Hastings. The stories she heard – of penniless refugee students and teachers – horrified her. Their exile dwarfed hers. Some were very young, only sixteen or seventeen. In meetings, Professor Hastings was neither vague nor forgetful. His small, hooded eyes glittered as he issued concise instructions or devastating criticisms of inefficiency or procrastination. Occasionally hollow-eyed young men knocked at his door. Professor Hastings barked questions at them in German, the cook fed them, and Tilda telephoned family after family, looking for someone to take them in. One of the refugees – just a boy – wept tears of relief and loss into his stew and dumplings. Tilda put her arm round him and stroked his hair, and knew that he understood hardly a word that she murmured to him. On the train home that night, she too wept, though she was not sure why.

In September, Professor Hastings went away for three days to give a lecture in Edinburgh. Arriving at work on the second morning, Tilda was greeted by the cook. ‘There’s a young man and a girl in the parlour,’ she hissed. ‘Knocked on the door at six o’clock, got me out of my bed. They don’t speak a word of English and the professor’s not back till tomorrow. And the little girl’s a bit odd.’

As soon as Tilda opened the parlour door, the young man rose to his feet and bowed. A child stood beside him, her head bent. The young man spoke, but Tilda understood nothing. Through gesture and writing she found out that the boy was called Gerd Toller, his sister, Liesl. Gerd was eighteen, Liesl only nine. Tilda found an atlas and Gerd indicated the German city from which they had travelled. A small series of scribbled cartoons told Tilda that the Tollers’ mother was dead, their father in prison. In spite of her brother’s protective arm around her shoulders, the little girl shivered constantly. ‘Liesl
ist
—’ said the boy, and tapped
his forehead. The cook brought milk and sandwiches, but Liesl would not eat. Tilda coaxed her, tearing off tiny pieces of bread and offering them to her, but the child sat, shuddering, her eyes staring into some terrifying middle distance. When Tilda hugged her, Liesl flinched. Her brother, wolfing down food, launched into a long explanation. Tilda could have wept with fury and frustration at her inability to understand.

That evening, travelling home on the train, she made a decision. Back at 15 Pargeter Street, she dumped her jacket and hat in her room, and then climbed the three flights of stairs to Max’s attic. When she knocked on the door, she heard his muttered, ‘Come in.’

He was hunched over his typewriter. Without looking round, he growled, ‘Just stick Boris in the corner, Anna—’

‘It’s me. Tilda.’

He swung round. ‘God. I thought it was the bloody parrot.’

‘I’m very sorry to disturb you, Max, but I wanted to ask you something. Shall I come back later?’

He stood up, stretching out his arms in a huge yawn, and shook his head. ‘Uh-uh. Go ahead. Ask. Are you hungry again?’

She was about to be angry with him, when she realized that he was teasing her. She shook her head as he transferred a pile of newspapers from a chair to the floor.

‘Sit down. Talk.’

She told him about Gerd and Liesl. When she had finished, he said, ‘I’ll have a word with the boy, if you want. My German’s not so bad.’

‘That’s very kind of you, Max, but it’s just that …’ She flung out her hands in a gesture of despair. ‘I felt so stupid. So useless!’

He said sensibly, ‘You did what you could, Tilda.’

‘I did nothing. I couldn’t do anything, because I couldn’t understand what Gerd was telling me. You were right, Max – I am ignorant.’

He said uncomfortably, ‘Look – I had no business—’ but she interrupted him.

‘People think I’m sweet and naive and – oh,
original.’
Tilda’s voice was scathing. ‘I don’t want to be like that. Being sweet and naive doesn’t help me, and it doesn’t help anyone else. So’ – she took a deep breath – ‘I’m here to ask you what I should do. Roland only seems to know about motor cars and things, and Michael just tells me about football and chemistry, and the girls talk about their clothes and their boyfriends and ballet. I went to the library, but there are so many books I don’t know where to start. So I thought I’d ask you how I should educate myself. Do you mind?’

He was silent, and she thought that he might refuse her. But then he said, ‘No. I don’t mind at all. You’ll have to tell me what you do know about, and then we can fill in the gaps. Only – not here. I’ve been incarcerated in this hole for the last forty-eight hours. Let me shave and change and then we’ll go for a walk.’

In the evening sunshine, even the dusty little square of planes and hawthorns seemed a small oasis, birdsong and strands of sunlight trapped within it. Max, after he had quizzed Tilda, said wonderingly, ‘Good grief – your science is pre-Copernican. You should ask Leo Hastings to talk to you – you don’t need to bother with relativity, just to know that the sun doesn’t orbit the earth. I’ll teach you German and take you to concerts. And I’ll pass the newspaper on to you. And you must go to art galleries with Anna – she’d love your company, and she knows a lot about painting.’

The sky had begun to darken a little. They walked slowly back to the lodging house. Max said curiously, ‘What happened to the refugees? Gerd and Liesl?’

Tilda sighed. ‘I found a bed for the night for the boy, but no-one wanted poor Liesl. I tried everywhere, Max, but once they heard that she wasn’t quite right in the head, no-one was interested. I couldn’t separate them, so we’ve put them up in camp beds at the professor’s house. I don’t know what will become of them. It was awful, Max. There are some children that nobody wants.’

And I was one of them once, a long time ago, she thought, but did not say.

When her stomach upset did not get better of its own accord, Jossy went to see Dr Williams, and learned that she was pregnant. She had mixed feelings about the discovery. On the one hand, her pride that she was to bear Daragh’s child was immense; on the other, she had never before felt so unwell. Dr Williams assured her that her morning sickness would pass by the end of the third month of pregnancy. The third month came and went and still Jossy was sick. Her hands and feet were fat and pink; by the sixth month she could no longer feed her sausage-fingers into her gloves. Dr Williams sent for a London specialist. The specialist sniffed and tutted and ordered Jossy to rest. She was supposed to spend the afternoons in bed, but she silently refused to. If she kept to her bedroom she missed Daragh. Instead, she heaved her cumbersome body from drawing room to terrace to garden. In the hottest part of summer she sat with her feet in the fishpond, to keep cool.

Even when the baby moved inside her, she felt none of the joy she was apparently supposed to feel. It was hard to feel joy about something that made her so ill. To Nana (now rather old and wobbly, but proud that her nursery was soon to have another resident), Jossy pretended to long to hold the baby in her arms. She imagined it like her biggest doll: blue-eyed, fair-haired, smiling. She supposed that it would be fun to dress and bathe it, and to take it out in the old perambulator. She imagined walking around the grounds of the Hall, Daragh at her side, the baby laughing.

It was Daragh who told her how the baby would come into the world. She had looked down at the huge globe of her belly one night and admitted complete ignorance. She imagined her stomach splitting open, the baby wriggling out, and everything somehow closing up. If anyone but Daragh had told her otherwise, she would not have believed them. ‘Does it hurt?’ she asked, appalled by his explanation, and he said, ‘A bit, I think,’ and patted the top of her head. She seized his hand and covered it in kisses. Because of the baby, they no longer shared a bed, no longer made love. She missed that dreadfully.

At the end of October Jossy fainted, and the specialist was called again. This time she was told to stay in bed until the baby was born. Black spots danced in front of her eyes, and her swollen hands were shiny and red. Daragh caught a cold, and Jossy tiptoed out of bed to make him honey and lemon. The following morning she was woken at five o’clock by an intermittent pain in her back. She lay still, watching the pink clouds slowly lighten the grey sky. The pain was tolerable at first, and then it was not. She knew that it could not be the baby because it was not supposed to be born for another three weeks. When she sat up in bed, something awful happened – a whoosh of liquid between her legs, and a shaming wet patch on the sheets. Weeping, Jossy shuffled out of the room and along the corridor to find Nana.