Some Old Lover's Ghost (17 page)

After supper, Max escorted Tilda and Emily back to their room and disappeared up to his attic. Tilda made cocoa in the kitchen and she and Emily drank it in bed, huddled in sweaters and dressing gowns because it was January, and the room was cold.

Emily said, ‘Are you in love with Max?’

Tilda laughed. ‘Of course not.’

‘I don’t see why not. He’s rather good-looking and frightfully intelligent.’

Tilda dipped a biscuit in her cocoa. ‘Then you may fall in love with Max, Em.’

Emily shook her head. ‘I don’t think so. He’s just the teeniest bit terrifying. And he thinks I’m trivial – no, Tilda, he does, I can tell. Some men do. I don’t care, they’re probably right. I’m looking for a man who’ll worship me. Could you recommend anyone?’

‘Well …’ Tilda considered the other occupants of 15 Pargeter Street. ‘There’s Michael. He’s great fun. And Fergus – sweet, but a bit – well,
passionate.’

‘Yum,’ said Emily. ‘I like Fergus already.’

‘And Stefan, though he’s rather odd. And Giles, but he prefers men. I think, to be realistic, Fergus and Michael are your best bet.’

‘And you?’ Emily clutched her hot-water bottle. ‘How many lovers have you had, Tilda?’

Tilda shrugged. ‘None.’ She wrapped her eiderdown around herself. The window panes were opaque with frost, though it was not yet midnight.

‘Because of Daragh?’

Tilda did not reply. She was friendly with all the male residents of 15 Pargeter Street, but she wasn’t in love with any of them. She would never again experience the same exhilarating delight that she had known with Daragh. She simply wasn’t capable of it. If she married, then she must settle for less.

‘I saw him,’ said Emily, ‘in Ely. I was walking home from my awful job. Daragh was coming out of the draper’s.’

‘Did you speak to him?’ Tilda’s voice was a whisper.

Emily nodded. ‘I was going to tear him off a strip, tell him how awful he’d made you feel, but somehow …’ She shrugged. ‘You know what Daragh’s like, Tilda. You just look at him and you
melt
, somehow. All your good intentions go. I told him that you were in London staying near my brother, and having a terrific time. I didn’t want him to think you were pining for him.’

‘I’m not,’ said Tilda sharply.

‘Of course not. Anyway, he told me that he has a baby daughter – Kathleen or something – so I suppose he’s a respectable family man now.’ She frowned. ‘He seemed different. I can’t quite … Smarter, of course … and more sure of himself. But – well,
colder
, and rather …’

‘What?’

‘Rather unhappy,’ said Emily.

Tilda had not only worked longer for Professor Hastings than any of her predecessors had, she had also taken on new responsibilities. As Professor Hastings’ work with the Academic Assistance Council had increased, so had Tilda’s. She spent much of her time on the telephone or writing letters, finding homes and funding for exiled students. She had one day charmed a crabby acquaintance of Professor Hastings’ into providing books and stationery for one of the refugees. The professor, impressed, had called her into his study the following day, given her a battered address book and a box of scribbled notes, and told her that she would now be responsible for fund-raising. The job involved everything from organizing jumble sales to accompanying Professor Hastings to the occasional college dinner – all to further the cause of academic refugees in Britain.

Tilda discovered that she was good at persuading people to donate money, time or help. To the maternal she described the loneliness of the young people who arrived penniless in Britain; to the practical she emphasized the skills and talents that the refugees could offer to their adoptive country. In February, she visited Liesl Toller in the children’s home in Oxford in which she was living. The institution had agreed to take Liesl if funds were provided. There had been no other solution. Tilda herself
raised the money by a combination of coaxing and nagging. The institution, which housed over a hundred physically and mentally handicapped children, appalled Tilda. None of the children were addressed by the staff by name, only by the number assigned to them. Though they were fed and bathed and kept reasonably warm, they were given no affection and were allowed no toys. Tilda brought with her a teddy bear for Liesl, but it was confiscated by the matron. Friends and relatives were allowed to visit only twice a year, so although Gerd Toller lived in a college only a few miles away, his sister rarely saw him. On the journey back to London, Tilda stared out of the carriage window, seized by a mixture of anger and grief.
There are some children that nobody wants
.

And for the first time in a year she found herself thinking of Aunt Sarah without anger and bitterness. Aunt Sarah had taken her from the orphanage when no-one else had claimed her. Without Sarah Greenlees, Tilda knew that she too might have become one of those silent creatures she had seen in the institution, rocking herself back and forth, banging her head rhythmically against the wall, twisting her hair into mad spirals.

Max was cooking eggs and bacon when Emily Potter came into the kitchen. Emily was small and noisy and inquisitive, and made Max think of a mosquito. He nodded to her, and continued to read his newspaper while cooking.

Emily peered into the frying pan. ‘Bacon – yum,’ she said. ‘Is there any going spare?’

‘No,’ said Max repressively. There were only three rashers, and he had thrown up his lunch somewhere in the middle of the afternoon, on a choppy Channel crossing.

‘We’ve been shopping.’ Emily wore a low-cut, close-fitting black dress that emphasized her magnificent bosom. ‘Tilda and I haven’t eaten
all day.’

Max remembered picking Tilda up from the kitchen floor, when she had fainted. She had been impossibly light, her bones delicate, like a bird’s. He said, suddenly worried, ‘Tell Tilda she can share this, then.’

Emily leaned against the table, her bosom displayed to its best advantage, looking at him, her dark little eyes bright with her discovery.

‘Oh,
Max
. Don’t worry, I won’t tell.’ She tore off a crust of bread, and dipped it in his egg yolk. ‘And I’m not heartbroken, either. You and I would never do. I’ve learned to leave the dark, sultry men to Tilda.’

She swayed seductively out of the kitchen, and Max cursed her under his breath. He had acknowledged several months ago that he had fallen in love with Tilda Greenlees. The realization both irritated and amused him. It had changed nothing, though, and never would. He was old enough and experienced enough to avoid the more risible symptoms of lovesickness, and responsible enough to take the relationship no further than friendship. He would not make love to Tilda, even if she wanted him to. He liked her too much. Anna’s summation of the way he separated his emotional and physical needs rang horribly true.

He had just returned from Germany again, having stayed a month with his friends the Hansens. He had realized, whilst witnessing the changes in both Munich and Berlin, that he missed Tilda. He refused to allow himself the pleasure of imagining taking Tilda to a foreign city, though, and made himself concentrate on his work. He had been commissioned to write a series of articles for the
Manchester Guardian
, one of the few daily papers to come anywhere near to understanding the implications of Hitler’s rise to power. In Berlin, a fight had broken out in a nightclub. His overriding memory of the evening was of garishly made-up men in evening dresses and cocktail gowns exchanging blows with brown-uniformed
Sturmabteilung
. Breaking his own rules, Max too had joined in, and had been hit over the head with a chair for his trouble. At night, unable to sleep, he had prowled round Gussy Hansen’s kitchen, a tea towel filled with ice cubes clutched against his head, thinking of Tilda. He thought of it as an illness that must eventually pass.

Provoked, perhaps, by her difficult birth, Caitlin Canavan continued to disrupt the Hall. At three months old, she was still unable to tell the difference between night and day, and never slept more than a few hours at a time. Jossy had been too ill to breastfeed her, and Nana was too old to cope with endless night feeds, but Daragh insisted on taking over, sleeping in the night nursery on a little put-down bed, warming Caitlin’s bottles and spending hours gently coaxing the baby to take an extra half-ounce. Looking out of the window to the grey, frosty lawn, his daughter sleeping against his shoulder, Daragh was happy. He had found love again. He was a passionate man, and he needed love. Though this was a different sort of love from that which he had felt for Tilda, it recalled to him the depth of feeling that they had shared.

Around her fourth month the miracle happened, and Caitlin changed from a little, red-faced, screaming changeling to a bonny, well-grown baby, sometimes capable of contentment. When Daragh put her to bed, she slept through the night. When Jossy or Nana tucked her up in her cot, she’d refuse to settle, or would wake a few hours later, howling. Daragh comforted Caitlin when her first tooth came through; Daragh showed her off to admiring visitors. When the weather grew milder he wheeled Caitlin around the garden in her pram, watching her laugh at the pattern of the windswept leaves, or reach out her tiny hand towards the sun.

Daragh’s love for his daughter initially distracted him from a problem that grew more troublesome as the months went on. He and his wife no longer made love: Dr Williams’ prohibition had been confirmed by the expensive Mr Browne. At first, when Jossy had been ill and Daragh himself had been tired by the demands of the child, it had not distressed him. But as his natural urges had returned and as Jossy had recovered and begun to shuffle clumsily round the house, Daragh had realized the implications of the situation. Jossy herself asked him back to her bed. He agreed, for a night or two, but found it a torment. She insisted on cuddling and caressing him, yet he was denied the relief of finishing off what she had begun. He was not a eunuch or a
priest. It was not that he found Jossy particularly attractive – since Caitlin’s birth she had not regained her figure – but he needed a woman, any woman. He even found himself looking at the dimwitted nursery-maid with desire, or wondering whether any of Jossy’s horse-faced schoolfriends had grown bored with their husbands. Daragh removed himself to another bedroom. Jossy wept great, globby tears that patched her pale face with scarlet. Daragh, in desperation, went to see the priest.

The priest was sympathetic, but to Daragh’s tentative and guilty suggestion that they employ mechanical means of avoiding another child, was adamant. God would give him strength, said the priest, and Daragh walked gloomily out into the early spring sunshine, a lifetime of celibacy stretching greyly in front of him. Choices bleakly offered themselves to him. He could go against the teachings of the church and use a French letter, and burn in hell. He could take his wife, regardless of the frailty of her body, knowing that to make love to her could kill her. He could continue, guiltily and furtively, to give relief to himself. Or he could take a mistress.

Daragh buried his face in his hands. The conviction, born on his wedding night, that he had, because of Sarah Greenlees’ interference and Jossy’s infatuation, stepped on the wrong road, grew stronger. He had imagined a lifetime with Tilda. The physical and emotional longing he had felt for her was still vivid and painful. He knew that Tilda was living in London, in a room in the same house as Emily Potter’s brother. Daragh clenched his hands and rested his chin on his fists, thinking. Emily’s brother had been called – God, he could almost remember it – Ronald. No. Robert? Richard?

Roland. Daragh smiled.

Anna dropped the letters into Max’s attic before she went to lunch. ‘Bills, darling, always bills.’ Max inspected his post. Three bills and a letter. The letter had a Brighton postmark.

The single sheet of paper told him that his mother was engaged to be married to a man called Leslie Bates.
He is a retired businessman
,
and was once a captain in the Guards
, wrote Clara Franklin proudly. Max grabbed his coat and hat and dashed to Victoria Station to catch the Brighton train.

He reached his mother’s flat by three o’clock. She was dressed in a new outfit, and the glossy dress boxes scattered around the apartment told him that her spending spree had been thorough. He made tea, and tried to coax Leslie Bates’s address out of her. ‘You’re not going to be horrid to him, are you, Max?’ said Mrs Franklin, cautiously. He tried to reassure her, but was unconvincing and succeeded in reducing her to tears. He had the address, though.

Leslie Bates wore a houndstooth suit and an Old Harrovian tie, and lived in a depressing room in a back-street hotel. He had false teeth and thinning hair, but maintained the upright stance that Clara Franklin was so often attracted to, and which was, presumably, evinced to support the Harrow and Guards fiction. He offered Max a Scotch and a seat in a greasy armchair, both of which Max refused. Max knew that Leslie Bates understood perfectly why he was there.

Max made clear the reality of his mother’s financial situation, but Mr Bates did not, like some of his predecessors, immediately and embarrassedly withdraw from the engagement. Instead, eyeing Max’s old but good shoes and shabby Burberry, he said, ‘But there is money in the family, I assume?’

Max groaned inwardly. ‘My father’s investments lost most of their value in ‘29. And you must take my word, Mr Bates, that I have no private income. If you marry my mother, then you must expect to be responsible for some fairly substantial bills.’

Bates twiddled his moustache. ‘Clara is very attached to me. To break off the engagement would distress her. But an unhappy marriage might, don’t you think, cause her greater pain in the end.’

Max wanted to seize the fellow by his horrible dog-tooth lapels and shove him through the window to the pavement below. Instead, he took out his cheque book and said, ‘How much, Mr Bates?’

He paid one hundred and fifty pounds so that his mother might continue to live as a single woman and Leslie Bates might leave Brighton. When, an hour later, he explained to Clara Franklin that the wedding was not to take place, she wept and would not be consoled. During the night, Max’s fitful sleep on the sofa was interrupted by his mother’s prowling footsteps, and the sound of bottles clinking in the kitchen. She took the glass and the gin bottle into her bedroom, where she wept again.