Some Old Lover's Ghost (2 page)

A fortnight later, I put up in the local shop an advertisement offering tutoring in A level history. I’d taught before, but had
thankfully abandoned teaching after the modest success of my biography of Ellen Wilkinson. But every spark of creativity seemed to have died, and I was badly overdrawn at the bank. I had several replies to my advert, yet, as I arranged times in my diary, I felt a qualm of nervousness, a fleeting suspicion that, faced by these unknown students, I would be dull, uninspiring, inaccurate.

In the middle of February, Charles, bearing a Chinese takeaway and a bottle of red wine, called at my flat.
Sisters of the Moon
was to be broadcast at nine o’clock that evening. Looking around with some amazement, he said, ‘But you’re always so organized, darling,’ and I felt fleetingly embarrassed by the heaps of unwashed dishes, the balls of dust gathering in the corners of the room.

Charles and I sat on my bed, watching the television, eating lemon chicken and egg fried rice. My name was on the credits, and I had already seen the preview, of course, but now the programme seemed alien, nothing to do with me. Someone else had interviewed those frail old ladies, someone else had consigned to her tape recorder those sad tales of abandonment and betrayal.
Sisters of the Moon
told the story of a group of women, victims of the Mental Deficiency Act of 1913. The Act had allowed local authorities to certify and incarcerate pregnant women who were destitute or, in the eyes of a judgemental male authority, immoral – unmarried mothers, in other words. The Act was not repealed until the 1950s, and by then the asylum was those women’s home, and the outside world a changed, incomprehensible place.

Researching the programme, I had met Ivy Lunn in an old people’s home in Nottingham. She had been almost ninety years old, and as bright as a button. I had taken her out to tea, a treat which had evoked in her a mixture of delight and trepidation. When, over scones and jam, she had relaxed a little, she had told me her story. At the age of fourteen, Ivy had obtained a position as a scullery-maid in a house in London, just after the end of the First World War. One morning, the eldest son of the house had come into the bathroom as she was cleaning the tub. She had felt his hands below her waist, pulling up her skirt.
She had been afraid to cry out when he had raped her, afraid afterwards to tell anyone. She had understood neither what he had done, nor the possible consequences of it. She had known only that he had hurt and degraded her. When her pregnancy had begun to show, Ivy’s mistress dismissed her. When Ivy tried to explain what had happened, it was made clear that all the responsibility was hers. The son was returned to public school, and Ivy was sent to the asylum. Sitting there on the bed, Charles’s arm slung around my shoulders, I remembered that I had cried when Ivy had told me her story. I had sat in that chintzy little café and wept tears of pity. Ivy had comforted
me
. And yet now, all these long months later, I felt nothing.

The credits rolled, the closing theme faded, and Charles gave a whoop of delight. His gooseberry-green eyes were bright with exhilaration, and he talked very fast.

‘Stunning, don’t you think, Becca? Should be some bloody good reviews. I shall go out first thing and buy all the papers. We make a good team, don’t we?’ And he lunged forward and kissed me.

‘Coffee,’ I said firmly, disentangling myself.

‘I’ve an idea for another piece—’ he yelled, as I ground beans in the kitchen. ‘Public schools at the beginning of the century. You know, beating and buggery. I’m going to tie it in with the First World War, loss of Empire, all that—’

He rambled on while I poured boiling water into the cafetière, and put crockery on a tray. After a while, I stopped listening to him. To create a documentary that will make the viewer weep, you have to feel for your subjects. If Ivy Lunn, who had been raped and incarcerated and separated for almost a lifetime from her only child, was no longer able to move me, then I doubted whether anything could.

A week later, I had a telephone call from my agent, Nancy Walker.
‘Terrific
news, Rebecca,’ she cried. ‘I’m
delighted.’
Nancy always speaks in italics. She went on, ‘Sophia Jennings from Crawfords has just been on the phone. They’d like to meet up
with you, talk through a possible project.’ I could almost hear her smile.

Crawfords is a successful and reputable London publisher. Nancy explained, ‘They’re planning to commission a life of Dame Tilda Franklin.’

Until a few years ago, every newspaper or television investigation concerned with child welfare had necessitated an interview with Dame Tilda. She had devoted her life to the welfare of children – adopting and fostering numerous orphaned infants, setting up psychiatric clinics to care for disturbed children, and organizing charities and helplines and safe houses for those abused or at risk. Loving, yet efficient; gentle, but incisive. When I thought back, I only vaguely remembered Tilda Franklin’s face – a fleeting recollection of charismatic beauty and a sense of intelligence and vigour behind the charm.

‘They want to talk to
me?’
I said incredulously. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Apparently Crawfords first contacted Dame Tilda years ago, but she’s always refused. And then
she
telephoned
them
, insisting on
you
. She said that she won’t consider anyone else.’

There was a pause, as Nancy waited for me to comment. But I said nothing. I was, literally, speechless. I couldn’t think why Dame Tilda Franklin should want me to write her biography – and I was still inclined to believe that it was all a mistake – but nevertheless it was as though I had suddenly turned the corner of a very long, dark tunnel, and could see in the distance a pinpoint of light. I knew that I ought to tell Nancy that I couldn’t write any more, but for some reason – professional pride, I suppose – I did not.

‘Fascinating
life …’ added Nancy. ‘She did something terribly heroic in the war, I believe. Rebecca?’ A note of anxiety had entered her voice. ‘You are pleased, aren’t you?’

‘Delighted,’ I mumbled, but remembered too clearly sitting in front of the word processor, unable to write a coherent sentence. I said cautiously, ‘I’m not sure, Nancy. All those children … Could I do justice to her? And it would be a lot of work …’

That hasn’t put you off before,’ said Nancy briskly. ‘I’m sure you could make a
marvellous
job of it. Think it over, Rebecca. Give me a ring, and I’ll arrange a preliminary meeting with Sophia.’

She added a few pleasantries, and then rang off. I sat for a while, staring at the wall. I should have explained, I thought, that I’d lost confidence in my ability even to write a shopping list. And that it really wasn’t my sort of thing, to write the biography of a saint. I prefer to show the skull beneath the skin. History only interests me when the glaze cracks, and I glimpse clay.

How could I describe the happy families that Tilda Franklin had created, when that sort of security was something I had never really known? How could I write of the joy of caring for children, when my only attempt to create a new life had ended in miscarriage? I picked up the telephone, ready to dial Nancy’s number and tell her that there was really no point in my talking to the people at Crawfords, but I put the receiver back without touching the keypad. There was still that flicker of optimism, that small, muted return of the self-belief I thought I had lost for ever.

I grabbed my car keys and left the house and drove to Twickenham, where I walked, watching the mist rise from the Thames. A wet, yapping dog ran along the bank towards me, and shook himself so that drops of water spun from his fur like sparks from a Catherine wheel. The clouds had thinned at last, and I glimpsed the sun, a dim pearl of pink and orange. The water lapped at the toes of my boots, but I turned away from the river before the clouds could return to blot out the sunshine. And when I reached home, I made myself phone Nancy. I’d go and talk to Crawfords next week, I told her.

Dame Tilda Franklin lived in the village of Woodcott St Martin, in Oxfordshire. Trapped on the M40 between hissing lorries and impatient sales reps, I almost wished I could turn back. But I forced myself to drive on, lurching and pausing with the queues of traffic, peering through the hypnotic sweep of the windscreen wipers.

I’d talked through the project with my prospective editor. She had suggested I speak to Tilda Franklin herself, and, if I was still interested in the commission, rough out some ideas. If Crawfords were happy with my suggestions, they’d pay a reasonable, if not over-generous, advance.

It was a relief to leave the motorway, and to plunge into a countryside of rolling hills and narrow, curling roads, and hollows where mist gathered in pools. I had to stop several times to check the map. I longed for coffee. It was early, not yet nine o’clock, and the world was only half awake. After about half an hour, I reached Woodcott St Martin, a sprawling village with a green, and a duckpond, and a couple of shops. I stopped at the newsagent and asked for directions to Dame Tilda’s home, The Red House. ‘She’s not been well,’ said the shopkeeper. ‘She often has a touch of bronchitis at this time of year.’

The Red House stood a little apart from the rest of the village. I saw a gleam of silver river to one side of the building, and playing fields, their untenanted swings ghostly in the greyish light, to the other. The house was large and old, its gables pierced by stone windows. The walls were of dark red brick, and the roof-tiles were discoloured by lichen. Box trees, carved into huge globes and four-sided pyramids, walled the narrow path. The mist faded their dark green leaves, and pearled their fantastic festoon of spiders’ webs. Chill and solid, the great topiaried bushes enclosed me between them, cutting me off from the rest of the garden. I shivered: this was not the careful tangle of rose and aster that I had expected. These trees were vast and arcane, their shapes suggesting a symbolism unintelligible to me. I was relieved to escape them for the narrow gravel court in front of the house. When I looked down at myself, and saw the gossamer that clung to my jacket, I brushed it hurriedly away and rang the doorbell.

Inside, I followed Dame Tilda’s housekeeper through rooms and passageways. Portraits of children – painted, sketched and photographed – looked back at me from the walls. Children that Dame Tilda Franklin had cared for, I assumed. Infants
and adolescents, girls with ribbons in their hair, boys in baggy corduroy shorts and sagging socks. Fading childhood scrawls, a clumsily worked length of cross-stitch, a blurred snapshot of a boy, hair quiffed Fifties-fashion, standing beside a gleaming motor scooter. The gilt frames of the pictures lit the dark oak-panelled interior.

The housekeeper led me to a room at the back of the house and tapped on the door. ‘Miss Bennett is here, Tilda.’

The garden room was furnished with shabby, comfortable furniture, and plants – hoya, plumbago, bougainvillaea –crawling up the walls. A woman was standing in a corner of the room, secateurs in hand. She turned towards me.

‘Miss Bennett? How good of you to come. I do apologize for suggesting such an unreasonably early hour, but I have a dreadful tendency to fall asleep in the afternoons.’

‘Mrs—’ But I remembered the damehood, or whatever one calls such things. ‘I mean, Dame Matilda—’ I floundered.

She put aside the secateurs. ‘Call me Tilda,
please
. The “Dame” reminds me of the pantomime. And no-one has ever called me Matilda – so forbidding, don’t you think?’

She smiled. Beauty lingers, and though Tilda Franklin was now eighty years old I could see its lineaments still in her high, delicate cheekbones, her straight, narrow nose. Her eyelids were blue-veined, almost transparent, and her light eyes were set deep into her skull. Her face was longish, carefully sculptured, and her spine even in old age was straight. Beside Tilda I felt short, sloppy, troll-featured. She wore a soft tweed skirt, a cashmere cardigan, pearls; I, a long black skirt and suede jacket that I’d always thought possessed a sexily crumpled allure. I should have worn my one good suit.

I asked her to call me Rebecca, and we shook hands. Her fingers were insubstantial and birdlike. I thought that if I gripped too hard the bones would turn to powder.

‘You’ll join me for coffee, won’t you, Rebecca? Such a long journey. So good of you to come.’

She talked about the plants in the garden room until the
housekeeper reappeared with a tray of coffee and home-made biscuits.

‘The hoya is in flower already. It has a glorious scent, though only at night-time, of course. I have never understood how a plant can have fragrance at one time of day and not at another. Patrick, my grandson, tried to explain to me once.’ She added, ‘I am so pleased that you agreed to talk to me, Rebecca. Do you know why I suggested that you write my biography?’

I mumbled cautiously, ‘I assumed you’d read my book.’

She shook her head. ‘I’m afraid I don’t read much these days. My eyesight – such a nuisance. I listen to the television, though. I saw your documentary.’

Everything about her – this house, her appearance, even the coffee cups – proclaimed her to be from another age. I couldn’t picture Tilda slumped on the living-room sofa, flicking channels on a remote control.

‘You saw
Sisters of the Moon
?’

She nodded. ‘Yes. And a few days later, I was in Blackwells, buying a birthday present for my granddaughter, and I saw your name on a book cover. Providential, don’t you think?’ She paused. ‘I found your television programme very … very touching.’

I was horrified to notice that there were tears in her eyes.

‘Very touching, and very intelligent. No unnecessary sentiment. No sensationalism. You stood back, and let those women tell their stories. I admire that. It implies a certain wisdom, a sense of your own limited importance in the scheme of things. It implies also a sense of justice. I do believe in justice, you see, Rebecca.’ Her expression altered, and her light grey eyes darkened. ‘People have forgotten those women, and they have forgotten the power that men like Edward de Paveley possessed. No-one should have such power.’