Some Old Lover's Ghost (3 page)

‘Who is – was – Edward de Paveley?’

‘Edward de Paveley was my father. He raped my mother, who was a maidservant in his house. When she became pregnant, he had her consigned to the workhouse, and from there she was sent to a mental institution in Peterborough.’

I was aware of a flicker of surprise. Looking at Tilda Franklin now, it was hard to believe that such a proud, elegant woman should have had so ignominious a beginning.

‘I am reckoned to have led an interesting life,’ Tilda added. ‘I have always guarded my privacy, though. But when I watched your programme I thought that could be interpreted as cowardice, rather than a lack of egotism. I have made a bargain with myself – I shall tell the story of my life in order that my mother’s story can be told.’ Tilda put aside her cup and saucer. ‘I would very much like you to consider writing my biography, Rebecca. I don’t expect you to give me an answer yet, of course. But you’ll think about it, won’t you?’

I mumbled something noncommittal. I couldn’t bring myself to confess to her that, though I had once been able to write, I was no longer able to do so. That Toby had taken, along with my self-respect, my art.

She seemed to take my silence for assent. ‘May I tell you a little more? Both my mother’s family – the Greenlees – and the de Paveleys lived in Southam, in the Cambridgeshire Fens. Fen villages were at that time very remote, very rural, little worlds of their own. My mother never travelled further than Ely, and that only occasionally. A wealthy landowner would have great influence in such a place.’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘My mother’s family had lived and worked in Southam for generations. My grandmother died young, and my grandfather – my mother’s father – was a labourer for the de Paveleys. They had two children – Sarah was the elder, and Deborah the younger. Their cottage was owned by the de Paveleys, and their renting of it was dependent on my grandfather’s continuing to work for the family. So when he died in 1912, the sisters lost their home as well as their father. Deborah, who was sixteen, went into service with the de Paveleys, but Sarah left the village to try her luck elsewhere.’

She paused. Looking outside, I noticed that the sun had broken through the mist. It caught the facets of the crystal chandelier hanging from the ceiling, so that pinpoints of coloured light – blue and orange and violet – danced across the walls.

‘I don’t know exactly what happened. Only that Edward de Paveley came to my mother’s bed and forced himself on her. And that my mother was thrown out of the Hall as soon as her pregnancy became obvious, and that she had nowhere to go but the workhouse. And I guess … I guess that my mother pleaded with Mr de Paveley. Told him that the child was his. Asked for his help.’

I imagined a bleak, featureless landscape, striped by narrow bands of water. I saw a young woman, little more than a child, her body distorted by pregnancy. And a man – on horseback, perhaps, or driving one of those boxy turn-of-the-century cars – pausing to speak to her.

‘Whatever my mother asked of Edward de Paveley, he refused to help her,’ Tilda continued. ‘In the May of 1914 she gave birth to me in the workhouse, and then the order was signed confining her to the asylum. I have a copy of that order. Edward de Paveley was a magistrate, and his signature is on the committal certificate.’

She fell silent, and when I glimpsed the terrible sadness in her eyes I could only guess at what it had cost her to lay bare to a stranger the secrets of what she had admitted was a very private soul. Then her expression altered: she seemed mentally to shake herself. ‘I was born in the workhouse,’ she explained, ‘but I spent my infancy in an orphanage. Illegitimate children were taken away from their mothers as soon as they were born, of course. People weren’t keen to adopt children such as myself, because it was thought that an illegitimate baby might inherit its mother’s immorality.’

The unwanted child, I thought, would salve the horror of her own birth by devoting her life to the rescue of other abandoned children. Such a neat, circular story.

‘I lived in the orphanage until I was about a year old. Then Sarah came back.’ Tilda smiled. ‘My Aunt Sarah. I have a picture.’

She opened the album that lay on the table. I looked down at the photograph. The face that stared back at me had that solemn, slightly uneasy expression common to so many portraits from the early part of the century. Something to do with having to sit
still so long for the camera, I suppose. Tilda’s Aunt Sarah had a stout, shapeless bosom covered by a high-necked blouse. I could see nothing of Tilda in her plain, strong face, nothing at all.

‘Deborah was the pretty sister and Sarah was the clever one,’ said Tilda, reading my thoughts. ‘I haven’t a photograph of Deborah, I’m afraid.’

‘You said that Sarah went away after her father died. Where did she go?’

‘Oh, anywhere and everywhere, I should imagine, knowing Sarah. She rarely settled in one place for long. By the time she came back to Cambridgeshire, my mother was dying. The regime was harsh in workhouses and asylums, and Deborah had never been strong.’

Tilda paused, and closed the photograph album. Just for a moment, her thin hand touched mine. ‘Sarah knew nothing of what had happened to her sister until she came back to the village. You must understand, Rebecca, how remote East Anglia was in the early part of the century. Very few people had telephones, and my mother had left school when she was ten to look after her father, and was more or less illiterate. Anyway, Sarah travelled to the asylum, and spoke to her sister before she died. Deborah told her what had happened. I imagine … I imagine, sometimes, how Sarah must have felt. How it must have eaten away at her, the anger and the guilt.’

‘Guilt?’

‘At not being there when her sister needed her. Sarah was a strong person, Rebecca. Sarah would have thought of something. Sarah would never have allowed Deborah to go to the workhouse.’

‘So Sarah adopted you?’

‘Yes. She buried her sister, and adopted her niece. I don’t remember the orphanage at all, of course – I was a baby when I left it. But Sarah never tried to pretend that she was my mother. I have always admired her for that honesty. As soon as I was old enough to understand, she told me that I was her younger sister’s child. Nothing more than that, naturally.’

Your father raped your mother
. I saw the impossibility of explaining such an outrage. ‘And you lived …?’ I prompted.

‘All over East Anglia and southern England. Suffolk … Norfolk … Kent, mostly. Sarah did seasonal farmwork.’

I smiled. ‘Like Tess of the D’Urbervilles?’

‘A little like that. In the summer we helped with the harvest and picked hops in Kent. In winter, we’d take in sewing. My Aunt Sarah could sew beautifully. You couldn’t see her stitches. She taught me to sew. She taught me everything.’

‘Did you go to school?’

‘Now and then, if we stayed in a village for more than a few weeks. Sarah taught me to read and to write, and she had a wonderful head for arithmetic. When I did go to school, I was always put in a class years above my age.’

It sounded a colourful, gypsy life, until I remembered that Tilda had been born in 1914, that ominous year, and that she had passed her childhood in the haunted, febrile Twenties. I said tentatively, ‘It must have been hard sometimes.’

‘Oh yes. I have never since been cold as I remember being cold then. How the frost used to eat into my hands and feet. The clouds that formed in the air when I took my first breath in the morning. And I was teased by other children, of course. For being different.’

Her words were matter-of-fact, untinged by self-pity. She still sat as upright as that woman in the sepia photograph, the aunt who had rescued her from the orphanage.

‘I am a little tired,’ she said suddenly. ‘So tedious to be old.’ She turned to me, focusing her flinty grey eyes on me. ‘Do you wish to know more, Rebecca? Shall I tell you about Jossy …?’

‘Jossy?’ I repeated.

‘Jossy de Paveley. Edward de Paveley’s daughter.’ Her expression altered, one of those abrupt changes of mood that I came to realize were characteristic of her. ‘She was my half-sister, of course …’

When her father was wounded in 1918, Joscelin de Paveley prayed each night that he would not recover. When he returned home, lurching on crutches from the Bentley to the front door, Jossy’s infant faith in God faltered, and never quite recovered.

Edward de Paveley’s experiences of war, his loss of a leg in the last months of bitter fighting, his near death and eventual recovery, did not, in forcing him to confront his own mortality, soften his autocratic character. To Jossy, the only lasting effect of the war that destroyed for ever Europe’s complacency was that her father had become slower, less mobile. He was, simply, easier to run away from.

Through the years of her childhood, Jossy and her father and Uncle Christopher in the steward’s house lived separate lives, planets orbiting the necessary sun of Hall and estate, their existences conjoined, but rarely touching. Uncle Christopher’s sphere was the fields and dikes and tenant farms, Jossy’s was school and the old nursery.

The de Paveleys’ house was called the Hall (it may have had another name once, but that had been forgotten centuries ago). The nearest village was called Southam. Both Southam and the Hall were built on small, separate, shallow islands of clay. In wet winters, floodwater licked at the shells and seedlings in Jossy’s garden.

Jossy’s life was governed by her desire to avoid her father, to escape the contempt in his gaze and the cold sarcasm that brought tears to her eyes. Occasionally, disastrously, their orbits collided. Once he tried to teach her to ride. The lesson lasted less than an hour. Jossy slumped in the saddle as her father shouted at her and beat his riding whip against his false leg. To someone else she might have attempted to explain that though she adored the pony, she was a little afraid of it. To her father, who was never afraid of anything, she knew that would be futile. When she realized that he would sell the pony, whom she had begun to love, Jossy started to weep, which made him angrier. The whip stung her knuckles as they gripped the reins, and Edward de Paveley railed against the fate that had given him only one spineless daughter.

Jossy divided her time between school, where she was reasonably happy, and home, where her happiness was dependent on avoiding her father. She had her own small kingdoms – the nursery, where she taught school to her dolls and gave them tea parties, and the garden, with the old swing. She had her mother’s desk in the morning room, where she wrote her stories and drew. She invented companions for herself, sketching pictures of her imaginary family. There were three sisters – Rosalie was the eldest, Claribel the youngest, and Jossy herself was in the middle. Their father was dead, and their mother was a glamorous, shadowy creature.

Jossy realized, when she was eleven or so, that her father would not remarry. Having tea one day with a friend who lived in Ely, she overheard Marjorie’s mother say to another lady, ‘I told Marjorie to invite poor little Joscelin de Paveley. I knew Alicia, her mother. The father won’t marry again – I’ve heard that his wound won’t let him.’ Jossy had struggled to hear more, but Mrs Lyons’ voice had lowered to a whisper. Jossy was not at all surprised to hear that her father’s false leg prevented him from remarrying. It was to her a source of revolted fascination. The echo of his uneven step on the stone flags of the Hall was the sound of fear. She had overheard Cook say to Nana that the master’s leg had been blown off at the hip; once, stumbling clumsily in a passageway, she had touched her father’s false leg. It had repulsed her, a dead thing attached to a living body.

Jossy had a tendency to be plump, and hair and eyes that she described to herself as mud-coloured. When she was fifteen, she began to rinse her hair with lemon juice and, in the many hours spent gazing into the mirror, almost succeeded in convincing herself that she was becoming fairer.

When she was nineteen, Jossy left school. She’d had two tries at her school certificate, and had failed both, but then most of the girls at her school failed their school certificate. A holding pen for the dim daughters of the rich, her father called it. On the day she left school, Jossy expected something extraordinary to happen, some sort of acknowledgement that she was now
a grown woman, a young lady. She would become suddenly beautiful. She would run the Hall with such smooth efficiency that even her father would be impressed. And she would meet, of course, the Gentleman.

She spent hours imagining the Gentleman. He was tall, dark, fleet-footed. He drove a car and rode a horse with fearless competence. He had a mysterious, troubled past, and he cared for Jossy more than for anything in the world. They would meet in romantic circumstances: escaping from the noise and heat of a ball, she would wander into the garden, where he would catch sight of her. He would be momentarily struck off his guard by her beauty. They would dance alone, whirling down paths studded with daisies, the scent of lilies perfuming the air, and the only light the soft gleam of the moon …

But nothing changed. Mrs Bradley and Cook continued to run the Hall, and Jossy’s hair, in spite of the lemon juice, remained a defiantly muddy brown. She attended dances and parties at her friends’ houses, but the boys were gauche and spotty and talked about cricket and motor cars. Nana still made Jossy’s dresses, which were not the sinuous clinging satin gowns pictured in the magazines that Jossy bought. Her days were divided between the nursery and the morning room and the garden, but without term-time to break up the tedium. Her outings were to church and to her cousin Kit, in the steward’s house. The days seemed very long. She kept her faith, though: she knew that he’d come. Two years after she had left school, Jossy de Paveley still waited for the Gentleman.

I sat back from the word processor. I felt exhausted but exhilarated. Four pages. I had driven home from Oxfordshire and, not even bothering to take off my coat, I had written four pages. And it had been easy. I felt as though someone had slackened the rope around my neck, the rope that had been choking me for months.