Some Old Lover's Ghost (37 page)

He was shivering again, so she stroked his shoulders, trying to rub warmth into them. ‘Hush now. Does Jossy know?’

He shook his head violently. Then he looked up and said, ‘Tilda, I shall lose the house,’ and she saw in his familiar green eyes an utter despair.

‘You’ll have to tell Jossy.’

Daragh pressed his knuckles against his chattering teeth. ‘She worships me,’ he muttered. ‘God knows why – I don’t deserve it, that’s for sure. How can I tell her the truth? How can I tell her that she’s been wrong, all these years? God knows, I haven’t been much of a husband to her – I never loved her, I didn’t even much
like
her – but she doesn’t deserve that. I’ve got used to her – we rattle along – it’s not much of a marriage, but—’

His voice broke. She took his hands between hers, trying to warm him. His body, more muscled with the years, had become unfamiliar, but when she laid his clenched fist against her face she remembered the warmth of his skin.

‘Such a tangle,’ he said, and took a shuddering breath. ‘Anyway, I’d the money from the early harvest earmarked to pay them off, and there was a little scribble in the dining room that someone told me was worth a thousand or so. Only the flood has washed away the crops and turned the picture to a pulp, and oh, Tilda, I don’t know what to do!’

She put her arms around him and let him rest his forehead on her shoulder. His entire body shook. He whispered, ‘I was always lucky … but it’s gone, Tilda. I can feel it running out—’

She stroked his hair and he pulled her tightly to him. She patted his back and muttered soothing words, but could feel the tears in her own eyes, taste them salt as they trailed down her face. She heard him whisper, ‘Tilda, what is it? I’m so sorry …’ and then felt him kiss her tears, small, soft pressings of his lips
against her face. ‘Darlin’ girl,’ he said, ‘you mustn’t cry for me, I’m not worth it, never was—’ and she knew that she should turn away, make some light-hearted remark, boil the kettle for tea.

Yet she did not. It was as though they were finishing at last what had been begun years before. His kisses changed in quality, lingering on her skin, coaxing from her a longing she had believed dead. Daragh wanted her; Daragh did not believe her old, undesirable, useless. With Daragh she was the young, optimistic, energetic Tilda that she once had been; with Daragh she could slough away war and loneliness. His touch brought her back from a sort of death, kindling a flame that seemed to set fire to her. When his hand slipped beneath the thin covering of her nightgown and he touched her breast, she wanted to cry at the exquisite, terrible pleasure of it. She had forgotten that she was capable of such pleasure. Daragh’s mouth traced the path from her neck to her cheekbone, and when their lips touched, she was lost.

Jossy, watching from the landing window, heard first the crunch of Daragh’s boots on the gravel, then the song that he whistled. It was half past midnight.

As he fumbled with his key in the lock, she ran from the landing to her bedroom. She crouched under the covers as he ran up the stairs and slammed the bathroom door. After a while, when there was silence, Jossy crept along the corridor to the bathroom. There, she touched Daragh’s shaving brush, still damp, and his towel, trying to stifle the misery of her suspicions with this second-hand proximity of him. She lifted the lid of the laundry basket and took out his shirt, holding it to her face, breathing in his scent. Then, opening her eyes, she caught sight of the unfamiliar laundry mark. And the name tag.
Franklin
, it read.

Jossy sank to her knees, moaning softly to herself.

Max had wanted to explain to Tilda that he needed time to think, time to recover the equilibrium that he had so resoundingly lost. He should have told her that it was he and not she who had
changed, but her wounded eyes had reproached him, and he had shied away from emotional involvement. If she touched him, or if he had allowed himself to touch her, then he might have broken into a thousand little pieces. He had stood on the edge of that precipice once, and he would do anything to avoid doing so again. He had, in the end, said all the wrong things, things that he suspected she had misinterpreted, but he knew that his clumsiness had been symptomatic of his state of mind.

In his rooms in London, it was easier. There was an armchair and a table and a basin and a wireless set that he hardly ever switched on. It was damned cold in this appallingly cold winter, and because of the fuel crisis the heating was off for most of the day, but both boarding school and the months he had spent with the Allied army in the winter of 1944–45 had taught him to tolerate cold. Here no-one hurled themselves at him shouting ‘Daddy’ in a way that made him, ridiculously, jump. Here no-one expected affection or intimacy, things he no longer felt able to give. He ate in the dingy little dining room, and his rooms were cleaned once a week by a preoccupied, silent woman who grieved for the son she had lost at El Alamein. The chap whom he now worked for tentatively suggested a trick cyclist, but Max waved away the suggestion, and nothing more was said. He knew that he was not shell-shocked, as so many of those who had survived the first war had been. It was just that he had seen things that no man ought to have seen, and they had left him with such a deep pessimism that, just now, he saw no point in anything. Max knew that men killed women as lovely as Tilda and tortured children as dear as Melissa and Josh, and that they took pleasure in doing so. The faces of his own children had constantly reminded him of that. He knew that he was not being fair to Tilda, that his absence wounded her, but he had no alternative.

He found solace in the dull routine of his life. Now, he rarely saw a newspaper, and all the magazines had had to close down because of the fuel shortage. He read only the most meaningless books, and listened only to the lightest music. He had photographs of Tilda and the children, but he kept them in a drawer. He used the
excuse of blocked roads and icy railway lines to avoid returning to Southam at the weekends. It was not that he did not love them, only that he had nothing left to give. Sitting in his rooms, Max watched the snow fall, and was thankful for the white blanket of silence that muted the city.

Yet the snow thawed, and spring came at last, and he found himself thinking of his family more and more. He took out the photographs, arranging them on a chest of drawers. He went to a concert, and did not weep. After work one day, he met his father in the Savoy. They talked about rugby, and about the government’s plans for nationalizing the iron and steel industries, and then Max told his father about his new job.

Mr Franklin blinked. ‘Didn’t think you liked that sort of thing, old boy.’

‘I don’t,’ said Max bluntly. ‘I detest it. But I didn’t want to write any more.’

‘What does Tilda think?’

Max evaded his father’s eyes. ‘Tilda and I have been living apart since January. I was working in London, and with the snow it became impossible to travel home, and …’ He shrugged.

Mr Franklin coughed. ‘I know that it’s damned difficult to find decent housing these days, but if one has money … You know that I have a bit put by, Max.’

Automatically, Max shook his head. His father substituted money for love. Affection was not his currency; only the cheques that Max always refused.

The waiter arrived. Mr Franklin poured water into his whisky and coughed again. ‘I let Clara down. Didn’t give her what she needed. Didn’t realize until it was too late.’

Max could not recall his father ever before talking about his marriage. He was almost stunned into silence, but he made an effort, guessing what those few fractured sentences had cost the older man.

‘Tilda’s not to blame. It’s all my fault. I saw some frightful things in the war, Dad, and I couldn’t get them out of my head.
Still can’t. You must know what I mean – you fought in the first show.’

This time the silence persisted. At last, rising from his seat, his father said, ‘When I first met your Tilda, I thought what a lovely girl she was. What a diamond.’ Mr Franklin gathered up his hat and umbrella, and his hand briefly rested on his son’s shoulder. ‘Don’t throw it away, Max. That’s what I did.’

Often she remembered Daragh’s leaving of her. He had turned away from her (they lay sprawled on the kitchen floor, their clothes scattered, gasping for breath) and he glanced at the clock and said, ‘Mother of God, Jossy will have sent out a search party.’ Then he sprang to his feet and, as he dressed, he whistled to himself.
No maid I’ve seen like the fair colleen that I met in the County Down
… Turning to go, he had seen his muddy clothes and scooped them up. Then, stooping, he had kissed her, and then he had gone, shutting the door behind him.

She had gone up to her bedroom, and had poured cold water from the jug to the basin, and had washed herself all over. Then she had sat, wrapped in a towel, on the edge of the bed. The dim light of the oil lamp had picked out shadowed reminders of the man she loved. His old dressing-gown, on the peg on the back of the door, his typewriter, on top of the chest of drawers, a packet of cigarettes on the mantelpiece. And their wedding photograph, silver-framed, on the bedside cabinet.
Oh, Max
, Tilda had whispered.
Oh, Max – what have I done?

At last, she wrote to him.
Dear Max
, she scribbled,
Sarah is very ill. In fact, I think she is dying. Everything is wrong since you went away. Please come home, Max, I need you so much
.

She signed the letter and blotted it. Then she stood up and moved to the window, pulling the curtain a few inches aside. She felt exhausted with guilt and dread and fear of the future, but she knew that she would not sleep. She longed to turn back the clock. Just then, she saw justice as Sarah did, a primitive weighing of good and bad. A reckoning. The heart suspended
on a balance and found wanting. She had betrayed Max, and for that a price must be paid.

Jossy drove to Cambridge. Water still blistered the fields, but the main roads were passable and the work of repairing the banks and dikes was well under way. In Cambridge, she made her way to a department store. There, in the beauty salon, she had her hair cut and tinted to hide the strands of grey. Then she spent a further half-hour while a disdainful girl in a white overall painted her face and lectured her on her failure to take care of her complexion. When Jossy opened her eyes and looked in the mirror, a new face stared back at her: the small lines around her mouth and nose disguised by powder and foundation, her dark eyes, always her best feature, given depth and size by liner and mascara.

After the beauty salon, she went shopping. She had bought nothing new for ages, so although clothing was still rationed she had plenty of coupons. With the help of an assistant, Jossy eventually selected a cream-coloured blouse and a knee-length black skirt. She would have preferred something calf-length – the ‘New Look’ that had been in all the magazines – but clothes were skimpily cut to save cloth. ‘Very smart, madam,’ said the girl as Jossy looked at her reflection in the changing-room mirror.
Smart
, thought Jossy savagely, as she began to take off the new clothes. Never beautiful.
Tilda is ten times more beautiful than you
. Her hands shook as she undid the buttons.

Back at the Hall, some of the bravado induced by the shopping spree faded. To begin with, the devastation of her home hadn’t upset her, because Daragh was safe. When she’d heard that the dike had blown, she had been seized by a certainty that she had lost him, convinced that though against the odds she had kept him from the greedy desire of other women, the floodwater had stolen him. Learning of his safety, she had not wept at what the waters had done to her home. Instead, when the waters had retreated, she had helped Daragh and the men drag sodden rugs and furniture from the lower level of the house, and then she had set to work, mopping out the residue of black silt.

Now, the paper that hung from the walls in tarnished shreds, and the bare, blackened floorboards, seemed to echo her sense of loss. At a time when she desperately needed to hold on to what she had, everything was disintegrating.

She served dinner at eight o’clock. Daragh’s eyes widened when he saw her. ‘You look very splendid, Joss.’

Very splendid. Ships and cars and houses were splendid. She saw herself as lumbering, broad-hipped, lacking all Tilda’s delicacy and elegance. But she smiled and said, ‘I’ve made us a special dinner, Daragh.’

His horse had thrown him the other day; he rubbed at the bruise on his chin. ‘Have I forgotten a birthday?’ he asked lightly. ‘Are we celebrating?’

‘I’ve some wonderful news, Daragh. I’ll tell you after we’ve finished.’

She had made three courses: soup, fish and dessert. The vegetables and fruit were from the garden, the fish plump trout that Daragh had caught the previous day. The bareness of the room was alleviated by the flames of the log fire and the candlelight. She brought the wireless from the kitchen and tuned it to the Third Programme, and music played softly as they ate. Daragh was as sparkling as he had been when he had begun the affair with Elsa Gordon.

After coffee and brandy, Jossy went to him as he stood by the fire, and nestled her head against his shoulder. She told him that she had visited the doctor that morning, and had learned that there was now no possibility that she would have another child. ‘It’s the change of life, Daragh. It comes earlier with some women than others, Dr Williams said.’

He hugged her, rather absently. ‘That’s rough. Poor old Joss.’

‘Daragh,’ she said. ‘You don’t understand. Don’t you see what this means? It means that we can be man and wife again. It means that you can share my bed again.’ There were tears in her eyes. She stood on tiptoe, her mouth seeking his. Her small kisses touched very gently his cut lip, and the bruise on his jaw. She drew him to
her, adoring the feel of him, the scent of him. Though a flicker of fear persisted, she knew that she had made the right decision.

She seduced him, this second honeymoon. She undressed him, she caressed him, she made him want her. When she felt him shudder inside her, she knew that she would win. Daragh would choose, as he had always done, the easiest path.