Some Old Lover's Ghost (39 page)

The future stretched out before her, as bleak and featureless as the fields that surrounded Southam. Sarah had died and Max had left her, and she would never have the third baby that she had longed for. The children who had once needed her – the academic and
Kindertransporte
refugees – now had their own lives. Josh and Melissa were growing older, and her own life seemed to have lost momentum. She thought of Max, and she thought of Sarah and, as she pressed her hands against her forehead, tears trickled through her latticed fingers.

Tilda knocked on the door of Kit de Paveley’s house. She heard Kit’s wheezing before he slipped the bolt. She began to apologize for her unexpected arrival, but Kit beckoned her inside.

The house shocked her. The floors and walls were blackened, and mould flowered in gaps between the wainscoting. The smell of damp and decay was overpowering. ‘The housekeeper won’t come any more,’ explained Kit as Tilda followed him down a corridor. ‘Since the flood. The water took weeks to drop below floor level – I was sloshing about in my gumboots for ages.’ He smiled, trying to make a joke of it, but he looked ill. He opened a door. ‘I’ve had a go at this room, though,’ he said. ‘Will it do?’

He looked at her with such obvious, such unexpected anxiety that she smiled and said, ‘It’s splendid, Kit. Quite splendid.’ The room was better than the others. Bare boards, a few pieces of furniture, old cretonne curtains flapping at the window.

‘The dig I’d begun …’ said Kit suddenly. ‘Where you found your coin, Mrs Franklin.’

She remembered giving Kit the coin that she’d worn around her neck. For luck. Her luck, like Daragh’s, had run out.

‘It was promising. I’d tried a few other sites beside the bank, but I found nothing. Then I discovered some tesserae and potshards. And a lovely little piece of glass. You must understand, you don’t often find Roman glass. They reused it, you see.’

Tilda wondered whether he remembered to shop for himself, or to cook, or to launder his clothes. She resolved to ask him to tea.

‘But I couldn’t dig in the snow, and then the flood … Everything swept away … destroyed …’ Kit blinked, and turned aside.

‘But you’ll try again, won’t you, Kit?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’ His hands dug into his pockets, he stared out of the window to the dike.

Tilda unfolded the handkerchief in which she had wrapped Sarah’s sovereigns. ‘I wondered if you would look at these? My aunt left them to me and I thought that I might sell them.’

The coins slid into Kit’s outstretched hands. His head bent, he examined them carefully. Through the window, Tilda could see the dike, the thinly grassed slope now the only evidence of the spring’s disaster.

The pains in her back persisted at irregular intervals throughout the night. Jossy fell asleep eventually, convinced that when she woke in the morning they would have stopped. They hadn’t, but they had eased enough for her to drive Caitlin to school. Sitting in the school car park, crouched over the steering wheel, she wondered whether to go and see Dr Williams. But it seemed too much trouble: all that fuss, all the complicated arrangements she would have to make if Dr Williams were to admit her to hospital. Whereas if she went home, it might go away.

She drove home and sat for a while in the kitchen, sipping a cup of tea. The pain retreated until it was a slight ache, almost unnoticeable. Outside, it was a warm, bright day. The sort of day when Daragh might come home. She always associated Daragh with summer: whenever she pictured him in her mind’s eye, he
was striding along the top of the bank, his hands in the pockets of his old corduroy jacket, the breeze feathering his short black curls. Jossy rose from the chair and tried an experimental walk to the front door. She felt fine. It was too sunny for a cardigan, so she covered her head with her old straw hat and went outside.

She walked through the gardens, remembering the first time she had walked here with Daragh. She had known then that she loved him, and would always love him. He had been everything she could not be: vivid and bright and beautiful. When she looked back over the years, she seemed always to have been running, trying to keep up with him as he darted just out of her reach, intangible, impossibly luminescent. She did not mind that: she was just then grateful for the experience of having loved.

She passed the tangled raspberry canes and mildewed gooseberries in the kitchen garden and looked out across the field, patched red with poppies and corncockles. Jossy walked to the dike and began slowly to scramble up the slope. The covering of grass and weeds was not yet complete, and her sandals slipped in the clay. When she reached the summit her heart was hammering painfully, so she sank to her knees beside the still black water. She closed her eyes, feeling close to him. She could almost hear his footstep and catch his whispering words, blown on the breeze. His hand might touch her shoulder, and he might sit beside her and look out with her across his lands. She sat for a long time, at peace with herself, and then she became aware of a wetness between her legs. She was afraid to look, and when she stood up and saw the bloodstains on the back of her cotton dress she began to whimper with fear. She half climbed, half slid down the bank, tumbling uncontrollably down the last few feet. Pain stabbed at her back. She wanted to lie down and weep, but she knew that she must not. She had to be strong. She had had to be strong throughout her marriage: through the ordeal of giving birth to Caitlin, through the empty years when she and Daragh had not shared a bed, through his infidelities. Slowly, Jossy hobbled back to the Hall.

When, cautiously, she visited the lavatory, she knew that she
had to get help quickly. There was no-one else in the house. Something terrible was happening, and she could not for a moment think what to do. Crouched in the cloakroom, she tried to think clearly. She had to drive to Ely, yet the pain was so crippling she could hardly move. But she had to live, because if she did not, she would never see Daragh again.

Jossy shuffled out to the old Bentley, parked on the forecourt. Every action – turning the starter handle, opening the driver’s door, climbing in – was a torment. But she managed it, her teeth clenched, her breathing laboured. The car rumbled down the driveway and the pain gathered and flowered, making her groan out loud. When she looked down, the towel with which she had covered the seat was crimson.

Ely was too far; she would drive to the village instead. Someone – one of the women who’d safely given birth to a dozen children – would be able to help her. Jossy steered the Bentley out through the gates onto the track. Daragh had always meant to asphalt the track, but had never got round to it. The ruts, dried by the sun, jolted the car. She reminded herself, as agony uncoiled in her spine, that it was only a couple of miles to the village. Her hands slipped from the steering wheel and she rested her forehead against the cool leather, gasping. The Bentley slewed diagonally across the road and came to a halt. When the contraction faded, Jossy tried to steer the car out of the ditch. The engine ticked away, but the wheels spun impotently, sending up dust. After a while, she stopped trying, and gave herself up to the pain. The sun beat down on her head and she closed her eyes. She knew that she was going to die, but because it hurt so much she did not particularly mind. What she minded was that she would never see him again. The word
never
was awful and terrifying. Jossy lay across the front seats, her knees curled up to her chest, and closed her eyes.

Yet in the black heart of the pain, everything else, even Daragh, became insignificant. When it subsided, a battle that each time she almost lost, so great was the relief of the absence of pain that it was almost a pleasure. Every now and then she seemed to lose
a bit of time, a little chunk cut out of her ebbing life, expelled like her half-formed baby. As the contractions intensified, she sank into unconsciousness. In the fleeting return of awareness, she remembered that he had always come back to her. She had only to look in the right place, and she would see him.

She was in her bedroom at the Hall, and the baby, a boy, slept in his cradle. She pushed open a door and looked down the long dark corridor. At the end of the corridor stood a man.
Daragh
, said Jossy, and smiled, and ran to him.

Tilda stared at the heap of peel and bean shells. The knife slid into the dirty water, and her reflection gazed back at her: pale and anxious and tired. A loud knocking at the door made her snap back to reality and hastily dry her hands on her apron.

Kit de Paveley was standing on the doorstep. He was wheezing, his fist held against his chest, his face contorted with the effort of squeezing out speech. ‘Jossy,’ he said. ‘In the car … She’s dead, Mrs Franklin. Jossy’s dead.’ Kit’s lungs struggled audibly. Then he said, ‘That bastard – he killed her!’

She half dragged him into the house. Sitting in the parlour, he repeated, ‘In the car. On her
own.’

And that was the most awful part of it. When she had the rest of the story, and had fetched the priest and had called the doctor (for Kit – she had seen, looking into the Bentley, that it was too late for Jossy), and had driven to Ely to break the news to poor Caitlin and had taken her to Kit, she had thought, how dreadful, to die alone like that. How dreadful, too, to be Caitlin Canavan, who had lost both her parents within four short months. Caitlin hadn’t screamed or cried when Tilda had broken the news to her that her mother was dead; she had just folded her arms around her chest and seemed to close in on herself, her eyes coal-black in a small, white face. She had not spoken until Tilda had taken her across the fields to Kit de Paveley’s house, where she had stopped suddenly, staring at the battered, dirty building, and had wailed, ‘But what about the
horses
?’

Kit de Paveley called again the following morning. His skin was almost transparent, his eyes blue-shadowed.

‘Caitlin’s gone,’ he said. His long, lank, fair hair flopped forward over his face. ‘I can’t do it, Mrs Franklin. Can’t look after her. Hopeless. Even the cooking … haven’t a clue.’

Tilda touched his shoulder. ‘Hush now. There must be someone—’

‘There’s no-one. No aunts or cousins. A couple of mad great-uncles who can hardly look after themselves. We are not a …
prolific
… family.’

Tilda cycled to the Hall. The huge iron gates creaked as she opened them. She looked up at the house and tried to imagine her mother working here more than thirty years ago, but the closed doors and dusty panes looked back at her, telling her nothing, their secrets secure. She was a trespasser here, shut out by the history and wealth of the place, and she found herself tiptoeing through the gardens, afraid that her footsteps might disturb angry ghosts.

Grant that no hobgoblins fright me, no hungry devils rise up and bite me
… She found Caitlin in the stables, as she had expected. The light was dim, the child wrapped in Daragh’s old corduroy jacket, her face pressed against the gleaming black neck of her pony. Just for an instant Tilda mistook the daughter for the father; for the flicker of an eyelid Caitlin Canavan adopted the fleeting image of the man who had pulled her life out of shape. But at Tilda’s small, stifled gasp, Caitlin turned, and the man’s face became the child’s once more.

C
HAPTER
E
LEVEN

Tilda’s recounting to me of the events of 1947 had erased some of the shock of Caitlin Canavan’s telephone call. Tilda had admitted to having committed adultery with Daragh Canavan, her childhood sweetheart, but had told me that she had regretted it almost immediately. In describing Daragh’s encounter with his creditors, Tilda had reinforced Patrick’s conclusion that Daragh’s precarious financial situation had led to his disappearance.

I had almost managed to rationalize Caitlin Canavan’s accusations. I had misheard them, or misinterpreted them. Or she had been drunk, as Patrick had suggested. The day before, I had phoned Caitlin and arranged to meet her for lunch in a restaurant in Covent Garden. Before I left the house, I glanced at the photograph of Caitlin and Daragh: the little girl in her velvet-collared coat, button boots and beret, her hand in her father’s. They were strikingly similar, strikingly good-looking. Even in that stilted black and white photograph I could sense their greedy hunger for life.

The Covent Garden restaurant was long and dark, tunnelling back into the building. When I looked around, I recognized Caitlin Canavan instantly, sitting at a table in a wrought-iron
booth, a cigarette in one hand, a glass in the other. She must have been over sixty, yet the child’s face lingered, the eyes wideset and watchful, the mouth sensuous, red-lipped. I wormed past the waitresses.

‘Miss Canavan?’

‘Miss Bennett?’ She shook my hand.

‘Rebecca, please. May I sit down?’

She laughed throatily. ‘I hope you don’t mind sitting in the pariah’s enclosure.’ She gestured to her cigarette, and called the waitress. ‘Another G and T, darling, and one for my friend. And could we see the menu?’

I watched Caitlin covertly as she studied the menu. Once more, I experienced that peculiar and exhilarating sense of the boundaries of past and present merging, becoming indistinguishable.

‘Pasta … frittata …’ muttered Caitlin dismissively, ‘one cannot buy decent food in London these days …’ She stubbed her cigarette out in her empty glass. ‘At least in Dublin one can get a good steak.’

Her accent was an uneasy mixture of upper-middle-class English and southern Irish. ‘Do you still live in Dublin, Miss Canavan?’

‘I’ve a lovely little Georgian house on the south side.’ The waitress returned to take our order. ‘I’ll have the prawns, please, darling. And a bottle of that gorgeous Chablis.’

I ordered an omelette and took another mouthful of gin while my first question formed in my head. But she beat me to it, leaning across the table towards me, her eyes dark and intense.

‘I want to tell you about my father. I want you to understand what he was like. He was a wonderful man, Rebecca, the best father a girl could have. He taught me to ride, and he taught me to fish and to shoot. And to dance. When my father danced, all the women in the room would turn and look at him and wish that they were his partner. And he was so kind. I remember, at the beginning of the war, he insisted that we took in evacuees – most of the county families managed to get out of it, you understand. Frightful little toads they were too – they didn’t stay long, thank
God, they were unsuitable for some reason, but at least he tried. All the servants and labourers loved him. And he was so good with the dogs and the horses … I can still remember how he wept when he had to shoot his old gun dog.’ She paused, and lit another cigarette.