Some Old Lover's Ghost (41 page)

We sat in silence, evading each other’s eyes. I thought of Jennifer: beautiful, elegant Jennifer Franklin. Six inches taller than me, and probably, damn it, a stone lighter. My headache was augmented by a feeling of utter misery.

Patrick said stiffly, ‘I realize that you need to talk to as many people as possible. But Caitlin is, I think, a special case. She’s always been a troublemaker. She drinks a lot, and then she talks a lot, and most of it is rubbish but, you know, mud sticks.’

‘You prefer her to stay in Dublin, out of the way.’ The words snapped out before I could hold them back.

His head jerked up, his blue eyes wide and angry. ‘Christ, Rebecca – you make it sound so sinister.’

He refilled his glass; I refused more wine. I felt slightly sick. ‘I can’t just ignore what Caitlin says, Patrick,’ I hissed. ‘I can’t just dismiss it – pretend it hasn’t been said.’

He blinked. His fingers drummed against the edge of the table. ‘So you believe her?’

‘No. I don’t know. Patrick—’

‘Not an unreasonable question, Rebecca. If you didn’t believe Caitlin then why did you go and see her?’

‘For heaven’s sake, Patrick—’ I had spoken too loud; some of the boys at the bar turned round and stared.
‘Stop trying to catch me out. Stop trying to make
me
feel guilty.’

My heart pounded painfully in my chest. Whereas formerly I had read desire, or even love, in his eyes, I now saw something else. His expression chilled me.

He said slowly, ‘I always knew this bloody biography was a mistake.’

‘What did you want of me, Patrick? Some anodyne little book showing only one side of Tilda? No-one is perfect, you know.’

‘I’d almost become resigned to the idea. Almost begun to welcome it. I thought I could trust you to do a decent job.’ His voice was bitter. ‘But you’re going to write some sensationalist rubbish, aren’t you?’

‘How dare you—’ I stood up clumsily, knocking over my wine glass so that it shattered on the tiled floor. There was a ragged chorus of cheers from the red-braced mob at the bar.

‘There are plenty of skeletons in our family closet, Rebecca, but they’re just not the ones you’re looking at. Ask Melissa what Caitlin did. Ask her.’ Patrick’s angry voice followed me as I ran out of the bar.

It was rush hour. My Tube ticket refused to go through the barrier; as I stood there stupidly staring at it, the man behind me pushed his ticket into the slot and shoved me through before him. I squeezed onto the Underground train, nauseated by the hot, sweating bodies that surrounded me. When the train stopped in a tunnel and for a few moments the lights went out, I thought of Daragh, in the dike: the darkness, the suffocating weight of the soil.

I discovered, when I finally reached my flat, that I had come out without my key, and I had to fiddle with the little kitchen window beside the gravel path. The telephone began to ring just as I shook the latch free and wormed through the open window onto the sink. I made a mental note to get it fixed and, convinced that Patrick must be telephoning to make up our quarrel, dashed to answer the phone.

When Charles answered, I began to cry. Because I was hot
and tired and miserable, I suppose. Charles was perfectly sweet. ‘I shall jump in a taxi
immediately
, Rebecca.’ I couldn’t put him off because I could hardly speak.

He was at my door in ten minutes, with a huge bunch of flowers, a bottle of wine and a video of
Casablanca
. He found a jug for the flowers, and a couple of glasses for the wine, and looked at my red eyes, and said, ‘You’re not weeping for the gorgeous Patrick Franklin, are you?’ and, though I thought I had got myself under control, I began to howl again.

He hugged me and patted my back, while I tried incoherently to explain.

‘Patrick – quarrelled. In a wine bar—’

‘Ghastly places, darling.’

‘Only trying to do my
job
—’

‘There, there.’

“S not my fault if his grandmother’s a murderer—’

‘Absolutely, darling.’

‘He’s
the bloody lawyer—’

‘Poor old Patrick’s got his reputation to think of, hasn’t he?’

At that, I stopped howling, and looked up. ‘What do you mean, Charles?’

He offered me his handkerchief. ‘Well, as you said, he is a lawyer. Rather a well-known lawyer, in fact. Probably intends to be a QC or a judge or something. Wouldn’t do his career much good if people knew his grandma had a habit of socking her lovers over the head and burying them alive in dikes.’

I stared at him. I felt cold inside. ‘You mean, you think that he
knows …
?’

‘I’ve no idea, darling. Never met the man.’

I thought of Patrick, who had responded to the news of the discovery of Daragh’s body with anger, not shock. Patrick, whose family had paid Caitlin Canavan off for years. Patrick, who had persuaded his friend in the Cambridgeshire police force that Caitlin was just a mad old drunk.

‘A drink?’ asked Charles, gesturing to the wine bottle, but I
shook my head. ‘I’d rather have tea.’ I had drunk enough today. ‘Would you, Charles?’

He went into the kitchen. I sat in the armchair, trying to think, but reduced to a sort of mental paralysis by fear and misery. Of course Patrick’s reputation – and the reputation of the Franklin family – was important to him. His well-loved grandmother, his illustrious father. At Tilda’s party I had met musicians, writers, doctors and scientists. Tilda’s family – Patrick’s family – were not ordinary. They were not filing clerks or bus drivers or shop assistants. Even Matty, with her nose-ring, intended to read physics at Cambridge.

If Tilda had been involved in the death of her old lover, and if that involvement was to become known – through me – how might that affect the Franklin family? As a dark stain, perhaps, tarnishing generations, blackening both the glamour of their past and their glittering present-day lives.

Charles placed the tray on my desk, and poured the tea. We didn’t talk about Patrick or Tilda; instead, he put on the video and we watched it, curled up on my bed, Charles’s comforting arm round my shoulders. Afterwards, he offered to stay the night in case I wanted company, but I refused. I needed to be alone. I needed to think. I needed to understand how deeply I had been betrayed.

I was curled up in a foetal postition, my wrists and ankles latched together. I struggled feebly as they shovelled the earth upon me. A clod of wet clay on my feet, another on my chest. It squeezed my lungs, stealing my breath, and its scent invaded my nostrils, heavy and grassy and cloying. Sticky morsels of earth struck my face, rolling into my eye sockets and mouth. I tried to move, but the soil weighed me down. It cut off the light, making me dumb, its weight increasing with each impacting spadeful, pinning me to the darkness, compressing the spongy air sacs of my lungs and the chambers of my heart. The heat, the weight and the blackness intensified, so that I could not move at all …

I sat up. I think I screamed aloud. My hand, searching for the light switch, shook so much that I knocked the lamp from the
chest of drawers and it fell to the floor, shattering the bulb. It was not yet dawn; the room was inky black, opaque. My heart pounded in my chest. Thud, thud, thud … I put a foot out of bed to stumble to the light switch, to escape this awful oppressive darkness, and then I realized that the sound I heard was not in rhythm with the beating of my heart. Thud, thud, thud … crunch, crunch, crunch. Footsteps on gravel. I had to clench my fists, to press them against my teeth to stop myself screaming. Fumbling in the darkness, I found the book about the Fens. I climbed out of bed, and knew from the pain in my heel that I had stepped on a fragment of broken glass. Blood pulsed in my ears, and I struggled to get hold of myself. I felt sick, my forehead glazed with sweat. I told myself that I was imagining the footsteps. That they lingered from my dream, the footprints of Daragh’s murderer, walking away from that unquiet grave.

I opened the bedroom door cautiously, the book clutched in my hand. The small corridor was unlit: the bulb had gone weeks ago and the socket was high and inaccessible. I tiptoed to the kitchen. As I pushed open the door, I heard the noise again, and then a yowl and the clang of a dustbin lid. A cat. I switched on the light and slid down the wall to sit on the floor, half laughing at myself, half furious. The book slipped out of my hands and fell open. I saw by the date stamp that it was already a fortnight overdue. For some reason this upset me disproportionately: my life seemed to be sliding out of control again. I sat there for a while, hot and trembling with reaction, but as cold as clay inside. The waves of nausea intensified; my stomach lurched and I ran to the bathroom and was extremely sick.

Afterwards, I went back to bed with a glass of water and a plaster for my foot. The nightmare lingered, oppressive and claustrophobic. How ridiculous, I told myself, to have been reduced to nausea by an image of something that might have happened almost fifty years ago. And then it occurred to me, with sudden horrible intuition, that it wasn’t only the library book that was overdue. That my sickness might have nothing to do with my dream. I limped into the living room and found
my diary and leafed back through the pages. After ten minutes of increasingly frantic checking, I came to the conclusion that I had not had a period since two weeks before I went to Cumbria. Eight weeks ago.

I hadn’t gone back on the pill since my miscarriage. Since Toby, I’d gloomily anticipated celibacy, and when Patrick and I had become lovers he had volunteered to take care of that side of things. I had been relieved: I had often felt sick and bloated when taking the pill. But that first time … I remembered the straw scratching my back, the echo of the rain, and how Patrick’s body had fitted into mine. Neither of us had considered the consequences. There hadn’t been time.

I counted the weeks again, certain that I must have made a mistake. The numbers were unchanged: eight weeks. I sat up in bed, my head clutched in my hands. Dawn had begun to seep through the window, showing me what I already knew: that my home, with its three small rooms and a concrete yard instead of a garden, was utterly unsuitable for children. I imagined a baby buggy, Moses basket, changing mat and all the other clutter that babies necessitate added to my own mess. I had glimpsed through my sister the unending effort that looking after a small child entails; I remembered Jane, white-faced and straggle-haired, telling me that she would sell her soul for eight hours’ uninterrupted sleep. I pictured myself changing a baby with one hand while typing with the other. I imagined the sniggering glances of the Jason Darkes of this world as I breastfed a baby while discussing the causes of the First World War.

And I began, sitting there in the cold early morning light, to question whether I could continue with Tilda Franklin’s biography. Tilda’s image seemed to be splitting in two, the private face at variance with the public one. My faith in Tilda had eroded like the dike that had been battered by floodwater, the dike which had once concealed Daragh Canavan’s body. I could not dismiss Caitlin Canavan’s accusations as the jealous ravings of a lonely, abandoned woman. Tilda herself had admitted that she and Daragh had been lovers, and Caitlin’s conviction that Daragh
had been going to meet Tilda on the night of his disappearance had the ring of truth.
I’m going to net a little bird
.

Leila Gilbert’s voice echoed, too.
Tilda shot him and pushed his body into the dike
. When I tried to picture the polders of north Holland, I saw instead the long bleak line of Southam dike. The splash and suck of bubbles as the soldier’s body tumbled into the water; the earth that had entombed Daragh Canavan as he still breathed.

Had Tilda lied to me about her motive for having her biography written? Had she contacted me not out of a desire to make her mother’s story public – a motive which convinced me less and less – but with a less reputable intention? Tilda was old and frail, she must know that she had not long to live. Had she chosen me as her instrument? Was I to see only the fairer face – was I to fix her image for posterity in white marble, indisputable, indissoluble? Was I to enable her to make her last gift to the family who had always been of paramount importance to her – the gift of an untarnished reputation?

And as I followed that thought to its logical conclusion, I remembered my first conversation with Patrick in the garden of The Red House. Myself, sarcastically asking him whether he thought me illustrious enough to write his grandmother’s biography. And his reply.
I should think you’re as good as anyone. Better than most, perhaps
. It occurred to me, with cold and threatening plausibility, that Patrick had approved my choice
because
of my inexperience, and not in spite of it. Patrick, the lawyer, guessing – or knowing – that Tilda had something to hide, had believed me too amateurish – and too stupid – to recognize the contradictions in his grandmother’s story.

The edifice that I had built up was failing, weakened from its foundations. We don’t believe in bad blood any more, but we do believe in genes. Little thumbprints, computer dots on a double helix. Is there a gene for evil, that Edward de Paveley passed on to one daughter and not to the other? For poor Jossy had been foolish, not evil. And Tilda – what was Tilda? Had she inherited her father’s ruthlessness, his imperiousness? Had
she, when she had understood that Daragh had destroyed her marriage, yet would cling on to his own, meted out her own sort of justice to her deceitful, fickle lover?
I do believe in justice
, Tilda had said to me, a long time ago – yet in what justice did she believe? An older sort of justice, I feared, Sarah Greenlees’ sort of justice. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth …

You cannot write unless you believe in what you are writing, and my belief was crumbling. My belief in Tilda, whom I had learned to love, was ebbing away. I could not be used as Tilda’s instrument. Yet without the income from the book about Tilda, I could not support myself, let alone a baby. I went back to bed, but I remembered the spider-webs that had festooned the box trees in the garden of The Red House, and how they had clung to me, a sticky gossamer that I could not brush away. And I wept again, knowing that I had lost Patrick, whom I had let myself love, a little.