Some Old Lover's Ghost (42 page)

When I awoke again at ten o’clock the following morning, the horrors of the previous day and night had receded. I told myself that my nausea was likely to have been the consequence of fear, rather than pregnancy. I had not been regular since my miscarriage and, after all, Patrick and I had only been careless once – since Cumbria we had practised safe sex like responsible adults. As for my work, I told myself that I must make no rash decisions. I decided to have a day off – I had become too embroiled in this book, and had lost the capacity for objectivity that had always been so useful to me. So I cleaned my flat, and borrowed a stepladder from my next-door neighbour to replace the light bulb in the hall, and left a message on the answerphone of a joiner to replace the window latch. Then I went to the supermarket and lastly to the library, where I paid the fine and ordered half a dozen more obscure histories of the Fens, gleaned from my overdue book’s bibliography.

At home, the little red eye of the answerphone announced that there were two messages waiting for me.
Patrick
, I thought, and when first Charles’s and then Toby’s voice filled the room I was
almost overwhelmed by a raw grief. I could have phoned him, I suppose, but I no longer trusted him. He had accused me of being callous and over-ambitious – such hurt cut deeply. I missed all of Toby’s message and had to rewind it. He had tickets for the ballet tonight, he said. Did I want to come?

I was about to phone him and refuse, when something occurred to me. I contacted Toby at his chambers and arranged to meet him outside the Royal Opera House. The ballet was
Giselle
, and the tale of betrayal and madness and doomed love wormed its way into my heart, gnawing at the precarious equilibrium of the day. In the interval, I questioned Toby about Patrick, picking away at the thin scab until it hurt. I didn’t care in the least that Patrick Franklin was plainly the last person that Toby wanted to talk about, so I deserved, I suppose, to find out what I did. That Jennifer and Ellie lived in Cumbria, that the farmhouse where Patrick and I had first made love was only a few miles from the town where Patrick’s wife now lived.

In the course of another long, sleepless night, I concluded that Patrick had never loved me, and that, from the beginning of our relationship, he had been using me. Keeping an eye on me, distracting me, trying to ensure that I saw only the admirable side of Tilda’s character. Reputation, as Charles had pointed out, mattered to Patrick. The sort of glittering career that Toby coveted, Patrick was seizing for himself. If Tilda had played a part in Daragh Canavan’s death, and if I made public her involvement, the scandal would inevitably affect Patrick. Patrick had never wanted Tilda’s biography written but, unable to stop her, he had taken the next best route and had attempted to influence the biographer. Rich, handsome Patrick Franklin had found it easy enough to bewitch short, plump, struggling Rebecca Bennett. I had never felt more humiliated.

At mid-morning the next day, the phone rang. It was Joan, Tilda’s housekeeper.

‘Tilda’s in hospital, I’m afraid, Rebecca. I thought I should let you know.’

‘Angina?’ I asked.

‘It’s more serious than that. She had a heart attack last night. The police came to talk to her yesterday. And that wretched woman phoned—’ I heard Joan’s quick angry outward breath. ‘I was at the shops, and Tilda answered it—’

‘Caitlin telephoned?’

Joan’s voice was grim. ‘Yes. Anyway, Tilda’s not too good. Only immediate family are allowed to visit, but I’ll be here as usual on Monday, of course.’

I asked a few more questions, muttered hollow good wishes, and put the phone down. I spent a wretched weekend wondering whether to write to Nancy to tell her that I was going to have to break my contract – and then wondering how on earth I could repay the advance. And knowing that I should buy a pregnancy testing kit, but being unable to face doing so.

In the end, I drove to Oxfordshire as usual on Monday morning, postponing all decisions a few more days. I had expected to spend a quiet day sifting through old letters, but when I rang the doorbell Joan greeted me and told me that Tilda had asked me to visit her in hospital.

Reluctantly, I drove to the Radcliffe Infirmary. Tilda was in a small side room. ‘We told her only family, but she insisted on seeing you,’ said the nurse disapprovingly, as she led me along the corridor. Tilda, propped up on pillows, looked small and frail and white. I touched her papery forehead with my lips: a Judas-kiss.

‘Just five minutes,’ said the nurse.

I began to ask Tilda how she felt, but she grabbed my hand, halting me. Her breath was shallow and quick. ‘I had to see you, Rebecca,’ she whispered. ‘Caitlin said that she had talked to you about Daragh.’

I looked away from her great, wounded eyes. Tilda’s hold on life seemed so fragile that I was afraid I had only to say a word, or to frame the wrong question, for the thread to be snapped. So I said nothing.

‘I have to tell you about Daragh.’ Her words echoed Caitlin’s,
only a few days before.
I want to tell you about my father
. ‘He was a destroyer. It took me a very long time to realize it, and he didn’t intend to be, but he was. Daragh destroyed almost everyone who came in contact with him. Jossy … Max … Caitlin … and me, of course.’ She closed her eyes for a moment, as though even the act of seeing exhausted her. ‘Daragh destroyed that silly girl he got pregnant … and he destroyed his daughter’s inheritance. Caitlin lost everything – the house, the land, everything … What Daragh did touched, in the end, my children too.’

Tilda opened her eyes and looked at me. ‘I am not saying that I was not also to blame.’ Her voice had become stronger. ‘And I am not saying that I did not love him once, because that would not be true. I am telling you only that I saw him clearly in the end. Which Caitlin, of course, can never do.’

‘Caitlin came with you to Oxfordshire, didn’t she?’

‘Yes, God help me.’ Her words weren’t much more than a sigh. ‘We had to leave Southam. The cottage was so cramped, and I had begun to detest the place. There was gossip … rumour. In so small a village, one has few secrets. I was desperate to leave, but I had little money and there was still a housing shortage.’ Tilda smiled weakly. ‘Kit de Paveley found me a job. I had offered to look after Caitlin, you see, so he wanted to help me in return. The poor girl had no-one else, and it was obvious that Kit could not bring her up.’

She paused, and seemed to gather her strength. ‘Kit found me the post of housekeeper to an old friend of his, Colonel Renshaw, who lived in Oxfordshire. It was perfect – a big house, with only the old gentleman living there, so there was plenty of room for all of us. I had to lie a little, of course,’ she added, and her gaze held mine, challenging me. ‘You must remember that morality was different then. Stricter, less accommodating. I told the colonel that my husband had been taken ill during the war and was living in the south of France for the sake of his health. I let him believe that my parents had been married, and that they had died when I was an infant. I was desperate, you see, Rebecca. I had to start again. I had to put the past behind me.’

I heard the clack of stout black shoes on the polished corridor behind me. The nurse said, ‘Time for our rest now, Dame Tilda.’

There was a flicker of the familiar impatience in Tilda’s eyes. Then she whispered, echoing Patrick, ‘You should talk to Melissa, dear,’ and turned away from me.

C
HAPTER
T
WELVE

Max had quit his job and sailed for France. Paris in the heat was every bit as awful as London in the heat, and even the decent hotels served only ersatz coffee, so he took the train to Angers, in the Loire valley, and sat in cafés drinking red wine, looking up at the château. France was as shabby as England, paint peeling from the doors and window frames, but somehow, in the sunlight, it didn’t seem to matter so much. From Angers, he travelled to Chinon, where he wandered through the ruins of the castle on its rocky crop and looked down at the bridge across the river, decked with flags because it was a fête day. Then Saumur, then Tours. His pace slowed as he went south, almost as though the sun and the heat had entered his veins, subduing the restlessness and nervous energy that had always been part of him.

He stayed a few days in each place, sleeping in cheap pensions, dining in cramped little cafés. The food was better in the countryside, where fields of sunflowers raised their yellow faces to the sky, and the village markets were crammed with stalls selling wild duck and pots of homemade jam. As he travelled south, the sun grew more intense, and Max, like the French, and like the lizards that darted in the shade, began to take a
siesta after lunch. Ten minutes at first, then half an hour, then an hour. One day he slept until four o’clock in the afternoon, and then got up and ambled round, looking at the people. His capacity for sleep amazed him. It was as though he was making up for all those years of nervous interrupted dozes in foxholes and jeeps.

Eventually, he went an entire day without wanting to curl up into a little, shaking ball when he remembered Belsen. He still thought of them, those grey shadowy people, and he still wept for them, and that was right, surely. But they had retreated just a little, making the business of living more tolerable. When that pain lessened, though, the other intensified. He had managed to avoid thinking of Tilda: now, every light-haired woman made him turn his head, and every low, melodic peal of laughter became hers. He would have liked to have killed Daragh Canavan, who had succeeded in proving to him what he had always feared: that Tilda had never really loved him. He had been second-best when they had married, and he had remained second-best until the end. He thought of her with bitterness and with anger, and a sense of betrayal. He had arranged with the bank to send money for Josh’s schooling and the children’s clothes and food, and he wrote to his children frequently – light, descriptive little notes about the places he had seen, the people he had spoken to. He had no contact with Tilda. When he thought of her, he saw her golden body entwined with Daragh Canavan’s, and he despised himself for having loved her.

When he reached the village a few miles to the south of Saintes, Max stopped and did not travel any further. It wasn’t much of a village: there was a church and a
mairie
and a butcher’s and a baker’s and a tobacconist’s and a ramshackle garage with a
Fermé
sign pasted outside it. The village was surrounded by bleached dusty fields and by vineyards. Max enquired for a room and was shown to a little stone-built hotel in the square. At night, the sky was a square of blue velvet, spangled with stars, set to the music of cicadas.

A few weeks later he bought the garage with the
Fermé
sign.
He had learned a lot about cars during the war. There was a house attached to the garage, of a pale stone that kept the sun out during the hottest part of the day. Part of the roof had fallen in, so Max cut wood to repair the broken rafters and replaced slates. There was no electricity or running water, so he used oil lamps in the evenings, and drew water from the well. He repaired the rusty old petrol pump and acquired second-hand tools from market places and house sales. The woman in the
boulangerie
where he bought his morning baguette began, around the new year, to greet him by name. He dined each midday in the little café, and drank red wine or a marc in the bar at the corner of the square. He abandoned his Players and taught himself to enjoy Gauloises. He was pleasant and friendly, passing the time of day with the black-shawled women who sat out in the sun, or the farm labourers in the bar. But he kept himself to himself, having relearned the dangers of becoming too involved. He liked to sit out on fine evenings, watching the sun go down, a bottle of the sharp local red wine on the table, playing chess against himself. When the curé ambled past one night and professed a passion for chess, Max was obliged to invite him to sit down. The curé called quite frequently after that. He was a good chess player, and didn’t talk too much.

He knew that he’d been a rotten father to Melissa and Josh, and that they’d be better off without him. He’d spent much of their infancy working abroad, and then, during the war, they had been separated again. His concerns for them had led him to be severe and distant, like his own father. He suspected that his children feared him as much as they loved him, and that they would react to his absence with relief, not grief.

He often felt lonely and angry, but the hard manual work exhausted him, leaving him blessedly unable to think. The southern sun entered his bones, unknotting muscles, rubbing away the lines of worry on his forehead.

Colonel Renshaw’s house was called Poona, and it clung to one side of the Oxfordshire village of Woodcott St Martin. The house was
huge, turn-of-the-century, incomparably ugly, a red-brick and stucco façade punctuated by immense bay windows, dormers and balconies. There were three floors: Tilda and her family occupied the top floor, the colonel and his collections the lower two. The garden was vast, and put entirely to the purpose of growing food and supplying fuel for the huge and temperamental stove that wheezed and coughed in the kitchen. Colonel Renshaw, who had been wounded in the Great War, had devoted the remainder of his life to becoming self-sufficient.

‘Poisonous,’ he said, poking a cabbage with his walking stick as he showed Tilda round the garden. ‘Buy this sort of thing in a shop, and they’ll have packed ‘em full of poisons. Grow ‘em yourself, and you know what you’re eating.’

The colonel also kept pigs and goats and a great many hens and ducks. He would, Tilda suspected, have kept sheep and woven his own cloth if his hands had not been too arthritic. His arthritis, and the lung complaints which were the consequence of inhaling mustard gas at the battle of the Somme, had forced him, at the age of sixty-seven, to engage a housekeeper.

Tilda mentioned their mutual acquaintance, Kit de Paveley.