Some Old Lover's Ghost (43 page)

‘Met the boy when he was at Oxford,’ said the colonel, thwacking nettles aside as they walked the perimeter of the garden. ‘Archaeology – mutual interest. Clever chap. Went on a dig or two together.’

Tilda’s duties were officially to cook, clean and launder the colonel’s clothes and linen. In reality, on days when the colonel’s arthritis was at its worst, her tasks ranged from writing the many letters of complaint with which he plagued the parish council to shooting the pigeons which were the bane of his existence. The work was arduous, but she welcomed that because it stopped her having to think. Rising at six, feeding the stove with wood and the dried turf that the colonel insisted would make excellent fuel, made her concentrate harder on avoiding frostbite than regretting, yet again, the last disastrous months of her marriage. Struggling in midwinter to give variety to another meal of parsnips, potatoes and cabbage distracted her at least temporarily from worrying
about the children. Polishing floors with a beeswax that the colonel extracted from his own hives left her too exhausted to think about what had happened to Daragh.

Their living quarters on the top floor of the house were spacious enough to take all their own furniture as well as that which the colonel had provided. There were four bedrooms: Melissa and Caitlin shared the largest, Josh and Erich had the room with the dormer, Rosi and Hanna, in the vacations, occupied the back bedroom, and Tilda herself slept in the small room with the bay. There was a bathroom, with basin, bath and lavatory of such clanking, rusting size that they seemed to have been made for giants, a small kitchen, and a larger sitting room. Compared to the cramped rooms and low ceilings of Long Cottage, Poona was a palace.

Woodcott St Martin had once been a village as small as Southam, but the introduction of a sprawling council estate and a row of red-brick bungalows had tripled its size. The wall that divided the council houses from the bungalows was typical, Tilda often thought, of the divisions within the village. Those from the council estate frequented the working men’s club; those from the bungalows and the big old houses that clustered around the green joined the tennis club or the Dramatic Society. There was a bus to Oxford every half-hour, which Caitlin and Melissa took to the girls’ grammar school. Josh would continue to weekly board until he took his Common Entrance.

The cheque that Max sent each month towards the children’s keep was unaccompanied by any letter or expression of goodwill, an omission that reopened the thin scab which barely covered the pain of his leaving. Sometimes, when she was scrubbing potatoes or ironing the colonel’s vast long johns, some of Tilda’s grief turned to anger. Anger that Max should desert his children. Anger that he should be so harsh, so judgemental. Anger that he had believed her to be less flawed than she was.

Caitlin loathed living in Colonel Renshaw’s house. In Southam, before they had moved, she had walked each day to the Hall,
afraid that her father would return and find her gone. But a For Sale board went up outside the house, and one day some awful people moved in. Dreadful scarlet pelargoniums, which Mummy would have certainly thought common, now grew in the greenhouse, so Caitlin, after making sure that no-one was looking, chucked a stone through the roof. The chime of breaking glass was satisfying.

At first Caitlin had been cold to Tilda, who hugged her, which was awful. Then she was rude to her, but Tilda’s patient firmness was if anything more aggravating than the hugging. Then she amused herself with small acts of revenge – a tablespoon of salt in the stew, or a well-aimed kick at the pole that held up the washing line, so that the sheets and pillowcases trailed in the mud – but she caught Tilda looking at her quizzically once or twice, and was more careful after that.

Then they moved to Oxfordshire. The move somehow made permanent all the most dreadful things about Caitlin’s new life. Before, she had believed that Daddy would come back, and that they would live at the Hall again, and that everything would be all right. The move eroded that conviction. She was expected to share a bedroom with Melissa, though at the Hall she had had a larger room all to herself, as well as a little dressing room. It was ridiculous and unfair that she had not her own room. Melissa herself regarded Caitlin with an uncritical admiration that was one of the few consolations of her new life, though when Melissa showed her the letters and sketches that Max had sent to her, Caitlin glanced at them, fury welling in her at the meanness of silly little Melissa’s knowing where her father was when she did not.

The colonel himself was mad, so Caitlin avoided him as much as possible. The food was horrible and boring, and she never had any new clothes. She started at the grammar school in January. There were thirty girls in each class, and some of them wore down-at-heel shoes and baggy stockings and spoke with country accents. Worse, no-one seemed to notice her. At Burwood School, everyone had known her. She had been Caitlin Canavan, who lived
in a big house and had been driven to school by her handsome father, and who took ballet and elocution. At her new school, some of the teachers didn’t even know her name and, though at Burwood she’d always been easily top of the class, at the grammar school she was unable to rise above the middle. When she talked about her ponies or about the parties that Daddy had given for her, or about her holidays in Deauville, no-one believed her. Your mother works for that potty old man, they said, and Caitlin felt doubly ashamed. That they should believe Tilda to be her mother, and that Tilda was herself a servant, humiliated her.

No-one seemed to realize that she was special. No-one seemed to notice that she was prettier, cleverer, altogether more interesting than other girls of her age. No-one seemed to admire her, and yet Caitlin knew, looking in the mirror, that she was indeed special. Her father had said so.

They were living in the colonel’s house when she found the private detective’s report. Her mother’s papers had been stored in cardboard boxes when the Hall had been put up for sale, and had remained packed away in the cottage in Southam. After they moved, Tilda offered to go through the boxes with Caitlin. Caitlin refused, unpacking them by herself because they seemed a last, precious link with her former life. Most of what she found meant nothing to her. A very dull diary kept when Jossy had been a child, letters, bills, grocers’ receipts. Anything connected with her father Caitlin kept. Then she found Mr Oddie’s report. When she realized what it was she flicked quickly through it, bubbling with excitement, certain that she would now know where he had gone. Curling up on her bed, Caitlin began to read the report in detail. As she read, her excitement changed to shock, and then to nausea. She was sick in the creaky bathroom, and when she came back Melissa had come into the room. Melissa looked at Caitlin and asked her whether she felt well, and Caitlin, seeing that Melissa was only a yard or so away from that awful thing, said coldly, ‘Did you know that there is the most frightful spot on your chin?’ which made Melissa gasp and run to the looking-glass.

Caitlin gathered up the papers and made for the outside loo,
the only place where one could be certain of privacy. In the dark, spidery little room she read the rest of what Mr Oddie had written. There were things that confused her (what was ‘intercourse? What was ‘a physical relationship’?), but she did understand that Mr Oddie was saying that her father had had lots of women friends. Mr Oddie had made a list: someone called Elsa Gordon was at the head of it, and Tilda Franklin’s name was at the bottom.

Erich worked each day on Colonel Renshaw’s garden. There was over an acre of land, plus the animals and wildfowl and the copse. Although the colonel, who commonly referred to him as ‘that Hun’, at first terrified him, Erich grew used to the old man. He realized that Colonel Renshaw couldn’t recall any of their names – he always addressed Melissa as ‘Lizzy’, confusing her with a long-dead sister – and he suspected eventually that ‘that Hun’ wasn’t meant as an insult. Erich’s stuttering explanations that he was Austrian and of Jewish origin were ignored, drowned by a lengthy description of a game of football the colonel’s men had played with the Kaiser’s troops between the trenches in the Christmas of 1914. Erich understood that, compared to his ability to dig thoroughly and collect chicken manure conscientiously, his race and religion were unimportant to the colonel.

The village frightened him. Every now and then he would have to visit the blacksmith to get the shears sharpened, or sell their surplus eggs to the bad-tempered grocer. These outings were an ordeal. His stammer invariably became insurmountable and, though his English was quite fluent, he forgot the commonest words. He could feel people staring at him. Their censorious eyes followed him from behind netted windows and privet hedges. A sheen of sweat would escape from his skin and, though he’d been fine when he left Poona, he’d realize that he needed the lavatory.

Tilda encouraged him to go to church; Erich went once, and then managed to discover something urgent to do in the garden each Sunday morning. To be enclosed with staring strangers was
unbearable. To his relief, after a few weeks Tilda told him he didn’t have to go if he didn’t want to. She insisted, though, that he join in the family game after tea each evening. He didn’t mind that, because sometimes Caitlin too joined in, and just to look at Caitlin gave Erich an odd, searing sort of happiness.

Christmas at Poona was sufficiently peculiar to distract Tilda, much of the time, from memories of other Christmases. The generator broke down in the early hours of Christmas morning, and though Josh, who was good at that sort of thing, tinkered with it for hours, they had to light the house with oil lamps and candles. The colonel insisted they all dine together, and poured everyone, including Josh, a measure of very old, very pale sherry. Dressed in their best clothes, they ate the turkey that Tilda had cooked. Afterwards, Hanna and Rosi played mah-jong with the colonel, Josh and Erich went back to the generator, and Melissa and Caitlin helped Tilda with the washing-up.

It was only much later, when the younger children were in bed, that Tilda was overwhelmed by the sheer loneliness of it all. There had been Christmases without Max before, but they had been in wartime, and his absence had been unavoidable. And there had always been
something
: a letter, a card, and once, sent from North Africa, a beautiful silk scarf that he had bought for her in a bazaar. This Christmas, Max had sent presents for the children, but nothing to her. Not a letter, not a card, not even the smallest indication that he cared whether she lived or died. Curled up on the sofa, smothered with rugs and shawls to keep out the wind that whistled through the gaps around the windows, Tilda imagined a lifetime of such absence, such anger.

Hanna placed the tea tray on the hearth. Rosi sat down on the rug. ‘I think that Christmas is better without electric lights. More romantic.’

Hanna poured out the tea. ‘It was fun, wasn’t it? Though the colonel beat us at mah-jong. Twice.’

‘He cheats.’ Rosi was unthreading her long plait.

‘Rosi,’
said Tilda.

‘It’s true. He does. Almost as much as Caitlin does.’

‘Rosi.’

‘Come on, Tilda – you must have noticed that Caitlin cheats. And at snakes and ladders, of all things.’

‘Of course I’ve noticed, but I thought it best not to say too much.’

‘Because she’s lost her mother and father, blah blah blah—’

This time it was Hanna who said,
‘Rosi.’

Rosi looked up. ‘Well, so have Hanna and Erich and I lost our parents, and we don’t cheat. Or read other people’s letters and diaries, or steal their lipsticks.’

Rosi had embarked on a stormy relationship with Richard Vaughan, a junior doctor at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge. When Rosi had discovered Caitlin reading Richard’s letters, she had thumped her soundly.

Tilda said slowly, ‘I am afraid Caitlin believes that her father is still alive. She can’t mourn him, you see, because she is waiting for him to come back to her.’

Hanna looked up. ‘You don’t think he will?’

‘Oh no.’ Tilda remembered Daragh, spreading out photographs of his baby daughter on a table in his room in the Savoy Hotel; Daragh, saying,
She is the light of my life
… ‘He adored her. I cannot imagine that anything less than death would have kept Daragh from Caitlin.’

Hanna said sensibly, ‘Then it’s not surprising that she’s taking a while to settle.’

Tilda tried to smile. ‘And of course, this sort of life is such a change for poor Caitlin. She was an only child, and she’s suddenly found herself part of a large family, and she’s had to move house and change school. She led such a privileged life, in some ways. And I have tried to talk to her about her father.’

Yet the conversation had been unsatisfactory. Caitlin had affected uninterest, but Tilda had seen through the pretence both hostility and fear. She had in the end balked at killing Caitlin’s hope that Daragh would return to her: she had not felt that she had the right. The intensity of Caitlin’s anger disturbed
her, and Tilda had wondered fleetingly whether Caitlin knew that she herself had been Daragh Canavan’s lover. She had pushed the idea aside. How could Caitlin know? Neither Jossy nor Daragh would have confided such a thing in their daughter. Yet the unease lingered, reborn every time she glimpsed her image in those dark, accusing eyes.

Often she questioned whether she had done the right thing in taking in Caitlin Canavan. Her own motives, she knew, had been a muddle of pity and guilt and an acknowledgement of a blood relationship of which Caitlin knew nothing.

At first, the girl just waved at Max when she cycled past the garage each morning, and then, after a few weeks, she called out a cheerful ‘Bonjour!’ She rode out at a quarter past eight, and back at seven o’clock in the evening, Monday to Saturday. She was young, her fair hair caught back in a chignon, and she dressed, even to ride her bicycle, in elegant silk or crisp cottons, her skirts blown back by the wind to show her brown legs. In spring, she called out as she glided past, ‘Ça va, Monsieur Franklin?’ and he looked up, surprised that she knew his name. He began to look out for her each day. One evening she was late coming home, and Max glanced at his watch several times as he tidied up the forecourt and set to work on an old Citroën that a farmer had brought in. Just before eight o’clock he heard the clack of her sandals as she walked up the hill, and saw the uneven lope of the bicycle wheel.