Some Old Lover's Ghost (45 page)

Late August was hot and dusty, the dog-end of the school summer holidays. Tilda made pastry as Rosi played the parlour piano and Colonel Renshaw tested his rifle, which he had recently cleaned, in the garden. Wasps buzzed around the high ceiling.

‘That awful noise,’ said Hanna, coming into the kitchen, slamming the door. ‘Bang, bang, bang from the garden, and crash, crash, crash from the parlour.’ Hanna’s mousy hair was escaping out of its plait, and her forehead was creased with irritation. ‘Stop it, Rosi!’ she yelled. ‘It is horrible!’

The music stopped. There was another explosion from the garden, and Erich, sitting at the table, flinched. Tilda put the colander of blackberries in front of him.

‘Pick out the leaves, Erich, please. Hanna, you’ll help, won’t you?’

‘My
essay,’
began Hanna, fractiously, but Tilda said gently, ‘Hanna,’ and Hanna sighed, but sat down next to Erich.

Caitlin and Melissa were in the adjoining scullery, supposedly sorting out the washing. Caitlin’s voice drifted into the kitchen, to Tilda, sprinkling flour on a marble slab.

‘… used to spend summers in Deauville. Such super beaches, Liss – you’d adore it …’

Then Melissa, glumly. ‘I never go anywhere.’

‘Daddy always took me to a restaurant for lunch. The waiters would pat me on the head and give me
bonbons.’

A particularly loud explosion from the garden. The blackberries upended over the table. Hanna scrabbled to pick them up. Erich’s face was greenish-white. When Tilda rested her hand on his shoulder, his body went rigid.

She went outside. The sun was a bright, hard white disc above the trees. Her hands were covered with flour and her forehead, from the heat of stove and sun, was damp with sweat. She heard the thunderclap of another shot, and saw that Josh was holding the rifle, aiming it at the tin can the colonel used as a target.

‘Josh, put that down.’ The sight of Josh with the rifle induced in her a rush of fear and anger.

‘Mum—’

‘I said, put it down.’

‘I’ve used a rifle at school.’

‘Now
, Josh. And give these scraps to the pig. Colonel, lunch will be about half an hour.’

She went back into the kitchen. Rosi had progressed from the ‘Coronation Anthem’ to ‘Zadok the Priest’. Tilda glanced at the table.

‘Where’s Erich?’

Hanna looked up. ‘He went upstairs. He was upset.’

Erich, Tilda knew, would be crouched in a corner of the room that he shared with Josh, his forehead pressed against his knees, humming the same tuneless little song that she had first heard years ago, in Ijmuiden.

The pastry was greying in the heat. Hanna, book in one hand, was eating the blackberries. Melissa’s paints were scattered over the window seat. Caitlin’s voice, from the scullery, penetrated through the rifle shots and music.

‘I don’t see why we should do this. After all,
she’s
the servant, not us.’

Tilda paused, rolling pin in hand. Her eyes met Hanna’s. ‘Finish the pie, please, Hanna.’

Tilda went into the scullery. The washing was still an unsorted heap in the basket. Melissa, glancing up, looked guilty, but in Caitlin’s dark eyes there was only antagonism.

‘Melissa, go and clear up your painting things.’

‘Josh was using them too.’

‘Josh is busy. Go on, Melissa.’ Melissa walked out of the room, heels dragging.

Which left Caitlin, sitting on an old wicker chair missing most of its canes, legs swinging, looking anywhere but at Tilda. Tilda said softly, ‘Kate, in our family, everyone shares the errands.’

Caitlin drawled, ‘You and I don’t have
quite
the same backgrounds, Tilda. You really should remember that.’ Yet she rose from the chair, and began, very slowly, to pair socks.

She could, Tilda thought, explain to Caitlin that Daragh had come from a poor rural family not dissimilar to her own. She could point out that, in the end, house, land and horses, the paraphernalia of a privileged way of life, had had to be sold to meet debts worth double their value. She could even tell Caitlin what she should perhaps have told her long ago: that they were of the same family. Yet she knew that she would do none of these things. For a proud, troubled child like Caitlin to understand the folly of her beloved father’s last years would, perhaps, destroy her. And she herself had never been anything but shamed by her relationship with the de Paveleys. But it was not only those reasons, Tilda acknowledged, that stopped her confronting Caitlin. She sensed that they walked a tightrope; they both feared yet only half recognized what lay beneath them, in the abyss.

Back in the kitchen, Melissa was crouched on the floor beside the window seat.

‘My
picture
—’ There were two torn scraps of paper in her hand.

Tilda knelt on the floor. She took the two halves from her daughter’s hands and fitted them together. From the floor, her family, carefully painted by Melissa, stared up at her. Max, Hanna, Rosi, Erich, Caitlin, Josh and Tilda herself. She and Max were now on separate halves of paper.

‘We can mend it, darling.’

‘It’s spoiled!’ Melissa buried her head in her hands, and sobbed.

As she ran upstairs to look for paste and tape, Tilda knew what she would do. She would attempt yet again to persuade Erich to talk to the nice doctor she had found in Oxford. She would make sure Hanna took no books other than the silliest romances with her when she went camping in Scotland with Rosi. And she would find a quiet half-hour alone with Caitlin, and try once more to talk to her about Daragh.

And she would write to Max. She would remind him that he had a daughter, who missed him. For whom letters and postcards and sketches were not enough. She herself might deserve to be punished, thought Tilda as she knocked on Erich’s door, but Melissa did not.

The whole village, Cé explained, helped with the
vendange
. So Max, after a tentative protest, covered up the petrol pump and swapped his oily overalls for ancient corduroys and a shirt his mother had bought him before the war, and picked grapes. The work almost took his mind off the letter he had received that morning. Tilda’s anger had been obvious in every sentence of her note; Max had read it with an indignation that matched hers. But as he worked, flanked on one side by the postmistress, on the other by a surly fellow who bought petrol for his tractor at the garage, he was aware of another emotion. Guilt. He had assumed, too easily perhaps, that his children would be glad to see the back of him. Tilda’s letter had told him that was not so.

Every now and then, when he straightened, he’d see Cécile, wearing shorts and a knitted top, her hair tied back with a red-spotted silk scarf. By the end of the day Max’s back ached and his hands were blistered. Long shadows, the same purple as the grapes, painted the rows of vines. The first spots of rain fell as they wheeled their final loads back to the barn. Cécile hooked her arm through Max’s, and led them all back to her grandmother’s house. Two long trestle tables were set up in the kitchen. The smell of the beef casserole made Max realize how hungry he was. The wine was rough and sour and delicious and he drank glass after glass to satiate his thirst. Rain drummed on the roof, and
when Max glanced back through the open door he saw steam rising from flagstones still hot from the sun.

It was almost midnight when the party broke up. Max thanked the grandmother and kissed her hand, and looked round to take his leave of Cécile. She was standing at the door, a cardigan draped over her slender shoulders. ‘I’ll walk with you,’ she said. ‘It’s stopped raining, and I need some air.’

They walked in silence through the quiet village. The perfume of rain-washed grass rose from the earth. Crickets chirped in the verges, and an owl, its white ghostly wings outspread, took flight from a derelict barn. When they reached the garage, she followed him inside, as he had known she would. He moved to light the oil lamp, but she halted him and her slim fingers rested on his shoulders as she kissed him. Her full, pointed breasts pressed against his chest, and he could taste the wine on her lips. He pulled her towards him, covering her face with kisses, the darkness intensifying his desire because it concentrated his senses. After a while, she said, ‘Max, don’t you think we should go to bed?’ and he let her go, torn between alarm and desire.

‘Max, what is it?’

He lit the oil lamp. ‘Cécile – I’m married.’

She said seriously, ‘I guessed that, of course.’

He looked at her. She was so different from Tilda: smaller and plumper and her face altogether rounder. ‘I mean, I’m still married. Not divorced or anything.’

‘But you have lived here alone for over a year, Max, so you are not
that
married.’ She approached him. ‘Or are you telling me that though your wife does not love you, you still love her?’

‘Yes … no … damn it, Cécile,
no
, the marriage is over. But I have children … ties. I’m trying to tell you that I am not free.’ Exasperated, he stared at her, golden in the light of the oil lamp. ‘And that I’m years older than you, and that you really would do better with one of those nice boys who helped with the harvest.’

‘But I don’t want any of the boys,’ she said softly, coming to stand in front of him. ‘I want
you
, Max.’

In the bedroom, a new fear possessed him. It had been a long time since he had made love to a woman. He remembered those nights with Tilda, bending to caress her, and seeing instead of her naked body those ragged, broken women of Belsen. He did not think he could bear the shame of failing to make love to Cécile.

But France had changed him; he had left that doubting, tormented part of himself behind, and moved on. Coupling with Cécile, the release of orgasm left him with such a relief of tension that his sleep was unbroken for the first time in years.

The following morning, after they had made love again and Cécile had left for work, Max wrote to Melissa, asking her to come and stay with him at half-term.

Two days before Hanna went back to Cambridge, she was swinging on the long, low branch of the beech tree, agonizing over the lymphatic system, when she saw Erich scuttling towards the back gate, two terracotta pots under his arm. She leapt off the branch and ran after him.

‘Erich, what on earth are you doing?’

He jumped, so she put out a hand to calm him. ‘It’s only me, silly.’

‘Shall I … would you like to see my s-s-secret, Hanna?’

She almost said no, thinking of exams, and all the work she had to do. But she had always, even as a child in Holland, sensed Erich’s fragility.

‘Of course I would.’

‘Then come with me.’ He darted out of the gate and Hanna followed him.

He led her through the village, past the houses and the shops, stopping in front of a big house set back from the road. ‘In here,’ he said. There was a plaque on the gate: ‘The Red House’.

‘Erich—’

‘It’s all right. No-one lives here. Come on, Hanna. Once you’re inside, no-one can see you.’

Clouds of raindrops sprinkled from the trees, scattering Hanna’s
dress as she walked. The avenue of high, bulky, overhanging bushes led to the front of the house.

‘Are you sure it’s empty?’ Hanna realized that she was whispering.

‘There’s only ghosts,’ said Erich.

Hanna guessed The Red House to be several hundred years old. When Erich took her to the terrace that lay behind the house, she looked down at the garden and said, ‘Oh,
Erich.’

He smiled. He smiled so rarely that Hanna’s eyes prickled with tears. She saw what he could have been: a tall, dark, good-looking boy. Most people saw only the hunched shoulders, the furtive eyes, the missing front tooth. Most people heard only the stutter and the placatory nervousness. Blinking, Hanna looked back at the garden.

The paths, made of an old weathered brick, twisted together in a complicated knot. Honeysuckles and ramblers drooped over the threads of the knot, and the late flowers of the rose were decorated with raindrops, like diamonds. The garden was studded with tiny ponds and shrubs and trellises. The parterres and paths were free of weeds.

‘Oh, Erich,’ she said again. ‘You did this, didn’t you?’

He nodded. ‘You’re not to tell anyone, Hanna. Not even Tilda. I’m not showing her until it’s finished. It’ll be a surprise for her, won’t it?’

As she walked, fronds of clematis brushed Hanna’s face, and the leaves of the wild geranium and lady’s mantle that edged the path soaked her feet. In the middle of a clearing paved with bricks stood a marble statue of a girl carrying a horn of plenty. Flora, thought Hanna, trying to remember her classics. Or Pomona—

‘Caitlin,’ said Erich, as if reading her thoughts. He touched the statue’s cold white head. The look on his face made Hanna shiver.

In the autumn term, Melissa fell in love. Martin Devereux was new to the sixth form of the neighbouring boys’ grammar. All
the girls were in love with him, and Susan Morgan was an object of envy because she possessed a cough-sweet tin containing a sticking plaster that Martin had once worn on his finger. Melissa first saw him from the hockey field, where the girl whom she was supposed to be marking pointed him out to her. She had read about love at first sight, but it had never before happened to her. Later she wrote his name on her pencil case in her best handwriting, with lots of curly bits on the M and the t and the n. A day was good if she saw Martin, dismal if she did not. The day that he brushed against her on the crowded pavement was glorious. The only time she remembered feeling so happy before was the day that her father had come home after the war.

She spent hours doing her hair and dabbing stuff on her spots and looking into the mirror and despairing. She put her straight, fine dark hair in curlers overnight, and howled when she took the curlers out in the morning and it spiralled in chaotic corkscrews. She let down the hem of her pleated skirt to make it more fashionable and nagged her mother for stockings instead of socks. She knew that Martin Devereux wouldn’t look at a girl who wore socks. She lay for hours on her bed, thinking about him. She imagined slipping and spraining her ankle in front of him, so that he’d have to pick her up and carry her in his arms. Or dropping something out of her satchel: he’d run after her and strike up a conversation. Her imaginings never got much further than that.