Some Old Lover's Ghost (48 page)

Though I wanted to, I could not quite convince myself. Four months after Daragh’s disappearance, Jossy had died of an unattended miscarriage. Could she have killed the father of her second child? Both Tilda and Caitlin had described to me Jossy’s search for her missing husband. Nothing I had discovered about Jossy Canavan led me to think that she was devious enough to go through such a charade, all the while knowing that her husband was buried less than a mile away in the dike. And she had loved Daragh: even her tombstone, inscribed with his name, proclaimed her love. I did not think Jossy responsible for Daragh’s death.

So I headed my list with another name. Tilda’s. Tilda Franklin had had both the means and the motive to kill Daragh Canavan. Tilda had reason to hate Daragh. He had destroyed her marriage, and he had betrayed her twice. I, who had also been twice betrayed, understood the bitterness and anger that she must have felt. Had Tilda the physical strength to kill a strong young man like Daragh Canavan? For much of her life Tilda had worked on the land: first, with Sarah Greenlees; then, during the war, growing food to feed her family; later, looking after Colonel Renshaw’s household. Tilda hadn’t bought her roasting chickens plastic-wrapped in Sainsbury’s: she had strangled and gutted the hens she herself had reared. She had shot pigeons in the colonel’s garden, she had slit the throat, perhaps, of the pig that had been fattened for bacon. Though she was now old and frail, the ghost-image of her earlier robustness lingered in her straight spine, her square shoulders. Compared to Tilda, I felt feeble, pampered, over-dependent on the dubious machinery of the late twentieth century.

With Tilda, Daragh would have been off his guard. If he
had intended, dressed in his best, to go to her, he would have intended also to seduce her. He would have been complacent: he had had her once – why not a second time? With everything else falling about his ears, Daragh, the charmer, must have remained confident only of his sexual prowess. I imagined him lying on the grass, eyes closed, expecting kisses. I imagined Tilda looking down at him and realizing what he had done to her, realizing too that he would never understand, and would never care. I imagined how she might have hated him then. How she might have struck him with a stone, or with a shovel abandoned by the workmen who were rebuilding the dike. If she had hit him hard enough, then she would have been able to truss him like an old hen for the pot and immure him beneath the clay. I imagined her dragging the body to the earthworks, just as she had hauled the German soldier’s body across the grassy polder.

Of course, the person to whom I most wanted to speak was wretchedly out of reach. I would, I thought, have given a great deal to talk to Daragh Canavan, that wrecker of dreams, that destroyer of hopes. I glanced at his photograph again, and said his name, but he just laughed back at me, careless and secretive, intriguing even in death.

I long to talk with some old lover’s ghost
,

Who died before the god of love was born …

C
HAPTER
F
OURTEEN

‘What’s “intercourse”?’ she said. She needed to know.

He looked shocked. Martin Devereux, whose self-professed ambition was to drink dry the cup of life, actually looked shocked. ‘Bloody hell, Caitlin – what a thing to ask.’

‘Don’t you know?’

‘Of course I do.’

‘Tell me, then.’

His eyes were lidded. Only a sliver of pale blue iris was visible. ‘I’d rather show you.’

‘OK.’ She shrugged, and looked round. ‘Where?’

‘Not here,’ he said, reddening. They were in a pub. ‘I haven’t the cash for a room. It’ll have to be the car.’

He drove until they came to some woodland and then he swung the motor car into the trees. The ruts in the track were clogged with dead, coppery leaves and, as they jolted along the uneven ground, the last of the leaves, like fragments of burnt paper, were torn from the trees by the wind. It was raining: dark, swollen drops that slid along the naked branches of the trees and plopped onto the windscreen of the car. Martin pulled on the handbrake.

‘We’d better get into the back.’

In the back of Martin’s father’s car, Caitlin unbuttoned her blouse and Martin took her nipple into his mouth, kissing her breasts, squeezing them with the palms of his hands. She felt slightly bored: they’d done much the same on previous dates. But then he reached under her skirt and began to fumble with her knickers. She pushed him away: he was breathing very fast and loudly, and his eyes had an intent, determined expression that alarmed her. He said, ‘I thought you wanted me to show you,’ and she had to swallow her embarrassment and her fear, and tell him to go on. She felt stupid, exposed, squashed up on the back seat of the car without her knickers on. When he pulled down his own trousers and underpants, and she saw the awful thing that lay beneath them, she cried out, but he did not seem to hear her.

She was glad that it didn’t last very long. He pushed it into her before she realized what he was doing. It hurt, and she shouted at him, and then he shuddered and yelled and collapsed on top of her, and lay very still. For one peculiar, disorienting moment, she thought that he was dead. She imagined lying there for ever, Martin stuck inside her, both of them buried eventually by the falling leaves. The rain still thudded onto the windscreen, and at last Martin muttered, ‘God, that was terrific.’

Caitlin sat up, shoving him off her, and pulled her knickers back on. There was an unpleasant dampness between her legs, which frightened her. She thought,
That was what my father and Tilda did
, and then she pushed the thought away, and climbed into the front passenger seat. She decided that she would not go out with Martin again. She enjoyed the chase, not the kill.

It was as though, Tilda often thought, she had been standing on a pier jutting out over the water, and someone had kicked away the stanchions. She was flailing in choppy water, unable to find much to hold on to. She had deserved to lose Max; but she could not understand why Melissa had chosen to leave her.

She continued to look after the children and the colonel, but now only rarely attended her lectures in Oxford. She disregarded offers
of friendship, rejecting invitations from even her oldest friends: Anna and Professor Hastings and Emily van de Criendt. Her father had abandoned her, and so had Max, but neither desertion had inflicted so terrible a wound as the loss of her child. From her remaining children she tried to hide the depth of her misery, knowing that she must not inflict her pain on them.

Now, Hanna and Rosi were making Christmas cards on the kitchen table, and Josh and Erich were collecting fallen branches from the copse to use as fuel for the stove. Tilda glanced at her watch. Caitlin was visiting a friend. She had promised to be home by six o’clock, and it was now almost seven. Tilda’s unease increased as she washed up. At half past seven, she put on her mackintosh and walked out to meet the bus. The cold, fine rain stung against her face. The bus slowed as it emerged out of the half-dark, its wheels curling waves from the puddles. Three women and a boy climbed out.

At the telephone box at the corner of the road, Tilda asked the operator to put her through to Mrs James, the mother of Caitlin’s friend.

‘It’s Mrs Franklin,’ said Tilda. ‘Caitlin’s guardian. She isn’t home yet – has she stayed for tea?’

There was a silence. Then Mrs James said, ‘Caitlin isn’t here, Mrs Franklin. Sylvia’s been at Guide camp all weekend.’

Tilda muttered something about having made a mistake, put the receiver down, and walked back to the house. The streetlamps illuminated the road with a yellowish glaze, but the sky and trees and fields were intensely black. Caitlin claimed to have spent the last three Saturdays with Sylvia. Tilda went home, but there was a cold feeling in her stomach, a certainty of disaster. She said, ‘I should phone the police, perhaps,’ but Rosi, sticking loops of red paper ribbon to cards, said, ‘She’ll have gone to the cinema and forgotten to tell you. You know what she’s like.’

‘But it’s almost—’ began Tilda, and then saw the flicker of movement between the hedges that flanked the front path. She ran to the back door, breathless with relief and anger.

‘Kate. Where were you?’

‘The bus was late.’

‘You didn’t come home by bus. I went to the stop. You didn’t go to the Jameses either. When you were late, I telephoned.’

‘Oh,’ said Caitlin, and shrugged.

Tilda, looking closely at Caitlin, saw that she was wearing make-up and nylons. The nylons were snagged, her blouse done up on the wrong buttons.

‘Kate. Were you with a boy?’

Caitlin shook her head. There was a dead look about her eyes that alarmed Tilda just as much as the snagged nylons and smeared lipstick. Fifteen, she thought. She had been only two years older when she had met Daragh. She remembered the intense sweetness and pain of first love, its terrible compulsion.

‘You are very young to have a boyfriend, Kate,’ she said, forcing herself to speak more gently. ‘I know that you’re grown-up for your age, but you are still only fifteen.’

Caitlin stood on the rug, rainwater dripping from the arms of her gabardine mackintosh. Daragh’s child, thought Tilda. She could see him now in Caitlin’s stubborn pride.

‘If you are fond of someone, then why not bring him home for tea? Then we can all meet him.’

Caitlin spoke at last. ‘What? To this place? So that Erich can offer him the bowl of c-c-cabbage? So that he can find out that my guardian is a servant?’ The emptiness in her eyes was replaced by anger and contempt. ‘Anyway, I haven’t a boyfriend. Not any more.’

She turned on her heel and left the room. Tilda looked down at herself. Her dress was covered by a dirty apron and her hands were red and raw, her fingernails black with mud. Her heart was beating so fast that it sickened her. She sat down on the bottom stair, her head in her hands.

‘It’s
burnt,’
said Melissa.

It’s steak, Max wanted to say. It’s steak, and what with the war and rationing, you probably can’t remember what steak
looks like. But he took Melissa’s plate from her and replaced it with his own. ‘Have mine, then.’

She looked down at it and sighed with a martyred air. ‘You know I don’t like onions, Daddy.’

The trouble was that he didn’t. He had forgotten – or had never known – that his daughter didn’t like onions, cabbage, or skin on her hot milk. And he had forgotten that she never remembered to polish her shoes unless he reminded her, and that she spent hours in the bathroom in the morning, so that for the first few days of her stay he had had to attend to his early customers unshaven. He had forgotten that she would insist on going for long cycle rides alone each weekend, yet each evening would demand a night light. Her inconsistency confused him.

Max finished his glass of wine. ‘I talked to the head teacher at the school this afternoon, Melissa. She says that you can start after Christmas.’

Melissa stared at him.

‘Just mornings to begin with,’ he added coaxingly. ‘Until you get used to it.’

‘
Daddy
—’ Tears were welling up in Melissa’s eyes.

‘You have to go to school, sweetheart – it’s the law. They’ll make allowances for your French.’

Tears dripped down Melissa’s nose. Her knife and fork dropped with a clang on the plate, and she pushed back her chair and ran from the table. He heard her bedroom door slam, followed by loud sobbing. Max sighed, and pushed away his dinner, his appetite gone.

He cleared up the half-eaten food and, standing in the kitchen doorway, lit a cigarette. He remembered the call that he had made six weeks ago to a telephone box in Oxfordshire, at a prearranged time. Somehow the sound of Tilda’s voice, carried all those hundreds of miles, had not induced in him the anger he had anticipated. Over the crackly line he had sensed her deep hurt and bewilderment and, after he had replaced the receiver, he had tried once again to persuade Melissa to return to England.
But she had said (her face crumpling up, as it had a habit of doing), ‘Don’t you want me, Daddy?’ so he had hugged her, and said, ‘Of course I want you, darling. You know that I want you.’

Outside the frost had begun to outline each blade of grass. Melissa had swept back into his life, Max thought, and had forced him to look again at an existence which he had previously found satisfactory. Nothing seemed right for her. The house (a tin bath, Daddy!), his work (you looked nicer in your suit, Daddy), and, of course, his cooking (bread and cheese
again
)
–
all came in for criticism. He had been made to see his life as she saw it – Spartan, rather bleak, perhaps even (the thought horrified him) slipping into the pathetic, faded mustiness of bachelordom.

He had not yet introduced Melissa to Cécile. Cécile had remained tactfully absent for the week of Melissa’s holiday and, when Melissa had made her unexpected decision, Max had written a hasty note, explaining the situation. He knew that he had been evading the issue. It was ridiculous that he should allow his social life to be constrained by a twelve-year-old girl. He decided to ask Cécile to dinner.

Max scrubbed the cigarette butt into the flagstone with his heel, and went back into the house. He could still hear the sobbing. Just for a moment, he looked back with longing to the easier days of infancy, and then, praying for superhuman tact and patience, he tapped on Melissa’s door.

Max made a great effort with the dinner. He bought a duck from the wizened old woman at the market, and carefully wrote down her instructions for cooking it. He chose a
tarte aux prunes
from the
pâtisserie
and discovered that one could not buy custard powder in France. He filled the basket with logs and lit the fire in the living room, and bought matching plates from a shop in Saintes, and candles for the table.

Cécile, elegant in black, arrived promptly at eight o’clock. Max looked round for Melissa.

‘She’s probably still in the bathroom. It seems to take her an hour to do her hair.’