Some Old Lover's Ghost (54 page)

‘Drink, darling?’

‘That would be lovely. Gin and it, please, Julian.’

Caitlin’s momentary nervousness had gone. She felt as though she were in a play. She had made her face up carefully, she had put on her nicest dress, and the room was an acceptable backdrop. She even remembered her lines.
Gin and it, please, Julian
.

He did not yet go to the piano, but sat down on a sofa, beckoning Caitlin to sit beside him. He said, ‘Sorry about last week’s rehearsal, darling, but I was frightfully unwell. The strain … I shall be glad when this wretched little revue is finished with.’

Caitlin stared at him. She had not thought about what would happen after the revue’s performance. The prospect filled her with a bleak emptiness. ‘Don’t you enjoy it?’

He put aside his glass. ‘I enjoy parts of it,’ he said, looking at her. He added, ‘Things have been difficult for me lately. My father-in-law wants me to go and work for his wretched business.’

‘What sort of business?’

‘He imports timber.’ Julian rolled his eyes. ‘Can you imagine? I can hardly tell the difference between mahogany and walnut.’

He took her glass and refilled it. While his back was to her, she said, ‘What would you like to do, Julian?’

‘Oh – write a play … direct a film. Leave this place. It suffocates me.’

‘It is dull,’ she agreed.

He glanced at her. ‘I thought you might find it so. You must long for your hills and your loughs, Caitlin Canavan.’

She did not tell him that she had seen Ireland only in atlases and on postcards. ‘I hate it here,’ she said simply.

He stared out of the window, lines of discontent furrowing his forehead. ‘One feels so trapped, so out of place.’

She felt a thrill of recognition. The sense of displacement she had felt ever since her mother’s death remained with her, undiminished.

He did not yet sit down, but moved restlessly around the room. ‘Sometimes I feel like chucking it all in … starting again. Slinging a few things into a knapsack and walking away …’

‘But your wife?’ she whispered.

‘It was largely a marriage of convenience,’ he said vaguely.

Caitlin imagined herself and Julian, travelling. Sleeping in hotels, working in little theatres. Riding with him, dancing with him. He would hold her to him, and kiss the top of her head.
Don’t you look the little princess …

He was standing at the window. It had begun to rain, great drops that slithered down the glass. His posture was oddly crushed, his head bowed, his arms folded around himself. She rose from the sofa and hesitantly touched his forearm. ‘Poor Julian,’ she said. ‘How perfectly beastly it must be for you.’

He looked up at her and smiled bleakly, and said, ‘I thought that you might understand. None of the others do.’ Then he held out his arms and enfolded her within them, her head against his chest. She had not felt so warm, so safe, for years. The sense of being detached from herself, that she felt most of the time, had gone. She closed her eyes, smiling, enjoying the warmth of his body. Some of the battles and confusions and ignominies of the last two years seemed to melt away, to recede to a nightmare past on which she could close a door.

For a long time, he didn’t say anything, but she felt his lips touch the top of her head, and the pressure of his fingertips on her back. At last, he said, ‘You’ve been here an hour, sweetheart. What time are your people expecting you back?’

‘My guardian’s away. No-one will notice if I’m late.’

‘Ah.’ After a pause, ‘You know I want you terribly, don’t you, Caitlin?’

She remembered Martin Devereux and that awful business in the back of his car, and wondered whether she could endure that again. She would have been content to stay like this, but she realized that, for men, this was not enough. It was a trade – this blissful assurance of love for that brief degradation. She looked up at him and smiled.

He took her to a bedroom on the first floor. There she began to undress herself, as she had with Martin, but he stopped her and undid buttons and zips himself, punctuating the movements with kisses and expressions of love. And then, in the bed, between linen sheets, he coaxed and caressed her so that when he touched her, she cried out with pleasure and gave herself to him.

The next time she went to Julian Pascoe’s house, he opened the front door to her and led her straight up to the bedroom without saying a word. There, he made love to her with such expertise and thoroughness that afterwards she lay back on the sheets, her eyes closed, exhausted, hardly able to move her sprawled limbs.

Then he said, ‘Margaret’s coming home at the end of the week,’ and she sat up.

‘It won’t make any difference, will it?’

‘Of course it will make a difference,’ he said irritably. He began to pull on his clothes. ‘It’ll make a hell of a difference.’

‘But you said …’

‘What?’

‘That you would leave her.’

Julian laughed. ‘One doesn’t just walk out, darling. One plans a little first.’ He knotted his tie.

Later, in her own bedroom, she thought about that. Her father had just walked out. Her father had not, as far as she knew, planned.

Caitlin admitted to herself that she was still unsure of Julian. He was her lover and she adored him and intended to marry him, but every now and then she was uncertain what he thought of her. When they rehearsed with the others in the Memorial Hall, he treated her exactly the same as he treated the other members of the cast, apart from the odd kiss stolen behind the wings. She realized that he had to be careful because of Margaret, but the occasional flashes of sarcasm that he still directed at her hurt her terribly. She knew that she was pretty, but his criticism of her dancing (‘rather elephantine, darling,’) still rang uncomfortably loud in her ears. Although he had expressed a common dislike
of Woodcott St Martin and its stupefying dullness, she was not sure, when she thought about it carefully, that he had actually suggested that they go away together. When they were together, she was certain of his love; when they were apart, her certainty crumbled. The revue was to be staged in early May; sometimes she thought that was what Julian was waiting for, and that on the last night he would sweep her up and take her away. But in her most miserable, most uncertain moments, she was afraid that after the revue her life would just return to boredom and emptiness.

At Poona, Rosi wrote her novel and revised sporadically. Finals were horribly close and she suspected that she was going to do rather badly. The thought did not depress her, because she was to be married in July, and besides, her book was going very well. Her heroine, abducted by a particularly unpleasant villain, had just escaped his clutches by tying the bedsheets to a corner of a four-poster and abseiling down the wall of his castle. When she was stiff and tired from writing, Rosi cooked messily and amused the colonel. Little housework was done. Caitlin was out most of the time at the stables or rehearsing her play, Erich worked in the garden, and Hanna studied from dawn to dusk. Until she overheard the conversation in the post office, Rosi thought that everything was going very smoothly.

Tilda and Josh were due to come home the following day. Rosi went to the post office to buy envelopes for her letters to Richard. There was a rack of second-hand books among the leaflets about free cod-liver oil and the posters advertising Bring and Buy sales. Rosi slid behind the rack and began to look through it, searching for titles she had not yet read. The post office’s door opened as another customer came in. The woman’s voice filled the tiny shop.

‘Have you the evening free, Dorothy? Only I simply must finish those flats tonight, or Julian will be furious.’

‘I thought Miss Canavan was supposed to be helping you.’ This was said rather slyly. Rosi, listening, hidden by the rack, replaced a book and took out another one.

‘She did promise, but she never turns up. These young girls … so unreliable.’

‘I believe that Julian is giving her a lot of extra rehearsals.’

A silence. Then, ‘Dorothy … you don’t mean …?’

‘Didn’t you know, Patricia? Nigel saw them in the Memorial Hall kitchen in a clinch. The whole village is talking about it.’

‘But she’s just a schoolgirl!’ Patricia’s voice quivered. ‘And poor Margaret—’

The doorbell clanged as another customer entered the shop. Mrs Cavell said, ‘Oh, she’ll forgive and forget, she always does,’ and Rosi stuffed the book, a romance called
Love’s Young Dream
, back in the rack upside down and ran out of the shop.

Cleaning out cupboards that afternoon, she decided not to say anything to Hanna yet. Hanna worried too much and besides, it might only be village gossip. Yet the more she thought about it, the more Rosi was concerned. Caitlin had had a rehearsal almost every evening this week. Rosi had noticed that she left the house plastered with make-up and wearing her fanciest clothes – furs and silks that Rosi assumed had once belonged to her mother. Caitlin was an inveterate flirt: when Richard, Rosi’s fiancé, had visited Poona earlier in the year she had even made eyes at him, to his consternation and embarrassment. As far as Rosi was concerned, Caitlin could go to the devil, but she knew that Tilda would not feel the same way. She considered her options. She could confront Caitlin, but she suspected that Caitlin would lie to her. Or she could try to find out the truth.

After supper that night, Caitlin emerged from her bedroom wreathed in clouds of cheap perfume. ‘Another rehearsal?’ enquired Rosi sweetly, and Caitlin nodded.

‘I may be rather late. Julian wants to run through the whole thing.’

Rosi waited until she had heard the front door slam before grabbing her jacket and running downstairs. She followed Caitlin down the road that led to the path beside the Memorial Hall. She felt like a spy, ready to duck behind a tree if Caitlin turned round, but Caitlin never once looked back. Eventually they reached a
large house, its gardens bordered by a privet hedge. Sheltered by the privet, Rosi saw Caitlin ring the doorbell. The door opened and Caitlin slipped inside. Rosi slid the gate off the latch and walked up the gravel drive, trying not to make any noise. Then she skirted round to the back of the house. No rooms were lit downstairs, but there was a light in an upstairs window. ‘Stupid, stupid little girl,’ muttered Rosi to herself, as she ran back to the front door. There, she pressed her finger on the bell, and did not take it away until she heard the thunder of footsteps and saw that the hall light had been switched on.

A man flung open the door and stared at Rosi furiously.

‘What the hell …?’

She assumed him to be Julian Pascoe. ‘I’ve come to take my sister home,’ she said, and pushed past him, making for the stairs.

C
HAPTER
S
IXTEEN

I worked in the library, surrounded by reference books, on a time-line of the events that had surrounded Daragh Canavan’s death. The flood, Daragh’s encounter with Tom Kenny and his henchmen, his brief affair with Tilda, and Jossy’s realization of her husband’s betrayal and her pathetic attempt to hold on to him, an attempt which had ultimately cost her her life. A few days later, Max’s fleeting and disastrous return to Southam, followed by Daragh’s disappearance the same night. I had tried to map out how Daragh had spent his last day. He had been drinking. He had suggested to Caitlin that they go riding the next morning. They had packed the picnic and, at sunset, Caitlin had watched her father leave the house and walk across the fields. It had been April, which would have meant, I estimated, that Daragh had left the Hall between six and seven o’clock in the evening. Caitlin, watching from the garden, seemed to have been the last person to see Daragh Canavan alive – apart from his murderer, of course. Though Daragh had taken the footpath to Southam, none of the villagers had recalled seeing him that evening. His body had been found forty-eight years later, in the wilderness between Hall and village.

But no sudden inspiration, no answer to an old mystery came to me, sitting there between the shelves of encyclopedias. I could not distinguish, as both Tilda and Caitlin had told me to, the truth. I had begun to think that the task I had set myself was hopeless. I could not tell whether Tilda was the angel the newspaper articles had proclaimed her to be, or the murderous hypocrite of Caitlin’s recollection. I thought once more of the cut-glass chandelier in The Red House’s garden room, moving in the draught, sunlight catching the facets so that they reflected different lights, no two colours quite the same. Though I wanted to believe Tilda’s version of events, I found myself leaning to Caitlin’s. That Tilda had turned the fifteen-year-old Caitlin out of her home seemed to be borne out by the diaries. Caitlin had been promiscuous and deceitful – but that was understandable, surely, in the light of the bereavements she had suffered. She had been cruel to Melissa, but then many adolescent girls are unkind to each other. Tilda’s abandonment of Caitlin seemed unjustifiably harsh.

I thought once more of my flight through London, running from Patrick’s house to Charles’s offices. I felt now as I had done then, coming to the familiar from a strange route, unable to recognize it. I stared at my notes, rubbing my aching forehead with my fingertips.

And my thoughts drifted, as they so often did, to Patrick. Had we parted because of a distrust engendered by our equally unhappy past experiences, or because I would not bend to his will? Was Patrick capable of loving me, as I had once believed, or did he pose a physical threat to me, as Charles had unnervingly suggested? Everything we had done, everything he had said to me, could be seen in two lights. Those crystal beads again, always turning, amber and turquoise and pink.

It was dusk by the time I reached home that night. My next-door neighbour was having a party, and I had to park some distance from the house. Walking home, my skin prickled with the awareness that I was being watched. I glanced around, but could see no-one.

I let myself into my flat, and felt safe again. It was too hot and too late to cook, so I cut bread and cheese and opened a packet of olives. Sitting at my desk, I rewound my tape recorder. Tilda’s voice, describing her holiday in France in 1949, echoed round the room. I began to take notes, but my eyelids were growing heavy and my head still ached. I switched off the tape-player, kicked off my shoes, and curled up on the bed.