Some Old Lover's Ghost (55 page)

I dreamed that I was cleaning fireplaces in a large old house. Sweeping out the ash, blackening the hearth, laying the fire. It took ages to clean up all the ash, because no matter how conscientiously I brushed, little runnels of soot trickled from the flue, gathering around the metal firedogs and behind the ornamental grate. I worked on my hands and knees, possessed by a feverish anxiety. I was wearing a long, black, high-collared dress, a white apron and button boots. My hair was swept up into a bun. The house was dark and silent at first, but after a while I became aware of a sound. A rattling and clicking, as though someone was trying to open a door. My anxiety to finish the grate increased, but soot still whistled down the chimney, dirtying the gleaming tiles. I heard the door handle turn once more, and knew that soon, when I looked round, I would see the face of my employer, Edward de Paveley. And if the grate was not clean, then I would feel his body against mine, the weight of him crushing the air out of my lungs. The door rattled.

I woke up, gasping for breath. There was, as before, that overwhelming relief when I remembered that this was 1995, and not 1913. It was pitch dark, and when I glanced at my clock I saw that it was eleven o’clock. Then I heard the sound again. A rattle: the sound from my dream.

I couldn’t move; I was paralysed with fear. I had begun sternly to tell myself that I was imagining things again when I heard a dull thud. Someone had jumped from the kitchen draining board to the floor. I pressed my knuckles against my mouth. That was no old ghost: that was neither Edward de Paveley nor Daragh Canavan. Someone was in the kitchen.

I managed to kneel up. My fumbling fingers groped around the
bedside table, but found nothing more than the lamp and alarm clock. I remembered that I had returned the hefty book about the Fens to the library. I heard footsteps crossing the kitchen floor.
Actually, I wondered whether you felt physically threatened
. I tried to call out Patrick’s name, but could not speak.

The door opened and light flooded the room, burning my eyes. ‘Charles,’ I said.

My first reaction was one of overwhelming relief. My dear old friend Charles. Safe, reliable, unthreatening Charles. Yet, when I looked at him properly, my relief faltered. Something about his eyes; something about his grubby, unkempt clothing.

‘Charles,’ I said again. ‘What on earth are you doing here?’

‘You should get your window fixed, Rebecca.’

‘For heaven’s sake—’ I was becoming angry. ‘It’s eleven o’clock at night—’

‘I said, you should get your window fixed. Anyone could walk in. Though perhaps that’s what you want.’

His gait was unsteady as he walked into the room, and I thought that he was drunk. As he neared my bed, I stood, but he reached out a hand and pushed me back onto the sheets.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Stay there. I want you to stay there.’

I said quickly, ‘We can talk in the kitchen, Charles. Let me make you a cup of tea.’

‘Don’t want to talk,’ he muttered. “S not what I’ve come for.’

Charles is slightly built, but I am five foot two and he is six foot. My fear was fast returning.

‘I waited
years,’
he said suddenly. ‘But I’m not going to wait any more.’

I whispered, ‘Waited for what?’

‘For you.’

He was neither ill nor drunk. There was an absence in his eyes. Something missing.

‘I waited for you, Rebecca,’ he repeated. His hand still rested on my chest; slowly, it slid down, caressing my breast. ‘When you were screwing that prick, Toby Carne,
I waited. When you lost the baby and he chucked you, I waited.’

‘You’ve been a good friend, Charles,’ I said. Though I tried to sound reassuring, my voice faltered. I could hear the sound of the next door party: music and screams of laughter. I knew that if I too screamed, no-one would hear me.

‘And things were going better,’ he added as though I had not spoken, ‘and I began to hope again. And then you jumped into Patrick Franklin’s bed. I couldn’t believe it. All those years I’d waited. You are so faithless, aren’t you? I kept an eye on you, though, Rebecca.’

He withdrew his hand and looked at me, and when I saw the cunning in his pale green eyes, I understood. ‘You were watching me, Charles. It was you.’

‘Course it was. I like to watch you sleep, Rebecca – did you know that? Sometimes you leave the curtains open a little, and I can look down at you. If Patrick Franklin had slept here, I would have killed him.’

He said that in such a matter of fact way that my mind, racing for an escape, seemed to still, unable even to think any more. Then I gasped and said, ‘Charles, you’re not well. Let me phone your doctor. Or Lucy—’

‘
No
.’ He looked down at me. There was in his face an expression of such mingled desire and pain that just then I hated myself. I had never taken seriously Charles’s avowals of love. I had not considered him a person capable of being deeply hurt.

‘And then you quarrelled with Patrick,’ he went on. ‘You let me hold you that night – you cried on my shoulder. Do you remember, Rebecca? I was so happy.’

I remembered weeping down the phone, and Charles coming round, laden with wine and roses. Now he bent his head, laying it on my breast. I stroked his fine, tangled hair, trying to calm him.

But when he straightened, his expression had altered. ‘I thought that you loved me then. I’d waited and waited and you needed someone, and I was there. So I offered to marry you. Even though
you were carrying that man’s child, I offered to marry you. I had a ring, Rebecca – did you know that?’

I shook my head, unable to speak. I remembered Southam, and the glassy, unreal stillness of the landscape.

‘And you laughed,’ he said wonderingly. ‘You laughed.’

I saw that the love in his eyes had been replaced by anger. Very slowly, almost imperceptibly, I began to raise myself upright, so that I could run for the door if I had to.

‘I didn’t mean to laugh, Charles,’ I said gently. ‘I shouldn’t have laughed. It was wrong of me.’

He turned suddenly, seizing my shoulder, shaking me. ‘Why aren’t I good enough for you, Rebecca?’

‘It isn’t that.’ His bony fingers dug into my shoulders, hurting me. ‘You know that I’m very fond of you, Charles. You’re my oldest friend—’ I could hear my panic in my voice.

‘I only wanted what everyone else has had. And then, after we went to the Fens, I realized that you weren’t going to give it to me. Everyone else, but not me. So I thought, why shouldn’t I take it?’

There was a sound – just the wind blowing the open window shut, I thought – but enough to make Charles turn his head. I saw my chance and wriggled out of his grasp, running across the room. But as I seized the door handle, he flung himself against me so that my head ricocheted against the door. My knees buckled, and I slid to the floor. The artexed ceiling of the room was studded with stars. I heard a voice call out my name, and I said weakly, ‘Patrick,’ and then thought how stupid I was, imagining that Patrick had come to save me. Charles’s body was pressed against mine, and his hands clawed at me, making real all my worst nightmares.

And then, quite suddenly, the weight was gone, and I was free. I opened my eyes, and as my vision cleared I saw Patrick dragging Charles across the room. Charles swung his fist at Patrick, and Patrick collapsed against my desk. My laptop, the box of disks and heaps of paper spilled to the floor. Charles hurled himself on top of Patrick, who somehow managed to push him aside. I knew that I should do something – call the police, or hit Charles
on the head with a vase the way heroines do in films, but I simply could not move. The fight wasn’t like in films, anyway. It was messy, scrappy, their fists more often missing than finding their mark. Eventually Charles, struggling to his feet, struck his head on the underside of my desk and fell back to the floor, stunned. When Patrick drew back his fist to hit him again, I cried out, ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Patrick – stop it! That’s enough!’

Patrick looked at Charles, who was not moving, and then he staggered back to the bed and sat down, his head in his hands, gasping for breath. Then he said, ‘Are you all right?’

I nodded. I wasn’t sure, actually. There was a moment’s silence, and then the awful noise began. Charles was crying. Beneath the desk, he hunched his knees up to his chin, and wept. My battered room was filled with his despair.

I sent Patrick into the kitchen to find ice to put on his cut eye, and I crawled across the room and gently coaxed Charles out from under the table. I sat on the bed, Charles’s head cradled in my lap, as he wept and told me that he had not meant to hurt me. My entire body felt bruised, but much more painful was the guilt I felt. Charles had loved me, and I had made light of his love. If nothing else, Tilda’s story should have taught me love’s capacity to wound the lover. Now, I believed Charles when he said that he had not meant to hurt me. When Patrick picked up the telephone to call the police, I stopped him.

‘Rebecca. For God’s sake. He tried to rape you. I heard him.’

‘He’s ill, Patrick.’ I tried to think what to do. ‘I’ll call his sister – perhaps his mother can get him to go into a clinic or something.’

He argued a bit more, but I insisted. A night in a police cell would finish poor Charles off. We tracked down Charles’s mother and then everything seemed to happen very quickly. Rattled out of her usual cold detachment, Charles’s mother arrived with a Harley Street doctor, protesting at being hauled out of bed at such an hour. Charles was more or less catatonic by that time, and went with them quietly. And then Patrick and I were alone in the ruins of my living room. It was past three in the morning.

I said, ‘Thank you, Patrick.’ My voice shook. ‘How did you know …?’

‘I didn’t. I’d something to tell you. I’ve been trying to contact you for weeks – I left several messages on your answering machine, but you didn’t get in touch.’

‘I erased them,’ I said, shamed, ‘without listening to them.’

‘Oh.’ He glanced at me. His good looks were marred by a ragged cut above his eyebrow. ‘Just as well, perhaps, or I wouldn’t have called tonight. Anyway, I was working late, so I thought I’d drive back this way and call in if there were any lights on. I was about to knock at the door when I heard the shouting. So I went round the back to see whether the door was still open. It wasn’t, but I managed to climb through the window.’

‘You are going to have a splendid black eye, Patrick. What did you want to tell me?’

‘The results of the DNA test came through. The body is Daragh Canavan’s.’

I had never doubted that. We sat for a while in silence. Then he said, ‘Rebecca, I overheard Charles say something. He said that you were expecting my child. Is it true?’

My head in my hands, I nodded.

‘Good God.’ He stared at me. ‘But that must be – how long—’

I could see him struggling with arithmetic, so I said quickly, ‘It must have been in Cumbria. I’m almost three months’ pregnant, I think.’

‘You think?’ Always the lawyer, he pounced on the significant word.

I blinked. For the first time in that long, dreadful evening, I wanted to cry. ‘I haven’t seen a doctor yet. There’s no point. I haven’t decided what to do.’

‘Oh.’ He seemed to shut himself off from me. The single syllable was flat, noncommittal.

‘It’s not easy,’ I said angrily. ‘I’d love to have the baby, of course I would, but you can see how small my flat is, and I don’t earn very much, and I’m just not sure I could give it a decent life.

If my writing doesn’t work out I’ll have to teach or do secretarial work or something, so it’d be a latchkey child, and—’

‘Stop.’ He put his arm round me and held me to him and I wept onto the shoulder of his expensively tailored white shirt.

Patrick insisted on taking me to the nearest A and E department for a check-up. There, waiting among the broken arms and cracked heads and scalds, he said, ‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’

Wearily, I thought back through the missed opportunities and misunderstandings of the past weeks. ‘It never seemed to be the right time. And I thought you hated me. And that you were still in love with Jennifer.’

‘I saw you, that evening. I ran after you, but I lost you in the crowds.’

I felt foolish, as well as exhausted. My pursuer, the ghost that had followed me that night in Richmond, had been Patrick. I saw too that I might have misinterpreted a friendly hug, the sort of greeting a man might give to the mother of his child.

‘We have to keep on reasonably good terms,’ he explained, echoing my thoughts. ‘I don’t want Ellie to grow up with her parents continually sniping at each other. If we can remain friends, it’ll be better for her.’

Three youths staggered in, two supporting their injured friend, who had a broken nose. There were blots of blood on the floor.

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. ‘Patrick, there’s something I’ve been meaning to say to you for weeks. I don’t want to hurt Tilda. I like Tilda – I love her, I suppose. I’ve no intention of harming her in order to further my career. I’m not that ambitious.’

He looked away from me. ‘That wasn’t what Toby Carne implied to me.’

‘Toby?’ I remembered Patrick saying, just before we had quarrelled in the wine bar,
I ran into a friend of yours the other day
. Old lovers’ ghosts again, haunting me.

‘If Toby told you that, then he was miffed because I didn’t run back to him as soon as he realized he missed me. It’s over between
us, Patrick – utterly and completely over. When I needed him, he let me down. Toby just can’t accept that I’m not interested. He likes to win.’

Fleetingly, Patrick smiled. ‘I know. I’ve been up against him in court.’

‘Who won?’

‘Me.’

Then I asked him the question that had haunted me for some time. I said, ‘You knew that Daragh was dead, didn’t you, Patrick?’

He did not answer. ‘Didn’t you?’ I persisted. ‘That was why you didn’t want Tilda’s biography written.’ And when he still did not reply, I said, ‘Patrick. Please.’

He stretched his long legs out in front of him. The boy with the broken nose collapsed on the floor, and two nurses rushed to pick him up.