Some Old Lover's Ghost (57 page)

‘Julian.’ She seized the sleeve of his jacket, pulling him towards her. ‘I love you. I really do. And you love me, I know that you do.’

‘No,’ he said, very deliberately. ‘No, I never told you that. I may be a complete bastard, but I would never have said that. You were an amusement for me, Caitlin. A diversion. You are reasonably attractive, and you were willing and I was bored. That’s all.’

Her hand slipped from his arm. She whispered, ‘But the play—’

and he said, ‘I’ve told Veronica she can do your song.’ He smiled at her. ‘She hit me, you know, your guardian. Slapped my face.’ He added, ‘Do you know, I rather enjoyed it,’ and then he went back into the hall.

Caitlin went back to Poona only because she could think of nowhere else to go. Had she ten shillings in her pocket then she would have walked away, left the village, never come back. In her bedroom, she sat wrapped in her eiderdown, her knuckles pressed against her mouth, her gaze fixed on the small posy of flowers in the jam jar on her window sill.

The following day Caitlin found Erich in the garden, netting the fruit bushes. ‘Erich,’ she said, ‘the chain has come off my bicycle. Do you think that you could put it back on for me?’

He blushed and stumbled to his feet, and followed her from the garden to the shed. There was something repulsive about his gangling arms, his lank hair, his crooked, broken teeth. But she showed him her bicycle. ‘Can you mend it?’

He said nothing, but stooped and fiddled with the oily chain. While his back was to her, she said curiously, ‘You give me those bunches of flowers, don’t you?’

The chain fell from his clumsy hands. ‘I’m s-s-sorry,’ he muttered.

‘There’s nothing to be sorry for, Erich. They are beautiful flowers.’

He looked back at her. She saw the disbelief in his eyes. ‘You like them, Caitlin?’

‘Of course I do.’ She smiled at him.

His expression changed from doubt to joy, and she knew that she could do it. She could make Erich Wirmer love her. It was the best revenge she could think of. She would make Erich love her because Tilda had taken Julian from her. Tilda had taken both her father and her lover and, in return, Caitlin intended to take something of hers.

Max was walking back from seeing Melissa to the school bus when he heard a voice call his name. He spun round.

‘Cécile!’

‘Max, chéri.’ She kissed him.

‘I wasn’t expecting you until next week.’

She frowned. ‘Didn’t Melissa tell you that I came back early?’ Her frown became deeper, and she pressed the palms of her hands together, touching her fingertips to her mouth.

Max felt confused. ‘Melissa didn’t mention … when did you call?’

‘It must have slipped her mind.’ Cécile seized his hand. ‘Buy me coffee, chéri, won’t you?’

They went to the café in the square. Max ordered black coffee. Cécile said, ‘I called at your house when I came home a few days ago. I was going to cook you dinner. I did not realize that your wife would be there.’

He glanced at her sharply.
‘Tilda
?’

She nodded. ‘I just walked in, I’m afraid. I saw Melissa in the garden and called out to her. I did not see Mathilde at first, they were in the shadow of the tree.’

He said urgently, ‘Which day was this, Cécile?’

She thought back. ‘Wednesday. At midday, or perhaps a little later.’

Max swore. Wednesday had been the last day of Tilda’s holiday. At midday on Wednesday he had been delivering the Rolls to that wretchedly tardy farmer.

She touched his hand. ‘Max, I did not know that your wife was visiting, or I would not have called.’

‘Not your fault,’ he said absently. ‘The arrangements were rather last minute. Tilda wrote, asking to visit at Easter. You had already left for your cousin’s.’ He groaned, realizing how it must have seemed to Tilda. Cécile, coming into an obviously familiar house and starting to cook. No wonder Tilda had been cold, distant, that last afternoon.

Cécile said, ‘I spoiled things for you, didn’t I?’

He shrugged. ‘I’m not sure.’

There was a silence. Cécile stirred her coffee, watching him. ‘And you,’ she said slowly, ‘you are still in love with her, aren’t you, Max?’

He looked away to the square, with its trees that dappled the cobbles with shadow.

‘Tell me!’ she said.

He turned back to her. ‘Yes. It’s taken me an age to realize it, but I still love her.’

It was her turn to look away. ‘Then you will go back to England.’

‘I don’t know.’ He had, over the past three days, veered between concluding that Tilda was lost to him for ever, and wanting to leap on the next train to Calais.

‘Of course you will. You must.’

‘Perhaps.’

‘And me?’ she said.

He took her hand. ‘Cécile, I owe you so much. You have been such a good friend.’

‘But you do not love me.’ Her voice was harsh.

‘You are my dear, dear friend.’

‘I love you, Max.’

He stared at her. She laughed. ‘Didn’t you know, Max?’

‘Cécile.’ He hated himself. ‘I never meant—’

‘I know that. So now you must choose, Max. Who is it to be?’

He didn’t answer. After a while, she said gently, ‘Don’t worry, I know that there is no choice. You will go back to Tilda.’ But he saw that there were tears in her eyes.

‘Cécile,’ he said. ‘I am so sorry. I have been such an idiot. Such a selfish swine.’

‘Oh, Max,’ she said, and laughed again. ‘So
English.’

Hanna was certain that she was going to fail her exams. She had made a revision timetable and she had started work in plenty of time, but this morning she had glanced at her notes on the liver, which she had revised weeks ago, and had not been able to
remember it at all. All the long words had muddled up in her head. She was afraid that when it came to the exams she would write nonsense, or she would forget all her English and scribble every answer in German.

She had a headache most of the time and found it hard to fall asleep at night. When she did sleep, she had awful dreams about Holland and Germany, arousing memories that she had tried to put out of her head. She heard her parents’ and her sisters’ voices calling out to her and, when she woke, often with tears pouring down her face, she would feel overwhelmed with guilt.

She spoke to Tilda one day after dinner. ‘I think I shall go back to college early, Tilda. I need to work in the library.’

Tilda was making tea. She poured Hanna a cup. ‘You look tired, Hanna.’

Hanna said fretfully, ‘I have so much work to do. And my brain is like that colander – I put things in and they just fall out.’

Tilda passed her the sugar. ‘Perhaps,’ she said gently, ‘you are working
too
hard, Hanna.’

Hanna said nothing, but scowled and stirred sugar into her tea.

‘Aunt Sarah used to say to me that each day I should do something with my head, something with my feet, and something with my soul. It was good advice.’

‘I haven’t time for all that.’

‘I just meant … go for a walk. Or feed the ducks. Or sit in the church for half an hour. It’s nice and cool there and your head might ache less. Then you’ll come back refreshed and be able to work better.’

Hanna was suspicious. Her tutor at Cambridge had said much the same: that she should work for no more than a couple of hours at a time.

‘Just a little walk,’ said Tilda coaxingly. ‘Please, Hanna.’

Hanna scowled, but put on her jacket. Outside, it had rained and the air smelt fresh and sweet. April and May were her favourite months, but this year she had hardly noticed the changing of the seasons. She wandered through the garden and onto the main
road. The breeze was cool and pleasant on her aching forehead. She tried mentally to list the bones of the foot, but found herself instead admiring the bluebells in the woods and the delicate nodding heads of the windflowers. She dug her hands into her pockets and ambled aimlessly. She would return to Cambridge tomorrow, she decided. Rosi, unable to bear her separation from her fiancé, had already gone back.

She found herself in the road that led to The Red House. Looking up, she saw in the distance two figures. She recognized Erich instantly, but had to look twice to convince herself that the girl beside him was Caitlin.

Hanna watched, frowning, as Erich opened the gate. She remembered the garden of The Red House, its wild beauty, and the patterns and blossoms that Erich had coaxed from the wilderness.

Then she glanced at her watch. She realized with a feeling of panic that she had been walking for forty minutes. She turned round, and headed back to Poona and her books.

Erich showed Caitlin the box trees, the lawn with the copper beech, the orchard and the shrubbery. Lastly, he took her to the garden behind the house. He led her along the curling paths, beneath the rambling roses. Erich explained how he had discovered the garden, how he had uncovered the paths, cleaned the pond and released the flowers from their imprisonment of weeds and dead leaves. He had never been able to talk so easily to a girl before. He hardly stuttered at all. When she smiled, he could not have been happier, and when she stood in the little clearing that he had made, and he looked from Caitlin to the marble girl who was her twin, he could hardly breathe for delight.

He picked her a bunch of flowers. Bluebells, roses, long strands of honeysuckle. She pressed her face in the bouquet to smell their scent, and looked up and smiled. ‘They are heavenly, Erich,’ she said, and he was part of the world again. No longer excluded, trapped by his gaucheness, his memories, his history.

Tilda felt as though everything was dissolving into chaos. Hanna was working too hard and Rosi wasn’t working at all, and Josh had gone back to school and she missed him dreadfully. She wept each night for Melissa, in France. She had been a rotten mother to Daragh’s child and she had lost Max. Only Erich, oddly, seemed happy. Erich’s happiness disturbed her most of all. She wanted to rejoice in it but could not. His happiness, like his misery, was extreme: a euphoria that seemed causeless, that emphasized the brittleness of his fragile body, and of his more fragile mind. He picked at his dinner, rose early and went to bed late. He never sat still and was constantly restless. She touched his forehead one evening, suspecting a fever, yet it was cool. He said, when she enquired, ‘I have a secret, Tilda, a very good secret,’ and laughed. She went guiltily into his room when he was out, and looked in his little suitcase, but there was none of the food that he tended to hoard there when he was deeply unhappy, only his few mementoes: his father’s broken watch, his mother’s photograph. From the telephone box in the village, Tilda called the psychiatrist in Oxford and made an appointment.

She went through her daily routine with a mechanical dullness that even the colonel noticed.
‘France,’
he said scathingly. ‘Damnable place. I was there from ‘14 to ‘17, y’know. You’d have better holidayed in Weymouth, m’dear.’

She worried about Caitlin constantly. The anger and resentment had eased off, replaced by cold politeness. Yet she remembered the way that Caitlin had looked at her. The undiluted hatred in her eyes. The sense that they lurched on the edge of something dangerous, a threatening truth that was only just hidden. Tilda made inquiries about boarding schools. A new school would give Caitlin a new start. She wondered how on earth she would afford it. Kit would help, perhaps.

She was afraid that Caitlin might be pregnant, and was overwhelmed with relief when Caitlin told her that she was not. She tried to talk to Caitlin again, to warn her once more of the dangers of the road she travelled, but Caitlin just said stonily, ‘Julian doesn’t want to see me any more. So you’ve got
what you wanted, haven’t you?’ Tilda knew that there would be other Julians, other men who would exploit Caitlin’s carelessness and vulnerability.

At night, unable to sleep, she thought of Max. She wrote to him a stiff little letter thanking him for her pleasant holiday. She knew that she must let him go, that she must allow him to begin a new life.

They sat on the terrace that looked out over the secret garden. Erich said, ‘The box trees in front of the house will be like the pieces on a chess board. The Black Queen, the White Knight.’

Caitlin glanced at the tall hedges, which Erich had begun to sculpt into shape. ‘Are there enough?’

‘There are eight. I’ll plant more around the lawn for the pawns.’

Caitlin had a bar of chocolate in her pocket. She gave Erich a piece. It was evening, and the late sun touched the winding paths and flowering shrubs with gold. ‘They’ll take ages to grow, won’t they?’

‘Many, many years. But only a short t-t-time compared to the life of this garden,’ he explained. ‘Whoever planted this would have known that he would not see it finished. That’s the thing about gardens.’

Caitlin liked things to be complete, to know the end of them. They sat for a while in silence, and Caitlin realized that she had for a while forgotten her purpose in seeking Erich’s company. She fidgeted uncomfortably, reminding herself that what she had meant to do was to make him love her, and not Tilda. She was good at making men love her. Sometimes she thought that was all she was good at.

She said curiously, looking at him, ‘What happened to your teeth, Erich?’ One tooth was missing, another was a broken stump.

‘A soldier hit me.’

‘In Vienna?’

He nodded. ‘When they killed my father.’

She stared at him. ‘Did you
see
them kill him?’

‘Yes. They came one evening. I hid from them.’ He began to chew the ragged skin at the edges of his fingernails.

For a moment, she felt sorry for him. She said suddenly, ‘My father’s in Ireland, you know. I’m going to find him.’ She explained about the priests she had written to, and the three Caitlin Canavans whose addresses she had subsequently obtained. Erich listened attentively and asked sensible questions, and she realized that he was not as stupid as she had always assumed him to be.

‘I’ve had two replies and they were no good, and I’m waiting for the third. I’m sure she’s the one. She lives in County Wicklow and I can remember my daddy talking about County Wicklow.’