Some Old Lover's Ghost (61 page)

I didn’t think so. As for the book – as for the baby – I could feel myself coming to a conclusion. But not yet. Not quite yet.

From behind me, Tilda said, ‘Patrick telephoned me yesterday. Apparently Daragh’s body has been released for burial.’

‘Caitlin told me.’

Her lids flickered. ‘You’ve spoken to her?’

‘Yesterday.’

‘How was she?’

‘Unhappy. Lonely.’

She said, ‘Poor Caitlin.’

‘She asked me to go to her father’s interment. I said that I would.’

‘I’m glad. I’d send flowers, but Caitlin would not welcome it.’

She was silent then for a such a long time that I wondered whether she had fallen asleep, but then she looked up suddenly and said, ‘You’ll stay for supper, won’t you, Rebecca? Joan could make up a bed for you. It seems such a long time since you stayed the night.’

She seemed lonely, like Caitlin, but I had to refuse. I bent and kissed her.

‘Next week, Tilda, I hope. I’ll telephone.’

Tilda closed the album. Her heart ached with remembering. She would have liked Rebecca’s company that evening; it would have distracted her for a while from the memories that would rush in as soon as she was alone. She had needed the past unravelled; she had needed Rebecca, the uninvolved outsider, to do that untangling for her. Yet she had not fully anticipated the depths of the pain that the past could still inflict on her: it had taken almost more from her than she had felt able to give. Recently, she had feared that she was running out of time.

The disjointedness, the bright horror of the days that had followed Erich’s death, she had never forgotten. The inquest; the terrible scene with Caitlin.
You were my father’s lover
! The tormenting knowledge, from that moment, that she too had played a part in Erich’s death.

Max had come home. Tilda smiled fleetingly. Max and Melissa had come home, and Max had taken over all the tasks she had no longer been able to do. She had forgotten how to peel a potato; to scrub a floor exhausted her. Max had telephoned Hanna’s college tutor to tell her that Hanna would not return to university until the autumn; Max had engaged a woman to cook and clean for the colonel, and Max had gone to the police station in Oxford, to persuade them to attempt to trace the runaway Caitlin.

Max had arranged the funeral. Tilda remembered sitting in the front pew, looking up at the bright, fractured lights of the rose window. Unable to say the prayers or to join in the hymns. Unable sometimes even to stand. If Max had not been been there, she could not have endured it. Afterwards she had looked around the sea of familiar faces. The van de Criendts had travelled from Holland, and with them had come the elderly couple who had looked after Erich in the months before the invasion. Anna had been there, and Professor Hastings, and Michael. And Harold
Sykes and his wife and daughters. And Archie Raphael, and their old neighbours from Southam. She had not realized that so many people cared.

It was becoming dark. When she looked out of the window, she saw that the box trees cast a purplish shadow on the gravel. Tilda remembered the first time she had taken Max to The Red House. It had been a week or two after the funeral – long, dark days, all jumbling exhaustingly together. She had found the courage, at last, to sort out Erich’s things, and had discovered his plans for the garden rolled up in a drawer. She had taken Max to The Red House that evening and had shown him what Erich had made, and what he would have done if he had had more time. And there, sitting on the steps of the terrace, looking down at the winding paths and drooping roses, she had sensed Erich’s peaceful presence. The rustle of a lilac bough. A footstep, almost heard. Free of fear at last, he had haunted his garden.

To write a book is to make a pattern, and yet, of course, in real lives, there is no pattern. People are not coherent, they are not programmed as a computer is programmed, to react in the same way to similar events.

Many people had known Tilda better than I ever would, and yet even they, perhaps, had not fully understood her. The events that had made her – her brutal conception, the pathos of her birth, the infancy spent in an institution – had no doubt spurred her to help all those other neglected and abandoned children, but they had also cut her off from the rest of us. The more extreme our experience, the less others are able to identify with it. This is why people avoid the bereaved. Because they do not, until it happens to them, know what to say or what to do. Their incomprehension, their dumbness, causes them to retreat.

I worked for hours that evening, concentrating on the latter half of Tilda’s life, writing about the Fifties, Sixties, and Seventies, the years when the difficulties of Tilda’s private life had retreated, and had taken second place to her work. I had photographs: Tilda being presented with a bouquet outside the newly opened Erich
Wirmer Clinic; Tilda receiving her CBE. I put in order my taped interviews and letters from adopted and fostered Red House children; I went through the list of grandchildren, ticking off those to whom I had spoken.

Though I did not finish work until almost one o’clock in the morning, I could not sleep. I lay in bed, memories reeling through my head like a fast-forwarding film. The box hedges in Tilda’s garden, the expression on her face as she had shown me her photograph album. Patrick, at the hospital.
Come to Cumbria with me
. I wondered whether I could. The thought terrified me. I had lived in London for seven years – could I uproot myself and start again in that bleak, beautiful place? Though my home was small and inconvenient, though I was often lonely, there was a safety in my present life, the safety of the familiar. To live in Cumbria with Patrick would take such a leap of trust, of commitment, that my heart shrank at the thought of it.

My thoughts exhausted me, yet I remained wakeful. I selected the biggest and oldest and dullest of the library books on my desk, and began to read. The book’s publication date was 1926; the first chapter dealt with the history of the Fens: a sure cure for insomnia. Curled up in the duvet I began to read about the Romans, their colonization of East Anglia, their attempts to drain a hostile land, their eventual decline and replacement by a less organized people. Then the Anglo-Saxons – St Guthlac complaining of mires and miasmas – and Hereward the Wake.

By the time I began the section on the medieval history of the Fens, my eyelids were growing heavy. I almost put the book aside but, flicking forward, I saw that there was only a couple of pages to the end of the chapter. I made myself continue. When I came to the paragraph describing the medieval punishment for landowners who had neglected their sea defences, I had to read it twice. My heart began to beat very quickly, and I was suddenly wide awake again.

I sat up in bed. I knew now who had killed Daragh Canavan.

These days, she woke about four in the morning, just before the first birds began to sing. Max was with her then: when she turned in bed and reached out to him, she was always surprised that he was not there.

Often she managed to doze again; today she could not. The conversation with Rebecca remained with her, the memories that it had stirred lingered, so that the events of forty years ago were more vivid than the misty grey of a late summer’s morning. Tilda rose from the bed and left the room. She walked quietly through the house, careful not to disturb Joan’s sleep.

Each room had its memories, yet he was closest to her, of course, in the solar. Voices whispered as she stood in the great bay window.

‘I assume it’s for that door.’ He pointed to the peeling, rotting entrance to the house.

Tilda looked at the key Max had given her.

‘I collected it from the estate agent this afternoon. I’m buying The Red House, Tilda. It’ll take six weeks or so, but they gave me the key so that we could look round.’

She whispered, ‘Buying the house?’

‘For you. I know that you love it. For us, if you choose, Tilda.’

She did not move, did not fit the key to the lock. She said only, ‘What about Cécile, Max?’

‘Cécile? Cécile was a friend, a dear friend.’

He was lying. ‘Cécile was your lover,’ she said.

When he bent his head in acknowledgement, she said angrily, ‘You should go back to her, Max. You don’t have to stay here just because you feel sorry for me.’

He took the key from her palm and fitted it into the lock. The door creaked, and was freed from its spider-web chains. There was a swirl of dead leaves in the hall. Max held out his hand. ‘Come on.’

She hesitated only momentarily, then she followed him inside. The rooms were just as she had imagined them, faded and beautiful, with fireplaces of golden stone, and worn, paved floors.

‘Cécile’s selling the garage for me,’ said Max. ‘And I went to see my father this morning, and he’s lent me enough cash to put down a deposit on The Red House. The price is reasonable – it’s been empty for years, and no-one wants houses of this size these days. It’ll need a lot of work, but I’m sure we can make it habitable. And when it’s ready, we can fill it with children.’

‘Max,’ she said.

They were in a room overlooking the front garden. The wide stone bay window was almost smothered by creepers. ‘Our own children, or your waifs and strays. It doesn’t matter. You’ll find them, Tilda, I know you will. It’s what you’re good at.’

She shook her head violently. ‘But I’m not, am I, Max? I failed Erich. I failed Caitlin. Even Hanna—’

‘Hanna will recover,’ he said. ‘Hanna is strong. As for Erich and Caitlin, you did your best, Tilda. No-one could have done more.’

‘I’ve always remembered what you said to me, years ago, in London. It was your birthday. The snow had begun. Do you remember? You said that I was fooling myself. That I was trying to put sticking plaster on wounds that were too deep. You were right, Max, I know that now. I thought I could help Erich, but I couldn’t.’

He said, ‘I remember that I was patronizing and arrogant. I remember believing that no-one could understand grief as I did.’

She whispered, ‘I am afraid.’

Standing beside her, he put his arms around her. ‘Loving someone is about taking risks. Love is dangerous.’

Then he kissed her. When, at last, she looked up, she saw that the setting sun had painted the garden with wild pinks and gold. She thought they had come home at last.

Slowly, they had come to her. The damaged, the bruised, the neglected. The children that no-one wanted.

Joan had been the first. Joan had come to live in The Red House in the July of 1949, a few days before Rosi and Richard
had married. Archie had found Joan, at twelve years old already the casualty of half a dozen children’s homes, stealing food from a market stall. Tilda had wanted to say no, to shake her head, to explain that it was too soon, but something about the child had stopped her.
I’ll try
, she had said, in the end, and a fidgeting, shuffling Joan had stood beside her in church as Rosi and Richard had made their vows.

Luke and Tom, the twins, had been discovered locked in a room with their retarded, dying mother. They had spoken no language except one of their own invention, and when Tilda had first heard of them they had been destined for a mental institution. The vast gardens and big, airy rooms of The Red House had at first terrified them, and they had made a cave of sheets and blankets in the corner of the bedroom in which they had huddled for the first fortnight of their stay.

Other children had followed. Teenage girls, far too young to be mothers to the babies they were expecting; boys with police records for burglary and vandalism. The money Max had earned from freelance journalism had at first been barely enough to feed them all.

Yet that other baby, the second daughter she had longed for, she had been denied. In her late forties, when she had given up hope, she had sat beside Erich’s grave and wept both for the son she had lost and the daughter she had never had. Then she had picked herself up, and walked back to The Red House, and her children.

The sky clouded over on the afternoon of Daragh Canavan’s burial, and the fidgety breeze marked the shifting of the seasons from summer to autumn. Less than half a dozen mourners attended the brief ceremony in Southam churchyard. I knew Caitlin, of course, and guessed the elderly woman beside her to be Jossy’s cook’s daughter. I wondered whether the two suits standing back beneath the yews were policemen. I saw, looking around, that
he
had not come.

As the earth was sprinkled onto the coffin, I slipped out and
walked to where the path led from the church to the dike. The boughs of the trees, their leaves just beginning to turn, met overhead to form a tunnel. When I emerged in the open field, I remembered how I had felt when I had walked here with Charles: cut off from the village, separated from my surroundings by both place and time.

The field had already been ploughed. Clouds, heavy and swollen, rolled in from the east. Black dust adhered to my shoes as I crossed the furrows, heading for the old steward’s house. The latch was broken, and the breeze flicked the gate open and shut as I walked down the path to the front door. There were small heaps of cement and stone in the grass, where pebbledash had fallen from the walls of the house. The window panes were dull and unreflecting, and the blistered paint on the frames was so tarnished by the weather that I could no longer tell what colour it once had been.

I knocked on the door. The sound of my knuckles on the wood was hollow, echoeless. I stood for a moment, listening to the wind shaking the leaves of the willow trees. When I glanced back to the dike, I saw that grass had covered the scarred earth that had once marked Daragh Canavan’s lonely grave. I knocked again and, stooping at the letter box, called out Kit de Paveley’s name. I heard shuffling footsteps, and the clink of metal as the chain slid from the door.

‘Yes?’

I suppose one expects to see in the face of a murderer evil, or guilt. But I saw only, through the inches between door and jamb, a very old, very sick man. The sound of Kit de Paveley’s wheezing, that Tilda herself had described to me, was painful to listen to.