The Very Thought of You (27 page)

“Then I’m asking you for your help,” He said. “We’re not happy, either of us.”

“Are you going to tell me you’re in love? She won’t have you. People will laugh at you. The crippled Thomas Ashton and his little girl.”

“I would like to leave Ruth out of this.”

“Ruth? Ruth is it? Have you tried kissing her yet?” She laughed.

“Please, Elizabeth—”

“She’s just fooling with you. She’ll want a man her own age, and children, not a middle-aged man in a wheelchair who’s already saddled with a vengeful wife.”

Elizabeth looked imperious. For a moment he despised her.

“She will have children,” He said quietly.

Elizabeth looked at him sharply.

“She will have children?” she asked. “What do you mean by that?
She will have children?
Tell me! Is she pregnant? Is she? Is she?”

Thomas held her gaze, narrowed his eyes.

“Yes,” He said, and watched shock and pain sweep across her face. Immediately, he regretted his bluntness, but it was too late; Elizabeth’s posture slumped as if some fragile inner strut had snapped inside her. At a stroke, her connection with her husband, his house, their life, was completely severed.
He had an heir.

“These things happen,” said Thomas in a conciliatory tone, retreating into truisms.

“
I wanted a child.
”

He glimpsed, for a moment, the depth of her grief. It was not so much a jealousy of Ruth, nor even of him, but more a wretched unfulfilled longing for her own child.

“I’m sorry, Elizabeth. I’m so sorry.”

She was crying. He waited for her tears to ease, but the minutes passed and she would not look at him.

He knew it was wrong, but he felt impatient. He did not want her to suffer and yet he did want to be released – soon. She looked up, and finally he met her eyes.

“No,” she said. “No, I will not let you go.” And she left the room.

Thomas stayed where he was, reminding himself that this was just the first stage. He braced himself to talk to her again when she was calmer.

He had not yet told Ruth that he would be speaking to Elizabeth that afternoon, but they were due to meet later, when he would warn her to keep her distance from his wife.

* * *

Thomas had not divined that Elizabeth was now in the grip of a hatred so intense that a malign force seemed to be driving her. She waited impatiently for Ruth to finish her last afternoon lesson, then she accosted her briskly in the staffroom, and asked her to join her on a trip to the village.

“We need to pick up a shipment of new blankets,” she said, not waiting for a reply. Her face was glacial; the younger woman followed her in puzzled submission.

They climbed into the car. Elizabeth’s clenched rage was such that she did not even look at Ruth.
Pregnant.
This girl was carrying Thomas’s child. The thought revolted her.

She reversed the car and turned to drive out through the forecourt gates. The gravel rasped under her wheels. Ruth sensed her bitterness, and was immediately afraid. What did she know?

Elizabeth pushed her foot on the pedal, and the car gathered speed down the long white drive. She said nothing, but gripped the wheel, looking ahead to the cattle-grid gateposts midway down the road. She accelerated.

Even as she forced the pedal, Elizabeth regretted her choice, but sheer speed hurtled them forwards. Ruth saw the moment coming, yet was mute with terror.
Please slow down, please.
The trees were flying past, the sky was rushing towards her, until the car crashed straight into one of the wrought-iron gateposts. Elizabeth lurched forwards onto the steering wheel, snapping her neck and her life. Ruth was thrown through the window onto the road, her clear face
ripped by breaking glass: she and her unborn child died on impact with the concrete drive.

Up at the house, Thomas heard the crash and had a sickening instinct that it was the sound of Elizabeth’s violence. He wheeled himself out into the Marble Hall, and various people ran onto the drive. For what seemed endless minutes, he waited to hear the news. He desperately wished that Ruth would appear, but she was probably up in her room and had heard nothing. Soon he would send one of the girls to fetch her.

It was Mr Stewart who hurried back, white-faced, to tell him that Elizabeth’s car had crashed: that his wife was dead.

Almost as an afterthought, he added that Ruth Weir had been with her.

“Is she all right?” asked Thomas in a rush of fear.

“...I’m afraid she’s dead too.”

Thomas’s heart lurched and he could not breathe. He looked up, raw with shock.

“I must see them,” He said. “Will you take me to them?”

And so Jock Stewart pushed Thomas down the drive, with his chair wheels grinding over the stony surface, to the midway gateposts where the two bodies had been laid out on the grass. The car was a contorted wreck of buckled metal and smashed glass. Somebody had brought out blankets to lay over the corpses. Thomas asked to see the bodies, and they uncovered his wife.

Elizabeth’s jaw was bruised and her hair had come loose, but her look was closed and finished and distant. As if in sleep.

He looked on and felt his tears welling, because it was the other body he wished to see.

“Can I see Ruth too?” He said her name. He could not call her Miss Weir: he had to use her proper name.

His chair was wheeled over, and somebody uncovered the blanket. Ruth’s face was torn and swollen. There was no expression, just a destroyed face: the light in her eyes snuffed out. Where was she, the spirit he cherished so dearly?

Every part of him was stretched out into an inward howl of pain. It should not have been her. How could she be gone? And the child growing inside her – their child, who might have redeemed all the sorrows he had ever known, now lost to both of them.

He sat on the drive of Ashton Park, crumpled into his chair. His love was dead and only because of him. He felt nothing for Elizabeth – no rage, no bitterness, just a blank hole. All his tenderness was consumed by grief for this poor young woman who would have lived if she had not met him.

I should never have allowed you to love me
, he thought.
Then you would still be alive, and firee to live your life.

They left him there, with his head in his hands.

* * *

The afternoon became evening. Thomas asked to be left alone in his study, and ignored the usual school routines, chapel, supper. Stewart tried to bring him some food, but he was too overwrought to eat. The undertakers had taken away the bodies, and they would have to discuss funeral arrangements in the morning. Thomas put him off till then.

At about nine o’clock, once the children had gone upstairs to bed, Thomas went into the saloon to distract himself at the piano.

The night drew in and he played on, with blunt fingers, Chopin, Schubert. Much of the time he just sat there, stunned with his loss, drinking the whisky he had brought with him.

He was sitting in the dark, but a light spilled through from the Marble Hall. Sometimes he drifted into sleep, sometimes he awoke, and his fingers reached over the piano keys once more. His whisky was sliding away. He was half drunk.

Deep into the night, the saloon door eased open, and a child appeared, backlit by the light from the hall. It was Anna sands, shivering. She stepped further forwards tentatively.

“Hello.”

“Shouldn’t you be in bed?”

“I can’t sleep.”

“Neither can I.”

She came over and crouched awkwardly at his feet. They sat there in silence – until Anna began to cry.

“I’m so sorry,” she mumbled. Thomas was weary beyond everything, but he remembered that this child’s own mother had also recently died, and was moved by her, despite his own sorrow.

“Now don’t you worry,” he said, and reached down to her in the half-light.

Before he knew it, she had grasped his hand and pulled herself forwards and curled up on his knee, burying her face in his shoulder. His arms, at first flapping indecisively, found their way to hold her in comfort. In an instant their limbs were folded together in a silent shape of mutual commiseration.

Nothing was said. The girl wept silently, for her mother and her teacher. Even for Mrs Ashton.

The contact with another person broke something open in Thomas, and his eyes spilled over too. For a long time they shook together, clasping each other in the dark. Slightly inebriated, Thomas had an odd feeling that this girl could read his mind.

“You know, I loved her,” he murmured. Anna said nothing; she was drowsy and drained after her sobbing, and sank deeper into Thomas’s shoulder.

“I loved her as I have never loved before,” he went on. “I don’t know if I can live without her.” In the darkness, in the silence, he felt the girl’s breathing settle against his chest, felt her drifting into sleep. Her gentle rhythm put him out too.

It was three o’clock in the morning before Thomas awoke, feeling parched and distressed. He found the girl still nestled against his shoulder. Anxiously, he roused her. He had woken up agitated by the thought of anyone prying in Ruth’s room.

“Anna, Anna, please do this for me,” He asked her gently. “Go to her room, and search it for any letters, any diaries, anything personal she might have.”

Am I mad
, he asked himself.

“Whose room?” said a startled Anna, blinking in his arms.

“Miss Weir, your teacher.”

Anna had woken up confused, but was just sharp enough to feign ignorance. She tumbled from his arms and set off almost at a run to the top floor, in the middle of the night, not quite knowing what she was looking for.

She was breathless and dazed when she arrived at Miss Weir’s room. She closed the door quietly before switching on the light. The brightness pricked her awake at once. The room was so tidy.

She opened the drawers and found clothes, handkerchiefs, folded underwear. She looked at the books in the shelves, neatly ordered. But she couldn’t find any letters.

Then she thought of lifting Miss Weir’s mattress. And there, sticking through the wire loops of the bed frame, she saw a bundle of papers pressed inside a book. She pulled it out. The letters were all in Mr Ashton’s handwriting. She took them out, then clapped the book shut and placed it on the shelf.

Downstairs, Thomas was waiting for her in the dark, just inside the saloon door. Anna handed him the sheaf of papers, and she could just see the gleam of his eyes. The night was waning now, and they could make out each other’s faces as strange pale masks.

“They were under her mattress,” she said in a small voice.

“Thank you,” He said, “thank you so much, Anna. Now go to bed. And let’s keep this as our secret.” He was whispering in an empty room. Anna nodded and smiled. She had helped. She was not some common child with no mother: she was a favourite with Mr Ashton. They had a secret, and she would keep it for ever.

Anna hauled herself to her dormitory and fell at once into a deep sleep. When she awoke at the sound of the bell, she hardly knew whether her strange night had been a dream or not. Queuing at the washbasins, she felt giddy, almost buoyant, as if she were floating with ghosts. She had lost her mother – and now Miss Weir and Mrs Ashton were gone too.

Yet it seemed as if dead people still went on living in your head – you could talk to them. She clattered down the stone stairs to breakfast, and every sound echoed in her ears, as if emanating from her own mind.

She felt tired and dazed all morning, but something drew her back to the tidy silence of Miss Weir’s room. After lunch she sneaked back up there and took down the book which she had found hidden under the mattress. It was a worn blue book of verse by “
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
”, with cloth covers and thin, frail paper. She saw some writing inside –
Ruth Weir, Oxford 1938.
Anna slipped the book under her cardigan and took it to her dormitory, where she hid it amongst the wire coils of her iron bedstead, under her own mattress.

46

In the months that followed the funerals, Thomas estranged himself from the other adults at Ashton Park. What went on inside him, nobody knew. He could barely muster anything more than formalities, reverting to that stiff reticence which had always been his diplomatic mask.

At the same time, an unspoken bond developed between him and Anna. The death of the girl’s mother had, in a way, given him almost a parental role, and he took extra care to watch over her. He would call her over at the end of a class to clarify a point. Or sometimes he encouraged her to browse through the books in his study. Neither of them ever discussed their strange night of shared grief, but a knowledge of that intimacy underscored their bond. She was always respectful, and never overfamiliar with him, nor he with her.

Thomas picked out books for her to read, and praised her insights when she reported back on them. It was a consoling relationship, paternal and tender, mentor and pupil, both drawing from each other. Unconsciously perhaps, Anna relaxed into emotional security because she had been singled out. And for Thomas, there was the privilege of having some small daily outlet for his natural kindness.

It was an alliance which both of them came to depend upon in an unacknowledged way. So it was a shock when Anna’s situation suddenly changed and the time arrived for her to leave Ashton.

In the late summer of 1943, she received a letter from her father in Africa. He was quick to assure her that he was safe, but his left leg had been injured when a mine had overturned his jeep, so he was being sent home from the front line, and would be taking a staff college job in the London area.

“
Now that the bombings have died down
,” He wrote, “
I want to bring you home too
.”

Anna was so excited that she did not at first consider that Ashton might now be her home, and that she would miss her friends and her teachers. Above all, Mr Ashton.

As the day of her departure drew closer, she thought of nothing but her bedroom at home, and all the treats to come with her father. She was twelve now, and had not seen him for four years. She craved family life, and the chance to talk about her mother.