The Very Thought of You (33 page)

She felt like an impostor here. It was an unviable house, she could see that at once, and she feared the strain it might place on her marriage. So when the keen-eyed curators arrived to meet her from the National Trust, she readily accepted their proposal to take over Ashton house in lieu of death duties. She extended her trip for another ten days, trying to be swift and decisive about divesting herself of this vast decaying house with its bad weather. She met with lawyers and valuation experts from Christie’s, and signed as many papers as she could to strip the estate of its more valuable assets, while leaving the house and its mementoes to the heritage trust.

When finally she met the redoubtable Mrs Smithie and went through Thomas Ashton’s personal effects in the park lodge, she caught a more sentimental glimpse of the Ashtons. She picked up a photograph of Thomas, and his face moved her. Mrs Smithie suggested – or, rather, pressed the point – that he was a distinguished man of letters whose book collection should be moved back to the library at Ashton House. Mrs De Groot was touched by her determined devotion, and
instructed the estate lawyers to be guided by Mrs Smithie as to which books, portraits and pieces of furniture should be returned to the main House. She began to justify her hasty retreat as no less than a respectful wish to keep the Ashtons’ family history intact for the National Trust.

Then Mrs De Groot took a taxi down the long drive and did not return to the estate for several years. Not until Ashton Park had been reclaimed and restored as an Edwardian-styled stately home open to the public. An award-winning day out in Yorkshire, a triumph for the National trust.

56

Early in 2006, Anna sands thought she saw her mother on television. She sat down one night to watch a programme about the Blitz, and the documentary began with tranquil shots of pre-war London, men in bowler hats streaming off to work, women wheeling their prams through the parks. But then came an abrupt shift to colour footage of wartime London, and there – apparently – was Anna’s mother, walking down the street in a pillbox hat and high heels.

The sighting of her was so brief that Anna wondered if she had seen a ghost. Her mother had appeared just for a few seconds, trance-like, during an elliptical sequence of burning buildings. The next day Anna rang the BBC to trace the archive footage. For weeks she followed a trail of phone calls and messages, until she found herself in an annexe of the Imperial War Museum, with a slip of paper requesting a viewing. A chatty film archivist led her to a cutting room, armed with a can of 16mm film.

“It’s one of our most popular reels,” He told her, “our only amateur colour footage of the Blitz. Shot by a woman, on
a simple wind-up Bolex, so it’s a little overcranked in some places – it makes London looks strange, like a dream.”

The film was running now, spooling through a noisy editing machine with a small screen. Anna sat back and watched random shots of wartime London, captured in the vibrantly simple colours of old film. People walked by, smiling at the camera. Workmen drank tea and ate sandwiches, all casually nonchalant against a background of destroyed buildings and cratered streets. For ten minutes or so, Anna saw nothing but strangers flickering by, until suddenly there she was – her mother striding down an empty pavement, ridiculously poised in her hat and suit as she passed the daytime debris. Anna cried out. The young man stopped the machine and rewound the footage.

The shot lasted for nine seconds. That was it. Just one extended glimpse of her mother walking down a street, before the reel cut to somewhere else altogether.

Robin was the archivist’s name. He showed Anna how to replay the shot, then left her to watch her mother over and over, as he went out to make a phone call. “Not strictly allowed,” He told her, “but I can see you need some time to see it properly.”

Anna played the scene repeatedly and watched her mother glide off, apparently without a care in the world. She was tantalizingly recognizable, though there was no eye contact with the camera. Or was it really her?

It was more than sixty years since Anna had seen her. Here she was, an old woman watching her mother in her prime. But as she rewound the shot over and over, the spirit of her mother began to depart from the scene. As if seeing Roberta there, beyond the control of her own imagination, had set her firee.

Her mother had had her own life, and that was that. She was Roberta sands, walking away from all of them to do
her own thing, until, by chance, she became one of the war’s many casualties.

Anna had waited for so many years to say goodbye to her mother. As a child, there had been no funeral, only her mother hovering as an imagined observer in her life. Causing her guilt sometimes. But now she saw that her mother had been an independent soul, striding down streets to meetings which Anna knew nothing about. She could let her go now – or might let her go, once the shock of seeing her had dwindled.

It was some months before Anna recovered her equilibrium. She had retired from publishing now, and was living alone, but with plenty of visits from her children and grandchildren.

Her marriage had ended many years before.

“I wanted to set off on a journey through life with you,” Jamie had told her when they parted, “but you wouldn’t join in. You were always somewhere else.” It was true; in the aftermath of her visit to Thomas Ashton, Anna had allowed herself to grow too detached from her husband. She had never even tried to tell him about her odd retrospective love for her teacher; Jamie would have thought her mad.

When he had left her, it had been a relief, in some ways. She was able to enjoy their children without worrying any more about her inadequacies as a wife. With Jamie, she had always felt an emotional fraud – and over the years, whenever she saw him, she always thought how handsome he looked, and was amazed that she had ever been with such a man. Jamie, for his part, always explained away their broken marriage by saying that Anna had been too much defined by an unhappy wartime childhood.

After the divorce, she and her children had moved to a run-down Georgian house in Clerkenwell and she had begun a long process of reclaiming it: restoring the old fixtures,
cleaning out the cornices, reconstituting the fireplaces and window shutters. She had even steamed off the wallpaper to uncover several layers of earlier paper, reaching right back to a Regency original.

“It’s like turning the pages of the House’s history, and peeling back the past to release its ghosts,” she would explain to curious visitors. Her children thought her a little eccentric, but enjoyed their trips to architectural junkyards, too.

After her own displaced childhood, Anna had drawn such comfort from motherhood that she was never much troubled by being single. She had her friends; that was enough for her.

By now, she had narrowed her life down to its essentials – books and music, and a simply furnished home. And the three slender volumes of poetry which she had written over the years, her careful distillations of a lifetime. Books which had been respectfully reviewed in their time, though none of them remained in print. But recently even the impulse to find words for feelings had left her: that was the measure of her placid self-suffciency now. She might be a little solitary, but on good days, she knew how to value life’s everyday beauty. A mindset, she sometimes reflected, which she had first learnt from Thomas Ashton.

One Sunday lunch, just after her seventy-fifth birthday, one of her grandsons asked her if she had been rich as a child. The question puzzled her.

“What makes you ask that?”

“Because you wrote a poem about a House with long corridors, so you must have grown up in a huge House,” he said. She smiled and explained how she had been evacuated to a stately home during the war.

“
That
was the House with the corridors, somebody else’s House.”

A memory of handstands on a sunlit lawn came back to her. Later, once she was back at home, she sought out the poem from her bookcase, and read it to herself before going to bed.

Back to the Old House

Let us go back to the old House
The House we once knew
The familiar door
The airy rooms
The light on the stairs,
Still at the back of your mind.

And if it is not quite so tall
As the house you used to know,
And less bright too, and emptier,
You need not turn away;
For a place is a time, too,
And you are older now,
And long since lost
From your own past.

Let us go back to the old house
The House we once knew, even
If it is a stranger’s house,
With windows blind to you,
And long, featureless corridors
Oblivious to all the old times.

The old house – the valedictory note was catching. Even though Anna was old herself now, she was still a child running down the long corridors of Ashton house. Her memory
of the house’s exterior was like an architect’s model: she could see its whole shape as if photographed from afar. Yet, inside, the house seemed to stretch on for ever in her mind – unexpected passages and high staircases, surprise landings and tall empty rooms.

She had been to so many places in her life, but inside her it was still Ashton Park which spread its contours: the long white drive, the light off sandstone walls, the morning view onto empty parkland. Sometimes, as she sat in a room, she could still be swallowed inwards to the long shadowed corridors of Ashton and the sound of children on the grass outside. It was a healing place, she thought, as she put away the book.

She awoke early the next morning to the sound of slow rain, a soft rhythmic pulse which lured her into a waking dream. The sound seeped deep inside her, returning her to old times, lost places, rainy days long gone. Once more she was inside the landscape of her childhood, a vista of wide sky and grey-green parkland, Ashton in the late bloom of evening light. All unease was stilled in the infinite calm of the place – its remove, its serene undulations. There was an inexpressible bliss in the light of the sky.

Yet even as she felt herself walking on grass, the dream began to fade. She struggled to hold on to the line of the horizon, but it eluded her like a vanishing melody – going, gone. She surfaced to consciousness with a deep ache of regret not to be there, not to be running on the lawns, through the woods, down the hill to the river. The landscape receding, the light dying – that private rapture evaporating into silent, colourless air.

She lay in bed, fully awake now, still yielding to the impact of her dream. It was so many years since she had been back to Ashton Park, and yet the place had never left her. She was stirred by a firesh longing to return to her old childhood
home – for it had been that, even if she had only ever been a visitor. She must go back.

And so she took a train, early the next day. The station at York still had its curving platform. From there, she caught a bus straight to Ashton village.

When she arrived at the park gates, she hesitated. Here it was, her place, her past. Yet it was open to the public now, and there was a lodge where visitors had to buy a ticket just to step into the park.

But curiosity and excitement were spurring her now. She paid her money – a ticket for both “House and garden” – and set off on foot up the drive. A woman of seventy-five with aching joints and heavy bones, walking slowly to catch her breath.

She passed the same trees, the same sky. Thistles alongside the drive, she recognized those too. The aroma of wild garlic. The rotting hulk of a fallen oak which she had clambered over as a child, all those years ago.

She turned the corner of the drive, and there at last stood Ashton House, with its curved wings. She paused to observe its unflinching façade, and a wave of sadness passed through her. What was it? The regrets of age, for her own childhood? She could not say.

The lion and the unicorn still stood on the gateposts, more begrimed than she recalled. Smaller too. Their expressions fixed, closing her out from their mutual past, stones that could not remember. A mix of memory and longing was flooding through her now, though she could not tell whether she felt sad or elated. All she knew was that the place was stirring up sediments of old emotion which made her heart ache.

She turned to face the rising plain before the House, a view which had filled her with such hope as a child. She could
remember her first weeks here, autumn at Ashton Park, the great oaks flaming with gold, the coppery sunshine reaching right through her fingertips to the unawakened spaces inside her.

Today’s sky was white and still, muting the October colours. In the weeks to come, the withdrawing tide of the dying year would slowly pull on her pulse, as winter set in. But today there was no hint of that. She had arrived just in time to see Ashton Park in all its sober autumn glory – so why did she feel so curiously detached from the scene before her?

...But there’s a tree – of many, one –
A single field which I have looked upon,
Both of them speak of something that is gone...

Perhaps life was one long story of separation, just as Wordsworth had said. From people, from places, from the past you could never quite reach even as you lived it.

But she did not want to give up yet on this place. She turned to the House and walked up the stairs to the tall mahogany doors which were still stiff to open. Then into the Marble Hall – she remembered waiting here for her flather’s arrival, so many years ago. And all the hours spent playing badminton on this chequered floor, with the sound of Thomas playing the piano in the saloon beyond.

Now there was a local woman selling postcards at a small table, proffering well-intended information about the House’s classical details.

“That’s Apollo playing his lyre in the dome, and those are griffins over the stone fireplaces...”

Anna turned and stood in the centre of the Marble Hall. Voices came to her, ringing through the years, Hillary Trevor
calling out the names of children with letters, all of them crowded about her, longing for news from home –
Maltby – Bailey – Peet – Rothery – Todd – Russell.
And there was the place where the Christmas tree stood, she remembered hanging the baubles, and all their spontaneous pleasure at the prospect of Christmas, that firesh, uncomplicated happiness of children –
Tyler – Dixon – Burnham – Peake.