The Very Thought of You (34 page)

She went towards the stone stairs, past the door to Thomas’s bedroom.
Is anybody there?
the place was thick with ghosts of the past, the lost, the dead. Memories of Thomas and the winter light of his eyes.

“Excuse me, madam—” A man in a tweed jacket stopped her, Explaining that she could not wander around at will but must follow one of the house tours. So she joined a group and saw the dining room, and the saloon, and all her old familiar places now redecorated in high Edwardian style – everywhere looked so different to the tattered school of her day with its desks and dormitories.

But when they reached the library, she was relieved to find it unaltered; it was still the same galleried room glowing with old books.

“The late Thomas Ashton was a classical scholar, and he completed many distinguished translations,” said the tour guide with as much enthusiasm as such information could merit. “We have his collection of old Greek and Latin books up there in the gallery.”

Anna looked up. She saw where the guide had pointed, and recalled the day Thomas had shown her the secret door to the gallery. A flicker of rebellion crept into her, and she lingered behind as the group moved on.

She found the hidden handle, and the click of the door was just as she recalled. Here she was, an old woman sneaking up the steep library steps on her own to find – what? She could
not say. But she stood in front of Thomas’s books, and ran her hand along their covers.

Her fingers snagged on a slender book sticking out. Her heart jolted, because she knew it at once, it was Ruth Weir’s book of Tennyson, the one which she had taken to Thomas all those years ago. She slid the book out and opened it. Here was the folded sheet with the pressed flower. But there was another letter there too – in Thomas’s handwriting.

Nobody was looking, so she removed the book and tucked it into her handbag. Then she slipped down the gallery stairs and stepped out into the gardens with a fragile heart.

She paused for a moment by the sundial in the rose garden, strangely elated to have retrieved Ruth Weir’s book. Seeking a quiet place to sit down, she made her way to a bench by the copper beech tree which had been planted, she knew, to mark Thomas’s christening. Gingerly she sat down before opening the book. There was the new letter, in Thomas’s hand. It was dated the year she had visited him. But the envelope was addressed to Ruth. An unsent letter written to a dead woman.

May 1964
My dearest,
Of all the many people we meet in a lifetime, it is strange that so many of us find ourselves in thrall to one particular person. Once that face is seen, an involuntary heartache sets in for which there is no cure. All the wonder of this world finds shape in that one person and thereafter there is no reprieve, because this kind of love does not end, or not until death.

For the lucky ones, this love is reciprocated. But for so many others, everywhere, anywhere, there follows an
unending ache of longing without relief. Incurable love is a great leveller. Yet I believe that this bittersweet love is better by far than the despair which blights those with a dead heart.

You are the woman I loved, Ruth. I have lost you all these years, but I believe and rest in the thought that we had our time of love together; it was extraordinary and I cherish the memory of it.

Today was a glorious day. There was a glow to the evening light which fired the trees into a green so radiant that I could feel the life of each leaf. The sight stirred me to a rare joy; I sat by the window, and my spirit reached out into the fields beyond until I was blessed with this recognition: that everything was illuminated by the auxiliary light which you once gave me. You may be gone, but you gave me love, and you opened my eyes to the daily miracle of the world about me. On good days, I can still see you everywhere. An inestimable blessing, for which I thank you, my best beloved.

Anna read the words and felt her heart puncturing, all the life leaking away from her. She tried to steady herself, and rocked gently on the bench, taking deep breaths.

It was a shattering letter. An expression of absolute love, nothing less, the love which Thomas had carried for Ruth Weir through all those years. The love which she had heard as a child through the wardrobe door, but never known for herself.

What was it, this pain which sliced through her? Jealousy? Awe? His letter revealed the one love for which she had longed, and yet it belonged to somebody else, in dead time beyond reach. And she had always been, and would remain, outside such love.

What she had witnessed all those years ago was somebody else’s unconditional love. And what she could read here in Thomas’s letter, so many years later, was the boundless patience of his love.

Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things,
endures all things. Love never ends...

The words from
Corinthians
surfaced in her mind, but in them she recognized her own devotion too. His was a love lost. Hers was a love never quite known. Even so long after Ruth’s death, she could sense the consummation of his love in that letter: even in the leaves of a tree he could find his peace. But all such things remained outside her; she could stand in Ashton Park, and look at the lawns of her luminous childhood, and see only life beyond her reach.

How did she find herself here now, all her years gone, still in love with someone long dead? How had it happened? After all the many people she had met, all the places she had been to. Surely there should have been somebody to enter her heart, at one stroke wiping out her devotion to this man she had met as a child? Yet here she was, back at Ashton Park, still locked into her first love, still remembering his eyes.

Her body was aching now, and she felt breathless, as if a vice was tightening her heart. She began to cry, the dry eyes of old age welling up and overflowing until at last her tears were spent, and her weeping began to ease. Then she breathed more deeply and grew quieter.

She looked down again at Thomas’s unsent letter.
The light of love.
Even so many years after Ruth’s death, he still had moments when he could retrace the shape of his wonder. Was it not so for her too? She would have liked to tell Thomas that
walking down the street and seeing buildings and trees and people – or any detail of anything, really – had been a daily wonder because of the love he had lit in her so long ago.

Her life rolled before her, flickering in glimpses: moments of tenderness, moments of reaching out – her mother dancing with her, or her daughter’s first day back from school, that look of loving dependence on her face.

Perhaps it was enough that she had loved Thomas. Perhaps just to have loved was enough – just to have seen this world, and known it, through the eyes of love.

Anna was panting a little, and could feel her own heartbeats. But as she looked around now, the park seemed to flower for her once more, as if touched with grace – it would only be fleeting, she knew, but here was Ashton Park quickening again before her eyes—

Later, when Anna was found dead on the bench, nobody knew who she was, or why she was there, or what it meant that she had collapsed beside this copper beech tree.

One of the House guides, Rufus, was just finishing his tour when a visitor ran into the saloon to raise the alarm.

He had never seen a dead person before, but as soon as he reached the old woman, her inert body was unmistakable. He rang the estate office to tell them.

“There’s a house visitor here who found her, says he saw her earlier in the rose garden. Yes, she seemed fine then.”

Rufus noticed how his supervisor’s face was blanched with shock as they waited for the ambulance to arrive. But he was ashamed to find himself edgily checking his watch, because he didn’t want to be late for his date that night. He did spare a quick thought for the woman’s family, but only while wondering which shirt he should wear, even when the paramedics arrived. She was old, after all, he told himself.

An hour later, he replayed the unexpected scene to his girlfriend at dinner.

“An elderly day tripper with a fireak stroke,” he said, putting her out of his mind.

The ambulance had long since gone when the caretaker began closing up Ashton House for the night. Shutting the windows, securing the garden doors, checking that nobody was left wandering through the corridors. The last of the evening light was still pooling unseen in the saloon’s antique mirrors, but then the caretaker came in to close the wooden shutters and lock the door, and any remaining light was shut out there too.

Only darkness and silence now flowed around the empty rooms, until at last the house lay quite still, like a photograph, ready for tomorrow’s visitors.

Acknowledgements

Several years ago my father gave me a batch of papers belonging to our cousin, a diplomat called Sir Clifford Norton. It was eerie to read his letters and dispatches from the Warsaw embassy, written just before and after the Nazi invasion in 1939. At around the same time, I visited a beautiful House in Cornwall which was open to the public. The visitors’ tour included a very touching archive of children who had been evacuated to the House during the Second World War.

Reading my cousin’s Warsaw diaries and seeing the photographs of evacuees in Cornwall sparked something in me. I was struck by the unexpected repercussions of war stretching right through to the stately homes of England, where small puzzled children were despatched, often not seeing their parents for several years.

Clifford Norton and his wife “Peter” (her confusing nickname) are the only “real” characters in this novel; they remain at the margins of this story, but act as an occasional chorus on the wider world beyond Ashton Park. As a couple, they had a knack of turning up at some of the defining moments of their century. Clifford was an Oxford classicist who survived the trenches at Gallipoli, and then joined the Foreign Office. Through the 1930s, he was private secretary to Sir Robert Vansittart, the charismatic head of the Foreign Office, whose persistent efforts to tackle Hitler’s threat were repeatedly ignored and thwarted, first by Baldwin, then Chamberlain.
Norton was a central figure in Vansittart’s group of “anti-appeasers”, and when he was posted to Warsaw, he did all he could to stiffen his Government’s support for the Poles. As ambassador in Switzerland during the war, it was Norton who sent reports of the death camps to Churchill, though his pleas to bomb the lines to the camps went unheeded. But his most effective service came after the war, during his years as ambassador in Athens: there, recognizing that the Greek civil war could open the door to rapid Soviet expansion, and that Britain was unable to provide the requisite aid, he played a dogged backroom role in wooing the Americans to intervene in Europe, with the Truman Doctrine. His obituaries painted him as an unobtrusive but tenacious diplomat who quietly played a key part in ushering Marshall Aid into Europe.

His wife Peter was a more flamboyant figure, a woman of infectious energy and vitality. As a young advertising agent, she fell under the spell of the Bauhaus group, and became a close friend and supporter of Gropius, Klee and Kandinsky. During the 1930s, she was drawn to the Surrealists, and in 1936 she opened what was the first avant-garde art gallery in Britain (called the London Gallery), together with Roland Penrose. She was passionate about art’s potential to change people’s lives, and her Cork Street gallery immediately became a centre for new art in London. When the Nortons were posted to Warsaw, she handed the gallery over to Penrose and E.L.T. Mesens, but continued to support emerging artists all her life, and was a founder member of the ICA. An archive of her papers can be found at the Tate.

Peter was also known for her tireless charitable work. She was a great one for driving aid lorries across Europe, and after the Nazi invasion of Poland, she threw herself
into work for Polish refugees, setting up a camp for them in Scotland. During the Greek civil war, she was decorated for her many strenuous efforts to provide aid for war victims, particularly orphaned children. Anecdotes about Peter’s generosity abound.

Amongst Peter Norton’s papers were several wartime testimonies collected from Polish refugees, from which I was able to draw some details for Pawel’s escape from Poland.

I’m very grateful to the friends who encouraged me through this book’s various stages, particularly Katy Emck and Stephen Wall, who were patient enough to read several drafts. Special thanks to Anna Webber, Elisabetta Minervini, Alessandro Gallenzi, Mike Stocks, and all the team at Alma. And my heartfelt thanks to Tim, Lucy and Daisy.