Some Old Lover's Ghost (21 page)

I looked then for the grave of Edward de Paveley’s elder daughter. I found it after a while, slightly cut off from the rest of her family, an acknowledgement, perhaps, of her conversion to Roman Catholicism. With its marble cross and metal flower container, now empty, it seemed rather isolated and forlorn. Cut off from her history and her family even in death, I thought. I read the inscription. ‘Joscelin Alicia Canavan 1911–1947. Beloved of Daragh, her husband.’ She had been only thirty-six, poor Jossy. I wondered what had killed her. A broken heart, perhaps? I took photographs of the gravestones, feeling slightly crass, as though my curiosity might disturb the sleep of the dead, and then I walked back to the shop with the terracotta pots and the
wind-chimes, and asked the girl who worked there for directions to the Hall. She couldn’t think where I meant at first, and I thought for a moment that the de Paveleys’ destruction might be complete, that their house might no longer stand. But an older woman put her head round the door, and said, ‘She means the Davises’ place. Four Winds. Back through the village, love, and then turn up the track to your left. They always meant to do the road, but they never got round to it.’

I saw what she meant as soon as I retraced my path through Southam and took the fork that led up through the fields. The track was unsurfaced, ridges of mud patched with puddles. The poor Fiesta lurched and slid through the deep channels, and I feared for its well-being. After twenty yards or so, I parked and climbed out and walked the rest of the way.

From everywhere except the village, with its fringe of trees, you must have been able to see the house for miles. It was a great square lump of a building, Georgian-windowed, unornamented. Quite ugly, though it must once have possessed a certain confident dignity. The wall of Leylandii that marked its borders, the huge double garage, complete with Range Rover, and the clutter of terracotta pots and window boxes, a futile attempt at prettiness, destroyed that dignity.

Three For Sale signs from different estate agents flapped forlornly in the wind. Someone’s dream had turned to dust. I walked alongside the acid-green ranks of Leylandii, treading the border of the field, aware of my disappointment. Neither Jossy, with her blindfolded love, nor faithless Daragh haunted that house. When I reached the corner of the grounds, I looked around. To one side of me was the house, to the other the village, and before and behind was a vast field of green and black. The dike bisected the land between the village and the house. It seemed to go on for ever, rising above everything else.

I climbed up the bank, slipping on the wet grass. Here, ten foot or so above the level of the fields, the wind was fierce. It belled out my jacket and tangled my hair. Time shifted, and I could have been standing there ten years ago, or fifty, or three
hundred, when the land had first been stolen from the water. When I looked around, I saw what Daragh must have seen when he had walked with Jossy: the ripples on the trapped water, the vast grey silence of the sky, the awful emptiness. The way that the horizon presses down, so that one knows instinctively that the land is below sea level. I wondered whether if he’d been born today, Daragh Canavan would have made the same choices. Whether he’d still have married the girl that had the land. I thought that Patrick had probably been right. Swamped by a financial mess of his own making, Daragh had run away. He’d run away before, after all, when he’d left Ireland. He hadn’t taken his daughter with him because, for the first time in his life, he’d been unselfish. He had recognized that what he could offer Caitlin was no longer enough.

I began to walk along the dike. I saw the long, squat building at the far boundary of the field and realized, with a thrill of recognition, that it must be Christopher de Paveley’s house. There was something repellent and disturbing about the windows that were half smothered with ivy, and the patches on the walls where lumps of pebbledash had fallen, like open sores. It looked as though it had not been lived in for decades.

I saw that the island on which the de Paveleys’ house was built was lower than that crested by Southam church. I imagined some ancient, arrogant de Paveley shaking his fist and daring the waters to steal back what he had seized. I imagined how the floodwater must, in the calamitous spring of 1947, have burst through the strong walls of the dike, and drowned the surrounding land. And it began to rain, so I bowed my head and headed back to my car, thinking again of Daragh Canavan, who had walked here, as I had done, and who had just faded away, lost, a ghost.

After his journey to London, after he had learned that Tilda would not – would never be – his lover, Daragh had returned to Southam Hall. There, he tried to comfort himself by reminding himself
that he still, after all, had Caitlin. And he still had the money and the status.

Yet, somehow, his possessions were not quite the comfort that they once had been. Jossy and Tilda were half-sisters. The discovery seemed to poison almost everything he did. It rubbed in the fact that he loved the one sister, yet had married the other. It reminded him how Sarah Greenlees had manipulated him, how she had employed his ambition to satisfy her own desire for vengeance. The discovery mocked him, and altered his attitude to Jossy, so that what had once merely irritated him, he began to despise. He compared Jossy’s features to Tilda’s, noting the coarseness of the one sister’s appearance, remembering the beauty of the other’s. Sometimes, when he found Jossy’s love particularly claustrophobic, he found himself wanting to tell her the truth, just to wipe from her face its expression of patient, beatific adoration.

He did not, though. Instead he drank a lot, and rode a lot, and went out as much as he could, just to be away from Jossy. He also flirted. He confined himself to flirtation at first, and then, at a party in Cambridge, he saw Elsa Gordon again. Daragh danced first with his wife, steering her dutifully around the perimeter of the room, and then with several other ladies, but he did not yet dance with the woman whose eye he had caught as soon as she stepped out of her fancy motor car. He’d make Elsa Gordon wait for him. Every now and then, circling the room, Daragh caught a glimpse of her neat little polished blonde head, her small, sinuous body, the firm calves and ankles encased in smooth seamed silk. Eventually her husband, a dull but wealthy fellow, went off to play cards. Daragh made his move.

First they danced, and then he suggested they escape the heat of the ballroom. In the quiet mustiness of the garden summer house, she pressed him against the wall, and laid her body against his, and kissed him. Through her thin dress he could feel rubbing against him her small, hard breasts, her jutting hips, her pubic bone. Her small hands undid his shirt buttons and loosened his trousers. Her eyes were glassy, her lips moist. When he pulled
up her skirt and pushed himself between her legs, she laughed with delight. He tried to make himself last, gritting his teeth and thinking of dull things like bills and accounts, but his years of abstinence almost let him down. But she came quickly, thank God, and Daragh let himself climax, a shuddering convulsion of pain and pleasure that made her contorted face swim black in front of his eyes.

A few days later, Elsa telephoned. Daragh managed to take the call, and to mention that he’d be driving out to Newmarket the following day, to look at some horses. He saw her car parked at the side of the road, halfway to Newmarket. They drove up a little winding farm track and made love in the back of Elsa’s Daimler. The heady perfume of the leather seats was drowned by the scent of sex, and he realized that she liked to be taken like this: rough and crude and with no preliminaries.

Max insisted on a six-month engagement, in case, he said, Tilda changed her mind. He also insisted, because Tilda was still under twenty-one, on getting Sarah Greenlees’ permission for the marriage. They took the train from Liverpool Street to Ely one Saturday, and caught the bus to Southam, a tortuous, winding journey through a bleak, grey countryside. Never had Max seen fields so flat, never had he seen a sky so vast, so ominous.

At Southam, they alighted. Max, who had lived in London most of his life, glanced at the clutter of cottages and shops. He kept thinking there must be more just round the corner. But Tilda led him along a track that was pitted with puddles, to a cottage. Sarah Greenlees, opening the front door to them, expressed surprise that Tilda had wasted money on the bus fare and had not walked from Ely, and told them to wipe their feet on the mat. When Tilda introduced Max, Sarah glared at him suspiciously, but shook his hand.

Inside the cottage, he looked around as Sarah and Tilda talked. It occurred to Max forcefully then how different his background was from Tilda’s. It wasn’t something he had thought about much. Yet this place, with its tiny windows hung with curtains patched
out of – old underclothes, he suspected – its earth floors and huge dresser covered with crockery, no two pieces of which matched, shocked him. In his home, cups had been thrown away if they had the smallest chip. Curtains had been made at Harrods or at Liberty. And there had been, of course, a cook-general and a woman to do the heavy work. Max guessed that Sarah Greenlees cleaned her own floors, cut her own wood, strangled her own hens when they no longer laid.

They had sandwiches and cake in the kitchen and Tilda told Sarah about the wedding. ‘We’d like you to come,’ she said. ‘My friend Emily’s brother could drive you to London in his motor car.’

‘Motor car?’ Sarah was affronted. ‘You know that I don’t believe in motor cars, Tilda. I shall catch the train.’ Then she began to clear up the dishes. The corners of Max’s mouth twitched.

They married in the early spring of 1935. It was a register office wedding, with a buffet reception afterwards in a small hotel. Tilda wore a cream-coloured costume that she had made herself, and Emily was her bridesmaid. Roland toasted the bride and groom with a glass of champagne from the case that was Anna’s wedding present, and took photographs. Mrs Franklin cried, and snow began to fall as they left the hotel for the station.

They were to honeymoon for two nights in Eastbourne. As the train moved out of Victoria Station, Tilda threw her bouquet and Emily caught it, and soon the waving figures on the platform were reduced to tiny black ants. Max let out an enormous sigh of relief, and said, ‘Thank God that’s over.’

‘Wasn’t the food awful?’

‘Hideous. And Fergus was plastered.’

‘And the wedding presents … have you seen them, Max?’

‘Egg cosies.’ In the corridor of the train he kissed her. ‘Three equally appalling cruet sets.’ He kissed her again.

‘No plates or bowls. We shall have to eat out of vases. Oh, Max’ – Tilda’s hands were around his neck, pulling him to her – ‘do you think we should go into a carriage?’

They found an empty carriage and pulled down the blinds. Tilda sat on Max’s knee. When the ticket collector saw the carnation in Max’s buttonhole, and the ‘Just Married’ that Michael had painted on their suitcase, he went out again, shutting the door behind him, not bothering to check their tickets.

Tilda always believed that Melissa was conceived in Eastbourne, a place of great gentility that had, surely, imprinted itself on her unborn daughter, marking out her neat, organized character. On the first day of their honeymoon, they got up late and walked along the beach, watching the rain pockmark the grey swell of the waves. On the second day, they did not get out of bed at all. Some time during the intervening night, Tilda had discovered that making love to Max was, simply, a tremendous pleasure. It was more fun than dining in the smart hotel room, more fun than dancing to the piano trio after dinner, and more fun, even, than sitting at the desk in the Residents’ Lounge, pretending to write letters on the thick, crested hotel notepaper. Any lingering doubts that she’d done the right thing in marrying Max Franklin, any suspicion that the sort of love she could offer to Max would not, in the end, be adequate, retreated to a small, neglected corner of her mind.

They went back to the flat they had rented in Fulham. They had chosen the flat for the privacy of its separate entrance way, and for its large, bay-windowed bedroom. There was a little boxroom that Max could use as a study, and a basement kitchen with steps that led up to a small, grimy back yard. The shops, doctor’s surgery and Tube station were only a brisk ten-minute walk away.

Tilda cleaned out the cupboards and put away the wedding presents. Sarah had given them sheets and towels, Clara Franklin had given them a pretty Clarice Cliff coffee set, Max’s father a crystal decanter. They had two dinner plates and two saucepans and no broom, dustpan, iron or bucket. They had, to begin with, no mangle, so all the washing had to be done in the kitchen sink and wrung out by hand in the back yard, often in the evening,
with much giggling. Afterwards, they tended to end up in bed, so that ‘Shall we do the washing?’ became a code.

The geyser was temperamental and unreliable, but Tilda became expert at it, coaxing it into life in the early morning, refusing to give in to its defeatist shudders and groans. Max went back to Germany in May, and while he was away the doctor confirmed what Tilda had suspected for weeks: that she was pregnant. The baby was due in December, about a week before Christmas. She dreamed of the baby, and of the house in the country that they would buy when they could afford it, with a garden and swings and huge open fires. When Max came home he guessed Tilda’s news before she had the chance to tell him. They shared a bottle of beer and went to bed, and made love, carefully, for hours.

She’d timed the pregnancy well. The summer of 1935 was hot and dry, but Tilda’s pregnancy did not begin to show until it was over. Until the last four weeks she felt well enough to continue the long journey to Professor Hastings’ house. Then she said a tearful farewell, and Professor Hastings gave her a set of encyclopaedias for the baby, and his housekeeper gave her a bale of terry cloth. For the next month she sewed: four dozen nappies, muslin and terry, and a dozen cot sheets, and half a dozen tiny white nightgowns. Clara Franklin discovered Max’s old cradle and had it sent up by carrier van. A feathering of white stretch marks appeared overnight on both sides of Tilda’s belly, and Max kissed them and rubbed olive oil into them. They discussed what to call the baby and could agree only that they would not use family names. The child would be a new beginning.