Some Old Lover's Ghost (27 page)

‘At least there’s an Aga.’

‘Circa 1925,’ said Patrick, inspecting it. ‘Coal-fired.’

It would take about three hours, I thought, to warm up an M & S Chicken Kiev for one. We toured the rest of the house, in which a bathroom was conspicuously absent, and then went to look at the outbuildings. Heavy clouds had gathered on the peaks while we had been inside. They blackened the fellside.

‘The … um … facilities,’ said Patrick, glancing dubiously at the brochure and then opening a door.

There was a sort of bench, set with a wooden plank in which three holes of diminishing circumference were cut. Father, Mother and Baby Bear. I shut the door quickly.

Patrick strode to the next building. ‘The byre,’ he said, opening the door to a huge barn. ‘To protect the sheep in winter.’

While we were inside inspecting the dark cavern, the rain began. It drove down in silvery stair-rods, flattening the heather, bouncing on boulders buried in the gorse. We were both wearing jeans and T-shirts. I stood in the doorway, watching the rain, and Patrick came to stand beside me. Where his body touched mine – shoulder, elbow, hip – my skin tingled.

‘What do you think?’ he said.

I stared at him blankly. His eyes were blue in the centre of the iris, a ring of charcoal grey around the outside.

‘The house,’ he added patiently.

‘Oh
… well, it’s wonderful, of course.’

‘Stunning, isn’t it? In London one feels so hemmed in. Here – well, you can breathe, can’t you?’

‘But it would be an impossible place to live, Patrick. Difficult … and inaccessible.’

‘I’ve always liked the difficult and the inaccessible.’ His eyes still held mine. ‘So much more of a challenge.’

I said quickly, ‘You’d go mad after an hour or two. So isolated. You’d miss the pubs and clubs and restaurants.’

‘I wouldn’t. Not in the least. Nor would I miss the traffic jams and the Tube at rush hour and the poor sods you see begging on the Embankment. Some of the company I’d miss, though.’

He leaned forward and his lips touched my forehead. The rain had thickened.

‘Me?’ I whispered.

‘Mmm. If I abandon the law and become a gentleman farmer, would you miss me, Rebecca Bennett?’

I didn’t say another word. Instead, I touched his lips with mine, small, delicate kisses that made me close my eyes, drunk with the nearness of him. His hands rested lightly on my waist and then travelled up my spine beneath my T-shirt, his palms gliding over my bare skin.

The rain drummed against the stone roof of the byre. I had forgotten that it was possible to want someone so much that you don’t care where, or how. I had forgotten how much more powerful are the desires of the body than the warnings of the mind. I made love to him, lying in the straw, with the barn door open and the rain beating down, breaking the silence of the hills.

Caitlin Canavan started at her new school in the January of 1939, when she was five. Daragh had put the day off as long as possible, and had suggested a governess, but Jossy had been insistent. With Caitlin at school, she would have Daragh to herself again.

For her first day, Caitlin wore a navy gymslip and white blouse, a grey tweed coat and a grey felt hat trimmed with a blue band, pulled over her black curls. Daragh took a photograph of her standing on the front steps of the Hall, her tiny leather satchel clutched in her hand. ‘Don’t you look the little princess, Kate,’ he said, and hugged her before they climbed in the car. Then they drove to Ely, and escorted Caitlin through the exclusive gates of Burwood School. A teacher took Caitlin from them, and they were left empty-handed as their daughter joined a long crocodile of little girls heading into the building.

Daragh watched Caitlin until she could no longer be seen, and then he turned on his heel and walked briskly back to the car. He tossed the keys to Jossy. ‘You drive back, Joss. I’ve business here. I’ll walk home. I could do with a walk.’

Jossy sat in the car, the keys in the ignition, but did not yet start up the engine. She felt, as she always did on such occasions, a terrible disappointment and grief. Her grief was not for her daughter, who had begun a new stage of her life, but for her husband. She knew that Daragh would spend the morning with a woman. She knew that she, as always, had hoped for too much.

As she drove back to Southam, Jossy repeated to herself all the things she always said on such occasions. That Daragh was hers, and that none of his affairs lasted for more than a few months. That she, and only she, slept under the same roof as him at night, and dined at the same table. That his wedding ring was on her left hand, and that she had given birth to his daughter. That he would eventually grow out of his need for those other women. They might hurt her, but she need not fear them.

She feared only Tilda, whom she had never seen. Tilda, her sister. She often thought about Tilda; it was like scratching away at an unhealed sore. She believed Tilda to be the twin of those imaginary sisters of her childhood, lighthearted and beautiful and charming. All that she herself was not. She guessed that Tilda was the sort of person for whom everything was easy. Jossy hated her.

The winter, which was ice-cold and wind-ridden, claimed the life of Christopher de Paveley that February. At the funeral, great draughts shrieked through the gaps around windows and doors, and seared the stained glass with ice. The mourners – ancient old schoolfriends of Christopher’s, decrepit comrades-in-arms of his service in the Great War, and red-faced shooting companions – wore their furs and overcoats. They brayed the hymns and joined in loudly in the responses. Though Jossy’s uncle had been dead only a few days, Daragh found that it was an effort to remember what he had looked like. Stooping, thin, whey-faced, like his son. Daragh’s gaze alighted on Kit de Paveley. The fellow had bronchitis or something, and wheezed like an old bellows as he struggled to bear his father’s coffin.

The service was brief and pallid, like all Anglican services. The burial that followed was an ordeal of wind and cold. Tiny spots of snow polka-dotted a leaden sky. When it was over, Daragh and Jossy and Kit stood at the lych gate, shaking hands with the mourners. Sympathy was muttered, condolences expressed. Daragh was bored, utterly bored, until the woman cut him.

Elizabeth Layton was an acquaintance of Jossy’s, and on every do-gooding committee in Cambridgeshire. She shook hands with Kit and then with Jossy, and then just walked past Daragh. He felt a jolt of anger, but told himself that it had been a mistake, not a deliberate insult. Yet the small incident rankled, and when, a few moments later, the last of the mourners left the churchyard, Daragh looked out into the road and saw her again, and walked to her side.

When she turned to him, he saw that she had dark, intelligent eyes.

‘I’m afraid that I haven’t had the opportunity to thank you for coming today. I just wanted you to know how much we appreciate your being here.’ Daragh smiled his best smile, the one that always won them over, and held out his hand. She looked down at it, but did not take it, so he added, floundering, ‘You must accept my apologies if you were overlooked—’

‘You did not overlook me, Mr Canavan. I did not choose to shake hands with you.’

She turned to go, but he grabbed her elbow. ‘I demand that you explain yourself!’

‘You have no right to demand anything of me. I had hoped to avoid speaking of such a subject on this occasion. But since you insist, Mr Canavan, I do not approve of the company that you keep. Of course many men stray once in a while, but when they do so it should be with one of their own class, who knows the rules. It should not be with a feather-headed little servant.’

He couldn’t think what she was talking about at first, and then he remembered Cora Dyce. Cora was nursemaid to a family in Cambridge; Daragh had met her through one of Caitlin’s friends.

The snow was falling thicker now. The woman said, ‘Cora Dyce is expecting your child, Mr Canavan. Did you know that?’

Her words struck him like a blow. ‘But I only saw her once or twice …’ he said feebly.

Mrs Layton’s smile was unamused. ‘Once or twice is enough, isn’t it?’

He muttered, ‘I had no idea …’

‘Although Cora is silly, she is not vicious. I don’t think the same can be said for you, Mr Canavan. Cora’s mother works for me. She came to me when she discovered her daughter’s condition. And you need not worry, she will ask nothing of you. The matter will be dealt with discreetly. Not to protect you, Mr Canavan, but because I like and respect Mrs Dyce.’

Elizabeth Layton walked away, leaving Daragh standing alone at the roadside. Motor cars had begun to drive back to the Hall, making twin herringbone tracks in the soft covering of snow. There was an odd, empty feeling in the pit of Daragh’s stomach. He crossed the road to Jossy.

‘I’ll walk back, if you don’t mind, Joss. I’ve a bit of a headache.’ He gave her a peck on the cheek, and headed for the path through the fields.

Little blots of snow danced in the air, but the black bones of
the ploughed fields showed through the incomplete covering of white. The land spread out to either side of him, as flat as a board, with only the dike to interrupt the eye before it found the horizon. There were no people, and even the birds, Daragh thought, huddled together in the reeds, out of sight. The cold, sharp air stung his lungs.

He climbed to the top of the dike, and saw how the long narrow length of water, trapped by the clay walls, had begun to turn to ice. He sat down on the bank, his head in his hands, not caring that the snow gathered on his shoulders and head, as it gathered on the land around him. His self-loathing was absolute. When he looked back over the last few years, he saw that he had lost sight of what he had meant to do with his life, and that he had acquired the careless dissolution of the English upper classes whom he had always scorned. Worst of all, he had let down Caitlin. He was not a father she could be proud of.

He saw how his longing for Tilda and his resentment of Sarah Greenlees’ interference had eaten away at him through the years of his marriage. With Tilda, he had been a better person. His fingers slid slowly down from his eyes, and when he looked round he noticed that even in the brief period of his sitting, the bands of ice that clung to the banks of the dike had begun to widen, spreading their dull grey grip across the water. Soon, if nothing halted it, the floes would meet in the middle, and the water would be stilled. His own life had begun to harden, something cold and poisonous seizing it, so that he had become, without intending it, worthy of contempt.

He stood up slowly; the chill had already entered his bones. He wanted to tear off his clothes and plunge into the dike so that the icy water could purify him, so that he could start again, but he knew that the cold embrace would kill him. He wanted to run as far as he could from this devilish place, but he would stay, he knew, for Kate, whom he loved.

He looked across the fields again. Part of the trouble was that he, who had always been able to turn his hand to anything, was now idle. Idleness did not suit him; it had let his mind drift to
occupations that diminished him. Daragh walked back to the Hall, the fast tread of his shoes leaving hollows in the snow.

Daragh called at the steward’s house the following morning. By then the snow had settled, so that the roof of the house was brighter than the whitewashed walls. When he rapped on the front door, the housekeeper showed him in.

Glancing through doorways, Daragh saw that all the rooms were much the same, that there was no differentiation between dining room and drawing room and study. They were all full of books and old-fashioned furniture and rows of stones and dirty bits of pot, with hardly a fire lit. The place needed a woman’s touch, but Daragh could not imagine the woman who would choose to marry Kit de Paveley.

Kit was in a square, ill-lit room at the back of the building. He nodded to Daragh; Daragh muttered condolences, and clapped him on the shoulder. He could feel the younger man’s bones through his clothing.

Daragh said, ‘I thought, now that your father’s gone, we should talk about the estate.’

Pale eyes, fringed with white lashes, glanced warily up. ‘The estate?’

‘The farm. You’re working now, aren’t you, Kit?’

Jossy had told Daragh that Kit was teaching at a boys’ school in Cambridge. Daragh thought that it wasn’t much of a job for a man.

‘I’m teaching classics,’ said Kit.

‘That’s great,’ Daragh said breezily, and glanced at Kit’s thin, hunched frame. ‘And I suppose you wouldn’t be up to farming, anyway?’

Kit’s pale eyes narrowed. ‘You’re planning to take over the farm.’ It was a statement, not a question.

‘It didn’t seem right to barge in while the old fellow was alive, but it’s what I’ve always wanted. My family owned a farm in Ireland, of course.’

The corners of Kit’s mouth twisted. ‘The Fens aren’t like
Ireland, you know. They’ve a geography and a history all of their own. You have to understand the land. I can lend you a book or two—’

Daragh brushed the offer aside. ‘It’s your father’s record books I’ve come for.’ He glanced at his watch, longing suddenly to escape the cold, airless house. ‘Bring them up to the Hall this afternoon, won’t you? Oh—’ Daragh, as he turned to go, recalled Kit’s peculiar hobby. ‘Jossy said to tell you that it’s all right about your digging. As long as you don’t get in my way, it won’t bother me at all.’

In 1939, Max thought, you could hear the nails being hammered into the coffin. Spain had fallen to Fascism in January, and Hitler had seized the weakened remains of Czechoslovakia in March. Mussolini, ever the opportunist, bombed Albania in April. The newspapers printed cheery headlines:
HITLER GET THE JITTERS, NO WAR THIS YEAR.

Clara Franklin had a fall and broke her hip. Tilda, who was fond of Max’s mother, had wanted to drive down with Max to the nursing home, but could not, in the end, get away. ‘Slippery lino,’ explained a white-faced Mrs Franklin from her hospital bed, but Max, checking his mother’s flat that evening, saw the gin bottles in the dustbin.

Brighton always induced in him a measure of gloom and anger. He celebrated his return to London by quarrelling with both Harold and Freddie. He did not get home until half past eleven at night. Tilda was in bed, asleep, and his dinner was congealing in the oven. As he scraped food from the plate into the bin and found cheese and biscuits, he calculated that he and Tilda had not spoken to each other for three days. He had been in Brighton, or working, or she had been involved with the RCM. He sat down at the kitchen table, his head in his hands. He longed for a drink, but resisted the temptation. He must be out of the house early the following morning to interview some tedious politician, to write yet another mendacious, morale-boosting article.