Some Old Lover's Ghost (28 page)

He dreaded that his and Tilda’s future would become one of
increasing separation. He saw how people gathered themselves to her, and feared that there might one day be no room for him. He knew how easily events could come between people, levering them apart, dissolving the glue of common experience. His father had worked long hours, and Max could remember his mother’s slow descent from bewildered loneliness to a frantic gaiety that had led her to seek company elsewhere. In the aftermath of a depressing couple of days, it crossed Max’s mind to wonder whether Tilda would be quite so otherwise engaged if she had married Daragh Canavan. Max imagined Daragh as a sort of Irish Rhett Butler. Good-looking, in an obvious way, and utterly unprincipled.

He realized that he was becoming self-pitying – a revolting failing – so he carried his plate and glass into the sitting room in search of the newspaper to read. The room was littered with children’s toys, and the square foot of space for his plate on the table was obtained at the expense of a heap of Joshua’s paintings. Josh’s idea of art was to cover an entire sheet of paper with red paint (always red), applied with the thick brushes that Tilda made for him out of rolled-up newspaper. Melissa’s paintings were of an altogether different character. Max had hopes of Melissa: at three and a half she drew figures with limbs and features that were even, sometimes, recognizable.

He finished his supper and glanced at his daughter’s painting. Melissa had drawn Max wearing his Burberry and hat, and Tilda in the blue dress that he had bought for her birthday. Joshua, as in all of Melissa’s paintings, was disproportionally small, as though to diminish his importance. Max put the painting aside. Then he went upstairs and for a while watched Tilda sleeping, hardly able to bear to acknowledge to himself how much he loved her, and how much he sometimes feared that she did not love him in quite the same measure.

Through the year of 1939, the ages of the children on the
Kindertransporte
dropped dramatically. Babies and toddlers began to arrive in Harwich, having been looked after throughout the long journey by their older brothers and sisters or, sometimes,
just pushed through the carriage window by a desperate mother into the lap of an unknown elder child. They broke Tilda’s heart, those babies, who had wept through Germany and Holland and across the North Sea in the arms of unfamiliar thirteen- or fourteen-year-old minders.

The boat-train now arrived in Harwich almost every day. The offices of the RCM were chaotic, understaffed and lacking professional help, chronically short of both money and suitable foster parents. All funding for the children had to be raised privately; the government refused to help beyond easing entry restrictions. Every now and then a foster placement that had appeared to be eminently suitable was shown to be anything but: a twelve-year-old refugee girl would be found slaving as a maid-of-all-work, or a boy, already disturbed by his experiences in Germany, would be beaten for wetting the bed. Throughout the summer, Tilda felt as though she was frantically applying sticking plaster to a wound that constantly threatened to re-open. At night she dreamt of those children: the girl who had escaped persecution in Germany to find a different, subtler sort of torment in England; the baby who had travelled to Harwich in the arms of a stranger, a ten-mark note and a letter explaining his circumstances enclosed by his mother in the uppermost of the six nappies she had pinned to him to keep him dry through the long journey.

Late home one evening, Tilda found Max in the kitchen. She kissed him on the cheek. ‘Sorry, darling – there was a last minute problem.’

He said, ‘I gave the tickets to Charlotte.’ His back was to her.

Her hand flew to her mouth. They had arranged to go to a concert. ‘Oh, Max—’

He was flinging the dishes so forcefully into the hot, soapy water that she feared they would break. ‘Max, I’m so sorry—’

‘You could have telephoned.’ His voice was taut. ‘At least you could have telephoned.’

She muttered miserably, ‘I forgot.’ Somewhere in the long,
frantically complicated day, the treat that she had been looking forward to for a week had slipped from her mind.

‘Didn’t you bother to write it in your diary? Along with all the other appointments – among the committee meetings and the fund-raising activities – wasn’t there a “meet husband”?’

His sarcasm wounded her. She tried to explain. ‘I did write it down, but I forgot to look in my diary. I didn’t have time. Max – you’ll break that jug—’

He slammed the jug onto the draining board. ‘What shall I do, Tilda? Shall I make another appointment to spend an evening with you?’

In the silence that followed, a voice echoed distantly. Daragh’s, saying,
Where do I fit into your scheme of things, Tilda
? She whispered, ‘Max – I’m doing something useful at last – not much, just sticking fingers in a dam – but oh, Max – if you could see those children!’

He dried his hands and lit a cigarette. ‘And your own children – Melissa and Josh and Rosi – which are more important to you?’

‘That’s not fair, Max,’ she said slowly. Tears stung at her eyes. ‘Our children are the most important thing in the world to me.’

‘But they are not enough.’

She stared at him, suddenly appalled. She loved her family more than she could have believed possible; she would have given her life for any one of them. And yet—

‘We are not enough,’ repeated Max. He sounded tired. ‘Are we, Tilda?’

She looked away from him. At home, she had felt confined and bored. When her work with the
Kindertransporte
had begun, it had been as though she had fitted the final piece into a jigsaw. There was something lacking in her, she thought miserably, her unsettled, itinerant childhood had left her unfit for normal family life.

‘I’ve been offered a new post,’ said Max abruptly. ‘I’d intended to turn it down because it would mean going abroad, leaving you, but …’ He shrugged.

As we hardly ever see each other anyway … The remainder of his sentence hung in the air, unsaid. She sat down at the kitchen table, her face turned away from him, her knuckles pressed against her teeth. Her whole life, she thought, had been a series of desertions. The father who had never acknowledged her, the mother who had died, the lover who had betrayed her. And now Max.

‘You want to go away … because of me?’

He flung out his hands in a gesture of despair. ‘I want to go away because I can’t bear to write any more duplicitous little pieces about how Hitler’s going to back down because Britain and France have made a pact with Poland. And I want to go away because if I write anything that might show the loyal British public just how close we really are to war, D-notices are clamped on it almost before the ink is dried. And because—’ He broke off, and shook his head. Then he added, ‘So I made a fuss, and they’ve offered me a foreign correspondent post at last. It would give me more freedom, but it would mean living abroad.’ He lit another cigarette, and stood at the window, his back to her, smoking. It was midsummer, and through the open window Tilda could smell in the darkening air the thick, oily scent of lavender. She asked Max the question she had never previously dared to voice.

He swung back to her. ‘War? Oh – a week. Perhaps two or three. No more, Tilda.’

War
. She felt an almost physical fear as she saw how war diminished everything else. How it would rob them all of the right to decide their futures. And how, just now, it clarified everything for her.

‘You must take the post, Max,’ she said. ‘I know how much you want to.’ She rose from her seat and began to dry plates and cups and put them away, as though by impressing order upon her home she could control a shapeless, frightening future.

‘And you?’

‘Perhaps we shall come with you.’

He stared at her. ‘Tilda, I said that there will be a war—’

‘And when there is, we shall go home.’ All the china was
stacked neatly in the dresser; she shut the double doors. ‘You’ll know, Max, when we must go.’

‘And the children? Rosi? It wouldn’t be safe to take Rosi abroad – she hasn’t a full passport.’ The dying sun shadowed the lines and planes of Max’s face, casting hollows around his dark blue eyes, carving runnels from nose to mouth. He said, ‘And the
Kindertransporte
?’

‘The transports will cease as soon as war breaks out. You know that too, Max. They will be trapped.’ And she saw in her mind’s eye the faces of the children pressed against the windows of the carriages, the shadows of tree and lamp cast across the glass like bars.

After the declaration of war at the beginning of September, Daragh tried to join up, but was told that his was a reserved occupation. He felt a mixture of disappointment and relief. He would have liked the activity and perhaps the danger of war, though not the squalor or the tedium. It would have been a relief to escape Jossy for a while, but he would have missed Caitlin dreadfully. He would have been glad to get away from the muddle in which Christopher de Paveley had left the estate, but he remained confident that he could sort things out.

Although Jossy watched him like a hawk, he had not strayed since the debacle with Cora Dyce. The reverberations of that episode still echoed. Shunned by certain people, struck off invitation lists, Daragh knew that Elizabeth Layton had talked. At first, for Caitlin’s sake, he cared, but as the coldness continued he gave up trying to seek the county set’s approval. ‘They’re just strutting peacocks,’ he said to Caitlin, as he gave her a riding lesson. ‘We don’t need them, do we, Kate? We’re better than the lot of them.’

Caitlin trotted her pony round the paddock. ‘We’re better than the lot of them,’ she sang. ‘We’re better than the lot of them.’

Daragh had his hands full with the farm. Somehow he had expected that the place would more or less run itself, as his granda’s farm seemed to have done. It did not, though, and he
lurched from one crisis to the next. The fencing collapsed and the sheep escaped into the new wheat; a ditch became clogged with reeds and flooded a field. In spring, when the snow melted, the water lay on the land, refusing to drain away, sullenly reflecting the sky like a black mirror, rotting the crop of potatoes that he had sown. When he looked back through the records, Daragh discovered that the farm had made little profit since the war. Edward de Paveley had lived off his capital, and that and the death duties had eaten away at the estate. What had, upon his marriage, seemed unlimited wealth, was in reality a dwindling source of income. He tried to economize, but it was difficult. They were already short of servants – only a cook, maid and nanny for that great barn of a house. The gardener had died and his boy had been called up, so Jossy attempted to keep the garden tidy. Caitlin’s smart school cost a mint of money, but what was the point of anything if she didn’t have the best? She had a wardrobe fit for a princess – a black velvet coat with a fur collar, a silk tussore party dress, a tiny little riding jacket and jodhpurs, and a pony of her own. He gave her everything she asked for.

That autumn, two evacuees were billeted at the Hall. Jossy tried to wriggle out of it, but Daragh, recalling the photographs of whey-faced slum children in the newspapers, drove to the reception centre and picked out a pair of brothers. Norman and Arthur Green came from the Isle of Dogs. Their knees were black with dirty scabs and their mouths permanently open, wet with saliva as they breathed adenoidally. Daragh handed them over to Nana to give them a bath, and the screams echoed through the house. At supper, they stuffed egg sandwiches whole into their mouths and refused to drink their milk without a dash of tea in it. Caitlin looked on, hardly eating, her dark eyes filled with disgust.

Norman and Arthur attended the village school. Most days, they would return to the Hall with their knees and knuckles even bloodier than before, because the village boys, sensing them to be different, had set on them on the way home. Daragh suspected
that Norman and Arthur could look after themselves. Jossy largely ignored them, and Caitlin continued to regard them with repelled curiosity, as though they were a new sort of animal that she had not hitherto encountered in one of her picture books. And they ran rings round Nana.

After Norman and Arthur had been at the Hall a few weeks, Daragh thought that Caitlin seemed under the weather. She hadn’t her usual enthusiasm for her daily ride, and she kept scratching her head. The following day, he noticed that Arthur and Norman, too, were always scratching. With a feeling of horror, he went through Caitlin’s curls with a fine comb. They were seething with lice. When he seized Norman and Arthur and dragged them into the bathroom and inspected their heads, Daragh hated them, though he knew his hatred to be unreasonable.

‘They’ll have to go,’ said Jossy, when he told her that evening.

He knew that she meant the boys, not the lice. This time, he did not argue. Norman and Arthur were found another billet the following day, in a cramped little cottage in Southam. Daragh spent hours combing through Kate’s hair until it was clean again.

C
HAPTER
E
IGHT

Because I wanted to see as far as possible what Tilda had seen, and experience what Tilda had experienced, I drove to Harwich and sailed to the Hook of Holland. I’d had my car expensively serviced at a garage a few days before, to be sure that it lasted out the journey. The boat docked at half past five in the morning and, as I travelled north to Amsterdam, I thought what a neat, bright little country it was, the fields and dikes and rows of flowers everything they should be.

Amsterdam was messy, though, curls of litter on the cobbles beside the canals and graffiti on the walls. It was hot and the traffic was awful, and by the time I found my hotel my silk shirt was stuck to my back with sweat. I lugged my suitcase up to my room, showered, and collapsed on the bed, the towel wound round me. I wanted to sleep but could not: my mind would not wind down. It leapt with disconcerting facility from Tilda to Daragh to Patrick; it muddled up the chill bleak waterways of East Anglia with the tidy canals I had glimpsed that morning. It conjured with an aching desire the illusion that Patrick was beside me, that his naked skin touched mine, that the warmth of the sunlight from the unshuttered window was the warmth of
his body. I longed for him: with every obsessive thought, with every fast pulse of my heart. It was only when I sat up straight, heart pounding, eyes wide open, having heard the aeroplanes dive-bombing the glittering roofs of Amsterdam, that I knew I had slept and, if only for a moment or two, had returned to the summer of 1940.