Some Old Lover's Ghost (32 page)

And the irony of surviving the Blitz, only to have her home destroyed by a V-2 rocket in the last year of the war. She had felt safe, she had told Max, when he had remonstrated with her for remaining in London in the autumn of 1940. She had sent the children to Sarah, in Southam, but she herself had returned to London, because she had work to do. When the worst of the Blitz was over, the children had come home. Then, years later, in the January of 1945, returning from the shops, Tilda had seen the plume of smoke rising from the street where she lived. The bomb had struck the row of terraced houses, destroying her home and those to either side of it. The little square of trees and grass had been littered with splintered branches and fallen leaves, and a pram had lain on its side on the pavement, its wheels buckled. At the corner of the square had been a motor car, the dust a grey shroud for its motionless occupants. Someone had made her a cup of tea, taking her silence for shock or despair at all she had lost, but she had felt only a sense of relief so intense that she had almost fainted. The children were safe: the loss of the home that she and Max had built up over ten years had seemed unimportant compared to that. When they returned from school, Josh had run among the rubble and dust, delighted by the strange new landscape, and Melissa had wept. Such a mess she had said, all my things are in such a mess. Hanna and Rosi had been sensible and comforting, as usual, and Erich had stared at the ruins and coughed his habitual little cough, and chewed at the tags of skin around his fingernails. Then they had taken what could be salvaged, and had gone to live with Sarah, in Southam.

Tilda’s eyelids had grown heavy … She did not want to think of Southam. She had not wanted to return to Southam then, and she did not wish to do so now. Yet the images persisted. May 1945. VE Day. Putting up bunting in the village hall. Feeling not joy, but relief and weariness and a persistent sorrow. Escaping the chatter of the women and children, and running along the path by the church to the dike. Sitting on top of the bank, and looking out across the fields to where puffy blue clouds nestled
on the horizon. Closing her eyes, breathing in the scent of the flowers …

Meadowsweet and mayweed. She could smell them still.

I remember …

Brushing blades of grass from her dress, Tilda stood up, looking for Josh. ‘That
boy,’
she said, exasperated, out loud. Josh was a wanderer.

The fields were deserted except for a solitary man, walking the perimeter. Tilda hailed Kit de Paveley as she ran down the bank.

‘Mr de Paveley!’

His face was shadowed by the brim of his straw hat. Tilda had seen Kit de Paveley half a dozen times since she had returned to Southam, alighting from the bus on the way back from the school in which he taught, or queueing for stamps in the post office. She never thought of Kit de Paveley as her cousin, any more than she thought of Joscelin de Paveley as her sister. She tried not to think of their relationship at all.

‘I’m sorry to bother you, but I wonder whether you’ve seen a little boy … eight years old … wearing …’ Tilda struggled to recall what Josh had dressed himself in that morning ‘… shorts and a striped jersey.’

Kit shook his head. Then he said, ‘Where did you get that?’ He was staring at her lucky coin, reclaimed from Max, strung again round her neck.

‘This?’ Tilda glanced back at the dike. ‘At the foot of the bank. I can’t remember exactly. I found it years ago.’

‘May I see it?’

She pulled it over her head and gave it to him. ‘Is it very old?’

‘It’s Roman. Silver. Quite rare. I’ve found plenty of pottery shards but very few coins, and those only bronze.’ Kit’s pale eyes were shining. ‘The Romans were the first people to drain the Fens. I believe that there was a settlement here – I’ve found tesserae in the vicarage garden, and there are signs of earthworks all over the
estate. Of course, there’s some disagreement over whether they settled in any numbers this far east, but I intend to prove—’

He broke off suddenly. ‘I do beg your pardon, Mrs Franklin. Your son—’

‘Josh will turn up. He always does. Would you like to keep the coin, Mr de Paveley?’

A flush stained Kit’s pale skin. ‘I couldn’t possibly—’

‘Please.’ She smiled at him. ‘I’d like you to have it. When you are famous, and you have an exhibition in the British Museum, then you can write on the label “Donated by Mrs Tilda Franklin”, and I shall feel very erudite and honoured.’

Something woke her: a bird’s cry, or the rumble of traffic from the road. Tilda sat up in bed, her heart beating too fast, staring at the darkness. If she pulled aside the curtain, would she see The Red House’s tangled, beautiful garden, or the flat fields and narrow waterways of Southam?

Her aching body, as she leaned across and switched on the bedside lamp, reminded her that she was old now, and in Oxfordshire, and alone. The lamplight illuminated her bedroom, but she longed still for dawn. In the early hours of the morning, all her fears gathered, and she was aware of her close proximity to death. Her mind, plagued by the past, raced along avenues of self-reproach.
If
…
if
… The awful relentlessness of the past. The immutability of it.

Rebecca’s visits, so necessary to her intention, tormented her. They stirred memories that had long lain hidden, memories that fluttered to the surface, colourful and jarring, sweet and painful. She thought of Kit again, holding her coin in the palm of his hand, his eyes, as he looked down at it, bright with a sort of longing. It occurred to her that Rebecca and Kit plied a similar trade: they both delved in the darkness for nuggets of silver, fragments of truth.

Badgering Patrick’s protective secretary, I managed to get through to him at his chambers. I read him the newspaper report.
Human remains have been discovered in a Cambridgeshire dike
… ‘In
Southam
, Patrick.’

‘Hell,’ he said.

‘Patrick, it could be Daragh.’

‘It could be anyone.’

‘But if it is—’

‘I’ll make some inquiries. Leave it with me.’ A pause. ‘Don’t say anything to Tilda yet, Rebecca. No point in upsetting her unnecessarily.’

I agreed readily. We talked a little, but he seemed rushed, so I said goodbye and put the phone down, aware of my unease.

Hell
, he had said. He should have sounded surprised, or shocked. But he had not. He had been angry.

Patrick phoned a few days later and asked me to come to his flat that evening. There, he poured me a glass of wine. ‘I managed to talk to someone in the Cambridgeshire police. Informally, of course – he owed me a favour.’

I glanced up at him. ‘And? Was it murder?’

‘The hands and feet had been bound. They found the remains of the strips of leather.’ He smiled grimly. ‘Yes, they think it was murder. There’s not much forensic evidence, but the fact that it was hidden in such a manner …’ He did not finish his sentence.

‘Have the police identified the body?’

He shrugged. ‘There were no convenient watches or rings. The skeleton was male, somewhat above average height, youngish. That’s all.’

Daragh, at the time of his disappearance, had been in his mid-thirties. And he had been tall. I had pinned a copy of his photograph to the board above my desk: I thought of it now, that innocent, vulpine face.

‘Can they tell when he died?’

‘The dike was breached in the floods of March 1947 and repaired
over the following weeks. They’ve only just begun to look into it, but there doesn’t seem to have been much work carried out since on that part of the earthworks until this summer, when the body was found.’

Which meant that the body had been concealed in April 1947. Daragh Canavan had disappeared in the April of 1947. I looked across the room at Patrick.

‘Come here,’ he said.

I went to him. He took my glass out of my hands and put it on the table. Then he began to unbutton my shirt. ‘They can’t rule out the possibility,’ he said, as he bent and kissed my breasts, ‘that the victim was buried alive.’

I shivered. ‘Are you cold?’ he said.

I shook my head. My shirt slithered to the floor. ‘Such a horrible way to die. I can’t imagine anything worse.’ He straightened, and I kissed him, drawing him towards me, exploring his mouth with my tongue, as if by immersing myself in his warm, breathing body I could shut out the images that crowded into my head.

We made love on one of the bleached cream rugs, our need for each other too urgent to walk the few yards to the bedroom. Patrick’s skin tasted of salt and when his hands touched my body my nerve-ends burned. Just for a moment, when he was inside me, and I could feel the weight of his body on mine, I thought of Daragh, alive in the darkness of the dike, spadefuls of earth weighting down his chest, his lungs, his heart. But then the aching pleasure gathered force and could not be resisted, and I heard my cry of delight echo against the walls and window panes.

We spent the night together, rising early the next morning; Patrick had to fly to Edinburgh on business. I took a taxi back to my flat and showered and drank coffee and tried to concentrate on my work. I had spent the last few days studying the war years. Though the V-2 rocket that had landed on Tilda’s house in January 1945 had destroyed some records and diaries, she had become a minor public figure, so I was able to get information from newspapers and magazines. Tilda had continued to work
with the
Kindertransporte
children throughout the war, and in 1944 had become involved with arrangements for evacuating children from London during the terror of the V-1 doodlebug bombs. I imagined her darting around Britain in crowded trains, or cycling through unlit, unsignposted country roads to check on the suitability of her charges’ billets.

Charlotte Sykes had joined up at the end of 1940; Tilda had afterwards relied on Sarah Greenlees to help her with the children. Max had stayed on in Germany after 1945 to cover the Nuremberg trials; by that time Tilda’s work had largely fizzled out. Yet the war had changed her. It had allowed her, as it had allowed so many women, the opportunity to use all her gifts. Ancient minutes of committee meetings showed me her organizational skills; letters to uncaring or ignorant officialdom proved her passion. She had possessed a valuable and unusual mix of talents, the greatest of which was her ability to attract love. Not only the love of men, but of women and, of course, children. She had a warmth, an ability which made everyone feel that they, and only they, were the person she most wanted to be with. I too had sensed that; I too felt drawn to her.

Today, though, I could not concentrate. My body recalled Patrick’s, and my mind persisted in drifting to a lonely earthworks, and a man bound hand and foot and buried alive. My desire, my horror, made me shudder. I pushed aside the laptop, and doodled aimlessly on my notepad. I was certain that those workmen, repairing the dike, had found Daragh Canavan’s body. Though, again, I had agreed with Patrick that we should say nothing yet to Tilda, I myself had no doubts. The skeleton had been that of a tall young man. It had been buried at the right time, in the right place. I looked at the snapshot on my pinboard, and thought, what did you do, Daragh Canavan, to merit such vengeance?

I began idly to scribble on my pad. Daragh had had money troubles; Daragh had been a womanizer. Cambridgeshire in the late 1940s must have been littered both with his creditors and with cuckolded husbands, any one of whom might have felt
angry enough to kill him. I sat back in my chair, chewing my pencil as it occurred to me that there were other names I could add to the list I was making. Jossy’s name, for instance. Daragh had humiliated Jossy for years – might the worm have turned at last? Might Jossy’s obsessive love have been turned to hatred by one last, appalling betrayal?

My heart began to beat a little faster. What could have hurt Jossy more than if Daragh had seduced the half-sister she had never acknowledged? What if Daragh and Tilda had, at last, consummated their love? In 1947, Daragh had vanished and Tilda and Max had parted. I recalled the promise that Tilda had made to Max when she had married him. Though she had admitted that she still loved Daragh, she had sworn not to betray Max. Had she, in the difficult postwar years, broken that promise?

I added Max’s name to my list. Perhaps Tilda had made love to Daragh, and Max, maddened by jealousy, had killed him. Perhaps Max had struck Daragh on the head and tied him hand and foot, and buried him in the half-repaired dike. Perhaps Tilda had guessed what Max had done, and that was why she had resisted having her biography written for so long. In her old age, she could have assumed her secrets safe. But the past had re-emerged, bones forcing their way up through the soil, relating a different story to the one she had intended to tell.

I drove to Oxfordshire the following morning. It was a fine, bright day, and Tilda was sitting on the terrace at the back of the house. I asked her about the post-war years.

‘Did you stay in Southam after the end of the war?’

She poured me a cup of coffee. ‘I wanted to go back to London, but it was impossible. There was a housing shortage, you see. And Sarah was unwell. She had a heart condition. She wouldn’t go to hospital to have it investigated – to Sarah, the hospital was the old workhouse.’

I remembered the photograph of Long Cottage. ‘It must have been rather cramped – seven of you in that little cottage.’

‘Eight, when Max came home in 1946. But the garden was marvellous – almost an acre of land, which meant that we could grow our own fruit and vegetables.’ She explained to me, ‘Less queueing, Rebecca. Food was still rationed. Erich helped me look after the garden. He never settled at school, I’m afraid – the other children used to tease him, because he was different, so as soon as he passed his fifteenth birthday he left.’

‘He was Austrian, wasn’t he?’

‘Erich was born in Vienna. I never knew much about his childhood – he wouldn’t speak about it – but I found out a little through the Refugee Children’s Movement. His mother died when he was a small boy, and after his father was killed by the Nazis Erich lived by himself on the streets of Vienna until someone found him a place on the
Kindertransporte
. He was nine years old, Rebecca – can you imagine, a child of nine, scavenging for food, living with such memories?’