Some Old Lover's Ghost (35 page)

So the snow, which had floated from a leaden sky for weeks, was a welcome distraction. The difficulties it created she welcomed too. The bus did not come, the wheels of her cycle would not turn, supplies could not get through to the village shop. All these things meant that her days were filled with hard work, so that she had less time to brood. Drifts blew as high as the hedgerows and curtained the lower windows of cottages. Thick grey ice stilled the water in ditches and dikes, and froze up the diesel pumps. The drains that should have taken the water from the land were frozen solid, blocked by snow.

When Erich was ill, Daragh cut the wood. Tilda watched him through the open door of the barn, splitting log after log. When he flung off his jacket, the dance of his shadow as he swung the axe was just as it had been years ago, when they had been young. She had to turn aside, go back into the house, make pastry, scrub the floor. Anything to distract her from the awareness that Max did not love her, and from the sudden, painful memory of an older love.

In March, the thaw set in. It began to rain, a steel-grey curtain that saturated the reeds that roofed the cottage. The wind got up, toppling chimney stacks, felling trees. Walking along the summit of the dike, Tilda saw that the water almost reached the top of the bank. On Sunday, rising early, she found Sarah, dressed in mackintosh and gumboots, standing in the parlour, staring out through the window at the flat, waterlogged, wind-lashed fields.

‘She’s going to blow,’ said Sarah. ‘I’ve been out and looked at her.’

‘The dike?’

Sarah nodded. ‘We must take the furniture upstairs.’ She began to drag an armchair across the room. Her lips were violet-blue.

‘Erich and I shall do it.’ Tilda placed her hand on Sarah’s sleeve, halting her. ‘I’m desperate for a cup of tea. You’ll make one, won’t you, Aunt Sarah?’ Their eyes met, and Tilda saw
the outraged pride in Sarah’s eyes, but Sarah did not shake off her hand.

Tilda woke the children. She set Melissa the task of carrying crockery and china up to the bedrooms, and sent Joshua into the barn to fetch logs. With Erich’s help, Tilda carried upstairs whatever furniture would fit up the narrow staircase. In Sarah’s bedroom they stacked bottles of pickles and preserves and sacks of flour and potatoes. They caught the hens, who squawked in their wicker cages on the landing, and packed into orange boxes all the little, worthless treasures that Sarah had amassed over the years: the chipped china cups, the mottled old books, the photographs and letters and keepsakes.

At midday Tilda went out to check on their nearest neighbour, an old widow who lived alone. On her way back, the wind was almost too fierce for her to stand. Men were running in the direction of the dike, their progress impeded by the gale. Tilda wrapped her coat round her and ran after them. Her gumboots splashed through deep puddles; but beneath the water, the earth was still iron-hard with frost. Scattered like spillikins by the wind, branches of elder and willow littered the path that led down the slope from church to field. Rain beat down on Tilda’s head, plastering her wet hair to her face. As she approached the dike, someone shouted, ‘Go back, lass! Go home!’

She stood for a moment, watching with horror the men’s frantic labour as they hurled sandbags on the summit of the dike. She saw where water, black and menacing, had begun to seep from the foot of the bank. The waters that the earthworks held back, maddened by wind and thaw and rain, cast up waves that lashed against those struggling to preserve the defences. She feared that this was a war already lost. This invader could not be turned back. Tilda retreated, running home to her children.

When one of his labourers pounded on the door in the morning, telling him of the imminent disaster, Daragh hurried his wife and child into the car and drove them to Ely. Returning from Ely, thankful that Caitlin was safe with the Tates, Daragh’s progress
was blocked by the branches that the wind had thrown across the drove, and by the deep puddles that had begun to spread from the overflowing ditches. Carefully negotiating these obstacles, he had time to think. A stark choice confronted him. He could save his home, or he could do his duty and help the men – the villagers, many of whom were his labourers and had been under his command in the Home Guard – to defend Southam. He could almost hear the whispering of sand in the hourglass: his luck trickling away, used, spent.

Daragh left the car, its wheels made immobile by thick black mud, its petrol tank almost empty, in the village. Then he ran down the slope to the field. Through the shimmering rain, he could see the men working on the dike. Some straddled the top of the bank, grey figures silhouetted against a malevolent sky, others grovelled in the earth at the edge of the field. Daragh moved among them, joking with one, encouraging another. He, like them, dragged wet, heavy sandbags to the top of the bank; he, like them, dug clay, barrowing it to the shifting, leaking foundations. It lifted his heart to know that his presence cheered them: that his magic – his looks, his charm, his luck – still counted for something. It almost compensated for his suspicion that this task was hopeless, that they could not possibly resist this black monster. ‘Haddenham pump went this morning,’ someone yelled at him through the terrible wind and, later, ‘Bank’s blown at Over!’ Daragh’s hands were raw and bleeding, every thread of his clothing soaked.

The water seeped through another section of the bank. Half a dozen men ran to it, shovelling clay against the leak. ‘Here too!’ shouted a boy, and they dashed a hundred yards or so to where a thin spray of water spat through the undergrowth. The rain was relentless. On the summit of the bank, where waves pounded the weakening structure, a lad slipped and fell into the water, and had to be hauled out with a rope. Daragh, looking up, every muscle straining with exhaustion, could see that the sandbags made the structure top-heavy. They could not win: either the flood would overtop the bank, or the force of the water would
eat away at foundations already weakened by the severe frost. Yet he still worked among the men, encouraging them, helping the half-drowned lad back to the safety of the church, offering exhausted men a mouthful from his hip flask.

A jet of water rushed out through the matting of docks and nettles that covered the slope. As soon as they stopped up one leak, another sprang. The narrow spray gushed, the earth bulging, clods of grass torn from their roots, unstoppable now. A voice shouted, ‘She’s going! Every man to high land!’ and they threw down the shovels and the sandbags and ran for the safety of the church.

Daragh, shambling along the track on legs that almost refused to bear him, heard the bank blow. It was the noise of a thunderclap. The blast shocked him, so that he reached out for something – anything – to cling on to. Someone supported him and a voice said gently, ‘She’ve gone, sir. Can’t do no more,’ and he allowed himself to be helped into the church, knowing that in the great roar and rush of water lay the wreckage of his hopes.

C
HAPTER
T
EN

‘And Daragh disappeared …?’ I asked.

‘A few weeks after that.’

There was a silence. Tilda and I were sitting in the garden room at The Red House. Clouds of blue plumbago were set against whitewashed walls and, because it was evening, the flowers of the hoya put forth their honey-scented dew. For a long time afterwards I associated that perfume with duplicity.

During the floods of 1947, the combination of rain, frozen earth and thawing snow had inundated thirty-seven thousand acres in the South Level. The army and fire service had been called in to help deal with the devastation. The Dutch government, experienced in similar disasters, had lent a pontoon crane.

‘Southam village was flooded,’ explained Tilda, ‘and the Hall was under six feet of water. Daragh lost so much – furniture, paintings, rugs – all destroyed. And his land … crops that he had sown swept away, fields covered with black mud. He believed himself ruined.’ She pressed her hand against her eyes, and I disliked myself for making her recount a past that was so obviously painful to her.

She told me that she was tired, so I left her and went to
work in the little boxroom. I was looking through a photograph album when the telephone rang. Joan had gone for the evening to Oxford; I dashed along the corridor to answer it.

A woman’s voice said, ‘I wish to speak to Tilda Franklin.’

‘She’s just dropped off, I’m afraid. Can I take a message and ask her to call you back?’

A pause. Then, ‘Are you the housekeeper?’

I explained who I was, and what I was doing at The Red House. There was another silence, and then, disturbingly, a peal of laughter. ‘You are writing that woman’s biography? How extraordinary!’

I felt affronted. ‘Who is this, please?’

She didn’t answer. Instead she said, ‘Another sycophantic little piece about the Angel of Amsterdam, I suppose.’ A second peal of laughter, and then the tone of voice altered. ‘Shall I tell you the truth? Shall I tell you how that saint – that
angel –
threw a penniless, friendless fifteen-year-old into the street? I think I reminded her of
him
. I reminded her of what she couldn’t have. I reminded her of what she had destroyed.’

I said again, more urgently, ‘Who is this? Who are you?’

‘She killed him.’ Some of the anger faded from the taunting voice, and was replaced by pain. ‘She killed my father. I always wondered, and now I know.’

My heart was pounding painfully in my chest. I knew, suddenly, to whom I was speaking. ‘Caitlin?’ I whispered, but she had already rung off.

I dialled 1471, to find out where she had been calling from. By the time I put the receiver down a few moments later, I knew that Caitlin Canavan was, in the flamboyant manner of her father, staying at the Savoy Hotel.

My intention to stay the night evaporated; I had to be alone. When Tilda woke, I made her tea and chatted to her, and did not meet her eyes. Throughout the drive home, that angry, taunting voice echoed in my head.
She killed my father
. I had assumed that Caitlin Canavan was either dead or long out of touch with the
Franklins. Caitlin had been a bit player, Jossy and Daragh’s spoilt only child. Now, she had forced herself into centre stage.

Back in London, I phoned Patrick and left a message on his answerphone. Puzzles constantly rearranged themselves in my mind. Tilda and Daragh had had an affair, and Max had discovered them and killed Daragh and buried his body in the dike … Or Jossy, maddened by jealousy of her more beautiful half-sister, had murdered her faithless husband … And now a new and terrible possibility, one I had not previously considered: Tilda herself, who had always loved Daragh, had realized that he would never leave his daughter for her, and—

So when the following evening, halfway through dinner, Charles, after talking endlessly about himself, looked up from his Thai green curry and said, ‘How’s Tilda? Found any skeletons in the cupboard yet?’ my face must have given me away. He put down his fork and said, ‘Oh,
Rebecca
, do tell.’

I shook my head. ‘It’s probably nothing. I’m just letting my imagination run away with me.’

He poured me another glass of wine. ‘You may not believe it, but I can be discreet.’

So I found myself telling him about the body in the dike and about Caitlin Canavan’s telephone call. ‘I thought that Max, Tilda’s husband, might have had something to do with it, but it never occurred to me that Tilda herself …’ The words trailed off; I was unable to voice my worst fears.

Charles took a mouthful of coconut ice cream, and waved his spoon at me. ‘A gift for you, though.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Don’t be dense, Rebecca. I’m sure that little brain of yours has been ticking away. Dame Tilda Franklin a murderer. They’ll be fighting for it in the bookshops. It’s like discovering that Mother Teresa was a child prostitute.’

I looked down at my coffee. I knew that he was right. Sinners are so much more newsworthy than saints.

‘Dynamite, don’t you think, darling?’ He had put down his spoon, and his pale green eyes had narrowed, and there was an
expression in them that, just for a moment, I interpreted as anger. How silly. Why should Charles be angry? Charles was detached, elegant, amusing, unthreatening. That was why I liked him.

‘Could cause you a tiny
crise de conscience
, I suppose,’ he said smoothly, adding, ‘I heard on the grapevine that you’re seeing a bit – or rather a lot, in fact – of the grandson. The handsome, brooding Patrick. I have to say, I didn’t believe it. But …’

It wasn’t any of his business, but I said, ‘I’ve been out with Patrick a couple of times.’

‘Such an unsuitable expression,
going out
. It usually means quite the opposite.’ He looked up. ‘It’s true, then?’

‘Yes. You sound surprised, Charles.’

‘I thought you were still pining for the oleaginous Toby.’

‘I’m not, and he wasn’t oleaginous. Over-ambitious. Pompous. Pretentious, perhaps.’

Finding suitable adjectives to describe my ex-lover was the sort of game I would have expected Charles to join in, but tonight he did not. Instead he said, ‘Are you in love with him?’

‘Patrick? I don’t know. I thought I was in love with Toby. I’m never too sure what it means,
in love.’

‘It means thinking about someone all the time. It means that when you’re with the object of your love, you don’t want to be anywhere else. You don’t want to be with anyone else. You don’t want to
be
anyone else.’

In all the years I’ve known him, I can’t remember Charles seeing a woman for more than a few weeks at a time, and that only occasionally. His mannerisms, his lack of close involvement with women – even our friendship – have all made me wonder whether he might be gay, yet for some reason have remained in the closet. ‘Charles, you surprise me,’ I said, but my mind had drifted once again to Tilda and Daragh.
She killed him
, echoed Caitlin Canavan’s angry voice.