Some Old Lover's Ghost (38 page)

The following day, Jossy went to Southam post office to buy stamps. Walking back through the village to the Hall, she recognized the man alighting from the bus. Purposefully, she marched forward.

She had to tap Max’s shoulder to gain his attention. Then she said, ‘Good afternoon, Mr Franklin. I’m glad to see you back in Southam. Perhaps, in future, you would take care to keep your wife away from my husband. That would be better for both of us, don’t you agree?’ Then she spun on her heel and walked back down the street.

He almost ran after her, seized her, shook her, forced her to withdraw her filthy accusations. Then he thought,
what if …
and stood in the middle of the road, staring at Joscelin Canavan’s retreating back. A tractor, loaded with gault to repair the dike, lumbered up the road towards him, but he did not see it until the driver leaned forward and yelled at him.

Max picked up his suitcase and began to walk to the cottage. He felt surprisingly calm. He thought back, remembering. Tilda, climbing up the stairs of the Savoy Hotel to Daragh Canavan’s room. Afterwards, walking with her along the Embankment, when her eyes had been bruised with grief.
You haven’t said that you don’t love him. I will be able to one day. It’ll just take a while
.

Later, Tilda, restless in domesticity, wanting something more than he had been able to give her. Their children, the
Kindertransporte
, the busy days and nights of her work with evacuees – had it all been an attempt to fill her days, to substitute for
this
, for the true love that she had found and lost?

He reached Long Cottage. She was in the garden; he saw her, hoe in hand, bending over a furrow in the soil. She possessed
a freedom of spirit that he envied and had wanted to take for his own. What had been extinguished in him by a middle-class childhood, school, work, still burned in her. He guessed that it burned also in Daragh Canavan, though it seemed to Max that in Daragh independence had been perverted to carelessness, and passion indulged until it became depravity. Max watched her for a while, stooped over the earth, her dark gold hair escaping out of its ribbon, her profile severe and perfect, and then he turned to go.

He must have made some sort of sound, because he heard her call out his name. He kept on walking, heading back along the drove to the road that led to Ely. He heard her footsteps drawing near to him, rubber boots splashing in the puddles. When she touched his shoulder, trying to pull him round, he almost hit away her hand.

‘Max
…’ She was gasping for breath.

He said, ‘I just spoke to Mrs Canavan. Or, rather, she spoke to me,’ and he watched Tilda’s face change, saw the fear, and knew that she had betrayed him.

‘I’d hoped she was lying,’ he said. Her hand slipped from his arm. ‘Or mistaken. But really, it doesn’t seem very likely. After all, you’ve been in love with him for years, haven’t you?’

‘Max … please …’ They were standing outside the post office. A lace curtain twitched; a woman paused in the street, pretending to check her purse.

‘We have to talk.’ Her eyes pleaded with him.

‘What is there to talk about? Mrs Canavan implied to me that you were having an affair with her husband. I almost told her not to be so cheap, so tawdry. But then I thought that perhaps it was true.’ He looked down at her, and he wanted to shake her until she told him the truth. ‘Is it, Tilda? Is it true?’

He heard her whisper, ‘I don’t love Daragh, Max, I love you. I loved Daragh once, but then I learned to love you, and I shall go on loving you for the rest of my life.’

But he no longer believed her. He had lost the capacity to believe in miracles. He said, ‘But you made love to him,’ and
when she shut her eyes, unable to meet his, he spun round on his heel, yelling at the woman with the shopping bag, the watchers in the cottages, ‘Leave us alone,
damn
you!’ Then he picked up his bag, and began the long walk back to Ely. He felt exhausted, all his anger dissipated in a terrible awareness that he was not enough for her, had never been enough for her, had deluded himself into thinking himself the sort of man that someone like Tilda could love.

Again, her footsteps followed him. Her voice was a howl of despair.

‘It was just
once
!’

Tears were streaming down her face. Max’s anger returned in full force. ‘You promised me,’ he said softly. ‘You promised me.’

Jossy had expected to be triumphant, but was instead exhausted. She went to her bedroom soon after supper, leaving Caitlin making sandwiches in the kitchen, expecting to doze for ten minutes or so.

When she woke, she knew by the intense blackness of the sky that she had slept for hours. She was still fully dressed. She felt a moment of intense disorientation. She glanced at the clock. It was half past two in the morning. She had slept for more than eight hours. Shivering with cold, Jossy pulled her dressing gown over her skirt and jersey and then padded down the corridor to Daragh’s room, intending to slip into bed beside him, to draw warmth from his body. She pushed open the door.

He was not there. She stood for a moment, not quite believing the smoothness of the bedspread. She switched on the light, looked around the room. Then she began to search the house, opening one door after another. The picnic things were piled on the kitchen table and Daragh’s empty whisky glass stood on the draining board. Daragh’s tweed jacket and his galoshes were missing. Which meant that he had walked over the fields to Southam.

Jossy told herself that Daragh had gone to the Pheasant, and from there to a cockfight or poker school. Yet she was
unable to sleep again that night, lying awake, watching the sky slowly lighten, listening for his footsteps. At dawn, she rose and made breakfast for Caitlin. Caitlin came downstairs dressed in her jodhpurs and riding jacket, but her mood was touchy and irritable. Jossy started to explain that Daddy wasn’t home yet, but Caitlin, sprinkling sugar on her porridge, said stiffly that he’d be back soon, because he’d promised. Caitlin ate two spoonfuls of porridge, and then ran out to the stables to make ready the horses. Jossy scoured saucepans, scrubbed cutlery. The day, which had started fine, clouded over, and soon thick rods of rain pounded the gravel, forming wide yellow puddles. Caitlin retreated to the house at last, but remained at the window, looking out through the shimmering curtain of rain. Jossy, watching her, realized suddenly the depth of her daughter’s misery. She placed an awkward arm round Caitlin’s shoulders, but though the child did not shake her off, neither did she turn to her. It occurred to Jossy that Caitlin hardly noticed that she was there, and that they both waited with painful, fearful love for the same man. Their twin sufferings should have allowed them to comfort each other, but did not.

Daragh did not come home that day, or the next. On Monday morning, after she had taken Caitlin to school, Jossy drove to Southam village. It had occurred to her, horribly, that in telling Max Franklin of his wife’s infidelity she might have achieved the very opposite of what she had intended. Mr Franklin might have left his wife, and Daragh, who had always loved Tilda, might have seized his opportunity.

Undisturbed by the curious glances her inquiries received, Jossy learned that Max Franklin had indeed left Tilda. Mrs Butler in the post office had seen Mrs Franklin running down the street after her husband, crying. Mrs Franklin, added Mrs Butler, her large, pale eyes fixed meaningfully on Jossy, was no better than she should be. Jossy drove down the spur of road that led to Long Cottage. Children ran in and out of the house; the refugee boy cycled from the village, his bicycle panniers full of spring cabbage, but there was no sign of Daragh. When Tilda left the cottage, a shopping
basket on her arm, Jossy looked at her carefully. Tilda’s face was pale and blotchy, her long hair straggled anyhow around her shoulders. She did not, Jossy thought, look beautiful any more. In fact, she was as plain as her sister.

Daragh had been gone five days when it occurred to Jossy that he might never come back. The thought came to her when she was bent over the stove, testing potatoes with a knife. She still cooked every meal for three people. The knife slid into the potato and Jossy straightened, pushing her fringe out of her eyes, trying to shake the thought away. Daragh had gone away before. But never for so long. Never without writing.

The next morning she walked across the field to Southam. The breach in the dike had been repaired, and only a few sullen, muddy puddles, choked with rusty tin cans and clogged scraps of sacking, licked the lowest levels of the field. Sometimes Jossy stared at the ground as she walked, looking for minute clues that he might have left – a discarded cigarette packet, or a button from his jacket – and sometimes she scanned the horizon, as though she might glimpse him, six days after his disappearance, his hands dug in his pockets, whistling as he walked back to her.

The next day she went to the police station in Ely. She could tell by their bored expressions that they weren’t interested, that Daragh was just another errant husband, so she thumped on the counter with her clenched fist, and said, ‘You do realize that my father was Edward de Paveley, don’t you, and that he was a magistrate?’ Though they scribbled a few details, they still looked bored, and she walked away, thinking how things had changed since the war.

At home, she noticed Daragh’s letters, piled on the table in the Hall. Sitting on the morning-room sofa, she slit each envelope with the paperknife, glancing frantically at the sheets of paper. She did not find out where Daragh had gone, but she did learn other things. She learned that they owed Caitlin’s school fees, and that there were large outstanding bills to the tradesmen. She learned that the Hall, her home, was mortgaged, and that the mortgage had not been paid for six months. She sat for a
while, fragments of paper scattered around her like fallen leaves, stunned by the realization that it was possible to lose the things that you had believed inalienable. Your position in society, your childhood home.

She went to the bank the following day. The bank manager told her that she might lose the Hall. Jossy stared at him stonily and snapped, ‘I’m sure it won’t come to
that
, Mr Mortimer,’ and stalked out of his office. But her legs were shaking. That night, standing at the window, looking for him, she thought that everything familiar was falling apart. If the night sky had lightened, or if the peaty earth had opened up to reveal chasms littered with the bones of dinosaurs, she would not have been amazed.

A month later she engaged a private detective. By then, she had visited London several times, haunting Daragh’s favourite places – the Savoy, the Café Royal, his club – leaving Caitlin at home in case he came back while she was out. She went to Newmarket and to Ascot, weaving among the crowds, doggedly scanning every face. She revisited the seaside resorts they had explored when Caitlin was a small child: Cromer and Great Yarmouth and South wold. Her heart leapt whenever she saw a tall, dark man with a spring in his step.

Mr Oddie, the private detective, was stooped, greying, and his clothes smelt of tobacco. Sitting in the morning room on the yellow silk sofa, he asked a series of impertinent questions. She endured them for Daragh’s sake. She endured them because she knew by now that she was pregnant with Daragh’s child. She felt for the baby only indifference. All her energy was concentrated on one undertaking. She knew that Daragh was out there,
somewhere
, and that it was just a question of looking in the right place. She refused even to consider the other possibility.

Mr Oddie shuffled around Southam, smoking his roll-up cigarettes, asking questions. Village gossip said that Daragh had gone back to Ireland, or that he had fled to America, as so many of his forefathers had. Village gossip also suggested, woundingly, that Daragh had run away with another woman.
Mr Oddie had investigated this possibility, but Daragh had been in love with Tilda Franklin at the time of his disappearance, and Tilda Franklin still lived alone in Southam. Jossy did not tell Mr Oddie of Tilda Franklin’s supposed connection with her own family.

Mr Oddie wrote a report which concluded that Daragh Canavan had fled the country because of his debts, though no trace of his name had been found on the boarding lists of planes and ships. Jossy thanked Mr Oddie and paid him by selling a necklace of her mother’s.

Kit called at the Hall. ‘The fields aren’t sown yet, Joss. Shall I organize the men?’

Jossy shook her head. ‘Daragh will sort everything out, Kit, when he comes home.’ Kit shuffled from one foot to the other and began to say something, but she silenced him. So long as no-one voiced her worst fears she could shut them away, put up with the physical discomfort that had become part of her day-to-day routine, keep going.

Yet sometimes she found herself thinking,
What if he never comes back
? What if Daragh, who had been the only joy of her life, had gone for ever? The pain of his leaving made her, sometimes, want to die. At night she wept and tore at the sheets, wanting to scream at the absence of him.

Sarah died in June. Tilda found her in the orchard one afternoon, sitting in the old deckchair, her eyes closed, an open book on her lap. She thought at first that Sarah was asleep, and then, touching her chill hand to wake her, knew that she was not. The sky was aquamarine, perfumed with the roses and pinks from Erich’s garden.

Tilda helped the nurse lay out Sarah’s body. Later, after the funeral, she sorted through Sarah’s room. Packing ancient stays and lavender-scented knitted stockings into cardboard boxes, she felt as though she was putting away the past, clearing out her childhood. Waking in the early hours of the morning, she remembered the broken floor brick where Sarah hid her savings,
and padded downstairs in her nightgown. Beneath the brick, she found an old stocking, filled with coins. The coins were sovereigns, a dozen of them, old and coated with a thin layer of black silt. She sat at the table, the money piled in front of her, a cup of tea growing cold in her hands as the room slowly lightened.