Some Old Lover's Ghost (60 page)

When I switched off my laptop, I glanced at my watch and saw
that it was midnight. I stared at the photographs on my pinboard. Daragh, Caitlin, poor doomed Erich, and Tilda herself, sitting in the garden of The Red House, surrounded by children.

A few days later, I received cards from the library, telling me that the books I had ordered had come in at last. When I arrived home after collecting them, a message was waiting on the answering machine. I switched it on, and there was a pause and a mumble, and a familiar voice cried, ‘God, I detest these damned things!’

Caitlin Canavan. I listened carefully.

‘Let me buy you a drink, Rebecca. We could have a nice old chat. Umm … give me a ring. I’ve left the Savoy, the service isn’t what it once was. Oh, my address …’ She gave the name of a hotel in south London.

I glanced at my watch; it was three o’clock. I dialled directory enquiries, who gave me the phone number of the hotel, but when I rang no-one answered. I hastily washed my face and combed my hair, and went out.

It took me over an hour to cross London, another half-hour to pick out the hotel from the warren of seedy buildings that lined the narrow streets. Caitlin’s hotel, the Blenheim, did not live up to the grandeur of its name. Paint peeled from doors and windows, and when I rang the bell and was eventually admitted, the stale smells of cooking wafted into the hall.

I was about to ask the number of Caitlin’s room when I caught sight of her through a doorway. She was sitting at a window table in the small bar room. The bar was formica-topped, backed by rows of bottles and optics. A bored young man rubbed a dirty cloth over the formica as Caitlin’s voice penetrated above the low buzz of a radio.

‘—simply must come to Dublin, darling. You’d love it. I could introduce you to simply masses of divine people.’

I went into the bar. ‘Caitlin?’

She looked up. ‘Darling! How lovely to see you.’ She lunged
inaccurate kisses at me. ‘You’ll join me, won’t you, Rebecca?’ She gestured to the barman. ‘Barry?’

I realized that she was already quite drunk, and that, if she was staying in this hole, she must be short of money. ‘Let me buy the drinks, Caitlin.’

‘Too sweet of you. A G and T, darling.’

I bought a gin and tonic and an orange juice, and sat down opposite her. The window beside us was open, and the rumble of the traffic made the table shake. Caitlin’s hand trembled slightly when she raised the glass. Though her face was heavily made up, she had been unable to disguise the redness of her eyelids.

‘I thought,’ she said, ‘that you might want to attend my father’s burial.’

I stared at her. ‘The body’s been released?’

She nodded, and then she rummaged in her bag for a tissue as tears began to slide from her eyes. ‘There’s to be a private Requiem Mass in Cambridge, but he’s to be buried next to my mother in Southam. I insisted on it.’ She told me the day and the time.

‘Caitlin, I’m so sorry.’

‘I’m not,’ she said fiercely, blowing her nose. ‘I’m glad. I’ve found him at last.’

There was a silence, which I expected her to fill with wild accusations about Tilda. Instead she said, ‘All these years, I never stopped searching for him. Every street I walked down, every time I entered a room, I would look for his face. I even went to America once – did you know that? And all the time’ – and she laughed unsteadily – ‘he was in Southam. So now I don’t have to look any more.’

It occurred to me that Caitlin had looked for Daragh in other ways too. In the succession of lovers, in the unsuccessful marriages that Patrick had mentioned. In her imitation of the way her father had lived – the drinking, the extravagance, the reckless bonhomie.

I said, ‘I’ve been talking to Melissa. She told me about Erich.’

I expected scornful denials, and for her to contradict Melissa’s version of events, so that I’d have to pick through the sad remains of another death, trying to salvage the truth. But she scrabbled in her bag again, this time taking out her cigarettes and lighter, and asked warily, ‘What did Melissa say?’

‘That Erich hanged himself.’

‘I suppose she told you that it was my fault?’ A flash of her old spirit. ‘He was unstable, you know. Unhinged.’

‘Melissa said that Erich was always haunted by what had happened to him in Austria.’

Caitlin lit her cigarette. ‘He was odd. Different. Rather peculiar and unattractive. He almost
smelt
of fear and defeat. I used to try to avoid him. He gave me the creeps.’

‘Erich showed you the garden of The Red House, didn’t he?’

She paused, the cigarette between her first two fingers. ‘Yes.’ Her voice, just then, was barely audible. ‘It was beautiful. You’ve seen it, of course?’

I nodded. ‘Melissa said that you left home after Erich died. Where did you go?’

‘I went to London. Tilda was going to send me to boarding school, so I ran away. We’d had the most frightful quarrel, you see. I found a job in a bar, and then some film work.’

‘You were an actress?’

She blinked. ‘It wasn’t quite what I was hoping for. A bit …
blue
, if you understand what I mean, darling. But it paid the rent, and then I met a lovely man who was so sweet to me. But he got into a teeny bit of trouble with the police, and quite soon after that I went to Ireland.’

‘To look for your father?’

‘I thought that even if Daddy hadn’t been able to go to my Aunt Caitlin, he must have had friends. My daddy always had simply masses of friends. Everyone loved him.’

Not quite everyone, I thought. Someone had hated Daragh Canavan enough to bind him hand and foot and bury him alive in the wall of a dike. A death of deliberate barbarism.

‘But I couldn’t find him, so I went back to England. I was working in a little club – quite chic, darling – when I met Graham. We married a fortnight later. Terribly romantic. A register office, I’m afraid – Graham had been married before, so we couldn’t wed in church. It was lovely at first. We had a sweet little house and Graham treated me like a princess.’ She sighed. ‘But he was dull, darling, and that’s the truth of it. Terribly dull. Especially about money.’

I imagined that, for Caitlin, the role of housewife had quickly palled. ‘Did you have any children?’

She shook her head. She was looking into her empty glass. ‘Couldn’t, darling. I’d got myself into a bit of a pickle when I first went to London. I sorted it out, but I must have botched it a bit.’

I shuddered. A knitting needle, perhaps, or an alcoholic doctor who’d years before been struck off the medical register.

‘You’ll come, won’t you?’ she said suddenly. She had gripped my hand; her eyes pleaded.

‘To your father’s burial? Of course I will.’

I slipped my notebook back into my bag. As I rose to go, she said, ‘I didn’t mean to hurt him. At the end, I quite liked him.’ The words were slightly slurred, and it took me a few moments to realize that Caitlin was speaking of Erich. ‘I didn’t know that he would do
that.’
The pain and regret of decades echoed in her voice. ‘I didn’t mean to hurt him.’

It was two months since I had visited The Red House. In that time, the garden had faded from the bright lushness of June to the dusty pallor of the end of August. The lawns were parched and yellowed, and the skeletons of the plants that had gone to seed cast lacy silhouettes against the walls. Plump greyish clouds intermittently blocked out the face of the sun, but it did not yet rain.

I had telephoned that morning to check that Tilda was well enough to talk to me. I found her sitting in the solar, a blanket, in spite of the lingering heat, folded over
her legs. There was a photograph album open on the table in front of her.

‘My Red House children.’ She indicated the album. ‘Here’s Joan.’ A dark-haired girl in a cotton dress: Joan was now, of course, Tilda’s housekeeper. ‘Joan was one of the first,’ she explained. ‘And Luke and Tom, the twins. There’s Brian, and Annie, and …’ She turned the pages of the album, naming the children.

I listened for a while, but I could not stop myself saying: ‘Didn’t it frighten you? Didn’t you fear for them? Didn’t you want to turn away, do something different?’

She looked up. ‘After Erich? Of course. When he died, a part of me died. A cliché, but it’s true. I wanted to hide away. I could hardly bear to face the world again.’

‘Then why did you?’

‘Max made me.’ She closed the album. ‘It has always haunted me, though. Not—I don’t mean why he hanged himself. I understood that he could not bear to live. But my part in it. The part of the de Paveleys.’

‘The de Paveleys?’ I did not understand her. ‘What have they to do with it? They’re all dead, aren’t they?’ The de Paveleys, in the chapters of the biography I had already written, had neatly epitomized the twentieth-century decline of the aristocracy.

‘Not quite,’ Tilda chided me. ‘There is Caitlin, of course. And I myself am half de Paveley, so my children and grandchildren have de Paveley blood. And you appear to have forgotten Kit.’

Kit de Paveley, that reclusive, unattractive bachelor, had been easy to overlook.

‘He still sends me flowers on my birthday,’ Tilda said, and I stared at her, shocked.

‘Kit’s alive?’

‘Of course.’ She seemed surprised that I had assumed otherwise. ‘He’s a year or so younger than me, you know. He never left Southam.’

I remembered standing on the dike with Charles, on the day he had proposed to me, and looking down to that distant, shabby
white house and seeing a flicker of movement behind a dusty window.

‘I haven’t seen him for years,’ Tilda added. ‘I wonder whether Caitlin keeps in touch with him? Probably not. They were never close.’ She paused for a moment, and then she said sadly, ‘I meant, Rebecca, that the de Paveleys have haunted me and my family. Even poor Erich’s fate was bound up with theirs. Caitlin knew about me and Daragh, you see. That was why she hated me so much.’

I remembered the private detective’s report, now in my desk drawer in London.

‘If Sarah had not wanted to punish the de Paveleys for what they had done to her sister, then Daragh would not have married Jossy. And Caitlin would not have, years later, also wanted to punish me.’

I rose and went to the window. Clouds bobbed in the sky, but it was not yet raining. The shadows cast on the topiaried box trees were pasted black on the faded lawn.

‘Chess pieces,’ I said, suddenly, looking down. I understood the box trees now: bishop, queen, king, and, half hidden by a copper beech, the flaring mane of the knight.

‘Of course. Didn’t you realize?’

‘I hadn’t looked at them properly from here. And from the path you can’t make them out.’ The trees were bunched up, crowded, so that you had to look carefully to distinguish their shapes. I was beginning to guess why, at the close of her life, Tilda had chosen to have her biography written. Not for the reason she had first given me – to tell her mother’s forgotten story – and not, as I had more recently assumed, to leave a bland, official version for posterity.

‘Erich and I used to play chess quite often,’ said Tilda. ‘Max taught me the game.’

The sun re-emerged from behind the cloud. ‘It’s a puzzle, isn’t it, Tilda?’ I said. ‘You wanted me to solve a puzzle.’

Her grey eyes, calm and steady, met mine. ‘You’re good at solving puzzles, aren’t you, Rebecca? I realized that when I watched
Sisters of the Moon.’

Researching the programme, it had taken me four months to track down Ivy Lunn’s child, taken from her mother at her birth in the workhouse in 1920. She herself had tried to find her natural mother a few years earlier, but had failed to do so. She had been adopted, and her adopted parents had changed her name. She had subsequently married twice. Tracing her had not been easy, but I had enjoyed it. It had been interesting yet uninvolving. It had allowed me to study the joys and griefs of others without suffering them myself. Yes, I liked solving puzzles.

‘You chose me,’ I said slowly, ‘because you thought that I might find out what had happened to Daragh?’

‘If he had not died, then Erich might have lived!’ The fleeting passion blazed and then faded, and Tilda said quietly, ‘I want to know before I die. Or I do not see how I shall rest easy. I didn’t foresee, of course, that Daragh’s body would be found. That was a great shock to me, but it was meant to be, don’t you think, Rebecca? It was meant to be.’

‘And your family …’ I remembered Patrick’s hostility. ‘What did they think?’

‘Melissa and the girls understand. And Max would have understood, of course. Josh has his own concerns, as always. Patrick tried to dissuade me from going through with it. I think that he was anxious about my health. I tried to explain to him how important it was to me, but he can be stubborn sometimes.’ She smiled. ‘Patrick often reminds me of Max. You’re fond of him, aren’t you, Rebecca?’

She looked at me, and I felt myself redden.

‘He got into such a tangle with that wretched Jennifer,’ she added. ‘Ellie was the only good thing to come out of that marriage. Jennifer had expensive tastes, and Patrick worked long hours to satisfy them. They were rarely together, and the marriage fell apart. But Patrick is deeply attached to Ellie.’

I remembered Patrick running down the path of The Red House, his dark-haired daughter clasped in his arms.

‘I’ve been hoping for some time,’ Tilda said meaningfully, ‘that Patrick would meet a nice girl. A sensible, kind, intelligent girl.’
Again, she looked at me. ‘It worries me, Rebecca, to think of him alone in that house in Cumbria. He showed me a photograph. It seems terribly bleak. What did you think? He told me that he’d taken you there.’

I had to go to the window again, and fiddle with the tassels on the curtains and make some noncommittal answer. The old questions still haunted me, but I found that I was looking at them in a different way.

Even if Tilda had killed Daragh, even if her explanation that she had engaged me to solve the mystery for her was only an elaborate red herring, did that negate the good that she had done in her life? The children she had cared for – the
Kindertransporte
children, the evacuees, the Red House children. The causes that she had later fought for – UNICEF and the Red Cross, and the psychiatric clinics that she had founded to help traumatized children. If she had, in a moment of anguish and fury, killed Daragh Canavan, did she deserve that I should expose her?