Some Old Lover's Ghost (9 page)

‘So you’ll tell her about me?’ His voice was scathing. ‘Or am I not important enough? Where do I fit into your scheme of things, Tilda? Or was I just to pass the time – just to tease a little – just to string along until something better turns up—’

She stood up then, and folded her napkin and placed it on the table. Then she walked out of the restaurant. Daragh wanted to run after her, but his pride stopped him. Instead he turned to the diners at the adjacent table, and said, with a smile that made them turn back embarrassed to their plates, ‘Well then,
the show’s over, and you can eat your pudding now, can’t you?’ Then he signalled to the waiter, and ordered a double whisky and swallowed it quickly, tearing the petals from the rose as he drank.

Tilda’s eyes were swollen and red. She told Sarah that she had a headache and went upstairs, but Sarah knew that she was crying. Sarah, listening to Tilda’s bedroom door closing behind her, smiled to herself. Then she took out the old stocking from beneath the floor brick, drew out several coins, and tucked them into the pocket in her petticoat.

That evening, she lifted the ancient cardboard suitcase down from the tallboy and began to pack.

The unprecedented treat of a train journey and three weeks in a bed and breakfast in Great Yarmouth should have been extraordinarily delightful to Tilda, but was not. All the pleasure she usually took in new places and new experiences was absent. Watching the waves crash down on the pier, walking along the rainswept esplanade, she thought only of Daragh. Locked in the guesthouse’s bathroom, the only place where she had any privacy, she tried to write to him. Each time she tore the letter up and flushed it down the lavatory.

Standing on the sea front, watching the waves heave and slap against the pebbles, Tilda knew that she loved Daragh – that her heart ached with loving him – and that she wanted, one day, his children. Tramping for hours with Sarah along the beach, she made a decision. When they went back to Southam, she would tell Daragh that she would marry him when she was twenty-one and no longer required Aunt Sarah’s permission. If Daragh loved her, then he would wait for her.

Miss de Paveley invited Daragh to tea for a second time. Together they walked across the fields, where the dry wind rustled the shorn stubble.

‘Shall we take the path along the dike, Miss de Paveley?’

She looked up at him. ‘Would you call me Joscelin, Mr Canavan?’ She had gone pink. ‘Or Jossy, if you prefer.’

Daragh let his hand, helping Jossy up the steep bank, linger just a little longer than necessary on her silk-covered elbow. The humiliation of Tilda’s rejection still rankled. There was an element of flirtation in his conversation with Jossy today – clumsy on her part, polished on Daragh’s – on which he intended to capitalize.

‘Then you must call me Daragh.’

He had the reward of seeing her tremble. If he’d taken her here on the ridge of the bank, he thought suddenly, she would not have objected. He did not touch her, though.

There were no clouds in the sky, and the sun was a bright, hard disc. Heat shimmered on the horizon, making the long, low white house that Daragh had previously noticed seem to shimmer and shift in the windless air. He said, ‘That’s a bleak-looking place.’

‘My Uncle Christopher lives there. He runs the farm.’

Daragh was disappointed. So she didn’t need a land agent. He said, hoping to prompt an encouraging response from her, ‘I know a fair bit about farm work myself.’

‘Are your family farmers, Daragh?’

He nodded, remembering his grandfather’s cottage, set in a patch of stony ground.

‘You’re Irish, aren’t you?’

He had smartened up his accent for Joscelin de Paveley, mimicking the clipped, proper English he had learned in London, and was galled that she had nevertheless recognized his origins.

‘We had a fine place,’ he said mysteriously, ‘a grand place, but we fell on hard times. I can’t tell you everything, Jossy – there’s some things it’s better to forget. Let’s just say that I won’t be going back to Ireland.’

When he saw the sympathy in her eyes, Daragh knew that he had struck just the right note to satisfy her romantic, naive
nature. He pressed his advantage. ‘So now I’m rather at a loose end. I miss the old country, and I haven’t found anything yet to take its place. I’ve done a bit of this and that, but I’m used to something better. I just need a chance.’

She started to speak, but her words were, to Daragh’s chagrin, interrupted by a shout from the field below.

‘Jossy! Hello there, Jossy!’

‘Kit!’ Jossy waved, and ran down the bank. Panting at the exertion, she clumped across the field, Daragh following after her.

A pale, thin young man crossed the field to join them.

‘Kit, let me introduce you to my friend, Daragh Canavan.’ Daragh noticed with what pride Jossy said ‘my friend’. ‘Daragh, this is my cousin Kit.’

Kit de Paveley wore filthy corduroys and an old cotton shirt. Even on such a hot day, Daragh was wearing his one good jacket. He knew that a gentleman always wore a jacket. Kit’s lank hair was uncovered and needed cutting. As he shook hands, Daragh reflected contemptuously that if he hadn’t been told that Kit was Jossy’s cousin, then he’d have taken him for a tramp, or a beggar.

‘Have you found something interesting, Kit?’

‘A couple of coins. Roman.’ Animation showed in the light grey eyes. Kit dug in his pocket. ‘Beauties, aren’t they?’ Two small, misshapen black lumps nestled on his palm.

Jossy seemed as unimpressed as Daragh was. ‘I thought they’d be shinier.’

‘I’ll clean them up, of course.’

Jossy’s unprepossessing cousin turned away without a goodbye, heading back to the white house. Daragh thought of taking Jossy’s arm again, but something stopped him, a spasm of self-disgust, and a sudden bitter awareness of the unfairness of things. If Tilda had all this. If marriage to the girl he loved would not entail penury. For he did love her: he faced that there and then, as his eyes stung with the heat and the dust.

Daragh had assumed that Tilda would call at the pub, or write to him. That she would apologize, or explain. After a week had passed, and she had done neither, Daragh swallowed his pride and cycled to Long Cottage. To his rap on the front door there was no reply other than the distant rumble of thunder from the clouds which had begun to billow on the horizon. Daragh hopped over the fence, and walked around the little house. All the windows were tightly shut, some curtains drawn. Seizing the handle, Daragh shook the back door, but it refused to open. In spite of the oppressive heat, a cold sensation flowered in his stomach. They never locked the back door.

A girl was whitening the front step of the next door cottage. When she explained that the Greenlees had gone away, Daragh kicked the wicket fence so hard that the stave broke. Then he walked back to the street, seized by the terrible certainty that they had left Southam for ever and returned to the vagrant way of life of Tilda’s childhood. As the vast arch of the iron-grey sky pressed down on him, Daragh learned how close love could be to hatred. Tilda had not loved him as he loved her, and his anguish was intensified by the suspicion that she had made a fool of him.

Daragh climbed onto his bicycle and left the village. Crackles of lightning sparked on the horizon, but the air was still dry. As he rode, the countryside was reduced to a streak of dun and ochre, yet the fast slipstream of air could not blank out the words that echoed in his head.
She didn’t even say goodbye
. His hair clung to his forehead and the back of his neck with sweat, and there was a bitter taste in his mouth.

A motor car overtook him, rather too close, and then lurched to a halt, sending up dust and pebbles. Daragh, recognizing Jossy as she turned in the driver’s seat and waved to him, groaned inwardly.

Her head was uncovered and her coarse brown hair tangled by the wind. ‘What luck that we met!’ she cried. ‘I was driving to Ely – I hoped that I might run into you.’

Her words bubbled and fell over themselves. At another time Daragh might have smiled at her infelicitous choice of phrase.
Instead, he raised his cap and said, ‘Good afternoon, Miss de Paveley. I hope that you’re well.’

She didn’t seem to notice his lack of enthusiasm. She said, ‘Come for a drive, Daragh,’ and he felt angered by the complacent assumption of the rich that he would drop everything, come running.

‘Sorry. I’ve the bike.’

‘Leave it in the ditch. See – it’s beginning to rain. Or put it in the back of the car.’

He was about to refuse when he realized that now Tilda was gone the only thing to keep him in this damnable place was the hope that Joscelin de Paveley might help him better himself. And besides, Jossy was right, large drops of rain had begun to fall from the darkening sky. Daragh slung the bicycle into the back of the huge, open-top car, and climbed into the passenger seat. Jossy scraped the motor car noisily into gear, rammed her foot on the accelerator, and the Bentley lurched diagonally across the road.

He grabbed the steering wheel, straightening it. ‘Do you know how to drive this thing?’

She was hunched over the steering wheel, her tongue between her teeth, her eyes narrowed in concentration. She had to shout because of the noise of the engine. ‘No. I’m teaching myself. It was my father’s car, but he didn’t drive it for years because of his leg. The gardener’s boy showed me how to do the gears. I can start and stop, but corners are difficult.’

He felt a fleeting admiration for her, mixed with nausea as they took a bend in the road too fast. He yelled, ‘You need to change down a gear.’

She yanked the gearstick again. ‘I couldn’t get the hood up. You’re not getting too wet, are you?’

He shook his head, enjoying the cold shock of the rain on his skin.

‘Do you drive, Daragh?’

‘A bit.’ His uncle, who ran a pub in Dublin, had owned a van.

‘Would you teach me properly?’

They were passing the little bridge where he had first kissed Tilda. He was aware of a wave of overwhelming grief, and knew that he wasn’t in the right frame of mind to flirt with Joscelin de Paveley. He said, ‘I’m a bit busy just now, I’m afraid.’

A herd of goats straggled across the road ahead. Daragh punched the horn and Jossy stamped on the brakes. The goats scattered as the car screeched to a halt.

‘Busy?’ repeated Jossy, looking across at him.

‘My work’s at a dead end. I thought I’d look around and try to find something that suits me better.’

He could hardly, he thought, put it plainer than that. Yet the stupid woman just stared at him, her lower lip stuck out.

‘Of course,’ he added impatiently, ‘if I can’t find anything here, then I’ll have to move on.’

They edged along the road again. Rain drummed on the dry, impacted earth. Jossy said, ‘You like the Hall, don’t you, Daragh?’

She began to talk, as they gathered speed, about wallpaper and distemper. Daragh looked at her almost with dislike. She was, he thought suddenly, one of the dullest women he had ever met.

Then she said, ‘I thought, when we are married, we could have the house redecorated.’

Jossy smiled at him, her love blatant in her eyes. Daragh coughed and blenched and reached instinctively into his pocket for his cigarettes. The car veered across the road, and then slid, slowly and gracefully, down the slope into the field below.

C
HAPTER
T
HREE

‘She changed her religion for him. Joscelin de Paveley, whose family had been Protestant since the sixteenth century, discarded her history and became a Roman Catholic.’

Tilda closed the photograph album with a snap. She looked up, and her eyes met mine. I had always assumed that our feelings become less painful in old age. That in compensation for physical frailties, all those bruising emotions – jealousy, grief, desire – do not trouble us as they used to. I knew, looking at Tilda, that I had been mistaken.

‘The news of their engagement was all around the village. All around the county. They were talking about it in the post office when I went to buy stamps. I’d been to Ely the previous day, and the publican had told me that Daragh had given in his notice. I was afraid that he’d left the area. I blamed myself, of course. But when I heard that he was to
marry
…’ Her voice faltered, fading away.

‘You were angry?’ I coaxed.

She shook her head. ‘No. Not then. Later.’ She frowned. ‘I felt stunned, literally. The only other time in my life that I can remember feeling like that was when the children were small and
we lived in a scruffy little house, and I slipped on the linoleum going downstairs and hit my head on the banister. Not being able to think … hardly being able to breathe.’ She looked up at me. ‘Have you ever felt like that, Rebecca?’

I didn’t want to answer. It was not a part of the bargain, to share my secrets with her. But I remembered only too clearly how I had felt when Toby had said,
I don’t think we should see so much of each other
. I had stared at him and at my hospital bed and at my own trembling hands, and they had all seemed unfamiliar.

Tilda did not wait for my reply. ‘Most of the other bad things that have happened to me – Holland, and Max, and even poor Erich – I had some sort of warning. But with Daragh … nothing.’

I forced myself to speak. ‘You must have loved him terribly.’

‘Oh, I did. I did.’

I wanted to ask whether that sort of love, dealt so grievous a blow, lingered. Yet I saw an inevitability of pain in her reply. To go on loving when love is futile, or to forget why you loved in the first place – which is worse?

Instead, I gathered my things together and took my leave of her. It was late, and the grey, swollen clouds told me that there was a possibility of snow. I said goodbye and walked downstairs, and took my coat from the peg in the hall. By the time I reached London, small crystals of snow dotted the beams from my car’s headlights. At home, I turned up the heating and opened a bottle of wine, and drank it rather quickly. The boiler lurched and grunted, but the radiators gave off only a feeble heat, so I delved in the wardrobe for a warmer sweater. Several garments stuffed in the back of the shelf fell out onto the floor. Just the sight of them filled me with rage. I thought of Tilda, learning of Daragh’s betrayal in Southam post office, and I thought of Toby, looking anywhere but at me as he spoke the words that broke my heart. I fetched the kitchen scissors.