Some Old Lover's Ghost (23 page)

‘Elsa Gordon is a slut, Daragh.’

There was silence. Then he said, ‘Sluts have their uses.’

Jossy said stubbornly, ‘You can’t
love
a woman like that.’

He looked back at her, his green eyes wide, his features shadowed by candlelight. ‘I don’t love Elsa.’

‘But you sleep with her.’

Daragh smiled. ‘If you wish to call it that. To tell the truth, sleeping’s about the only thing I haven’t done with her.’

His words shattered her frail composure. ‘How could you, Daragh? Don’t you see how you’ve hurt me?’

He blinked. ‘I didn’t intend to. It wasn’t something I’d thought about.’

‘You thought I wouldn’t mind?’

‘I thought you wouldn’t
know.’
He frowned. ‘Though now I think about it, I don’t much care whether you mind or not.’

Jossy gasped. Her pain was physical. It took more courage than she had known she possessed to voice her next question. ‘Don’t you love me any more?’

Daragh poured himself another glass of whisky. She knew from the glitter of his eyes that he was very drunk.

‘Any more?’ he said. ‘I never loved you, Jossy.’

‘That’s not true! You did! I know that you did! It was love at first sight – think of your letter!’

‘Letter?’ He frowned. ‘Oh,
that
letter. Well, I told you that I didn’t write it. Someone else did.’

She cried out, ‘Don’t talk like that, Daragh, please! You’re drunk, aren’t you?’

‘I am drunk, Jossy, that’s so. But I’m telling you the truth. You can believe it or not, as you wish. You don’t have to worry about Elsa Gordon, though. I was getting tired of her anyway. I don’t love her, I never did, and she’s some funny little ways about her. I don’t love you either, I’ve told you the truth about that, but I’ll not leave you, and if I find someone to replace Elsa then I’ll be discreet because of
Caitlin. I lost the only woman I ever loved when I married you, you see.’

His voice was slurred by alcohol, but Jossy could still make out the words.
I lost the only woman I ever loved when I married you
. She stared at him, her heart pounding.

He muttered, ‘You don’t know her. Though, by God, you ought to.’

As he turned away from her, she seized his sleeve, pulling him back. ‘Who? Who do you love, Daragh? Tell me!’ She was screaming, and her clenched fists battered his chest. He took a step backwards, but she would not let him go, and her hands clawed at his face and hair. He seized her wrists.

‘You want to know, do you? Then I’ll tell you. Your half-sister, Jossy. Your father’s little by-blow. Got on the wrong side of the blanket, all that.’ He scowled, pulling her to him, shaking her to emphasize his words. ‘Your father fucked Tilda’s mother, don’t you see? The old bastard got her pregnant. Tilda’s aunt hated him for that. So she – the aunt – wrote that letter. She guessed that you wanted to bed me, and she thought, what a joke, to pass her niece’s old lover to the daughter of the man who’d ruined her sister.’

Jossy saw that she had hurt him. A trickle of blood trailed from the corner of his mouth. She began to cry.

‘What a joke,’ Daragh repeated, ‘that Edward de Paveley’s fancy daughter should lower herself by marrying a good-for-nothing Irish peasant.’

He let go of her at last, and she sank to the floor, still weeping. As he opened the door, he said, ‘You don’t look like your sister at all, you know, Jossy. Tilda is ten times more beautiful than you.’

She remembered her father’s funeral, and cried out, ‘That girl – the one you were with in Southam—’

He paused. ‘We were to marry.’ The words stabbed her.

Tilda realized that she was pregnant again in the autumn of 1936. The unplanned baby made its presence felt by relieving
Tilda of her breakfast each morning, something that she had not experienced with Melissa.

Max returned from Spain in mid-November, grey with exhaustion. Tilda waited until Melissa was settled in her cot, and they had dined, and were alone in the basement, and then she told him about the new baby. She saw his eyes widen and the small vertical line between his eyebrows, which had formed during the course of the year, deepen.

‘I’m sorry, Max. I know you wanted to wait.’

He put his arm round her waist, pulling her towards him. ‘Don’t be silly.’

‘Melissa’s in the big cot now. The baby can go in the cradle. It’ll be all right, Max.’

‘Of course it will. It’ll be terrific.’

Yet though he kissed her head, his good humour seemed forced.

‘Are you worried about money?’

Max shrugged. ‘We’ll manage.’

‘We always said that we wanted lots of children. It’ll be good for Melissa to have a brother or sister.’

‘Of course it will.’ His voice was flat and expressionless.

‘Then what is it, Max? Tell me!’ She could feel him shutting himself off from her.

He was silent for a moment, and then he said, ‘It’s what I saw in Spain, Tilda. And it’s what I’ve seen for years now in Germany. I am afraid. Before we had Melissa, I still had a bit of optimism. Not much, but enough. I don’t have that now.’

‘But that’s over there, Max,’ she said. ‘It’s awful, but at least it’s not happening here.’

‘We will not be untouched,’ he said simply. ‘There will be another war, and I feel … I feel
guilty
for bringing a child into this world. That’s the truth, Tilda.’ Max fumbled in his pocket for his cigarettes. ‘Baldwin and most of those idiots in Parliament think that if they talk nicely to Hitler, then he’ll leave us alone. But he won’t, Tilda, I know he won’t. I spent most of the journey back from Spain writing an article that explains that. And no-one
will print it. Today I went from editor to editor, and the only paper to make me an offer was a left-wing rag that no-one reads. Too gloomy, they told me. Doesn’t look on the bright side.’

Tilda stroked his hair. ‘Poor Max.’

‘I even thought of fighting for Spain. Lots of people have joined the International Brigades.’

‘Fergus has gone. You won’t, will you, Max?’ The idea appalled her.

‘Of course not. You know that I’m not one for joining things.’ He shook his head. ‘I used to pride myself on that, but now I find that I rather despise myself.’

She had to ask him. ‘Max. Do you mind about the baby?’

‘Oh, Tilda.’ His eyes were sad. ‘How could I? How could I possibly mind?’

Emily married Jan van de Criendt in the spring of 1937, the white wedding followed by a huge reception in Ely. The arrival of letters from Holland each week compensated a little for Emily’s departure. Emily pressed Tilda and Max to visit, but they hadn’t the money for the ferry passage. Tilda felt as though her circle of friends was inexorably shrinking. Emily was in Amsterdam and Fergus was in Spain, and Michael had been offered a lectureship at Edinburgh University. Roland Potter called in every now and then and, when Tilda could face the Underground train with a baby and carrycot, she went to see Anna at 15 Pargeter Street. Her visits became less and less frequent. Although she had stopped feeling sick, she was always terribly tired. The doctor said she was anaemic and told her to eat liver.

Joshua was born in June, when Melissa was eighteen months old. He was a breech baby and two weeks early, so the head midwife herself attended the delivery. Blurred with pain and gas and air, Tilda had none of the sense of triumph that she had experienced when Melissa was born. She felt only an overwhelming sense of relief that it was over and, when she looked into the dark blue eyes of her newborn son, an instant and intoxicating love.

Joshua was not, like his sister, an easy baby. He caught his first cold at three weeks old, and screamed with misery. Only Tilda could console him. Max went back to Germany, a journey he had put off because of the expected confinement. Tilda’s stitches hurt, and her breasts wept milk that the snuffling baby struggled to take. Melissa loathed Joshua and pinched him in his cradle. Clara Franklin came to help, but both the stove and the geyser refused to work for her.

Joshua woke for a feed three times each night. At the age of six weeks, he still needed to be fed seven times in every twenty-four hours. The books said to keep him to a strict schedule, but the sound of his crying was like fingernails drawn across Tilda’s heart, and she could not bear to make him wait the regulation four hours between feeds. The nurse at the clinic suggested a piece of rusk last thing at night, but Joshua sicked it up. Tilda began to think of sleep as a luxury, something other people did. She lived in a sort of haze. If she didn’t write herself a list, then she forgot most of what she had meant to buy at the shops. It took almost an hour to get ready to go shopping. Both children had to be changed and dressed, and Melissa tended to bury her shoes in her sandpit. The pram had to be hauled up the area steps, no mean feat. Tilda had to find her purse and shopping bag and, if one or other child wasn’t howling or wet by then, to run a comb through her hair. The pram was too big to fit into most shops, so she had to do everything with one eye continually glancing back to the doorway.

To begin with Melissa slept in the cot in Max and Tilda’s room, and Joshua slept in the cradle. But though he was frailer than his sister, Joshua was also more adventurous. At three months old he hauled himself to the rim of his cradle and pivoted there, laughing. Tilda caught him before he plunged to the stone floor. At the weekend, she and Max made Melissa a little bed in the boxroom and Joshua was promoted to the cot. Melissa loved her tiny room, but Max now had to work in the bedroom or, if Joshua was asleep, in the kitchen. Once, Melissa knocked a cup of cocoa over an article Max had just finished
writing, and he had to type the entire piece again. Tilda saw the whitening of Max’s face, and knew that they trembled on a precipice, something chaotic and frightening just visible. The moment passed, Max took a howling Melissa onto his knee and cuddled her, and Tilda went back to the ironing, her shoulders aching with tension.

She hadn’t realized how much more expensive two children would be than one. Melissa’s tiny shoes cost almost as much as Tilda’s own sandals, and the medicine for Joshua’s earache cost ten shillings a week. Although she was expert at making stews from scrag end of lamb, or eking out a broiling fowl to last four days, that sort of cooking took time. Often she cooked with Joshua tucked under one arm, and a jealous Melissa clinging to her legs. She made all the childrens’ clothes, but material and needles and thread cost money. She and Max were frequently too tired to talk to each other in the evenings.

Max was away from home a great deal. She missed him; his absences distanced him in more ways than the purely physical. When he returned, though she tried to make him talk about what he had seen, he would be tired, depressed, and would have closed off another little part of himself from her. When he was away, when the children had colds, or when she just couldn’t face the effort of getting them ready to go to the park, then Tilda felt as though she had returned to the isolation of her childhood. Sometimes an entire week passed when the only adults she spoke to were the grocer and the milkman. When she tried to make friends with the other women at the clinic, conversation was disrupted by Joshua’s screams of frustration when Melissa stole his rattle. They rarely had enough money for the cinema or a concert. Max’s sweaters had more darns than knitting, and Tilda could not remember when she had last bought a new pair of stockings. She felt trapped by the poverty she’d never thought she would mind.

In October it rained ceaselessly, and Melissa caught a cold. Joshua went down with it a few days later. He had just begun to sleep through the night; now he woke at three in the morning
and Tilda could not settle him until five. Melissa, always an early riser, woke for her breakfast at half past six. When Max left the house at half past seven, escaping the howls and the wet nappies and the running noses, Tilda, just for a moment, bitterly envied him his freedom. Her own throat was sore and her head ached. She queued for two hours at the doctor’s for Joshua’s eardrops. On the way home, she bought buns for the children’s dinner, using up the remainder of the money in her purse, feeling guilty, but unable to face cooking. The cold, sharp wind made her cough. After she had hauled the pram down the steps and opened the kitchen door, she guessed from the icy air that the stove had gone out. Melissa discovered that she had left her favourite doll at the doctor’s, and began to cry. Joshua joined in for good measure. Tilda got Joshua out of his snowsuit and unbuttoned Melissa’s coat, and looked at the stove. The layer of ash was cold and grey and sullen. There were no matches in the drawer. Max had returned and was working upstairs in the bedroom; his coat was hanging in the hall, so Tilda went upstairs to fetch his lighter from his pocket. As she came back down, her damp shoe slipped on the steps and she fell the rest of the way, hitting her head on the banister. Tears of pain burnt her eyes, and she sat on the bottom step, her head in her hands. The children howled louder, their mouths wide Os of fear and indignation. Max emerged to discover the cause of the noise. When he saw the bruise on Tilda’s forehead he bundled up the two children in their outdoor clothes again, and took them out of the house. Tilda crawled up to bed and fell asleep.

Max pacified Melissa and Joshua on the Tube by giving them chocolate drops. Joshua coughed his up; Max looked at him unsympathetically. In Fleet Street, he carried the two children, one under each arm, up the three flights of stairs to Harold Sykes’s office, pausing every now and then to wipe noses.

Harold looked at the two infants with a measure of distaste. ‘Nanny’s day off, Max, old son?’

‘Tilda’s not well.’ Max sat Melissa on Harold’s desk, and cradled
Joshua in the crook of his arm. ‘I’ve come to ask about that staff job, Harold. Is it still on offer?’

Harold raised an eyebrow. ‘You know that Freddie’s been courting you for months. What’s prompted the change of heart?’

‘I’ve been a selfish blighter,’ said Max bluntly. ‘Clinging to my precious bloody principles while Tilda tries to bring up these two in a slum.’

‘Bloody,’ repeated Melissa carefully. ‘Bloody.’