Some Old Lover's Ghost (26 page)

I was about to say that I hadn’t thought that there were any family secrets, when I recalled Tilda’s diaries and the eventful year of 1947. Jossy had died, and Max had gone, and Daragh had disappeared somewhere in the middle of a cold, lonely night. I glanced at my watch.

‘I’m expecting a pupil in a few minutes.’

‘Good Lord, Rebecca – are you teaching again? I thought you hated it.’

My annoyance returned. ‘I do. But I need the money, you see, Toby.’ I stood up to show him out.

‘We were in Paris when war was declared,’ said Tilda. ‘I remember that Max and I walked along the banks of the Seine that evening, and wondered what it would mean to us. I tried to make him promise that nothing would separate us, but he wouldn’t, of course. Max always took his promises seriously.’

It was the end of May, half-term week. Tilda had invited me for lunch. There had been a tableful of us: Melissa’s three grandsons, who were now playing cricket noisily on the front lawn, a middle-aged man who had once been one of Tilda’s Red House extra children, and Matty, who was supposed to be revising. ‘They’re just school exams,’ she said, cushioning her head on her books, and plugging in her Walkman. ‘They don’t count.’ Now we sat in the garden behind The Red House, in the little clearing with the stone nymph. Matty was lying along the path, bordered by clumps of lavender. Her dress code
did not seem to permit her to make any concession to the heat: she wore black from neck to ankle. Bees buzzed at her and she brushed them carelessly away.

We talked about the events of 1939 for a while, and then there was a distant crash: Matty, whose headphones shut her off from the outside world, did not look up, but Tilda started and rose out of her chair.

‘Excuse me a moment, won’t you, Rebecca?’ She walked slowly back to the house.

I put aside my pad and pen. The garden, with its secret paths and festoons of roses, should have cheered me up, but failed to. I was to visit my father for the remainder of the week, a prospect that filled me with gloom. And though I would have liked to have been able to say that I had hardly given Toby a thought during the days that had passed since his visit, it would not have been true. When I thought about him, I shuttled in a futile fashion between anger and regret. My anger was with myself, for not seeing him clearly long ago. The regret was that he should have come upon me at my worst: a cluttered, dusty flat, hair that needed washing, and a career all too obviously struggling.

Tilda reappeared. ‘Roddy hit the ball into the cucumber frame,’ she explained. ‘The boys have cleared up the broken glass, but he was upset, so I said he could make tea.’

‘Treacle sandwiches,’ said Matty, who had unplugged herself. ‘Roddy always makes treacle sandwiches.
Gross.’

‘Will you stay, Rebecca?’ asked Tilda.

I declined, less because of the treacle sandwiches than because I had to get ready for my trip to Yorkshire.

‘Melissa has invited Joan and me to spend the rest of the week at the cottage,’ added Tilda. The Parkers had a cottage in the West Country. ‘There isn’t a telephone. If you should need anything …’ She frowned. ‘Have you Patrick’s home phone number, Rebecca? No? He has a key, which he could lend you, if necessary.’

My father’s house – detached, built of stone – is beside a road that leaps and curls through the North Yorkshire Moors. The
stone has darkened over the hundred and twenty years since its building, and when it rains, water from the hillside gathers in pools in the back garden. The house is a mile from the nearest village, eight miles from a doctor’s surgery or a supermarket. My father does not drive and, since deregulation, the bus passes his house only twice a day.

I arrived late on Monday afternoon, having become entangled in Bank Holiday traffic. I squeezed my car up the driveway and hauled my bag indoors. We ate Eccles cakes and drank tea in the kitchen, while conversation stuttered like my Fiesta attempting a steep hill. The kitchen combined Spartan neatness with an underlying level of grime that shocked even me. The house was too big for one person – my father’s last dream, he and my mother had moved to Yorkshire two years before she died. The stairs were, like the drive, both steep and narrow, the sash windows temperamental and leaky. The bathroom had an overhead cistern and a high-sided cast-iron bath that took hours to fill. In winter, clouds would form from your breath when you stuck your head out from beneath the blankets.

I drove my father to the supermarket the following day. Most of what I tried to put in the trolley he took out, tutting at the price. I had seen that his small fridge was almost empty, containing things like half-full tins of meatballs covered with greaseproof paper, or a single sardine nestling menacingly on a saucer. My father boasted that he could with careful management make a loaf of bread last the week. I cooked dinners for him of the traditional British food men of his generation prefer – stews and roasts and pies. No pasta, no garlic or spices. I scrubbed the grease and dust from the quarry-tiles in the kitchen and cleaned out his cupboards with a vigour and energy I rarely apply to my own. I hacked away at the weeds in his garden, found a grocer who promised to deliver supplies and, in the evenings, I read. My father has hundreds of books; he used to teach English Literature. In literature, he delights in the passionate and the exquisite, yet in reality he dismisses passion as false and self-indulgent. His favourite era encompasses the Elizabethan and Jacobean, all
those jewelled little sonnets, those perfect miniatures of verse. My mother, who was a calligrapher, illuminated some of his favourites. One was framed in the room in which I slept.
I long to talk with some old lover’s ghost, Who died before the god of love was born …

On the morning on which I was to leave, my father cycled to the village to buy me ham for my sandwiches. I could have explained to him that I didn’t need sandwiches, that I could stop at a motorway service station. Or that I don’t even much like ham. But I didn’t say anything because I knew that he wanted to do it for me. I watched him put on his flat cap and fit cycle clips round his turn-ups and set off on his old sit-up-and-beg bicycle for the village, slow and wobbling as he climbed the hill. And I had to turn away and blow my nose, and go quickly back into the house.

The drive back to London was slow and tedious. All three lanes of traffic stuttered to a halt outside Northampton. The car radio informed me that a Deranged Person had found his way onto the motorway, and that there had consequently been an accident. Pewter-grey clouds blanked out the blue sky, and the air was still and heavy, appropriate weather for lunacy. When I arrived home, two hours later than I had anticipated, Jason Darke, my most aggravating pupil, was waiting on my doorstep, smoking a quick ciggie. Jason – nineteen, good-looking and incorrigibly lazy – had failed his History A level the previous year, and looked likely to do so again. When he did not complete the homework I set him, which was most weeks, he employed a clumsy charm that was irritating rather than endearing. He had a good brain, but preferred to avoid using it. Most annoying of all, his blithe confidence in his future was probably justified; his father was Something in the City, and Jason expected him to use his influence successfully.

He was more irksome than usual, flirting with me in a condescendingly half-hearted way, not bothering to disguise his yawns. After we had struggled one-sidedly with the decline of the Liberal Party for an hour and he had left the house, the
realization that I would have to take on more pupils next year simply to maintain my mediocre standard of living was infinitely depressing.
Good Lord, Rebecca – are you teaching again?
I dragged the latest box from Tilda’s house out from beneath the desk, but could not interest myself in its contents. On top of the pile were some yellowing photographs cut from a newspaper: a fishing boat; a portrait of a younger Tilda, her hair long and loose, with a serious expression on her face. I went to the fridge and poured myself a large glass of wine, but the alcohol failed to raise my spirits. I was pursued – albeit in a rather desultory fashion – by old lovers and callow youths. My financial situation was precarious: my advance would barely cover my living expenses over the eighteen months or so it would take me to complete Tilda’s biography. I was in my early thirties, without a partner or a child or a steady income. The wine blurred things, staving off the possibility that I might just sit in the middle of the carpet and howl. I realized that I hadn’t eaten since the sandwiches on the motorway, and wondered if I’d enough money for a pizza. I scrabbled in my bag for my purse, opened it, and took out the scrap of paper on which Tilda had written Patrick’s home telephone number.

If I hadn’t been a little drunk, I’d never have dialled. I rose unsteadily to my feet, picked up the receiver, and stabbed the buttons. When Patrick answered, I had no idea what to say.

‘Hello? Hello?’ Patrick’s tone altered as he repeated the word, growing more impatient. ‘Who’s calling?’

‘It’s Rebecca,’ I managed.

‘Rebecca?’ he said. ‘I was going to phone you.’

I blinked, and stared at the receiver. ‘Why?’

‘I’m going to look at a house tomorrow. I wondered whether you’d like to come with me.’

‘House?’ I said blankly.

‘I’m thinking of buying a place in Cumbria. The estate agent has sent me particulars.’

‘I saw you as more of a Docklands sort of person, Patrick. A weekend place?’

‘Something like that. Well?’

I imagined he was like that in court, barking short, incriminating questions at hesitant witnesses. ‘All right,’ I said.

He picked me up from my flat at seven o’clock the following morning. Friday’s gloomy skies had cleared, and the haze of cloud thinned as we drove out of London. I realized as we left the city behind that I felt happy. I had almost forgotten what it was like, to feel happy.

As we headed north, I said, ‘I’m travelling to the Netherlands at the beginning of June to look at the places where Tilda lived. I’ve got some names out of her address book – people to look up.’

He focused on the road ahead. ‘Who have you spoken to?’

‘Jan van de Criendt, and a woman who was Tilda’s neighbour in 1940. And Hanna Schmidt’s daughter. She lives in Scheveningen.’

I talked a bit more about Holland, and then I let the subject drop. I still sensed Patrick’s hostility to Tilda’s decision to make public the story of her life, and I didn’t want to spoil the mood of the day. Telemann and Vivaldi sang from the tape-player and we stopped every now and then for coffee. Somewhere north of Nottingham the countryside rucked and rose, shedding the green and brown dullness of middle England. Sunlight glittered on silvery lakes trapped by hills, and trees rose from slopes hazed azure with bluebells.

We stopped briefly for lunch, and then drove on. The trees became sparser, the grass replaced by heather, boulders showing through the earth like bones. Patrick consulted the map. ‘There should be a side road and then a track to the left.’

The side road proved to be the width of the Renault, circling up through the fells. We almost missed the track, two parallel ruts in the heather, climbing up the hillside at an unreasonable angle.

‘We’ll have to walk a bit. Have you suitable shoes?’

I was wearing sandals. I thought of adders, and then put them firmly out of my mind and climbed out of the car. When I looked
back, the road was just a grey ribbon and the pub where we had eaten our lunch was less than a matchbox.

The fellside soared above us, rising up towards the sky like a great grey and purple tidal wave. Patrick said, ‘There it is.’

I could see nothing but a few tumbledown farm buildings, high up on the fell. Then I glimpsed, incongruously, the estate agent’s board, pinned to a fence, flapping frantically in the wind.

‘That
?’

Patrick walked ahead, flattening a path through the heather. Though in the valley it had been windless, up here the breeze was both capricious and cold. Eggs of snow curled in the shaded hollows around the peaks. As we neared it, I saw that the farm consisted of three buildings – a farmhouse and two outbuildings. Sunlight glimmered on the thick roof-slates; in winter the fellside would shelter the house from the snow and winds of the north.

I was out of breath by the time we reached the house. Too much sitting at a desk and not enough exercise, I told myself sternly. I would sign up for an aerobics class in the autumn. Meanwhile Patrick had taken a key from his pocket, and was flicking through the estate agent’s flysheet.

‘We might as well start with the farmhouse. We can look at the byre and outhouse afterwards.’

He fitted the key to the lock. It creaked resentfully, and when he pushed it open I smelt cobwebs and damp, evidence of a building too long deserted. I heard tiny scurrying feet, and my eyes struggled to adjust themselves to the lack of light.

‘I should have brought a torch,’ said Patrick. ‘You don’t mind spiders, do you?’

Not in moderation, I wanted to say. I could not see how he could possibly consider buying such a heap, even as a weekend retreat. Then he pushed open a door and, all of a sudden, I did see. Light streamed through the big stone window, larger even than the window in Tilda’s solar, and painted long white bands on the stone-flagged floor.

‘Heavens,’ I whispered.

‘Exactly.’ He was smiling.

I’ve never been good at judging distances, so I could not say whether from that window you could see for five miles or for ten or for fifty. All I know was that it was as though you could see the whole world, in all its splendour, like a tapestry spread out before you. The chain stitch of the roads and dry stone walls; the herringbone of the rivers and streams; French knots of boulders and barns, and lakes and tarns of cloth of silver.

I dragged my gaze from the view and looked around the room. It was vast, its height reaching the vaulted roof, the fireplace immense and baronial. I imagined it with curtains and rugs and burning logs and candles in sconces. When we went through to the next room, the kitchen, I saw that it too was huge.