Some Old Lover's Ghost (50 page)

In the spring of 1949, Colonel Renshaw fell ill. Tilda nursed him, sitting beside his bed during the worst of the fever, putting cold compresses on his forehead while he retreated to the battlefields of Flanders.

The generator broke down again: Josh, at the weekend, took it apart, cleaned it, and reassembled it. A fox got into the hen-coop, leaving a trail of feathers and mangled corpses. Erich, a purple vein beating in his forehead, hacked a hole in the frosty ground; Tilda helped him bury the dead birds.

At half-term, Tilda took Caitlin to Cambridge. While Caitlin spent the afternoon with Kit de Paveley, Tilda met Rosi in a gloomy little basement café. Rosi was wearing a full black skirt and a tight black sweater and was smoking. Every time the door of the café swung open, she’d leap up and wave at the new arrivals.

‘Charles! Maureen! Are you coming to our party tonight?’ or, ‘Stella! Have you seen Finn?’ Then in a slightly lowered voice to Tilda, ‘Finn is Irish – a poet – so talented. We read each other our work sometimes.’

Rosi, who was in the final year of her English degree, was writing a romance. Tilda suspected a great many swooning damsels, dangerous highwaymen, and hairbreadth escapes.

‘How is Hanna, Rosi?’

Rosi scowled. ‘Hanna is very, very dull. All the other medical students have lots of fun, but Hanna always studies. She thinks she will fail her exams.’ Rosi’s expression altered. ‘Now, I have a favour to ask you, Tilda. I want you to make my wedding dress.’

Tilda gave a gasp of pleasure and hugged and kissed Rosi.

‘I haven’t a ring yet. Richard and I are to go to London next weekend and choose one.’

‘And Richard’s parents? Do they approve?’

‘They adore me.’ Rosi beamed. ‘Tell me what it’s like to be married, Tilda.’

Tilda looked away, remembering. It had been wonderful at first, when things like lack of money and a poky basement flat hadn’t mattered. She remembered wringing the laundry in the back yard, she and Max each holding one end of the sheet. Collapsing with laughter and then tumbling into bed. Often she looked back, wondering what had happened.

‘Marriage is different for everyone, Rosi. And I’m not much of an advertisement for it, am I?’

‘But you still love Max, don’t you?’

Only Rosi would ask such a question, bluntly, without preamble. Everyone else tiptoed round it, tactfully avoided it. Tilda rubbed her aching forehead with her fingertips. Then she said, ‘Yes. Yes, I do.’

‘Why don’t you tell him?’

She shook her head and blew her nose. ‘There’s no point. He doesn’t love me any more, you see.’

‘Are you sure?’

She thought back to that last, terrible meeting with Max, in the street at Southam. ‘Yes, I’m sure.’

They were both silent. A dozen students piled into the cramped little café, shouting and laughing.

‘So will you?’ said Rosi.

‘Make your wedding dress?’ Tilda smiled. ‘Of course. If you really want me to. If you’re sure that you don’t want one from one of the smart London shops—’

Rosi made a dismissive gesture. ‘You must sew it for me, Tilda. That is’ – she looked suddenly concerned – ‘if you don’t mind. You do look very tired. You have a red nose.’

‘It has taken me ages to get rid of this wretched cold. And the colonel still isn’t well.’

‘You should have a holiday.’

For what seemed the first time in months, Tilda laughed. ‘A holiday?
Rosi.’

‘Well, why not? You haven’t had a holiday in years.’

‘Not since before the war.’ The beach at Trouville, she thought, escaping an unbearably hot Paris in the baleful August of 1939. Herself and Max, building a sandcastle for baby Josh …

‘You shall go to France,’ said Rosi, as though it was settled. ‘You shall go and see Melissa. Hanna and I will stay at Poona over Easter and look after everything.’

Erich worked each day in the colonel’s vegetable garden and then, at half past four, he watched for Caitlin’s bus. From the old beech tree, perched on one of the long, grey branches, he saw her alight from the bus and walk up the hill. Sometimes she looked tired and he would long to run down the hill and carry her bag for her, but of course he never did. He spoke to her only occasionally, at dinner time. It did not hurt him that she rarely seemed to acknowledge his existence. He would not have expected her to. She seemed to be from a different sphere, somewhere shut off from the ugliness of the world, like the stone angel.

In the evenings, he went to The Red House and worked on the garden. From the spring flowers he had grown there he made a posy for Caitlin, twisting wire around the stems to bind them together. The wire looked ugly. Tilda had made an appointment for him to see a doctor in Oxford; she offered to accompany him, but Erich, who was now eighteen, refused. He caught the bus, stuttering over the fare, dropping his threepence to the floor while the conductor made sarcastic remarks. At the surgery he made himself smile and be cheerful in a way that he thought the
doctor would like, and did not tell him about the dreams or the bits of his life that seemed, sometimes, just to be missing. When the doctor asked him about Vienna, Erich bared his broken teeth in a grin and explained that he had forgotten all that. Then he stood up and clicked his heels together and bowed, and left the surgery.

Outside, there were too many people in the streets, so he pulled his shoulders in and made himself small, trying not to touch them. In a haberdasher’s shop he studied reels of ribbon, grabbing the nearest reel, a narrow scarlet, when he saw that the assistant was looking at him.

‘A f-f-foot, please.’

The haberdasher cut a length and Erich paid and put the ribbon in his pocket. Then he ran for the bus, sweat sheening his forehead, the eyes of the watchers a physical sensation in the small of his back, the footsteps of his pursuers echoing in his ears.

Back at Colonel Renshaw’s house, he covered the wire with a length of ribbon and tiptoed into Caitlin’s room. It was scattered with stockings and petticoats and with pale talcum-powder footprints, and the air was rich with a deep, heady perfume. Erich bent to kiss one of the footprints, and then, leaving the posy on the window sill, he shut the door behind him and ran back to the garden.

Cécile had taken Melissa shopping in Saintes. Max had expected them back within a couple of hours, and when they had been gone over four hours he prowled around the garage forecourt, glancing from his watch to the road.

He saw them at last and gave a huge sigh of relief. Their bicycle baskets were full of bags. When they pedalled into the forecourt, Melissa leapt off her bicycle and hugged him.

‘I’ve had the most wonderful day, Daddy! Look!’ She began to take the bags out of the basket.

‘In the house, Melissa,’ said Cécile, as she kissed Max. ‘You would not want oil on your new clothes.’

In the living room, Melissa took what seemed to Max to be an entire shopful of clothes out of various carrier bags.

Cécile said, ‘Now you should hang them up in your wardrobe, darling, so they do not get creased,’ and Melissa, her arms full, ran upstairs.

When she was out of earshot, Cécile said, ‘They are my present to Melissa, Max. A very late birthday present.’

‘Cécile, I can’t possibly—’

‘Melissa is my friend, Max. I hope you will not deny me the pleasure of buying a few gifts for a friend?’

He glared at her, and then realized that he must give in with grace. ‘Then that’s very generous of you, Cécile. And so kind of you to spare the time.’

‘It was no trouble, Max. In fact, it was a pleasure. We had a delightful afternoon. And now, chéri, I would simply adore a glass of wine.’

She followed him into the kitchen, closing the door behind them. The kitchen was tacked on to the side of the house, somewhat separate from the rest of the building. Max poured two glasses of red wine.

Cécile said, ‘I found out why Melissa does not want to go back to England.’

He spun round. ‘Why?’

‘I had to promise not to tell you, Max. But it is as I thought, because of a boy.’

‘A
boy
?’ He stared at her. ‘That’s ridiculous, Cécile, you must have made a mistake. Melissa’s only a child.’

‘Oh, Max,’ she said, looking at him in the way that she sometimes did. ‘So
English.’

Some of the priests to whom she had written sent Caitlin addresses of Canavans in Ireland. She wrote letters to each, explaining who she was, certain that one of these Caitlin Canavans must be her father’s favourite sister. Soon her father would write back to her, explaining his long absence, and then he would take her away from this horrible house and she would be happy again.

Meanwhile, she had a rehearsal with Julian Pascoe. ‘Just a few chassés and poses,’ Julian said vaguely, blowing his nose on a large red handkerchief. ‘Nothing too complicated, the stage isn’t big enough.’

Caitlin, wearing her ballet slippers and a dress with a full skirt, danced around the four chairs that were supposed to represent the gilded cage that she and Patricia were making of cardboard and gold paint. She felt rather silly, up there by herself, Julian beating time and singing the verses and sniffing because he had a cold. When she had finished, he turned away and said: ‘That’ll do. But cut the jumps. You haven’t a ballet dancer’s build, darling, and it looks rather elephantine.’

He sat down at the piano, balancing the music on the stand. Caitlin bit her lip. She had always felt rather proud of her figure, but now she saw herself through his eyes: top-heavy, short (she had stopped growing at five foot two), ridiculous.

He had begun to play. She managed to join in at the right time, but she knew that it was awful: her voice wobbled, her steps were leaden and she muddled the words of the second verse. As he played the final chord, she waited miserably for the inevitable sarcasm.

It came. Julian took his hands from the keyboard, flung back his head and closed his eyes. ‘Dear God,’ he said. ‘This fucking cold … this fucking village …’ He spun round on the piano stool. ‘I could have gone to RADA – did you know that, Caitlin Canavan? Instead of being stuck in this godforsaken hole listening to talentless little girls murder frightful music-hall songs—’

She stopped hearing what he said and walked off the stage. She tried to put on her cardigan, but the sleeves were inside out, and she could not see to disentangle them.

‘Where are you going?’

She mumbled, ‘Home.’

‘You’re crying.’

She wanted to say something sarcastic in return, but could not speak. He took her cardigan out of her hands and put it back on the chair, and turned her round to face him.

He touched her face, sweeping up the tears, licking them from his fingertip. She gave a strangled little cry.

He said, ‘I’ve been a pig, haven’t I? You mustn’t mind me. I’ve this frightful cold and things are difficult at home.’

She managed to speak at last. ‘It doesn’t matter.’ Yet tears rolled down her face.

This time, he stooped and kissed them with his lips. For a while she stood quite still, her eyes closed, but then she lifted up her face and let him touch her mouth with his.

Her cold refused to shift: Tilda gargled with fennel tea, but her voice was scratchy and taut. She persuaded the colonel to engage a nurse to sit with him at night, but the woman left after less than a week, refusing to occupy the same room as the products of the colonel’s latest interest, taxidermy. Rosi sent a bale of material for her wedding dress, but Tilda, exhausted each evening, had not yet begun to cut it out. Neither did she write to Max, though she tried to several times, the ink from the nib of her pen spreading in a circular black blot over the blank paper.

The season shifted haltingly from winter to summer. Sleet and wind one day, blue skies and sun the next. The garden alternated between quagmire and soil so frost-hardened a spade could not pierce its surface. She was hacking away at the earth, searching for any remaining potatoes, when a voice called her name.

‘Tilda?’

Looking round, she saw Archie Raphael. He pushed open the gate and picked his way across the garden towards her.

‘You haven’t been to the lectures for weeks.’

She dropped the spade. ‘My employer’s been ill. I had to look after him.’

‘I thought I’d drop in and give you these.’ ‘These’ were a huge bunch of daffodils and narcissi. ‘And ask if there was anything I could do for you in Oxford.’

She wished he hadn’t come. She had spoken to no-one but the colonel and family for so long that it was an effort to take the flowers and murmur thanks.

‘Damned cold out here,’ Archie said hopefully.

Reluctantly she took the hint, and led him into the house. In the colonel’s kitchen, he looked around at the vast ceilings, the sweating pipes and groaning stove, and said, ‘Dear God. Like “Gormenghast”.’

She dumped the flowers in a bucket and filled the kettle. He told her about the lectures that she had missed. He had slept through one, argued through another. There was a new student who thought the United Nations was pointless because either the Soviet Union or America was bound to drop the Bomb in the next couple of years, and there was a young woman who believed that in the future all wars would be fought in outer space. ‘Rather a nice idea, I thought,’ said Archie cheerfully, ‘lugging all those tanks and U-boats and things to the moon.’ He glanced at Tilda. ‘I say, are you all right? You look pretty frightful, you know.’

She said stiffly, ‘I’ve had a cold.’

He looked around. ‘A lot of work, this place, I should think.’

‘I can manage.’

‘Only I’ve a friend who’s a solicitor in Oxford. I know that he’s looking for someone to do secretarial work—’

‘I like it here, Archie.’ She began to clear up the tea things.

There was a silence. Then he said, ‘Sort of
penance
, is it?’

Tilda stood at the sink, her back to him, almost too furious to speak. At last she said, ‘This house gives me and my family a roof over our heads. It has given me work which I am not ashamed of. Now, I’ve things to do, if you don’t mind.’ She began to wash up, scrubbing the dishes so hard she thought the pattern might come off, but then she stopped suddenly and swung back to him.