Some Old Lover's Ghost (8 page)

The Gentleman now had a face. And green eyes and black hair. Jossy had glimpsed him in the street after her father’s funeral. She had been to Southam several times since in the hope of encountering him again, but had not seen him. He lingered in her memory, though, and in her imagination. She fantasized a dozen times a day about their next meeting. He’d rescue her from robbers or kidnappers; or she’d go to a party, look across a crowded room, and their eyes would meet. Each day she dressed carefully and spent hours doing her hair. Time lengthened and intensified with Jossy’s feverish anticipation. She thought of names for him: Charles or Leo or David or Rupert …

When she came home from a walk one day, a letter was waiting for her on the hall table. Jossy did not recognize the handwriting. Opening the envelope, she stared, bewildered, at the signature at the foot of the page. Then she began to read.

Since I saw you that day, I have been able to think of no-one else. I long to see you again, to speak to you …

Daragh. Such a beautiful and unusual name. He was called Daragh.

He had found a boat nestling in the reeds; he slid the painter from the post and the rowing boat glided slowly into the river. Tilda lay in the prow, one hand trailing in the water. When
Daragh knelt beside her, the boat rocked a little. First he kissed her, and then he undid, one by one, the buttons of her blouse. To begin with, she let him kiss her throat and her breasts, but then she wriggled out of his arms and sat up, and the boat lurched wildly, sending up spray.

‘You’ll have us both in the water, darlin’ girl.’

‘Give me the oars, Daragh.’

He shook his head. ‘No. Sit down, Tilda Greenlees.’

She stood up, so he ran his fingertips from her ankle along her bare calf to her thigh. Her heart was hammering. She could see her reflection in the water: her hair tangled from his caresses, her blouse open.

Daragh lay in the boat, looking up at her. His eyes were narrowed by the sun. ‘I’ve hardly seen you these last few weeks.’

‘I haven’t been able to get away, Daragh. Aunt Sarah came into town with me again yesterday.’

He searched in his pocket for his cigarettes, flicking open the packet one-handed. ‘Do you think she knows about us?’

Tilda looked down at him. ‘She’d have said something. And we’ve been very careful.’

He struck a match on the side of the boat. ‘I’ll come and see you tonight after work,’ he said. ‘There’s an old ladder in that barn where I cut the wood. I’ll throw a few stones at your window—’

‘Daragh,’ said Tilda. ‘Aunt Sarah has ears like a
bat’s.’

He lay back in the boat, smoking. His exploring fingers had reached the elasticated leg of Tilda’s bloomers. She stepped over him and seized the oars. The boat swayed, throwing Daragh’s matches and cigarettes, balanced on the gunwale, into the river. ‘Mary, Mother of God, Tilda!’ cried Daragh, and sat up.

‘I have to get home.’ She turned the boat rapidly, heading back to the bank. ‘Aunt Sarah will wonder where I am.’ Tilda knew that her face was red, and that a fire burned inside her.

Daragh, too, burned. He had wanted her for months; he had never waited so long for a girl. He had been prepared to wait because she
was so young – six years younger than he – and because there was something different, something slightly daunting, about her. If anyone had told him that he would one day be a little in awe of an eighteen-year-old girl, he would have laughed in their face, but it was so.

The landlord of the Fox and Hounds gave Daragh the note as he swept out the cellar the following morning. His mood, already uncertain, worsened as he glanced at the single folded piece of paper and saw that it was an invitation to tea from someone called Joscelin de Paveley. Daragh crumpled up the note and flung it to the floor. He slammed empty bottles into crates, and hurled barrels across the flags. His need for Tilda, which he had thought he could control, had become a torment. It was easier for her; women didn’t have the same desires.

As he hacked at the cobwebs, disturbing spiders that had slept peacefully for decades, Daragh knew that he was not being fair. There were, after all, two sorts of women. There were the easy ones, and there were the ones a man could respect. Tilda, like his sister Caitlin, belonged in the second category. He had not wanted Caitlin to give herself to that great lug of a farmhand who courted her back in Ireland. Daragh himself would have murdered the fellow if she had.

There was only one answer to their difficulties, though it was a solution he was loath to accept. He had come to England to make his fortune, and he was well aware that an early marriage would bring with it a trail of bills and babies. A family would tie him to a grindstone he had intended to avoid, and would both curtail his freedom and limit his future. Yet he could not see another way. He needed her so much.

The cellar was tidy, the dust swept into a corner. Daragh’s anger too had been swept away, so he picked up the crumpled scrap of paper from the heap of dirt and cobweb, smoothed it out and glanced at it again. He remembered standing next to Tilda in the church tower, and looking out through the window at the Hall. ‘The de Paveleys live there,’ Tilda had said.

Daragh took the fork in the road that led to the Hall. There, a servant showed him into the drawing room. Daragh stood, cap in his hand, waiting. He couldn’t imagine why Miss de Paveley had asked him to tea, but he had nevertheless bought new socks and laboriously patched the elbows of his jacket. When he looked down, his face stared back at him from the polished reddish wood of an occasional table. The furniture was dark and heavy, and a froth of photographs, knick-knacks and ornaments cluttered the mantelpiece and sideboard. Heavy curtains excluded the bright sunlight. Daragh reached out to touch the smooth, silky damask covering of a chair, and then slammed his hand back to his side as he heard a footstep behind him.

A young woman stood in the doorway. ‘Mr Canavan?’

‘Miss de Paveley?’ He’d imagined her a gracious old trout with a lifelong ambition to help young men better themselves. She was not old at all, though. He saw a tall, strapping girl, the ordinariness of her face redeemed by a pair of fine dark eyes.

She didn’t smile. She looked terrified. There was a long, awkward silence. At last, Miss de Paveley blurted out, ‘That was such a sweet note you wrote me, Mr Canavan.’

He thought she meant his acceptance of her invitation to tea. ‘Ah, sure, it was nothing.’

‘It was something to
me.’
The vehemence of her tone surprised him. Then she said, ‘I’m sorry – I didn’t mean—’ She looked frightened again.

Daragh felt a mixture of embarrassment and impatience and pity for her. Incongruously, he found himself trying to put her at her ease.

‘It’s a grand place you have here, Miss de Paveley.’ He was going to add,
My ma has a candlestick or two like that
, but was stopped by a caution that his months in England had taught him. He had made a fool of himself too often to court further humiliation.

Conversation died once more. Daragh searched desperately for something more to say. ‘My condolences on the death of your father, Miss de Paveley. It must be a sad time for you.’

‘Oh!’ A smile brightened her pale, round face. ‘I saw you in Southam after my father’s funeral.’

Which explained, at least, how she knew him. Daragh sensed that there was in this odd rendezvous a possibility of advantage. The realization excited him.

‘Those people that you were with,’ she said. ‘Are they relations?’

‘Friends, miss. Old friends.’

She seemed to have gained confidence. ‘Shall we walk around the grounds before tea, Mr Canavan? I’ll just get my hat.’

Miss de Paveley showed him the old motor car in the garage, and her flower garden, and the tennis court. There was no boundary between the kitchen gardens and the fields, just a mingling of decaying brassica stumps and ripe wheat. A dusty track swung out through the fields, parallel to the dike. Daragh could see in the distance a long, low house, its whitewashed walls disappearing into the sky. When she said, ‘The estate’s mine, now that my father’s dead,’ he felt a stab of envy that this drab, diffident little thing – younger than he, surely – should have all this. The afternoon seemed to him suddenly irrational and senseless. He wished she’d come to the point – offer him a labouring job, or whatever it was that she intended to do.

Yet when he glanced round at her, he understood, and his heart hammered in his chest. Her great brown eyes burned as she looked up at him. He couldn’t think how it had happened, but Daragh Canavan knew that Joscelin de Paveley was in love with him.

He had meant to do it properly, the proposal. Tilda managed to escape the old witch of an aunt, and when Daragh met her in Ely he gave her the single red rose he’d nicked from the garden of the inn, and told her that he’d booked a table in a restaurant. He’d had a bit of luck at cards a few nights past. Tilda looked startled and asked whether it was his birthday, and Daragh shook his head and planted a kiss on her lips. ‘Just a treat for you, darlin’.’ She fussed a bit about her old dress, but he told her what he knew
to be true: that she’d be the most beautiful woman there. So she twisted her long hair into a knot on top of her head (just the movement of her wrists made him ache with longing for her), and then she walked with him to the restaurant.

Daragh caught the waiter glancing at the patched sleeves of his jacket, but he slipped the fellow a half-crown and they were shown to a decent table. Daragh ordered oysters and dressed crab. Tilda had never eaten oysters before, so Daragh showed her how to lift the shell to her lips and let them slide down. ‘At home,’ he said ‘we just pick them out of the rock pools and prise them open with a knife. They’re a rare treat.’

Tilda’s eyes were enormous.
‘Alive
?

‘Still kicking,’ said Daragh.

The waiter had served the crab when Daragh told Tilda about the conversation he’d had with the priest. ‘He said you could start taking instruction straight away. It’ll take a few months, that’s all.’

Tilda looked up from trying to pick the meat out of a crab leg. ‘Take instruction?’

‘So we can get married.’ He realized what he had done, and cursed himself. So he pushed back his chair, and knelt on the floor in front of her. ‘Will you marry me, Tilda?’

She laughed. He thought, much later, that it would all have been different if she had not laughed. If the other diners, staring, had not also heard her laugh. She took his hand and tried to raise him to his feet, and said, ‘Daragh – please – they’ll throw us out of here.’

‘I’m asking you to marry me, Tilda.’ The heat, his frustration, even the unsettling afternoon he’d spent with that peculiar woman, all conspired to shorten his temper. Daragh sat down again. ‘We’ll marry, won’t we, Tilda?’

‘Daragh—’

He grasped her hand tightly. ‘You’ll not say no, will you, sweetheart?’

Her face had become rather pale and rather still. He could feel her distancing herself from him, cutting him off in the
imperious way she had. All his doubts had slipped away, and he wanted nothing more at that moment than to be the husband of Tilda Greenlees. He felt for the first time a flare of anger that this girl, this
child
, should choose to keep him at arm’s length.

She said, ‘You’re hurting me, Daragh,’ and, shamed, he let go of her hand. Then she said, ‘You were joking, weren’t you?’ and his anger returned, doubled.

‘Why should I be joking?’ Daragh’s voice was dangerously low. ‘Am I not good enough for you?’

The waiter fussed around the table, refilling their glasses, picking up Daragh’s fallen napkin. When he had gone, Daragh said softly, ‘You’re no better than me, after all, Tilda – less, if anything. At least my granda
owned
the fields I ploughed.’

Her eyes flashed with anger. ‘The man’s no better and no worse than the master,’ she hissed. ‘Aunt Sarah taught me that years ago!’

They glared at each other across the table. Anger suited her, brightening her eyes, marking patches of pink on her cheekbones. He found himself pleading with her.

‘I’ve my job at the pub. And I’ve hopes of something better.’ He thought of Joscelin de Paveley, and how he might capitalize on her lust for him by persuading her to help him. ‘We could find a couple of rooms in Ely. You’re doing that typing course – you could take a little part-time job until the babies come along. That’s why you have to take instruction, Tilda. We can’t marry until you convert – I’d want my children to be brought up in the church.’

‘I don’t want children yet, Daragh.’ She was avoiding his eyes. Daragh realized that the diners on the adjacent table – a fat, besuited man and his fancy mistress – were staring at them.

‘Of course you do. You like babies. I’ve seen you cooing over prams.’

‘Not yet, though. I don’t want babies yet. I’d like them some day, lots of them, but when I’m … oh, twenty-one, perhaps.’

Daragh said bitterly, ‘You can’t plan your life like that, darlin’. You think you’re going to do one thing, and you end
up doing something else. Babies come along when God tells them to.’

She looked down at her plate. ‘I’m eighteen, Daragh. Too young to have children.’

‘Plenty of girls have babies at your age.’ He shrugged dismissively, and glared at the nosy blonde piece sitting at the next table.

‘And are old and poor and exhausted by the time they’re twenty.’ Tilda had abandoned her crab, and it lay, a jumble of hollow shell and disjointed limb, on the plate in front of her. ‘I’ve seen them, Daragh.’

‘My ma had three of us before she was twenty,’ he said contemptuously, ‘and we always had food in our bellies and shoes on our feet.’

She leaned forward. ‘You are rearranging my life, Daragh. Putting it in a different order. Forgetting some of the important bits.’

‘Those classes that you hate?’ He knew that, little as he could offer Tilda Greenlees, it was more than she had now. ‘That poky little cottage? The old aunt you’re happy enough to deceive – are those the important bits?’

She became very still, her hands curled into fists. ‘I’ve no intention of being a typist all my life,’ she said slowly. ‘And Long Cottage is better than many of the places I’ve lived in. And you’re right, Daragh, it has been wicked of me to lie to Aunt Sarah. I’ll not lie to her any more.’