Some Old Lover's Ghost (34 page)

‘Where would you put it?’ said Max. ‘In the coal hole?’

She flushed. ‘Max, I’m thirty-two. Josh is nine. I’ve always wanted another child. We both wanted a big family, didn’t we? If we leave it much longer, it’ll be too late.’

He looked at her. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, Tilda. No more children.’

For a moment she did not speak. Then she whispered, ‘Never?’

He closed his eyes again, shutting himself away from her. Tilda stared out of the window. All through the years of the
war, she had looked forward to a third baby. She had imagined another daughter, to name after Sarah. Since her work with the children of the
Kindertransporte
had tailed off, she had quelled her returning restlessness with the prospect of another baby. She wondered for the first time whether Max had met someone else. She imagined a glamorous woman, platinum blonde, red-lipped. Not the sort who wore second-hand cotton dresses or shabby corduroy trousers. Whether that woman existed or not, she knew that she was losing Max, that he drifted further and further away from her. He had always been reserved, emotionally cautious, a man typical of both his class and his nationality, but it seemed to Tilda now that reserve had hardened to coldness, and that caution had become indifference.

In January, Max started work in Whitehall. An officer he had known on Field Marshal Montgomery’s staff found him the job. Though he never admitted it, Tilda knew that he hated the work; she knew also that he was deeply unhappy. She had thought that the end of the war would reunite them, but it had not. Max, who had always tended to cynicism, had nevertheless lost something during the war – some sort of fundamental faith in humanity. Increasingly Tilda feared that some of his unhappiness was centred around her. He rarely spoke to her about anything other than the superficial. Worse, it had been weeks since he had turned to her in bed. Because of the weather, Max stayed in London more and more frequently. Her marriage was crumbling, and her efforts to shore it up felt increasingly desperate.

Towards the end of the month, on Max’s birthday, Tilda took the train to London. She met Max outside his offices and they went to a restaurant in Knightsbridge. The food was dull and badly cooked, and Max talked too little and smoked too much. After they had exhausted the topics of the children and the weather there didn’t seem to be much to say. They had become, Tilda thought miserably, like the other married couples one saw in pubs and restaurants, their gazes flicking around the room for diversion.

They walked back to the hotel where Max had booked in for the night. It began to snow again, new flakes settling on the dirty mounds of the old. Inside their room, ice greyed the inside of the windows. Tilda took from her pocket a small package.

‘Happy birthday, darling.’ She watched Max unfold the brown paper. ‘I found it in a second-hand bookshop in Ely. Is it all right?’

It was an early edition of Hakluyt’s
Voyages and Discoveries
. She quoted, ‘“There is no land unhabitable, nor sea unnavigable”,’ and smiled. ‘I like that.’

‘Such optimists, the Elizabethans,’ said Max. Tilda nestled up to him, her arms around him, beneath his overcoat. Kissing him, she thought for a moment that it was going to be all right. They had drifted apart but they would come together again.

She said, ‘I thought perhaps you could begin to look for somewhere in London, Max.’

He drew away from her, hanging his coat on the peg on the back of the door. ‘I’ve done so already, Tilda.’ He lit another cigarette. ‘Can’t afford a place like this too often, and Harold’s sofa is damned lumpy. I’ve found a couple of rooms in Bloomsbury.’

She frowned. ‘A couple of rooms? That’s not big enough, darling. I’ll have to bring Sarah – I can’t leave her on her own. And the girls must have a room to themselves in the vacations.’ Rosi and Hanna had started at Cambridge the previous October.

‘I meant,’ said Max, ‘a couple of rooms for myself.’

It was as though he had hit her. She sat down on the edge of the bed, winded, cold. She heard him say: ‘The expense – the arrangement we have at present is quite impractical.’

She said, ‘Is there someone else?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous, Tilda.’ He sounded angry.

She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror over the basin: the shadows beneath her eyes, the beginnings of two lines to the sides of her mouth. She had never bothered much about her looks; just for a moment she regretted that. She wondered whether he was lying to her.

‘Why, then, Max?’ she whispered.

‘I told you. Because it is impossible for me to keep travelling between London and the Fens. Impossible, expensive and exhausting.’

‘Then we shall all move back to London.’ Tilda reiterated the decision she had come to several days ago. ‘Melissa would love to live in London again, and I’d be able to find a local school for Josh so that he wouldn’t have to board, and—’

‘No,’ said Max.

She stared mutely at him, silently pleading with him for something, for some small sign that he still loved her. He moved restlessly about the room, and she looked down at her hands, threading her fingers together, then drawing them apart. The gold wedding band blurred, but she forced back the tears and made herself speak. ‘You’ve been unhappy since you came home, Max. It’s because of what you saw in Germany, isn’t it? Why don’t you tell me about it? It might make it better, and at least …’ The words trailed off.

‘No,’ said Max again. His voice was taut, brittle.

‘Max.’ She knew that she was fighting for her marriage, for her family, for all that was most important to her in the world. ‘How can I understand what you’re feeling if you keep it from me? If you don’t give me some idea of what it is that haunts you?’

‘For God’s sake, Tilda—’

‘Is it to do with the concentration camps?’ She saw him flinch. ‘Talk to me, please, Max.’

He spun round. ‘So that you can place sticking plaster over the wound? So that you can make things better like you do with the children?’

‘I didn’t mean that. You know I didn’t.’

He did not seem to hear her. ‘Has it occurred to you, Tilda, that not everything can be repaired? Do you really think that you have made everything all right for Rosi – for Hanna – for Erich?’

She gasped. ‘I tried … that’s all. I tried. Do you think I shouldn’t have?’

‘It doesn’t matter what I think, does it?’ His face was white, and there were bluish hollows beneath his eyes. ‘You’ve
never paid too much attention to what
I
think, have you, Tilda?’

She stared at him. ‘What do you mean?’

He flung out his hands. ‘Crossing the North Sea in a cockleshell. Staying in Holland after I begged you to go home. Gathering up all those waifs and strays—’

‘They just happened, Max! I was there, and I had to do something. I couldn’t have left Rosi alone at Liverpool Street, and I couldn’t have abandoned Hanna and Erich in Holland.’

‘But don’t you see, Tilda,’ he said softly, ‘that Erich was destroyed long ago, and that Hanna will probably spend the rest of her life searching for sisters who were put to death in some hell-hole?’

She said miserably, ‘At least they are
alive,’
and he turned away, and stood at the window, smoking. She sat on the edge of the bed, staring at the discoloured basin, the tarnished mirror, seeing through his eyes her role of the last nine years: bumbling and amateurish and naive.

‘You’re fooling yourself, Tilda. You can’t really make any difference. No-one can.’

She rose slowly to her feet, and pulled her coat back on. Max’s words, condemning her, echoed around the room. He said, ‘Where are you going?’ and she said, ‘To the station,’ and walked out, shutting the door behind her. He did not come after her. She thought he might, but he didn’t.

She walked to Liverpool Street. She was just in time for the last train. Snowflakes dissolved in the steam from the funnels. She climbed in the carriage as the engine started up. When she sat down tears flowed silently from her eyes, though she pushed at the bones of her face with her fingertips to stem them.

Daragh had regretted the ending of the war. He’d enjoyed the Home Guard – his social standing and his comparative youth and energy had meant that he had run the show. His men had been a mixture of the very young and the very old, and those with reserved occupations and a few crocks unfit for military service.
He’d enjoyed knocking them into shape, making soldiers of them. He hadn’t put up with any slackness, and he thought they’d respected him for that. The end of the war had left a hollow in his life; the constant possibility of drama replaced by the certainty of tedium.

Now, in the first bitter months of 1947, the snowflakes floated through the leaden air like puffy white feathers, and the blizzard howled and shrieked like a banshee. All the things that Daragh was supposed to do – sowing crops, clearing ditches and dikes – the snow made impossible. He built snowmen with Caitlin, and he cut and stored wood and tried to keep the old Bentley running. Because of the weather, the trains and ships could not get through to the power stations, which threatened to run out of coal. Power cuts dimmed the towns and cities. Though the Hall had its own generator, there wasn’t enough petrol to keep it running, and there was no coal to be bought. Daragh hacked down a couple of trees, but the vast fireplaces consumed them within a week. Jossy took to wearing her fur coat indoors. Daragh didn’t mind the cold, but on the day he found Caitlin sitting in a window seat, pinched and blue, he took an axe to one of the garden sheds. It burned gloriously, kindled by the letters and bills he had discovered in his desk.

When the weather trapped them indoors, Daragh had too much time to think. In spite of the cold, he sometimes woke in a sweat in the early hours of the morning, knowing that he was in a worse mess than he had ever been in his entire life. All his borrowings had been the answer to an immediate crisis; each loan had, he had thought, been the last. He had borrowed from credit companies in order to repay the bank; he had borrowed from moneylenders to repay the credit companies. Yet the chain of loan and debt that he had so carefully put together was breaking apart. Letters and telephone calls pursued him to the Hall. He burned the letters without reading them, and slammed down the receiver without speaking. He avoided certain parts of London: they would not have been safe for him.

His worst fear was that his troubles would affect Caitlin. The
school was already making a fuss about overdue fees. Daragh did what he always did when he had problems: he tried to distract himself. He couldn’t run away this time because of Caitlin, but he could spend the odd evening at the Pheasant in Southam, and once or twice he battled out to the neighbouring farms to see a cockfight. The brutality of it – the bloodied, featherless birds –disturbed him, but took his mind off things.

And there was Tilda, of course. Before Tilda had come back to Southam, he had accepted his lot – Caitlin, the Hall, Jossy. He had begun, almost, to feel happy. Then, one morning, he had ridden into the village with Caitlin, and he had looked up and seen Tilda. He had had no warning of her return, and the shock had struck him with an almost physical blow. He had wanted to shout for joy, or to weep, but he had done neither, because of Caitlin. He had known then that what he had taken for happiness had been only an illusion; that he had slept and, seeing Tilda, had woken.

His joy soon dissipated, replaced by frustrated desire and bitterness. Her physical presence tormented him, and at night he dreamed of touching her, of undressing her, of losing himself in her slender body. To subdue the pain of his longing, he struck up an acquaintance with the obliging wife of a labourer, and called, now and then, at a certain house in the back streets of Ely. But these were only palliatives, not remedies.

Daragh began to hope when he perceived the obvious disarray of Tilda’s marriage. He saw a chance for himself: Tilda was lonely and isolated from her London friends; Max was rarely at home. Daragh visited Long Cottage more frequently, helping with the heavy work that the boy Erich was not fit enough for, and offering the occasional lift to Ely.

Driving home from a cockfight one afternoon, the car, Jossy’s father’s ancient Bentley, spluttered to a halt three miles from Southam. Daragh, wrapped up against the cold in coat, scarf and hat, fiddled about under the bonnet. Then he saw Tilda.

She had a knapsack on her back, and was walking across the fields. She was wearing a longish flowered skirt under a short
blue coat, and Wellington boots. She looked, he thought, about seventeen. He waved his arms and hailed her, and she waved back and tramped through the snow towards him.

She’d been to Ely, she explained, to get medicine for Erich’s bronchitis. Her eyes were bright, her long dark gold hair escaping from her velvet beret. He thought what a great girl she was, walking twelve miles to get medicine for a kid who wasn’t even her own. To Daragh’s question, she explained that Max was still in London, and that he’d started a new job, but she didn’t meet Daragh’s eyes while she said that.

Tilda looked at the bonnet of the Bentley. ‘What’s wrong with it?’

‘Fan belt’s gone,’ he said. ‘I need’ – he glanced at Tilda – ‘a stocking or something to get me home.’

Because her cheeks were pink with the cold, he could not tell whether she reddened or not. She said, ‘Then you’ll have to look the other way.’

He sneaked a look. He heard her kick off her gumboot, and then he peeked and saw her, her skirt above her knees, peeling off her stocking. Her legs were long and slim and brown. The sight stabbed at him, producing an immediate physical response that he had not anticipated. He almost wished he hadn’t looked, he wanted her so much. It was weeks since he’d slept with a woman, and that with some raddled old whore. He insisted on giving Tilda his overcoat to make up for the stocking. He fixed the fan belt, and then he drove Tilda back to Southam, but he hardly spoke, he ached so with desire.

Always, she expected Max to come home. Through the commonplace disasters and excitements of family life – through placating Josh’s headmaster after her son’s most recent absence without leave, through Rosi’s unrequited passion for the curate, who had boils on his neck, through Hanna’s nightmares and Erich’s silences – she expected him to come home. To Tilda, her family was the hub at the centre of a turning wheel: she had believed it to be the same for Max. That it was obviously not so, that he
could deliberately cut himself off from those he claimed to love most, eroded the foundations of her world.