Some Old Lover's Ghost (49 page)

Cécile smiled.

‘Glass of wine?’

‘That would be lovely, chéri.’

Cécile was halfway through the glass of wine when Melissa appeared. She was wearing her oldest clothes: a jersey that needed darning, and a skirt so short it revealed her bony knees. Max decided to say nothing.

‘Melissa – this is Cécile. You remember that I told you that she was a friend of mine. Cécile, this is my daughter, Melissa.’

Melissa, looking at the floor, mumbled a greeting. Max felt a flicker of irritation, but decided to serve the duck.

He knew before they had finished eating the first course that the evening had been a mistake. To all Cécile’s attempts at conversation, to his own coaxing efforts, Melissa remained monosyllabic. Her mouth twisted down at the corners, and her fringe, which needed cutting, flopped over her eyes. If his cooking did not come in for the usual searing criticism, then that was only because she remained sulkily uncommunicative.

Afterwards, Melissa stomped upstairs to bed, and Max poured himself and Cécile a brandy.

‘Sorry.’

‘What for, chéri?’

‘She was terribly rude.’

Cécile smiled. ‘She is thirteen, Max.’

He sat down next to Cécile, and put his arm around her. ‘Is that an excuse?’

‘She sees me as a rival. An enemy.’

Max said, exasperated, ‘I explained to her that you were a friend. Nothing more.’

Cécile’s face was turned away as she picked up her brandy glass. ‘Nevertheless, Max, Melissa loves both you and her mother. She is bound to see any other woman as an interloper.’

He said self-pityingly, ‘I can’t do a bloody thing right, Cécile. She finds fault with everything. I keep thinking she’ll say that she’s had enough, and wants to go home.’

‘Is that what you want?’

He was silent for a moment. Then he said, ‘No. No, of course not. She drives me to distraction, but …’ He had not realized that his daughter loved him so much. Through a muddle of other emotions, he had recognized that he felt honoured and touched that she had chosen to stay with him.

Cécile touched his hand. ‘Do you want to tell me about it?’

‘About what?’

‘Max.’
When she looked at him like that it was as though she were fifteen years older than he, and not the other way round. She explained patiently, ‘Melissa loves you, or she would not be here, and she loves her mother, or she would not have behaved as she did. The simple solution to the problem of Melissa would be for you and – Mathilde, is it? – to live together again.’

Max shook his head. ‘That’s not possible.’

‘Why not?’

He had never voiced it before. It was an effort to get out the ugly words. ‘Tilda was unfaithful to me.’

‘During the war?’

‘Afterwards. Though she’d been in love with the fellow for years.’

Cécile was silent for a few moments. Then she said, ‘And your wife is still with this other man?’

‘Oh no.’ Max, rising, chucked another log on the fire. ‘It was just the once that they … Apparently he went away soon after. Left his wife and child and disappeared into the undergrowth …’ And how typical of Daragh Canavan, Max thought, to desert a pregnant, dying wife – and how typical of Tilda, too, to take in the wretched man’s child. And then suddenly to up and leave Southam, and become housekeeper to a complete stranger. The thought of Tilda’s job, and the peculiar ménage that Melissa had described, made Max feel uneasy. It all sounded horribly hard work. He told himself that Tilda had, as usual, done exactly what she wanted to do, but all the same, he found himself feeling vaguely guilty.

‘Once
…?’ repeated Cécile.

He glanced back at her. ‘Once … twice … fifty times … It doesn’t matter, does it? It’s still a betrayal.’

She was looking at him in a way that was not entirely sympathetic. He had expected her to understand. He said, justifying himself, ‘Faithfulness in marriage is so important, isn’t it? My mother played fast and loose with half my father’s business colleagues. I saw what it did to him. I couldn’t have endured
that.’

‘So you left your wife,’ said Cécile slowly, ‘because you discovered that she was like your mother?’

He flushed. Put like that, it sounded ridiculous. ‘No, of course not. Tilda isn’t in the least like my mother. It was just – damn it, Cécile, I had the right to expect constancy, didn’t I?’

‘Of course, Max,’ she said gently.

He fetched the brandy bottle, and refilled their glasses. He would have liked to have drunk until the uncomfortable thoughts that echoed in his head began to recede, until he was no longer made to look back and question his own behaviour, that he had until recently believed unimpeachable.

Cécile leaned over and kissed him. ‘I think that I must not stay the night, Max. We would have to be very quiet and I would feel like a naughty adolescent.’

He watched her cycle down the hill and then he went back into the house. Reluctantly, hoping that she was asleep, he climbed the stairs and tapped on Melissa’s door.

A whisper. ‘Daddy?’

He pushed open the door. The night light showed that her eyes were red. Max groaned inwardly, but hardened his heart.

‘Cécile is my friend, poppet. And she was our guest. You’re to write her a note tomorrow, apologizing.’

To his surprise, she did not protest. She just looked at him, her eyes big and dark in her pale little face, her knees hunched up to her chin, cocooned in the bedclothes.

‘Do you want me to go home, Daddy?’

‘Of course not. Why should you think that?’

‘When we were at home …’ Her voice wobbled. ‘When we
were at home … when we were at Aunt Sarah’s … you didn’t want to be with us then.’

Max sat down on the edge of the bed, his heart thudding. Melissa’s words stabbed at him. He almost said,
That’s not true
, but instead he put his arm round his daughter, and sat in the half-dark, his eyes fixed on a snaking crack in the plaster on the opposite wall, appalled to realize that she had interpreted his absence as a lack of love for her. Yet why should she have thought otherwise? He had been away for so much of Melissa’s young life – why should she not have seen that as a deliberate choice on his part?

He imagined trying to explain to her. First I had to go away because of my job, and then because of the war, and then because I was a bit mad. Because he recognized, looking back, that he had been pushed to a brink that he had not let himself or anyone else acknowledge, by exhaustion and despair. He knew, though, that it was too late to explain. Children understood actions, not words. Some of Melissa’s difficult behaviour was because she needed to push him, to test him, to measure his love for her.

It was quite dark now. Though Melissa slept, Max did not yet go. It had occurred to him that Tilda, too, might have interpreted his distancing himself from family responsibilities as a lack of love and, though he angrily tried to push the thought away, the idea that he might, in some sense, have propelled Tilda into Daragh Canavan’s arms was an unpleasant one, and could not easily be dismissed.

Tilda gave Caitlin an embarrassingly explicit lecture about the birds and the bees, and Caitlin consequently endured an anxious three weeks worrying whether she was was going to have a baby. She spent a lot of time in church, praying, and made a very vague confession to Father O’Byrne. She wasn’t pregnant; the relief was enormous.

She went back to her old occupation of trying to find her father. She studied the map of Ireland for hours, struggling to remember the name of the village he had told her about.
Sometimes in dreams he came to her and spoke its name, but when she woke up, her face wet with tears, she had forgotten it. She knew that the village could not be far from the sea, as her father had told her that he had gathered oysters on the shore, and she knew that there had been hills and lakes. But there seemed to be no part of Ireland that was not within a couple of hours of the sea and peppered with hills and lakes. Mr Oddie, the private detective, had investigated Ireland, too, but had been unable to trace her father’s relatives. Caitlin determined to do better than Mr Oddie.

Guessing most Irish villages to have a priest, she wrote letters, explaining that she was looking for her relatives, addressing the envelopes to The Priest, Ballywhatever, and the name of the county, which she gleaned from the atlas. Some of the priests wrote back to her. She learned that in Ireland, Canavan was a common surname. She did not know her grandparents’ Christian names, only that she herself had been called after her father’s sister, Caitlin. She persisted, confident that she would eventually succeed.

Most of the time, her prevailing emotion was one of utter boredom. She was bored at school, her position in class having sunk until it was nearer the bottom than the middle, and she was bored at Poona. She was glad she had managed to get the bedroom to herself, though sometimes, when she was really bored, she even found herself missing Melissa. She went to the cinema a great deal, envying the luxury and ease that the American films portrayed. She began to skip church, which she had attended every Sunday since she was a small child. If God had not returned her father to her, which was what she most wanted in the world, then what use was He?

Saturday mornings she spent at the stables in the village, mucking out loose boxes in exchange for a ride. Tilda had arranged the Saturday mornings after the Martin Devereux episode, and Caitlin, though she hated to enjoy anything Tilda had given her, had not been able to resist the opportunity. When she gave her horse its head, cantering across the meadow, the fast slipstream of air blanked out pain and loss and tedium.

Then she saw the notice in the window of the village shop. ‘A Revue is to be performed by the Woodcott St Martin Amateur Dramatic Society. Preliminary meeting for all interested at the Memorial Hall, 7.30, Tuesday 15 February.’ The notice was signed by someone called Julian Pascoe.

The Memorial Hall was ghastly: ice-cold, cavernous, with lavatories that perpetually leaked. There were about a dozen people in the room when Caitlin arrived. Mrs Cavell, who ran the post office, was calling instructions about chairs; a short, plump man with a shiny bald patch was placing rickety wooden seats in an inaccurate circle. No-one took any notice of Caitlin. Someone shouted, ‘Where’s Julian?’ and a woman in a red skirt with lipstick that clashed said, ‘Escaping Margaret, I expect,’ and everyone laughed. They all seemed to know each other, and Caitlin began to think that she had made a mistake in coming. It was only an awful village thing anyway, and would probably be just as pathetic as a school play. She sidled towards the door.

The door swung open just as Caitlin reached it. A tall, thin man with dark hair cut in a messy fringe almost collided with her. ‘Julian, darling!’ shrieked someone.

Julian, who wore coat, gloves and scarf and still looked cold, glanced at Caitlin, and said: ‘Not running away, are you?’

She shook her head.

He held out his hand. ‘Julian Pascoe.’

‘Caitlin Canavan.’

He frowned. ‘Irish. A fair colleen. “No maid I’ve seen, like the fair colleen, that I met in the County Down.” Are you from the County Down, Caitlin Canavan?’

She shook her head. ‘Cambridgeshire.’

He roared with laughter, as though she had said something funny.
‘Cambridgeshire
. Good God. Such a delightful name, such alliteration, such an harmonious juxtaposition of syllables, and she comes from
Cambridgeshire.’
He glanced at her. ‘Didn’t mean to rag you, fair colleen,’ he said softly. ‘Now give me a nice smile – yes, that’s better – and go and sit down with the others, like a good girl.’

She sat down. Her knees were shaking slightly and she was not sure whether to feel angry or flattered. The chairs made a sort of horseshoe; Julian Pascoe sat between the two arms of the horseshoe. Mrs Cavell poured him a cup of tea from a thermos flask and he beamed at her and said, ‘Too sweet of you, darling.’

The woman with the red skirt said, ‘Shall I light the oil heater, Ju?’ but he shook his head.

‘Like trying to heat the Cheddar Gorge, Patricia, and the fumes are so bad for my asthma.’ Julian glanced at his pad of paper. ‘We’d better start by taking names. And if you could tell me what you’re interested in … acting, singing, props, whatever.’

He went round the circle, one by one. Mrs Cavell – ‘Scenery and props. You know me, Julian, ready to muck in with anything.’ The bald man – ‘Bit of tap dancing’, which made Caitlin giggle. A skinny young man with a prominent Adam’s apple – ‘Singing – my repertoire’s mostly ballads and comic stuff.’ He reached Caitlin.

‘And the fair colleen?’

She made herself look him in the eye. ‘I can act and sing and dance.’

‘Dear me,’ he said ‘such an embarrassment of riches.’ Then he glanced at his watch. ‘Auditions on Sunday afternoon, people. Here, I’m afraid. Now, I shall tell you what I’ve sketched out so far. It’s in the early stages, but …’ Julian Pascoe shrugged his thin shoulders.

Throughout the next few days, Caitlin sometimes found herself thinking of Julian Pascoe. He was quite old – in his thirties, she guessed – and he was married. Patricia Cunningham told her about his wife.

‘She’s called Margaret. Frightful bitch. She makes poor Julian’s life absolute hell.’

They were in the Memorial Hall’s sordid kitchen, washing cups. ‘Why did he marry her?’ asked Caitlin. ‘Is she very pretty?’

Patricia sneered. ‘Horse-faced, darling. But pots of money.
Nouveau riche. Poor Ju is frightfully well-connected, but there’s simply no cash in the family. Before he married Margaret, he had to teach at a ghastly prep school in Oxford. Hated it, of course, and it didn’t do his health much good.’ Patricia shook her head. ‘He is frightfully artistic, you know.’

After the auditions, Julian cast Caitlin in several sketches. She was also to sing ‘Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage’ entirely by herself. Some of the other women in the society had made catty remarks about that, seeing her stardom as unmerited, but Caitlin didn’t care. After rehearsals, they all went to the pub. Caitlin, accompanying them, realized that they assumed that she was eighteen, so she talked about sixth form, and always wore make-up.