Some Old Lover's Ghost Read online

  SOME OLD

  LOVER’S GHOST

  Judith Lennox

  Dedication

  To lain, with love

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  PART ONE

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINTEEN

  About the Author

  Also by Judith Lennox

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PART ONE

  PROLOGUE

  For two days, frost had fringed the reeds and the grass with a silvery filigree. Filaments of ice on every leaf and branch reflected the remains of the dying sun. Ice clung to the walls of the dike. Around the stems of the plants at the water’s edge an opaque, whitish glaze hid the rotting vegetation beneath. But where the current ran free a mist rose, small curling wisps like steam from a boiling bath, as though the black heart of the water ran warm.

  The dike gouged a channel through the flat East Anglian landscape. To either side of it fields fell away, vast and featureless, their boundaries marked by a pathway of twin ruts or a straggle of stunted bushes. The sun touched the church tower and the bare branches of the trees that surrounded it, and then moved slowly to the empty land beyond, delineating the long ridges left by the plough. All was still: no breeze rustled the frozen grass or flicked aside a swirl of dead leaves to reveal the bare bones of the earth beneath.

  As he walked along the bank of the dike, his breath made grey clouds in the chill evening air. It seemed to him that though this land had been stolen from the sea by man, and though the marks of man’s stubbornness and ingenuity were visible in the deep scars of the dikes and waterways, yet there was never a sense of ownership, only of borrowing. The low horizon, the vastness of the sky, reduced humanity to small, bustling insignificance. If a god existed, then that god interceded, through flood and tempest, only as a reminder of impotence. When landscape itself was impermanent, then what chance had fragile bones and flesh? Others had believed they had mastery of this place; others had been expelled by the greater armies of water and tide.

  Looking ahead, he saw the house that stood by itself a mile or so from the church. As the rays of the setting sun touched them, the panes of glass in the windows flared with red and gold light, and the four-square walls lost their dreariness, so that the house seemed to come alive again. He stood still, remembering, the words if only searing his frozen heart just as the dike seared the cold earth. Then the sun sank below the horizon, and the house retreated into the shadows.

  He turned back, retracing his footsteps. It was quite dark now, a thin filament of cloud covering the face of the moon, the stars not yet bright. Conscious of the water to one side of him he moved carefully, wishing he had brought a torch or lantern. Just the thought of falling into the dike – a cracking of ice and then no sound at all – made him shudder. Drowning was the worst death: the water in your lungs, your mouth, your nostrils, choking you. Like being buried alive.

  The sound of a step, and a gasping breath where he had believed himself to be alone, made him almost lose his footing. His heart lurched against his ribcage, and he looked to left and right, wide-eyed, half expecting the swirls of steam that rose from the water to have acquired shape and substance, to have become small ghosts, the will-o’-the-wisps that haunted the Fen.

  But then the cloud thinned, and the moonlight showed him the dog, scrabbling at the sloping wall of the dike. Paws clawing the iron-hard earth, wet nose sniffing for secrets.

  Stooping, he gathered pebbles and flung them at the creature until it yelped and ran into the darkness.

  CHAPTER ONE

  After Toby had gone, I took the bouquet of flowers he had given me and flushed them one by one down the lavatory. Their petals floated on the surface of the water, smooth and pink and perfumed. Then I went to the dreary little room at the end of the corridor, and stared out of the window. It was raining, a dark, thin October drizzle that sheened the streets beyond the hospital. The television was on, but I didn’t hear it. I heard only Toby’s voice, saying, I don’t think we should see so much of each other, Rebecca.

  I had been unable to stop myself whispering, ‘Please, Toby. Not now.’ I had seen him flinch. Then he had said, ‘It just hasn’t felt right for a while. But because of the baby—’ and he had reddened, and looked away, and I had heard myself say coolly, ‘Of course. If that’s how you feel.’ Anything rather than become an unwanted, burdensome, pitiable thing.

  I turned away from the window. EastEnders was on the television, and a very young girl in a shabby dressing gown was curled in front of it, smoking. She offered me a cigarette, and I accepted one, though I hadn’t smoked since university. On the side of the packet was written a slogan, SMOKING CAN DAMAGE THE HEALTH OF YOUR UNBORN CHILD, but that didn’t matter any more. My poor little half-formed child had been, like the flowers, disposed of. I lit the cigarette, and closed my eyes, and saw petals floating on the water, pink and foetus-shaped.

  After I was discharged from hospital I went back to my flat in Teddington. I rent the ground floor of one of the many Victorian villas that line the streets of west London. The rooms – kitchen, bathroom, and bedsitting room – had a dusty, unfamiliar look. There was a heap of letters by the front door, and the answerphone was blinking frantically. I disregarded both, and lay down on the bed, my coat wrapped around me.

  I thought of Toby. I had first met Toby Carne eighteen months ago, in South Kensington. There had been a sudden heavy rain shower, I had had no raincoat, and when a gentleman had drawn level with me and offered to share his umbrella, I had thankfully accepted. I say ‘gentleman’, an old-fashioned term, because Toby had looked, to me, every inch the gentleman – Burberry and black city umbrella; short dark hair just touching his collar; old but expensive leather briefcase. I had guessed him to be around ten years older than me, and I had walked beside him, forgetting to dodge the puddles, hypnotized by his sudden smile and by the unmistakable interest in his eyes. When he suggested going for a drink to escape the rain, I accepted. By the time we parted, he had my name and telephone number. I had not expected him to phone, but he did, a few days later. I’d made him laugh, he explained. I was refreshing, different.

  Toby had been my adventure. He had come from another world, and I had believed that our relationship would transform me. And it had, for a while. With Toby, I had lost weight, had worn smarter clothes, and had my long hair lightened. I had worn high heels and had not tripped over them, and I had bought expensive make-up, the sort that stays where you put it on. I had visited Toby’s parents’ house in Surrey, and had pretended that I was used to sofas whose cushions did not fray, and bathrooms with matching towels. Together we had visited Amsterdam, Paris, and Brussels; together we had dined in expensive restaurants and been invited to fashionable parties. He introduced me to his lawyer friends as ‘Rebecca Bennett, the biographer’; they tended to look blank, which he noticed after a while. He suggested I write a novel; I explained that I needed the solidity of history. He proposed, late and drunk one glorious summer’s night, that we try for a baby, and when, a couple of months later, I told him that I was pregnant, he toasted the infant with the b
est champagne, but did not suggest that we move in together. And when, several weeks after that, I began to lose our baby at a dull but important dinner party, he seemed put out that I had chosen such a time, such a place.

  I had considered my remaking, which he had begun and I had colluded with, to be permanent. With one sentence – I don’t think we should see so much of each other – he had reminded me of what I really was. My ‘difference’ had become tiresome or, worse, embarrassing. And I hadn’t made him laugh for ages.

  In the days after I came home from hospital, I did not leave the flat. I drank cups of tea and ate, when I could be bothered to eat, the contents of ancient forgotten tins that gathered dust at the back of the kitchen cupboard. I neither answered the telephone nor opened the post. The dull ache in my belly, a memento of the miscarriage, slowly faded. The panicky feeling, the sense that everything was falling apart, persisted. I slept as much as I could, though my dreams were punctuated by nightmares.

  Then Jane turned up. Jane is my elder sister. She has two little boys aged one and three, and a cottage in Berkshire. A mild but persistent mutual envy has always been a part of our relationship. Jane hammered on the door until I opened it, then took one look at the frowsty squalor and at me, and said, ‘Honestly, Becca, you are hopeless.’ I burst into tears, and we hugged awkwardly, the products of a family not much given to displays of physical affection.

  I spent a week with Jane, and then returned to London. You must begin to pick up the threads, she said, as she saw me onto the train. But it did not seem to me that there were any threads left to pick up. The life I had planned had been Toby and the baby and a continuation of the career I had struggled for throughout my twenties. I had lost both Toby and the child and, though I sat dutifully at my desk and stared at my word processor, I was not able to write. I could think of nothing worth writing about. Any sentence I attempted to assemble was clumsy and meaningless. Ideas flickered through my head and I scribbled them down in a notebook, but the next morning they always seemed shallow, empty.

  Jane and Steve invited me to stay with them at Christmas. The noise and enthusiasm of the little boys filled in the gaps made by my mother’s death, four years ago, and my father’s cantankerousness. Back in London, Charles and Lucy Lightman dragged me off to a New Year party. I’ve known Charles Lightman for years. He and his sister Lucy both have pale green eyes and the sort of fine, light brown hair that keeps to no particular style. Charles and I met at university, but now he has his own production company, Lighthouse Productions, which specializes in television programmes with an archaeological or historical interest. The previous summer we had worked together on a documentary, Sisters of the Moon.

  At the party, the ritual beginnings of courtship – the What do you do? and the Shall I get you a drink? – seemed forced. In the bathroom, I caught sight of my reflection in the mirror. Round face, short mousy hair (I’d had it cut a few weeks before, and could no longer be bothered colouring it), light blue eyes expressing a dazed bewilderment and defencelessness that seemed to me inappropriate to my thirty-one years. I stared in disgust at my inept reflection, and then grabbed my coat and went home. But I thought, as I curled up in bed to escape the sounds of revelry on the street outside, that I was doing better. It was weeks since I had cried myself to sleep, weeks since I had felt a stab of pain at the sight of a dark-haired man, or a baby in a pram. I was teaching myself not to feel. I was teaching myself well.

  A fortnight later, I put up in the local shop an advertisement offering tutoring in A level history. I’d taught before, but had thankfully abandoned teaching after the modest success of my biography of Ellen Wilkinson. But every spark of creativity seemed to have died, and I was badly overdrawn at the bank. I had several replies to my advert, yet, as I arranged times in my diary, I felt a qualm of nervousness, a fleeting suspicion that, faced by these unknown students, I would be dull, uninspiring, inaccurate.

  In the middle of February, Charles, bearing a Chinese takeaway and a bottle of red wine, called at my flat. Sisters of the Moon was to be broadcast at nine o’clock that evening. Looking around with some amazement, he said, ‘But you’re always so organized, darling,’ and I felt fleetingly embarrassed by the heaps of unwashed dishes, the balls of dust gathering in the corners of the room.

  Charles and I sat on my bed, watching the television, eating lemon chicken and egg fried rice. My name was on the credits, and I had already seen the preview, of course, but now the programme seemed alien, nothing to do with me. Someone else had interviewed those frail old ladies, someone else had consigned to her tape recorder those sad tales of abandonment and betrayal. Sisters of the Moon told the story of a group of women, victims of the Mental Deficiency Act of 1913. The Act had allowed local authorities to certify and incarcerate pregnant women who were destitute or, in the eyes of a judgemental male authority, immoral – unmarried mothers, in other words. The Act was not repealed until the 1950s, and by then the asylum was those women’s home, and the outside world a changed, incomprehensible place.

  Researching the programme, I had met Ivy Lunn in an old people’s home in Nottingham. She had been almost ninety years old, and as bright as a button. I had taken her out to tea, a treat which had evoked in her a mixture of delight and trepidation. When, over scones and jam, she had relaxed a little, she had told me her story. At the age of fourteen, Ivy had obtained a position as a scullery-maid in a house in London, just after the end of the First World War. One morning, the eldest son of the house had come into the bathroom as she was cleaning the tub. She had felt his hands below her waist, pulling up her skirt. She had been afraid to cry out when he had raped her, afraid afterwards to tell anyone. She had understood neither what he had done, nor the possible consequences of it. She had known only that he had hurt and degraded her. When her pregnancy had begun to show, Ivy’s mistress dismissed her. When Ivy tried to explain what had happened, it was made clear that all the responsibility was hers. The son was returned to public school, and Ivy was sent to the asylum. Sitting there on the bed, Charles’s arm slung around my shoulders, I remembered that I had cried when Ivy had told me her story. I had sat in that chintzy little café and wept tears of pity. Ivy had comforted me. And yet now, all these long months later, I felt nothing.

  The credits rolled, the closing theme faded, and Charles gave a whoop of delight. His gooseberry-green eyes were bright with exhilaration, and he talked very fast.

  ‘Stunning, don’t you think, Becca? Should be some bloody good reviews. I shall go out first thing and buy all the papers. We make a good team, don’t we?’ And he lunged forward and kissed me.

  ‘Coffee,’ I said firmly, disentangling myself.

  ‘I’ve an idea for another piece—’ he yelled, as I ground beans in the kitchen. ‘Public schools at the beginning of the century. You know, beating and buggery. I’m going to tie it in with the First World War, loss of Empire, all that—’

  He rambled on while I poured boiling water into the cafetière, and put crockery on a tray. After a while, I stopped listening to him. To create a documentary that will make the viewer weep, you have to feel for your subjects. If Ivy Lunn, who had been raped and incarcerated and separated for almost a lifetime from her only child, was no longer able to move me, then I doubted whether anything could.

  A week later, I had a telephone call from my agent, Nancy Walker. ‘Terrific news, Rebecca,’ she cried. ‘I’m delighted.’ Nancy always speaks in italics. She went on, ‘Sophia Jennings from Crawfords has just been on the phone. They’d like to meet up with you, talk through a possible project.’ I could almost hear her smile.

  Crawfords is a successful and reputable London publisher. Nancy explained, ‘They’re planning to commission a life of Dame Tilda Franklin.’

  Until a few years ago, every newspaper or television investigation concerned with child welfare had necessitated an interview with Dame Tilda. She had devoted her life to the welfare of children – adopting and fostering numerous orphaned infa
nts, setting up psychiatric clinics to care for disturbed children, and organizing charities and helplines and safe houses for those abused or at risk. Loving, yet efficient; gentle, but incisive. When I thought back, I only vaguely remembered Tilda Franklin’s face – a fleeting recollection of charismatic beauty and a sense of intelligence and vigour behind the charm.

  ‘They want to talk to me?’ I said incredulously. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Apparently Crawfords first contacted Dame Tilda years ago, but she’s always refused. And then she telephoned them, insisting on you. She said that she won’t consider anyone else.’

  There was a pause, as Nancy waited for me to comment. But I said nothing. I was, literally, speechless. I couldn’t think why Dame Tilda Franklin should want me to write her biography – and I was still inclined to believe that it was all a mistake – but nevertheless it was as though I had suddenly turned the corner of a very long, dark tunnel, and could see in the distance a pinpoint of light. I knew that I ought to tell Nancy that I couldn’t write any more, but for some reason – professional pride, I suppose – I did not.

  ‘Fascinating life …’ added Nancy. ‘She did something terribly heroic in the war, I believe. Rebecca?’ A note of anxiety had entered her voice. ‘You are pleased, aren’t you?’

  ‘Delighted,’ I mumbled, but remembered too clearly sitting in front of the word processor, unable to write a coherent sentence. I said cautiously, ‘I’m not sure, Nancy. All those children … Could I do justice to her? And it would be a lot of work …’

  That hasn’t put you off before,’ said Nancy briskly. ‘I’m sure you could make a marvellous job of it. Think it over, Rebecca. Give me a ring, and I’ll arrange a preliminary meeting with Sophia.’

  She added a few pleasantries, and then rang off. I sat for a while, staring at the wall. I should have explained, I thought, that I’d lost confidence in my ability even to write a shopping list. And that it really wasn’t my sort of thing, to write the biography of a saint. I prefer to show the skull beneath the skin. History only interests me when the glaze cracks, and I glimpse clay.