Some Old Lover's Ghost Read online

  How could I describe the happy families that Tilda Franklin had created, when that sort of security was something I had never really known? How could I write of the joy of caring for children, when my only attempt to create a new life had ended in miscarriage? I picked up the telephone, ready to dial Nancy’s number and tell her that there was really no point in my talking to the people at Crawfords, but I put the receiver back without touching the keypad. There was still that flicker of optimism, that small, muted return of the self-belief I thought I had lost for ever.

  I grabbed my car keys and left the house and drove to Twickenham, where I walked, watching the mist rise from the Thames. A wet, yapping dog ran along the bank towards me, and shook himself so that drops of water spun from his fur like sparks from a Catherine wheel. The clouds had thinned at last, and I glimpsed the sun, a dim pearl of pink and orange. The water lapped at the toes of my boots, but I turned away from the river before the clouds could return to blot out the sunshine. And when I reached home, I made myself phone Nancy. I’d go and talk to Crawfords next week, I told her.

  Dame Tilda Franklin lived in the village of Woodcott St Martin, in Oxfordshire. Trapped on the M40 between hissing lorries and impatient sales reps, I almost wished I could turn back. But I forced myself to drive on, lurching and pausing with the queues of traffic, peering through the hypnotic sweep of the windscreen wipers.

  I’d talked through the project with my prospective editor. She had suggested I speak to Tilda Franklin herself, and, if I was still interested in the commission, rough out some ideas. If Crawfords were happy with my suggestions, they’d pay a reasonable, if not over-generous, advance.

  It was a relief to leave the motorway, and to plunge into a countryside of rolling hills and narrow, curling roads, and hollows where mist gathered in pools. I had to stop several times to check the map. I longed for coffee. It was early, not yet nine o’clock, and the world was only half awake. After about half an hour, I reached Woodcott St Martin, a sprawling village with a green, and a duckpond, and a couple of shops. I stopped at the newsagent and asked for directions to Dame Tilda’s home, The Red House. ‘She’s not been well,’ said the shopkeeper. ‘She often has a touch of bronchitis at this time of year.’

  The Red House stood a little apart from the rest of the village. I saw a gleam of silver river to one side of the building, and playing fields, their untenanted swings ghostly in the greyish light, to the other. The house was large and old, its gables pierced by stone windows. The walls were of dark red brick, and the roof-tiles were discoloured by lichen. Box trees, carved into huge globes and four-sided pyramids, walled the narrow path. The mist faded their dark green leaves, and pearled their fantastic festoon of spiders’ webs. Chill and solid, the great topiaried bushes enclosed me between them, cutting me off from the rest of the garden. I shivered: this was not the careful tangle of rose and aster that I had expected. These trees were vast and arcane, their shapes suggesting a symbolism unintelligible to me. I was relieved to escape them for the narrow gravel court in front of the house. When I looked down at myself, and saw the gossamer that clung to my jacket, I brushed it hurriedly away and rang the doorbell.

  Inside, I followed Dame Tilda’s housekeeper through rooms and passageways. Portraits of children – painted, sketched and photographed – looked back at me from the walls. Children that Dame Tilda Franklin had cared for, I assumed. Infants and adolescents, girls with ribbons in their hair, boys in baggy corduroy shorts and sagging socks. Fading childhood scrawls, a clumsily worked length of cross-stitch, a blurred snapshot of a boy, hair quiffed Fifties-fashion, standing beside a gleaming motor scooter. The gilt frames of the pictures lit the dark oak-panelled interior.

  The housekeeper led me to a room at the back of the house and tapped on the door. ‘Miss Bennett is here, Tilda.’

  The garden room was furnished with shabby, comfortable furniture, and plants – hoya, plumbago, bougainvillaea –crawling up the walls. A woman was standing in a corner of the room, secateurs in hand. She turned towards me.

  ‘Miss Bennett? How good of you to come. I do apologize for suggesting such an unreasonably early hour, but I have a dreadful tendency to fall asleep in the afternoons.’

  ‘Mrs—’ But I remembered the damehood, or whatever one calls such things. ‘I mean, Dame Matilda—’ I floundered.

  She put aside the secateurs. ‘Call me Tilda, please. The “Dame” reminds me of the pantomime. And no-one has ever called me Matilda – so forbidding, don’t you think?’

  She smiled. Beauty lingers, and though Tilda Franklin was now eighty years old I could see its lineaments still in her high, delicate cheekbones, her straight, narrow nose. Her eyelids were blue-veined, almost transparent, and her light eyes were set deep into her skull. Her face was longish, carefully sculptured, and her spine even in old age was straight. Beside Tilda I felt short, sloppy, troll-featured. She wore a soft tweed skirt, a cashmere cardigan, pearls; I, a long black skirt and suede jacket that I’d always thought possessed a sexily crumpled allure. I should have worn my one good suit.

  I asked her to call me Rebecca, and we shook hands. Her fingers were insubstantial and birdlike. I thought that if I gripped too hard the bones would turn to powder.

  ‘You’ll join me for coffee, won’t you, Rebecca? Such a long journey. So good of you to come.’

  She talked about the plants in the garden room until the housekeeper reappeared with a tray of coffee and home-made biscuits.

  ‘The hoya is in flower already. It has a glorious scent, though only at night-time, of course. I have never understood how a plant can have fragrance at one time of day and not at another. Patrick, my grandson, tried to explain to me once.’ She added, ‘I am so pleased that you agreed to talk to me, Rebecca. Do you know why I suggested that you write my biography?’

  I mumbled cautiously, ‘I assumed you’d read my book.’

  She shook her head. ‘I’m afraid I don’t read much these days. My eyesight – such a nuisance. I listen to the television, though. I saw your documentary.’

  Everything about her – this house, her appearance, even the coffee cups – proclaimed her to be from another age. I couldn’t picture Tilda slumped on the living-room sofa, flicking channels on a remote control.

  ‘You saw Sisters of the Moon?’

  She nodded. ‘Yes. And a few days later, I was in Blackwells, buying a birthday present for my granddaughter, and I saw your name on a book cover. Providential, don’t you think?’ She paused. ‘I found your television programme very … very touching.’

  I was horrified to notice that there were tears in her eyes.

  ‘Very touching, and very intelligent. No unnecessary sentiment. No sensationalism. You stood back, and let those women tell their stories. I admire that. It implies a certain wisdom, a sense of your own limited importance in the scheme of things. It implies also a sense of justice. I do believe in justice, you see, Rebecca.’ Her expression altered, and her light grey eyes darkened. ‘People have forgotten those women, and they have forgotten the power that men like Edward de Paveley possessed. No-one should have such power.’

  ‘Who is – was – Edward de Paveley?’

  ‘Edward de Paveley was my father. He raped my mother, who was a maidservant in his house. When she became pregnant, he had her consigned to the workhouse, and from there she was sent to a mental institution in Peterborough.’

  I was aware of a flicker of surprise. Looking at Tilda Franklin now, it was hard to believe that such a proud, elegant woman should have had so ignominious a beginning.

  ‘I am reckoned to have led an interesting life,’ Tilda added. ‘I have always guarded my privacy, though. But when I watched your programme I thought that could be interpreted as cowardice, rather than a lack of egotism. I have made a bargain with myself – I shall tell the story of my life in order that my mother’s story can be told.’ Tilda put aside her cup and saucer. ‘I would very much like you to consider writing my biography, Rebecca. I do
n’t expect you to give me an answer yet, of course. But you’ll think about it, won’t you?’

  I mumbled something noncommittal. I couldn’t bring myself to confess to her that, though I had once been able to write, I was no longer able to do so. That Toby had taken, along with my self-respect, my art.

  She seemed to take my silence for assent. ‘May I tell you a little more? Both my mother’s family – the Greenlees – and the de Paveleys lived in Southam, in the Cambridgeshire Fens. Fen villages were at that time very remote, very rural, little worlds of their own. My mother never travelled further than Ely, and that only occasionally. A wealthy landowner would have great influence in such a place.’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘My mother’s family had lived and worked in Southam for generations. My grandmother died young, and my grandfather – my mother’s father – was a labourer for the de Paveleys. They had two children – Sarah was the elder, and Deborah the younger. Their cottage was owned by the de Paveleys, and their renting of it was dependent on my grandfather’s continuing to work for the family. So when he died in 1912, the sisters lost their home as well as their father. Deborah, who was sixteen, went into service with the de Paveleys, but Sarah left the village to try her luck elsewhere.’

  She paused. Looking outside, I noticed that the sun had broken through the mist. It caught the facets of the crystal chandelier hanging from the ceiling, so that pinpoints of coloured light – blue and orange and violet – danced across the walls.

  ‘I don’t know exactly what happened. Only that Edward de Paveley came to my mother’s bed and forced himself on her. And that my mother was thrown out of the Hall as soon as her pregnancy became obvious, and that she had nowhere to go but the workhouse. And I guess … I guess that my mother pleaded with Mr de Paveley. Told him that the child was his. Asked for his help.’

  I imagined a bleak, featureless landscape, striped by narrow bands of water. I saw a young woman, little more than a child, her body distorted by pregnancy. And a man – on horseback, perhaps, or driving one of those boxy turn-of-the-century cars – pausing to speak to her.

  ‘Whatever my mother asked of Edward de Paveley, he refused to help her,’ Tilda continued. ‘In the May of 1914 she gave birth to me in the workhouse, and then the order was signed confining her to the asylum. I have a copy of that order. Edward de Paveley was a magistrate, and his signature is on the committal certificate.’

  She fell silent, and when I glimpsed the terrible sadness in her eyes I could only guess at what it had cost her to lay bare to a stranger the secrets of what she had admitted was a very private soul. Then her expression altered: she seemed mentally to shake herself. ‘I was born in the workhouse,’ she explained, ‘but I spent my infancy in an orphanage. Illegitimate children were taken away from their mothers as soon as they were born, of course. People weren’t keen to adopt children such as myself, because it was thought that an illegitimate baby might inherit its mother’s immorality.’

  The unwanted child, I thought, would salve the horror of her own birth by devoting her life to the rescue of other abandoned children. Such a neat, circular story.

  ‘I lived in the orphanage until I was about a year old. Then Sarah came back.’ Tilda smiled. ‘My Aunt Sarah. I have a picture.’

  She opened the album that lay on the table. I looked down at the photograph. The face that stared back at me had that solemn, slightly uneasy expression common to so many portraits from the early part of the century. Something to do with having to sit still so long for the camera, I suppose. Tilda’s Aunt Sarah had a stout, shapeless bosom covered by a high-necked blouse. I could see nothing of Tilda in her plain, strong face, nothing at all.

  ‘Deborah was the pretty sister and Sarah was the clever one,’ said Tilda, reading my thoughts. ‘I haven’t a photograph of Deborah, I’m afraid.’

  ‘You said that Sarah went away after her father died. Where did she go?’

  ‘Oh, anywhere and everywhere, I should imagine, knowing Sarah. She rarely settled in one place for long. By the time she came back to Cambridgeshire, my mother was dying. The regime was harsh in workhouses and asylums, and Deborah had never been strong.’

  Tilda paused, and closed the photograph album. Just for a moment, her thin hand touched mine. ‘Sarah knew nothing of what had happened to her sister until she came back to the village. You must understand, Rebecca, how remote East Anglia was in the early part of the century. Very few people had telephones, and my mother had left school when she was ten to look after her father, and was more or less illiterate. Anyway, Sarah travelled to the asylum, and spoke to her sister before she died. Deborah told her what had happened. I imagine … I imagine, sometimes, how Sarah must have felt. How it must have eaten away at her, the anger and the guilt.’

  ‘Guilt?’

  ‘At not being there when her sister needed her. Sarah was a strong person, Rebecca. Sarah would have thought of something. Sarah would never have allowed Deborah to go to the workhouse.’

  ‘So Sarah adopted you?’

  ‘Yes. She buried her sister, and adopted her niece. I don’t remember the orphanage at all, of course – I was a baby when I left it. But Sarah never tried to pretend that she was my mother. I have always admired her for that honesty. As soon as I was old enough to understand, she told me that I was her younger sister’s child. Nothing more than that, naturally.’

  Your father raped your mother. I saw the impossibility of explaining such an outrage. ‘And you lived …?’ I prompted.

  ‘All over East Anglia and southern England. Suffolk … Norfolk … Kent, mostly. Sarah did seasonal farmwork.’

  I smiled. ‘Like Tess of the D’Urbervilles?’

  ‘A little like that. In the summer we helped with the harvest and picked hops in Kent. In winter, we’d take in sewing. My Aunt Sarah could sew beautifully. You couldn’t see her stitches. She taught me to sew. She taught me everything.’

  ‘Did you go to school?’

  ‘Now and then, if we stayed in a village for more than a few weeks. Sarah taught me to read and to write, and she had a wonderful head for arithmetic. When I did go to school, I was always put in a class years above my age.’

  It sounded a colourful, gypsy life, until I remembered that Tilda had been born in 1914, that ominous year, and that she had passed her childhood in the haunted, febrile Twenties. I said tentatively, ‘It must have been hard sometimes.’

  ‘Oh yes. I have never since been cold as I remember being cold then. How the frost used to eat into my hands and feet. The clouds that formed in the air when I took my first breath in the morning. And I was teased by other children, of course. For being different.’

  Her words were matter-of-fact, untinged by self-pity. She still sat as upright as that woman in the sepia photograph, the aunt who had rescued her from the orphanage.

  ‘I am a little tired,’ she said suddenly. ‘So tedious to be old.’ She turned to me, focusing her flinty grey eyes on me. ‘Do you wish to know more, Rebecca? Shall I tell you about Jossy …?’

  ‘Jossy?’ I repeated.

  ‘Jossy de Paveley. Edward de Paveley’s daughter.’ Her expression altered, one of those abrupt changes of mood that I came to realize were characteristic of her. ‘She was my half-sister, of course …’

  When her father was wounded in 1918, Joscelin de Paveley prayed each night that he would not recover. When he returned home, lurching on crutches from the Bentley to the front door, Jossy’s infant faith in God faltered, and never quite recovered.

  Edward de Paveley’s experiences of war, his loss of a leg in the last months of bitter fighting, his near death and eventual recovery, did not, in forcing him to confront his own mortality, soften his autocratic character. To Jossy, the only lasting effect of the war that destroyed for ever Europe’s complacency was that her father had become slower, less mobile. He was, simply, easier to run away from.

  Through the years of her childhood, Jossy and her father and Uncle Christopher in the steward’s house lived separate li
ves, planets orbiting the necessary sun of Hall and estate, their existences conjoined, but rarely touching. Uncle Christopher’s sphere was the fields and dikes and tenant farms, Jossy’s was school and the old nursery.

  The de Paveleys’ house was called the Hall (it may have had another name once, but that had been forgotten centuries ago). The nearest village was called Southam. Both Southam and the Hall were built on small, separate, shallow islands of clay. In wet winters, floodwater licked at the shells and seedlings in Jossy’s garden.

  Jossy’s life was governed by her desire to avoid her father, to escape the contempt in his gaze and the cold sarcasm that brought tears to her eyes. Occasionally, disastrously, their orbits collided. Once he tried to teach her to ride. The lesson lasted less than an hour. Jossy slumped in the saddle as her father shouted at her and beat his riding whip against his false leg. To someone else she might have attempted to explain that though she adored the pony, she was a little afraid of it. To her father, who was never afraid of anything, she knew that would be futile. When she realized that he would sell the pony, whom she had begun to love, Jossy started to weep, which made him angrier. The whip stung her knuckles as they gripped the reins, and Edward de Paveley railed against the fate that had given him only one spineless daughter.

  Jossy divided her time between school, where she was reasonably happy, and home, where her happiness was dependent on avoiding her father. She had her own small kingdoms – the nursery, where she taught school to her dolls and gave them tea parties, and the garden, with the old swing. She had her mother’s desk in the morning room, where she wrote her stories and drew. She invented companions for herself, sketching pictures of her imaginary family. There were three sisters – Rosalie was the eldest, Claribel the youngest, and Jossy herself was in the middle. Their father was dead, and their mother was a glamorous, shadowy creature.