CHAPTER SEVEN

‘Rosi was the first of my extra children,’ said Tilda, after she had introduced us. It was Tilda’s eighty-first birthday party.

I shook hands. I estimated that Rosi Liebermann was now in her late sixties. She was tall and Junoesque, draped in colourful scarves, her long grey pigtail wound in a coronet around her head.

‘I was a dumpling,’ Rosi said, and laughed. ‘I grew four inches in my twelfth year, and acquired a magnificent bosom. No wonder that poor woman ran from me on sight.’

‘Rosi is a writer,’ said Tilda, but I knew that, of course. In my mid-teens, I had been addicted to Rosi Liebermann’s long, escapist, historical epics.

One of the great-grandchildren grabbed at Tilda’s knees and in spite of her age, in spite of her frail health, she scooped him up and the crowds closed around them. Her family had spread through The Red House; they shrieked and argued everywhere. Cars were parked along the street, visitors squeezed through the tall, tight ranks of box hedges, and were spat out onto the forecourt of the house. The doorbell rang constantly, and the sound of champagne corks was like a drumbeat. The room heaved and throbbed with Tilda’s confident, noisy, successful relatives. Those who did not dress elegantly, dressed originally; those who were not beautiful were stylish or unusual. There wasn’t a plain, dumpy, dull person there.

I turned back to Rosi Liebermann. ‘So many of Tilda’s children and grandchildren seem to be terribly illustrious.’

Her pleasant face creased in a smile. ‘Oh, I think that I’m forgotten already. My sort of fiction doesn’t last. Joshua is famous, of course. It’s a pity he couldn’t be here today.’

‘I can’t see his son,’ I couldn’t resist saying.

‘Patrick?’

Whenever I heard a car draw up outside, I looked out through the open window, but it was never the blue Renault. I felt exasperated with myself for looking; I told myself that Patrick had invited me to Wheeler’s to help with the book. That was all.

‘Tilda has always been very close to Patrick,’ said Rosi. ‘He stayed here in the school holidays when he was a child.’

The Red House, with its secret gardens and tall trees, must have been a wonderful place for a child. ‘And you, Miss Liebermann?’ I asked. ‘Did you once live here?’

‘I holidayed here, that’s all. I was married by the time Tilda bought The Red House.’

‘I’ve been researching the Kindertransporte,’ I told her. Ten thousand children had been scooped up and saved from Nazi Germany in 1939 – a fraction of the doomed six million, but a significant number nevertheless. ‘The train journey … Holland … getting ready to leave Germany … Do you remember it?’

Rosi put aside her glass. ‘I can’t remember the weeks before I left Berlin. I suspect that my parents must have tried to make life normal, unmemorable. Although those were not, of course, normal times. I didn’t really understand what was happening until we were at the station in Berlin, and it was time to leave. I thought I’d see my parents again in a few weeks’ time, you understand. But when the engine started up, I saw how my mother went behind my father and put her hands over her face. She could not bear to see me go. She could not bear to think that it might be the last time.’

I whispered, ‘And was it?’

‘Oh yes. Both my parents died in Auschwitz.’

I mumbled something inadequate, appalled by such a separation, such loss.

‘Tilda and Max became my family. Tilda and Max and Aunt Sarah. I stayed with Aunt Sarah for much of that first year in England. I was unwell – tonsillitis – and the doctor thought I needed country air, so Tilda sent me to the Fens. When Max was sent abroad by his newspaper in 1939, he didn’t think it safe to take me to Paris. I hadn’t a proper passport or visa, you see, so I went back to Aunt Sarah. The Franklins returned to London in December, and we all spent Christmas together. Then, in the New Year, Max was posted to Amsterdam.’ Rosi paused. ‘I knew that Tilda found it hard to choose – whether to go abroad with Max, or to stay in England so that all her children could be together – so I told her how much I enjoyed living in Southam. And it was true, I did enjoy it. I was a city girl, so the country was a great adventure to me.’

Someone yelled, ‘Rosi! Rosi – come over here and tell Tilda what Professor Hermann said—’ and Rosi Liebermann excused herself and disappeared into the throng.

I heard feet crunching on the gravel below, and looked down again. I glimpsed Patrick’s fair head first and then, framed by the box hedge, I saw the dark-haired woman who walked beside him, and the little girl who held her hand.

I guessed who they were, of course. The woman must be Patrick’s wife, and the child must be his daughter, Ellie. I grabbed a glass of orange juice from a tray and ducked through the crowd, escaping along the corridor, heading for the little room that Tilda had set aside for me. I had fallen into the routine of driving to The Red House on Monday, talking to Tilda and staying overnight, and returning to London on Tuesday afternoon. I spent the rest of the week writing up my notes and doing background research.

The room was cluttered with box-files and notebooks referring to the Kindertransporte and the Refugee Children’s Movement. Looking around, I acknowledged that I felt miserable because, compared to Tilda’s, my own family was pale and anaemic. A father, a sister, two nephews and a brother-in-law. The sum total of my living relations. My father and I invariably irritated or upset each other, my nephews were too young for sensible conversation and, if my brother-in-law wasn’t working, he was so tired that he snored in an armchair in front of the television. Though I love my sister, we both seem to want what the other has. I envied Tilda her large, noisy, colourful family. It was what I should have liked for myself, and I did not enjoy the feeling of exclusion that an outsider must inevitably endure at a celebration such as today’s.

I tried to distract myself by thinking about the question that had recently preoccupied me: the events of the year of 1947. I had asked Tilda, but she had said, maddeningly, ‘We have only reached 1939, Rebecca. I am too old to dart around the years.’ Tilda was organized and autocratic and, over the months, I had become very fond of her. She had never lost the energy and impulsiveness of her girlhood; her enthusiasm and love of life made me feel tired and cynical.

I collected some documents, enough to keep me busy through the weekend, and slipped out of the house. I thought that Tilda, surrounded by her relatives, would not notice that I had left without saying goodbye. I had almost reached the gate when I heard footsteps behind me. I looked back.

Patrick was running down the path, a small child clasped in his arms. The documents slipped out of my hands and swooped and fluttered, clinging to the wide topiaried boxes like posters on a billboard.

He said, ‘I saw you from the solar.’

I grabbed at the papers. The action filled in the typically awkward silence that followed. ‘I have to go.’

‘Joan’s about to serve the food.’

I shook my head. ‘It’s a family thing, Patrick.’ I made sure I didn’t sound too forlorn. ‘And I’ve work to do.’

‘I’ll walk you to your car.’

I said sharply, ‘Won’t your wife miss you?’ and he looked down at me.

‘Jennifer? I don’t think so.’ He sounded weary rather than bitter. The little girl wriggled in his arms, looked at me briefly, and said, ‘Put me down, Daddy. I want to play in the trees.’

Patrick said, ‘Ellie, this is Rebecca. Rebecca, this is my daughter, Ellie,’ but she had gone, jumping out of his grasp, ducking under the twisting yellow branches of the box.

‘She’s beautiful,’ I said, and she was.

‘She’s a livewire.’ He watched her adoringly. ‘She spent the weekend with me. She won’t sit still for more than ten seconds at a time, will you, Ellie?’ He held out a hand, and she squirmed out from the box tree and ran to him, and he hugged her.

We walked along the road to where I had parked my car. The countryside was at its best: a froth of May blossom on the hawthorns, leaves uncurling on the trees. I unlocked my car door and put the documents on the back seat. Ellie, in blithe disregard of her white party dress, played happily in a puddle at the side of the road. Patrick, like his daughter, looked fidgety.

He said, ‘I’ve been so damned busy, but I meant to phone you.’

‘About Daragh?’

‘Daragh?’ He looked bewildered. ‘No. I thought that we—’

‘Patrick. Oh, Ellie. Patrick, how could you?’

I looked up. Jennifer Franklin, her beautiful face creased with displeasure, marched along the verge and pulled her daughter out of the puddle. ‘Patrick, her dress. I bought it in Paris.’

I thought it time to go. I called a quick farewell, climbed into my car, and drove away.

The doorbell rang just as I tipped the contents of the box onto the floor. When I peeped out of the window I saw Toby. My hand shook as I took the chain off the door.

‘I thought I’d call in on my way home,’ he said. He stood on the front step, untypically hesitant. ‘Bit of a nerve coming here like this, I know, but there are things we should talk about.’

He followed me into the living room. I said, ‘I thought everything was said last October.’

‘I was a bastard. A complete bastard. I don’t blame you for hating me.’

I felt an ill-natured pleasure in his discomfort. ‘I don’t hate you, Toby,’ I said lightly, as I heaved a pile of books from an armchair so that he could sit down. ‘I did once, but I don’t now.’

‘You’re indifferent to me. I think that’s worse.’

I wanted to say all the harsh, vindictive things I had not been capable of saying when he left me. Then I saw the misery in his eyes, and I felt ashamed of myself, and went into the kitchen to make coffee. The simple, repetitive actions calmed me: measuring the beans, grinding them, pouring on the boiling water, arranging biscuits on a plate. I thought of my mother, scrubbing the kitchen floor after my father had come home from college in one of his more rancorous moods, or Jane, rinsing out baby clothes in the sink, her eyes sapphire chips set in planes of stone.

I carried the coffee in, poured it out. Black, no sugar: it irked me that I had not forgotten. I said, ‘Why now, Toby? After so long?’ I had built a fence around myself in the months since we had parted; I did not want him to breach it.

‘I tried before, but I couldn’t. And the longer you leave it, the more difficult it becomes – the more aware you are that you should have done something weeks or months ago. Then I thought I’d write, but that would have seemed cowardly.’ He looked up at me. ‘When we lost the baby, I just couldn’t cope. Nothing like that had ever happened to me, you see, Rebecca. I couldn’t accept it, I wanted to pretend that it hadn’t happened.’

My first feeling was one of surprise. Then a flicker of relief. I had always assumed that Toby had left because of me, because I was somehow not up to scratch. That the failure of our relationship was my responsibility. Yet Toby’s version of events convinced me: it fitted my knowledge of the man I had once loved. Toby Carne was the only child of doting parents. He had been to Westminster and then to Cambridge and he had become a successful barrister. He had probably had everything he wanted until the day his child had begun to bleed from my womb, six and a half months too early.

‘I’m not trying to make excuses,’ he added. ‘I just wanted to explain. I don’t think I was particularly rational at the time.’

People react to loss in different ways. After our mother died, my sister Jane fell in love with Steven, got married, and had two children, all in the space of three years. Whereas I put on a stone and a half, and wept whenever I saw a fifty-fivish woman in a blue suit. Quite a lot of fifty-fivish women wear blue suits.

There was a long silence. Of course, Toby’s explanation had come too late. Although, if I was honest with myself, a month would have been too late, or a week, or a day, or an hour. I don’t think we should see so much of each other. Those words had sown a seam of distrust that I was unable to rid myself of. I shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter now.’

He smiled, interpreting my muttered words as forgiveness. I realized then that I was free of him. Once his smile would have melted my heart. Now, not a vestige of that sharp, sudden initial attraction lingered, and for that I felt profound thankfulness.

He said suddenly, ‘I saw that television programme you made.’

‘Sisters of the Moon? Rather an appropriate theme, don’t you think? Lost babies, I mean.’

The smile faded. A considerable proportion of the documentary had been devoted to attempting to track down the daughter of Ivy Lunn, the woman who had been raped and incarcerated in a mental institution. I had found Ivy’s child – a pensioner herself now – living in a council house in Letchworth and, with the permission of both women, we had filmed their reunion. Tacky, I suppose, but touching all the same.

He asked me what I was doing now, and I explained about Tilda. Toby’s eyes narrowed and he said, ‘She’s some relation to Patrick Franklin. You telephoned me—’

‘Tilda is Patrick’s grandmother.’

‘I’ve come across him a few times. And I know Jenny, of course.’

‘Patrick’s wife? What’s she like?’

‘Beautiful. Quite stunning.’ I had seen that for myself. ‘She modelled for a while, you know.’

‘But … difficult?’

Toby looked surprised. ‘Not at all. Jenny is perfectly sweet. They split up because of the family, didn’t they? Poor old Jen couldn’t cope with the in-laws. She said they closed ranks, made her feel an outsider. Wouldn’t let her in on the family secrets.’

I was about to say that I hadn’t thought that there were any family secrets, when I recalled Tilda’s diaries and the eventful year of 1947. Jossy had died, and Max had gone, and Daragh had disappeared somewhere in the middle of a cold, lonely night. I glanced at my watch.

‘I’m expecting a pupil in a few minutes.’

‘Good Lord, Rebecca – are you teaching again? I thought you hated it.’

My annoyance returned. ‘I do. But I need the money, you see, Toby.’ I stood up to show him out.

‘We were in Paris when war was declared,’ said Tilda. ‘I remember that Max and I walked along the banks of the Seine that evening, and wondered what it would mean to us. I tried to make him promise that nothing would separate us, but he wouldn’t, of course. Max always took his promises seriously.’

It was the end of May, half-term week. Tilda had invited me for lunch. There had been a tableful of us: Melissa’s three grandsons, who were now playing cricket noisily on the front lawn, a middle-aged man who had once been one of Tilda’s Red House extra children, and Matty, who was supposed to be revising. ‘They’re just school exams,’ she said, cushioning her head on her books, and plugging in her Walkman. ‘They don’t count.’ Now we sat in the garden behind The Red House, in the little clearing with the stone nymph. Matty was lying along the path, bordered by clumps of lavender. Her dress code did not seem to permit her to make any concession to the heat: she wore black from neck to ankle. Bees buzzed at her and she brushed them carelessly away.

We talked about the events of 1939 for a while, and then there was a distant crash: Matty, whose headphones shut her off from the outside world, did not look up, but Tilda started and rose out of her chair.

‘Excuse me a moment, won’t you, Rebecca?’ She walked slowly back to the house.

I put aside my pad and pen. The garden, with its secret paths and festoons of roses, should have cheered me up, but failed to. I was to visit my father for the remainder of the week, a prospect that filled me with gloom. And though I would have liked to have been able to say that I had hardly given Toby a thought during the days that had passed since his visit, it would not have been true. When I thought about him, I shuttled in a futile fashion between anger and regret. My anger was with myself, for not seeing him clearly long ago. The regret was that he should have come upon me at my worst: a cluttered, dusty flat, hair that needed washing, and a career all too obviously struggling.

Tilda reappeared. ‘Roddy hit the ball into the cucumber frame,’ she explained. ‘The boys have cleared up the broken glass, but he was upset, so I said he could make tea.’

‘Treacle sandwiches,’ said Matty, who had unplugged herself. ‘Roddy always makes treacle sandwiches. Gross.’

‘Will you stay, Rebecca?’ asked Tilda.

I declined, less because of the treacle sandwiches than because I had to get ready for my trip to Yorkshire.

‘Melissa has invited Joan and me to spend the rest of the week at the cottage,’ added Tilda. The Parkers had a cottage in the West Country. ‘There isn’t a telephone. If you should need anything …’ She frowned. ‘Have you Patrick’s home phone number, Rebecca? No? He has a key, which he could lend you, if necessary.’

My father’s house – detached, built of stone – is beside a road that leaps and curls through the North Yorkshire Moors. The stone has darkened over the hundred and twenty years since its building, and when it rains, water from the hillside gathers in pools in the back garden. The house is a mile from the nearest village, eight miles from a doctor’s surgery or a supermarket. My father does not drive and, since deregulation, the bus passes his house only twice a day.

I arrived late on Monday afternoon, having become entangled in Bank Holiday traffic. I squeezed my car up the driveway and hauled my bag indoors. We ate Eccles cakes and drank tea in the kitchen, while conversation stuttered like my Fiesta attempting a steep hill. The kitchen combined Spartan neatness with an underlying level of grime that shocked even me. The house was too big for one person – my father’s last dream, he and my mother had moved to Yorkshire two years before she died. The stairs were, like the drive, both steep and narrow, the sash windows temperamental and leaky. The bathroom had an overhead cistern and a high-sided cast-iron bath that took hours to fill. In winter, clouds would form from your breath when you stuck your head out from beneath the blankets.

I drove my father to the supermarket the following day. Most of what I tried to put in the trolley he took out, tutting at the price. I had seen that his small fridge was almost empty, containing things like half-full tins of meatballs covered with greaseproof paper, or a single sardine nestling menacingly on a saucer. My father boasted that he could with careful management make a loaf of bread last the week. I cooked dinners for him of the traditional British food men of his generation prefer – stews and roasts and pies. No pasta, no garlic or spices. I scrubbed the grease and dust from the quarry-tiles in the kitchen and cleaned out his cupboards with a vigour and energy I rarely apply to my own. I hacked away at the weeds in his garden, found a grocer who promised to deliver supplies and, in the evenings, I read. My father has hundreds of books; he used to teach English Literature. In literature, he delights in the passionate and the exquisite, yet in reality he dismisses passion as false and self-indulgent. His favourite era encompasses the Elizabethan and Jacobean, all those jewelled little sonnets, those perfect miniatures of verse. My mother, who was a calligrapher, illuminated some of his favourites. One was framed in the room in which I slept. I long to talk with some old lover’s ghost, Who died before the god of love was born …

On the morning on which I was to leave, my father cycled to the village to buy me ham for my sandwiches. I could have explained to him that I didn’t need sandwiches, that I could stop at a motorway service station. Or that I don’t even much like ham. But I didn’t say anything because I knew that he wanted to do it for me. I watched him put on his flat cap and fit cycle clips round his turn-ups and set off on his old sit-up-and-beg bicycle for the village, slow and wobbling as he climbed the hill. And I had to turn away and blow my nose, and go quickly back into the house.

The drive back to London was slow and tedious. All three lanes of traffic stuttered to a halt outside Northampton. The car radio informed me that a Deranged Person had found his way onto the motorway, and that there had consequently been an accident. Pewter-grey clouds blanked out the blue sky, and the air was still and heavy, appropriate weather for lunacy. When I arrived home, two hours later than I had anticipated, Jason Darke, my most aggravating pupil, was waiting on my doorstep, smoking a quick ciggie. Jason – nineteen, good-looking and incorrigibly lazy – had failed his History A level the previous year, and looked likely to do so again. When he did not complete the homework I set him, which was most weeks, he employed a clumsy charm that was irritating rather than endearing. He had a good brain, but preferred to avoid using it. Most annoying of all, his blithe confidence in his future was probably justified; his father was Something in the City, and Jason expected him to use his influence successfully.

He was more irksome than usual, flirting with me in a condescendingly half-hearted way, not bothering to disguise his yawns. After we had struggled one-sidedly with the decline of the Liberal Party for an hour and he had left the house, the realization that I would have to take on more pupils next year simply to maintain my mediocre standard of living was infinitely depressing. Good Lord, Rebecca – are you teaching again? I dragged the latest box from Tilda’s house out from beneath the desk, but could not interest myself in its contents. On top of the pile were some yellowing photographs cut from a newspaper: a fishing boat; a portrait of a younger Tilda, her hair long and loose, with a serious expression on her face. I went to the fridge and poured myself a large glass of wine, but the alcohol failed to raise my spirits. I was pursued – albeit in a rather desultory fashion – by old lovers and callow youths. My financial situation was precarious: my advance would barely cover my living expenses over the eighteen months or so it would take me to complete Tilda’s biography. I was in my early thirties, without a partner or a child or a steady income. The wine blurred things, staving off the possibility that I might just sit in the middle of the carpet and howl. I realized that I hadn’t eaten since the sandwiches on the motorway, and wondered if I’d enough money for a pizza. I scrabbled in my bag for my purse, opened it, and took out the scrap of paper on which Tilda had written Patrick’s home telephone number.

If I hadn’t been a little drunk, I’d never have dialled. I rose unsteadily to my feet, picked up the receiver, and stabbed the buttons. When Patrick answered, I had no idea what to say.

‘Hello? Hello?’ Patrick’s tone altered as he repeated the word, growing more impatient. ‘Who’s calling?’

‘It’s Rebecca,’ I managed.

‘Rebecca?’ he said. ‘I was going to phone you.’

I blinked, and stared at the receiver. ‘Why?’

‘I’m going to look at a house tomorrow. I wondered whether you’d like to come with me.’

‘House?’ I said blankly.

‘I’m thinking of buying a place in Cumbria. The estate agent has sent me particulars.’

‘I saw you as more of a Docklands sort of person, Patrick. A weekend place?’

‘Something like that. Well?’

I imagined he was like that in court, barking short, incriminating questions at hesitant witnesses. ‘All right,’ I said.

He picked me up from my flat at seven o’clock the following morning. Friday’s gloomy skies had cleared, and the haze of cloud thinned as we drove out of London. I realized as we left the city behind that I felt happy. I had almost forgotten what it was like, to feel happy.

As we headed north, I said, ‘I’m travelling to the Netherlands at the beginning of June to look at the places where Tilda lived. I’ve got some names out of her address book – people to look up.’

He focused on the road ahead. ‘Who have you spoken to?’

‘Jan van de Criendt, and a woman who was Tilda’s neighbour in 1940. And Hanna Schmidt’s daughter. She lives in Scheveningen.’

I talked a bit more about Holland, and then I let the subject drop. I still sensed Patrick’s hostility to Tilda’s decision to make public the story of her life, and I didn’t want to spoil the mood of the day. Telemann and Vivaldi sang from the tape-player and we stopped every now and then for coffee. Somewhere north of Nottingham the countryside rucked and rose, shedding the green and brown dullness of middle England. Sunlight glittered on silvery lakes trapped by hills, and trees rose from slopes hazed azure with bluebells.

We stopped briefly for lunch, and then drove on. The trees became sparser, the grass replaced by heather, boulders showing through the earth like bones. Patrick consulted the map. ‘There should be a side road and then a track to the left.’

The side road proved to be the width of the Renault, circling up through the fells. We almost missed the track, two parallel ruts in the heather, climbing up the hillside at an unreasonable angle.

‘We’ll have to walk a bit. Have you suitable shoes?’

I was wearing sandals. I thought of adders, and then put them firmly out of my mind and climbed out of the car. When I looked back, the road was just a grey ribbon and the pub where we had eaten our lunch was less than a matchbox.

The fellside soared above us, rising up towards the sky like a great grey and purple tidal wave. Patrick said, ‘There it is.’

I could see nothing but a few tumbledown farm buildings, high up on the fell. Then I glimpsed, incongruously, the estate agent’s board, pinned to a fence, flapping frantically in the wind.

‘That?’

Patrick walked ahead, flattening a path through the heather. Though in the valley it had been windless, up here the breeze was both capricious and cold. Eggs of snow curled in the shaded hollows around the peaks. As we neared it, I saw that the farm consisted of three buildings – a farmhouse and two outbuildings. Sunlight glimmered on the thick roof-slates; in winter the fellside would shelter the house from the snow and winds of the north.

I was out of breath by the time we reached the house. Too much sitting at a desk and not enough exercise, I told myself sternly. I would sign up for an aerobics class in the autumn. Meanwhile Patrick had taken a key from his pocket, and was flicking through the estate agent’s flysheet.

‘We might as well start with the farmhouse. We can look at the byre and outhouse afterwards.’

He fitted the key to the lock. It creaked resentfully, and when he pushed it open I smelt cobwebs and damp, evidence of a building too long deserted. I heard tiny scurrying feet, and my eyes struggled to adjust themselves to the lack of light.

‘I should have brought a torch,’ said Patrick. ‘You don’t mind spiders, do you?’

Not in moderation, I wanted to say. I could not see how he could possibly consider buying such a heap, even as a weekend retreat. Then he pushed open a door and, all of a sudden, I did see. Light streamed through the big stone window, larger even than the window in Tilda’s solar, and painted long white bands on the stone-flagged floor.

‘Heavens,’ I whispered.

‘Exactly.’ He was smiling.

I’ve never been good at judging distances, so I could not say whether from that window you could see for five miles or for ten or for fifty. All I know was that it was as though you could see the whole world, in all its splendour, like a tapestry spread out before you. The chain stitch of the roads and dry stone walls; the herringbone of the rivers and streams; French knots of boulders and barns, and lakes and tarns of cloth of silver.

I dragged my gaze from the view and looked around the room. It was vast, its height reaching the vaulted roof, the fireplace immense and baronial. I imagined it with curtains and rugs and burning logs and candles in sconces. When we went through to the next room, the kitchen, I saw that it too was huge.

‘At least there’s an Aga.’

‘Circa 1925,’ said Patrick, inspecting it. ‘Coal-fired.’

It would take about three hours, I thought, to warm up an M & S Chicken Kiev for one. We toured the rest of the house, in which a bathroom was conspicuously absent, and then went to look at the outbuildings. Heavy clouds had gathered on the peaks while we had been inside. They blackened the fellside.

‘The … um … facilities,’ said Patrick, glancing dubiously at the brochure and then opening a door.

There was a sort of bench, set with a wooden plank in which three holes of diminishing circumference were cut. Father, Mother and Baby Bear. I shut the door quickly.

Patrick strode to the next building. ‘The byre,’ he said, opening the door to a huge barn. ‘To protect the sheep in winter.’

While we were inside inspecting the dark cavern, the rain began. It drove down in silvery stair-rods, flattening the heather, bouncing on boulders buried in the gorse. We were both wearing jeans and T-shirts. I stood in the doorway, watching the rain, and Patrick came to stand beside me. Where his body touched mine – shoulder, elbow, hip – my skin tingled.

‘What do you think?’ he said.

I stared at him blankly. His eyes were blue in the centre of the iris, a ring of charcoal grey around the outside.

‘The house,’ he added patiently.

‘Oh … well, it’s wonderful, of course.’

‘Stunning, isn’t it? In London one feels so hemmed in. Here – well, you can breathe, can’t you?’

‘But it would be an impossible place to live, Patrick. Difficult … and inaccessible.’

‘I’ve always liked the difficult and the inaccessible.’ His eyes still held mine. ‘So much more of a challenge.’

I said quickly, ‘You’d go mad after an hour or two. So isolated. You’d miss the pubs and clubs and restaurants.’

‘I wouldn’t. Not in the least. Nor would I miss the traffic jams and the Tube at rush hour and the poor sods you see begging on the Embankment. Some of the company I’d miss, though.’

He leaned forward and his lips touched my forehead. The rain had thickened.

‘Me?’ I whispered.

‘Mmm. If I abandon the law and become a gentleman farmer, would you miss me, Rebecca Bennett?’

I didn’t say another word. Instead, I touched his lips with mine, small, delicate kisses that made me close my eyes, drunk with the nearness of him. His hands rested lightly on my waist and then travelled up my spine beneath my T-shirt, his palms gliding over my bare skin.

The rain drummed against the stone roof of the byre. I had forgotten that it was possible to want someone so much that you don’t care where, or how. I had forgotten how much more powerful are the desires of the body than the warnings of the mind. I made love to him, lying in the straw, with the barn door open and the rain beating down, breaking the silence of the hills.

Caitlin Canavan started at her new school in the January of 1939, when she was five. Daragh had put the day off as long as possible, and had suggested a governess, but Jossy had been insistent. With Caitlin at school, she would have Daragh to herself again.

For her first day, Caitlin wore a navy gymslip and white blouse, a grey tweed coat and a grey felt hat trimmed with a blue band, pulled over her black curls. Daragh took a photograph of her standing on the front steps of the Hall, her tiny leather satchel clutched in her hand. ‘Don’t you look the little princess, Kate,’ he said, and hugged her before they climbed in the car. Then they drove to Ely, and escorted Caitlin through the exclusive gates of Burwood School. A teacher took Caitlin from them, and they were left empty-handed as their daughter joined a long crocodile of little girls heading into the building.

Daragh watched Caitlin until she could no longer be seen, and then he turned on his heel and walked briskly back to the car. He tossed the keys to Jossy. ‘You drive back, Joss. I’ve business here. I’ll walk home. I could do with a walk.’

Jossy sat in the car, the keys in the ignition, but did not yet start up the engine. She felt, as she always did on such occasions, a terrible disappointment and grief. Her grief was not for her daughter, who had begun a new stage of her life, but for her husband. She knew that Daragh would spend the morning with a woman. She knew that she, as always, had hoped for too much.

As she drove back to Southam, Jossy repeated to herself all the things she always said on such occasions. That Daragh was hers, and that none of his affairs lasted for more than a few months. That she, and only she, slept under the same roof as him at night, and dined at the same table. That his wedding ring was on her left hand, and that she had given birth to his daughter. That he would eventually grow out of his need for those other women. They might hurt her, but she need not fear them.

She feared only Tilda, whom she had never seen. Tilda, her sister. She often thought about Tilda; it was like scratching away at an unhealed sore. She believed Tilda to be the twin of those imaginary sisters of her childhood, lighthearted and beautiful and charming. All that she herself was not. She guessed that Tilda was the sort of person for whom everything was easy. Jossy hated her.

The winter, which was ice-cold and wind-ridden, claimed the life of Christopher de Paveley that February. At the funeral, great draughts shrieked through the gaps around windows and doors, and seared the stained glass with ice. The mourners – ancient old schoolfriends of Christopher’s, decrepit comrades-in-arms of his service in the Great War, and red-faced shooting companions – wore their furs and overcoats. They brayed the hymns and joined in loudly in the responses. Though Jossy’s uncle had been dead only a few days, Daragh found that it was an effort to remember what he had looked like. Stooping, thin, whey-faced, like his son. Daragh’s gaze alighted on Kit de Paveley. The fellow had bronchitis or something, and wheezed like an old bellows as he struggled to bear his father’s coffin.

The service was brief and pallid, like all Anglican services. The burial that followed was an ordeal of wind and cold. Tiny spots of snow polka-dotted a leaden sky. When it was over, Daragh and Jossy and Kit stood at the lych gate, shaking hands with the mourners. Sympathy was muttered, condolences expressed. Daragh was bored, utterly bored, until the woman cut him.

Elizabeth Layton was an acquaintance of Jossy’s, and on every do-gooding committee in Cambridgeshire. She shook hands with Kit and then with Jossy, and then just walked past Daragh. He felt a jolt of anger, but told himself that it had been a mistake, not a deliberate insult. Yet the small incident rankled, and when, a few moments later, the last of the mourners left the churchyard, Daragh looked out into the road and saw her again, and walked to her side.

When she turned to him, he saw that she had dark, intelligent eyes.

‘I’m afraid that I haven’t had the opportunity to thank you for coming today. I just wanted you to know how much we appreciate your being here.’ Daragh smiled his best smile, the one that always won them over, and held out his hand. She looked down at it, but did not take it, so he added, floundering, ‘You must accept my apologies if you were overlooked—’

‘You did not overlook me, Mr Canavan. I did not choose to shake hands with you.’

She turned to go, but he grabbed her elbow. ‘I demand that you explain yourself!’

‘You have no right to demand anything of me. I had hoped to avoid speaking of such a subject on this occasion. But since you insist, Mr Canavan, I do not approve of the company that you keep. Of course many men stray once in a while, but when they do so it should be with one of their own class, who knows the rules. It should not be with a feather-headed little servant.’

He couldn’t think what she was talking about at first, and then he remembered Cora Dyce. Cora was nursemaid to a family in Cambridge; Daragh had met her through one of Caitlin’s friends.

The snow was falling thicker now. The woman said, ‘Cora Dyce is expecting your child, Mr Canavan. Did you know that?’

Her words struck him like a blow. ‘But I only saw her once or twice …’ he said feebly.

Mrs Layton’s smile was unamused. ‘Once or twice is enough, isn’t it?’

He muttered, ‘I had no idea …’

‘Although Cora is silly, she is not vicious. I don’t think the same can be said for you, Mr Canavan. Cora’s mother works for me. She came to me when she discovered her daughter’s condition. And you need not worry, she will ask nothing of you. The matter will be dealt with discreetly. Not to protect you, Mr Canavan, but because I like and respect Mrs Dyce.’

Elizabeth Layton walked away, leaving Daragh standing alone at the roadside. Motor cars had begun to drive back to the Hall, making twin herringbone tracks in the soft covering of snow. There was an odd, empty feeling in the pit of Daragh’s stomach. He crossed the road to Jossy.

‘I’ll walk back, if you don’t mind, Joss. I’ve a bit of a headache.’ He gave her a peck on the cheek, and headed for the path through the fields.

Little blots of snow danced in the air, but the black bones of the ploughed fields showed through the incomplete covering of white. The land spread out to either side of him, as flat as a board, with only the dike to interrupt the eye before it found the horizon. There were no people, and even the birds, Daragh thought, huddled together in the reeds, out of sight. The cold, sharp air stung his lungs.

He climbed to the top of the dike, and saw how the long narrow length of water, trapped by the clay walls, had begun to turn to ice. He sat down on the bank, his head in his hands, not caring that the snow gathered on his shoulders and head, as it gathered on the land around him. His self-loathing was absolute. When he looked back over the last few years, he saw that he had lost sight of what he had meant to do with his life, and that he had acquired the careless dissolution of the English upper classes whom he had always scorned. Worst of all, he had let down Caitlin. He was not a father she could be proud of.

He saw how his longing for Tilda and his resentment of Sarah Greenlees’ interference had eaten away at him through the years of his marriage. With Tilda, he had been a better person. His fingers slid slowly down from his eyes, and when he looked round he noticed that even in the brief period of his sitting, the bands of ice that clung to the banks of the dike had begun to widen, spreading their dull grey grip across the water. Soon, if nothing halted it, the floes would meet in the middle, and the water would be stilled. His own life had begun to harden, something cold and poisonous seizing it, so that he had become, without intending it, worthy of contempt.

He stood up slowly; the chill had already entered his bones. He wanted to tear off his clothes and plunge into the dike so that the icy water could purify him, so that he could start again, but he knew that the cold embrace would kill him. He wanted to run as far as he could from this devilish place, but he would stay, he knew, for Kate, whom he loved.

He looked across the fields again. Part of the trouble was that he, who had always been able to turn his hand to anything, was now idle. Idleness did not suit him; it had let his mind drift to occupations that diminished him. Daragh walked back to the Hall, the fast tread of his shoes leaving hollows in the snow.

Daragh called at the steward’s house the following morning. By then the snow had settled, so that the roof of the house was brighter than the whitewashed walls. When he rapped on the front door, the housekeeper showed him in.

Glancing through doorways, Daragh saw that all the rooms were much the same, that there was no differentiation between dining room and drawing room and study. They were all full of books and old-fashioned furniture and rows of stones and dirty bits of pot, with hardly a fire lit. The place needed a woman’s touch, but Daragh could not imagine the woman who would choose to marry Kit de Paveley.

Kit was in a square, ill-lit room at the back of the building. He nodded to Daragh; Daragh muttered condolences, and clapped him on the shoulder. He could feel the younger man’s bones through his clothing.

Daragh said, ‘I thought, now that your father’s gone, we should talk about the estate.’

Pale eyes, fringed with white lashes, glanced warily up. ‘The estate?’

‘The farm. You’re working now, aren’t you, Kit?’

Jossy had told Daragh that Kit was teaching at a boys’ school in Cambridge. Daragh thought that it wasn’t much of a job for a man.

‘I’m teaching classics,’ said Kit.

‘That’s great,’ Daragh said breezily, and glanced at Kit’s thin, hunched frame. ‘And I suppose you wouldn’t be up to farming, anyway?’

Kit’s pale eyes narrowed. ‘You’re planning to take over the farm.’ It was a statement, not a question.

‘It didn’t seem right to barge in while the old fellow was alive, but it’s what I’ve always wanted. My family owned a farm in Ireland, of course.’

The corners of Kit’s mouth twisted. ‘The Fens aren’t like Ireland, you know. They’ve a geography and a history all of their own. You have to understand the land. I can lend you a book or two—’

Daragh brushed the offer aside. ‘It’s your father’s record books I’ve come for.’ He glanced at his watch, longing suddenly to escape the cold, airless house. ‘Bring them up to the Hall this afternoon, won’t you? Oh—’ Daragh, as he turned to go, recalled Kit’s peculiar hobby. ‘Jossy said to tell you that it’s all right about your digging. As long as you don’t get in my way, it won’t bother me at all.’

In 1939, Max thought, you could hear the nails being hammered into the coffin. Spain had fallen to Fascism in January, and Hitler had seized the weakened remains of Czechoslovakia in March. Mussolini, ever the opportunist, bombed Albania in April. The newspapers printed cheery headlines: HITLER GET THE JITTERS, NO WAR THIS YEAR.

Clara Franklin had a fall and broke her hip. Tilda, who was fond of Max’s mother, had wanted to drive down with Max to the nursing home, but could not, in the end, get away. ‘Slippery lino,’ explained a white-faced Mrs Franklin from her hospital bed, but Max, checking his mother’s flat that evening, saw the gin bottles in the dustbin.

Brighton always induced in him a measure of gloom and anger. He celebrated his return to London by quarrelling with both Harold and Freddie. He did not get home until half past eleven at night. Tilda was in bed, asleep, and his dinner was congealing in the oven. As he scraped food from the plate into the bin and found cheese and biscuits, he calculated that he and Tilda had not spoken to each other for three days. He had been in Brighton, or working, or she had been involved with the RCM. He sat down at the kitchen table, his head in his hands. He longed for a drink, but resisted the temptation. He must be out of the house early the following morning to interview some tedious politician, to write yet another mendacious, morale-boosting article.

He dreaded that his and Tilda’s future would become one of increasing separation. He saw how people gathered themselves to her, and feared that there might one day be no room for him. He knew how easily events could come between people, levering them apart, dissolving the glue of common experience. His father had worked long hours, and Max could remember his mother’s slow descent from bewildered loneliness to a frantic gaiety that had led her to seek company elsewhere. In the aftermath of a depressing couple of days, it crossed Max’s mind to wonder whether Tilda would be quite so otherwise engaged if she had married Daragh Canavan. Max imagined Daragh as a sort of Irish Rhett Butler. Good-looking, in an obvious way, and utterly unprincipled.

He realized that he was becoming self-pitying – a revolting failing – so he carried his plate and glass into the sitting room in search of the newspaper to read. The room was littered with children’s toys, and the square foot of space for his plate on the table was obtained at the expense of a heap of Joshua’s paintings. Josh’s idea of art was to cover an entire sheet of paper with red paint (always red), applied with the thick brushes that Tilda made for him out of rolled-up newspaper. Melissa’s paintings were of an altogether different character. Max had hopes of Melissa: at three and a half she drew figures with limbs and features that were even, sometimes, recognizable.

He finished his supper and glanced at his daughter’s painting. Melissa had drawn Max wearing his Burberry and hat, and Tilda in the blue dress that he had bought for her birthday. Joshua, as in all of Melissa’s paintings, was disproportionally small, as though to diminish his importance. Max put the painting aside. Then he went upstairs and for a while watched Tilda sleeping, hardly able to bear to acknowledge to himself how much he loved her, and how much he sometimes feared that she did not love him in quite the same measure.

Through the year of 1939, the ages of the children on the Kindertransporte dropped dramatically. Babies and toddlers began to arrive in Harwich, having been looked after throughout the long journey by their older brothers and sisters or, sometimes, just pushed through the carriage window by a desperate mother into the lap of an unknown elder child. They broke Tilda’s heart, those babies, who had wept through Germany and Holland and across the North Sea in the arms of unfamiliar thirteen- or fourteen-year-old minders.

The boat-train now arrived in Harwich almost every day. The offices of the RCM were chaotic, understaffed and lacking professional help, chronically short of both money and suitable foster parents. All funding for the children had to be raised privately; the government refused to help beyond easing entry restrictions. Every now and then a foster placement that had appeared to be eminently suitable was shown to be anything but: a twelve-year-old refugee girl would be found slaving as a maid-of-all-work, or a boy, already disturbed by his experiences in Germany, would be beaten for wetting the bed. Throughout the summer, Tilda felt as though she was frantically applying sticking plaster to a wound that constantly threatened to re-open. At night she dreamt of those children: the girl who had escaped persecution in Germany to find a different, subtler sort of torment in England; the baby who had travelled to Harwich in the arms of a stranger, a ten-mark note and a letter explaining his circumstances enclosed by his mother in the uppermost of the six nappies she had pinned to him to keep him dry through the long journey.

Late home one evening, Tilda found Max in the kitchen. She kissed him on the cheek. ‘Sorry, darling – there was a last minute problem.’

He said, ‘I gave the tickets to Charlotte.’ His back was to her.

Her hand flew to her mouth. They had arranged to go to a concert. ‘Oh, Max—’

He was flinging the dishes so forcefully into the hot, soapy water that she feared they would break. ‘Max, I’m so sorry—’

‘You could have telephoned.’ His voice was taut. ‘At least you could have telephoned.’

She muttered miserably, ‘I forgot.’ Somewhere in the long, frantically complicated day, the treat that she had been looking forward to for a week had slipped from her mind.

‘Didn’t you bother to write it in your diary? Along with all the other appointments – among the committee meetings and the fund-raising activities – wasn’t there a “meet husband”?’

His sarcasm wounded her. She tried to explain. ‘I did write it down, but I forgot to look in my diary. I didn’t have time. Max – you’ll break that jug—’

He slammed the jug onto the draining board. ‘What shall I do, Tilda? Shall I make another appointment to spend an evening with you?’

In the silence that followed, a voice echoed distantly. Daragh’s, saying, Where do I fit into your scheme of things, Tilda? She whispered, ‘Max – I’m doing something useful at last – not much, just sticking fingers in a dam – but oh, Max – if you could see those children!’

He dried his hands and lit a cigarette. ‘And your own children – Melissa and Josh and Rosi – which are more important to you?’

‘That’s not fair, Max,’ she said slowly. Tears stung at her eyes. ‘Our children are the most important thing in the world to me.’

‘But they are not enough.’

She stared at him, suddenly appalled. She loved her family more than she could have believed possible; she would have given her life for any one of them. And yet—

‘We are not enough,’ repeated Max. He sounded tired. ‘Are we, Tilda?’

She looked away from him. At home, she had felt confined and bored. When her work with the Kindertransporte had begun, it had been as though she had fitted the final piece into a jigsaw. There was something lacking in her, she thought miserably, her unsettled, itinerant childhood had left her unfit for normal family life.

‘I’ve been offered a new post,’ said Max abruptly. ‘I’d intended to turn it down because it would mean going abroad, leaving you, but …’ He shrugged.

As we hardly ever see each other anyway … The remainder of his sentence hung in the air, unsaid. She sat down at the kitchen table, her face turned away from him, her knuckles pressed against her teeth. Her whole life, she thought, had been a series of desertions. The father who had never acknowledged her, the mother who had died, the lover who had betrayed her. And now Max.

‘You want to go away … because of me?’

He flung out his hands in a gesture of despair. ‘I want to go away because I can’t bear to write any more duplicitous little pieces about how Hitler’s going to back down because Britain and France have made a pact with Poland. And I want to go away because if I write anything that might show the loyal British public just how close we really are to war, D-notices are clamped on it almost before the ink is dried. And because—’ He broke off, and shook his head. Then he added, ‘So I made a fuss, and they’ve offered me a foreign correspondent post at last. It would give me more freedom, but it would mean living abroad.’ He lit another cigarette, and stood at the window, his back to her, smoking. It was midsummer, and through the open window Tilda could smell in the darkening air the thick, oily scent of lavender. She asked Max the question she had never previously dared to voice.

He swung back to her. ‘War? Oh – a week. Perhaps two or three. No more, Tilda.’

War. She felt an almost physical fear as she saw how war diminished everything else. How it would rob them all of the right to decide their futures. And how, just now, it clarified everything for her.

‘You must take the post, Max,’ she said. ‘I know how much you want to.’ She rose from her seat and began to dry plates and cups and put them away, as though by impressing order upon her home she could control a shapeless, frightening future.

‘And you?’

‘Perhaps we shall come with you.’

He stared at her. ‘Tilda, I said that there will be a war—’

‘And when there is, we shall go home.’ All the china was stacked neatly in the dresser; she shut the double doors. ‘You’ll know, Max, when we must go.’

‘And the children? Rosi? It wouldn’t be safe to take Rosi abroad – she hasn’t a full passport.’ The dying sun shadowed the lines and planes of Max’s face, casting hollows around his dark blue eyes, carving runnels from nose to mouth. He said, ‘And the Kindertransporte?’

‘The transports will cease as soon as war breaks out. You know that too, Max. They will be trapped.’ And she saw in her mind’s eye the faces of the children pressed against the windows of the carriages, the shadows of tree and lamp cast across the glass like bars.

After the declaration of war at the beginning of September, Daragh tried to join up, but was told that his was a reserved occupation. He felt a mixture of disappointment and relief. He would have liked the activity and perhaps the danger of war, though not the squalor or the tedium. It would have been a relief to escape Jossy for a while, but he would have missed Caitlin dreadfully. He would have been glad to get away from the muddle in which Christopher de Paveley had left the estate, but he remained confident that he could sort things out.

Although Jossy watched him like a hawk, he had not strayed since the debacle with Cora Dyce. The reverberations of that episode still echoed. Shunned by certain people, struck off invitation lists, Daragh knew that Elizabeth Layton had talked. At first, for Caitlin’s sake, he cared, but as the coldness continued he gave up trying to seek the county set’s approval. ‘They’re just strutting peacocks,’ he said to Caitlin, as he gave her a riding lesson. ‘We don’t need them, do we, Kate? We’re better than the lot of them.’

Caitlin trotted her pony round the paddock. ‘We’re better than the lot of them,’ she sang. ‘We’re better than the lot of them.’

Daragh had his hands full with the farm. Somehow he had expected that the place would more or less run itself, as his granda’s farm seemed to have done. It did not, though, and he lurched from one crisis to the next. The fencing collapsed and the sheep escaped into the new wheat; a ditch became clogged with reeds and flooded a field. In spring, when the snow melted, the water lay on the land, refusing to drain away, sullenly reflecting the sky like a black mirror, rotting the crop of potatoes that he had sown. When he looked back through the records, Daragh discovered that the farm had made little profit since the war. Edward de Paveley had lived off his capital, and that and the death duties had eaten away at the estate. What had, upon his marriage, seemed unlimited wealth, was in reality a dwindling source of income. He tried to economize, but it was difficult. They were already short of servants – only a cook, maid and nanny for that great barn of a house. The gardener had died and his boy had been called up, so Jossy attempted to keep the garden tidy. Caitlin’s smart school cost a mint of money, but what was the point of anything if she didn’t have the best? She had a wardrobe fit for a princess – a black velvet coat with a fur collar, a silk tussore party dress, a tiny little riding jacket and jodhpurs, and a pony of her own. He gave her everything she asked for.

That autumn, two evacuees were billeted at the Hall. Jossy tried to wriggle out of it, but Daragh, recalling the photographs of whey-faced slum children in the newspapers, drove to the reception centre and picked out a pair of brothers. Norman and Arthur Green came from the Isle of Dogs. Their knees were black with dirty scabs and their mouths permanently open, wet with saliva as they breathed adenoidally. Daragh handed them over to Nana to give them a bath, and the screams echoed through the house. At supper, they stuffed egg sandwiches whole into their mouths and refused to drink their milk without a dash of tea in it. Caitlin looked on, hardly eating, her dark eyes filled with disgust.

Norman and Arthur attended the village school. Most days, they would return to the Hall with their knees and knuckles even bloodier than before, because the village boys, sensing them to be different, had set on them on the way home. Daragh suspected that Norman and Arthur could look after themselves. Jossy largely ignored them, and Caitlin continued to regard them with repelled curiosity, as though they were a new sort of animal that she had not hitherto encountered in one of her picture books. And they ran rings round Nana.

After Norman and Arthur had been at the Hall a few weeks, Daragh thought that Caitlin seemed under the weather. She hadn’t her usual enthusiasm for her daily ride, and she kept scratching her head. The following day, he noticed that Arthur and Norman, too, were always scratching. With a feeling of horror, he went through Caitlin’s curls with a fine comb. They were seething with lice. When he seized Norman and Arthur and dragged them into the bathroom and inspected their heads, Daragh hated them, though he knew his hatred to be unreasonable.

‘They’ll have to go,’ said Jossy, when he told her that evening.

He knew that she meant the boys, not the lice. This time, he did not argue. Norman and Arthur were found another billet the following day, in a cramped little cottage in Southam. Daragh spent hours combing through Kate’s hair until it was clean again.