She dreamt of 1940, sailing across the North Sea with Felix and Hanna and Erich. The tiny craft exposed on the great expanse of water. The fog that surrounded the English coast had magnified the sound of the sea lapping against the bows, and the shouting of the men on the beach.
Tilda awoke. Lying in the darkness, she remembered how Harold Sykes’s newspaper article about the crossing had changed her life. ‘Tilda Franklin? Didn’t you …?’ people had said when she had introduced herself, adding some ludicrously inaccurate version of her flight from Holland. At first she had tried to explain that she had just needed to get home to her children, but that too had been misinterpreted, ANGEL OF AMSTERDAM SAYS, I DID IT FOR MY BABIES! She had resented the intrusion into an episode that she would have preferred to forget, just as now, sometimes, she had to swallow her resentment of Rebecca’s questioning. There had been fear behind her anger at the assumption that her life had become public property, fear of the pointing fingers, the invasive questions, the crass curiosity about her origins. That fear lingered. She had never shaken off the shame she felt at her procreation, her birth, her earliest years. And the uncritical admiration of strangers had driven further the wedge between herself and Max. Max had seen her flight from Holland rather differently: an unnecessary risk, the breaking of a promise. Promises had been important to Max.
Though it was June, she felt cold. Younger, she would have walked for miles to chase away her demons, or surrounded herself with her family. Old age reduced you to essentials, and to memory. A frail body and a tormenting memory. She hoped that when she had told Rebecca everything she needed to know, she herself would be free.
Now, though, she was still enchained. The war years lingered, in all their danger and drama and tedium. When she closed her eyes, trying to shut out the darkness, she saw the faces of those whom the war had taken. Clara Franklin. Felix van de Criendt. In 1941, Clara Franklin had been dancing in a nightclub when a bomb had struck a direct hit. Tilda remembered scouring a battered London for a bunch of the scarlet lilies that Clara had loved. Max, working abroad as a war correspondent, had been unable to attend his mother’s funeral. Another brick built into the wall with which he had surrounded himself. Max had been able to grieve properly neither for the mother who had died, nor for the mother he might have wished to have had. The snatched, unsatisfactory days that she and Max had been able to spend with each other during the war years had been marked by physical and emotional exhaustion. He had been reluctant to talk, she too busy to coax him. She had feared that they would never regain their old intimacy, or worse, that it had been hollow, built on sand.
Irony had haunted her throughout the war: the irony of saving Hanna and Erich from almost certain death, while losing their saviour. Felix van de Criendt had joined the RAF as soon as he had turned eighteen. He had been killed in 1942, when a German plane had shadowed his bomber as he had flown back to England. Felix had been gunned down within sight of his airfield, almost home, a pitiless death, a mockery of bravery and youth. Tilda had wept for Felix and had felt a complicity in his death, because she had brought him to England.
And the irony of surviving the Blitz, only to have her home destroyed by a V-2 rocket in the last year of the war. She had felt safe, she had told Max, when he had remonstrated with her for remaining in London in the autumn of 1940. She had sent the children to Sarah, in Southam, but she herself had returned to London, because she had work to do. When the worst of the Blitz was over, the children had come home. Then, years later, in the January of 1945, returning from the shops, Tilda had seen the plume of smoke rising from the street where she lived. The bomb had struck the row of terraced houses, destroying her home and those to either side of it. The little square of trees and grass had been littered with splintered branches and fallen leaves, and a pram had lain on its side on the pavement, its wheels buckled. At the corner of the square had been a motor car, the dust a grey shroud for its motionless occupants. Someone had made her a cup of tea, taking her silence for shock or despair at all she had lost, but she had felt only a sense of relief so intense that she had almost fainted. The children were safe: the loss of the home that she and Max had built up over ten years had seemed unimportant compared to that. When they returned from school, Josh had run among the rubble and dust, delighted by the strange new landscape, and Melissa had wept. Such a mess she had said, all my things are in such a mess. Hanna and Rosi had been sensible and comforting, as usual, and Erich had stared at the ruins and coughed his habitual little cough, and chewed at the tags of skin around his fingernails. Then they had taken what could be salvaged, and had gone to live with Sarah, in Southam.
Tilda’s eyelids had grown heavy … She did not want to think of Southam. She had not wanted to return to Southam then, and she did not wish to do so now. Yet the images persisted. May 1945. VE Day. Putting up bunting in the village hall. Feeling not joy, but relief and weariness and a persistent sorrow. Escaping the chatter of the women and children, and running along the path by the church to the dike. Sitting on top of the bank, and looking out across the fields to where puffy blue clouds nestled on the horizon. Closing her eyes, breathing in the scent of the flowers …
Meadowsweet and mayweed. She could smell them still.
I remember …
Brushing blades of grass from her dress, Tilda stood up, looking for Josh. ‘That boy,’ she said, exasperated, out loud. Josh was a wanderer.
The fields were deserted except for a solitary man, walking the perimeter. Tilda hailed Kit de Paveley as she ran down the bank.
‘Mr de Paveley!’
His face was shadowed by the brim of his straw hat. Tilda had seen Kit de Paveley half a dozen times since she had returned to Southam, alighting from the bus on the way back from the school in which he taught, or queueing for stamps in the post office. She never thought of Kit de Paveley as her cousin, any more than she thought of Joscelin de Paveley as her sister. She tried not to think of their relationship at all.
‘I’m sorry to bother you, but I wonder whether you’ve seen a little boy … eight years old … wearing …’ Tilda struggled to recall what Josh had dressed himself in that morning ‘… shorts and a striped jersey.’
Kit shook his head. Then he said, ‘Where did you get that?’ He was staring at her lucky coin, reclaimed from Max, strung again round her neck.
‘This?’ Tilda glanced back at the dike. ‘At the foot of the bank. I can’t remember exactly. I found it years ago.’
‘May I see it?’
She pulled it over her head and gave it to him. ‘Is it very old?’
‘It’s Roman. Silver. Quite rare. I’ve found plenty of pottery shards but very few coins, and those only bronze.’ Kit’s pale eyes were shining. ‘The Romans were the first people to drain the Fens. I believe that there was a settlement here – I’ve found tesserae in the vicarage garden, and there are signs of earthworks all over the estate. Of course, there’s some disagreement over whether they settled in any numbers this far east, but I intend to prove—’
He broke off suddenly. ‘I do beg your pardon, Mrs Franklin. Your son—’
‘Josh will turn up. He always does. Would you like to keep the coin, Mr de Paveley?’
A flush stained Kit’s pale skin. ‘I couldn’t possibly—’
‘Please.’ She smiled at him. ‘I’d like you to have it. When you are famous, and you have an exhibition in the British Museum, then you can write on the label “Donated by Mrs Tilda Franklin”, and I shall feel very erudite and honoured.’
Something woke her: a bird’s cry, or the rumble of traffic from the road. Tilda sat up in bed, her heart beating too fast, staring at the darkness. If she pulled aside the curtain, would she see The Red House’s tangled, beautiful garden, or the flat fields and narrow waterways of Southam?
Her aching body, as she leaned across and switched on the bedside lamp, reminded her that she was old now, and in Oxfordshire, and alone. The lamplight illuminated her bedroom, but she longed still for dawn. In the early hours of the morning, all her fears gathered, and she was aware of her close proximity to death. Her mind, plagued by the past, raced along avenues of self-reproach. If … if … The awful relentlessness of the past. The immutability of it.
Rebecca’s visits, so necessary to her intention, tormented her. They stirred memories that had long lain hidden, memories that fluttered to the surface, colourful and jarring, sweet and painful. She thought of Kit again, holding her coin in the palm of his hand, his eyes, as he looked down at it, bright with a sort of longing. It occurred to her that Rebecca and Kit plied a similar trade: they both delved in the darkness for nuggets of silver, fragments of truth.
Badgering Patrick’s protective secretary, I managed to get through to him at his chambers. I read him the newspaper report. Human remains have been discovered in a Cambridgeshire dike … ‘In Southam, Patrick.’
‘Hell,’ he said.
‘Patrick, it could be Daragh.’
‘It could be anyone.’
‘But if it is—’
‘I’ll make some inquiries. Leave it with me.’ A pause. ‘Don’t say anything to Tilda yet, Rebecca. No point in upsetting her unnecessarily.’
I agreed readily. We talked a little, but he seemed rushed, so I said goodbye and put the phone down, aware of my unease.
Hell, he had said. He should have sounded surprised, or shocked. But he had not. He had been angry.
Patrick phoned a few days later and asked me to come to his flat that evening. There, he poured me a glass of wine. ‘I managed to talk to someone in the Cambridgeshire police. Informally, of course – he owed me a favour.’
I glanced up at him. ‘And? Was it murder?’
‘The hands and feet had been bound. They found the remains of the strips of leather.’ He smiled grimly. ‘Yes, they think it was murder. There’s not much forensic evidence, but the fact that it was hidden in such a manner …’ He did not finish his sentence.
‘Have the police identified the body?’
He shrugged. ‘There were no convenient watches or rings. The skeleton was male, somewhat above average height, youngish. That’s all.’
Daragh, at the time of his disappearance, had been in his mid-thirties. And he had been tall. I had pinned a copy of his photograph to the board above my desk: I thought of it now, that innocent, vulpine face.
‘Can they tell when he died?’
‘The dike was breached in the floods of March 1947 and repaired over the following weeks. They’ve only just begun to look into it, but there doesn’t seem to have been much work carried out since on that part of the earthworks until this summer, when the body was found.’
Which meant that the body had been concealed in April 1947. Daragh Canavan had disappeared in the April of 1947. I looked across the room at Patrick.
‘Come here,’ he said.
I went to him. He took my glass out of my hands and put it on the table. Then he began to unbutton my shirt. ‘They can’t rule out the possibility,’ he said, as he bent and kissed my breasts, ‘that the victim was buried alive.’
I shivered. ‘Are you cold?’ he said.
I shook my head. My shirt slithered to the floor. ‘Such a horrible way to die. I can’t imagine anything worse.’ He straightened, and I kissed him, drawing him towards me, exploring his mouth with my tongue, as if by immersing myself in his warm, breathing body I could shut out the images that crowded into my head.
We made love on one of the bleached cream rugs, our need for each other too urgent to walk the few yards to the bedroom. Patrick’s skin tasted of salt and when his hands touched my body my nerve-ends burned. Just for a moment, when he was inside me, and I could feel the weight of his body on mine, I thought of Daragh, alive in the darkness of the dike, spadefuls of earth weighting down his chest, his lungs, his heart. But then the aching pleasure gathered force and could not be resisted, and I heard my cry of delight echo against the walls and window panes.
We spent the night together, rising early the next morning; Patrick had to fly to Edinburgh on business. I took a taxi back to my flat and showered and drank coffee and tried to concentrate on my work. I had spent the last few days studying the war years. Though the V-2 rocket that had landed on Tilda’s house in January 1945 had destroyed some records and diaries, she had become a minor public figure, so I was able to get information from newspapers and magazines. Tilda had continued to work with the Kindertransporte children throughout the war, and in 1944 had become involved with arrangements for evacuating children from London during the terror of the V-1 doodlebug bombs. I imagined her darting around Britain in crowded trains, or cycling through unlit, unsignposted country roads to check on the suitability of her charges’ billets.
Charlotte Sykes had joined up at the end of 1940; Tilda had afterwards relied on Sarah Greenlees to help her with the children. Max had stayed on in Germany after 1945 to cover the Nuremberg trials; by that time Tilda’s work had largely fizzled out. Yet the war had changed her. It had allowed her, as it had allowed so many women, the opportunity to use all her gifts. Ancient minutes of committee meetings showed me her organizational skills; letters to uncaring or ignorant officialdom proved her passion. She had possessed a valuable and unusual mix of talents, the greatest of which was her ability to attract love. Not only the love of men, but of women and, of course, children. She had a warmth, an ability which made everyone feel that they, and only they, were the person she most wanted to be with. I too had sensed that; I too felt drawn to her.
Today, though, I could not concentrate. My body recalled Patrick’s, and my mind persisted in drifting to a lonely earthworks, and a man bound hand and foot and buried alive. My desire, my horror, made me shudder. I pushed aside the laptop, and doodled aimlessly on my notepad. I was certain that those workmen, repairing the dike, had found Daragh Canavan’s body. Though, again, I had agreed with Patrick that we should say nothing yet to Tilda, I myself had no doubts. The skeleton had been that of a tall young man. It had been buried at the right time, in the right place. I looked at the snapshot on my pinboard, and thought, what did you do, Daragh Canavan, to merit such vengeance?
I began idly to scribble on my pad. Daragh had had money troubles; Daragh had been a womanizer. Cambridgeshire in the late 1940s must have been littered both with his creditors and with cuckolded husbands, any one of whom might have felt angry enough to kill him. I sat back in my chair, chewing my pencil as it occurred to me that there were other names I could add to the list I was making. Jossy’s name, for instance. Daragh had humiliated Jossy for years – might the worm have turned at last? Might Jossy’s obsessive love have been turned to hatred by one last, appalling betrayal?
My heart began to beat a little faster. What could have hurt Jossy more than if Daragh had seduced the half-sister she had never acknowledged? What if Daragh and Tilda had, at last, consummated their love? In 1947, Daragh had vanished and Tilda and Max had parted. I recalled the promise that Tilda had made to Max when she had married him. Though she had admitted that she still loved Daragh, she had sworn not to betray Max. Had she, in the difficult postwar years, broken that promise?
I added Max’s name to my list. Perhaps Tilda had made love to Daragh, and Max, maddened by jealousy, had killed him. Perhaps Max had struck Daragh on the head and tied him hand and foot, and buried him in the half-repaired dike. Perhaps Tilda had guessed what Max had done, and that was why she had resisted having her biography written for so long. In her old age, she could have assumed her secrets safe. But the past had re-emerged, bones forcing their way up through the soil, relating a different story to the one she had intended to tell.
I drove to Oxfordshire the following morning. It was a fine, bright day, and Tilda was sitting on the terrace at the back of the house. I asked her about the post-war years.
‘Did you stay in Southam after the end of the war?’
She poured me a cup of coffee. ‘I wanted to go back to London, but it was impossible. There was a housing shortage, you see. And Sarah was unwell. She had a heart condition. She wouldn’t go to hospital to have it investigated – to Sarah, the hospital was the old workhouse.’
I remembered the photograph of Long Cottage. ‘It must have been rather cramped – seven of you in that little cottage.’
‘Eight, when Max came home in 1946. But the garden was marvellous – almost an acre of land, which meant that we could grow our own fruit and vegetables.’ She explained to me, ‘Less queueing, Rebecca. Food was still rationed. Erich helped me look after the garden. He never settled at school, I’m afraid – the other children used to tease him, because he was different, so as soon as he passed his fifteenth birthday he left.’
‘He was Austrian, wasn’t he?’
‘Erich was born in Vienna. I never knew much about his childhood – he wouldn’t speak about it – but I found out a little through the Refugee Children’s Movement. His mother died when he was a small boy, and after his father was killed by the Nazis Erich lived by himself on the streets of Vienna until someone found him a place on the Kindertransporte. He was nine years old, Rebecca – can you imagine, a child of nine, scavenging for food, living with such memories?’
She looked across at me. Her eyes were bright – with anger or with sorrow, I could not tell. I thought of Tilda’s other two adopted children.
‘And Rosi? She lost all her family, didn’t she? What about Hanna?’
‘None of Hanna’s family survived. She had four sisters – they all died in Dachau. Rosi accepted her loss, but Hanna could not. Max found out for her what information he could through the Red Cross, but Hanna went back to Germany when she was eighteen, to look for herself.’
I drank my coffee, wrote my notes, and was aware, as I had been when I had spoken to Rosi Liebermann at Tilda’s party, of the slightness, the triviality of my own experience.
‘Of all my children, Josh was happiest in Southam.’ Tilda smiled. ‘He loved it. The rivers … the open spaces. He was always in trouble, though – he’d leave school at midday, pretend he was going home for lunch, and just roam about. Once he thumbed a lift to Denver Sluice. He didn’t come home until late at night, and by that time Max had called the police. Max was furious, and took him out of the village school and insisted he weekly board. Max thought he was running wild, you see. I knew that he was just Josh.’
The famous Josh Franklin was, as far as I knew, still roaming about. There had been a postcard on Patrick’s mantelpiece from some remote part of China.
Tilda had fallen silent. I wondered, looking at her, what it had been like to go back to Southam after all those years. I said tentatively, ‘Did the children know about your connection with the de Paveleys?’
She shook her head. ‘I never spoke about it to them. Max thought that I should, but I didn’t. I couldn’t. I saw later that I should have done. Secrets are so destructive. At the time, I felt that I was protecting my children from an unpleasant truth. I remembered how it had hurt me when Sarah had told me about my father, and I didn’t want to inflict that pain on them. Though it was … unsettling when Melissa and Caitlin struck up a friendship.’
She looked away from me. I sensed many things unsaid, and I thought both of the German paratrooper she had shot, and the body unearthed from the dike. I said, ‘And Daragh? Did you see much of him?’
Tilda’s profile was set against the background of blue sky like a cameo.
‘Not at first,’ she said slowly. ‘But then … when Josh went missing, Daragh organized the men to search for him. And when Melissa broke her collarbone, he drove us to the hospital. It was always Daragh who would bring Caitlin to our house to play with Melissa. Never Jossy.’
I imagined Daragh, that practised seducer, that consummate opportunist, watching, waiting. How he must have wanted Tilda, who had been beautiful, and who should, but for Sarah Greenlees’ interference, have been his.
‘Daragh kept away, of course, when Max was at home,’ Tilda added.
‘Was Max away a lot?’
‘He stayed in London part of the week, and the rest of the time he worked at home. Freddie, his editor, wanted him to go back to Germany, but Max refused. The war changed him, Rebecca – he couldn’t settle. He became more and more restless. He was deeply unhappy, in fact. And as always he tried to keep his unhappiness to himself. He shut himself off from me …’
Harold Sykes persuaded Max to accompany him to the pub to celebrate Lorna Clarke’s engagement. ‘Chap’s been sniffing after her for years,’ confided Harold, over Scotches. ‘Never thought he’d come up to scratch.’
The pub was crowded, men jostling for space at the bar. They pulled chairs round a small table: Harold and Max and Lorna and two new boys, Reggie Gates and Basil Dayton. Basil, who had drunk too much, was talking loudly, gesturing with his cigarette. ‘So old-fashioned. Dismal little photographs, long-winded articles for ever harping on about the war. People don’t want to read about the war any more, do they?’
Max knocked back his whisky rather quickly. Harold said amiably, ‘Rather a big thing to ignore, old boy.’
‘People are looking to the future, and so should we.’
‘You mean,’ said Lorna, ‘draw a line under it, forget it?’
Basil Dayton was fair-haired, pink-cheeked, and he looked, Max thought, as though he should still be in sixth form.
‘People don’t want to plough through endless depressing paragraphs about ancient old Nazis in prison in Germany. They want something short – snappy – bright.’
Max drawled, ‘An interesting journalistic challenge. Write a cheerful piece on the Nuremberg trials, using words of no more than two syllables.’
Lorna sniggered. Basil flushed. ‘I just meant that we should look ahead … be less hidebound …’
Reggie Gates lit himself a cigarette, and glanced across the table at Max. ‘After all,’ he said, inhaling, ‘does anyone read those impenetrable essays you write, Max?’
Scenting danger, Harold offered to buy another round of drinks. Max, who had months ago classed Reggie as bright but obnoxious, said lazily, ‘One or two plough through them to the end, I suppose.’
‘I mean,’ and a smoke ring circled to the ceiling of the pub, ‘what was your last sermon about? Something to do with the Jews and Palestine? People would rather read about football, or some nice scandalous film star. They’re not interested in Palestine – most of them don’t even know where the place is. As long as there’s some cheap little kike to make their suits—’
Max’s fist struck Reggie Gates’s chin. Reggie’s chair fell back and there was the sound of breaking glass. Harold said, ‘Max, for God’s sake—’ and Lorna’s hand gripped Max’s sleeve, halting him. Reggie climbed unsteadily to his feet. ‘You shit, Franklin,’ he said, as he dabbed at his bloody nose with his handkerchief. Max left the pub.
Harold caught up with him when he was halfway down Fleet Street. Rather portly, Harold struggled for breath. ‘Max – what the hell—’
Max shrugged and kept on walking.
‘Slow down, damn you. And what in God’s name did you do that for? Reggie Gates is a ghastly little twerp, but for heaven’s sake, Max, you have to work with him—’
Max stopped at last, his hands dug into his pockets. It was bitterly cold, and he noticed for the first time the flakes of snow that spun in the air. ‘No, I don’t, Harold. I’m giving in my notice.’
Harold gaped, open-mouthed. ‘Don’t be an idiot, Max.’
Max shook his head. ‘It’ll be the most sensible move I’ve made in months. I’ve had enough, Harold. I’m chucking it in.’ Because Harold was an old friend, he tried to explain. ‘Harold, it has all seemed so utterly futile since I came back from Germany. And I feel so old. Those kids – Basil and Reggie and their like – they are the future. Smart, brash little grammar-school boys. They can’t spell, and they can hardly construct a sentence, but who cares about that nowadays? You and I are leftovers, Harold. Our clothes – our manners – our backgrounds – we don’t fit in any more. Things have moved on, and I don’t care to run along, trying to keep up.’
He walked away then, and Harold made no move to follow him. The snow thickened as Max left Fleet Street, and when he looked up he saw the flakes darting against the topaz light of the streetlamps, a frantic, jiggling polka-dot pattern. Max thought how loathsome England had become: a shabby, worn-out little country, the streets still cratered by bomb damage, the population shambling and grumbling, lacking imagination, drained of energy. He no longer felt part of it. None of the post-war visions – neither the idealistic socialism of Attlee’s government, nor the material goods that the people longed for – were his. He could only stand aside and watch it all with a distaste that was both futile and impotent.
Nana had died early in the war, and Cook had left service to earn better wages in a munitions factory. A woman from the village came up several times a week to scrub floors and do the washing, but that was all. The Hall, with its large, numerous rooms and formal gardens, had consequently lost much of its former austere grandeur. Jossy, who rarely noticed her surroundings, didn’t mind. She tended the kitchen garden so that they had fresh fruit and vegetables and, with the aid of Mrs Beeton, taught herself to cook. Because Daragh liked to fish and shoot wildfowl, and because he had many useful contacts in the seedier London pubs and clubs (Jossy tried to avoid thinking of it as the Black Market), their rations were not too restricted.
The Hall, like everywhere else, had the dreary, slightly disreputable look of a building that has not seen a lick of paint in seven years. But it was still the Hall, Jossy’s childhood home, the home of her ancestors for centuries. That her hands were blistered with digging, or that she, queueing for meat at the butcher’s in Ely, was indistinguishable from all the other tired women, did not trouble her, because she knew that her breeding was in her speech, her blood, her name, her ancestry.
She minded only one of the changes that the war years had brought. Since Tilda Franklin had come back to Southam, Jossy had watched Daragh constantly. Tilda is ten times more beautiful than you, Daragh had said, long ago, and Jossy, seeing Tilda, had acknowledged that he had spoken the truth. When he had first told her of Tilda’s existence, Jossy had made discreet inquiries. Cook, who had worked at the Hall only since the mid-Twenties, had been unable to help, but Nana, her memory carefully prompted, had recalled Deborah Greenlees. Nana’s version of Deborah Greenlees’ disgrace had been different from Daragh’s. Nana, like everyone else in Southam at the time, had believed Deborah Greenlees to be flighty, promiscuous, the author of her own troubles.
It was only later, thinking of her father, that Jossy began to doubt the truth of Nana’s version. Jossy remembered her father’s uneven step on the stairs, and how the sound had always produced in her an instant and inescapable fear. A child, she had seen herself through her father’s contemptuous eyes: plain, stupid, worthless. Her childhood had been governed by her fear of him; though he had rarely struck her, she had always sensed his capacity for violence. Her fear of him was still too vivid to be dismissed. Though she tried to reassure herself of her father’s innocence, she was haunted by doubt.
During the latter years of the war, she had realized that Daragh had begun to see other women again. An obliging widow from the village; a shop assistant in Ely. No-one who threatened her. Though his affairs hurt her, Jossy hid her pain. Though she loved Daragh with an undiminished passion, she knew him to be weak. Daragh’s good looks had not lessened in the fourteen years of their marriage, but the quality of Jossy’s love for him had altered. Not the quantity of it: that was unchanged. But she understood him now, and his capriciousness enchanted her as much as it tormented her. She knew herself to be a plodding, mundane person, her nature so different and so inferior to Daragh’s mercurial brightness. She knew that Tilda, and only Tilda, was a threat to her.
At first Jossy had tried to ignore Tilda Franklin’s existence. But weeks and months had passed and Caitlin, riding through the village one day, had struck up a friendship with Melissa Franklin. Because Melissa was, superficially at least, the only other girl in Southam sufficiently well-bred to be a companion for Caitlin, and because Jossy had kept secret from everyone Tilda’s supposed relationship to her own family, she had been able to make no real objection to the friendship. And besides, Caitlin was useful. Caitlin could keep an eye on Daragh.
Today, Caitlin had spent the afternoon with Melissa, and Daragh had collected her from Long Cottage and brought her back to the Hall in time for tea. After tea, Jossy went upstairs with Caitlin to help her comb out her plaits before her bath. Caitlin, who loathed having her hair done, liked to sit at her mother’s dressing table, distracting herself with the scrapings of cosmetics left in the gilt glass pots.
Jossy unknotted Caitlin’s ribbon. ‘Was he talking to her?’
Caitlin dabbed her nose with the swansdown powder puff. ‘Only a bit. I said I was hungry.’
‘What were they talking about?’
Caitlin shrugged. ‘This and that.’
‘Kate.’
‘The weather. Some boring thing in the newspaper. That exam Melissa’s taking.’
Jossy was relieved. She began to draw the hairbrush through Caitlin’s thick, dark curls. Caitlin painted her lips. She said, ‘And then that woman thanked him and said that she thought he was a marvel.’
Jossy stiffened. ‘Ow,’ said Caitlin. ‘You’re pulling my hair, Mummy.’
‘That woman said that Daddy was a marvel?’
‘Miss Greenlees’ barn door won’t shut properly and all the sacks of potatoes were getting wet, so Daddy carried them into the scullery.’
‘Surely,’ said Jossy coldly, ‘Mr Franklin could have done that?’
‘He’s away.’ Caitlin squinted. ‘He’s always away.’
Jossy’s eyes narrowed, and her hand gripped the hairbrush hard. ‘Away? What do you mean, Caitlin?’
‘He’s in London. Melissa’s really fed up about it.’ Caitlin, dabbing at her eyelashes, sounded bored. But Jossy, all her anxieties suddenly doubled, stared at her daughter’s reflection in the mirror.
Caitlin’s dark eyes emerged from a white skin, and her lips were carefully drawn in scarlet. She is only thirteen years old, thought Jossy with a pang, and she is already beautiful.
After they had dined, they sat in the kitchen, the wireless tuned to a Bach recital. Max closed his eyes, but Tilda knew that he was not sleeping. Eventually she said hesitantly, ‘Max. Do you think that we might have another baby?’
His eyes opened. ‘Tilda—’
‘You said, after the war …’
‘We have five children. Isn’t that enough?’
‘Babies are’ – and she struggled to put her feelings into words – ‘babies make everything all right. A new baby would be a new start. We need a new start.’
He stared at her. ‘We have Hanna, who weeps every night for her family. We have Rosi, who is in love with that frightful curate. We have Josh, who is quite impossible, and Erich who cannot cope in normal society—’
She knew all these things. ‘A baby might distract Hanna from her grief and Rosi from the curate. And Erich is so good with kittens and day-old chicks and things like that, that I thought he might be able to love a baby.’
‘Where would you put it?’ said Max. ‘In the coal hole?’
She flushed. ‘Max, I’m thirty-two. Josh is nine. I’ve always wanted another child. We both wanted a big family, didn’t we? If we leave it much longer, it’ll be too late.’
He looked at her. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, Tilda. No more children.’
For a moment she did not speak. Then she whispered, ‘Never?’
He closed his eyes again, shutting himself away from her. Tilda stared out of the window. All through the years of the war, she had looked forward to a third baby. She had imagined another daughter, to name after Sarah. Since her work with the children of the Kindertransporte had tailed off, she had quelled her returning restlessness with the prospect of another baby. She wondered for the first time whether Max had met someone else. She imagined a glamorous woman, platinum blonde, red-lipped. Not the sort who wore second-hand cotton dresses or shabby corduroy trousers. Whether that woman existed or not, she knew that she was losing Max, that he drifted further and further away from her. He had always been reserved, emotionally cautious, a man typical of both his class and his nationality, but it seemed to Tilda now that reserve had hardened to coldness, and that caution had become indifference.
In January, Max started work in Whitehall. An officer he had known on Field Marshal Montgomery’s staff found him the job. Though he never admitted it, Tilda knew that he hated the work; she knew also that he was deeply unhappy. She had thought that the end of the war would reunite them, but it had not. Max, who had always tended to cynicism, had nevertheless lost something during the war – some sort of fundamental faith in humanity. Increasingly Tilda feared that some of his unhappiness was centred around her. He rarely spoke to her about anything other than the superficial. Worse, it had been weeks since he had turned to her in bed. Because of the weather, Max stayed in London more and more frequently. Her marriage was crumbling, and her efforts to shore it up felt increasingly desperate.
Towards the end of the month, on Max’s birthday, Tilda took the train to London. She met Max outside his offices and they went to a restaurant in Knightsbridge. The food was dull and badly cooked, and Max talked too little and smoked too much. After they had exhausted the topics of the children and the weather there didn’t seem to be much to say. They had become, Tilda thought miserably, like the other married couples one saw in pubs and restaurants, their gazes flicking around the room for diversion.
They walked back to the hotel where Max had booked in for the night. It began to snow again, new flakes settling on the dirty mounds of the old. Inside their room, ice greyed the inside of the windows. Tilda took from her pocket a small package.
‘Happy birthday, darling.’ She watched Max unfold the brown paper. ‘I found it in a second-hand bookshop in Ely. Is it all right?’
It was an early edition of Hakluyt’s Voyages and Discoveries. She quoted, ‘“There is no land unhabitable, nor sea unnavigable”,’ and smiled. ‘I like that.’
‘Such optimists, the Elizabethans,’ said Max. Tilda nestled up to him, her arms around him, beneath his overcoat. Kissing him, she thought for a moment that it was going to be all right. They had drifted apart but they would come together again.
She said, ‘I thought perhaps you could begin to look for somewhere in London, Max.’
He drew away from her, hanging his coat on the peg on the back of the door. ‘I’ve done so already, Tilda.’ He lit another cigarette. ‘Can’t afford a place like this too often, and Harold’s sofa is damned lumpy. I’ve found a couple of rooms in Bloomsbury.’
She frowned. ‘A couple of rooms? That’s not big enough, darling. I’ll have to bring Sarah – I can’t leave her on her own. And the girls must have a room to themselves in the vacations.’ Rosi and Hanna had started at Cambridge the previous October.
‘I meant,’ said Max, ‘a couple of rooms for myself.’
It was as though he had hit her. She sat down on the edge of the bed, winded, cold. She heard him say: ‘The expense – the arrangement we have at present is quite impractical.’
She said, ‘Is there someone else?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Tilda.’ He sounded angry.
She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror over the basin: the shadows beneath her eyes, the beginnings of two lines to the sides of her mouth. She had never bothered much about her looks; just for a moment she regretted that. She wondered whether he was lying to her.
‘Why, then, Max?’ she whispered.
‘I told you. Because it is impossible for me to keep travelling between London and the Fens. Impossible, expensive and exhausting.’
‘Then we shall all move back to London.’ Tilda reiterated the decision she had come to several days ago. ‘Melissa would love to live in London again, and I’d be able to find a local school for Josh so that he wouldn’t have to board, and—’
‘No,’ said Max.
She stared mutely at him, silently pleading with him for something, for some small sign that he still loved her. He moved restlessly about the room, and she looked down at her hands, threading her fingers together, then drawing them apart. The gold wedding band blurred, but she forced back the tears and made herself speak. ‘You’ve been unhappy since you came home, Max. It’s because of what you saw in Germany, isn’t it? Why don’t you tell me about it? It might make it better, and at least …’ The words trailed off.
‘No,’ said Max again. His voice was taut, brittle.
‘Max.’ She knew that she was fighting for her marriage, for her family, for all that was most important to her in the world. ‘How can I understand what you’re feeling if you keep it from me? If you don’t give me some idea of what it is that haunts you?’
‘For God’s sake, Tilda—’
‘Is it to do with the concentration camps?’ She saw him flinch. ‘Talk to me, please, Max.’
He spun round. ‘So that you can place sticking plaster over the wound? So that you can make things better like you do with the children?’
‘I didn’t mean that. You know I didn’t.’
He did not seem to hear her. ‘Has it occurred to you, Tilda, that not everything can be repaired? Do you really think that you have made everything all right for Rosi – for Hanna – for Erich?’
She gasped. ‘I tried … that’s all. I tried. Do you think I shouldn’t have?’
‘It doesn’t matter what I think, does it?’ His face was white, and there were bluish hollows beneath his eyes. ‘You’ve never paid too much attention to what I think, have you, Tilda?’
She stared at him. ‘What do you mean?’
He flung out his hands. ‘Crossing the North Sea in a cockleshell. Staying in Holland after I begged you to go home. Gathering up all those waifs and strays—’
‘They just happened, Max! I was there, and I had to do something. I couldn’t have left Rosi alone at Liverpool Street, and I couldn’t have abandoned Hanna and Erich in Holland.’
‘But don’t you see, Tilda,’ he said softly, ‘that Erich was destroyed long ago, and that Hanna will probably spend the rest of her life searching for sisters who were put to death in some hell-hole?’
She said miserably, ‘At least they are alive,’ and he turned away, and stood at the window, smoking. She sat on the edge of the bed, staring at the discoloured basin, the tarnished mirror, seeing through his eyes her role of the last nine years: bumbling and amateurish and naive.
‘You’re fooling yourself, Tilda. You can’t really make any difference. No-one can.’
She rose slowly to her feet, and pulled her coat back on. Max’s words, condemning her, echoed around the room. He said, ‘Where are you going?’ and she said, ‘To the station,’ and walked out, shutting the door behind her. He did not come after her. She thought he might, but he didn’t.
She walked to Liverpool Street. She was just in time for the last train. Snowflakes dissolved in the steam from the funnels. She climbed in the carriage as the engine started up. When she sat down tears flowed silently from her eyes, though she pushed at the bones of her face with her fingertips to stem them.
Daragh had regretted the ending of the war. He’d enjoyed the Home Guard – his social standing and his comparative youth and energy had meant that he had run the show. His men had been a mixture of the very young and the very old, and those with reserved occupations and a few crocks unfit for military service. He’d enjoyed knocking them into shape, making soldiers of them. He hadn’t put up with any slackness, and he thought they’d respected him for that. The end of the war had left a hollow in his life; the constant possibility of drama replaced by the certainty of tedium.
Now, in the first bitter months of 1947, the snowflakes floated through the leaden air like puffy white feathers, and the blizzard howled and shrieked like a banshee. All the things that Daragh was supposed to do – sowing crops, clearing ditches and dikes – the snow made impossible. He built snowmen with Caitlin, and he cut and stored wood and tried to keep the old Bentley running. Because of the weather, the trains and ships could not get through to the power stations, which threatened to run out of coal. Power cuts dimmed the towns and cities. Though the Hall had its own generator, there wasn’t enough petrol to keep it running, and there was no coal to be bought. Daragh hacked down a couple of trees, but the vast fireplaces consumed them within a week. Jossy took to wearing her fur coat indoors. Daragh didn’t mind the cold, but on the day he found Caitlin sitting in a window seat, pinched and blue, he took an axe to one of the garden sheds. It burned gloriously, kindled by the letters and bills he had discovered in his desk.
When the weather trapped them indoors, Daragh had too much time to think. In spite of the cold, he sometimes woke in a sweat in the early hours of the morning, knowing that he was in a worse mess than he had ever been in his entire life. All his borrowings had been the answer to an immediate crisis; each loan had, he had thought, been the last. He had borrowed from credit companies in order to repay the bank; he had borrowed from moneylenders to repay the credit companies. Yet the chain of loan and debt that he had so carefully put together was breaking apart. Letters and telephone calls pursued him to the Hall. He burned the letters without reading them, and slammed down the receiver without speaking. He avoided certain parts of London: they would not have been safe for him.
His worst fear was that his troubles would affect Caitlin. The school was already making a fuss about overdue fees. Daragh did what he always did when he had problems: he tried to distract himself. He couldn’t run away this time because of Caitlin, but he could spend the odd evening at the Pheasant in Southam, and once or twice he battled out to the neighbouring farms to see a cockfight. The brutality of it – the bloodied, featherless birds –disturbed him, but took his mind off things.
And there was Tilda, of course. Before Tilda had come back to Southam, he had accepted his lot – Caitlin, the Hall, Jossy. He had begun, almost, to feel happy. Then, one morning, he had ridden into the village with Caitlin, and he had looked up and seen Tilda. He had had no warning of her return, and the shock had struck him with an almost physical blow. He had wanted to shout for joy, or to weep, but he had done neither, because of Caitlin. He had known then that what he had taken for happiness had been only an illusion; that he had slept and, seeing Tilda, had woken.
His joy soon dissipated, replaced by frustrated desire and bitterness. Her physical presence tormented him, and at night he dreamed of touching her, of undressing her, of losing himself in her slender body. To subdue the pain of his longing, he struck up an acquaintance with the obliging wife of a labourer, and called, now and then, at a certain house in the back streets of Ely. But these were only palliatives, not remedies.
Daragh began to hope when he perceived the obvious disarray of Tilda’s marriage. He saw a chance for himself: Tilda was lonely and isolated from her London friends; Max was rarely at home. Daragh visited Long Cottage more frequently, helping with the heavy work that the boy Erich was not fit enough for, and offering the occasional lift to Ely.
Driving home from a cockfight one afternoon, the car, Jossy’s father’s ancient Bentley, spluttered to a halt three miles from Southam. Daragh, wrapped up against the cold in coat, scarf and hat, fiddled about under the bonnet. Then he saw Tilda.
She had a knapsack on her back, and was walking across the fields. She was wearing a longish flowered skirt under a short blue coat, and Wellington boots. She looked, he thought, about seventeen. He waved his arms and hailed her, and she waved back and tramped through the snow towards him.
She’d been to Ely, she explained, to get medicine for Erich’s bronchitis. Her eyes were bright, her long dark gold hair escaping from her velvet beret. He thought what a great girl she was, walking twelve miles to get medicine for a kid who wasn’t even her own. To Daragh’s question, she explained that Max was still in London, and that he’d started a new job, but she didn’t meet Daragh’s eyes while she said that.
Tilda looked at the bonnet of the Bentley. ‘What’s wrong with it?’
‘Fan belt’s gone,’ he said. ‘I need’ – he glanced at Tilda – ‘a stocking or something to get me home.’
Because her cheeks were pink with the cold, he could not tell whether she reddened or not. She said, ‘Then you’ll have to look the other way.’
He sneaked a look. He heard her kick off her gumboot, and then he peeked and saw her, her skirt above her knees, peeling off her stocking. Her legs were long and slim and brown. The sight stabbed at him, producing an immediate physical response that he had not anticipated. He almost wished he hadn’t looked, he wanted her so much. It was weeks since he’d slept with a woman, and that with some raddled old whore. He insisted on giving Tilda his overcoat to make up for the stocking. He fixed the fan belt, and then he drove Tilda back to Southam, but he hardly spoke, he ached so with desire.
Always, she expected Max to come home. Through the commonplace disasters and excitements of family life – through placating Josh’s headmaster after her son’s most recent absence without leave, through Rosi’s unrequited passion for the curate, who had boils on his neck, through Hanna’s nightmares and Erich’s silences – she expected him to come home. To Tilda, her family was the hub at the centre of a turning wheel: she had believed it to be the same for Max. That it was obviously not so, that he could deliberately cut himself off from those he claimed to love most, eroded the foundations of her world.
So the snow, which had floated from a leaden sky for weeks, was a welcome distraction. The difficulties it created she welcomed too. The bus did not come, the wheels of her cycle would not turn, supplies could not get through to the village shop. All these things meant that her days were filled with hard work, so that she had less time to brood. Drifts blew as high as the hedgerows and curtained the lower windows of cottages. Thick grey ice stilled the water in ditches and dikes, and froze up the diesel pumps. The drains that should have taken the water from the land were frozen solid, blocked by snow.
When Erich was ill, Daragh cut the wood. Tilda watched him through the open door of the barn, splitting log after log. When he flung off his jacket, the dance of his shadow as he swung the axe was just as it had been years ago, when they had been young. She had to turn aside, go back into the house, make pastry, scrub the floor. Anything to distract her from the awareness that Max did not love her, and from the sudden, painful memory of an older love.
In March, the thaw set in. It began to rain, a steel-grey curtain that saturated the reeds that roofed the cottage. The wind got up, toppling chimney stacks, felling trees. Walking along the summit of the dike, Tilda saw that the water almost reached the top of the bank. On Sunday, rising early, she found Sarah, dressed in mackintosh and gumboots, standing in the parlour, staring out through the window at the flat, waterlogged, wind-lashed fields.
‘She’s going to blow,’ said Sarah. ‘I’ve been out and looked at her.’
‘The dike?’
Sarah nodded. ‘We must take the furniture upstairs.’ She began to drag an armchair across the room. Her lips were violet-blue.
‘Erich and I shall do it.’ Tilda placed her hand on Sarah’s sleeve, halting her. ‘I’m desperate for a cup of tea. You’ll make one, won’t you, Aunt Sarah?’ Their eyes met, and Tilda saw the outraged pride in Sarah’s eyes, but Sarah did not shake off her hand.
Tilda woke the children. She set Melissa the task of carrying crockery and china up to the bedrooms, and sent Joshua into the barn to fetch logs. With Erich’s help, Tilda carried upstairs whatever furniture would fit up the narrow staircase. In Sarah’s bedroom they stacked bottles of pickles and preserves and sacks of flour and potatoes. They caught the hens, who squawked in their wicker cages on the landing, and packed into orange boxes all the little, worthless treasures that Sarah had amassed over the years: the chipped china cups, the mottled old books, the photographs and letters and keepsakes.
At midday Tilda went out to check on their nearest neighbour, an old widow who lived alone. On her way back, the wind was almost too fierce for her to stand. Men were running in the direction of the dike, their progress impeded by the gale. Tilda wrapped her coat round her and ran after them. Her gumboots splashed through deep puddles; but beneath the water, the earth was still iron-hard with frost. Scattered like spillikins by the wind, branches of elder and willow littered the path that led down the slope from church to field. Rain beat down on Tilda’s head, plastering her wet hair to her face. As she approached the dike, someone shouted, ‘Go back, lass! Go home!’
She stood for a moment, watching with horror the men’s frantic labour as they hurled sandbags on the summit of the dike. She saw where water, black and menacing, had begun to seep from the foot of the bank. The waters that the earthworks held back, maddened by wind and thaw and rain, cast up waves that lashed against those struggling to preserve the defences. She feared that this was a war already lost. This invader could not be turned back. Tilda retreated, running home to her children.
When one of his labourers pounded on the door in the morning, telling him of the imminent disaster, Daragh hurried his wife and child into the car and drove them to Ely. Returning from Ely, thankful that Caitlin was safe with the Tates, Daragh’s progress was blocked by the branches that the wind had thrown across the drove, and by the deep puddles that had begun to spread from the overflowing ditches. Carefully negotiating these obstacles, he had time to think. A stark choice confronted him. He could save his home, or he could do his duty and help the men – the villagers, many of whom were his labourers and had been under his command in the Home Guard – to defend Southam. He could almost hear the whispering of sand in the hourglass: his luck trickling away, used, spent.
Daragh left the car, its wheels made immobile by thick black mud, its petrol tank almost empty, in the village. Then he ran down the slope to the field. Through the shimmering rain, he could see the men working on the dike. Some straddled the top of the bank, grey figures silhouetted against a malevolent sky, others grovelled in the earth at the edge of the field. Daragh moved among them, joking with one, encouraging another. He, like them, dragged wet, heavy sandbags to the top of the bank; he, like them, dug clay, barrowing it to the shifting, leaking foundations. It lifted his heart to know that his presence cheered them: that his magic – his looks, his charm, his luck – still counted for something. It almost compensated for his suspicion that this task was hopeless, that they could not possibly resist this black monster. ‘Haddenham pump went this morning,’ someone yelled at him through the terrible wind and, later, ‘Bank’s blown at Over!’ Daragh’s hands were raw and bleeding, every thread of his clothing soaked.
The water seeped through another section of the bank. Half a dozen men ran to it, shovelling clay against the leak. ‘Here too!’ shouted a boy, and they dashed a hundred yards or so to where a thin spray of water spat through the undergrowth. The rain was relentless. On the summit of the bank, where waves pounded the weakening structure, a lad slipped and fell into the water, and had to be hauled out with a rope. Daragh, looking up, every muscle straining with exhaustion, could see that the sandbags made the structure top-heavy. They could not win: either the flood would overtop the bank, or the force of the water would eat away at foundations already weakened by the severe frost. Yet he still worked among the men, encouraging them, helping the half-drowned lad back to the safety of the church, offering exhausted men a mouthful from his hip flask.
A jet of water rushed out through the matting of docks and nettles that covered the slope. As soon as they stopped up one leak, another sprang. The narrow spray gushed, the earth bulging, clods of grass torn from their roots, unstoppable now. A voice shouted, ‘She’s going! Every man to high land!’ and they threw down the shovels and the sandbags and ran for the safety of the church.
Daragh, shambling along the track on legs that almost refused to bear him, heard the bank blow. It was the noise of a thunderclap. The blast shocked him, so that he reached out for something – anything – to cling on to. Someone supported him and a voice said gently, ‘She’ve gone, sir. Can’t do no more,’ and he allowed himself to be helped into the church, knowing that in the great roar and rush of water lay the wreckage of his hopes.