‘What’s “intercourse”?’ she said. She needed to know.
He looked shocked. Martin Devereux, whose self-professed ambition was to drink dry the cup of life, actually looked shocked. ‘Bloody hell, Caitlin – what a thing to ask.’
‘Don’t you know?’
‘Of course I do.’
‘Tell me, then.’
His eyes were lidded. Only a sliver of pale blue iris was visible. ‘I’d rather show you.’
‘OK.’ She shrugged, and looked round. ‘Where?’
‘Not here,’ he said, reddening. They were in a pub. ‘I haven’t the cash for a room. It’ll have to be the car.’
He drove until they came to some woodland and then he swung the motor car into the trees. The ruts in the track were clogged with dead, coppery leaves and, as they jolted along the uneven ground, the last of the leaves, like fragments of burnt paper, were torn from the trees by the wind. It was raining: dark, swollen drops that slid along the naked branches of the trees and plopped onto the windscreen of the car. Martin pulled on the handbrake.
‘We’d better get into the back.’
In the back of Martin’s father’s car, Caitlin unbuttoned her blouse and Martin took her nipple into his mouth, kissing her breasts, squeezing them with the palms of his hands. She felt slightly bored: they’d done much the same on previous dates. But then he reached under her skirt and began to fumble with her knickers. She pushed him away: he was breathing very fast and loudly, and his eyes had an intent, determined expression that alarmed her. He said, ‘I thought you wanted me to show you,’ and she had to swallow her embarrassment and her fear, and tell him to go on. She felt stupid, exposed, squashed up on the back seat of the car without her knickers on. When he pulled down his own trousers and underpants, and she saw the awful thing that lay beneath them, she cried out, but he did not seem to hear her.
She was glad that it didn’t last very long. He pushed it into her before she realized what he was doing. It hurt, and she shouted at him, and then he shuddered and yelled and collapsed on top of her, and lay very still. For one peculiar, disorienting moment, she thought that he was dead. She imagined lying there for ever, Martin stuck inside her, both of them buried eventually by the falling leaves. The rain still thudded onto the windscreen, and at last Martin muttered, ‘God, that was terrific.’
Caitlin sat up, shoving him off her, and pulled her knickers back on. There was an unpleasant dampness between her legs, which frightened her. She thought, That was what my father and Tilda did, and then she pushed the thought away, and climbed into the front passenger seat. She decided that she would not go out with Martin again. She enjoyed the chase, not the kill.
It was as though, Tilda often thought, she had been standing on a pier jutting out over the water, and someone had kicked away the stanchions. She was flailing in choppy water, unable to find much to hold on to. She had deserved to lose Max; but she could not understand why Melissa had chosen to leave her.
She continued to look after the children and the colonel, but now only rarely attended her lectures in Oxford. She disregarded offers of friendship, rejecting invitations from even her oldest friends: Anna and Professor Hastings and Emily van de Criendt. Her father had abandoned her, and so had Max, but neither desertion had inflicted so terrible a wound as the loss of her child. From her remaining children she tried to hide the depth of her misery, knowing that she must not inflict her pain on them.
Now, Hanna and Rosi were making Christmas cards on the kitchen table, and Josh and Erich were collecting fallen branches from the copse to use as fuel for the stove. Tilda glanced at her watch. Caitlin was visiting a friend. She had promised to be home by six o’clock, and it was now almost seven. Tilda’s unease increased as she washed up. At half past seven, she put on her mackintosh and walked out to meet the bus. The cold, fine rain stung against her face. The bus slowed as it emerged out of the half-dark, its wheels curling waves from the puddles. Three women and a boy climbed out.
At the telephone box at the corner of the road, Tilda asked the operator to put her through to Mrs James, the mother of Caitlin’s friend.
‘It’s Mrs Franklin,’ said Tilda. ‘Caitlin’s guardian. She isn’t home yet – has she stayed for tea?’
There was a silence. Then Mrs James said, ‘Caitlin isn’t here, Mrs Franklin. Sylvia’s been at Guide camp all weekend.’
Tilda muttered something about having made a mistake, put the receiver down, and walked back to the house. The streetlamps illuminated the road with a yellowish glaze, but the sky and trees and fields were intensely black. Caitlin claimed to have spent the last three Saturdays with Sylvia. Tilda went home, but there was a cold feeling in her stomach, a certainty of disaster. She said, ‘I should phone the police, perhaps,’ but Rosi, sticking loops of red paper ribbon to cards, said, ‘She’ll have gone to the cinema and forgotten to tell you. You know what she’s like.’
‘But it’s almost—’ began Tilda, and then saw the flicker of movement between the hedges that flanked the front path. She ran to the back door, breathless with relief and anger.
‘Kate. Where were you?’
‘You didn’t come home by bus. I went to the stop. You didn’t go to the Jameses either. When you were late, I telephoned.’
‘Oh,’ said Caitlin, and shrugged.
Tilda, looking closely at Caitlin, saw that she was wearing make-up and nylons. The nylons were snagged, her blouse done up on the wrong buttons.
‘Kate. Were you with a boy?’
Caitlin shook her head. There was a dead look about her eyes that alarmed Tilda just as much as the snagged nylons and smeared lipstick. Fifteen, she thought. She had been only two years older when she had met Daragh. She remembered the intense sweetness and pain of first love, its terrible compulsion.
‘You are very young to have a boyfriend, Kate,’ she said, forcing herself to speak more gently. ‘I know that you’re grown-up for your age, but you are still only fifteen.’
Caitlin stood on the rug, rainwater dripping from the arms of her gabardine mackintosh. Daragh’s child, thought Tilda. She could see him now in Caitlin’s stubborn pride.
‘If you are fond of someone, then why not bring him home for tea? Then we can all meet him.’
Caitlin spoke at last. ‘What? To this place? So that Erich can offer him the bowl of c-c-cabbage? So that he can find out that my guardian is a servant?’ The emptiness in her eyes was replaced by anger and contempt. ‘Anyway, I haven’t a boyfriend. Not any more.’
She turned on her heel and left the room. Tilda looked down at herself. Her dress was covered by a dirty apron and her hands were red and raw, her fingernails black with mud. Her heart was beating so fast that it sickened her. She sat down on the bottom stair, her head in her hands.
‘It’s burnt,’ said Melissa.
It’s steak, Max wanted to say. It’s steak, and what with the war and rationing, you probably can’t remember what steak looks like. But he took Melissa’s plate from her and replaced it with his own. ‘Have mine, then.’
She looked down at it and sighed with a martyred air. ‘You know I don’t like onions, Daddy.’
The trouble was that he didn’t. He had forgotten – or had never known – that his daughter didn’t like onions, cabbage, or skin on her hot milk. And he had forgotten that she never remembered to polish her shoes unless he reminded her, and that she spent hours in the bathroom in the morning, so that for the first few days of her stay he had had to attend to his early customers unshaven. He had forgotten that she would insist on going for long cycle rides alone each weekend, yet each evening would demand a night light. Her inconsistency confused him.
Max finished his glass of wine. ‘I talked to the head teacher at the school this afternoon, Melissa. She says that you can start after Christmas.’
Melissa stared at him.
‘Just mornings to begin with,’ he added coaxingly. ‘Until you get used to it.’
‘Daddy—’ Tears were welling up in Melissa’s eyes.
‘You have to go to school, sweetheart – it’s the law. They’ll make allowances for your French.’
Tears dripped down Melissa’s nose. Her knife and fork dropped with a clang on the plate, and she pushed back her chair and ran from the table. He heard her bedroom door slam, followed by loud sobbing. Max sighed, and pushed away his dinner, his appetite gone.
He cleared up the half-eaten food and, standing in the kitchen doorway, lit a cigarette. He remembered the call that he had made six weeks ago to a telephone box in Oxfordshire, at a prearranged time. Somehow the sound of Tilda’s voice, carried all those hundreds of miles, had not induced in him the anger he had anticipated. Over the crackly line he had sensed her deep hurt and bewilderment and, after he had replaced the receiver, he had tried once again to persuade Melissa to return to England. But she had said (her face crumpling up, as it had a habit of doing), ‘Don’t you want me, Daddy?’ so he had hugged her, and said, ‘Of course I want you, darling. You know that I want you.’
Outside the frost had begun to outline each blade of grass. Melissa had swept back into his life, Max thought, and had forced him to look again at an existence which he had previously found satisfactory. Nothing seemed right for her. The house (a tin bath, Daddy!), his work (you looked nicer in your suit, Daddy), and, of course, his cooking (bread and cheese again) – all came in for criticism. He had been made to see his life as she saw it – Spartan, rather bleak, perhaps even (the thought horrified him) slipping into the pathetic, faded mustiness of bachelordom.
He had not yet introduced Melissa to Cécile. Cécile had remained tactfully absent for the week of Melissa’s holiday and, when Melissa had made her unexpected decision, Max had written a hasty note, explaining the situation. He knew that he had been evading the issue. It was ridiculous that he should allow his social life to be constrained by a twelve-year-old girl. He decided to ask Cécile to dinner.
Max scrubbed the cigarette butt into the flagstone with his heel, and went back into the house. He could still hear the sobbing. Just for a moment, he looked back with longing to the easier days of infancy, and then, praying for superhuman tact and patience, he tapped on Melissa’s door.
Max made a great effort with the dinner. He bought a duck from the wizened old woman at the market, and carefully wrote down her instructions for cooking it. He chose a tarte aux prunes from the pâtisserie and discovered that one could not buy custard powder in France. He filled the basket with logs and lit the fire in the living room, and bought matching plates from a shop in Saintes, and candles for the table.
Cécile, elegant in black, arrived promptly at eight o’clock. Max looked round for Melissa.
‘She’s probably still in the bathroom. It seems to take her an hour to do her hair.’
‘Glass of wine?’
‘That would be lovely, chéri.’
Cécile was halfway through the glass of wine when Melissa appeared. She was wearing her oldest clothes: a jersey that needed darning, and a skirt so short it revealed her bony knees. Max decided to say nothing.
‘Melissa – this is Cécile. You remember that I told you that she was a friend of mine. Cécile, this is my daughter, Melissa.’
Melissa, looking at the floor, mumbled a greeting. Max felt a flicker of irritation, but decided to serve the duck.
He knew before they had finished eating the first course that the evening had been a mistake. To all Cécile’s attempts at conversation, to his own coaxing efforts, Melissa remained monosyllabic. Her mouth twisted down at the corners, and her fringe, which needed cutting, flopped over her eyes. If his cooking did not come in for the usual searing criticism, then that was only because she remained sulkily uncommunicative.
Afterwards, Melissa stomped upstairs to bed, and Max poured himself and Cécile a brandy.
‘Sorry.’
‘What for, chéri?’
‘She was terribly rude.’
Cécile smiled. ‘She is thirteen, Max.’
He sat down next to Cécile, and put his arm around her. ‘Is that an excuse?’
‘She sees me as a rival. An enemy.’
Max said, exasperated, ‘I explained to her that you were a friend. Nothing more.’
Cécile’s face was turned away as she picked up her brandy glass. ‘Nevertheless, Max, Melissa loves both you and her mother. She is bound to see any other woman as an interloper.’
He said self-pityingly, ‘I can’t do a bloody thing right, Cécile. She finds fault with everything. I keep thinking she’ll say that she’s had enough, and wants to go home.’
‘Is that what you want?’
He was silent for a moment. Then he said, ‘No. No, of course not. She drives me to distraction, but …’ He had not realized that his daughter loved him so much. Through a muddle of other emotions, he had recognized that he felt honoured and touched that she had chosen to stay with him.
Cécile touched his hand. ‘Do you want to tell me about it?’
‘About what?’
‘Max.’ When she looked at him like that it was as though she were fifteen years older than he, and not the other way round. She explained patiently, ‘Melissa loves you, or she would not be here, and she loves her mother, or she would not have behaved as she did. The simple solution to the problem of Melissa would be for you and – Mathilde, is it? – to live together again.’
Max shook his head. ‘That’s not possible.’
‘Why not?’
He had never voiced it before. It was an effort to get out the ugly words. ‘Tilda was unfaithful to me.’
‘During the war?’
‘Afterwards. Though she’d been in love with the fellow for years.’
Cécile was silent for a few moments. Then she said, ‘And your wife is still with this other man?’
‘Oh no.’ Max, rising, chucked another log on the fire. ‘It was just the once that they … Apparently he went away soon after. Left his wife and child and disappeared into the undergrowth …’ And how typical of Daragh Canavan, Max thought, to desert a pregnant, dying wife – and how typical of Tilda, too, to take in the wretched man’s child. And then suddenly to up and leave Southam, and become housekeeper to a complete stranger. The thought of Tilda’s job, and the peculiar ménage that Melissa had described, made Max feel uneasy. It all sounded horribly hard work. He told himself that Tilda had, as usual, done exactly what she wanted to do, but all the same, he found himself feeling vaguely guilty.
‘Once …?’ repeated Cécile.
He glanced back at her. ‘Once … twice … fifty times … It doesn’t matter, does it? It’s still a betrayal.’
She was looking at him in a way that was not entirely sympathetic. He had expected her to understand. He said, justifying himself, ‘Faithfulness in marriage is so important, isn’t it? My mother played fast and loose with half my father’s business colleagues. I saw what it did to him. I couldn’t have endured that.’
‘So you left your wife,’ said Cécile slowly, ‘because you discovered that she was like your mother?’
He flushed. Put like that, it sounded ridiculous. ‘No, of course not. Tilda isn’t in the least like my mother. It was just – damn it, Cécile, I had the right to expect constancy, didn’t I?’
‘Of course, Max,’ she said gently.
He fetched the brandy bottle, and refilled their glasses. He would have liked to have drunk until the uncomfortable thoughts that echoed in his head began to recede, until he was no longer made to look back and question his own behaviour, that he had until recently believed unimpeachable.
Cécile leaned over and kissed him. ‘I think that I must not stay the night, Max. We would have to be very quiet and I would feel like a naughty adolescent.’
He watched her cycle down the hill and then he went back into the house. Reluctantly, hoping that she was asleep, he climbed the stairs and tapped on Melissa’s door.
A whisper. ‘Daddy?’
He pushed open the door. The night light showed that her eyes were red. Max groaned inwardly, but hardened his heart.
‘Cécile is my friend, poppet. And she was our guest. You’re to write her a note tomorrow, apologizing.’
To his surprise, she did not protest. She just looked at him, her eyes big and dark in her pale little face, her knees hunched up to her chin, cocooned in the bedclothes.
‘Do you want me to go home, Daddy?’
‘Of course not. Why should you think that?’
‘When we were at home …’ Her voice wobbled. ‘When we were at home … when we were at Aunt Sarah’s … you didn’t want to be with us then.’
Max sat down on the edge of the bed, his heart thudding. Melissa’s words stabbed at him. He almost said, That’s not true, but instead he put his arm round his daughter, and sat in the half-dark, his eyes fixed on a snaking crack in the plaster on the opposite wall, appalled to realize that she had interpreted his absence as a lack of love for her. Yet why should she have thought otherwise? He had been away for so much of Melissa’s young life – why should she not have seen that as a deliberate choice on his part?
He imagined trying to explain to her. First I had to go away because of my job, and then because of the war, and then because I was a bit mad. Because he recognized, looking back, that he had been pushed to a brink that he had not let himself or anyone else acknowledge, by exhaustion and despair. He knew, though, that it was too late to explain. Children understood actions, not words. Some of Melissa’s difficult behaviour was because she needed to push him, to test him, to measure his love for her.
It was quite dark now. Though Melissa slept, Max did not yet go. It had occurred to him that Tilda, too, might have interpreted his distancing himself from family responsibilities as a lack of love and, though he angrily tried to push the thought away, the idea that he might, in some sense, have propelled Tilda into Daragh Canavan’s arms was an unpleasant one, and could not easily be dismissed.
Tilda gave Caitlin an embarrassingly explicit lecture about the birds and the bees, and Caitlin consequently endured an anxious three weeks worrying whether she was was going to have a baby. She spent a lot of time in church, praying, and made a very vague confession to Father O’Byrne. She wasn’t pregnant; the relief was enormous.
She went back to her old occupation of trying to find her father. She studied the map of Ireland for hours, struggling to remember the name of the village he had told her about. Sometimes in dreams he came to her and spoke its name, but when she woke up, her face wet with tears, she had forgotten it. She knew that the village could not be far from the sea, as her father had told her that he had gathered oysters on the shore, and she knew that there had been hills and lakes. But there seemed to be no part of Ireland that was not within a couple of hours of the sea and peppered with hills and lakes. Mr Oddie, the private detective, had investigated Ireland, too, but had been unable to trace her father’s relatives. Caitlin determined to do better than Mr Oddie.
Guessing most Irish villages to have a priest, she wrote letters, explaining that she was looking for her relatives, addressing the envelopes to The Priest, Ballywhatever, and the name of the county, which she gleaned from the atlas. Some of the priests wrote back to her. She learned that in Ireland, Canavan was a common surname. She did not know her grandparents’ Christian names, only that she herself had been called after her father’s sister, Caitlin. She persisted, confident that she would eventually succeed.
Most of the time, her prevailing emotion was one of utter boredom. She was bored at school, her position in class having sunk until it was nearer the bottom than the middle, and she was bored at Poona. She was glad she had managed to get the bedroom to herself, though sometimes, when she was really bored, she even found herself missing Melissa. She went to the cinema a great deal, envying the luxury and ease that the American films portrayed. She began to skip church, which she had attended every Sunday since she was a small child. If God had not returned her father to her, which was what she most wanted in the world, then what use was He?
Saturday mornings she spent at the stables in the village, mucking out loose boxes in exchange for a ride. Tilda had arranged the Saturday mornings after the Martin Devereux episode, and Caitlin, though she hated to enjoy anything Tilda had given her, had not been able to resist the opportunity. When she gave her horse its head, cantering across the meadow, the fast slipstream of air blanked out pain and loss and tedium.
Then she saw the notice in the window of the village shop. ‘A Revue is to be performed by the Woodcott St Martin Amateur Dramatic Society. Preliminary meeting for all interested at the Memorial Hall, 7.30, Tuesday 15 February.’ The notice was signed by someone called Julian Pascoe.
The Memorial Hall was ghastly: ice-cold, cavernous, with lavatories that perpetually leaked. There were about a dozen people in the room when Caitlin arrived. Mrs Cavell, who ran the post office, was calling instructions about chairs; a short, plump man with a shiny bald patch was placing rickety wooden seats in an inaccurate circle. No-one took any notice of Caitlin. Someone shouted, ‘Where’s Julian?’ and a woman in a red skirt with lipstick that clashed said, ‘Escaping Margaret, I expect,’ and everyone laughed. They all seemed to know each other, and Caitlin began to think that she had made a mistake in coming. It was only an awful village thing anyway, and would probably be just as pathetic as a school play. She sidled towards the door.
The door swung open just as Caitlin reached it. A tall, thin man with dark hair cut in a messy fringe almost collided with her. ‘Julian, darling!’ shrieked someone.
Julian, who wore coat, gloves and scarf and still looked cold, glanced at Caitlin, and said: ‘Not running away, are you?’
She shook her head.
He held out his hand. ‘Julian Pascoe.’
‘Caitlin Canavan.’
He frowned. ‘Irish. A fair colleen. “No maid I’ve seen, like the fair colleen, that I met in the County Down.” Are you from the County Down, Caitlin Canavan?’
She shook her head. ‘Cambridgeshire.’
He roared with laughter, as though she had said something funny. ‘Cambridgeshire. Good God. Such a delightful name, such alliteration, such an harmonious juxtaposition of syllables, and she comes from Cambridgeshire.’ He glanced at her. ‘Didn’t mean to rag you, fair colleen,’ he said softly. ‘Now give me a nice smile – yes, that’s better – and go and sit down with the others, like a good girl.’
She sat down. Her knees were shaking slightly and she was not sure whether to feel angry or flattered. The chairs made a sort of horseshoe; Julian Pascoe sat between the two arms of the horseshoe. Mrs Cavell poured him a cup of tea from a thermos flask and he beamed at her and said, ‘Too sweet of you, darling.’
The woman with the red skirt said, ‘Shall I light the oil heater, Ju?’ but he shook his head.
‘Like trying to heat the Cheddar Gorge, Patricia, and the fumes are so bad for my asthma.’ Julian glanced at his pad of paper. ‘We’d better start by taking names. And if you could tell me what you’re interested in … acting, singing, props, whatever.’
He went round the circle, one by one. Mrs Cavell – ‘Scenery and props. You know me, Julian, ready to muck in with anything.’ The bald man – ‘Bit of tap dancing’, which made Caitlin giggle. A skinny young man with a prominent Adam’s apple – ‘Singing – my repertoire’s mostly ballads and comic stuff.’ He reached Caitlin.
‘And the fair colleen?’
She made herself look him in the eye. ‘I can act and sing and dance.’
‘Dear me,’ he said ‘such an embarrassment of riches.’ Then he glanced at his watch. ‘Auditions on Sunday afternoon, people. Here, I’m afraid. Now, I shall tell you what I’ve sketched out so far. It’s in the early stages, but …’ Julian Pascoe shrugged his thin shoulders.
Throughout the next few days, Caitlin sometimes found herself thinking of Julian Pascoe. He was quite old – in his thirties, she guessed – and he was married. Patricia Cunningham told her about his wife.
‘She’s called Margaret. Frightful bitch. She makes poor Julian’s life absolute hell.’
They were in the Memorial Hall’s sordid kitchen, washing cups. ‘Why did he marry her?’ asked Caitlin. ‘Is she very pretty?’
Patricia sneered. ‘Horse-faced, darling. But pots of money. Nouveau riche. Poor Ju is frightfully well-connected, but there’s simply no cash in the family. Before he married Margaret, he had to teach at a ghastly prep school in Oxford. Hated it, of course, and it didn’t do his health much good.’ Patricia shook her head. ‘He is frightfully artistic, you know.’
After the auditions, Julian cast Caitlin in several sketches. She was also to sing ‘Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage’ entirely by herself. Some of the other women in the society had made catty remarks about that, seeing her stardom as unmerited, but Caitlin didn’t care. After rehearsals, they all went to the pub. Caitlin, accompanying them, realized that they assumed that she was eighteen, so she talked about sixth form, and always wore make-up.
In the spring of 1949, Colonel Renshaw fell ill. Tilda nursed him, sitting beside his bed during the worst of the fever, putting cold compresses on his forehead while he retreated to the battlefields of Flanders.
The generator broke down again: Josh, at the weekend, took it apart, cleaned it, and reassembled it. A fox got into the hen-coop, leaving a trail of feathers and mangled corpses. Erich, a purple vein beating in his forehead, hacked a hole in the frosty ground; Tilda helped him bury the dead birds.
At half-term, Tilda took Caitlin to Cambridge. While Caitlin spent the afternoon with Kit de Paveley, Tilda met Rosi in a gloomy little basement café. Rosi was wearing a full black skirt and a tight black sweater and was smoking. Every time the door of the café swung open, she’d leap up and wave at the new arrivals.
‘Charles! Maureen! Are you coming to our party tonight?’ or, ‘Stella! Have you seen Finn?’ Then in a slightly lowered voice to Tilda, ‘Finn is Irish – a poet – so talented. We read each other our work sometimes.’
Rosi, who was in the final year of her English degree, was writing a romance. Tilda suspected a great many swooning damsels, dangerous highwaymen, and hairbreadth escapes.
Rosi scowled. ‘Hanna is very, very dull. All the other medical students have lots of fun, but Hanna always studies. She thinks she will fail her exams.’ Rosi’s expression altered. ‘Now, I have a favour to ask you, Tilda. I want you to make my wedding dress.’
Tilda gave a gasp of pleasure and hugged and kissed Rosi.
‘I haven’t a ring yet. Richard and I are to go to London next weekend and choose one.’
‘And Richard’s parents? Do they approve?’
‘They adore me.’ Rosi beamed. ‘Tell me what it’s like to be married, Tilda.’
Tilda looked away, remembering. It had been wonderful at first, when things like lack of money and a poky basement flat hadn’t mattered. She remembered wringing the laundry in the back yard, she and Max each holding one end of the sheet. Collapsing with laughter and then tumbling into bed. Often she looked back, wondering what had happened.
‘Marriage is different for everyone, Rosi. And I’m not much of an advertisement for it, am I?’
‘But you still love Max, don’t you?’
Only Rosi would ask such a question, bluntly, without preamble. Everyone else tiptoed round it, tactfully avoided it. Tilda rubbed her aching forehead with her fingertips. Then she said, ‘Yes. Yes, I do.’
‘Why don’t you tell him?’
She shook her head and blew her nose. ‘There’s no point. He doesn’t love me any more, you see.’
‘Are you sure?’
She thought back to that last, terrible meeting with Max, in the street at Southam. ‘Yes, I’m sure.’
They were both silent. A dozen students piled into the cramped little café, shouting and laughing.
‘So will you?’ said Rosi.
‘Make your wedding dress?’ Tilda smiled. ‘Of course. If you really want me to. If you’re sure that you don’t want one from one of the smart London shops—’
Rosi made a dismissive gesture. ‘You must sew it for me, Tilda. That is’ – she looked suddenly concerned – ‘if you don’t mind. You do look very tired. You have a red nose.’
‘It has taken me ages to get rid of this wretched cold. And the colonel still isn’t well.’
‘You should have a holiday.’
For what seemed the first time in months, Tilda laughed. ‘A holiday? Rosi.’
‘Well, why not? You haven’t had a holiday in years.’
‘Not since before the war.’ The beach at Trouville, she thought, escaping an unbearably hot Paris in the baleful August of 1939. Herself and Max, building a sandcastle for baby Josh …
‘You shall go to France,’ said Rosi, as though it was settled. ‘You shall go and see Melissa. Hanna and I will stay at Poona over Easter and look after everything.’
Erich worked each day in the colonel’s vegetable garden and then, at half past four, he watched for Caitlin’s bus. From the old beech tree, perched on one of the long, grey branches, he saw her alight from the bus and walk up the hill. Sometimes she looked tired and he would long to run down the hill and carry her bag for her, but of course he never did. He spoke to her only occasionally, at dinner time. It did not hurt him that she rarely seemed to acknowledge his existence. He would not have expected her to. She seemed to be from a different sphere, somewhere shut off from the ugliness of the world, like the stone angel.
In the evenings, he went to The Red House and worked on the garden. From the spring flowers he had grown there he made a posy for Caitlin, twisting wire around the stems to bind them together. The wire looked ugly. Tilda had made an appointment for him to see a doctor in Oxford; she offered to accompany him, but Erich, who was now eighteen, refused. He caught the bus, stuttering over the fare, dropping his threepence to the floor while the conductor made sarcastic remarks. At the surgery he made himself smile and be cheerful in a way that he thought the doctor would like, and did not tell him about the dreams or the bits of his life that seemed, sometimes, just to be missing. When the doctor asked him about Vienna, Erich bared his broken teeth in a grin and explained that he had forgotten all that. Then he stood up and clicked his heels together and bowed, and left the surgery.
Outside, there were too many people in the streets, so he pulled his shoulders in and made himself small, trying not to touch them. In a haberdasher’s shop he studied reels of ribbon, grabbing the nearest reel, a narrow scarlet, when he saw that the assistant was looking at him.
‘A f-f-foot, please.’
The haberdasher cut a length and Erich paid and put the ribbon in his pocket. Then he ran for the bus, sweat sheening his forehead, the eyes of the watchers a physical sensation in the small of his back, the footsteps of his pursuers echoing in his ears.
Back at Colonel Renshaw’s house, he covered the wire with a length of ribbon and tiptoed into Caitlin’s room. It was scattered with stockings and petticoats and with pale talcum-powder footprints, and the air was rich with a deep, heady perfume. Erich bent to kiss one of the footprints, and then, leaving the posy on the window sill, he shut the door behind him and ran back to the garden.
Cécile had taken Melissa shopping in Saintes. Max had expected them back within a couple of hours, and when they had been gone over four hours he prowled around the garage forecourt, glancing from his watch to the road.
He saw them at last and gave a huge sigh of relief. Their bicycle baskets were full of bags. When they pedalled into the forecourt, Melissa leapt off her bicycle and hugged him.
‘I’ve had the most wonderful day, Daddy! Look!’ She began to take the bags out of the basket.
‘In the house, Melissa,’ said Cécile, as she kissed Max. ‘You would not want oil on your new clothes.’
In the living room, Melissa took what seemed to Max to be an entire shopful of clothes out of various carrier bags.
Cécile said, ‘Now you should hang them up in your wardrobe, darling, so they do not get creased,’ and Melissa, her arms full, ran upstairs.
When she was out of earshot, Cécile said, ‘They are my present to Melissa, Max. A very late birthday present.’
‘Cécile, I can’t possibly—’
‘Melissa is my friend, Max. I hope you will not deny me the pleasure of buying a few gifts for a friend?’
He glared at her, and then realized that he must give in with grace. ‘Then that’s very generous of you, Cécile. And so kind of you to spare the time.’
‘It was no trouble, Max. In fact, it was a pleasure. We had a delightful afternoon. And now, chéri, I would simply adore a glass of wine.’
She followed him into the kitchen, closing the door behind them. The kitchen was tacked on to the side of the house, somewhat separate from the rest of the building. Max poured two glasses of red wine.
Cécile said, ‘I found out why Melissa does not want to go back to England.’
He spun round. ‘Why?’
‘I had to promise not to tell you, Max. But it is as I thought, because of a boy.’
‘A boy?’ He stared at her. ‘That’s ridiculous, Cécile, you must have made a mistake. Melissa’s only a child.’
‘Oh, Max,’ she said, looking at him in the way that she sometimes did. ‘So English.’
Some of the priests to whom she had written sent Caitlin addresses of Canavans in Ireland. She wrote letters to each, explaining who she was, certain that one of these Caitlin Canavans must be her father’s favourite sister. Soon her father would write back to her, explaining his long absence, and then he would take her away from this horrible house and she would be happy again.
Meanwhile, she had a rehearsal with Julian Pascoe. ‘Just a few chassés and poses,’ Julian said vaguely, blowing his nose on a large red handkerchief. ‘Nothing too complicated, the stage isn’t big enough.’
Caitlin, wearing her ballet slippers and a dress with a full skirt, danced around the four chairs that were supposed to represent the gilded cage that she and Patricia were making of cardboard and gold paint. She felt rather silly, up there by herself, Julian beating time and singing the verses and sniffing because he had a cold. When she had finished, he turned away and said: ‘That’ll do. But cut the jumps. You haven’t a ballet dancer’s build, darling, and it looks rather elephantine.’
He sat down at the piano, balancing the music on the stand. Caitlin bit her lip. She had always felt rather proud of her figure, but now she saw herself through his eyes: top-heavy, short (she had stopped growing at five foot two), ridiculous.
He had begun to play. She managed to join in at the right time, but she knew that it was awful: her voice wobbled, her steps were leaden and she muddled the words of the second verse. As he played the final chord, she waited miserably for the inevitable sarcasm.
It came. Julian took his hands from the keyboard, flung back his head and closed his eyes. ‘Dear God,’ he said. ‘This fucking cold … this fucking village …’ He spun round on the piano stool. ‘I could have gone to RADA – did you know that, Caitlin Canavan? Instead of being stuck in this godforsaken hole listening to talentless little girls murder frightful music-hall songs—’
She stopped hearing what he said and walked off the stage. She tried to put on her cardigan, but the sleeves were inside out, and she could not see to disentangle them.
‘Where are you going?’
She mumbled, ‘Home.’
‘You’re crying.’
She wanted to say something sarcastic in return, but could not speak. He took her cardigan out of her hands and put it back on the chair, and turned her round to face him.
He touched her face, sweeping up the tears, licking them from his fingertip. She gave a strangled little cry.
He said, ‘I’ve been a pig, haven’t I? You mustn’t mind me. I’ve this frightful cold and things are difficult at home.’
She managed to speak at last. ‘It doesn’t matter.’ Yet tears rolled down her face.
This time, he stooped and kissed them with his lips. For a while she stood quite still, her eyes closed, but then she lifted up her face and let him touch her mouth with his.
Her cold refused to shift: Tilda gargled with fennel tea, but her voice was scratchy and taut. She persuaded the colonel to engage a nurse to sit with him at night, but the woman left after less than a week, refusing to occupy the same room as the products of the colonel’s latest interest, taxidermy. Rosi sent a bale of material for her wedding dress, but Tilda, exhausted each evening, had not yet begun to cut it out. Neither did she write to Max, though she tried to several times, the ink from the nib of her pen spreading in a circular black blot over the blank paper.
The season shifted haltingly from winter to summer. Sleet and wind one day, blue skies and sun the next. The garden alternated between quagmire and soil so frost-hardened a spade could not pierce its surface. She was hacking away at the earth, searching for any remaining potatoes, when a voice called her name.
‘Tilda?’
Looking round, she saw Archie Raphael. He pushed open the gate and picked his way across the garden towards her.
‘You haven’t been to the lectures for weeks.’
She dropped the spade. ‘My employer’s been ill. I had to look after him.’
‘I thought I’d drop in and give you these.’ ‘These’ were a huge bunch of daffodils and narcissi. ‘And ask if there was anything I could do for you in Oxford.’
She wished he hadn’t come. She had spoken to no-one but the colonel and family for so long that it was an effort to take the flowers and murmur thanks.
‘Damned cold out here,’ Archie said hopefully.
Reluctantly she took the hint, and led him into the house. In the colonel’s kitchen, he looked around at the vast ceilings, the sweating pipes and groaning stove, and said, ‘Dear God. Like “Gormenghast”.’
She dumped the flowers in a bucket and filled the kettle. He told her about the lectures that she had missed. He had slept through one, argued through another. There was a new student who thought the United Nations was pointless because either the Soviet Union or America was bound to drop the Bomb in the next couple of years, and there was a young woman who believed that in the future all wars would be fought in outer space. ‘Rather a nice idea, I thought,’ said Archie cheerfully, ‘lugging all those tanks and U-boats and things to the moon.’ He glanced at Tilda. ‘I say, are you all right? You look pretty frightful, you know.’
She said stiffly, ‘I’ve had a cold.’
He looked around. ‘A lot of work, this place, I should think.’
‘I can manage.’
‘Only I’ve a friend who’s a solicitor in Oxford. I know that he’s looking for someone to do secretarial work—’
‘I like it here, Archie.’ She began to clear up the tea things.
There was a silence. Then he said, ‘Sort of penance, is it?’
Tilda stood at the sink, her back to him, almost too furious to speak. At last she said, ‘This house gives me and my family a roof over our heads. It has given me work which I am not ashamed of. Now, I’ve things to do, if you don’t mind.’ She began to wash up, scrubbing the dishes so hard she thought the pattern might come off, but then she stopped suddenly and swung back to him.
‘And what on earth do you think gives you the right to walk in here, uninvited, and criticize the way I live? We haven’t all been to a smart school, you know … We don’t all have a private income—’
He said mildly, ‘I left school at fifteen, actually. My parents were tailors in the East End. The war helped me – I wasn’t fit enough for active service, so I went into a unit which made stirring little films that were meant to keep up morale on the home front. You know the sort of thing – “With root vegetables, we can win the war” … “Make your saucepans into ack-ack guns.’” Archie blinked. ‘After the war, I worked for the Central Office of Information, but then I couldn’t stand it any more – too patronizing – so I left to go freelance. And as for my right to come here … well, I thought that I was your friend.’
‘I don’t have friends, Archie. I haven’t time for friends.’ Her voice was brittle.
This time, the silence lasted longer. Then he said slowly, ‘No … I would imagine that you keep everyone at arm’s length. You’re very good at that, aren’t you, Tilda? It took me weeks to pluck up courage to speak to you the first time, and then – well, I hardly know any more about you now than I did six months ago. I understand that you’re not attracted to me. I wasn’t expecting that. But friendship would have been nice.’
He picked up his hat and gloves. She said, and the words trembled, ‘Archie, you don’t understand. You don’t know anything about me.’
His smile was fleeting. ‘That’s the thing, isn’t it? You made sure of that, didn’t you? It’s been like trying to get to know an icicle.’
He left the house and she went back to the washing-up. But one of the plates slipped from her hand on the journey from sink to draining board, and smashed on the tiled floor. Tilda stared at the shattered pieces for a moment and then she ran upstairs. In the bathroom, she splashed cold water over her face, but her reflection – red eyes, peeling nose, dark shadows – told her that Archie had been right: she looked terrible. Old and plain, with lines of bitterness and loneliness and disappointment beginning to extend from nose to mouth. She sat on the living-room sofa, her coat around her shoulders, and wondered whether Archie had been right, too, in the other things that he had said. Whether she was indeed cold and unapproachable; whether she had learned to wall herself off from other people. Whether Melissa had left because her mother had changed, had become unloving and distant.
She mopped her eyes and found pen and ink and writing paper. She began the letter, My dear Max …