Melissa was crying. I had to swallow hard to keep the tears from my own eyes.
She said, ‘I was in France when he died. There was a telegram. We left for England the next day.’ Her tears made rivulets through her make-up, but she did not yet dab them away. ‘I didn’t know about Caitlin’s part in it at first. Rosi told me, after the funeral. Caitlin had gone by then and Hanna was ill, and my mother … I’d never seen her like that before. She seemed so beaten.’
She looked up. ‘I’ve a photograph of Erich. Would you like to see it?’
As she went to fetch it, I looked out of the window to her back garden. A week had passed since the episode with Charles. The hospital had kept me in overnight, but my body had clung to this unplanned, unexpected child. Charles was now in a private nursing home, recovering from a nervous breakdown. His sister had told me that his production company had gone bankrupt. From the events of that night I still endured a lingering sense of shame, combined with a guilty relief that Charles was still considered too ill for visitors. Tall trees surrounded the velvety lawn in Melissa’s garden, but I was afraid to look at them in case I saw a dark shadow in their branches.
‘There.’ Coming back into the room, Melissa handed me the snapshot. ‘That’s Erich.’
His face looked back at me, thin and dark with haunted eyes. The black and white image reminded me of those photographs one sees in the newspaper of other lost boys: runaways, and rent boys, and the residents of remand homes. I asked Melissa if I could borrow the photograph.
She agreed and, in the distance, I heard the front door slam. A voice called out, ‘Mum!’
‘Matty!’ cried Melissa, and leapt from the sofa, darting out of the room. As I gathered my belongings, I couldn’t help overhearing the conversation.
‘Matty, I expected you yesterday.’
‘I missed the ferry, Mum.’
‘And you are so brown – and so thin – you have been eating properly, haven’t you?’
‘Mum, don’t fuss—’
‘I don’t want you to catch anorexia—’
‘You can’t catch anorexia, Mum, it’s not contagious. And I’m fine – starving actually—’
Matty wore the familiar Doc Martens and layers of black T-shirts. Her hair was a furze bush of snaking dreadlocks, and the nose-ring had been augmented by a little loop of silver in her eyebrow.
I thanked Melissa and took my leave, and drove home carefully. The events of the last week, and Melissa’s story, had made me aware of the fragility of life. At home, after I had eaten, I typed up my notes. No wonder Tilda had found it difficult to talk to me about the postwar years. Her husband and her daughter had left her, the child whom she had, at great risk to herself, saved from the terrors of occupied Holland had killed himself. Her lover’s daughter – her own niece – had been, if not responsible for Erich’s death, bound up in it in a disturbingly unpleasant way.
When I switched off my laptop, I glanced at my watch and saw that it was midnight. I stared at the photographs on my pinboard. Daragh, Caitlin, poor doomed Erich, and Tilda herself, sitting in the garden of The Red House, surrounded by children.
A few days later, I received cards from the library, telling me that the books I had ordered had come in at last. When I arrived home after collecting them, a message was waiting on the answering machine. I switched it on, and there was a pause and a mumble, and a familiar voice cried, ‘God, I detest these damned things!’
Caitlin Canavan. I listened carefully.
‘Let me buy you a drink, Rebecca. We could have a nice old chat. Umm … give me a ring. I’ve left the Savoy, the service isn’t what it once was. Oh, my address …’ She gave the name of a hotel in south London.
I glanced at my watch; it was three o’clock. I dialled directory enquiries, who gave me the phone number of the hotel, but when I rang no-one answered. I hastily washed my face and combed my hair, and went out.
It took me over an hour to cross London, another half-hour to pick out the hotel from the warren of seedy buildings that lined the narrow streets. Caitlin’s hotel, the Blenheim, did not live up to the grandeur of its name. Paint peeled from doors and windows, and when I rang the bell and was eventually admitted, the stale smells of cooking wafted into the hall.
I was about to ask the number of Caitlin’s room when I caught sight of her through a doorway. She was sitting at a window table in the small bar room. The bar was formica-topped, backed by rows of bottles and optics. A bored young man rubbed a dirty cloth over the formica as Caitlin’s voice penetrated above the low buzz of a radio.
‘—simply must come to Dublin, darling. You’d love it. I could introduce you to simply masses of divine people.’
I went into the bar. ‘Caitlin?’
She looked up. ‘Darling! How lovely to see you.’ She lunged inaccurate kisses at me. ‘You’ll join me, won’t you, Rebecca?’ She gestured to the barman. ‘Barry?’
I realized that she was already quite drunk, and that, if she was staying in this hole, she must be short of money. ‘Let me buy the drinks, Caitlin.’
‘Too sweet of you. A G and T, darling.’
I bought a gin and tonic and an orange juice, and sat down opposite her. The window beside us was open, and the rumble of the traffic made the table shake. Caitlin’s hand trembled slightly when she raised the glass. Though her face was heavily made up, she had been unable to disguise the redness of her eyelids.
‘I thought,’ she said, ‘that you might want to attend my father’s burial.’
I stared at her. ‘The body’s been released?’
She nodded, and then she rummaged in her bag for a tissue as tears began to slide from her eyes. ‘There’s to be a private Requiem Mass in Cambridge, but he’s to be buried next to my mother in Southam. I insisted on it.’ She told me the day and the time.
‘Caitlin, I’m so sorry.’
‘I’m not,’ she said fiercely, blowing her nose. ‘I’m glad. I’ve found him at last.’
There was a silence, which I expected her to fill with wild accusations about Tilda. Instead she said, ‘All these years, I never stopped searching for him. Every street I walked down, every time I entered a room, I would look for his face. I even went to America once – did you know that? And all the time’ – and she laughed unsteadily – ‘he was in Southam. So now I don’t have to look any more.’
It occurred to me that Caitlin had looked for Daragh in other ways too. In the succession of lovers, in the unsuccessful marriages that Patrick had mentioned. In her imitation of the way her father had lived – the drinking, the extravagance, the reckless bonhomie.
I said, ‘I’ve been talking to Melissa. She told me about Erich.’
I expected scornful denials, and for her to contradict Melissa’s version of events, so that I’d have to pick through the sad remains of another death, trying to salvage the truth. But she scrabbled in her bag again, this time taking out her cigarettes and lighter, and asked warily, ‘What did Melissa say?’
‘That Erich hanged himself.’
‘I suppose she told you that it was my fault?’ A flash of her old spirit. ‘He was unstable, you know. Unhinged.’
‘Melissa said that Erich was always haunted by what had happened to him in Austria.’
Caitlin lit her cigarette. ‘He was odd. Different. Rather peculiar and unattractive. He almost smelt of fear and defeat. I used to try to avoid him. He gave me the creeps.’
‘Erich showed you the garden of The Red House, didn’t he?’
She paused, the cigarette between her first two fingers. ‘Yes.’ Her voice, just then, was barely audible. ‘It was beautiful. You’ve seen it, of course?’
I nodded. ‘Melissa said that you left home after Erich died. Where did you go?’
‘I went to London. Tilda was going to send me to boarding school, so I ran away. We’d had the most frightful quarrel, you see. I found a job in a bar, and then some film work.’
‘You were an actress?’
She blinked. ‘It wasn’t quite what I was hoping for. A bit … blue, if you understand what I mean, darling. But it paid the rent, and then I met a lovely man who was so sweet to me. But he got into a teeny bit of trouble with the police, and quite soon after that I went to Ireland.’
‘To look for your father?’
‘I thought that even if Daddy hadn’t been able to go to my Aunt Caitlin, he must have had friends. My daddy always had simply masses of friends. Everyone loved him.’
Not quite everyone, I thought. Someone had hated Daragh Canavan enough to bind him hand and foot and bury him alive in the wall of a dike. A death of deliberate barbarism.
‘But I couldn’t find him, so I went back to England. I was working in a little club – quite chic, darling – when I met Graham. We married a fortnight later. Terribly romantic. A register office, I’m afraid – Graham had been married before, so we couldn’t wed in church. It was lovely at first. We had a sweet little house and Graham treated me like a princess.’ She sighed. ‘But he was dull, darling, and that’s the truth of it. Terribly dull. Especially about money.’
I imagined that, for Caitlin, the role of housewife had quickly palled. ‘Did you have any children?’
She shook her head. She was looking into her empty glass. ‘Couldn’t, darling. I’d got myself into a bit of a pickle when I first went to London. I sorted it out, but I must have botched it a bit.’
I shuddered. A knitting needle, perhaps, or an alcoholic doctor who’d years before been struck off the medical register.
‘You’ll come, won’t you?’ she said suddenly. She had gripped my hand; her eyes pleaded.
‘To your father’s burial? Of course I will.’
I slipped my notebook back into my bag. As I rose to go, she said, ‘I didn’t mean to hurt him. At the end, I quite liked him.’ The words were slightly slurred, and it took me a few moments to realize that Caitlin was speaking of Erich. ‘I didn’t know that he would do that.’ The pain and regret of decades echoed in her voice. ‘I didn’t mean to hurt him.’
It was two months since I had visited The Red House. In that time, the garden had faded from the bright lushness of June to the dusty pallor of the end of August. The lawns were parched and yellowed, and the skeletons of the plants that had gone to seed cast lacy silhouettes against the walls. Plump greyish clouds intermittently blocked out the face of the sun, but it did not yet rain.
I had telephoned that morning to check that Tilda was well enough to talk to me. I found her sitting in the solar, a blanket, in spite of the lingering heat, folded over her legs. There was a photograph album open on the table in front of her.
‘My Red House children.’ She indicated the album. ‘Here’s Joan.’ A dark-haired girl in a cotton dress: Joan was now, of course, Tilda’s housekeeper. ‘Joan was one of the first,’ she explained. ‘And Luke and Tom, the twins. There’s Brian, and Annie, and …’ She turned the pages of the album, naming the children.
I listened for a while, but I could not stop myself saying: ‘Didn’t it frighten you? Didn’t you fear for them? Didn’t you want to turn away, do something different?’
She looked up. ‘After Erich? Of course. When he died, a part of me died. A cliché, but it’s true. I wanted to hide away. I could hardly bear to face the world again.’
‘Then why did you?’
‘Max made me.’ She closed the album. ‘It has always haunted me, though. Not—I don’t mean why he hanged himself. I understood that he could not bear to live. But my part in it. The part of the de Paveleys.’
‘The de Paveleys?’ I did not understand her. ‘What have they to do with it? They’re all dead, aren’t they?’ The de Paveleys, in the chapters of the biography I had already written, had neatly epitomized the twentieth-century decline of the aristocracy.
‘Not quite,’ Tilda chided me. ‘There is Caitlin, of course. And I myself am half de Paveley, so my children and grandchildren have de Paveley blood. And you appear to have forgotten Kit.’
Kit de Paveley, that reclusive, unattractive bachelor, had been easy to overlook.
‘He still sends me flowers on my birthday,’ Tilda said, and I stared at her, shocked.
‘Kit’s alive?’
‘Of course.’ She seemed surprised that I had assumed otherwise. ‘He’s a year or so younger than me, you know. He never left Southam.’
I remembered standing on the dike with Charles, on the day he had proposed to me, and looking down to that distant, shabby white house and seeing a flicker of movement behind a dusty window.
‘I haven’t seen him for years,’ Tilda added. ‘I wonder whether Caitlin keeps in touch with him? Probably not. They were never close.’ She paused for a moment, and then she said sadly, ‘I meant, Rebecca, that the de Paveleys have haunted me and my family. Even poor Erich’s fate was bound up with theirs. Caitlin knew about me and Daragh, you see. That was why she hated me so much.’
I remembered the private detective’s report, now in my desk drawer in London.
‘If Sarah had not wanted to punish the de Paveleys for what they had done to her sister, then Daragh would not have married Jossy. And Caitlin would not have, years later, also wanted to punish me.’
I rose and went to the window. Clouds bobbed in the sky, but it was not yet raining. The shadows cast on the topiaried box trees were pasted black on the faded lawn.
‘Chess pieces,’ I said, suddenly, looking down. I understood the box trees now: bishop, queen, king, and, half hidden by a copper beech, the flaring mane of the knight.
‘Of course. Didn’t you realize?’
‘I hadn’t looked at them properly from here. And from the path you can’t make them out.’ The trees were bunched up, crowded, so that you had to look carefully to distinguish their shapes. I was beginning to guess why, at the close of her life, Tilda had chosen to have her biography written. Not for the reason she had first given me – to tell her mother’s forgotten story – and not, as I had more recently assumed, to leave a bland, official version for posterity.
‘Erich and I used to play chess quite often,’ said Tilda. ‘Max taught me the game.’
The sun re-emerged from behind the cloud. ‘It’s a puzzle, isn’t it, Tilda?’ I said. ‘You wanted me to solve a puzzle.’
Her grey eyes, calm and steady, met mine. ‘You’re good at solving puzzles, aren’t you, Rebecca? I realized that when I watched Sisters of the Moon.’
Researching the programme, it had taken me four months to track down Ivy Lunn’s child, taken from her mother at her birth in the workhouse in 1920. She herself had tried to find her natural mother a few years earlier, but had failed to do so. She had been adopted, and her adopted parents had changed her name. She had subsequently married twice. Tracing her had not been easy, but I had enjoyed it. It had been interesting yet uninvolving. It had allowed me to study the joys and griefs of others without suffering them myself. Yes, I liked solving puzzles.
‘You chose me,’ I said slowly, ‘because you thought that I might find out what had happened to Daragh?’
‘If he had not died, then Erich might have lived!’ The fleeting passion blazed and then faded, and Tilda said quietly, ‘I want to know before I die. Or I do not see how I shall rest easy. I didn’t foresee, of course, that Daragh’s body would be found. That was a great shock to me, but it was meant to be, don’t you think, Rebecca? It was meant to be.’
‘And your family …’ I remembered Patrick’s hostility. ‘What did they think?’
‘Melissa and the girls understand. And Max would have understood, of course. Josh has his own concerns, as always. Patrick tried to dissuade me from going through with it. I think that he was anxious about my health. I tried to explain to him how important it was to me, but he can be stubborn sometimes.’ She smiled. ‘Patrick often reminds me of Max. You’re fond of him, aren’t you, Rebecca?’
She looked at me, and I felt myself redden.
‘He got into such a tangle with that wretched Jennifer,’ she added. ‘Ellie was the only good thing to come out of that marriage. Jennifer had expensive tastes, and Patrick worked long hours to satisfy them. They were rarely together, and the marriage fell apart. But Patrick is deeply attached to Ellie.’
I remembered Patrick running down the path of The Red House, his dark-haired daughter clasped in his arms.
‘I’ve been hoping for some time,’ Tilda said meaningfully, ‘that Patrick would meet a nice girl. A sensible, kind, intelligent girl.’ Again, she looked at me. ‘It worries me, Rebecca, to think of him alone in that house in Cumbria. He showed me a photograph. It seems terribly bleak. What did you think? He told me that he’d taken you there.’
I had to go to the window again, and fiddle with the tassels on the curtains and make some noncommittal answer. The old questions still haunted me, but I found that I was looking at them in a different way.
Even if Tilda had killed Daragh, even if her explanation that she had engaged me to solve the mystery for her was only an elaborate red herring, did that negate the good that she had done in her life? The children she had cared for – the Kindertransporte children, the evacuees, the Red House children. The causes that she had later fought for – UNICEF and the Red Cross, and the psychiatric clinics that she had founded to help traumatized children. If she had, in a moment of anguish and fury, killed Daragh Canavan, did she deserve that I should expose her?
I didn’t think so. As for the book – as for the baby – I could feel myself coming to a conclusion. But not yet. Not quite yet.
From behind me, Tilda said, ‘Patrick telephoned me yesterday. Apparently Daragh’s body has been released for burial.’
‘Caitlin told me.’
Her lids flickered. ‘You’ve spoken to her?’
‘Yesterday.’
‘How was she?’
‘Unhappy. Lonely.’
She said, ‘Poor Caitlin.’
‘She asked me to go to her father’s interment. I said that I would.’
‘I’m glad. I’d send flowers, but Caitlin would not welcome it.’
She was silent then for a such a long time that I wondered whether she had fallen asleep, but then she looked up suddenly and said, ‘You’ll stay for supper, won’t you, Rebecca? Joan could make up a bed for you. It seems such a long time since you stayed the night.’
She seemed lonely, like Caitlin, but I had to refuse. I bent and kissed her.
‘Next week, Tilda, I hope. I’ll telephone.’
Tilda closed the album. Her heart ached with remembering. She would have liked Rebecca’s company that evening; it would have distracted her for a while from the memories that would rush in as soon as she was alone. She had needed the past unravelled; she had needed Rebecca, the uninvolved outsider, to do that untangling for her. Yet she had not fully anticipated the depths of the pain that the past could still inflict on her: it had taken almost more from her than she had felt able to give. Recently, she had feared that she was running out of time.
The disjointedness, the bright horror of the days that had followed Erich’s death, she had never forgotten. The inquest; the terrible scene with Caitlin. You were my father’s lover! The tormenting knowledge, from that moment, that she too had played a part in Erich’s death.
Max had come home. Tilda smiled fleetingly. Max and Melissa had come home, and Max had taken over all the tasks she had no longer been able to do. She had forgotten how to peel a potato; to scrub a floor exhausted her. Max had telephoned Hanna’s college tutor to tell her that Hanna would not return to university until the autumn; Max had engaged a woman to cook and clean for the colonel, and Max had gone to the police station in Oxford, to persuade them to attempt to trace the runaway Caitlin.
Max had arranged the funeral. Tilda remembered sitting in the front pew, looking up at the bright, fractured lights of the rose window. Unable to say the prayers or to join in the hymns. Unable sometimes even to stand. If Max had not been been there, she could not have endured it. Afterwards she had looked around the sea of familiar faces. The van de Criendts had travelled from Holland, and with them had come the elderly couple who had looked after Erich in the months before the invasion. Anna had been there, and Professor Hastings, and Michael. And Harold Sykes and his wife and daughters. And Archie Raphael, and their old neighbours from Southam. She had not realized that so many people cared.
It was becoming dark. When she looked out of the window, she saw that the box trees cast a purplish shadow on the gravel. Tilda remembered the first time she had taken Max to The Red House. It had been a week or two after the funeral – long, dark days, all jumbling exhaustingly together. She had found the courage, at last, to sort out Erich’s things, and had discovered his plans for the garden rolled up in a drawer. She had taken Max to The Red House that evening and had shown him what Erich had made, and what he would have done if he had had more time. And there, sitting on the steps of the terrace, looking down at the winding paths and drooping roses, she had sensed Erich’s peaceful presence. The rustle of a lilac bough. A footstep, almost heard. Free of fear at last, he had haunted his garden.
To write a book is to make a pattern, and yet, of course, in real lives, there is no pattern. People are not coherent, they are not programmed as a computer is programmed, to react in the same way to similar events.
Many people had known Tilda better than I ever would, and yet even they, perhaps, had not fully understood her. The events that had made her – her brutal conception, the pathos of her birth, the infancy spent in an institution – had no doubt spurred her to help all those other neglected and abandoned children, but they had also cut her off from the rest of us. The more extreme our experience, the less others are able to identify with it. This is why people avoid the bereaved. Because they do not, until it happens to them, know what to say or what to do. Their incomprehension, their dumbness, causes them to retreat.
I worked for hours that evening, concentrating on the latter half of Tilda’s life, writing about the Fifties, Sixties, and Seventies, the years when the difficulties of Tilda’s private life had retreated, and had taken second place to her work. I had photographs: Tilda being presented with a bouquet outside the newly opened Erich Wirmer Clinic; Tilda receiving her CBE. I put in order my taped interviews and letters from adopted and fostered Red House children; I went through the list of grandchildren, ticking off those to whom I had spoken.
Though I did not finish work until almost one o’clock in the morning, I could not sleep. I lay in bed, memories reeling through my head like a fast-forwarding film. The box hedges in Tilda’s garden, the expression on her face as she had shown me her photograph album. Patrick, at the hospital. Come to Cumbria with me. I wondered whether I could. The thought terrified me. I had lived in London for seven years – could I uproot myself and start again in that bleak, beautiful place? Though my home was small and inconvenient, though I was often lonely, there was a safety in my present life, the safety of the familiar. To live in Cumbria with Patrick would take such a leap of trust, of commitment, that my heart shrank at the thought of it.
My thoughts exhausted me, yet I remained wakeful. I selected the biggest and oldest and dullest of the library books on my desk, and began to read. The book’s publication date was 1926; the first chapter dealt with the history of the Fens: a sure cure for insomnia. Curled up in the duvet I began to read about the Romans, their colonization of East Anglia, their attempts to drain a hostile land, their eventual decline and replacement by a less organized people. Then the Anglo-Saxons – St Guthlac complaining of mires and miasmas – and Hereward the Wake.
By the time I began the section on the medieval history of the Fens, my eyelids were growing heavy. I almost put the book aside but, flicking forward, I saw that there was only a couple of pages to the end of the chapter. I made myself continue. When I came to the paragraph describing the medieval punishment for landowners who had neglected their sea defences, I had to read it twice. My heart began to beat very quickly, and I was suddenly wide awake again.
I sat up in bed. I knew now who had killed Daragh Canavan.
These days, she woke about four in the morning, just before the first birds began to sing. Max was with her then: when she turned in bed and reached out to him, she was always surprised that he was not there.
Often she managed to doze again; today she could not. The conversation with Rebecca remained with her, the memories that it had stirred lingered, so that the events of forty years ago were more vivid than the misty grey of a late summer’s morning. Tilda rose from the bed and left the room. She walked quietly through the house, careful not to disturb Joan’s sleep.
Each room had its memories, yet he was closest to her, of course, in the solar. Voices whispered as she stood in the great bay window.
‘I assume it’s for that door.’ He pointed to the peeling, rotting entrance to the house.
Tilda looked at the key Max had given her.
‘I collected it from the estate agent this afternoon. I’m buying The Red House, Tilda. It’ll take six weeks or so, but they gave me the key so that we could look round.’
She whispered, ‘Buying the house?’
‘For you. I know that you love it. For us, if you choose, Tilda.’
She did not move, did not fit the key to the lock. She said only, ‘What about Cécile, Max?’
‘Cécile? Cécile was a friend, a dear friend.’
He was lying. ‘Cécile was your lover,’ she said.
When he bent his head in acknowledgement, she said angrily, ‘You should go back to her, Max. You don’t have to stay here just because you feel sorry for me.’
He took the key from her palm and fitted it into the lock. The door creaked, and was freed from its spider-web chains. There was a swirl of dead leaves in the hall. Max held out his hand. ‘Come on.’
She hesitated only momentarily, then she followed him inside. The rooms were just as she had imagined them, faded and beautiful, with fireplaces of golden stone, and worn, paved floors.
‘Cécile’s selling the garage for me,’ said Max. ‘And I went to see my father this morning, and he’s lent me enough cash to put down a deposit on The Red House. The price is reasonable – it’s been empty for years, and no-one wants houses of this size these days. It’ll need a lot of work, but I’m sure we can make it habitable. And when it’s ready, we can fill it with children.’
‘Max,’ she said.
They were in a room overlooking the front garden. The wide stone bay window was almost smothered by creepers. ‘Our own children, or your waifs and strays. It doesn’t matter. You’ll find them, Tilda, I know you will. It’s what you’re good at.’
She shook her head violently. ‘But I’m not, am I, Max? I failed Erich. I failed Caitlin. Even Hanna—’
‘Hanna will recover,’ he said. ‘Hanna is strong. As for Erich and Caitlin, you did your best, Tilda. No-one could have done more.’
‘I’ve always remembered what you said to me, years ago, in London. It was your birthday. The snow had begun. Do you remember? You said that I was fooling myself. That I was trying to put sticking plaster on wounds that were too deep. You were right, Max, I know that now. I thought I could help Erich, but I couldn’t.’
He said, ‘I remember that I was patronizing and arrogant. I remember believing that no-one could understand grief as I did.’
She whispered, ‘I am afraid.’
Standing beside her, he put his arms around her. ‘Loving someone is about taking risks. Love is dangerous.’
Then he kissed her. When, at last, she looked up, she saw that the setting sun had painted the garden with wild pinks and gold. She thought they had come home at last.
Slowly, they had come to her. The damaged, the bruised, the neglected. The children that no-one wanted.
Joan had been the first. Joan had come to live in The Red House in the July of 1949, a few days before Rosi and Richard had married. Archie had found Joan, at twelve years old already the casualty of half a dozen children’s homes, stealing food from a market stall. Tilda had wanted to say no, to shake her head, to explain that it was too soon, but something about the child had stopped her. I’ll try, she had said, in the end, and a fidgeting, shuffling Joan had stood beside her in church as Rosi and Richard had made their vows.
Luke and Tom, the twins, had been discovered locked in a room with their retarded, dying mother. They had spoken no language except one of their own invention, and when Tilda had first heard of them they had been destined for a mental institution. The vast gardens and big, airy rooms of The Red House had at first terrified them, and they had made a cave of sheets and blankets in the corner of the bedroom in which they had huddled for the first fortnight of their stay.
Other children had followed. Teenage girls, far too young to be mothers to the babies they were expecting; boys with police records for burglary and vandalism. The money Max had earned from freelance journalism had at first been barely enough to feed them all.
Yet that other baby, the second daughter she had longed for, she had been denied. In her late forties, when she had given up hope, she had sat beside Erich’s grave and wept both for the son she had lost and the daughter she had never had. Then she had picked herself up, and walked back to The Red House, and her children.
The sky clouded over on the afternoon of Daragh Canavan’s burial, and the fidgety breeze marked the shifting of the seasons from summer to autumn. Less than half a dozen mourners attended the brief ceremony in Southam churchyard. I knew Caitlin, of course, and guessed the elderly woman beside her to be Jossy’s cook’s daughter. I wondered whether the two suits standing back beneath the yews were policemen. I saw, looking around, that he had not come.
As the earth was sprinkled onto the coffin, I slipped out and walked to where the path led from the church to the dike. The boughs of the trees, their leaves just beginning to turn, met overhead to form a tunnel. When I emerged in the open field, I remembered how I had felt when I had walked here with Charles: cut off from the village, separated from my surroundings by both place and time.
The field had already been ploughed. Clouds, heavy and swollen, rolled in from the east. Black dust adhered to my shoes as I crossed the furrows, heading for the old steward’s house. The latch was broken, and the breeze flicked the gate open and shut as I walked down the path to the front door. There were small heaps of cement and stone in the grass, where pebbledash had fallen from the walls of the house. The window panes were dull and unreflecting, and the blistered paint on the frames was so tarnished by the weather that I could no longer tell what colour it once had been.
I knocked on the door. The sound of my knuckles on the wood was hollow, echoeless. I stood for a moment, listening to the wind shaking the leaves of the willow trees. When I glanced back to the dike, I saw that grass had covered the scarred earth that had once marked Daragh Canavan’s lonely grave. I knocked again and, stooping at the letter box, called out Kit de Paveley’s name. I heard shuffling footsteps, and the clink of metal as the chain slid from the door.
‘Yes?’
I suppose one expects to see in the face of a murderer evil, or guilt. But I saw only, through the inches between door and jamb, a very old, very sick man. The sound of Kit de Paveley’s wheezing, that Tilda herself had described to me, was painful to listen to.
‘My name’s Rebecca Bennett,’ I bawled, assuming, as one patronizingly tends to with the elderly, that he was deaf. ‘I’m writing a biography about Tilda Franklin, and I’d like to speak to you, if I may.’
‘Tilda?’ he said. Pale eyes, the whites yellowed, glared at me.
I took a deep breath. ‘I came to Southam to attend Mr Canavan’s burial, and I’d like to talk to you about him.’
For a moment, Kit de Paveley neither moved nor spoke. But at last he opened the door and said, ‘Then you’d better come in.’
I followed him into the house. The smell made my stomach, still delicate, turn. Must and mould and damp and unwashed clothes. I followed Kit de Paveley along a corridor of greys and browns, of peeling wallpaper and ancient, dingy distemper. Heaps of damp-spotted books stood against the wainscoting, and a stack of broken umbrellas and cracked, mud-encrusted galoshes were abandoned in a corner. It was the sort of house where a lonely old pensioner lies dead for a month before a passer-by catches the scent of death and we all feel a collective shame. Both the house and its owner were decaying.
He led me into a room at the back of the house. More books, and piles of yellowing newspapers and magazines. There was a tray with a milk bottle and a sliced white loaf and a jar of Marmite. He had just had his tea, I supposed.
‘Sit down, Miss Bennett.’
I sat, though I would have preferred not to. It wasn’t a house you wanted to touch: as though sickness and old age and old crimes were themselves contagious.
Kit de Paveley sat opposite me. He wore baggy tweed trousers and a shirt without a tie, and a cardigan of some indeterminate mustardy colour. The frayed collar of the shirt was greyish-white. His face was a similar colour, greyish and translucent, as though letting through the colour of the bones beneath. I wondered whether he was afraid.
He said, ‘Daragh Canavan’s interment … doubtless an edifying event. Were there many mourners?’
I shook my head. ‘Very few.’
He laughed, and then he began to cough, a horrible, racking noise that filled the dark room. My mouth was dry. I said, ‘I thought that you might come, Mr de Paveley.’
‘Now why’ – and he smiled – ‘would I wish to do that?’
‘Guilt, I suppose. You killed Daragh, didn’t you, Mr de Paveley?’
‘Dear me,’ he said. ‘Such an imagination.’ Yet he seemed neither offended nor concerned.
I glanced around the room. Such a lot of books. I said, ‘You’re a historian, aren’t you, Mr de Paveley?’
‘I don’t recall’ – again, that small smile – ‘that being an historian is considered a criminal offence. Even in these uncultured times.’
‘I borrowed a book from the library.’ I delved in my bag and took it out. ‘I expect you’ve read it, Mr de Paveley. In fact, I’m sure you have. There’s probably a copy of it somewhere in this house. After all, you’ve always been interested in the history of the Fens, haven’t you?’ I found my marker, and opened the page. I said, ‘This section discusses the medieval penalty for those who neglected the banks and drains on their land. “Bound hand and foot, the miscreant was staked down in the breach in the bank and there buried alive. In death, he thus became part of the Fens’ sea defences.’” I looked up. ‘That’s what you did to Daragh, wasn’t it, Mr de Paveley? You tied him hand and foot and buried him in the breach of the dike.’
He began to cough again. When the spasm was over, I said, ‘I don’t understand why you killed him. I don’t understand why you hated him. As far as I can see, you didn’t have much to do with each other.’
There was a long silence. A fly crawled around the rim of the Marmite jar. I heard Kit de Paveley say softly, ‘The assumptions of the young are always so preposterous. Assuming that I was responsible for Mr Canavan’s death, why on earth, after so many years of silence, should I choose to tell you about it?’
‘Not me,’ I said. ‘Tilda.’
The supercilious mask shifted slightly. ‘Tilda?’
‘Tilda’s old and frail, Mr de Paveley. She wants to know the truth before she dies.’
‘She was well rid of him!’ he hissed suddenly. ‘He would have destroyed her!’
He still sends me flowers on my birthday I thought I understood. ‘You loved her?’
‘Of course I loved her. She was beautiful. And she was kind to me. She was nothing, a housemaid’s bastard daughter, but she was a lady.’
When he smiled, I saw the similarities between them, Kit de Paveley and Tilda Franklin, and recognition made the breath catch in my throat. Both had the same long, straight nose, high forehead and light grey eyes. In Tilda, beauty was informed even now by energy and compassion, but in Kit de Paveley the same features had been dulled by bitterness and apathy.
‘What is it?’ he said suddenly. ‘Why do you stare at me like that?’
I had not meant to stare. I turned my face away, and wondered whether I should tell him that Tilda Franklin was his cousin, his blood relative. The impulse died, lost as suddenly as it had been born.
He rose, and shooed the fly from the Marmite jar, and screwed on the lid. Then he stood beside me, his shadow over me, and for the first time I felt afraid.
‘For Tilda? Well then, I will tell you. After all, I’ve nothing left to lose.’
In the brief pause that followed, I heard the first raindrops strike the window pane.
‘I killed him because he laughed at me.’
I licked my lips. Suddenly, he reminded me of Charles. ‘About Tilda?’
‘Not at first.’ He remained standing beside me, one mottled purple hand resting on the frayed arm of the sofa, just a few inches away from me. ‘I’d spent the day trying to rediscover the site I’d been working on before the flood. It was evening. I was about to pack up, and go home. It had been hopeless, of course. Layers of silt covering everything, artefacts washed away. Anyway, Daragh Canavan appeared just as I was packing away my things. He was drunk. He was disgusting. Swaggering.’ Kit de Paveley’s voice lowered, and as he leaned towards me, sharing his secrets, I tried not to shudder. ‘Shall I tell you what he said to me?’
I nodded mutely. He was mad, I thought. Isolation and disappointment and bitterness had turned his mind.
‘He said, Did the water wash away your mud pies, then?’
‘So you hit him?’
‘Not yet. He was bigger than me, remember. Stronger. Like an animal. He rutted like an animal – I saw him once, lying in a field with some tart from the village. He thought that I was a weakling. He used to make fun of me in the Home Guard, in front of the other men. And in the flood, he sent me to the church, with the women.’
I had to look away then, unable to bear the intensity of those eyes. The room had darkened as the clouds swelled, and heavy drops of rain battered against the dusty panes, sliding down to the sills.
‘Would you like to know how I killed him, Miss Bennett? So that you can write it in your book?’
Again I nodded, and sighed silently with relief as he moved away and sat down again.
‘He said, Did the water wash away your mud pies? but I didn’t rise to it, I just kept on working. He was drinking from a hip flask. He offered me the flask, and I said no, alcohol didn’t agree with me. He said that it agreed with him very well, that it improved his performance. He said he could keep going for hours if he’d had a drink or two, which would make the lady he was going to see very happy.’
He began to cough again. The sound was so dreadful that I thought his frail old lungs would burst. I left the room, and opened one door after another until I found the kitchen. I filled a teacup with water, and brought it back to him.
The redness induced by the coughing fit was succeeded by pallor. He was not only mad, I thought, but close to death. I should have left the house, perhaps, gone to find a doctor, but my curiosity persisted. I said, ‘Did you know that Daragh was going to see Tilda?’
‘He’d been sniffing after her for years. Wouldn’t leave her alone. I asked him. He told me. And that was when’ – Kit de Paveley’s forehead was damp with sweat; he dabbed at it with a handkerchief – ‘that was when he guessed that I loved her. And he laughed at me. So I hit him with the shovel. The first time I hit him, he was stunned, and fell to the ground. And then I hit him again, while he lay there.’
He began to smile. The smile was worse than anything. ‘It was easy,’ he said. ‘He was drunk, and he never thought I’d do it. He thought I was a cissy, a weakling. But I’ve strong arms, Miss Bennett. All that digging.’
‘You hit him with the spade and killed him?’
He stifled a cough. The rain still drummed against the windows. Water oozed through the leaky frames.
‘Not – just – then.’ He sipped the water. ‘I couldn’t think what to do at first. I almost ran to get help, and then I realized that we’d all be better off without him. Tilda – Jossy – me – everyone. He was a harlot and a wastrel. I’d a lantern with me, and I remember looking up and seeing the repair work to the dike. And I thought, how appropriate, how perfect. Of course I’ve read that book. Daragh Canavan hadn’t looked after the land as he should have done. I’d tried to tell him, years before, that the Fens are different. He hadn’t listened, of course. I bound his hands and feet with my bootlaces, while he was still unconscious. They were good leather laces – I bought the boots for a dig in Crete in ‘36 – he’d not have been able to break them. Then I lugged him to the gap in the bank. I wasn’t sure then whether he was dead or not. It’s not as easy to tell as you might think. But when I began to shovel the earth on him, I saw him move. His foot twitched. But I kept on shovelling.’
He went quiet. I felt sick. My fear had gone: he was just a mad, pathetic old man. I wanted to leave this dirty, airless little house, with its old hatreds, old jealousies.
But he was still talking. After so long, he welcomed the release of the confessional, perhaps.
‘I thought they’d find him. All the next day I waited for the knock on the door. For weeks, months, I thought they’d find him. I’d dream about bones pressing up through the grass. I’d dream about opening a trench, and finding myself looking down at a skull. I couldn’t dig any more.’ He laughed. ‘Well, I couldn’t, could I? At night, when I was alone – and I was always alone – I’d imagine a knock at the door, opening it, and seeing him standing there, brushing the earth from his clothes.’
I had to get up and go to the window, though the dust and the rain kept out the light. ‘Did you regret it?’
‘Of course not! Think of the harm that he’d done. Think of poor Jossy.’
‘Jossy loved Daragh. And what about Caitlin? Didn’t you realize how much Daragh’s death would hurt her?’
He mumbled something inaudible. The silence was filled only by the fly’s buzzing, the rain’s tattoo.
He said, ‘What will you do now, Miss Bennett? Will you go to the police? They came here, you know. I lied to them – pretended that I knew nothing. What will you do?’
I shook my head. ‘I don’t know.’
‘You shouldn’t count on a dramatic trial. Your name in all the newspapers. I am dying, Miss Bennett, which is why I have told you this. I would not have done so otherwise. I have cancer. The lungs rotting from within. They say that I could have another six months, but I don’t think I will live that long. I don’t intend to see another New Year.’ He looked around the shabby room. ‘I have outlived my time. The world has become unfamiliar to me.’
He stood up. ‘How many mourners attended Daragh Canavan’s burial, Miss Bennett?’
‘Five,’ I said.
‘Do you think I will have as many?’
His words followed me as I walked down the corridor. As I opened the front door, he said, ‘Give my regards to Tilda, Miss Bennett. Remember me to her.’
I left the house, and walked across the field to the dike. The rain soaked through my thin dress and jacket, but I welcomed its falling. It cleansed me. I climbed the bank and stood on the summit in the wet grass. In the dike the raindrops made concentric circles on the black surface of the water. I looked up to the distant Hall, square against the grey sky, and I knew what I must do. I began to pick the last wild flowers that bloomed on the bank: purple loosestrife, oxeye daisies, tormentil. The bunch of flowers in my hand, I walked back to the village. In the churchyard, I knelt by Jossy Canavan’s grave, and arranged the flowers in the metal container. Though I am not a believer, I said a prayer for Jossy, who had passed her childhood in terror of one man, and had endured through her adult life a tormenting love for another. I prayed that now her lost love lay beside her, she would rest in peace. I stood up, my hands protectively clutched over my flat belly. I knew that I would keep my baby, that there had been too many lost children in this story for me to abandon this one. I glanced for a last time at Tilda’s sister and Tilda’s lover, and then I walked to my car.