Some Old Lover's Ghost Read Free Page A

relief to leave the motorway, and to plunge into a countryside of rolling hills and narrow, curling roads, and hollows where mist gathered in pools. I had to stop several times to check the map. I longed for coffee. It was early, not yet nine o’clock, and the world was only half awake. After about half an hour, I reached Woodcott St Martin, a sprawling village with a green, and a duckpond, and a couple of shops. I stopped at the newsagent and asked for directions to Dame Tilda’s home, The Red House. ‘She’s not been well,’ said the shopkeeper. ‘She often has a touch of bronchitis at this time of year.’
    The Red House stood a little apart from the rest of the village. I saw a gleam of silver river to one side of the building, and playing fields, their untenanted swings ghostly in the greyish light, to the other. The house was large and old, its gables pierced by stone windows. The walls were of dark red brick, and the roof-tiles were discoloured by lichen. Box trees, carved into huge globes and four-sided pyramids, walled the narrow path. The mist faded their dark green leaves, and pearled their fantastic festoon of spiders’ webs. Chill and solid, the great topiaried bushes enclosed me between them, cutting me off from the rest of the garden. I shivered: this was not the careful tangle of rose and aster that I had expected. These trees were vast and arcane, their shapes suggesting a symbolism unintelligible to me. I was relieved to escape them for the narrow gravel court in front of the house. When I looked down at myself, and saw the gossamer that clung to my jacket, I brushed it hurriedly away and rang the doorbell.
    Inside, I followed Dame Tilda’s housekeeper through rooms and passageways. Portraits of children – painted, sketched and photographed – looked back at me from the walls. Children that Dame Tilda Franklin had cared for, I assumed. Infantsand adolescents, girls with ribbons in their hair, boys in baggy corduroy shorts and sagging socks. Fading childhood scrawls, a clumsily worked length of cross-stitch, a blurred snapshot of a boy, hair quiffed Fifties-fashion, standing beside a gleaming motor scooter. The gilt frames of the pictures lit the dark oak-panelled interior.
    The housekeeper led me to a room at the back of the house and tapped on the door. ‘Miss Bennett is here, Tilda.’
    The garden room was furnished with shabby, comfortable furniture, and plants – hoya, plumbago, bougainvillaea –crawling up the walls. A woman was standing in a corner of the room, secateurs in hand. She turned towards me.
    ‘Miss Bennett? How good of you to come. I do apologize for suggesting such an unreasonably early hour, but I have a dreadful tendency to fall asleep in the afternoons.’
    ‘Mrs—’ But I remembered the damehood, or whatever one calls such things. ‘I mean, Dame Matilda—’ I floundered.
    She put aside the secateurs. ‘Call me Tilda, please . The “Dame” reminds me of the pantomime. And no-one has ever called me Matilda – so forbidding, don’t you think?’
    She smiled. Beauty lingers, and though Tilda Franklin was now eighty years old I could see its lineaments still in her high, delicate cheekbones, her straight, narrow nose. Her eyelids were blue-veined, almost transparent, and her light eyes were set deep into her skull. Her face was longish, carefully sculptured, and her spine even in old age was straight. Beside Tilda I felt short, sloppy, troll-featured. She wore a soft tweed skirt, a cashmere cardigan, pearls; I, a long black skirt and suede jacket that I’d always thought possessed a sexily crumpled allure. I should have worn my one good suit.
    I asked her to call me Rebecca, and we shook hands. Her fingers were insubstantial and birdlike. I thought that if I gripped too hard the bones would turn to powder.
    ‘You’ll join me for coffee, won’t you, Rebecca? Such a long journey. So good of you to come.’
    She talked about the plants in the garden room until