The Very Thought of You (30 page)

There were still moments when the faces of her children broke through to her. How could she not respond to those small hands reaching out to her, that electric current of love, when she returned home from work and they ran forwards to greet her? But her helplessness when facing their expectant eyes made her buckle sometimes, so fearful was she of letting them down.

She could not sleep. She feared her nights, when darkness only intensifled her claustrophobia. She was trapped inside
her own mind, stuck in an endless loop of repetition, and the empty hours stretched away as she tried to lie still, to trace inward circles, any soothing pattern that might hypnotize her away from her own consciousness. But she could find no release from the kaleidoscope of her own ever-multiplying thoughts.

Thoughts of love. Of her failure to love her husband. Could she ever love anyone, or even desire them? She would lie there awake while Jamie appeared to sleep so soundly beside her. Jamie, who was her husband and used to find her attractive, even love her. How could it be possible that their marriage was failing?

In their courtship they had gone for walks in the park, and looked at each other fondly across tables at Italian restaurants. They had laughed together at the theatre, and queued for tickets to the Proms, sharing all the rituals of a young couple in love, and so she had thought –
this must be it
. She took it on trust from his desire, his urgency, that this was love. He had chosen her, and so she followed his lead and hoped that her buried feelings would surface soon.

But a part of her had always been a little afraid of him. She would watch him as they walked down the street and suddenly it would strike her,
Jamie is too good for me, too handsome, too perfect.
Sometimes she tried to take their bond on trust, but other times she felt like an impostor who would soon be found out – that one day Jamie would look at her and think,
Why did I end up with this woman?

Their marriage had at least been blessed with children. Sometimes, when she went to rouse her son and daughter for breakfast, she could not bear to wake them, but stopped to watch their sleeping faces: Joe’s arms thrown behind him onto the pillow, his mouth slightly open; the stillness of Amy’s eyelids, and the tendril of fair hair which fell over
her ear. And then the wonder of their waking eyes – that unquestioning love in their faces, that assumption that she was their mother, and that they were depending on her.

Why am I falling apart?
she asked herself. With so many blessings – her children, her husband, her work – she should be happy. But it was as if a depth charge of buried grief was shaking all the foundations of her carefully constructed defences, pulling her downwards into her own quicksand.

Her thoughts turned obsessively to her childhood, and her absolute, unquestioning adoration of her mother. She still cherished her memories of their last day together in London, shopping, eating ice cream in the roof-garden café. But had their wartime separation been necessity or choice on her mother’s part? There were those cheery but infirequent letters, then just one visit before her death. She could not help blaming her mother for being so careless. Why had she not hidden herself away in a shelter?

If you lost your mother too young, didn’t that cripple your courage to love? Had she not been cut off at the roots? These were the thoughts which tugged at Anna. Perhaps she had resisted her childhood pain for too long, hiding it away in a box. But she could not flathom why all this forgotten life was now rearing up and unsettling her. It was an odd self-pity, a retrospective grief that she had not been loved as she loved her own children. More, she felt guilty that her unhappiness was now creeping up on Joe and Amy too.

She might fall asleep at six only to be woken, exhausted, by the alarm clock at seven. Then she had to get the children ready for nursery, smiling and cheerful, and set off to work, kissing her husband goodbye.

“I’ll be out late tonight,” He said.

“Oh,” she said, hoping it was not obvious that she knew why he would be out late.

“There’s a performance of a new play by a dramatist we might want to commission. I would’ve asked you too, but the children hate us both going out—”

“It’s fine, you go,” she said.

Later, when he returned home after making love to his BBC researcher, he found his wife slumped at the kitchen table beside an empty bottle of wine. He took her to bed and she kept saying, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

She did not seem to mind about Jamie’s lover. But why did she not mind? It did not make any sense. She began to drink every evening now, after the children had gone to bed. When Jamie wasn’t watching. The wine gave her a gentle oblivion, but then she would wake up at three in the morning, and the insomnia would drain her again.

One lunch hour she drifted onto Oxford Street, and found herself wandering past Broadcasting house, home to her mother’s wartime life. Beyond the traffc and fumes of Marylebone Road, she felt the pull of Regent’s Park, with its wide open lawns and empty paths.

But the sudden quiet of the park only sharpened her overwrought senses. Even though she was hardly looking, she felt as if she could register every leaf on the tree before her, and every vein in each leaf. Like the veins in her hand and neck. The sky before her was open and infinite, and she thought she could feel the weight of the stars beyond, even in clear daylight. Everything was out there and upon her: the constellations singing and her pulse ringing and every leaf on every tree calling out for attention.
Enough, enough, enough, enough.

She closed her eyes and covered her ears, and sank to the ground underneath a chestnut tree, where the grass was sparse and the shells of old conkers lay half-sunk in the earth. There she hunkered down and wept, until her body started heaving, her face pressed against her knees.

A retired doctor was walking his dog in the park, a wiry man slightly stiffened by arthritis.

“Can I help?” He asked, when he saw Anna.

She looked up.

“No, thank you.” Her face retreated back into her knees.

He sat on a bench nearby and threw a stick for his Labrador to fetch. Anna sensed that he was still there and raised her eyes again.

“Are you sure you don’t need any help?” He asked. Then he stood up and pulled out a folded white handkerchief for her.

It was at that moment that it hit Anna, a pain so deep inside that it reached back twenty years: the white handkerchief given to a child who could not cry. Mr Ashton’s handkerchief, pulled out to comfort her on the day she had lost her mother.

She looked up at the stranger and saw a creviced face, thinning grey hair, dark serious eyes.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Keep it – I hope it helps,” He said, dipping his head. “I have a drawer full of these at home—”

Then he was off after his dog, his arm raised to her in a backwards wave.

He left her folding up the handkerchief. Then she picked herself up and began walking through the park, along paths, past playgrounds.

Something in her shifted as she allowed the thought of Thomas Ashton to surface in her mind; he had always been there, hidden inside her, she realized. She hadn’t seen him for over twenty years – he must be past sixty now. But she began to admit to herself that there was a part of her still pining for him, however ridiculous that might be. That nobody else could quite fill the hole in her heart because it was a shape made when she parted from him all those years ago.

She did not even know if he was still alive, or whether he would want to see her. But she at least wanted to try and visit him. And in the days that followed, she began to unscramble the patterns of her past in the light of these submerged feelings for him.

She remembered how hard she had worked to win her place at Oxford. Was it not to fulfil his hopes for her? She had arrived there with a green bicycle and a new set of clothes, all ready for love. But nobody there seemed able to reach her. By the end of her first year she had lost her virginity to a smooth lanky boy who had wooed her with chat about Albert Camus and
L’Etranger.
Yet she did not know how to feel at ease with him, and the relationship soon stalled.

She had found it so hard to form any bond with young men. Even when she met and married Jamie, her own lack of desire had confused her. He was so appealing and yet she had felt so remote from him. She longed to be held, but Jamie could not give her the embrace which she craved – he was too much her own friend, her own equal, it was like a sexless sibling relationship. So when they made love, she closed her eyes and sought out other images to ignite her feelings.

Lurking somewhere in her mind had always been the thought of Thomas Ashton. She remembered that look of care in his eyes, and a part of her wanted to imagine him as a lover. Forbidden thoughts, even in the privacy of her own mind. Yet she had divined the force of his feelings for Miss Weir, and she retained a sense that nobody else could be quite so tender, so passionate, so fixed in love as Thomas.

The great swinging sensation of her childish heart came back to her. But had he really ever had any special affection for her, or was it all her imagination?

She kept thinking about the night of Miss Weir’s death, when he had asked her to perform that unexpected errand to find his letters; their secret.

It was as though their strange embrace that night had penetrated right through to her unconscious. She remembered sitting on his knee, and quietly crying as she crumpled against him. She could still feel her tears soaking into his checked flannel shirt. He had put his arms around her and held her gently, with kind words, soft words. “My dear,” He called her. His chest was big enough to contain her trembling, and she melded with his adult shape, felt completely held by him. When she looked up into the white disc of his face in the darkness, she knew him as closely as she would ever know another person. His gaze had reached right inside her.

It had been a true intimacy, she felt now. Whenever they had seen each other in the months thereafter, that physical bond had been there between them, never mentioned, never acknowledged, but still there.

She began to wonder if she had ever recovered from him. In every embrace she had ever known, she now felt, she had been searching to recapture that look of tenderness in his eyes. Perhaps for him it had been no more than a look of lost hope, in which he saw only the child he did not have. But for her, it had been a look of love which had penetrated her soul and fixed her for ever at Ashton Park, in the summer of 1943.

At home, she returned to the objects from that part of her life, buried at the back of her desk drawer. His white handkerchief, monogrammed with
T.A.A.
His two formal, courteous letters to her. The book of Tennyson’s verse she had taken from Miss Weir’s room.

Feeling rash, she called Directory Enquiries one day and discovered the telephone number of the Ashton Park estate office. A middle-aged man answered the phone and confirmed
that Mr Ashton was alive and well, but living now at a more convenient house on the estate. He told her the address, and she read it back to him, checking that she had noted down the post code correctly.

Then she sat down, a thirty-three-year-old wife and mother, and wrote a formal letter to her childhood teacher, hoping for help of some kind.

52

Ashton Park, 1964

It was a subdued spring afternoon, and Thomas Ashton was at his desk, as usual.

“Come in,” he said, to the knock on his door. Every day at four o’clock his housekeeper would appear with a tray of tea and ginger biscuits. He never ate the biscuits, but she always put them there, just in case.

This housekeeper had been with him for six years now. He had called her
Mrs Smithie
for the first two years, until she had boldly asked him to call her Mary instead. He was unfailingly polite and considerate to her, and she regarded him as a perfect gentleman, if hard to know.

She had studied all his old photographs, the framed one of his wedding, and later pictures of him with his wife. But she still knew only fragments of his past: that he had survived polio as a young man only to lose his wife in a wartime car crash; that he had been alone ever since, and had chosen to leave the big house, Ashton Park, after a fire there had gutted one of the wings.

She had heard tales from the villagers of the night when Ashton House nearly burned to the ground. An electric
fire in one of the housemaid’s rooms, it was thought. The people in the house were all safely evacuated, but it was the treasures inside which were at risk. Word went around the village, and people hurried up the long drive to help, right through the night hours. There was a chain of men passing the paintings and furniture out onto the sunken lawn, where Mr Ashton sat in his chair, watching the flames and smoke rising from his home. Fortunately the fire brigade arrived in time to control the fire, and the damage was contained to one burnt-out wing.

But it emerged that Ashton House had not been properly insured, so the restoration of the east wing proved impossibly expensive. Mr Ashton had apparently lost the will to live in the big house thereafter, and so he had leased Ashton Park to a girls’ preparatory school with an enterprising headmistress.

He had moved into this lodge deep inside the park. Some of the better pieces of Ashton furniture had come with him, but none of them quite fitted: his new home appeared curiously over-crammed with distinguished tables and dressers and desks which clearly belonged to the main house. When she first came for her interview, Mary Smithie was a touch unnerved by the family paintings which loomed from the walls and dwarfled any visitors. But she was also struck by Mr Ashton’s gentle, detached demeanour.
He’s a philosophical man
, she said to her friends,
never critical, never demanding.

For many years he had continued to teach Latin and English at the school in Ashton House – but he had recently retired, and spent most days in his study working on a commissioned translation of Virgil’s
Georgics.
From time to time he had visitors from London, “old friends from my days in the Foreign Office”, as he explained to Mrs Smithie, such as Sir Clifford Norton and his energetic wife Peter, “who escaped from the Nazis in Warsaw in 1939”, and Lord Vansittart, who
was tall and broad-chested and stood before the fireplace with his legs apart – “the one Englishman who might have stopped the war, if only he had been heard”.