The Very Thought of You

by Rosie Alison

  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”.

  Mrs Smithie was glad he was not entirely alone. Solitary, yes, but not without a few old friends. If he was unhappy, or lonely, she never saw it.

  The clock chimed as she put down the tea tray. He looked up to thank her, but she sensed he did not want to talk further and so she left the room.

  She closed the door behind her without knowing the day’s significance for Thomas, that this was the anniversary of the day on which he had lost his wife, his lover and his unborn child. Twenty-one years without you, he wrote in his notebook, and I’m still thinking of you.

  The years had passed, week by week, hour by hour, and Thomas still awoke to the thought of Ruth – still talked to her in his head and wondered what she would have thought of the things he saw, the people he met.

  He could not let her go. Her memory reverberated around the empty shell of his present life like a lost sea.

  Thomas was sixty-four now, yet he still saw Ruth as she was on the day she had died. Sometimes he tried to imagine her as she might have become – a mother, a fuller figure, with the first signs of ageing. He would have liked to see that, to trace every new line on her face. The lines of their time spent together.

  Nobody had ever guessed the true nature of his loss; he had never shared his grief with anyone. Those who worked for him no doubt wondered about the misfortune of his polio, or the tragedy of his wife’s death, but none of them knew of his unspent love for the young teacher who was carrying his child. Perhaps it was thought that he must miss Elizabeth, but she had vanished altogether from his heart, leaving him only with guilt that he had not fireed her to another life before it was too late for all of them.

  He did not believe that Elizabeth’s crash had been inevitable. He was sure it had been a ft of temper, a momentary aberration of jealous rage. Another day or two and she would have found less irreparable means of wounding him. She might even have let them both go with grace. No, it had been the fault of his own pride – that he had in some way gloated over Ruth’s pregnancy in the face of the woman it would hurt most, inciting her violence.

  Resigned guilt was all he had left for Elizabeth. The tenderness which still welled inside him was only for Ruth – a tenderness so acute that he sometimes felt himself haunted. Working at his desk, he would suddenly feel her subtle presence behind him, creeping up on him, silently entering the rhythm of his breathing. Until he would pause and gather himself to stillness, then turn his head to see what might be there.

  Nothing. Dust and air.

  And yet he felt her at his shoulder, at his elbow, a tweak in his soul. The grief should have faded by now, he told himself, but sometimes, when he woke in the morning, his sense of her was so firesh that he still reached out for her.

  At other
times he wondered if he had gone quietly mad. Here he was, an ageing cripple in a damp Yorkshire house, dreaming daily of a dead woman. Unable to move beyond her, unable to take anyone else into his life – into his confidence, even. Any conversation about Ruth would only trivialize her memory, and the elixir of her presence in his heart.

  He had grown accustomed to his double life. There was the polite surface of each day, with his estate business, and then there was his hidden life with Ruth. His memories of all the things she had said, endlessly raked over in his mind to uncover lost embers of feeling. His sense of her face as they kissed, the yielding curve of her breasts, her hair falling over her cheek, the touch of her.

  The grief would not go, but sometimes he cherished it. It hung about him, like a loyal ghost. The wind at the window, the sudden fall of a petal from a vase, the last flicker of twilight, all spoke to him of the strange shadowland of his heart.

  “Stars! Stars! And all eyes else dead coals!”

  He could still see her eyes – sometimes they flashed right through him, like the cry of remembrance from The Winter’s Tale.

  He had no photograph to remember her by, only the consolation of her one letter. He loved her handwriting. It flowed forwards, and curled back on itself, and embodied her intelligence and passion, but also her tentative modesty, her gentleness. It was her – all he had of her. After each of the words had passed into his mind and heart, it was the writing itself which moved him. He had opened her letter so often that it was faded now, and worn by the touch of his fingers.

  The letter lay before him as he wrote in his notebook, his eyes passing over the familiar shape of her writing. But a part of him was numb, and the words would not yield up any fresh emotion: today it was just a dead letter whose life had leaked away.

  There was a knock at the door, and Mary appeared to remove the tea tray. She gave him a stiff white envelope.

  “This arrived in the afternoon post, sir.”

  It was a personal letter, in a handwriting he did not recognize. He laid it on his desk and waited until he was alone. Probably an academic correspondent. Sometimes he received letters from fellow classicists with new thoughts on a word or phrase.

  Mary closed the door and he took the letter in his hand, and opened it.

  Dear Mr Ashton,

  It has been many years since we met, so I would not be at all surprised if you did not remember me. My name is Anna sands, and I arrived at your House as an evacuee in 1939. I very much enjoyed my time at Ashton Park, and am particularly grateful for the education I received there. Later, I completed a degree at Oxford and now I am a fiction editor at a publishing House. It is an enjoyable job to mix with my family life: I am married with two children.

  I have recently been recalling my wartime years with much fondness. In particular, I have remembered your kindness, and also what a remarkable teacher you were. I will be coming to York in April, and wondered if I might possibly come to visit you? That would be a treat for me, but I quite understand if you are disinclined to meet exevacuees. You probably get a number of letters like this.

  But if you would be so kind as to let me visit, I can be reached at the above address or on Firemantle 2104.

  Yours sincerely,

  Anna sands

  Thomas remembered her at once, the child whose mother had died in the Blitz. An image of her flickered through his mind, a girl with a gap-toothed smile putting up her hand in class. He was seized with gladness, and replied at once with uncharacteristic effusion.

  My dear Anna,

  Of course I remember you. It was a great pleasure to hear from you, and I would be delighted if you would visit me on your next trip to York. I am happy to hear that you have enjoyed Oxford – my old university, too – and that you have a family of your own now. I will look forward to hearing your news.

  Tea is served here at four o’clock daily, so please just let me know when you would like to come.

  Yours sincerely,

  Thomas Ashton

  There was a flurry of calls with the Housekeeper. Anna, it seems, was nervous about speaking to him directly. Tea was set for 25th April.

  53

  Ashton Park, 1964

  On the appointed day, Anna found her way to the estate lodge in which Thomas Ashton was now living. She drove up to a plain, square Georgian house, perhaps once Asteward’s quarters. Ample, but not the House to which she knew he had once been accustomed. The flowerbeds at the front were sparse and untended.

  She parked her car, then checked her face and hair in the driver’s mirror. When she rang the doorbell, a closed-faced Housekeeper let her in.

  She found herself standing stiffly in his empty hall. Clearly a bachelor’s House, she noted, lacking any signs of family life, and somewhat unloved. The hall windows were streaked with the gathered grime of several seasons, and newspapers were piled carelessly by the fireplace, as if inertia had overtaken the place.

  Anna stood there waiting, trying to breathe evenly and adjust herself to the obvious decline in Thomas’s standard of living.

  Another door opened, and suddenly there he was, wheeling forwards to greet her with his right arm outstretched, his face welcoming, smiling, expectant.

  “Anna! How lovely to see you.”

  With a start of pleasure and relief she saw that he looked the same. Older, but the same. His ankles were slightly thickened; his shoulders shrunken a little, his belly a touch fuller. But his face – it had the same astonishing clarity. Perhaps it was even more arresting now, etched with character lines, his hair still swept back from his forehead and flecked now with silver. Just as she remembered, his soul was almost tangible through those eyes.

  Anna was instantly flooded by a wave of love for him. Here was the man in her head, her heart, her soul, the one man who could reach right through to the empty spaces inside her.

  He leant forwards, perhaps for a kiss, but she was awkward and fumbling, and so he converted the move into a firm handshake.

  “You look so different, yet I’d recognize you at once,” He said with a quizzical smile. With a familiar gesture of gallantry he tossed back his hand.

  “I haven’t seen you since you were – what? – eleven, twelve? Anyway, you’re looking wonderful.”

  “It’s lovely to see you too,” she said. “you look just the same.”

  “Oh come now,” he said wryly. Then he swivelled his chair with a practised swing of his hand.

  “There’s tea for us both, if you come through with me.”

  She did not know whether to push his chair, but he wheeled himself forwards with such resolute dexterity that she simply followed.

  They arrived in a room of faded green – but she had only the most glancing impression of the place: all her attention was riveted on Thomas. There were a few stiff pleasantries about where to sit, then the charade of pouring tea, which Anna volunteered to do. She called him “Mr Ashton”, and he raised his hand: “Please – call me Thomas.”

  The tea cups were rimmed with a gold line; one had a tiny chip. Anna’s hand shook as she held the slight brittle saucer and poured in the tea. She feared she might drop the china with her clumsy hands.

  But she delivered his cup without mishap and once they were both successfully armed with tea, she sat down and they turned to look at each other.

  Thomas saw a woman of unusual youth: her face unlined and glowing, as if arrested in a kind of pre-adolescence – charming, if a little unnerving – with something fearful or distanced in her eyes.

  “It’s so good to see you,” she said, stuttering at the banality of her remark.

  “It’s very kind of you to come,” He said. He rested his eyes on hers for a moment, and her heart turned over.

  She brought out photographs of her children, which were stashed in a small slip album deep in her handbag. Crouching by his side, she was closer to him now as he concentrated on the children’s faces, their names, their ages, trying to find something particular to say about them. He
paused at one image of her daughter.

  “This one,” He said, “she’s like you.” He looked up at her, to corroborate his claim. She put the album away and retrieved her tea cup, sitting down once more.

  He was silent. Anna shifted in her chair, looked down at her cup.

  The nothing that you say. She thought, is there anything between us, some invisible thread, or is there really nothing there?

  “Does the management of the estate occupy you a great deal?”

  “I am fortunate to have a marvellous manager. Mr Reynolds. He has energy, and a passionate attachment to the park – does a tremendous job.”

  “And the House?”

  “It’s still a school. A rather successful girls’ school. They have a proper gymnasium now, and a small swimming pool.”

  “It’s a wonderful House for children—”

  “Do you think so? I’m so glad you remember it that way.”

  He smiled at her with unguarded warmth, and she wanted to say, I have been looking for you all my adult life – that look in your eyes.

  “Do you get the morning sun in this room?”

  “Yes, indeed, and we’ve had plenty of winter sunshine this year.”

  “These Georgian windows must give you a whole theatre of light.”

  “How well you put it.”

  She just wanted to reach out and touch his hand – but they sat there stiffly, talking instead of Thomas’s newly purchased recordings of Schubert, and the new fiction which Anna was publishing.

  Was that it? Just tea and cakes with a polite, ageing man?

  She longed to unlock him, to prise open some memory of their unacknowledged intimacy. Tentatively, she fished into her handbag to pull out Miss Weir’s faded blue book of verse.

  “Do you remember that night – when I fetched your letters?”

  “Yes,” He said, “of course,” and his face settled on hers for the first time, warily revealing himself at last.