The Very Thought of You Read online

  But alongside her teaching, something entirely new was happening to her at Ashton. She had met Thomas. This is what she called him in her mind. For many weeks now, every meeting between them had been polite and friendly, and no more – yet for the first time in her life she felt close to someone, even though any intimacy was unacknowledged between them.

  It was as if she could read his mind. And it was unlike any other feeling she had ever known before, this sense of unspoken connection. But was there really something fowing between them, as she sometimes thought, or was it all just her imagination?

  26

  Ruth had just finished reading The Selfish Giant to her class. Anna’s heart was still thrumming with pleasure at the story – the boy reaching out his hand, the giant’s melting heart, the frozen garden coming to life. Already, it was her favourite book.

  “Please can we have another story?” she asked, raising her hand.

  “Not today,” smiled Ruth. “Another time,” she promised.

  Anna had been used to very basic teaching in her fulham school: the drilling of maths and grammar, and wall charts with the royal milestones of British history. But here at Ashton, the lessons were so much more interesting.

  It must be the teachers, she told herself as she ran towards the dining room for tea. There was a familiar quickening of her heart as she passed by the study of Mr Ashton, her favourite teacher. Something in his eyes always drew her in.

  Whenever he taught them Latin or history, he conjured up glorious pictures of the past for them, all based on his own house. Only last week he had sent them off to visit the two greek temples in the park, and for Anna it was as if an air of Arcadia swept through their pillars. Indoors, he took them to the Marble Hall and showed them Apollo playing his harp among the dome’s painted clouds, while Cupid shot his arrows above the freplace and fierce griffns guarded the mantelpieces.

  Intrigued by so many details, Anna was feeling the strange pull of Ashton’s past. She sensed that everything had been done for someone else, the gilded cornices in the ceiling, the panelling, the great carved fireplaces. It was as if she was only eavesdropping on another time and place. The books in the library, the clocks in the saloon, the kneelers in the chapel – all, all belonged to somebody else’s life. She knew she was only achance visitor there.

  But this did not stop her from secretly carving her initials on odd corners of skirting boards, under the washstand, inside her desk. She wanted to be part of this place. To join its history.

  It was during her first summer at Ashton that Anna began to feel that this house was now her home. Every day the park pulled them outside. There were boating trips on the lake, and picnics by the river. Some of the children tried fishing in the cascade pool. They began by borrowing a length kitchens, but when Thomas heard about it, he arranged for a batch of fishing rods to be bought. Soon after, he organized cricket bats for the boys and rounders bats for the girls, and all summer long they played ball games on the great sunken lawn, under the crumbling gaze of father time.

  13th June 1940

  Dear Mummy,

  It is sunny here now and we sometimes have lessons in the

  gardens. On Wednesdays we have my best class, when we

  make up our own poems…

  * * *

  Throughout the summer of 1940, Thomas and Ruth met properly at least once a week, when they gave an optional poetry class after tea. It had begun as an impromptu class of Ruth’s, but one day Thomas had asked if he could attend it too: thereafter, he joined them every week.

  There was a group of some twelve children who came, mostly girls, but a few boys too. It was informal, on the grass. Ruth and he would each read out a poem, then the children would put up their hands to give a response. Everyone was encouraged to write their own poems too – on animals, or home, or their parents, or food, which Ruth returned to them the following week.

  To My Mother

  Time won’t last for ever,

  Neither will my life with you,

  So let us be happy together

  Or as close as we can.

  That was Anna’s first poem. Thomas was moved that this came from a child who had not seen her mother for nearly a year, just one of the many stray casualties of war. It relieved him that the children could find this outlet for their feelings – knowing all the while that it was his own needs, too, that had led him to join them.

  Every Wednesday that summer, Thomas waited for Ruth to fetch him from the house. There was an unavoidable proximity between them as she wheeled him down the ramp into the garden, and along the chalk path to the open temple, where the children were waiting in a grassy clearing.

  The journey took a little under ten minutes, but the time was freighted with unstated intimacy. He tried to talk casually, but sometimes he would turn round to face her, out of politeness, and their eyes would meet for a moment. There was that slight pressure of her hands and arms as she pushed him up a small hill, but all the while they talked of the children’s progress, or the weather, or the news from the front.

  “I dread the deaths of our children’s parents—”

  “But perhaps the air raids will touch fewer families than we think?”

  “I fear that soon we will all know someone who has died in this war.”

  They could talk of mortality in the general way of wartime, but Thomas was still wary of attempting any more personal conversation.

  Yet with time their tentative intimacy began to find its way through the conduit of teaching. Ruth took simple verses, and uncovered their secrets for the children. As a teacher, she shone. Thomas watched and listened as her appreciation of ordinary things – more, her sacred sense of life – flowed through her teaching.

  The Sun’s rim dips; the stars rush out:

  at one stride comes the dark…

  She taught them The Ancient Mariner, and conjured up Coleridge’s great pictures of A solitary man on the sea of life, besieged by the elements. Thomas, meanwhile, introduced them to the strange word-music of Gerard Manley Hopkins, with his tongue-twisting rhythms.

  As kingfishers catch fire, dragonfies draw fame;

  As tumbled over rim in roundy wells

  Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s

  Bow swung finds tongue to fing out broad its name…

  Anna was enthralled – for the first time, she saw and breathed and tasted the world in words. In the years to come, she would remember odd lines and images, and even Asense of that particular afternoon light – supple, fluent, benign on them all.

  After the lesson’s end, Ruth would wheel Thomas back to the house, sometimes with the children alongside. The subtle pressure of her hands against his shoulders was met, she almost fancied, with an answering pressure from him – but both of them feared it was nothing more than their own imagination.

  Would Thomas ever dare to cross the line? at the end of each journey, there was the fleeting meeting of eyes, the gallant thanks from Thomas, the shy acceptance from Ruth, nothing more. What could this girl see in me? thought Thomas. What could this married man, with a beautiful wife, see in me? thought Ruth. But at night, each of them lay awake to think about the other.

  27

  Anna was playing jacks on the long sideboard by the pantry – an intense, repetitive game with a small rubber ball.

  “Here pet, can you carry this tea tray out to Mr Ashton?” Mrs Robson was there at her elbow with her apron slightly askew, harried by too many tasks. “You’ll find him somewhere near the garden doors.”

  It was a warm afternoon, still and blue, and Anna willingly carried the tea outside, gingerly. There was Mr Ashton, sitting at the edge of the rose garden with a pile of books on a table. Marking some schoolwork in the sunshine.

  “I’ve brought you some tea, sir, from Mrs Robson.”

  “Thank you, Anna.”

  He smiled at her – an encouraging smile. Anna set the tray down, politely waiting to help, and so he let her pour hi
s tea – “one spoon of sugar, please” – and she passed him the cup.

  “What’s that, sir?” Anna asked, pointing to the stone column in the centre of the garden.

  “It’s a sundial,” he said, and saw her puzzled eyes. “Look at its face and you’ll see the sun’s shadows marking the time. It doesn’t often work, but even in Yorkshire we sometimes have sunshine.”

  Anna stepped up on the stone pediment, and saw a shadow line falling from an iron blade in the centre.

  “Is it working?” asked Thomas.

  “Yes,” she said quickly, because she was hazy about actually telling the time.

  “There was a water well there years ago, but it was closed up – too dangerous for children. Somebody put a sundial there instead.”

  “Is there water under this garden?” she asked, surprised.

  “Oh yes,” he said, “all this land is limestone, full of hidden springs. I sometimes think I can hear the whisper of buried streams, but perhaps that’s only because I know they’re there.”

  Anna was suddenly enchanted by this glimpse of deep wells and secret springs, hidden just beneath them. And if he could sense them, perhaps she might too.

  “Look, here’s a ladybird,” said Mr Ashton, studying his finger.

  “Isn’t that lucky?”

  “You should take it—”

  Anna came over and watched the bright-red bug creeping over his hand. He held it up and passed it to her.

  Anna had never noticed a man’s hand before. There were black hairs on his knuckles where the ladybird crawled. The sight enthralled her, and scared her too, those long dark hairs which matched his eyebrows.

  “The ladybird tickles,” she said, looking up. As she did so, the ladybird flew away.

  “Fly away home,” said Thomas gently. Probably that was the child’s wish too, he guessed. He looked at Anna. A sweet girl, he thought, so solemn-eyed, so serious about everything.

  “Thank you for the tea, my dear. You can leave the tray with me now.”

  He watched her running off through the garden. Children always run everywhere, he thought as he sat back to enjoy his tea in the sunshine. The scent of roses sweetened the air and made him feel light-headed – until he realized, quite suddenly, that he was ridiculously happy. Because every day now, he could look forward to seeing Ruth again, in the blameless routine of school life. An unexpected blessing granted to him by this war.

  28

  Elizabeth was drinking too much again, and every night the cellar was searched for more wine. When Clifford Norton came up for a weekend, he dared to mention to Thomas that perhaps his wife was too drunk too often.

  Thomas rebuffed him lightly: he would not, and could not acknowledge the black hole of his marriage to anyone. Norton backed off but sensed a change in his friend: a private serenity which he could not quite fathom. He went away assuming that Thomas’s new contentment must come from his teaching role.

  By now, Ruth had begun to enter Thomas’s dreams, and he often awoke with her presence almost tangible in his mind. Sometimes he saw her as she was – walking, turning, smiling at him. At other times she appeared to him more obliquely. He would dream of Ashton’s brimming lake, fringed with trees, breathing with that benign last light of the day. He would send pebbles skimming across the water’s sheer surface, agitating its mirror-like calm with small ripples, until the pebbles found the centre and plunged deep down into the lake’s untroubled depths – whose level silence and peace he knew was Ruth.

  On other nights, Thomas felt himself to be a loud waterfall, crashing over rocks before plunging into a still, deep pool which lay below and contained all the haste and flux of the falling water. And just as he found himself released into this quiet pool, it welled up into his sense of Ruth.

  He clung to these waking dreams, which eased his limbs with a deep boon of sensual release. Then he awoke, and faced the strange dislocation of his actual life, split between his brittle and beautiful wife – who was as chilly and distant to him as a piece of decorative porcelain – and the slightly awkward young teacher with freckles on her nose, who was unable to meet his glance, or even stand at ease in the same room as him.

  One might laugh at the situation. He did, sometimes, to himself. But as his was a devotion which was unlikely ever to be declared or resolved, he continued to indulge his thoughts of Ruth. He did not think that any harm could ever come from just thinking about someone in private.

  29

  There were mornings when Anna woke up and could no longer remember what her mother looked like. Her face had become as elusive as a ghost, leaving behind only traces of an expression: a smile, a look in her eyes, fast receding into after-image only. So she was thrilled when her mother wrote to say that she was at last coming to visit her.

  In the summer of 1940, Roberta arrived in Yorkshire with her usual swoop of joy and laughter. Anna’s happiness at seeing her mother was boundless. She reached out to hug her, and the pair swung along, mother and daughter, holding hands on their river-meadow walk.

  Anna was so proud to show off Ashton Park to her mother: the river, the lake, the old palm house in the woods, the gilded saloon which her mother admired so much, and the classrooms. Finally they climbed the stairs to her dormitory, where her mother sat on her bed to test the springs.

  “Plenty of bounce,” she announced, before checking the view. “And you can see the park from your window—”

  “Pretty isn’t it?”

  “It’s perfect.”

  Her mother knew just how to see a place. Pictures were noticed, and details of statues and clocks that Anna had never given much thought to; everything took on a new grace.

  Roberta was given a small bedroom at Ashton for the weekend, and their first day together was one of undimmed pleasure. But by Sunday morning the ache of parting was already threatening Anna’s happiness. Her elation at her mother’s presence gave way to a ticking clock, counting the moments before she would lose her once more. She felt sick at the prospect. At tea, she was unable to swallow her bread, such was her dread of her mother’s return home.

  When Roberta gathered up her small bag and said goodbye, Anna crumpled into her arms. Deep sobs shook her skinny frame.

  “Please don’t go, Mummy, please don’t, please don’t go.”

  “Train travel is restricted now, sweetheart, so I can’t get here often. But I’ll come back again, I promise. When they give me some more leave from work. Soon.”

  Anna was inconsolable. For twenty minutes Roberta tried to soothe her weeping daughter, while Mr Stewart hovered nearby.

  “It unsettles them, when they see their mothers,” he murmured to Roberta. In the end, it was he who led Anna away, releasing Roberta to catch her bus to York station.

  There, she resolved that she would not come back again too soon: her daughter was thriving, and this visit had only upset her.

  It was a relief to see her so cheerful and well, she wrote to Lewis on the train. We’re lucky she’s found her way to such a glorious house! Much better for her to be safe there, far away from German bombs.

  Or was that an excuse? Roberta felt a prick of guilt. As her train rolled south to London, she thought of her daughter crying herself to sleep in her dormitory, while she was off enjoying herself at the BBC, and not a plane in sight.

  But it was not long after her visit that London was finally attacked by a wave of German bombers. The long-awaited Blitz began on the night of 7th September, 1940 – Roberta marked it on the kitchen calendar. At first the raids were far from her home, in the East End and the docks. But in the following weeks no part of the city was left unscarred by collapsed buildings or cratered streets.

  Roberta made up her bed in the cellar, though it was hard to sleep through the wailing sirens and thundering night skies. Londoners slipped into a twilight life of fitful sleep, with waking dreams seeping through them, until they all felt disembodied by exhaustion. With all its lights switched off, London was transformed into a city
of darkness. People stumbled through unlit streets, and night life was reconvened below ground. For the hedonistic, there were subterranean clubs and dance floors, open all hours. For the anxious, there were underground platforms packed with sheltering crowds.

  With the arrival of dawn, the skies would be empty once more, revealing the destruction of the night before in all its charred strangeness. Fires from broken gas pipes persisted into the morning, with flames flaring a violet haze in the daylight – like lost souls leaking away into the sky, Roberta thought.

  Meanwhile, everyone in Broadcasting House seemed more determined than ever to keep the show running. Roberta worked long hours, then relaxed with her friends in the pubs of Fitzrovia, before returning home in the dark and reluctantly finding her bed in the cellar, waiting for that night’s dance of death.

  She was glad now that Anna was not with her. She thought with pleasure of her daughter running around in that beautiful park.

  30

  On the evenings when Elizabeth was senseless with drink, Thomas felt free to think about Ruth without any anxiety that his face might betray him. That night Elizabeth had passed out on their bed by ten o’clock. She would perhaps wake in the early hours and stumble into bed after undressing; or she would lie there as she was until morning.

  Elizabeth did not want him to seek help for her. It was not that she was an alcoholic, she’d say: she merely resorted to drink a few times a week, only in the evenings, usually in the bedroom. Drunkenness enveloped her swiftly after a bottle of wine. If she added spirits, she would pass out. It was a secret ritual, behind closed doors, her dependence on alcoholic oblivion.

  While she slept, Thomas sat still in their room, piecing together tranquil thoughts of his love for Ruth. When was the moment he had first known? using Stendhal’s metaphor, when had his love first “crystallized”? The feeling had crept up on him, it was not something he had pursued. At first he had only opened up a crack in himself – but still the tenderness had taken root, until that single moment came when he realized he was in love.