The Very Thought of You Read online

  She went back to the house and took out a novel by Rider Haggard from the library, and sat with it in the garden, letting the story enthral her. Anything to avoid Katy Todd and her gang.

  It was nearing eight o’clock when she made her way back though the French windows which led into the saloon. After the silence of the garden, the closing of the doors gave an unnatural clatter. She stepped quickly towards the library to return her book.

  “Hello.”

  Anna’s heart stopped. Mr Ashton was sitting at one of the library tables, surrounded by books.

  “Shouldn’t you be upstairs in your dormitory?” he asked, but he did not appear to be angry.

  “Yes, sir, I’m very sorry.”

  “It’s all right. But where have you been?”

  “Just reading. I couldn’t stop—”

  “Ah! A true lover of books knows no time. What are you reading?”

  Anna stepped forwards with her book.

  “The World’s Desire, it’s called. It’s about Odysseus’s last voyage, when he goes to Egypt and meets Helen of Troy who’s become a High Priestess—”

  “Perhaps they marry?” he teased.

  “I’ve come to bring it back,” said Anna apologetically.

  “But you must keep it and finish it – I insist. I’m delighted that somebody is using this place.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Come again soon. But while you’re here, let me show you the secret stairway to the gallery, so you can fetch me a book—”

  He gestured to a small case of dummy book spines, and pointed out the secret brass catch which his grandfather had installed. The door swung open with a click and Anna bounded up the steep stair ladder to the gallery above. From below, Mr Ashton directed her to an atlas on a far shelf.

  She was just proudly bringing the book down the stair ladder when she heard a distinctive clack-clack of footsteps and the library doors swung open. She froze behind the bookcase door.

  It was Mrs Ashton.

  “Still working?” she quizzed her husband.

  “Just a few pages more,” he answered in a quiet voice. Anna held her breath. Mrs Ashton would be furious if she found her, so the girl cowered behind the door, dreading the lash of her angry eyes.

  Elizabeth walked over to Thomas’s table, a slow swing of high heels on wood.

  Thomas stopped tidying up his papers and looked up.

  “I’ve come to tell you that I’m not happy,” Elizabeth announced, in a voice both deadpan and direct. He tried to read her eyes, to see if she had been drinking.

  “I said, I’m not happy.”

  “I heard,” he said.

  “Don’t you want to know why?”

  Thomas paused; all he could think about was the child hiding behind the gallery door. Elizabeth drew a breath and raised herself to her full height. She spoke with deliberate precision to curb any slurring in her voice.

  “I’m unhappy because of you. You’re my husband and you’re a stranger to me.”

  Thomas did not know how to reply: he just shifted in his chair, painfully aware of Anna, only a few feet away. It was too late, now, to reveal her.

  “Have you nothing to say to me?” Elizabeth’s voice was terse, bitter, beginning to break.

  “Not here, please – in the bedroom, later. Please.”

  Her face was puckering with tears.

  “You – statue. You cripple. You bloody cripple.”

  “Please—” He reached out to her.

  “Don’t touch me!”

  Her voice was low, stifled. She held her hands over her face, shaking with tears.

  “You won’t even come to sit with me in the other room. I need intimacy—”

  “Of course I’ll come with you.”

  “Now?”

  “Of course.”

  “No more books?”

  “No more books.”

  He wheeled forwards and touched his wife’s elbow, eager to dispel her anger. He held out his handkerchief to her and she wiped her face. Together they left the room.

  Anna stayed rooted where she was, terrified of moving. She felt mortified that Mr Ashton knew what she had heard.

  She waited until the way seemed clear, then crept through the gallery door and carefully placed the atlas on Mr Ashton’s pile of books – then ran, fast, up the stairs to her dormitory, barely catching her breath in an effort to get past the matrons unseen.

  “Where have you been?” asked the other girls in her dormitory.

  “We’ve been covering for you,” said Suzy.

  “Said you were stuck in the lavatory—”

  Within moments Anna was in her nightdress, and when Miss Harrison appeared there was a full complement of girls in their beds. The lights were turned out.

  “We caught a whole stack of frogs by the river,” said Katy Todd.

  “You missed such a trip!” said another.

  “We put them all back again.”

  “You would have enjoyed it,” said Katy, “but we didn’t know where you went.”

  “Thanks,” said Anna, secretly consoled, “but I got tied up with my book.”

  “Bookworm!”

  “Quiet now!” The matron’s voice rang out.

  Anna was relieved to be left alone in the dark to think about the eruption of anger she had just witnessed. She knew by now that Mr Ashton was only lame because of polio, an unlucky illness – so how could his wife be so cruel to him about that?

  She fell asleep to dreams of shouting and crying, and angry people lashing out at each other for no clear reason.

  The next day she saw Mr Ashton in the Marble Hall. He waved to her, and she came over. He looked at her with an encouraging smile.

  “Can you talk to me for a moment?”

  She wheeled him to his study and he shut the door behind them. She was nervous, because she did not know how to be with Mr Ashton on her own, behind a closed door. But his face was kind, tender.

  “Anna, I am more sorry than I can say that you heard an adult conversation beyond your years.”

  “It’s all right,” she said, and hesitated because she could not think what else to say.

  “I should have said you were there, but I didn’t want to—”

  “I know,” said Anna. There was a silence.

  “Sometimes couples argue, but then they make up,” said Mr Ashton softly.

  “My parents argue too,” blurted Anna, even though she had never seen them arguing. “I won’t tell anyone,” she added.

  “You won’t?”

  “No, because it’s – my mother would say it was private.”

  “Well, your mother sounds like a sensible woman.”

  “She likes – private things,” Anna went on, stumped for something to say.

  There was a longer pause.

  “I’m just sorry, my dear,” he said, “that’s all.”

  With that, his face closed up with a gentle smile which ended the conversation. So off she went, closing the door behind her, determined to keep his secret.

  She remembered how Mrs Ashton had been her favourite when she first arrived there. There was the time she had cut her knee, and Mrs Ashton had scooped her up. But now she was scared of her. Mrs Ashton had a temper.

  Unlike her husband, who was never sharp with any of them. He would tilt his face to one side and listen to whatever he was asked in class. Of course she would be true to his secret.

  Anna didn’t mean to take sides. But she knew that Mr Ashton was kind and fair, and that she didn’t like Mrs Ashton any more.

  34

  It had been raining all day in Ashton Park. If anyone was feeling at odds with the world, they could blame it on the weather, thought Thomas. Ruth was wheeling him to lunch after their lessons had overlapped in the west wing.

  “Summer rain, I’d call it,” said Ruth, “but heavy, for July.”

  “We have many kinds of rain at Ashton Park – slow, fast, soft, heavy. I prefer the ‘soon over’ variety mys
elf.”

  She laughed, but could think of no rejoinder.

  Their conversation had grown a little more fluent lately, but still stalled sometimes. It was like being stranded on the opposite banks of a deep river, thought Thomas. There were all these swift currents passing between them, under a polite surface, yet they still did not know how to reach each other directly.

  “What will you do when you leave here, after the war?”

  “I can’t imagine that time.”

  “But it will end – and then what will you do?”

  “I suppose I will go back to London.”

  “And teach? You’re a natural teacher.”

  “Thank you but – I’ve enjoyed it so much here that I’m not sure if an ordinary London school could ever be the same.”

  “It would give you more of a life. A young woman like you needs to get out, meet people—”

  “I’ve been happy here, I haven’t craved anything else.”

  “But you mustn’t shut the door on new people when you’re still so young.”

  What was he telling her? Ruth was confused by their oblique conversations; something unspoken hovered between their words, each leaving the other to decipher what was really being said. Their meetings left her at once anxious and excited, she thought, as she walked out into the gardens after lunch.

  * * *

  From his study window, Thomas watched Ruth walk past the sundial, towards the woods; he was still shaken by their morning conversation.

  He was in love with her, it was that simple. Every room without her was empty. When she was there, his heart sang.

  He saw her face everywhere now. The sky was her, and the grass, and light itself. For so many years he had waited to live, biding his time for an unknown illumination, and here, now, at last, he had such hope. A desire to love so acute it strained every nerve in him. Love. If there was a higher word, a further word, he would have used it.

  Ruth. Ruth, Ruth. he said her name over and over, sometimes out loud. He worried he might say it in front of others, or in his sleep. Ruth.

  It did not matter that he could not walk. It did not matter if she did not love him. Nothing mattered beyond the joy of knowing that she existed, and that he might see her again. Her face, her hair, her hands. Nothing could diminish the wonder which this love, this rapture, had opened in him. He was touched to the quick – brim, overbrimming, my cup runneth over. What so many had felt before but never him, now at last his time had come.

  But his euphoria was volatile. There were still other times, darker hours, when his happiness plummeted. Days when she did not look at him even in passing, and his hope shrivelled away.

  He would never touch her. He could make love to Elizabeth, even though he didn’t care if he never held her again. But he could not touch Ruth. He wanted to stroke her cheek, and run his fingers through her hair. He wanted to look into her eyes – and see them open up, to let him into her soul. He felt the displaced potency of his gaze, that he could no longer meet anyone’s eyes in case they might guess he was wishing for Ruth.

  He knew from his pain that this was love. All those years of hoping he might feel something, driving him to act out a pretence of love. But now, at last, he had this spontaneous joy at the thought of another person.

  It was everything about her. Her generosity, her hope, her spirit. Her pale, almost transparent face. Her tentative articulacy. The hesitant incline of her neck, such an uncertain gesture. Her soul in her fingertip as she spoke. Her awkward sincerity, which asked for him to hold her in his arms. Her tenderness.

  35

  Every evening at six o’clock, the children lined up in the Marble Hall before walking the long corridors to the chapel. Silently, they filed into the vaulted room with its wooden pews and plain leaded windows. The walls were panelled with oak, and lightly edged in blue and gold. It was a family chapel, intimate and simply furnished. But sometimes the setting sun would strike through the long windows, and the oak panelling would glow like a lamp, intimating something more than wood and stone.

  Immortal, invisible, God only wise

  In light inaccessible, hid from our eyes

  Most blessed, most glorious, the ancient of days,

  Almighty, victorious, thy great name we praise.

  Anna loved the chapel, the solemnity of the prayers and the singing of hymns. She believed in God ardently, and prayed to him daily for her mother, her father and the end of the war.

  There was an age-old smell of polished wood and musty leather kneelers. Anna liked to sit near the memorial to William, Mr Ashton’s older brother killed in the Great War. His helmet hung on the wall, and she could see the bullet holes. Next to it was a wooden shield for Edward Ashton, “Missing in Action”. And beside that was a plaque for their sister Claudia.

  Anna always felt a little guilty looking at these memorials, as if she were spying on Mr Ashton’s sorrows. When he taught them about Roman battles, all she wanted was to hear about his own brothers in their war – but she never dared to ask.

  She fidgeted on her kneeler, and watched Miss Weir, who always sat so still in the chapel, avoiding everyone’s eyes. They all knew she was a vicar’s daughter, perhaps that was why. But Mr Ashton always kept his eyes to himself too, she noticed.

  Perhaps all adults knew how to look inwards when they were inside a church. She tried it herself, screwing up her eyes and praying that she might go home soon, even as she chanted the Lord’s Prayer.

  “... Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven...”

  The same familiar prayer reached through to Ruth in her pew, as she puzzled over her feelings for Thomas. Lead us not into temptation. She was moved by him – though it had taken many months to admit this to herself. She knew it was wrong to keep thinking about him, and yet she could not bring herself to feel guilty.

  She was not yet quite sure what was happening to her. She knew that she enjoyed being in a room with Thomas, and that she was pleased if he spoke to her. He produced a slight flutter in her limbs when they talked together, and she wanted him to think well of her. But these feelings were surely just natural signs of respect for someone older and more articulate than her, whose courtesy was so particular, even to her.

  Ever since her arrival, Ruth had been a little in awe of Thomas. The scale of his house had daunted her, and he himself appeared to be so guarded and self-sufficient, without any crack of need. A part of her feared him – perhaps because his disability moved her too much, and she was uncomfortable about such feelings. So she kept her distance, barely acknowledging even to herself that she looked forward to their meetings.

  Perhaps it was Thomas’s apparent powerlessness which had first attracted her, easing her own romantic inadequacy. Or perhaps it was simply the kindness he showed her. But somehow, at some point, she began to recognize that she was craving opportunities to talk to him. One morning, walking to a classroom, she realized that she was speaking to him in her head: he had entered her mind as her secret friend, and there she was, rehearsing what she might say to him, and qualifying her opinions in the light of what he might think.

  They met daily, but there was little chance for talk of any consequence. There were lunchtimes, which he took in the main dining room, and there were staff meetings, and twice a week she had to push him back to his study from some farflung classrooms where their lessons overlapped. On these occasions, as they returned down the long curved corridor to the house, he always found ways to dispel her shyness with his banter.

  “I have been reading Elizabeth Bowen,” Thomas ventured one day. “Have you read any of her novels?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “She writes about gloomy houses with secrets.”

  “Is there a particular book I should read?”

  “I’d like to lend you The House in Paris. There’s a watchful girl who reminds me of some of our children here—”

  Their conversations seemed to be riddled with so many gaps that she of
ten found herself trying to finish off their sentences after they had parted.

  Eventually she realized that she was talking to Thomas in her head all the time. She caught herself practising lines to him. “Is there a time I could pick up the Bowen novel from your study? I know I would enjoy any book you think is special.” I must be lonely, she told herself.

  Sitting beside him at lunch one day, they were just discussing the Russian Front, when she glanced towards Thomas and found him watching her face very intently. For a moment their eyes met with peculiar force, startling her like an electric jolt – it was the first time she had ever caught a glimpse of somebody truly looking at her, as if thinking about her, as if she were not quite the invisible person she felt herself to be. Or was it nothing?

  All through the next week, whenever she talked to anyone, she observed how and when people looked into each other’s faces. The right amount of eye contact was something she found impossible to quantify. But when she had caught Thomas’s look that day it had felt personal and intimate. Or had she misinterpreted him? She longed to seek out his eyes again, but did not dare.

  Did she ever cross his mind, she wondered. He sometimes remembered things she had said, and repeated them back to her weeks later. That surprised her. She was growing nervous of him, of the boundaries of their conversations. There was the time he told her he was reading Thomas Hardy’s elegies for his dead wife – and he casually mentioned their erotic power. Erotic. Nobody had ever used such a word with her before. Surely he had noticed her discomfort, the catch of her breath? A part of her felt ashamed that she had never had such conversations before. She worried whether she was too prim.

  She began to think about what he might be like to embrace – as an experiment, almost, at first. She was not afraid of his wheelchair; she intuited that he was still capable of “erotic” feeling. It was his word, after all.

  Yet she was reduced to a shadow by his wife. Ruth was fearful of Elizabeth, who was so poised and could be so scathing – who would certainly scorn the mere idea that a gauche vicar’s daughter might form an attachment to her husband. When Ruth looked at herself in the cheap buckled mirror in her room, all she could see was a scrubbed, slightly freckled blank face. Not even a woman’s face, yet. She felt – inadequate.