The Very Thought of You Page 18

  And yet she kept thinking about Thomas, even if it was wrong. But she could imagine how deeply she might embarrass him by any declaration of feeling, and then she would have to leave. The thought of that separation was too painful to consider, so she continued to nurture her tenderness for Thomas, but only in secret.

  36

  It was a special night for Roberta. For the first time she was dancing at the Savoy, in London’s most elegant ballroom. Carroll Gibbons was leading his band, the Savoy hotel Orpheans, and the floor was overflowing with wartime lovers seizing their chance.

  She had been invited by Billy, the cornet player in Geraldo’s band who had caught her eye in so many rehearsals at the BBC. Sometimes he played for the Savoy Orpheans too, which got him into the Savoy on his nights off. She had arrived in her best satin dress.

  Both of them were natural dancers. Their bodies brushed together as he laced his fingers through hers, and they stepped fluently across the polished floor, jubilant to have found each other.

  This affair with Billy had moved so swiftly. After all those studied glances in the rehearsal hall, they had come face to face in one of the Fitzrovia pubs. “Have you two met yet?” somebody asked, and they both smiled, because they felt familiar already.

  Their first conversation was delicate, as each wanted to put the other at ease, to commiserate with each other’s life, almost. Both of them were married, “happily” of course. He lived in Brockley, an easy train ride from London Bridge, and was fond of his wife although she had “lost interest” in him. (Roberta listened with complicit eyes, knowing that they were both making excuses.) Diabetes had kept him out of the army. He was doing his bit for Britain by playing his music.

  That was enough, wasn’t it, they told each other. The Nazis had banned jazz as black and degenerate. Just to play dance music was a rebellion. Just to feel the music slide through your body, panther-like, even that was a stand against Hitler, and one embraced by Roberta with alacrity. She was an alluring dancer, languid and intimate, with a sinuous abandon in her hips and arms which excited every man she danced with.

  Billy was besotted, and wanted to find a place where they could stay together in London. He told his wife he must rent a room in town for the nights when he couldn’t catch the last train home. Rooms were not hard to find, with so many people away. There was the thrill of pretending they were married, and giving the name Smith, “because it’s so obviously a lie”. A landlord took them round bedsits in Maida Vale and St John’s Wood. Abandoned houses, stacked with empty rooms. In the end, they took a place in Notting Hill, a one-bedroom flat in Linden Gardens, furnished with a large bed and tatty chairs. There was a view onto the backs of other buildings, and a woman opposite who sat on her fire escape to feed the pigeons. The bird woman, they called her.

  They locked the door and made love with a mirror perched against the wall, the more to entice each other. She, at thirty-seven, was relishing her late bloom of sensuality. Enjoying the fullness of her breasts which swelled at his touch. Feeling, for the first time, the pleasing roundness of her form, and relaxing about her imperfections, the slight thickening of her thighs which only seemed to excite Billy. His waist was filling out too, and the hair on his chest was flecked with grey, which moved her.

  It seemed such a waste not to be together, when they might die tomorrow anyway. That was what they said when they parted in the morning, already planning their next meeting.

  37

  Summer lessons finished earlier at Ashton Park, allowing both children and teachers to make the most of the long days outside.

  It was a clear day, and Ruth went for a long walk through the gardens. The breeze lifted her hair and her spirit, and everything before her looked flawless and new, as if fireshly hatched. The forget-me-nots at her feet were like brilliant blue eyes, startled into pleasure at the scene before them. She picked one and took it back up to her bedroom, to remember that day. She laid the flower on a sheet of paper and wrote the date, with a message. To lay down her marker – that she was in love. Think what you have meant to me. She folded the paper with the flower at its crease, and carefully pressed it inside a book of verse.

  Ruth had realized that she was happy in this house, because being with Thomas was all she wanted. She thought about him all the time now. It took longer to admit the right word to herself. Love. She loved this man.

  At the same time, she feared she was a fool – but she could not help herself any longer. The feeling had taken hold of her before she had even guessed what was happening. He had penetrated her soul.

  Even if she could never tell him, there was still the joy of seeing him. All day long she cherished the thought of him, even as she taught her lessons. “Thomas” – she privately called him by his first name. After so many conversations in her head, she felt a flash of guilt whenever she saw him. What if it showed on her face?

  She sensed an unseen cord stretching between them, but told herself, too, that this was her delusion. And yet – she sometimes allowed herself the gift of hope. Every expression of his eyes, every gesture he made, reached right through to her. She hardly dared to look at him, but when she did, and their eyes met in passing, she shook inside. She felt his presence so acutely now that she no longer knew how to stand in the same room as him.

  A wished-for moment of disclosure began to hover in her mind and in her heart. She dreamt of daring to look into Thomas’s face, and finding love in his eyes; she wanted to touch his cheek, she wanted to say she loved him. It was not something she had ever said to anyone before.

  After so many years alone she longed for intimacy. She imagined that if she could just lie naked in Thomas’s arms, she would be at peace for the first time in her life. Breathing with someone. All secrets, all fears, laid open. Her head on his chest. But the crossing to that place could never be possible, she knew that too.

  38

  It was almost two years since Anna had first arrived at Ashton Park, and by now the place had settled inside her – its peace and quiet and remove.

  In the evenings, she would sit at the window seat of her dormitory and gaze out at the tranquil sweep of parkland, flecked with oaks and elms. Sometimes she watched the steady drift of grazing sheep. Whatever the weather, it was a view of unfailing serenity, a landscape which reached inwards – until that pale wash of sky was distilled into the light of memory.

  Anna and the others invented numerous games and routines around the park. They made dens in the woods, and a secret camp in the derelict water tower, even though it was strictly forbidden. In gangs, they played chase through the gardens, and block-one-two-three by the sundial.

  One girl had a pair of roller skates, and on rainy days they would spend hours skating up and down the smooth stone corridors of the west wing. When the leather straps broke, they tied the skates with string instead.

  In the winter, they were often cold, and constantly foraging for food. Someone found a rusty old tin of sugar in the marmalade cupboard, and the children spooned the sweet grains onto slices of bread until the sugar ran out. Through all those chilly months, they wore their socks and jerseys in bed, bracing themselves against the frost. Until spring arrived, with an abundance of wild flowers blazing along the grass terraces – buttercups, daffodils and violet-blue speedwells. Forget-me-nots too, and untended clumps of azaleas.

  Come the summer, the children left footprints in the firesh uncut grass. The woods teemed with wild garlic, which they would pick and suck for its clean, sweet taste. And on summers’ evenings, if the matrons could not keep them quiet at bedtime, they would be sent outside to run circuits round the south lawn, to tire them out.

  It was on one of these runs in 1941 that Anna gazed out across the gardens in the long light of evening, and was lost in a moment of complete happiness.

  She loved this place, that was all. The slight stir of the trees, the wide evening sky, the moist grass. The gaze of the house, its silence. Her heart swelled with a joy she could not fathom, a su
rge of gladness which held her right where she was, drawing in the view around her.

  “Come on, Anna,” called Mary Heaney, prompting her to run on and catch up with the girl in front. She ached with a sense that the light would soon leak away, and the day too – and then how would she remember all this?

  She stopped still, and looked back, trying to hold this moment fast in her heart, to keep it close.

  39

  As soon as Thomas found the poem, he knew he must read it out to Ruth. Peace settled in him, because he could at last see a way to make some kind of indirect declaration. It was by E.E. Cummings, an American poet he had chanced upon in a recent anthology. He bookmarked several other short poems for cover.

  Two days later, the weather was auspiciously clear as Ruth came to fetch him for their poetry class. She straightened her skirt and knocked on his study door.

  “Come in!”

  Just the sight of her lifted him with hope, though he hid any elation behind his habitual manners.

  She pushed him up the short ramp to the garden path. Thomas was quiet and seemed preoccupied, and Ruth was careful not to disturb his thoughts.

  When they reached the group of children, and everyone was settled, Thomas told them about E.E. Cummings: an American poet who looked for new ways to make his feelings immediate, such as doing away with capital letters and some of the punctuation.

  “Spontaneity – that’s what he’s after,” said Thomas. “Capturing a moment as it happens, not as some afterthought.”

  Having intrigued the children with the idea of a poet who broke all the rules, Thomas started to read. He began with a poem about the moon as a balloon, then one in which spring was like a hand. The book was passed around and the children looked at the eccentric layout of the lines.

  “This next one is a love poem. He raises his game here—” said Thomas, retrieving the book and turning the page. He began to read again, lightly and fireely, as the poem suggested.

  somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond

  any experience, your eyes have their silence:

  in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,

  or which i cannot touch because they are too near

  your slightest look easily will unclose me

  though i have closed myself as fingers,

  you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens

  (touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first rose

  or if your wish be to close me, i and

  my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,

  as when the heart of this flower imagines

  the snow carefully everywhere descending;

  nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals

  the power of your intense fragility:whose texture

  compels me with colour of its countries,

  rendering death and forever with each breathing

  (i do not know what it is about you that closes

  and opens;only that something in me understands

  the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)

  nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

  When he had finished reading the poem there was a silence. Ruth, usually, would spark off a discussion, but she said nothing.

  Thomas felt his mistake at once – it was clearly not a poem for children. He had been too blatant.

  “I liked the flower in the snow.” It was Anna Sands who spoke up. Thomas had never been so entirely pleased with any child before.

  “Quite so. A rose in the snow. A beautiful idea, though it is hard to say why. That is the magic of poetry.”

  “But I thought it was a sad poem,” said Anna.

  “Why?” asked Thomas.

  “Because it was about sad love,” she said.

  “Why do you think that?”

  “It was all distant, as if they could never be together.”

  “Perhaps it’s a poem to woo her—”

  “But it sounds as if he thinks he’ll never reach her.”

  “Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all,” chanted a girl with pigtails, Sarah. Silence.

  “Better to have loved at all,” said Thomas.

  He was afraid to look at Ruth. Had she understood what he was trying to tell her? She did not speak until the children engaged her.

  “Will you read to us too?” asked Anna.

  “I’ve brought you something spooky,” she said, “by Walter de la Mare.”

  It was a ghost poem, ‘The Listeners’. It got them all talking about the ghosts of Ashton Park – the Blue Lady, the Girl with the Lapdog – there was no end to the ghost stories conjured up by the children. In his mood of nervous levity, Thomas laughed with them all. Ruth too.

  In laughter, their eyes met briefly. His heart stalled. How could she not know his feelings for her? There was an invisible thread running between them, if only she would dare to take it. He had read the poem for her – surely she had understood that? He willed her to respond, but did not dare look at her again.

  The banter of the class went on for too long, it seemed to Thomas. But then at last came the moment of parting, and Ruth began to wheel him back to the house. As she pushed him, he realized that he had lost all his regret that he was in a wheelchair, because he felt that she might love him as he was. Or was this his delusion?

  When they arrived at his study, he reached for the door handle, trying to think of a suitable quip. But the doorknob stuck for a moment. Her hand came upon his in an effort to free it. He looked up at her, right into her face. Surely, that might be love he saw there? Together they opened the door.

  “Please, come in,” he said. She followed. Boldly, he shut the door behind her. For the first time, they were alone together in a room with a closed door. She was avoiding his gaze, but he looked straight up at her. She crumpled into retreat before he had a chance to speak.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Why?” he replied, confused. “What’s worrying you?”

  “I’ve been too – familiar.”

  “I can’t think how,” he said.

  She was stooped, her face down, unable to meet his eyes.

  “I’m so sorry.” It was all she could think to say.

  He did not know how to respond.

  “Please tell me what’s worrying you,” he asked gently.

  “You were wonderful today,” she said, trying to raise her face to his. He wondered if she was just being polite. He was in agony. What was she really thinking?

  “They enjoyed themselves, didn’t they?” he said as lightly as possible, shuffling his legs. The moment of greatest tension was passing, and he knew he must produce pleasantries now, to stall her retreat.

  “Anna might even be quite a passable poet if she sticks at it,” he went on.

  “She’s not shy of her own feelings, that’s for sure.”

  “I wonder what becomes of the Annas of this world?”

  “They find it hard to meet anyone who will take life as seriously as they do.”

  “Is that so?”

  “I can only guess.’”

  What other trivia could he muster? Was she holding him off through indifference or shyness? For surely she must now know what he felt.

  She started to move, to leave the room.

  “Thank you.” He said it too loud. She turned.

  “Thank you,” she said, daring to look into his face for a moment. He fancied he saw tenderness in her eyes, but he had lost all sense now of what she felt. Perhaps everything had been his imagination?

  Then she was gone. He sat in his chair, trying to unravel the signs. Had her discomfort signalled love or embarrassment?

  40

  Ruth was shaking as she returned to her room.

  When he had read out that poem, she could only assume that he was thinking of his wife – and the thought of their long intimacy made her ache with jealousy.

  And yet a part of her indulged
a thought that perhaps he had chosen the poem for her – or was she a fool to think so? She wanted to talk to him, and be with him, and go on seeing him for ever. But another voice told her she was going mad, that she must leave Ashton Park, that she was deluding herself, seeing love in everything he said where there was nothing but courtesy and kindness.

  She sat down to write him a letter. She wrote it and rewrote it, knowing that she would only change it again. Then she hid the letter in a book, ready to revise in the morning. She might never dare to give it to him, but writing it was a solace.

  The next day he did not meet her look in the dining room. He seemed to snub her, even – that hurt, very much. Did he worry that he had sparked a feeling in her and must now show her that there was nothing there? Was he telling her to keep her distance?

  Through all her lessons that day, her heart was so heavy she could barely stand. Teaching the children, she heard her voice as if it came from outside. Yet, whatever she was doing, she had the flashing sensation of seeing Thomas’s expectant face, smiling at her, holding out his hand to her.

  In one Maths lesson, a sudden memory of his eyes made her gasp and lose her concentration. She was mad – he was not thinking of her, not even for a moment. The children were puzzled by her sudden silence, but she regained herself and talked on.

  The succeeding days were no easier. She tried to be alone whenever she could, because her body kept crumpling beneath her. She thought: I must leave before I unravel. But a part of her still wanted to finish her letter to Thomas, still wanted to tell him what he meant to her. Outside lessons, she sat on the bed in her room under the dim bulb and worked on it, copying it out again and again in a fair hand.

  For three days she did not change the letter. Just read it. In those days her decision came – that she must leave before her behaviour became an embarrassment. She told Mrs Ashton, and Mr Stewart, that she would like to seek new work in St Albans, to be closer to her parents. Of course they understood, though they regretted her departure because she was such an accomplished and dedicated teacher – as they both told her.