The Very Thought of You (6 page)

He smiled, and saw three rows of open young faces gaze back at him, guileless and obedient.

Was teaching really so very easy, he wondered, remembering his own boarding school, the hectoring masters, the routine canings, the nameless daily fears. He felt no wish to do anything other than help these motherless children.

“Even today, you will find that Latin turns up in odd places,” Thomas said, and he passed around a coin on which they saw
Georgius Rex
written underneath the picture of the King.

“Have you always been a Latin teacher, sir?” asked a girl, Katy, with pigtails.

The question came abruptly, and pricked Thomas. He saw himself suddenly as they must see him: a man in a wheelchair, apparently infirm, drilling them in a dead language. He should not feel the need to explain himself to a group of children, surely?

“No, I have not always been a teacher,” he said with a slight shrug, looking across at the curious faces before him. “Things are not always quite as they seem. I was once a diplomat,” he added.

“What’s a
dip
lomat, sir?”

“Somebody who works to keep the peace between different countries.”

“Can they stop wars?”

“They try to.”

“Can they stop this war, sir?”

“If only,” he said wryly, “but there have been many blunders.”

Silence. He looked round the room, suddenly stricken by these trusting faces looking up to him, waiting for their teacher to reassure them that all would be well. He smiled as convincingly as he could.

“But I have no doubt that we will see Herr Hitler off: it will only be a matter of time. And then you’ll all go home again.”

A pang of unease tugged at him as the children showed such willing relief, all of them, wanting to sense victory right around the corner, just because he had said so.

“But in the meantime,
you will learn your Latin words
,” he tutted at them with mock fierceness. Several faces broke into smiles, but then the gong rang, and the next lesson was upon them.

Thomas wheeled himself away; Anna Sands from the back row got up to open the door for him.

“Thank you, Anna,” he said brightly, but she averted her eyes, shy of him. Watchful eyes, he noticed, as he left the room.

Anna returned to her seat. Did the Ashtons have any children of their own, she wondered? She hoped so. He must be a kind father.

9

Thomas made his way back to the estate office, which had been transformed into a staffroom. Opening the door, he found himself suddenly face to face with Ruth Weir, the sandy-haired young teacher from Pimlico.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, for no clear reason.

“What about? This is meant to be your place too.” She was clutching a stack of books and looked flustered, with startled eyes. He hoped it wasn’t because of his abrupt entrance.

“Have you found anywhere to stow your things yet?”

“I was just trying to find a corner—”

“Here,” said Thomas decisively, wheeling himself over to a set of wall cupboards. “I’ve been meaning to clear these, and now I have the rest of the morning to do so.” He looked up and gave her a reassuring smile. “By the time you return here at lunchtime, this cupboard will be yours.”

She smiled her thanks and disappeared to her lesson with an armful of books and pencils. The room without her felt suddenly still and empty.

A whistle shrieked in the distance. Thomas glanced out of the window, and saw Jock Stewart supervising some boys’ races on the front lawn.

Turning back to the overfowing cupboard, he allowed himself a mental sigh. For days he had put off clearing out
all these pointless old accounts books. He locked his chair brakes and settled his feet on the ground, and began to make a rubbish pile.

When Thomas reached the second cupboard, a leatherbound christening album fell at his feet. “
Thomas Arthur Ashton, March 1900
” said the gold lettering on the spine. He picked it up, unclasped the brass lock and abruptly opened a door onto his past.

There was his family, staring up at him. The photographs showed a formal group assembled outside the chapel, but even within the stillness of a photograph Thomas could sense their hidden lives. At the centre stood his father Robert, bracing his shoulders and staring into the camera defiantly, as if proud to be marking this new century with a third son. Beside him, his mother Miriam looked so poised, her luminous pale face enhanced by an oyster-silk dress. Cradled in his mother’s arms, the infant Thomas had an attentive gaze and a thin, rather adult face, he thought. At their side hovered William and Edward, his older brothers, clearly fidgeting for a chance to run wild in the early spring weather.

Thomas could remember his mother telling him all about the elaborate pomp of his christening party, the crowded reception spilling out into the gardens, where his father had planted his christening tree – a copper beech sapling – to much applause from family and friends. Afterwards, in the crimson dining room, the guests had sat down to a banquet entirely sourced from the estate: meat, fish, tender vegetables, fresh bread, even the cheese, with a steady flow of vintage wines from the cellars.

The sound of cheering roused Thomas, and his eyes flicked back outside to the boys running their races on the south lawn. He watched them for a moment, enjoying their reckless speed. One boy tumbled on the grass, then picked himself
up as if nothing had happened. Thomas could still remember those easy boyhood falls – and rolling down the grassy banks of the rose garden with his sister Claudia.

Turning back to the album, he noticed with regret that there were no pictures of his sister there: she was born two years later. Yet all his earliest memories were shared with her. Playing in the blue nursery, with its looming rocking horse and scattering of tin soldiers. Or hiding behind the leafy palms in the saloon, listening to their mother playing Schubert on the piano.

Every morning they would visit their mother in her dressing room. She had a view to the lawns, and a small writing table crowded with letters and exotic bijouterie. Sometimes they watched her brushing her long chestnut hair, and then there was the familiar clink of rings and bracelets as she took the jewels from her ring dish and put them on. She never wore her wedding ring at night, “because it makes my finger go stiff,” she told them.

“When I grow up, can I have your rings?” Claudia asked one day.

“Of course you can, my darling,” their mother replied, “and Thomas can have this bracelet for his wife,” she added, to be fair.

Thomas had felt instantly possessive about her white-gold bracelet – so elegant, so delicate, already part of his future. He watched his mother slip it on her wrist and snap shut the clasp.

Those were the Edwardian years of plenty, Thomas now recognized, when the rooms overflowed with rich trailing draperies and potted palms, and his mother’s exquisitely coloured figurines were scattered on tables covered with ornate cloths.

There had been many reassuring family traditions, which he still liked to retrace in his mind. He could picture the long
light of summer evenings, when the Ashtons and their guests would sit out on the garden steps, under the colonnade, with drinks and stories. Sometimes, he would accompany the butler on his clock-winding rounds. There were grandfather clocks, carriage clocks, hanging clocks – some that chimed, some with swinging pendulums, all requiring regular winding with their own key. Stillwell, the butler, held all the clock keys together on one ring, and he occasionally let Thomas do the winding.

“Gently does it – gently, gently,” he would mutter, stooping his back awkwardly to check on the boy. “Be careful not to force the mechanism.”

Thomas never looked up to notice Stillwell’s face, though now he fancied he could imagine the butler’s anxious expression, as if reliving the scene outside himself.

Every spring, a man would climb up on a high ladder to polish the great crystal chandelier suspended in the Marble Hall. When he was finished, the crystal drops glistened like the purest water. Or if Thomas stood below it and looked upwards, the chandelier shone like the sun against the painted azure sky of the high-domed ceiling, where a halfnaked man played his lyre amongst the clouds.

“hat’s Apollo,” his father explained to him one day, “Greek god of the sun, and music too. Decent of him to join us here in Yorkshire – very decent.”

Thomas’s parents were frequently away at their Regent’s Park house in London, but whenever they returned to A shton,a mood of relaxed gaiety would flow once more through the house as their trunks and suitcases were carried upstairs. Twice a year, they held dances in the gilded-oak saloon – a long, many-windowed room which glowed in the late afternoon sun. Sometimes, Thomas was allowed to stay up for the occasion. Guests would assemble in the Marble
Hall, and he would shake their hands without ever quite recognizing their faces. He retained an impression of the men throwing back their shoulders to carry their bellies, while the women seemed always to be tilting their heads to one side, as if to balance precious objects on their noses.

At the centre of any room stood his parents. He would never forget his mother in blue-shadowed silk, sweeping into the dining room on his father’s arm, truly beautiful.

“You’re an Ashton,” his father would fondly tell him, to the mild annoyance of the others. For Thomas had inherited his father’s arresting blue gaze, which Robert, in his vainer moments, believed was the gift and guiding spirit of the Ashton family. When Robert looked into his youngest son’s face, he saw a pleasing mirror of his own soul.

History, too, pervaded Thomas’s childhood. Family portraits looked down at him from the walls, and he ran his fingers across the calf-backed books accumulated over generations in the library.

In one corner of the library was a secret door, subtly encased in dummy books, which revealed the gallery steps at the flick of a catch. Thomas knew that this device had been installed by his grandfather, and he felt a rush of complicity with him whenever he clicked open the door. He would spend hours walking along the brass rail of the library’s gallery, touching all the old books, histories, Greek poetry, atlases, editions of old dramatists.

All over the house, Thomas sensed the presence of earlier Ashtons – in the air, in the smoke rising from the great carved fireplaces, always watching. He could walk through every room secure in the continuity of generations, with ancestors whose names were known and remembered.

But minor intimations of an imperfect world had still intruded upon his early years. When he was eight, his Aunt Mary came to visit, and walked with him to the statue of Father Time on the south lawn.

“I used to swing round him as a child,” she said fondly, scraping away a little moss from his pedestal. “He looks so much smaller than I remember.”

As she turned to face the house, Thomas was startled to recognize that Aunt Mary used to live here, and that he, too, would one day be a stranger at Ashton like her. His elder brother William would inherit the house, and install his wife and children. He would be only partly welcome, no more than an uncle to the new heirs. For some weeks, he wandered round the house staring at favourite pictures and clocks with a puzzled sense of incipient loss.

There was, too, the eerie warning of the local monasteries, which they visited every summer. Laden with baskets of food and drink, cars would carry them to the picturesque ruins of Rievaulx and Byland, perfect spots for a picnic. He and his brothers would race about on the broken walls, jumping over the stumps of old pillars. Until a stray breeze would make Thomas stop, and look round at the mighty walls reduced to piles of tumbled rock. Here was Rievaulx, once one of the greatest abbeys in the land, where now the grass grew right up to the altar. Where soaring broken arches framed sheep grazing on the far hill.

Thomas could recall sitting quietly with Claudia on an open staircase, and rubbing his hand over the sheer stone steps. The tricks of time were all about them, stones worn smooth by wind and rain, but this was the oblivion of somebody else’s past.

“This stream runs into the river in our park,” his whiskered father once explained to him, as they walked along the small
beck at Rievaulx. “They named the abbey after the river here – Rie-vaulx, valley of the Rye. It’s a broader river through our land, but it’s the same source.”

Thomas had looked into the rocky shallows of the water, and blithely speculated that all the life and spirit of this ruined abbey had simply drifted downstream a few miles and settled with them instead, in the seemingly imperishable splendour of Ashton Park.

Outside, the cry of children grew suddenly more insistent. Thomas wheeled himself to the window, and realized that it was the break before lunch.

Girls and boys were thronging the lawn in scattered groups, and queuing for the swing. For a while, he watched the random formations of children, just checking that none of them looked excluded.

His wife wandered onto the lawn. He felt faintly guilty about spying on her unobserved, but kept watching. Jock Stewart followed just behind her, and began to swing the lunch bell high and low, drawing the children towards the dining room.

He watched his wife standing on the crest of the lawn steps, as dozens of children raced past her. Until a girl stopped there, Anna Sands, and reached up her hand to Elizabeth. Thomas felt his heart lurch.

But his wife would not accept the gesture. She patted the girl on the shoulder a little awkwardly, and sent her on her way.

Thomas winced, and pushed himself off to lunch. Her pain was his pain. What were they, he asked himself, but a childless couple in a vast house, surrounded by other people’s children?

10

Every morning, a housemaid brought a tray of tea to the Ashtons’ bedroom. Sometimes the maid would open the door to find Elizabeth in triptych, reflected in all three of her dressing table mirrors as she brushed her long hair. And if Elizabeth turned to thank the maid, her reflection would glance round three times too.

Elizabeth persisted in keeping her hair long at a time when most women cut theirs. She had long dark hair tinged with copper, which she groomed with a set of silver hairbrushes. Thomas would watch her at her dressing table, with her hair falling down her back, brushing and brushing. When white strands began to appear, she first plucked them out, then discreetly dyed her hair until she could no longer remember its true colour. a woman in her thirties should not have any white hairs, she was clear about that.