Page 47 of Happily Ever After
‘That’s just it. Thereweren’tany nefarious dealings. Oswald really did not like Lady Tanith at all. He took her in as a favour to a friend because her mother was dead and her father had left her and this friend had brought her up and needed somewhere for her to go. To be honest, he really ought to have wondered a little bit more about what a background like that might do to a person.’
‘Oh dear,’ Jay said, biting his toast.
‘He calls her things like “that annoying child” and “my bleating shadow”. Apparently Lady Tanith inserted herself into his life; she waseverywhere.Oswald was trying to write – she’d be there, in the library, talking, trying to give him ideas or lines he could use.’
Jay pulled a face. ‘That sounds… irritating.’
‘According to Oswald it was more than irritating. I actually started to feel really sorry for him. He even took to hiding in the icehouse to try to get away from her, but she followed him there too. By 1972 the poor man was desperate.’
‘Wow.’
‘Yes. She was obviously damaged. I mean, everyone she’d ever loved had dumped her, she was desperate for something to love and she fixated on poor Oswald. Round about May he got absolutely scathing about her. He was clearly being fairly polite to her face but letting it all out in his diary. There arepagesof stuff about how she wouldn’t leave him alone, how she trailed behind him, how he was going to have to leave Caroline – to whom he was, incidentally, absolutely devoted – and go down to London just to get a break from Lady Tanith.’
Jay licked his fingers and got up to put more bread in the toaster. ‘Why didn’t he just tell her to push off? Explain that he needed space to write? Lock the library door?’
‘Apparently the door didn’t lock, not until late 1972, when he got one put on. But Lady Tanith would take a chair and sit outside, talking through the door. And Caroline liked her; Lady Tanith made her life easier and gave her someone to talk to – when she wasn’t pestering Oswald, obviously. To be honest, I’m not sure Lady Tanith would have gone, even if he’d given her her marching orders. She was too much in love with Oswald. It just wasn’t returned. At all,’ I added, in case there was any doubt.
‘So – so all that stuff about her being his muse? About them being devoted to each other? That’s all in Tanith’shead?’ Jay leaned against the Aga as though he needed its support in his shock. ‘She made it all up?’
‘Fifty years, Jay. I’m not sure she even knows what was true and what she just invented. She didn’t do it deliberately I don’t think. She just didn’t know what love was meant to look like.’
‘Bugger me.’ He scraped his hair back with both hands. ‘Fifty years. Fifty years of that bloody memorial service every month. For a man who didn’t even like her.’
I made a ‘there you go’ face.
‘So, she’s got a shrine in the attic, she lays flowers at that stone, she’s been staring at that portrait, forfifty years! It was pretty weird when we thought they’d been lovers, now it’s not just weird it’s – well, treatment territory, I’d have said.’
‘I think it’s grief,’ I said, taking another slice of toast.
‘Grief? No. Iknowabout grief, Andi.’ Jay rubbed, probably unconsciously, at the tattoo on his wrist. ‘Grief is carrying someone with you, in your soul. It’s wanting to live your life for them too, because they didn’t get the chance. It’s hearing their voice in the rain, wishing they could have met… Look, what Lady Tanith has, that’s not grief. That’s self-indulgence.’
I looked at him over my crust. ‘You don’t have a monopoly,’ I said softly.
‘Sorry? You’re eating and…’ Jay waved a hand at my face. ‘That bit wasn’t clear.’
‘You can’t speak for everyone’s grief. The way you feel about your sister, that’syourgrief. Lady Tanith has her own grief. OK, yes, it’s over the top and utterly bonkers from our perspective, especially knowing now that she’s grieving for someone who really disliked her, but she’s still entitled to it, Jay.’
This was as close as I could come to explaining what I felt about Lady Tanith. The pity I had come to feel, more and more, as I’d read those diaries. Oswald, who had been too – I wanted to say soft, but he’d been kind, really – tookindto sit Lady Tanith down and tell her that she could never be anything to him. Or perhaps – the thought had come at about two in the morning – perhaps he had been afraid to say anything? Perhaps he’d half thought that Lady Tanith might lose any reason she had and do something awful to Caroline just to have him free for her? And he’d needed Lady Tanith, whatever he thought of her. He’d loved his wife, but he couldn’t care for her, couldn’t be with her all the time. He’d had his writing.
And he’d been bloody stupid.
But Lady Tanith had rewritten history. Perhaps she’d always believed it. Maybe she’d taken Oswald’s attempts to shake her off as being his artistic temperament. His inability to declare love for her, as loyalty to his wife.
After all, she hadn’t had the best start in life. But pity only took you so far, before you wanted to shake her really hard and tell her how much she had interfered with Oswald’s life. He may even have written twice as many dreadful novels and even more execrable poetry, if she hadn’t been over his shoulder all the time, ‘helping’. So maybe it wasn’t medicating she needed, so much as a medal.
Jay took a deep breath which sounded more like a gasp. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Of course. You’re right. Everyone loses someone in their own way and everyone deals with it in their own way. I can’t speak for the entire world of loss.’ He came over and flopped beside me on a chair at the table. ‘Thank you,’ he said, softly.
‘What for? Telling you you aren’t the only person ever to lose a loved one?’
‘For stopping me from being so self-absorbed. Grief starts out dark and tortured and it ends up – well, like Lady Tanith.’ He shook his head. ‘Poor woman. All those years telling herself that he loved her.’
‘But it does rather beg the question,’ I said, pointing at the diaries on the table. ‘What do I do with those? Lady Tanith isn’t going to be happy until she gets them, but I can’t let her see them… or can I?’
He pulled a ferocious face. ‘Argh. That’s a tough one.’
‘It might be good for her. To see life as it really was, not as she’s constructed it to be. I mean, shemusthave known, surely, men don’t run away and hide when they see you coming if you’re their muse and the love of their life. Even Lady Tanith must know that, deep down.’
‘Or’ – Jay pushed my cup of tea towards me – ‘or it might send her over the edge and she kills everyone who might know and then takes to the woods, gibbering and bloodstained.’
