Past Caring (29 page)

“I like her too. I thought I might visit her.”

Helen came in then. “You should have had those sandals off by now,” she said, still annoyed, but with me not Laura.

Laura made another prod at the buckle, but her mind wasn’t on the job. “Martin’s going to see Nanny Couchman.”

Helen shot a glare at me, but kept talking to Laura. “Never mind about that now. Let’s see to those sandals.” She stooped and undid them for her. “Now, into the kitchen and I’ll make you some tea.” Laura scampered off down the hall. Helen was left with an opportunity for inquisition. “Is this true?” It was more an accusation than a question.

“I’m considering it. I told you so.”

“To ask about the Suffragettes?”

“That sort of thing.”

“I don’t believe you. There’s something else.”

“Why should there be?”

“I don’t know. But there must be.”

“If you say so.” I was tired of being conciliatory, but I shouldn’t have been—it was my best line.

“I don’t want you bothering my grandmother.”

“It’d be no bother.”

“I’ll be the judge of that. I don’t want you bothering any of my family. We agreed you wouldn’t. Remember?”

I remembered. But it was an agreement I couldn’t afford to honour. “What we agreed was that I could see Laura whenever I wanted. I haven’t abused that, have I?”

“No, but only because you don’t care about her.”

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“How would you know?”

“Because I know you.” This was getting messy—and out of hand. “Now listen”—and I did, because she could still command me, which was just one of the things I hated her for—“Leave Nan alone and the rest of my family, or I can make it impossible for you to see Laura. Do you want that?”

“Of course not.” But how could I avoid it? “This is getting us nowhere, Helen, and I must go.” It seemed the best thing to do.

“I’ll say goodbye to Laura and go now—if that’s all right.” I didn’t wait for her agreement.

It was, in all conscience, a hasty exit. Laura was as surprised to see me go as she had been to see me arrive. Helen had been painfully near the truth when she’d said I didn’t care. I did, of course, but not enough. I knew that I’d really only come to glean what I could of Lady Couchman. The rest was a pretence I couldn’t persist in. So I left, so abruptly that it can have left Helen in little doubt that she’d been right to suspect me.

A steely, filamentary rain was falling now. I followed the lanes in a broad curve round the foot of Castle Hill and climbed back into the town up cobbled Gold Hill, with its famous view of Cranborne Chase shrouded in cloud. I was eager to be away, but there was a long wait in the High Street for a bus to Gillingham station. A boy and a girl in school uniform stood at the stop, kissing and giggling. They both looked too young for it, but it was, for me, that afternoon, a chilling portent. I couldn’t turn away and I certainly couldn’t disapprove. The boy went off into a nearby shop at one point and I looked at the girl, leaning against the stop, russet hair tumbling over her raincoat collar, a haughty hint of beauty in her face, but chewing gum energetically and eagerly accepting the cigarettes the boy brought back. I was relieved when the bus came. They clattered to the rear while I sat at the front with my holdall full of secrets.

On the train to London, I considered my next move.

Strafford’s Elizabeth was alive and well and I now had her address in Sussex. That was the obvious place to go. But something made me hesitate. I didn’t feel quite ready. When the train stopped at Salisbury, I got out, on a whim, and walked down to the cathedral.

The rain had stopped and a watery sun was shining now on the 164

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old, mellow building. There was only one tea shop with a good view of the Green, an old-fashioned little place full of high-backed settles and dimpsy alcoves, knots of garrulous county town ladies tangled at small wooden tables overloaded with teapots, cakestands and white lace doilies. I was only just in time to be served and sat alone, sipping coffee by the window, the sun-splashed lines of the cathedral curved by the bullseye panes.

This had to be where Strafford and Elizabeth had stopped on their way down to Barrowteign all those years ago, when everything was going well, when they could debate Hardy’s poetry and smile at each other over the teacups. It was eerie to sit there nearly seventy years later, with so little changed—apparently.

But we’d changed—they and I—and not for the better. When I left the shop, I went and sat on a bench at the edge of the Green and watched the light fade on the noble cathedral. Then I walked slowly back to the station—but never got there. I wasn’t in the mood for a dark, solitary train ride. Sellick was paying well and I passed a pub just short of the station where the noise from the bar was cheery and welcoming. So I booked a room there for the night and spent the rest of the evening sampling the local beer. I drank too much of it—of course—but it didn’t prevent me from waking with a bright idea, and I was at the reference library as soon as it opened its doors to a warm, hazy day.

It took no particular skill to plump for the
Dictionary of
National Biography
. Sure enough, in the Supplement covering deaths between 1951 and 1960, I found him. Sellick had told me of finding the entry himself and that it had said little. He was right. It seemed to me that a former Home Secretary might have warranted something fuller. But no, the measured biographese was aimed at the surface and found its mark.

“STRAFFORD, EDWIN (1876–1951), politician, was born at Barrowteign in Devon 20 April 1876, the second son of George Strafford, colonel in the Indian Army. He was educated at Marlborough and Trinity College, Cambridge . . .”

It went on in the same vein. After Strafford’s own chronicle of his life, it was dull and skeletal.

“When Asquith became Prime Minister in 1908, he persuaded Herbert Gladstone to retire from the Home Office and ap-

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pointed Strafford in his stead, swift recognition indeed for the promising young M.P.” We know, we know. “Whether the speed of his rise went to his head or his onerous responsibilities proved too much for him must be a matter of conjecture”—conjecture I didn’t much like and which wouldn’t have pleased Strafford—

“since he remained but two years in the post before resigning shortly after the commencement of the Constitutional Conference of 1910, called in an attempt to resolve . . .” Yes, but what about that resignation? “No sure reason for Strafford’s departure was given at the time and none has emerged since. The commonest theory held is that he lost patience with the Conference as a means of settling the dispute between Lords and Commons and sought to panic Asquith into more desperate remedies. If he thought other ministers would follow his example, he was sadly wrong and if, as may be guessed, he made that familiar mistake of the overweening young, to suppose himself irreplaceable, he was promptly disabused of the notion. One so swiftly raised was as swiftly brought low. His fate resembled that of Lord Randolph Churchill in resigning the Exchequer in 1887. Both gestures were simply ignored and only the makers of them suffered as a result.

Like Churchill, Strafford drifted into a twilight world and became the despair of his friends and colleagues.” Where was the evidence for this? The writer disliked Strafford—that much was clear. “He left Parliament at the general election of December 1910 and lived thereafter mostly in Devon until the outbreak of the First World War, when he joined his regiment in France. His war career was without distinction.” A damning little sentence that stuck in my throat. “At its end, he was appointed H.M.

Consul to Madeira, a post which he held from 1919 until his retirement in 1946. He coped well when rebels exiled from mainland Portugal tried to seize the island in 1931, and earned thereby the thanks of MacDonald’s government. Otherwise, the obscurity and remoteness of his posting were such as to render him entirely forgotten in the public mind at home.” The writer seemed to take pleasure in emphasizing the point. “Strafford remained in Madeira after his retirement, although it was on a visit to his nephew at Barrowteign that he met his death, struck by a train on a level crossing in the early hours of 5 June 1951. He was buried 166

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in the churchyard of the nearby village of Dewford.” Nothing was made of the irony that Strafford’s brother had died in similar circumstances forty years before. It annoyed me. While I was struggling to solve the Strafford mystery, some hack had penned this dismissive obituary without knowing there even was a mystery. I braced myself for the summing-up.

“It was perhaps inevitable that some—or at any rate one—of the young men promoted by Asquith should turn out not to have the capacity for high office. That was Strafford’s deficiency and it was unfortunate for him that there were so many other able contemporaries—notably Lloyd George and Winston Churchill—with whom his rapid decline stood in such stark contrast.” The bibliography was virtually non-existent:
The Times
6 June 1951, private information, personal knowledge. For that read ignorance and aspersion. Who’d written this? Three initials—M.E.B.—protected the guilty party. I thumbed through the list of contributors to identify him.

M.E.B.: Marcus Everard Baxter. Double-take: I knew him.

Marcus Baxter was my Director of Studies at Cambridge, a drunk and a bore but also, in his day, a gifted historian, an acknowledged expert on twentieth-century British politics. His judgement mattered—more than mine would to anyone else.

Marcus Baxter cutting his historical teeth on a character assassination for the D.N.B. I could have done without. But, if the old soak was going to set himself up as judge and jury on a wronged man, I’d lead for the defence. At least it was someone to bounce ideas off in Cambridge and, if I could discredit his treatment of Strafford, so much the better.

Baxter’s lofty pronouncement gave me the fire—dampened in Shaftesbury—that I needed to find Elizabeth, the one surviving person who might know everything. After one night in London, I set off for Miston.

I liked what little I saw of Chichester, that demure little cathedral city that preens itself on the warm coastal plain of Sussex, but I could spare it no time now. Buses north from there across the South Downs were rare, so I took a taxi. A jowly, garrulous cabbie

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drove me up past Goodwood Racecourse, telling me—which I could have guessed—that most of his fares stopped there.

“I suppose so,” I said, vaguely, my mind flitting to the Goodwood of long ago, with an invitation being issued and accepted to spend a few weeks in Devon. I wondered if the old lady in Miston ever thought now of the young girl at Goodwood.

“Not a gambling man yourself, sir?”

“Not on horses, no.” But on other things maybe. Perhaps my journey was a gamble in itself.

“Which village did you say it was?”

“Miston. Do you know it?”

“I know where it is, right enough. Quiet little place just over the Downs. What’s the address?”

“Just drop me in the centre. I’ll find my way from there.” I didn’t want this man spraying gravel round a quiet Sussex drive-way. I wanted to arrive silently and in my own good time.

We topped the Downs in sunshine. They looked clean and green and peaceful, sheep with their lambs dotting the slopes.

Below us, a small wooden-spired church stood in a cluster of thatched roofs. As we came down the hillside, I spotted the sign: MISTON—PLEASE DRIVE CAREFULLY. We didn’t, of course, lurching to a halt by the war memorial in the centre of the village.

I paid the driver off and looked around me. The little post office–store on the other side of the road was closed for lunch.

Further along, there was a gentle hum from the pub—a solid, welcoming, four-square English pub, the sort I liked, full of simple rural pleasures, though not simple rural customers to judge by the pair in pinstripe suits who emerged as I watched and loaded themselves into a company car. Like most other English villages, Miston wasn’t self-sufficient anymore. It had been once, I thought, turning to look at the memorial behind me: a rough-hewn Celtic cross above a cairn-shaped stone bearing the names of the village’s young men who’d “laid down their lives in war that others might live in peace.” I wondered what they’d make of expense account businessmen at the bar of their Royal Oak, then forgot them. After all, a pub was a good place to seek directions.

They told me how to find Quarterleigh and, after a couple of 168

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pints, I made my way there down a narrow, musty lane past a terrace of timbered and tile-hung almshouses, with an arched and pillared gallery running the length of them in which hung heavy-scented flower baskets. Beyond the almshouses, the lane broadened in front of the church, an unpretentious flint structure behind yew hedges on the lower slope of the Downs. Doves were cooing in the rafters of the wooden spire and rabbits scattered from the tumbledown graveyard at the sound of my lifting the latch on the gate. It seemed a pity to disturb their peace, but the barmaid had been specific—“Quickest way is through the churchyard into Croxon’s Lane. Quarterleigh is the house beyond the Rectory.”

One path led to the door of the church. Another led across the graveyard to a kissing-gate in the hedge. I headed towards it, my eye wandering over the gravestones, some overgrown or askew, others newer and well-tended. It felt strange, but seemed right, to be approaching Elizabeth by this old, silent path. Then I stopped dead. Hard by the track there was a clean, white, marble tombstone. The inscription on the stone was clear and stark:

“Gerald Victor Couchman, Knight Bachelor, Colonel (Devonshire Regiment), died 26th September 1954, aged 78 years. Rest in Peace.” So, here was one of my quarry, at rest in a Sussex churchyard. But at peace? Not, perhaps, if he knew what I was stirring up in search of his past. There was space on the stone for another name, that of his widow, but it was blank. I pressed on through the gate.