Past Caring (35 page)

I chose the hour before dinner to call on his room—a spacious, three-windowed apartment over an arch to the left of the chapel—and was in luck. When I knocked, his hoarse, bellowed

“Come” was at once familiar.

It was always said of Baxter that he didn’t so much enter a room as invade it. When it was his own, he didn’t inhabit it so much as infest it. There was about him a strange combination of the seedy and the glamorous, the louche and the honourable. An aroma distinctive of his proud perversity—or was it an odour?—hung around the room and transported me instantly back to my many previous visits, all of them more deferential than this one.

There was still a mix of old books, fine whisky, stale onions and cheap cigarettes in the air, still the look of an old bull remembering spring about Baxter as he glared up at his visitor. He was seated on a utility chair, rasping into a pocket dictating machine, while the velvet-upholstered
chaise-longue
by the window, where he could have had a good view of the court, was piled instead 202

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with books and papers, and the wooden swivel chair behind the crowded desk stood empty. The room was given over completely to books and papers, the only decoration being a small bust of Cromwell on a pedestal in one corner and a drinks cabinet entirely stocked with malt whisky in another. Unless, that is, you counted Baxter himself—a short, stocky, weatherbeaten figure with the look of a prizefighter about him, blue towelling bathrobe wrapped over his day clothes, high tar cigarette in the corner of his mouth, grey and balding but still with that widow’s peak that lent a devilish air to the crumpled face.

“Who’s that?” he barked, peering through the fug of his own creation.

“Martin Radford—remember?”

Baxter may have meant to smile, but the effort of keeping his cigarette where it was converted the expression into a crooked leer. “Naturally, my boy. Class of ’67.” His memory was intact, as I might have known. “What stone have you crawled out from under?”

“Teaching, you might say.”

“Best thing—for you and it. Have a drink.” As ever, he made no move to fetch one for me, so I poured some myself.

“What’s your excuse for creeping back here? You know I don’t encourage it.”

“Why is that?” I asked, topping up his own drink and trying not to be nettled.

“Because, my boy, the ones who come back to tell me how successful they’ve been tend to be those I thought the least of.”

He consented to remove the cigarette from his mouth, but only to swallow some whisky.

“That’s all right then.” I cleared a space on the
chaise longue
and settled in it. “I’ve no successes to tell you about.”

“Then I’ll agree not to say what I thought of you.”

“What about you? How are the books going?”

“I’ve got a biography of Bonar Law coming along.”

Time for a dig of my own. “Wasn’t he rather a dull dog?”

“That’s the whole point. I don’t want gossip column stuff getting in the way of politics. Did he drink? Did he go with

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women—or young boys? Who cares? Did he create an Irish problem to dish the Liberals?—that’s more like it.”

“I’m doing a little bit of historical research myself at the moment.”

He snorted into his whisky. “Better late than never.”

“That’s why I dropped by. Noticed from the records that you’d been there before me.”

“Where?” Baxter made it sound as if I were insulting him.

“Edwin Strafford. Home Secretary under Asquith. You wrote his D.N.B. entry.”

Baxter grinned. “Radford, this must be the first time you’ve read anything I’ve written. I trust you were impressed.”

I ignored the sarcasm and threw in some of my own. “I found the length manageable but the conclusions questionable.” It could’ve been him commenting on an essay of mine.

“Ho, ho. Strong words indeed. As always, Radford, I must ask you: where’s your evidence?”

“It’s more a question of where’s yours? Do you remember how you explained Strafford’s sudden resignation from the Home Office in 1910?”

Baxter flapped his hand at an imaginary fly. “Of course I do.

Strafford was just a busted flush. Wanted to be a politician with clean hands. When he found he couldn’t be, he tried to pressurize Asquith into calling an election and scrapping the Constitutional Conference. I think he regarded compromise as sordid. Too much of a gentleman to be involved in that. Too big a fool to see that his resignation was pointless. No power base, you see—no political nous.”

“But how do you know that’s why he resigned?”

“Why else? It fits the picture: an empty gesture by an irrelevant dilettante.”

“It sounds like pure prejudice to me.”

“Then what do you think?”

“I’ve got hard evidence that he resigned in order to marry a Suffragette.”

Baxter threw up his hands and guffawed. “And Bonar Law was Jack the Ripper. Thank God you quit teaching, Radford.”

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I tried to stay cool. “I think you’ll find my evidence a good deal more convincing than yours.”

“I doubt it. What’ve you got?”

“A memoir left by Strafford—newly discovered among his papers in Madeira.”

A primary historical source was pure gold to Baxter, so, for all his sneering, a prospector’s glint came into his eye. “Could be interesting. But don’t make the old mistake of believing what a politician says about himself.”

“In this case I do. It shows that Strafford tried to withdraw his resignation immediately after submitting it but wasn’t allowed to—something conveniently overlooked in your D.N.B.

piece.”

“I’d heard that, but it only confirms what I think of him.

Lost his nerve as soon as he realized how weak his position was.

Asquith would hardly have wanted him back after that. If your Suffragette nonsense was correct, why did his ardour cool so quickly?”

“It didn’t: he was thrown over.”

“Then why didn’t Asquith take him back?”

“Exactly what I’m trying to find out. I believe one or more of his Cabinet colleagues conspired to ruin his reputation.”

“Who—and why?”

“Lloyd George seems favourite. He tried to entice Strafford into secret negotiations with Balfour to form a coalition and oust Asquith.”

“When?”

“June 1910—immediately before his resignation.”

“Then your chronology’s out. Lloyd George
did
discuss the possibility of a coalition with Balfour—but not until the autumn of that year.”

“Then either Lloyd George was lying when he told Strafford about it or we simply don’t realize how early he started exploring the idea.”

“Or Strafford’s led you up the garden path.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, since you’re here at this time, do you want to be led into Hall? I’m going across.” He rose, flung his bathrobe over the

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back of a chair, plucked a stained and threadbare gown from the back of the door and struggled into it. I agreed readily enough and followed him out onto the court, where evening sun was shining on the cobbles—wet from an afternoon shower—and gowned figures were beginning to trickle in to the summoning dinner bell.

Then came the first sign that Baxter was thinking about what I’d said to him. “Why should Lloyd George need to ruin Strafford,” he pondered, almost to himself, “just because he refused to participate in negotiations with Balfour?”

“Because Strafford then knew enough to discredit Lloyd George in the party’s eyes and scupper the negotiations before they’d even started. It’s my belief Lloyd George feared Strafford’s youth and ability enough to need either his complicity—or his head.”

Baxter stopped in his tracks and pursed his lips against his finger. “Your version has all the appeal of a skimpy garment on a beautiful woman, Radford—eye-catching, but not much use in bad weather. First, verify your source—let the U.L. take a look at it. Second, spend a few months with all the other contemporary material. Third, assemble your case. Then come back.”

“I don’t have time for all that.”

“Then you don’t have time for history.”

I bit my lip and we went on into dinner. Baxter was greeted jocularly at high table; he introduced me cursorily and inaudibly.

In the seat opposite us, an etiolated figure wrapped in the folds of an oversized gown measured his porcelain profile against the candlelight and raised one hand feyly in welcome. “Marcus,” he said, in a whine forgivable only for its vintage, “that you are come once more amongst us is unexpected justification for my risking again the perils of the chef ’s rabbit pie.”

“Do cut the crap, Stephen,” Baxter retorted. “Radford, meet Stephen Lamzed, our foremost art historian. Not here in your day.

We poached him from King’s.”

“Pleased to meet you.” I tried to sound non-committal.

“Enchanted.” Somehow, Lamzed contrived to look it. His face, framed by long silver hair, was a mosaic of wrinkles, but I could have taken them for the cracked oil of an Old Master till 206

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the moment he wet his lips with the long, thin tongue of a lizard catching insects in the desert. “If you will permit me to say so, Marcus, it is too long since you last brought glad company to our table. To what do we owe the pleasure?”

Baxter smiled slyly. “Radford’s investigating a Suffragette romance.”

Lamzed winced. “What say you, young Radford?”

“You could put it that way. I’m researching an episode of Edwardian history that touches on the Suffragettes.”

Lamzed began checking the cleanliness of his cutlery. “I confess that the study of women being forcibly fed and—which is worse—shouting at men holds no attractions for me, but it is much in vogue of late. Is not the history faculty a hotbed of feminist causes, Marcus?”

Baxter raised his eyebrows above nearly closed eyelids.

“Hardly that.”

“But am I not daily regaled with tales of the dark lady of Darwin? Is not the siren of the Sidgwick site the talk of every common room in Cambridge? And is she not a proponent of just such study?”

“Who do you mean?” I asked.

Baxter wrenched a bread roll in half. “He means there’s a few lecturers easier on the eye than me and one in particular who gets a good audience simply by being female and under fifty.”

Lamzed’s wrinkles organized themselves into a grin. “Marcus, you underestimate yourself. But it is certainly the case that Miss Randall enjoys a following which, even if less academically pure than your own, is nonetheless a shade larger and conspicuously more enthusiastic.” Baxter returned the grin through clenched teeth and swayed out of the way of a bowl of soup. I waited for my own to arrive before pressing for details.

“Miss Eve Randall,” Baxter explained, siphoning soup noisily from his spoon between phrases, “is a research fellow at Darwin.

She gave a course of lectures last Michaelmas term on Edwardian protest movements. Well-received, I’m told.”

“You didn’t hear any?”

“They clashed with some of my own on imperialism.

Stephen could no doubt give you the respective audience ratings.”

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Lamzed bowed in acknowledgement. “Anyway, she’s giving six more this term.”

“Weight of popular demand,” Lamzed breathed over the table.

“Edited highlights,” Baxter continued, “for the benefit of those too starstruck to concentrate last time.”

“Would it be worth my going along to one?”

Baxter let his spoon fall with a clatter into the now empty bowl and began to pick his teeth. “Why not? If you really want to work up a Suffragette angle to Strafford, you could bounce the idea off Miss Randall. I don’t think she’ll thank you for some hearts and flowers theory, though. She sees the Suffragettes as sexless Amazons.”

Lamzed peered suspiciously at a solitary asparagus tip that he’d fished from his soup. “Wednesdays at ten,” he intoned.

“Queue early to avoid disappointment.” I decided to do just that.

Which was, though even I could be forgiven for not realizing it, another mistake. While Lamzed simpered on about the declining art of male lecturing—and Baxter cracked his teeth on rabbit bones—I quickened my pace down the steepening slope.

The Sidgwick site at ten the following morning—a cool, nonde-script sort of day, with a scattering of distracted students around the stark, grey blockhouses of the arts faculty. It had been a new development when I’d first been a student there—a triumph of soulless sixties architecture—but was now looking older than its years: concrete stained, façades peeling, extractor fans straining. I sat outside the coffee bar watching the changeover between nine o’clock and ten o’clock lectures, then filed in at the back of a croc-odile of students for the one we’d all been waiting for.

I sat at the back of the room and looked around, first self-consciously, then curiously, at the students, all busy comparing their reactions to last week’s lecture and snapping open files with excessive enthusiasm. They looked younger and more serious than I’d expected: so many pimply youths and bluestockings. But perhaps that was just incipient middle age.

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that fell on the room a few moments later. A tall, elegant figure entered by a side door and walked briskly, but without hurrying, to the lectern: Eve Randall, a cool, grave beauty in a lemon dress beneath an academic gown, standing serene yet unsmiling at the head of the room. Her entrance was like a window opening in a stuffy room, but there was a keen edge to the breeze it let in. Her features had a fine distinction that made you catch your breath and the dark, lustrous hair curled on her shoulders with an alluring bounce, but the flashing eyes and slightly raised jaw told you the cat had claws. Not that there was any need for her to show them—the audience was in her power.