Past Caring (37 page)

“They’ve adapted very well.”

“So light and airy. And you admire the pointillistes?” I gestured at the Seurat.

“I admire their pleasure. Art is an antidote to history.”

“In what way?”

At that, she nearly smiled—for the first time. “Historians need to be reminded occasionally how much pleasure the past contains. To hear the music of Handel played on a harpsichord or

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see those bathers at Asnières as Seurat saw them is to realize how much of life history misses.”

“You may find the Memoir restores some of that life to history.”

“We shall see.”

Yes, I thought, we shall. I caught myself smiling for no reason as I walked along Silver Street back to the College that afternoon. I say no reason, though it was in fact that I felt my luck to be changing at last. As indeed it was.

I positioned myself early outside Princes’ next day, leaning against the railings with as much nonchalance as I could summon. A silver MG eased throatily to a halt ten minutes later and Eve invited me to hop in. The roof was down in the bright and breezy weather and her hair and the white scarf round her neck had been ruffled by the wind. She wore dark glasses, a navy blue guernsey and white slacks, as if for yachting. At once, a third side of her was shown to me. I’d seen the cool professional and the temptress in repose. Now here was the young woman of action and means.

We drove, very fast but with studied expertise, out to a village south of Cambridge. During the journey, I tried to draw Eve out about the Memoir, but she kept distracting me with questions about Princes’. So it was not until we were seated in a sunny corner of a pub garden, with a flat village green, some elm trees and a Norman church in front of us, sharing a platter of fine beef sandwiches, that I got anywhere on that score.

“What do you think then?” I asked, sipping at my beer.

“I think it’s a lovely day.”

“I meant the Memoir.”

“I know.” She smiled. “I’m sorry.” She needn’t have been—her smile was worth any tease. “The Memoir is a fascinating document. Particularly for me. I’ve tended to concentrate on female writers of the period. The book I’m writing is very much the Suffragette viewpoint. To that extent, Strafford is tangential to my theme. But the novelty and vitality of his chronicle make it a tangent worth following.”

“And what about my theory?”

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“It’s certainly a possibility.” At last, I thought: an open mind, willing to be convinced. Neither of us, of course, was ingenuous in our readiness to entertain the theory. I hoped Eve saw in it promising material for her book, for all that it clashed with her theme. For myself, the more such study was likely to throw us together, the better it suited me.

“Only a possibility?”

“At this stage, yes. But let’s put it to the test.”

“How?”

“What we need is corroboration. I’ve had access to a vast quantity of documentation on the period. We need to cull through it again, looking specifically for anything which might tell us how or why Strafford was disgraced. If we can establish a connexion with existing evidence, then there might really be something to build on.”

“You really think it’s worth a try?”

“I do.”

“Well, I’ll drink to that.” I chinked my glass against hers and thought at once, as I had before with Sellick, of Helen and our marriage. Sitting there with Eve on a spring afternoon, it seemed to me that, at long last, I was wholly glad to be rid of that part of my past, unreserved in my conviction that I was now doing something infinitely more worthwhile.

I’d never been meticulous enough to make a good researcher, but Eve soon showed she didn’t suffer from the same deficiency.

She produced—already typed—a list of autobiographies, diaries, memoirs, old magazines and newspapers, which were to form the basis of our enquiries. It meant me sifting through them all in the U.L. and other libraries on the lookout for any link—however slender—with Strafford and my theory. These were sources Eve had already examined but, clearly, our only hope of substantiation was to go through them again. So it was a task I was happy to undertake.

“I’ll look through all the material I have,” Eve said as we sped back towards Cambridge, “but pressure of work obliges me to leave most of it to you.”

“That’s as it should be.”

“Not really. I’m not completely disinterested, you know.”

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“You mean your book?”

“I’m committed to finishing it by Christmas. If your theory stands up, it could become something of a scoop . . . I’d have to talk to my publisher about a co-author.”

“An acknowledgement would do.” We laughed. “Or perhaps you could make an advance.”

“What sort of advance?” Her tone of voice played with the idea that my pun had been intended—as it had.

“How about your company for a little trip down the river on Sunday? That’s one occasion when I can’t visit libraries and it’s May Day. I could celebrate by trying to remember how to punt.”

I felt undermined by the pause which followed. “Of course, I realize you’re probably pretty busy at the weekends.”

We drew to a halt at the first set of lights into Cambridge.

“Leave me to worry about how busy I am, Martin. I’d enjoy a day on the river. Cambridge is a close little community, as you must know, never short of rumour. It’s refreshing to meet somebody who isn’t—any longer anyway—associated with it.”

I went back to my room at Princes’ with the Memoir and the reading list, feeling, it struck me, rather as Strafford must have felt about a Sunday appointment 68 years before, with Elizabeth in Hyde Park: a tremulous relish of playing with fire.

May 1st was a day of fragile spring brilliance, better than I could have hoped. I walked round to Darwin while the city was still cool and quiet, pausing by the Mill Pool to look upstream. The river was calm, empty and perfect for punting, a quaint activity with just the right romantic edge for my purposes that day.

Eve was dressed all in white—calf-length pleated skirt, a high-necked blouse with fluted sleeves. She donned dark glasses and a wide-brimmed straw hat and we walked round to Scudamore’s Yard, where I hired a punt for the day.

We set off slowly up the Granta, with Coe Fen on our left. I concentrated on giving a competent display of punting technique, while Eve reclined on a cushion and asked how my first day in the Library had gone.

“Fruitlessly.”

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“Give it time. Research isn’t a quick business.”

“That’s what Baxter said.”

“Is that Marcus Baxter?”

“Yes.” A pause while I hauled the pole out of a muddy reach.

“Used to be my Director of Studies.”

“A respected figure in the Faculty.”

“He spoke highly of you too.”

“Flattery indeed.”

“Baxter’s no flatterer.” I grinned ruefully. “Praise from him has to be earned. You’re a rising star, Eve. Beautiful, female history fellows are a rare commodity here. How did you manage it?”

She laughed. “Beauty I deny. Sex was an accident of birth. As for my career, being a woman is a handicap, undeniably. The fact that it shouldn’t be only drives me on.”

“So writing about the Suffragettes is a labour of love?”

“In a sense. More, perhaps, the paying of a debt to those who had more to struggle against than I. But an historian can’t afford to be starry-eyed. They had their faults and made mistakes.”

“Such as?”

“They too often failed to exploit their natural advantages.”

I ducked as we passed under Crusoe Bridge and pondered the point. “Does that mean you think they should have fluttered more eyelids than banners?”

Eve extended a finger at a passing mallard. “Well, we know one, don’t we, who swayed a minister of the Crown?”

“Can we believe it was for some sinister purpose?”

“Nothing is ever quite what it seems, Martin, as Strafford discovered. We all have ulterior motives, don’t we?”

“Do we?” I didn’t quite know what she meant.

“Well, I’m not only interested in how Strafford was brought down. I’m also concerned to make my name as a writer. And what about your mysterious sponsor?”

“No mystery. Leo Sellick’s just a wealthy man indulging a whim. Who are we to complain? Still, I’m prepared to volunteer my ulterior motive.”

“Which is?”

“To lure you out for trips like this.”

Eve smiled seraphically, settled back on her cushion and

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pulled the hat down over her eyes. “Wake me in Grantchester.

Punting that far should make you question your motives. And mind the decoys.”

I laughed, but Eve was right. My punting days were too far behind me for us to reach Byron’s Pool, which had been my objective. I tied up at an old landing stage on the banks of a field, with the church tower at Grantchester showing beyond some not too distant trees and persuaded Eve to walk through the lengthening grass to a gate which gave onto a track into the village. We reached The Red Lion shortly after noon and took lunch at a metal trellis table in the garden.

“How’s the intrepid punter?” Eve asked with a smile as I gulped my beer.

“Temporarily demotivated. It’s seven years since I last did that sort of thing.”

“Was that when you graduated?”

“Yes. I remember coming down here the morning after a May Ball. Mid-June it was: very hot.”

“And who was your companion on that occasion?”

“A leading question.”

“Forgive the historienne her curiosity.”

“That’s all right. My companion later became my wife, later still my ex-wife.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. I’m not.” And I wasn’t. But that was about the last wholly accurate remark I made as we drifted on to a discussion of Eve’s university teaching career and my schoolteaching experience. It was an inevitable but uncomfortable subject for me, even more so than my marriage, but it was easy—all too easy—to present my withdrawal from both as a reasoned reaction against boredom and indifference, almost, indeed, as a bold assertion of individual integrity. It was, in many respects, a prepared speech: camouflage I’d long prepared for a truth which could only do me harm in other’s eyes, not to mention my own.

“So you see,” I said, “there’s not much to show for those seven years since I was last here.”

“There’s more than you might think. I’m impressed by anyone abandoning a career—for the right reasons.”

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“I only had to do that because I’d entered it for the wrong ones. I’m sure that doesn’t apply in your case.”

“No. I don’t think it does.” She was firm on the point. “It might have done at one stage. When I graduated from Durham, I walked straight into a bursary to study for a doctorate at Berkeley in California. I never finished it, till now. The book is its final form. But I wasn’t ready for it then. A publisher in San Francisco persuaded me to become his personal assistant. When it became clear that he wanted something more personal than I was prepared to provide, I came home. Only later did I do an M.A. at Manchester, then persuade Darwin that I was the woman they wanted. Now they’ve given me some lecturing, things are going really well.”

I felt the same—things were going well. After lunch, we ambled back across the field towards the punt, lazily anticipating the more leisurely journey back. I pushed off from the bank and poled back towards Cambridge. The going was indeed easier downstream, but that wasn’t the reason life seemed sweet. The broad skylines of the Fens symbolized the fresh air that had blown into my life. More specifically, Eve Randall, her figure rousing in repose, drew me on with the languid promise of her gaze as it flicked up from the rippling water to meet my own.

We didn’t see each other after that until Wednesday afternoon, when I called at Darwin on my way back from the University Library to bring Eve up-to-date on my research. A bearded, sweat-shirted student was leaving as I went in and I found Eve dressed soberly for the supervision that had just taken place: mauve an-gora jumper over a heavy purple skirt, hair gathered in a bun—schoolma’amish, with a suppressed sensuality that made me want to unfasten her bun and kiss the pout off her lips as she said, in mock censure, “Deserting the Library before closing time, Mr.

Radford?”

I contented myself with a smirk. “Seeing double from too much small print. The newspapers seventy years ago used micro-scopic type, you know.”

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“I do know, Martin,” she said with a smile. “I think they had more to say than the tabloids of today.”

“Not about Edwin Strafford.”

“Another blank?”

“I’m afraid so.”

She made tea while I sat on the couch and gazed out through the window at the river, remembering with relish our outing three days before and wondering how I could arrange another.

Eve came back with the tea. “I’m glad you called,” she said, setting down the tray. “I’d have contacted you today anyway.”

“Oh yes? Thanks.” I took the cup from her hand.

“I’m going to London tomorrow. Coming back on Friday. I’ve got to see my publisher and I thought I’d take the opportunity to have another look through the Kendrick Archive.”

“The what?”

“Julia Lambourne—who crops up in the Memoir and was one of the Five Furies—died three years ago. Her married name was Kendrick. She bequeathed a large quantity of correspondence and miscellaneous documentation pertaining to the suffragist movement to Birkbeck College. It’s not yet been properly evaluated, though I had a look through it last year in connexion with my book. Now, I’d like to take a second look.”

I sat up abruptly, spilling some tea into my saucer. “Eve, you should have mentioned this before. Julia Lambourne was close to Elizabeth Latimer. Her brother tried to warn Strafford off when he visited the house in Putney at the time of the rift. Surely this could be just what we’re looking for?”