Past Caring (39 page)

“But you said you’d not returned empty-handed either.”

“That’s true.”

“Then ladies first.”

“Isn’t it the woman’s right to choose? I choose to hear your news first.”

“All right.” I conceded with a smile. “But it’s not really my news. Baxter pointed me in the right direction.”

“Really?” She raised her eyebrows.

“Yes. The diaries of Charles Hobhouse. A
bon mot
from Lloyd George about Strafford’s resignation, with lots of implications.” I removed the sheet of paper from my pocket and passed it across the table. “Look at the entry for 17th October 1910.”

Eve pursed her lips and read through it, then sipped some wine. “What did Baxter make of it?” She was less obviously impressed than I’d hoped.

I sat back in my chair. “You know Baxter. He requires signed affidavits for any conclusions—except his own. Said it was still flimsy. But, taken in conjunction with the Memoir—which he hasn’t seen—doesn’t it reinforce the idea that Lloyd George was out to get Strafford?”

“No link with the Suffragettes, I see.”

“Not yet. But isn’t it a start?”

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“Oh yes.” She shot me a reassuring smile. “You’ve done splendidly, Martin. We could look on it as a breakthrough, except . . .”

“Except what?”

“Except for what I found at Birkbeck—in the Kendrick Archive. So many papers, documents, notes, letters—not properly catalogued yet. And there, amongst them, the answer. So simple, really—it shouldn’t be any surprise.”

Is this it? I thought. Do I get truth served, sweet and simple, as an extra course: bathos in the evening? Does the high priestess just roll me a secret, like a cigarette she doesn’t smoke? Can she pass me Strafford on a serviette? If she can work the oracle, what’s to be my votive offering?

All those thoughts, in the second between sentences. But all I said was “What is it?”

“Elizabeth Latimer couldn’t marry Strafford because he was already married.”

“He was what?” I felt as if the restaurant chair was about to flip me, Sweeney Todd–like, into the world of turned tables and discarded masks.

“Married. Amongst the Kendrick papers, I found a marriage certificate: Strafford’s, dating from his years in South Africa. He married—and evidently deserted—a Dutch girl there.”

“Are you certain?”

“Only that the certificate is there—or rather, here.” She reached into her bag and brought out a buff envelope, which she placed on the table between us. I fumbled at the flap, pulled out the folded, yellowed, crinkled sheet within and held it to read in the candlelight.

No mistake. The name was there, recorded for posterity in some rough Boer registrar’s jagged hand. Edwin George Strafford, aged 24, and Caroline Amelia van der Merwe, aged 21, joined in matrimony at Port Edward, Natal, on 8th September 1900.

“I don’t know what to say.”

“Do you believe it?”

“Do you?”

“It looks genuine, Martin. It feels genuine. It seems awfully 230

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like the truth. I feel sorry that my suspicions have been confirmed.”

“You suspected this?”

“Not exactly. Something like it. Something disappointingly conclusive. I’m afraid it was always on the cards that Strafford would turn out to have discredited himself.”

“But, Eve, the Memoir. This goes against everything he wrote in that.”

“True. But I fear it’s not unprecedented for people—especially famous people—to present their past as they would wish it to have been. There’s no reason to doubt the veracity of the Memoir—as far as it goes. It’s simply that Strafford edited out the one ugly truth he couldn’t face.”

“But how could he? How could it remain hidden in the circumstances?”

“I was thinking about that on the train. This document was in Julia Lambourne’s possession. It was she and her brother who were on the scene in Putney to protect Elizabeth at the time of the split, right? Therefore it’s fair to conclude that Julia uncovered this information and showed it to Elizabeth to save her from a bigamous marriage. She’d presumably decided to check Strafford’s credentials when she first realized how close he was to her friend. The enormity of her discovery may have made her hesitate to reveal it, but, when she learned of Elizabeth’s seduction, she could no longer hold it back. As for not making it public, how could they, when to disgrace Strafford was also to ruin Elizabeth? She would have had to admit to adultery, then a considerable social stigma. And what good would it have done the Suffragettes for the public to know that one of their brave, responsible young ladies claiming the right to vote was happy to take a roll in the hay with a Cabinet minister? No, everyone was better off burying the truth—including Strafford.”

The waiter came to remove our plates. I had no stomach for dessert. We ordered coffee. “It still doesn’t make sense. Why did Strafford pour out his soul in that Memoir if it was built on a lie?”

“It wasn’t. An impetuous, regrettable marriage doesn’t make Strafford a bad man. It doesn’t mean he didn’t love Elizabeth, or mourn their separation as much as he claimed. It doesn’t even

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mean that your own theory is invalid. If Lloyd George really did want to get rid of him and somehow found out why Elizabeth had broken off their engagement, then the information might certainly have persuaded Asquith that Strafford should be decently ostracized.”

“But Hobhouse’s quote makes it sound as if Strafford’s removal was so much more contrived.”

“Useful, perhaps, as a threat to other potential opponents of Lloyd George. To anyone who didn’t know better, Strafford’s fall was exemplary—
pour encourager les autres
.”

“I don’t know, Eve. I thought I knew Strafford, thought I knew his mind. Now, it seems, I must think again.”

Eve reached across the table and touched my hand. “Then take time to think again.” I opened my hand and grasped hers.

“Then we’ll decide what to do—for the best.” When we left the restaurant, we walked down through King’s College, past the dark, looming outline of the Chapel, to the river, and talked of Strafford again.

“I have an idea what we should do about this discovery, Martin,” Eve said, “but it’s important you should decide. Do you want to drop it—or carry on?”

“How can we carry on?”

“That’s up to you.”

“And you.”

“Let’s say both of us.”

“All right. Let’s say that.”

“Last Sunday was good.”

“Yes, it was.”

“Then let’s do something similar this Sunday. I’ll drive you somewhere—we could picnic if the weather’s fine.”

“I’d like that.”

“Well, regard that as your deadline. Tell me then what you feel we ought to do. Reveal the truth about Strafford after seventy years—or leave it buried?”

We walked across the bridge towards Queens’ Road, our hands joined now, saying nothing but pledging silently to give Strafford what he’d asked for: justice, suddenly a less pretty thing than I’d once thought.

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Eve had given me, had given Strafford, a day’s grace. It was a dull, wet day in Cambridge: slate grey clouds scudded across the flat landscape. There was only one thing I could do to help me make up my mind, so I did it: immured in that cheerless guest room of Princes’ Hall, I read the Memoir through again, from start to finish, only this time acutely, unsympathetically, like an interrogator looking for inconsistencies, inaccuracies, giveaways.

You couldn’t really say I found any. Eve had been quite right.

As far as it went, the Memoir left no room for doubt. But the certificate, flourished without warning from the past of a distant country, focused my attention on its fateful date: September 1900.

“Passing through Capetown in early September, I met Couch . . . and mentioned I would have to disappoint the van der Merwes . . . Couch volunteered to take my place in Durban . . . So it was that I arrived home in England with but a week in which to conduct my election campaign.”

The election that year had been held on October 4. That would place Strafford’s return to England “but a week” before around September 27. A sea voyage from South Africa? Say two weeks. So he’d have left Capetown around September 13. Damn: there was time enough for him to have married Miss van der Merwe in Port Edward on September 8.

“Couch volunteered to take my place in Durban.” Not Port Edward. Did he really? Presumably not. Then why say it? Unless Strafford was laying an alibi, reassuring himself that, no, he didn’t really commit the van der Merwe madness, that foolish last fling in South Africa never happened at all, couldn’t for that reason touch him so long after, so far away. Yet it did happen. I’d seen his upright, fluent, English signature on the certificate and there it was again, at the end of the Memoir, little changed by the intervening fifty years.

I paced the tiny room, glowered at the rain-lashed wall of Pembroke College across the alley from my window, and wondered: who was she, Strafford? Just some poor, pretty maid you wanted to forget? Is that what you thought? That Elizabeth shouldn’t be denied you just because of a senseless soldier’s lapse?

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“That was in another country, and besides the wench is dead”?

Only she wasn’t, was she?

Later, I began to feel anger rising against Strafford. I felt cheated, deceived by him, a little as Elizabeth must have felt. In that mood, I went out to drink away the evening, roamed the bars and pubs whetting my resentment with alcohol. The Couchmans’

concern to keep me away from Elizabeth in her dotage, to dissuade me from reopening an old wound, suddenly made sense.

More than that, it seemed a decent thing for them to do.

That, in itself, gave me pause for thought. I didn’t know Elizabeth, but I knew her son and her granddaughter—all too well. Decency was a quality they identified with what was neat and seemly. And, when drunk, I naturally thought of Ambrose, and the mysterious, threatening visitors to Lodge Cottage the spring of Strafford’s last journey home. Who would fear an old, disgraced man? Nobody. That answer wouldn’t go away and nor would the growing conviction that there was something wrong with the story—or this version of it, presented to me by somebody whose objectivity I knew to be as questionable as my own.

What about that, after all? The one revelation that hadn’t been made the night before.

I raced back to Princes’ and read the South African sequence in the Memoir over again. “Couch volunteered to take my place in Durban.” Couch the coward, cheat and . . . what else? Did Couch go to Durban after all? Perhaps they both went to Port Edward.

Who were the witnesses to the wedding? I’d forgotten to look, would have to check. But, if Couchman knew of it, perhaps even connived at it, was it he who betrayed Strafford, alerted Julia Lambourne, maybe Lloyd George as well, then casually helped himself to a distraught Elizabeth? That would explain his fear of Strafford, why he tried to buy him off, why, perhaps, he finally had him killed off. And Henry? Could I detect his podgy hand in a nasty little murder of a helpless old man?

I’d arranged to meet Eve on the Fen Causeway at noon. Neutral ground was fitting, I suppose, for an occasion that might well 234

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decide whether we joined forces or went our separate ways. I made my way to the rendezvous across Coe Fen, breathing deeply and trying to blow away a thick head. Certainly, Saturday’s rain had left Cambridge clean and fresh. The only haze left was in my mind, surrounding Eve. I couldn’t forget my dream of her—the perfect, nubile temptress. Yet, in the waking world, she was sharp-brained, giving just enough to make me want more but without dispelling one atom of her mystery.

There was another rub: the Couchman connexion. A marriage certificate, conjured like a rabbit from a hat: so convenient, so unanswerable. Alone and clear-headed in a rational moment, I questioned that. If Eve was simply doing the Couchmans’ bidding, what better than to produce a piece of paper, like a blank cheque, to buy my silence?

If that was so, I realized, Eve would lead me to a policy of inaction. Let the dead bury the dead, let Strafford and his friend or foe Couchman, with all their secrets and deceits, rest in peace. It wasn’t the historian’s line though, certainly not that of the thrusting young academic out to make a name for herself. So which line would she choose and which would I follow?

As soon as I saw the low, sleek shape of the silver MG heading my way along the Fen Causeway, I knew it didn’t really matter which line she chose. Whichever it was, I was bound, in all my knowing weakness, to follow.

We drove out along the Colchester road to the Gog Magog Hills and walked around the wooded slopes of the Wandlebury earthworks until we found a sunny grass slope to spread the car blanket against the damp of Saturday’s rain.

Eve had brought cold chicken, crisp salad and chilled white wine to lull me into well-being. If that wasn’t enough, there was the distant view of a village cricket match and, of course, Eve by my side. She was dressed in the white jeans and blue peasant-style blouse she’d worn the first time I’d visited her at Darwin, ten days before. Was it really only ten days? It seemed longer to me, as we sat together on the hillside, as if she’d been around me—or in my head—for as long as I could or cared to remember.

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“Have you come to any conclusions, Martin?” she said.

“Let’s look at it this way.” I was thinking aloud now, tailoring my conclusions to fit Eve’s expectations. The full range of my reactions weren’t for her consumption. “I could tell Sellick that Strafford compromised himself by pretending never to have been married and that that alone explains his fall from high office. But I’m far from sure it would satisfy him.”