Past Caring (43 page)

I stood my ground and played the only trump I held. “I’m not alone in suppressing the truth. You never told me you were working for the Couchmans.”

Eve’s contempt was verging now on boredom. “This isn’t a game, Martin. Just try to understand that what I’ve learned about you makes it impossible—intolerable—for me to associate with you. Please leave now—and don’t come back.”

“One question. How did you find out?”

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“A well-wisher told me your seamy little secret, and I’m grateful to them.” She walked slowly over to the telephone on the bookcase. “If you don’t go now, I’ll have you removed.”

I stared at her incredulously. I realized that the shock to her of the truth about me must be great. I’d learned to live with it because I’d had to—why should she? I’d lied, yes, and worse, but did I really deserve this clinical dismissal? Every gesture of Eve’s, every look, suggested that she believed I did, that, if I remained, she might actually enjoy my being turned out by porters, because degraded men don’t deserve dignity.

If I’d been Strafford, I remember thinking, I might have stayed, argued and fought it out. But he’d had the strength of not knowing his crime, whereas I was in no doubt. From the truth, as much as Eve’s coolly threatening tone, I retreated headlong down the stairs.

Where do you go in flight from yourself ? I’d asked that before, several times since 1973, perhaps, subconsciously, even before. In the wake of exposure, publicity and disgrace, I’d even contemplated suicide. But if I’d had enough strength for that, I’d never have been weak enough to fall for Jane in the first place.

Black Friday in Cambridge. I wandered along Silver Street in a daze, not knowing what to do or where to go. I turned off and headed south across Sheep’s Green, alongside the Granta, where, thirteen days before, I’d punted with Eve, where we’d smiled and flirted on the edges of intimacy, lied and lazed our way towards today’s bitter parting.

Isat up all that night staring out of the window at the tangible nothing of night, neither wanting nor daring—from a fear of dreaming—to sleep. There was something else, I knew, offering none of the ecstasy I’d hoped for with Eve, none of the respectability I’d long ago forfeited, but at least a purpose, a cause, a scrap of honour. It was Strafford. His mystery had fallen to me, and if there was anything left of Martin Radford worth calling a man, this at least I could try to measure up to. What I’d been incapable of doing, Eve had done for me: she’d chosen what I should do.

Next morning, on the London train, I started thinking about something more prosaic but nonetheless irksome. Who’d told Eve about my past? Who’d been the “well-wisher” she was grateful to? And why tell her? Who stood to gain by it?

A jealous lover I ruled out. There’d been no sign of one and, even if there had been, what would he know about me? Few people remembered a nine days’ wonder four years later.

No, the answer was clear. It had to be the only person I’d told directly about my plans for and with Eve: Alec, my loyal, trusted friend. He’d materialized without warning, questioned me, could have guessed what little I didn’t tell him and he alone knew all about Axborough in 1973 because I’d told him at the time and again since, in drunken confessionals when I’d needed to explain to somebody, as well as myself, what it had all meant. Who else would have known where to lay hands on the chapter and verse of 258

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my disgrace as well as where to find the one person who would, four years on, be as shocked by it as if it had happened yesterday?

But why? It was the only answer which made sense and yet it made no sense. I felt entitled to know Alec and I felt sure I did. It wasn’t his style, this mean, covert betrayal. And he’d so recently shown me his customary generosity by fixing the job with Sellick.

The train stopped at Bishop’s Stortford, but my mind accelerated through another layer of deception: the job with Sellick. My talk with Alec in the pub in Clerkenwell had threatened the basis of that job quite specifically. It had implied I was about to ditch Sellick and use the Memoir for my own purposes, notably to get closer to Eve. Never mind that I’d had second thoughts later. That had been the intention Alec had wheedled out of me. I remembered our drink-loosened chat:

“I don’t think that’s the sort of discovery Leo’s hoping for.”

“Neither do I . . . I’d appreciate your keeping quiet about it.”

And Alec had said he would, as, earlier, he’d spoken of his dis-satisfaction with being Sellick’s errand boy and later had said:

“Don’t worry about me, Martin. I’ve no axe to grind.”

But what if he had? What if all that chafing at well-paid servitude to Sellick had just been to lull me into frank disclosure?

What if he’d even then been running an errand for Sellick, to check on my progress, and had known his paymaster wouldn’t like what he’d heard? What if he’d reported back and been told that my dalliance with Eve must be stopped, that I must be put back on the straight and narrow? If so, Alec had had the means to do it, painfully but effectively.

As soon as we reached London, I dashed to a phone and rang Alec’s hotel.

“Mr. Fowler booked out yesterday morning, sir . . . No, no forwarding address . . . I believe he said he was leaving the country.”

Yes, he would have done. Scuttled back to Madeira now he’d done his job. God, Alec, I thought, if you’ve really done this to me . . . then you’re no better than I am. What was the reason?

What was the bribe? What price did you hold out for?

It was a long time coming. I hadn’t felt it when they’d denounced me in Axborough, hadn’t been able to feel it on behalf of Strafford. But I felt it now, stirring and seething within me:

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anger—a rising fury at the Couchmans and all they’d done and all they represented: a falsified morality that said the likes of Strafford and me weren’t permitted to succeed, weren’t allowed to be happy. Well, Strafford and I could prove them wrong. It was time to put the record straight. I had to see Elizabeth, the unheard witness, before Eve could get to her or Henry pack her off again. She’d lived too long to avoid a last encounter with her past.

It was a relief to find that Jerry had gone away for the weekend and that I could be alone in the house. I felt bone weary and decided to stay overnight, even thought—and smiled at the thought—of writing another report for Sellick. But there’d be no report. I wasn’t doing this for Sellick anymore.

It was odd to think that I was, already, retracing my steps, yet in another way only just beginning, as if all before had been a dry run and this time the guns were loaded. Victoria, Chichester and a taxi ride to Miston by night. A room at The Royal Oak to lay up in, feeling furtive and resenting having to, feeling nervous about the morrow and knowing why. I’d waited a long time—Strafford far longer—for a word with this stubbornly living lady, the only one left with a foot in both camps, an existence shared between the real, spare presence of a room at a village inn—where the floorboards rumbled with the laughter of locals drinking after time—and the leather-bound, scarcely credible reality of a remote, remembered world. Another vigil, another dawn—a deed I couldn’t dodge.

I exerted myself to wait until a reasonable hour. Even then, it was before nine o’clock when I left The Royal Oak on a ludicrously sweet, bird-chirruping, bright-as-paint spring morning. A GPO

van was parked by the post office down the road and, on the other side, a butcher in a striped apron was arranging chops in his window. Old ladies were pottering through the village dressed for winter, carrying wicker shopping baskets and trailing scottie dogs on leads.

The flowers in the garden were a little more luxuriant, 260

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otherwise Quarterleigh was as it had been a month before: the white gates, the forsythia, the gravel drive and the pink-washed house, recumbent in its fold of the Sussex Downs, with honeysuckle round its door.

It was not Elizabeth who answered the door. But it wasn’t Henry either. Instead, a cheery, red-cheeked dumpling of a woman in a flowered housecoat, smiling out of habit even though it was suspiciously early and she didn’t know me.

“Is Lady Couchman at home?”

“Ar, she is, but she’s ’avin’ breakfast. It’s a mite early to be callin’ on folks.”

“You’re right. I’m sorry. But, if she could spare me a moment, I’d be most grateful.”

“I’ll go an’ ask.” She lumbered off down the hall, then stopped and turned round. “What shall I say y’name is?”

“Martin Radford. She may remember me.” I hoped not, but pretence was pointless.

The housecoated lady returned a moment later. “Mrs.

Couchman”—there was no ladyship here, it seemed—“says you can come in, if you’re ’appy to take us as you find us.”

“Of course.” I followed her along the low-ceilinged passage, then turned behind her into a room with two windows looking out onto the garden, so that the occupant could have seen me coming.

In a chair on the far side of a dark gate-leg table was Elizabeth. I knew her at once, not so much from our one brief meeting at my wedding seven years before—though she’d changed little since—as from all the other, better, vicarious ways I’d made her acquaintance.

She was eighty-eight years old, but looked no more than seventy of them in her starched blouse and powdered dignity. The hair was shorter, of course, snowy white and simply cut, the face lined with a filigree of faded beauty turned to fragile charm, the mouth had lost its assertiveness and gained a winning humility.

But the way she held her head as I walked in, the flash of her dark, glinting, unchanged eyes, were still as they were, for all the years, in that photograph on Madeira. If I’d been Strafford, walking in from a banished past, I’d still have loved her—for her

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poised serenity, her look of reconciled enfeeblement, her embodiment of so many memories.

“Martin,” she said. “How very nice to see you again.”

I was taken aback by this kindly, regal greeting. “Lady Couchman . . . I’m surprised you remember me.”

“Of course I do, my dear. We old ladies have little to do but remember. Would you care for some tea—or toast? Have you come far?” This can’t be, I thought. You can’t just welcome me like a favourite nephew. But she could and did. “Dora, could you possibly bring some hot water for the tea?” Dora waddled out. A black and white cat glared at me and made way reluctantly for me to sit down.

“No toast for me,” I said. “I’ve just had breakfast at The Royal Oak.”

“Really? It’s comfortable there, I believe. What brings you to these remote parts, my dear?”

“You do.”

“I’m flattered that a young man should want to look out this old stick.”

“I came to see you a month ago, but you were away. Your son was here.”

“Strange. He’s never mentioned it.”

“He wouldn’t. We’ve not been on good terms since Helen and I parted.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“In fact, I didn’t think I was on good terms with any of your family.”

“Well, that just shows you how wrong you can be, young man.” Dora rattled in with the hot water and poured some into the pot, then pottered out humming to herself. “Dora is such a dear. I don’t know what I’d do without her.”

“Does she live here?”

“Oh no. She comes in mornings and afternoons for a couple of hours to attend to those things I’m getting too old for.”

“You don’t look too old for much.”

She smiled. “Martin, if I were fifty years younger, I’d think you were trying to turn my head.”

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“I am, in a way. Or rather, turn your mind, back a little more than fifty years.”

“Goodness—so far?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“You needn’t be. Reminiscence is one of the few things left to me.”

“The past isn’t always pleasant to recall. Look at my own.”

“My dear, I may be old, but I’m not taken in by everything people tell me. You had your problems, I believe, as did Helen, and naturally I’m sorry for her, because she’s my granddaughter.

But you mustn’t judge me by my son’s attitude. Like his father, Henry is good-hearted, but inclined to be hasty. I try to judge people only by what I personally know of them.”

Sensing that, if I waited much longer, I wouldn’t be able to say anything to this dear old lady, I blurted it out. “Is that how you judged Edwin Strafford?”

She looked at me as if she’d seen a ghost. Maybe she had.

“Edwin? What do you know of Edwin?”

“More than you, I think. I know why you broke your engagement with him, which he never did. I know how he frittered away his life after you rejected him. I think I know what you meant to him, and what losing you meant to him.”

She sat back in her chair. “Martin, you alarm me. I’m not used to shocks like this.”

“I know. I’m sorry.” I rose and went to her side. “Are you all right?”

“Yes, yes. I think so. But, please, what do you mean?”

“Would you like to sit in an armchair?”

“I think perhaps I should.” I helped her up. “It’s all right. I can manage.” A touch of vexation. She sank into a chair by the fireplace, recovered herself a little. “I’m forgetting myself. Do help yourself to some tea.”

“Not just at the moment.”

“Then please continue. I don’t understand what you’re telling me.”

I sat down opposite her, on the edge of my chair. “Elizabeth”—the use of her name seemed to come naturally—“I have in my

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possession a copy of a memoir written by Edwin Strafford in his retirement on Madeira. It relates his life in full, especially the period of his engagement to you. It professes a lifelong bafflement as to why you ended that engagement. I know that you discovered he was already married. But the Memoir contains no mention of such a thing, as if Strafford never knew he was married. I have this Memoir with me today, here in this room.” I pointed to the bag I’d dropped by the side of her chair.