Past Caring (55 page)

Who’s Who gave two addresses for Sir Gerald Couchman: one
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in Sussex, the other the house in Hampstead where I had last seen
Elizabeth. I started with neither. Instead, I went to the armament
works in Woolwich, or, rather, the site of the armament works. It
had been removed—bombed or demolished, who knew?—and in its
place houses were being erected. A board proclaimed: “Homes for
Londoners by Couchman Estates.” As befits an opportunist, Sir
Gerald had diversified.

Churchill had told me over dinner the night before that Couch’s
son , Henry, was a prominent Conservative and the party’s prospective candidate for a suburban constituency. There was every likelihood of his being elected. So there could be no doubt that Couch had
founded a prosperous dynasty to whom my reminder of less glorious passages was unlikely to be welcome.

The headquarters of the Couchman business empire was now a
modern office in Finsbury Square. In response to my enquiry, the
receptionist told me that both “Sir Gerald” and “Mr. Henry” were
engaged at a board meeting. So I left quietly.

But I did not stray far. I stationed myself on a bench, shabbily
dressed and inconspicuous, and waited. Shortly after four o’clock, a
knot of well-dressed and opulent figures emerged. At a distance of
twenty yards, I could distinguish Couch from the rest. He had
grown fat and rather puffy round the face. He wore a mohair overcoat against the cool afternoon , smoked a cigar with the flourish of
affluence, but seemed withal frail and unsteady. He was helped into
a waiting car by a man whose looks betrayed him as Henry—

young and thick-set with a malevolent cast to his features. I heard
him say “Hampstead” to the chauffeur. As the car drew away past
me, I could see Henry leaning forward intently in the back seat, energetically making a point. Couch was gazing out of the window,
straight past me with an unfocussed, dissipated blankness.

I hastened to Hampstead by taxi. Yet once there, once standing in
front of the gates of the Couchman residence—the house screened
from the road by undergrowth—I hesitated. The sun had come out
and The Bishop’s Drive on a spring evening seemed altogether too
sedate and tranquil to permit of any outrage.

Now it had come to the point, I was nervous and uncertain.

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A housekeeper answered my knock, which was more tentative
than I had meant.

“Is Sir Gerald Couchman in?”

“Yes, but . . .”

“I must see him . . . at once.”

“He’s only just finished dinner. This is hardly . . .”

“I must see him. I think he’ll agree if you give him my card.” I
had written on a blank postcard: “Couch: remember September
1900? Edwin Strafford.” She took it away, then , a few minutes later,
returned and showed me into a back room. There were french windows giving onto the darkened garden—the curtains had not yet
been drawn. The room was surprisingly untidy; in other circumstances it would have been charmingly so. There was an open music
box, some knitting behind a cushion on the settee, a child’s playing
brick on the carpet. I felt like an intruder in a family home—as
I was.

The door opened and Sir Gerald Couchman stood before me.

He was an ashen-faced septuagenarian in carpet slippers and a
patched cardigan , trembling slightly as he looked at me.

“What do you want?” he said in a thick voice.

Of a sudden , I did not know what I wanted. Did I really want to
ruin an old man if I could? Did I really think I could win back
Elizabeth? I felt a sense of futility sap my spirits. In the end, all I
did was hand him the certificate.

He stared at it for some moments. “What do you want?” he repeated.

“I want an explanation.” He handed it back without a word.

“Do you recognize this certificate?”

“No.”

“I believe you do.”

“No.”

“It’s dated 8th September 1900. The names on it are Strafford
and van der Merwe. In September 1900, I was due to visit the van
der Merwe family in Durban , but never did. You went in my place.

That’s what I want you to explain.”

“It was a long time ago.”

“Is that your explanation? Did you or did you not go to Durban
in September 1900?”

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“No. I don’t know the name van der Merwe. I never agreed to
take your place on any mission to Durban.”

In so saying, he erred tactically. For to lie at that stage revived
my dormant anger. I stepped towards him and he, in retreating,
half-fell, half-slumped into an armchair. I looked at him in surprise.

He was physically frightened ofme. In his eyes there was a look of
helplessness, a helplessness that had driven him to a pointless lie.

“Sir Gerald, I can prove I wasn’t in Port Edward on the date
quoted on this certificate. Can you?”

“No. But it was fifty years ago. Who can prove anything?”

“Is that what you’re relying on? You must know what this
means. It means I’ve found out. I’ve found out how Elizabeth was
turned against me. This is how, isn’t it? Not content with amusing yourself with some absurd marriage in South Africa, using
my name, you then employed the evidence of it to steal Elizabeth
from me.”

“No.”

“Sir Gerald, it’s my belief that, if I took this to Elizabeth, she’d
recognize it and admit it was how she was persuaded that I’d deceived her. If I then proved to her that I couldn’t have married
Caroline van der Merwe in Port Edward on 8th September 1900 because I wasn’t there, how do you think she would feel about the man
who was?”

He said nothing, so I continued.

“It’s not my signature, Sir Gerald. I think that can be proven.

Even if it can’t, I can prove I was on the boat to England on that
date.” This was a lie: I could prove no such thing. I could not recollect the date of sailing, but I suspected that it was after the 8th. “And
if all that only convinces her that you are the innocent beneficiary
of my impersonation , I can , if necessary, arrange for your real wife
to identify you as the Lieutenant Strafford she married.”

He covered his face with his hand and pronounced one word:

“Caroline.”

I was angry then , not for myself, but for Elizabeth. I took the
gun and harness from my bag and dropped it onto the cushion next
to him. “On her behalf, I’m returning some lost property.”

He parted his fingers and stared at it. He lifted it with one hand
and flexed the leather. Then he looked at me solemnly.

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“What took you so long, Edwin? Since Colenso—perhaps even
since Cambridge—I’ve sensed you would do for me in the end. I
backed a winning streak so long I thought it would carry me
through. God damn you for leaving it so late.”

I sat down opposite him. “Tell me about your winning streak.”

“First, tell me about Caroline.”

“She’s dead. Died last year in a lunatic asylum.” Further pretence on that score seemed pointless.

“But you said . . .”

“That was to draw you out.”

“You bastard. Without her, what can you prove against me?”

“I don’t need to prove anything. I can make Elizabeth doubt
you enough to believe you married her bigamously, I can . . .”

“After forty years? You wouldn’t do that to a woman you once
loved.”

“Maybe I wouldn’t—if you told me the whole truth, here
and now.”

“Here and now. Do you know what that means? This is my son’s
house. He lives here with his wife and two children. Some old man
from nowhere can’t just walk up the path one evening and demolish
all that. Henry’s likely to be elected to Parliament . . .”

“The truth is all I want. About that gun , this certificate, about
Elizabeth and me.”

“All right. But I can’t tell you here. It makes me feel . . . unclean.

We’ll drive somewhere in my car. Then I’ll tell you.”

“Anywhere you like.”

“Wait here.” He left the room and I heard muttering elsewhere
in the house. A few minutes later, he returned, dressed to go out.

“Come on.” He led the way by a communicating door to the garage
and his Bentley. “Usually, my chauffeur drives me,” he murmured.

“But not tonight.”

We set off in silence, by some route he knew that took us to
Parliament Hill. He pulled up at the side of the road and wound
his window down. The lights of London sparkled below us in the
night. He lit a cigarette and smoked it through, then took a nip from
a hip flask and began to tell me. Once he had commenced, he required no prompting. There was a quality almost of relief in his
confession.

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“You wouldn’t understand, Edwin. The irony is that I have the title,
but you’re the
parfit gentle
knight, too pure for your own good—

and everyone else’s. It’s hard to believe you still exist—here, now, in
1951. Take my word for it: it would have been better if you’d gone
over the top one day in France and not come back.

“Because that’s what happened in 1914—a world ended. You’re
out of place, out of step, out of time. The days of liberal, amateur
politics—liberal, amateur anything—are long gone. Remember
your touching faith in the demos? Your belief in the sweet triumph
of intellectual debate? It was a sham even then. Now it’s an
anachronism.

“None of us is free anymore. We lost that, somewhere along the
way to what they laughably call a welfare state. I’m not complaining. I turned a profit every step of the way. If they wanted to kill
each other, I sold them the means. If they wanted to house or entertain each other, I sold them the homes and the cinemas. You see, I
rumbled it all a long time ago. Profit is pleasure. And pleasure is
life. I believe in hedonism as an honourable calling. I’ll sell you a
silk tie to wear with your hair shirt.

“But freedom? That was the baby that went with the bathwater.

We couldn’t have sat at Lord’s in 1939 debating whether to enlist or
not, as we did forty years before. We’d have been told. The British
have become hostages to history, triumphant in a war but still queuing for meat rations while every black face round the world condemns us as imperialist ogres.

“I have to know-two to a load of cloth-capped union leaders who
call themselves a government and they have to kow-tow to the Yanks.

I suppose we ought to laugh really. It’s all a bit of a bloody joke.

“Hostages to history? Yes, all of us. Even me—especially me.

Because you’re my history. You’re my conscience, the albatross I’ve
looked out for all these years. I’ve always had a simple approach to
problems: change them. You don’t like the past? Then fiddle the
books. Rewrite your image until it fits the bill. You’d be surprised
how easy it is, as long as it’s just paper and fallible memory. Not so
easy when it’s a real, live human being like you. Why didn’t you die
on the Somme, Edwin? You’d have done us all a favour, including
yourself.

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“The trouble with altering the facts to fit the picture is that it’s a
cumulative exercise. It starts as a game—a bit of a lark really.

Then it gets serious, then complicated, then . . . then pleasure becomes pain because you find yourself and everyone else believing
the charade—living the lie as if it were the truth.

“When did it begin? At Cambridge, I think. I was surrounded
by handsome, athletic young men—the cream of England’s youth.

And first at cards—and later at almost everything—I found I
could dupe them, gull them utterly at the drop of a hat.