Past Caring (62 page)

“Naturally. And Timothy was subtle enough to know that threatening me with removal from the Couchman Fellowship

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would only have encouraged me to continue our research. I suppose he thought it cleverer to set me against you.”

Timothy, like his father, had laid claim to Eve’s complicity. It would have been in character for him to have done so just to cover up his seamy act of discrediting me. “Cleverer . . . and more effective?”

“So it must have seemed.”

“Then why didn’t it work?” We’d come to the crunch.

“Because I missed you.” As simple, as prosaic, as touching, as that. “Cambridge was a lonely place without you. What it offered me was no longer . . . sufficient. At first, I couldn’t identify my sense of loss. Then I realized that you’d got under my skin. You were my loss, a loss, if you like, of humanity. Your successes and failures, your Strafford’s mystery, even your scandal, are so much more real—so much more human—than the finely chiselled ar-tificiality of Cambridge. I’d hoped you might feel flattered, Martin, that I had to follow you here.”

Flattered wasn’t the word. What I felt, when Eve’s lips played with the candlelight and shadow as if about to smile, when she gazed at me with a sparkle of promise and a depth of mystery, was irresistible fascination bordering on hopeless infatuation.

What I felt was that I was in her power and didn’t mind. “What are we to do, Eve? I wish it were as simple as our feelings for each other. I wish you could just forgive my past and we could forget Strafford and the Couchmans. But we can’t . . .”

“Because it’s part of the bond between us?”

“And because Ambrose is dead. What was just a cerebral game has begun to hurt people. What was just speculation has become hard fact.”

“In what way? All I heard at the inquest indicated that Ambrose had drowned accidentally.”

“But not before finding out the truth about his uncle.”

Eve raised her eyebrows. It gave me a kick to be able to surprise this serenely imperturbable woman. “And what is the truth?”

“Not what you or I thought. Stranger—subtler—than we could have envisaged. Devastating, I’m afraid, for your study of the Suffragettes.”

She refilled our glasses with wine: an odd, distractive gesture.

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“No matter, Martin. In the context of Cambridge, your disregard for conventional interpretation is as refreshing as your personality. Hang the Couchman Fellowship, hang the book. I can find another job, re-write the book. One of the reasons I followed you was because you’d inspired me with this strange concept of truth in history. It might be uncomfortable to apply it—in your own case, for instance—but let’s not funk the issue. Unless . . .”

“Unless what?”

“Unless it drowned with Ambrose. Is that what you’re saying?”

I paused and gulped some wine, trying to test her with her own practice of meaningful delay. It was a poor effort. She sipped and waited for me, demonstrating with her ease that her patience could outlast mine. “No, Eve. It didn’t drown with Ambrose. He discovered a further statement by his uncle, shedding new light on his resignation.”

“What light?”

I tested her again with postponement. “It’s a long story. This doesn’t seem the time or place for it.”

“Perhaps not. Perhaps it is . . . premature. After all, there’s a lot for us to talk about before we turn to questions of history.”

Again, the poise, the elegant deflection, the turning of my remark to anticipation of something I hadn’t meant, but wanted nonetheless. “Let’s not be in too much of a hurry, Martin. We owe each other some time.”

“You must know I’d give you all the time in the world.” The world’s time was history, our mutual profession. The debt I’d commuted to a gift was another deflected, unintended meaning, the history I’d found myself offering her was another person’s past.

“Let’s start with one whole day. I have tomorrow free. We could go somewhere . . . and talk.”

I agreed, naturally, enthusiastically. I didn’t want to question too hard her change of heart. That she was prepared to see me again was enough. A day together, an empty space she offered to fill, a doubt she promised to still. All that I’d discovered, all the mad tumble of begged questions and suspicions spattering the years between Strafford and me, all the bleak lessons of my four-year voyage from one temptation to another, I forgot in a mo-

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ment, discarded without a second thought, for the sake of 24

hours held out to me, a day that could become a stage for every variant on the theme of her beauty.

I dodged explanations where the Bennetts were concerned and planned to slip out early the following morning. I’d refastened the Postscript in its wrapping and put it away where I didn’t have to see it. For the moment, I didn’t want to know too much about Strafford.

But I already knew too much to forget and the Postscript, whether open or closed, confronted me with the fact. It had become a portentous, uncomfortable document, filling me with uncertainty. It was also, as I’d already concluded, dangerous to many who didn’t know what it contained and some who did. Acting as its custodian was a disturbing experience.

Accordingly, I took it with me that warm, clear Friday morning, the air still fresh but the sun warm with a promise of heat later. I walked with unnecessary stealth down through the domesticated hush of the housing estate and across the river to St.

David’s station. There, a left luggage locker gave me just the repository I was looking for. With the Postscript under my arm, I felt insecure and vulnerable. With a key to its obscurely ordinary hiding place, I felt powerful in my knowledge of its whereabouts.

She came as I might have imagined, speeding with precision down the road from the University in her silver MG. It could have been Cambridge the first time she collected me from Princes’.

She wore dark glasses, a silken scarf, a pale blue blouse over white jeans. She smiled with a restraint which might have been either distance or intimacy, daring me to express the doubts we had about each other, while hinting we could pretend instead that they didn’t exist.

“I thought we’d go to Braunton Burrows,” she said matter-of-factly.

“Wherever you say.”

“A botanist at Darwin recommended the orchids there when she heard I was coming down here. And living in Cambridge makes you yearn for the sea.”

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As we passed through the pine forests of the Taw valley, Eve broke the silence which had fallen tensely between us.

“Where did you go from Cambridge, Martin?”

“London—to think. Then Miston—to work off my sadness.

Lady Couchman is an antidote to any self-pity.”

“So you’ve met her?”

I remembered my relief at the time that Eve hadn’t. “Yes.

She confirmed what we’d suspected about Strafford.”

“Did that disappoint you?”

“Not really. She held no bitterness towards him. In fact, she suspects Strafford could have killed himself—out of a kind of remorse.”

“But you don’t?”

“Not now. Not in the light of the evidence Ambrose discovered.”

“And you’re keeping me in suspense about that?”

“For a little longer.”

We stopped for a drink at a pub the other side of Barnstaple. The garden overlooked the Taw estuary, reaching in idle sweeps towards the Atlantic Ocean. The air, as we sat with our chilled drinks, was charged with something other than heat.

“When we parted in Cambridge, Martin, I denied you the opportunity to . . . explain. That was wrong of me.”

“Do you want me to explain now?”

“Only if you want to.”

I tried. I told Eve then more of the truth about Jane and me than I’d ever told anyone. Still it wasn’t the whole truth. Jane could never have been as calculating as I depicted her. But how else could I explain my squandering of what passed for respectability? I couldn’t let her know how irresolute I really was.

“It’s not,” I concluded, “a glorious account. I don’t pretend it is. But it’s far from being as bad as . . . newspapers . . . make it sound.”

“I realize that now, Martin. I think it may even have made you . . . a better person.”

“Perhaps.”

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“Do you know what happened to the girl?”

“Not a clue. Enquiries from me would hardly have been welcome. Besides . . .”

“Yes?”

“Adolescents are hardier than adults tend to think. I imagine she’s forgotten all about it. Married with two kids by now. Everyone would have wanted her to forget. Nobody would let me.”

“I see.” She looked into the estuarine distance. “I think, perhaps, it’s time we forgot the past.”

“And the present?”

“You’ll want to know about me and the Fellowship.” She smiled slowly. “As I said, Timothy Couchman found out about our research. I’ve no idea how. But walls have ears in Cambridge.

After we’d parted, I made no secret to him of what we’d discovered and planned. By then, it didn’t seem to matter. The cat was out of the bag and there was no longer any prospect of integrating Strafford’s story in my book.”

“He came to see me and claimed that you’d kept him informed all along.”

“A lie. Timothy’s a natural liar. I should never have fallen for his line about you, but it was such a shock that I never had a chance to take stock of it. Not till after you’d gone, anyway. Not till the immaculacy of Cambridge had begun to pall. Not till I’d realized that, without flaws, people aren’t real.”

“If it’s flaws you’re after, I’m your man.” We laughed at that—spontaneously and mutually, at ease with each other for a renewed moment.

After lunch, we carried on through Braunton to the coastal plain beyond: a strange, unexpected landscape after the switchback interior of field and hedgerow. There, red earth gave way to white sand and the Burrows came into view: an undulating expanse of grass-topped dunes rolling towards a distant, unseen ocean. The warmth of the sand had a steely edge, its very stillness held an awareness of instability.

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crisis. The Burrows were a sparse, shifting, alien place, without association, without location. We could have been anywhere—at any time.

The atmosphere should have worried me, but it didn’t. Eve had consented to take me there and that was enough. She smiled and gloried in the sun and led the way, as if she knew it, through the dunes. In the airless slacks between them, she pointed to the colourful carpets of flowers, identified varieties of orchid, bent to explain their differences of form and colour. She was almost skit-tish, as if taking a girlish delight at returning to her element. Her sudden lightness of spirit dazzled me more than the sun.

Beyond one orchid-rich slack, we descended a sheer slope of sand, with no marram grass to cling to. We slithered down, knee-deep in the heat-dried grains, falling together at the bottom, arm in arm.

Eve laughed and brushed herself down. “I’m glad to be back, Martin,” she said.

“But we’ve never been here before.” It was an assertion I was no longer sure of.

“Back with you, I mean.” She kissed me lightly, then pulled me up and walked on, her hand in mine.

When we reached the sea, over the last grass-fringed ridge, it was a limitless mirror, laid beyond a lapped rim of flat sand. The beach stretched into haze either side of us and the sea reached as far and as wide as the sky. It was a beach you dream of, at a time you dream of: empty, as if reserved for us, perfect for whatever purpose we cared to imagine.

We sat for a while, at the foot of the ridge backing the beach, absorbing the warmth of the sun, scanning the horizon—broken only by one yacht and the distant hump of Lundy Island—and talked of Cambridge, childhood, orchids and each other: an over-ture of trivia with Strafford and all—or both—his works for once forgotten.

Eve lay back and closed her eyes, not to sleep but to bask in the heat. I kissed her eyelids and she smiled faintly, patient and assured in what seemed, more than ever, her particular realm.

“Now you’re back,” I said, “I’m free to say what I was going

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to say that morning at Darwin: that you make questions of history seem . . . unimportant.”

“So they are, Martin.”

“And you an historian?”

“But also a woman.”

“I wasn’t about to forget that.” I kissed her again.

She opened her eyes as I drew away. “I think I was away too long.”

“I thought that after one day.”

“See if you still do, after this day.” She smiled and scanned my face with her eyes, as if searching for something in my expression—and finding it. Then she closed her eyes again and stretched back with leisured, feline abandonment. I watched the hem of her blouse ride up over a narrow strip of flesh above the waistband of her jeans and the buttons of the blouse strain between her breasts as she arched her back. I longed in that moment, as her body slowly relaxed onto the sand beside me, to tear the clothes from her, to enter her violently where she lay, to burst the smouldering promise of her words and looks. But her studied languor forbade me, her quiet command held me back, as if saying that she would choose the moment and I would await her choice.

So I did wait, though with none of Eve’s self-possession. I stood up and walked out across the sand towards the rippling edge of the sea, leaving her lying beneath the dunes. It was the hottest time of the day, the deserted stretch of beach shimmering away towards a distant headland in one direction and an ultramarine horizon in the other. I’d taken my shoes off and the heat of the sand stung my feet, so I walked out to the cooler, firmer foreshore, corrugated by the retreating tide.