Past Caring (64 page)

Substantiate what we can, then publish—and be damned.” Did I believe that hopeful itinerary as I sketched it over the dinner table? Did I believe that Eve believed it? There wasn’t really any need to do either. For the moment, she’d stopped me caring about the end of the road. For the moment, being with her was all that mattered. The Strafford mystery was as good as any pretext—so long as we needed one.

What happened when we returned to Book End that night blended a clutch of private pleasures. The ice-maidenly historienne gave herself again to the down-at-heel outsider. A queen rewarded her subject for his tribute of the truth. An absentee hospitality was deliciously abused. A sexual act became a metaphor for a dozen other urgings and desires. I knew them all, but they made no difference. Though you know the sea is deep, the white horses still call.

And even the metaphors omitted one, crucial meaning. We sustained a continuum of which Couchman’s conduct in Durban and mine in Axborough were both part. Somehow, in our differ-

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ent ways, we were all accessories to a betrayal of trust. But whose betrayal? Whose trust?

We enacted a different dream, in the borrowed bedroom above Topsham’s period streets, from the one on the beach.

Different—but the same, in a way. Less impulsive, more portentous. When we made love that night, a deed was done more shocking than any daring sexual refinement—though Eve’s daring did shock me, several times, before the night was out.

I knew, of course, that I was compromising Strafford as much as myself, but I didn’t know—couldn’t have guessed—what that really meant. Not that it would have stopped me. Eve, in giving herself to me, prevailed over all other considerations. My only thought to the future was to ask myself whether it would always be as it was then. Even that, as it turned out, was the wrong question. Substitute ever for always. Then I’d have been nearer the mark.

Dawn. I propped open the bedroom window and watched the estuary slither into day. A mackerel sky and the grey Exe widening towards sea. A few lights on the western shore. Gulls wheeling and screeching over the mud-steeped pontoons of the riverside.

An insipid summer morning in an obscure locale. Topsham and Port Edward seemed, in that moment, the same: refuges from reality, bolt holes in some wrinkle of a coastline, hidden settings for acts which would stay with the perpetrators longer than they could ever imagine.

Behind me, elegant even in sleep, one arm over the coverlet, hair fanned across the pillow in the way—yes, damn it, in just the way—I’d dreamed, Eve held the wonder of a day I hadn’t thought to see. Well-used to disappointment, resigned to failure, I was already accustoming myself to unexpected triumph. The draw had been her faraway beauty shaped by her far-seeing mind. The prize was the mystery of her pliant flesh become familiar, that morning and every morning, become mine beyond hope.

Eve stirred and stretched and smiled—and proved she was really there.

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“What are you thinking?” she said with a decorous yawn.

“Just that I never dared to hope it would come to this.”

“And now that it has?”

“Now that it has, I’m in some danger of becoming a happy man.”

Eve stepped from the bed and wrapped herself in the same dragon-patterned kimono I’d seen her in once at Cambridge—a light year’s worth of weeks before. She walked across to where I was standing by the window, put her arm round my waist and followed my gaze out over the dew-sheened roofs of the town.

“To tell you a secret,” she said, “I expected us to wake up together in Norfolk, not Devon.”

“So did I, at one point.” I smiled ruefully. She smiled consol-ingly. “It’s strange how things turn out.”

“Stranger than you’d think.” With that enigmatic echo, she went to make some coffee.

For breakfast, Eve cooked ham and eggs the way she’d learned in California. We ate them in Dr. Sutcliffe’s intricately automated kitchen and laid plans for the day.

“The Postscript has me on tenterhooks,” Eve said, sipping her coffee while I cleared my plate.

“Easily solved. I’ll collect it this morning.”

“You could fetch your stuff from the Bennetts while you’re about it—if you want to stay.”

I smiled. “You know the answer to that.” She smiled back.

“Okay. It’s a good idea. I’ll go straightaway.”

“There’s no hurry. But it would be convenient if you were out this morning.”

“Two-timing me already?” I joked.

“Professor Pollard arranged to call at eleven to discuss how I’m finding things at Exeter. I made the appointment before I knew what I’d be doing today.”

“Lucky Professor Pollard.”

“Don’t worry. It won’t take long. And the Professor must be sixty if he’s a day. But I don’t want him to jump to any conclu-

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sions on Petra’s behalf—especially the right ones. Why not take my car? You could be back by lunchtime.”

I readily agreed. A quick whirl round St. David’s station and the Bennett household suited my purpose. By 10:30, I was on my way.

I collected the Postscript from the station without difficulty, relieved to find it in place in its locker. Then I drove straight to the Bennetts’, intending to collect my luggage, make a few lame excuses and return to Topsham with my booty. But it wasn’t to be as simple as that.

Nick opened the door and I could see from his expression that he was angry. In so calm a man, it was worrying.

“Martin—where the hell have you been?”

“Sorry I didn’t phone, Nick. You know how it is.” It was clear he didn’t.

“I’ll tell you how it’s been here. We’ve been bloody burgled!”

That feeling: I’d had it before. Nausea. A whirling sense of accelerating motion. Of ground slipping from under my feet. It began with Nick’s remark, splitting the euphoria of a self-satisfied morning.

We went inside. Hester was cleaning and dusting, rearranging with excessive energy. She didn’t look happy. Their usually carefree household had an edgy, shaken atmosphere.

Something had been violated and I could believe from their expressions that it was our friendship.

“What happened?” I asked.

“When Hester came home yesterday afternoon,” Nick said grimly, “she found the house had been ransacked. Drawers opened, contents all over the floor, cupboards and wardrobes emptied. It was a God-awful mess. She’s been working like a demon since then to clean it up.” He put his arm round her and she stopped what she was doing, looked for a moment pained by the memory of the experience.

“It was terrible, Martin,” she said. “Really. Not so much the mess as the knowledge that somebody had been through everything—handling my clothes, touching all our most private possessions. It makes them seem—soiled.” She shuddered.

“Was much taken?” I asked.

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“Not a thing,” said Nick. He looked at me darkly. “That was the strangest part of it. Camera, stereo, jewellery—all the stuff you’d expect a burglar to take. Even some cash in the kitchen. All still here. Not just left, but untouched. As if that weren’t what they were looking for.”

“Then what?”

Nick sat down. “Well, I don’t know. Do you?”

“Of course not.”

“We expected you back last night,” Hester put in.

“I’m sorry. There wasn’t an opportunity to ring. Circumstances were . . . fraught.”

“They were bloody fraught here too,” said Nick. “To tell you the truth, Martin, I don’t think we were burgled so much as searched. After all, as I told the police, everything we can account for is still here. There’s only your belongings that anything could be missing from.” His emphasis spoke volumes.

“I’ve nothing of the slightest value here.” A defensive, factual remark. My only valuable possession was outside in Eve’s car, safe—for the moment. But Nick was right. Their intruder had been looking for something of mine: the Postscript. It had to be.

The Bennetts’ home, like Ambrose’s before them, ransacked, sul-lied in a frantic search for something that wasn’t there. Relief at my foresight in using the left luggage locker was overtaken by a sickening fear of the implications. I’d only told one person that I even had the Postscript. None of which was any consolation to Nick.

“We’re not fools,” he said. “We’re supposed to be your friends. Since the inquest, you’ve hardly said a word to us. Then, last night, you go missing immediately after the house is broken into. What would you make of it?”

“I’m sorry about the breakin. Maybe it is my fault. I seem to attract this sort of thing. But I can’t explain anything, because I don’t understand it myself.” I paused. “Look, I must go up to my room.”

“Go right ahead.” Nick’s sarcasm echoed after me. He and Hester hadn’t deserved any of this. They had a right to expect the truth from me. But I wasn’t ready to tell it to them. I was only just daring to face it myself.

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I raced upstairs. Hester appeared to have put my room in order. My clothes were folded in neat piles on the bed. I pulled my bag out and found the Memoir where I’d left it. So there could be no question. Someone knew enough to distinguish that from the Postscript. Someone who’d also searched Lodge Cottage, who could have bundled Ambrose into the Teign, who knew what I’d only told to . . . Eve.

Ah, Eve. The hint of mockery in her smile. A deception more naked even than her body on the beach. I cast desperately for a way to discount the suspicion which had begun to grow in my mind. So beautiful. So mysterious. So it couldn’t be, could it?

Coincidence. Confusion. Anything would do rather than what was already looming over me with all the implacability of an unpalatable truth.

I raced from the house, leaving Nick and Hester to despair of the friend they thought they knew. I drove like a madman through the city and south to Topsham. I wanted nothing so much as to see Eve and hear her say that my fears were groundless. All she needed to do was say so and I’d believe, I knew, whatever I had to believe to explain it away.

But, as I accelerated past the Topsham town sign, I felt my headlong anxiety ebb slightly. It wasn’t enough just to see Eve and hear her voice. I had to think first, prepare my case so that it wouldn’t sound like the accusation it really was.

I pulled off the High Street in Topsham and parked in a narrow lane leading down towards the river. Then I set off on foot by a circuitous route towards Book End, allowing myself time to breathe and think on the way, to gulp in the breeze from the Exe and scour my mind for alternatives. If there’d been any, I’d have found them.

Ahead of me, on the left, The Passage House Inn was filling rapidly as lunchtime drew on. Laughing groups had occupied the tables in front of it, their chinking glasses out of tune with my mood. All I wanted to do was get by them quietly.

But, as I approached, two people stepped from the doorway of the pub and I stopped dead in my tracks. Eve, smiling, relaxed, 394

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in control—as always, at ease—as ever. And, at her side, not white-haired Professor Pollard, but Timothy Couchman, slickly dressed, sleekly groomed, donning dark glasses against the sun and pausing to stub out a cigarette with an expensive grate of leather on slate.

A little way down the road was parked the red Porsche. The two walked slowly away from me towards it, talking and laughing about something as they went. Timothy slipped his arm round Eve’s waist. She was dressed in a simple yellow blouse and the white jeans she’d worn the day before: somehow that made it worse. As I watched, Timothy slid his hand down her hip, ran it round the swell of her bottom and patted her lightly—a casual, proprietorial signal to stay on her side of the car while he got in and unlocked the door for her. Typical of him, in a way, to get in first. Awful for me, in every way, to see how easily Eve accepted his clammy attentions.

As he rounded the bonnet of the Porsche and went to open the driver’s door, he saw me. His jaw dropped, his eyes narrowed and then he smiled—with hideous condescension. Eve looked towards me as well. Our eyes met, but there was nothing there.

Her face was a mask, her expression mannered to the exclusion of meaning. I could have looked forever into her beautiful eyes and seen only my own reflection, lost, distorted and alone.

“Martin, old man,” said Timothy with extravagant hypocrisy,

“it’s great to see you.” Eve spoke to him under her breath and his expression hardened.

From the night I’d given Timothy the chance to see Ambrose’s letter we’d been heading, I now knew, for this moment. Timothy in search of the Postscript which incriminated his father. Ambrose drowned, his house searched. But still no Postscript. Inconveniently, I laid my hands on it. So, get me out of the way and search another house. Failing that, bribe me—if not with money then with something my past suggested I would find irresistible.

I had to get away, had to flee the scene of our meeting—a meeting of lies, a glimpsing of minds. I turned to run, to run as far and as fast as I could from what my new awareness told me about the mendacity of others and the ruin of myself. Even as I

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turned, I heard Timothy shout after me: “Radford—stop!” but I didn’t look back. He’d have realized, as I had, that their plans had foundered at the last gasp on an unscheduled encounter, that however satisfying my discomfort, it was premature, because I still had the Postscript and couldn’t now be persuaded—only forced—to give it up.

I heard his feet ringing on the tarmac as he pursued me. He wasn’t far behind. But as we ran past the pub, a group of people came through the door and spilled out into the road. I threaded through them, but heard a collision in my wake. Glancing round, I saw Timothy, cream trousers darkly stained with beer, cursing a bemused, bearded young man in tee shirt and jeans. Beyond the gesticulating group, Eve stood silently by the car, her eyes looking past them straight at me—solemn, unabashed, candidly gazing. I paused and struggled for an instant with the message of her look—distant, discerning and perversely disappointed. Then I ran on.