Past Caring (69 page)

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out. Blowing the gaff to Eve was the worst. If that ended something good, I’m truly sorry.”

His admission was well-timed. Before discovering Eve with Timothy, I’d have been harder on him and easier on myself. “I’m not sure it did that—though it seemed like it at the time. It turns out Eve wasn’t on the level either.”

Alec raised his eyebrows fatalistically. “Who is? It must be the age. After the Enlightenment, one day they’ll call this the Disillusionment.”

“Maybe. But since we are now being . . . honest with each other, tell me why you’ve come.”

“Like I said—to spy out the land.”

“That’s all?”

“What else would there be?” I challenged him with my eyes, but he wouldn’t meet my gaze. I couldn’t quite believe him, but his candour had defused my disbelief.

“I don’t know, Alec. I didn’t know before. Tell me what Leo made of my letter.”

“He summoned me to the Quinta yesterday morning, showed me the letter and told me to travel here by the first available flight and arrange for him to follow on Monday. We didn’t debate the matter—we never do. All that reasoned discussion was for your benefit. Leo prefers to give instructions and see them followed. Obviously, he knew the letter would tell me things about him I didn’t know, but it didn’t seem to bother him. Still, something did. Perhaps the imprecision in your description of the Postscript. How much is there in it you didn’t mention?”

As soon as he’d asked the question, I felt reluctant to answer it. Whatever we now admitted to each other, it could never be the same again between us. I’d never demanded anything as crude as loyalty from him, but its loss was as keenly felt as its existence had been blandly assumed. “When the time comes, Leo will know.”

“When is that time?”

“When he meets Lady Couchman—and her son.”

“Well, I’m to collect him from Gatwick Airport tomorrow afternoon. Do you want me to bring him straight here?”

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sure we all have questions we want answered.” We did, but, equally, delay had its appeal. I’d not seen Sellick for two months, not yet spoken to him with the advantage of the knowledge I’d since come by. Before, he’d had the upper hand. Now, I might wrest it from him. But, drinking beer that evening with Alec, 24

hours away from the opportunity, I felt only a sapping inadequacy for the occasion. There were no grounds for any other feeling. “I have a question: why tell me now? You could have kept me guessing about your motives a little longer.”

“Could I? You were bound to work out who’d blabbed to Eve.

That was a trick we could only play once. Effectively, it blew my cover. But Leo didn’t seem to care. You were bound to confront me with it when we next met, which is why I made such a quick get-away at the time. Of course, I could have held out longer, but there are limits even to my obedience. Leo can do without this particular secret—I’m glad it’s out in the open.” So that was Alec’s act of minor heroism—to tell me before he had to. It wasn’t enough.

“How do I know the timing of this disclosure isn’t Sellick’s choice—like everything else?”

“You won’t.” He drained his glass. “If I were you, I wouldn’t trust me. That’s the measure of Leo’s gift for corruption.”

I left him to drink away the evening. It was unlike me not to stay, but I had no wish to, after what he’d said, and there was much to be arranged. I hastened back to Quarterleigh through the velvet darkness and found Elizabeth waiting for me, eager to hear my news.

“Sellick will fly in to Gatwick tomorrow afternoon,” I said.

“Alec will collect him and bring him here. I hope I was right to assume that’s what you’d want.”

“You were, Martin. Now that I’ve taken the step of inviting him, I’d like to see him as soon as possible. And I’d like Henry to be here as well.”

“I don’t think he’ll come. He was hoping you’d withdraw the invitation.”

Elizabeth smiled. “I’m sure he didn’t seriously expect me to. I shall speak to him now and instruct him to be here.”

She went to the telephone and dialled the number.

I listened to her half of the telephone conversation while

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foreboding gathered in my mind and moved towards a stark conclusion: if I’d been set up in the first place to take the job Sellick had offered, had this invitation and the meeting it was about to lead to been foreseen as well? If so, its purpose was already planned—and it wasn’t ours.

Elizabeth had been speaking to Letty, but a change of tone told me Henry had come on the line. “Mr. Sellick will be here tomorrow evening. I’d like you to come and meet him over dinner . . . I realize that . . . Possibly—let’s just wait and see . . . Yes, he will be . . . Very well then, dear, I’ll look forward to seeing you about seven o’clock . . . Bye bye.”

She came and sat down. “That was easier than I’d expected.

He agreed to come.”

“Just like that?” I was puzzled.

“No. He said he was busy and didn’t see why you had to be here. But he said he’d come. He didn’t sound pleased—in fact, rather low generally—but he consented and that’s the main thing. Still, the lack of argument was unlike him. He sounded tired. Perhaps he’s sickening for something.” She looked thoughtful for a moment. “Once he’s here, I can make sure he doesn’t take it too badly.”

It was wrong and I knew it. Henry should have raged at his mother, refused to have anything to do with Sellick, raced down and tried to prize the Postscript out of our keeping. Why this meek compliance? Why this lack of fire from the arch-fulminator? I was too slow to make the connexions, still too busy forming the questions to guess the answers. Elizabeth was content to wait and see and I, though not content, had to do the same.

I went out at dawn the following morning and walked myself into a physical fatigue with which to face the day. Then I sat with Elizabeth in the conservatory and talked about suffragism to pass the afternoon, though our thoughts were far more on the present, for once, than on the past. Dora began to fuss around in preparation for a grander dinner than she’d served at Quarterleigh in a long time and we knew the evening—with all its uncertain events—would soon arrive.

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A taxi crunched up the drive shortly after seven o’clock, true to Alec’s phoned estimate. I watched from the lounge as Alec paid off the driver while Sellick climbed—a little stiffly—from the back seat. Immaculately dressed in crested blazer and grey trousers, groomed and slightly self-conscious, but every inch in command. He surveyed the house with his sharp, discriminating eye and betrayed no hint of a reaction. He was the same man who’d charmed and won me in Madeira with his knowing, connoisseur’s intellect, but there he’d shone in his proper firmament.

Damp-wooded, parochial Sussex didn’t quite fit. It viewed him as an outsider while, in his penetrating gaze, he seemed to view it as a conquest—or perhaps an inheritance.

Elizabeth went out to meet him, while I lingered indoors and watched the long-destined moment. I saw her smile and say a word, then extend a hand in greeting. I saw Sellick incline his head and shake her hand. But I also saw that he didn’t smile. His lips beneath the pencil-straight moustache didn’t even play with the idea. In that moment, my heart sank.

The group filed into the house and joined me in the lounge.

Leo’s eyes shot across to me as he entered the room and his tongue passed along his lower lip in a sole concession to nervousness.

“Why, Martin,” he said, “what a pleasure to see you again. I cannot fault your industry over the past two months.” He shook my hand before I could avoid it. “I hope you’ve enjoyed yourself in that time.” His look defied me to acknowledge the sarcasm.

“I think I’ve done what you asked, Leo.”

“That and more.” He turned to Elizabeth. She looked solemn and dignified in a full-length, dark blue dress with a simple pearl necklace. In her easy grace there was no hint of the inner turmoil she must have felt. “I’m sure, Lady Couchman, you would agree that we owe Martin a great debt for making this meeting possible.”

“There is much that I owe Martin,” she replied in measured tones. “But I feel sure he would be the first to acknowledge that thanks on this occasion are due to you for accepting my invitation and coming such a long way in the interests of . . . reconciliation.”

“It was, I assure you, no hardship.” There was too much electricity in the atmosphere for my liking. I poured sherry as a dis-

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traction and suggested we all sit down. We did, but it made little difference. Elizabeth was trying for something Sellick clearly had no intention of giving. As for Alec, he looked uncomfortable and carefully avoided my eye.

“My son will be arriving later,” said Elizabeth. “I hope you’ll bear with him in what he’s bound to find a difficult encounter.”

“It’s difficult for all of us, Lady Couchman. After all, few men have to wait until they reach my age to meet their family.”

Bravely, Elizabeth persevered. “It has been a long time, it’s true, but I hope you accepted my invitation in the spirit in which I issued it, namely that it’s never too late to put right old wrongs.”

“Oh, I agree wholeheartedly. After all, in English law there is no statute of limitations.”

I intervened in an attempt to wrong-foot Sellick. “Tell me, Leo, why did you let me discover your part in Strafford’s life rather than volunteer the information? It would, after all, have made my task a good deal easier.”

He smiled with patronizing indulgence. “In the first place, Martin, you accepted the terms of my offer and can hardly complain if you had to work for your money. In the second place, I doubt myself if the information would have aided you, quite the reverse. And lastly, of course, I had no idea that you would come upon this . . . Postscript.” So measured and so cool, but so careful to avoid mentioning what I’d withheld from him. “When am I to be allowed to see it?” In that last remark, a hint of impatience that was unlike him.

“I think that should await Henry’s arrival,” Elizabeth said.

“You both have an interest in it.” I understood her reluctance to reveal the extent of her son’s involvement in her husband’s fraud to so unyielding a guest, but Sellick seemed to interpret the remark differently.

“I should have thought,” he said slowly, “that, as Martin’s employer, I had first call on the fruits of his research.”

I couldn’t let him get away with that. “The Postscript is nobody’s property—but Strafford’s.”

“True. But since Strafford is dead, I own his house and other . . . written work . . . and he has no surviving family, I would contend that it devolves upon me.”

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Now it was Elizabeth who tried to defuse the situation.

“Speaking of Edwin’s house, Mr. Sellick, why did you buy it all those years ago?”

The reply was sharp. “Because, at the time, it was the only link to any kind of family left open to me. Of course, when I found the Memoir there, even that link was called into question.”

Abruptly, Elizabeth rose from her chair. “If you’ll excuse me, gentlemen, I’ll telephone my daughter-in-law—to be sure my son’s on his way. We may have to dine without him.” She seemed happier to go than she was anxious about Henry.

“Presumably,” I said, “you didn’t accept Elizabeth’s invitation in the spirit in which it was issued.”

“Using all the new-found knowledge that the Postscript has made available to you, Martin, why don’t you tell me?”

“The Postscript has told me nothing about you that you don’t already know yourself.”

“You must let me be the judge of that. Your letter hinted at more than it said.”

“It wasn’t meant to. I couldn’t say much without drawing premature conclusions. For instance, I’ve read Strafford’s account of his meeting with you in 1951, but I’m sure your account would be different.”

Sellick eyed me closely. His brow furrowed as if he were trying to glean something from my words that wasn’t there. “As you say, I’m sure it would be.” But he wasn’t going to say how. The certainty hung in the air between us, the certainty that he hadn’t come to Sussex to bare his soul but to comb other people’s.

Elizabeth returned to the room, looking more strained than when she’d left. “Henry set off in good time to have been here an hour ago,” she said. “I can’t think where he’s got to. We’d better start dinner without him.”

Dora had excelled herself in a lost cause: the meal was a country cook’s triumph. Unhappily, nobody’s thoughts were on food.

Sellick became less ambiguous and more overtly bitter as the evening went on, while Elizabeth bore his sarcasm with a mar-

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tyr’s fortitude. Alec ate and drank in glum silence, while my interventions failed to lighten the atmosphere.

My mind went back to the meal in Madeira with which Sellick had fêted and beguiled me two months before. How different that had been from this ashen feast in Sussex. I had the sensation that it should never have been, that we four should never have met—Elizabeth struggling to make good her husband’s wrongs, Sellick determined to inflict some harsh, hubristic lesson on any of the Couchmans left to face him, Alec embarrassed by his own complicity. As for me, Strafford’s trail had shorn me of the delusions which Sellick had exploited so well. They’d fallen away and left him, the arch-manipulator, in clear sight. I watched him, picking at the moistly textured lamb with suspicion, sipping the fine bordeaux without enthusiasm, and recognized him for the first time. Not the cultured recluse or the wealthy free-thinker who’d commissioned my research, but a keen mind narrowly focussed, in whose field of vision we struggled like specimens on a watch-glass.