Past Caring (79 page)

In fact, there was no need. At her own request, Elizabeth was buried on Madeira, in the graveyard of a small chapel just down the valley from Quinta do Porto Novo. Helen went out to attend the funeral, though she disapproved of Elizabeth’s determination not to be buried with her husband at Miston. It was less symbolic than Helen supposed. By being laid to rest in Madeira, Elizabeth avoided having to choose between the two men she’d loved. I wished I could have been there, but officialdom wouldn’t relent.

Then came the bombshell. Tremlett had gone to Madeira to settle Elizabeth’s affairs. Early in December, when he returned, he wrote to me with the startling news that Elizabeth had left me in her will the whole estate of Quinta do Porto Novo and a bequest of £210,000, almost all, in fact, of what she had to leave.

While I was dumbstruck, Helen was scandalized. I had to endure several bitter telephone calls and, from as far away as Australia, a lawyer’s threat on behalf of Timothy—who’d received nothing—to contest the will. It didn’t come to anything.

As Tremlett pointed out, Elizabeth’s judgement that I needed help far more than either of her grandchildren was undeniably reasonable, even if distasteful to them. I cared little for their protestations. My thoughts and hopes were already bound up in the gist of a letter Elizabeth had left for me.

“I have made Quinta do Porto Novo happy with the memory of Edwin and the promise of a future faithful to its tradition of displaced Englishness. It is my final and finest achievement.

What would you have me do with it? Let another passing hotelier snap it up? I think not. Leave it to Helen? She wouldn’t want it.

Or Timothy? Never. You, Martin, are the only one who under-

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stands this place and why I have come here. So take it gladly and treat it well. For you and me, the meaning of your noble action at Quarterleigh six years ago is a bond stronger and more enduring than any certificated lineage. For Edwin to die as he did and for you to be imprisoned as you were, it was unnecessary for me to fail. Permit me, then, this one success. Use your future wisely.”

Overnight, I became a wealthy man. Suddenly, I didn’t have to be an ex-con clawing his way back anymore. Suddenly, I could do whatever I wanted. It was Elizabeth’s gift. The one who’d suffered most from my delving into the past had treated me best. For Strafford, for me, for us all, she’d appeased the past with a bright future.

It took me six months or so to settle here. Six months of fretting about the harvest despite all Gabriel’s reassurances, six months of getting used to being accepted—indeed welcomed—by an expatriate English community happily unaware of my past. Not having to explain or excuse myself anymore was a strange experience.

But it was one to which I soon adapted. Finally, I realized with mild shock that I was a man of means with nothing to worry about. The Quinta brings in a modest income. That, plus the capital Elizabeth left me, gives me complete security, complete freedom, in fact, to do whatever I want.

Or so I thought.

Then, this morning, just like any other morning, I took a shortcut out of the Quinta through the vine groves on its south-facing slope to the Gaula road and walked down towards the chapel where Elizabeth is buried. I rounded the last curve just as a banana lorry passed me, throwing up a cloud of dust in its wake.

As it slowly cleared, a car came into view, pulled up on the verge by the railings fronting the tiny, neglected chapel. Clearly, I was not to be alone.

Built in the last century by a Scotsman whose Presbyterian soul couldn’t tolerate interment in Roman Catholic soil, St.

Andrew’s Chapel is undeniably in Madeira but not of it, a slab of local granite forever chilled by a Caledonian memory. Always 494

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under-used, latterly forgotten, its small, overgrown burial ground wreathes lily, rhododendron and hibiscus round the gravestones of transplanted Protestants. On hot afternoons, I often walk down there to cool in its perpetual shade, to listen to the eucalyptus pods splitting beneath my feet, to collect water from the spring behind the chapel and replace the flowers on Elizabeth’s grave, its stone still white and sharply etched amid all the lichened encroachment.

I pushed open the wicket gate and walked up the short path towards the chapel, brick-red paint peeling on its wooden door.

Inscribed and barely legible in the stone arch above, a Scotsman’s Portuguese joke: BOA MORTE—Death is a happy release. Something made me stop before entering, a faint noise, the click of a camera shutter from the graveyard to my right. I turned and walked towards the sound.

I caught sight of her as I passed the angle of the chapel wall.

She was standing by Elizabeth’s grave, lowering her camera from where she’d just trained it to photograph the inscription. She could have been any English tourist in her pale blue blouse, full white skirt and open-toed sandals, any English tourist with curiosity and a camera. Only she wasn’t. When she swung round at the sound of my steps on the path and a shaft of sunlight through the trees caught her face and hair, I saw that she couldn’t be anybody but Eve, her expression composed even if I had surprised her, her eyes fixing and at once assessing the sudden, remembered stranger.

“Hello, Martin,” she said simply.

I walked slowly towards her. “I never expected to see you again.”

“Nor I you.”

“Tell me, why do you always choose . . . hallowed ground . . . to meet me? Miston Church, Chichester Cathedral, now here.”

She smiled. “I never intended to meet you in Chichester, or here. But it’s not inappropriate. Remember the medieval law of sanctuary.”

“You think this is my fugitive’s refuge?”

“Yours or mine. What difference does it make?” She turned and walked a few paces to the bench old Tomás had crafted from

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local willow and placed there after Elizabeth died. She sat down and looked up at me in a pose chosen for conciliation—or something subtler.

“You still haven’t told me why you came.”

“Do you really want to know?”

I stooped to push a tiny lizard down from Elizabeth’s grave -

stone. “I’d really like to know.”

“I’ve just spent a term at the University of Coimbra researching the Spanish occupation of Portugal. Still the academic gypsy, you see. There’s a Madeiran on the staff there who sang the island’s praises. I decided to come over on the boat from Lisbon for a couple of weeks during the Easter break.”

“Just idle curiosity, then?”

“No. Not just that. In fact, not that at all.”

“Then why?”

“To see you. I made enquiries in Lisbon and found out you now own the Quinta.”

I walked slowly round behind the bench and leant with my back to it, where I could hear Eve clearly but avoid the fixity of her eyes. “I thought that’s the last thing you’d want to do.”

“So did I, once.”

“Then what’s changed?”

“You have. We both have. The mystery that bound us has been resolved . . . finished.”

“Were we ever bound? You were determined all along to make me tread your path.”

“And why not? I knew what I was doing, and why. Of course, the Strafford mystery was interesting in its own right, but I knew more than you thought all along. More about you too. As soon as Strafford’s name came up, I remembered the marriage certificate in the Kendrick Archive. So I strung you along, just to see how far you’d go to please me.

“For all your high-flown male principles you were easily persuaded to sell poor Strafford down the river to suit the theme of my book. I wondered when you’d find out about the Couchman Fellowship, but I reckoned that even when you did, you’d keep quiet about it, and I was right.”

“I don’t suppose you’ll believe it, but that morning—when I 496

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came to Darwin—I was going to call a halt and refuse to cooperate in distorting what I believed about Strafford.”

“You seemed to be moving in that direction a couple of days beforehand, but I successfully talked you out of it. Are you sure that wouldn’t have happened again?”

“On reflection, no.” I wasn’t sure, because Eve was right. She could have talked me into anything then.

“I expected it to end there, but Timothy suggested I could wheedle the Postscript out of you—if you had it. And I was vain enough to think: why not? Besides, Timothy promised to pressurize his grandmother into cooperating with the book. I still had my career to think of. At that time, I didn’t realize how weak Timothy was—or how strong Elizabeth could be. And I had no idea Timothy’s father had killed Ambrose.”

“So our trip to Braunton was orchestrated from the first?”

“Not quite. Timothy just wanted you out of the way so he could search the Bennetts’ house. I didn’t find out till the following morning that the Postscript wasn’t there. But the day wasn’t wasted.”

“I don’t understand why you did it. The rest . . . yes. But why that?”

“Because of something you said on the way there. Do you remember we stopped at a pub near Barnstaple and I got you to talk about that girl—Jane Campion? Even then, you couldn’t stop portraying yourself as the victim of a ruthless seductress. It sickened me—that you could forget she was just a child, just a vulnerable teenage girl you were supposed to protect. And then I asked you what you thought might have happened to her.”

“I remember.” I stared at the ground. “I said I imagined she was married with two kids by then, that she’d forgotten all about it.”

“That’s right! You imagined. You didn’t know or care, as you still don’t know or care. I looked at you—so soft, so unstretched, so pathetically self-pitying, cruising through life on somebody else’s expense account. And I thought: you bastard, it’s time you began paying for your past. For what you did to that girl—and for other reasons you could never understand—it’s time you began to suffer. And suffer is what I’ll make you do.

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“What happened on the beach tested me as well as you. I set out in cold blood to seduce you, to take you in so completely that the final rejection, when it came, would break you. I don’t think you once guessed, in all we did, that mine was just a courtesan’s performance.”

I looked up and breathed in deeply. “You’re right. I never did guess.”

“When you left the next morning, I knew you’d find the Bennetts had been broken into and that you’d rush back to Topsham, hoping I could assure you it was all a terrible mistake.

So I planned a suitable reception. It was to have been at Book End, but you returned sooner than I expected. I’d been leading Timothy on for weeks. He thought we were going back to the house so that I could yield to his irresistible charms. In fact, he was just a pawn in the game. Still, it achieved its purpose. In some ways, it was even more of a shock for you than I could have hoped.”

“Except that it meant Timothy couldn’t get his hands on the Postscript.”

“That worried him more than me. But I had to follow you, if only to get my car back. Then Sellick showed up and it got better still from my point of view. Timothy revived the idea of putting pressure on his grandmother to contribute to my book, which suited Sellick—and me. Whatever else was tied up with it, the Strafford story was good history. It would have made my name.

And that’s when it all began to worry me.

“Whatever your failings, Martin, you were never worse than thoughtless. In Leo Sellick, I encountered true evil for the first time in my life. It infected Timothy at once. Then it spread to me.

When we visited Lady Couchman, I realized I was condoning a vicious piece of somebody else’s revenge.”

“But you still went along with it?”

“Oh yes. That was the worst of it. Sellick had a talent for identifying other people’s weaknesses—and exploiting them.

Mine was academic ambition. His plans were carefully designed to offer me a way of fulfilling that ambition. So I’d have gone along with him all the way, victimizing an old woman without compunction.”

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“You could just have dropped it.”

“But I wouldn’t have done. I prided myself on a liberated woman’s single-mindedness. Besides, Sellick implied he could get you to do it for him if I didn’t—and I believed him.”

“That at least wasn’t true—not by then.”

“No, but, when we met in Chichester, you seemed to confirm it was. I asked you—challenging myself as well as you—what you’d do to protect Lady Couchman. And you said . . .”

“Nothing.”

“But the next day, you killed him.”

I walked slowly round and faced Elizabeth’s grave. “I did it for her.”

“I know that now. It was just so . . . unexpected.”

“It surprised me at the time. It surprised everyone—even Sellick, I think.”

“I went back to Cambridge as soon as I heard about it.

Shocked, yes, but also, somewhere in my mind I couldn’t own up to, rather pleased that you’d put yourself in a worse position than I could ever have devised for you.”

“I’m glad you approved.”

“There’s no point being bitter about it now, Martin. I’m just trying to explain how it was. Couchman Enterprises wound up the Fellowship straightaway, so, suddenly, I was out of a job and not about to become famous overnight.”

“Sorry to have messed it up.”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Actually, you saved me from a terrible mistake. I left Cambridge that summer, spent a year in Paris, then went back to the States. Female academics have it easier there. It was a good move—for a while. I got on well at Harvard—finally did produce that study of suffragism: a straight academic treatment. I married an attorney with a good practice in Boston.”

“Congratulations.”

“He died last year.”

I stopped short. I didn’t have a monopoly on adversity. Even she could suffer. “I’m sorry.”