Past Caring (80 page)

She got up from the bench and walked past me. “It’s okay. We had five good years. I’ve come to terms with his death.” She

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stopped by the chapel wall and looked back at me. “I left Harvard to make a clean break. Coimbra seemed as far away as I could get from my old life. Then I realized how near it had brought me to you.”

“Eve, I’m sorry about the girl. Truly I am. So long ago. I reckon maybe I have paid now.”

“I reckon so too.”

“And I’m sorry about your husband. But I still don’t understand why you came here.”

“To seek your forgiveness—this time sincerely.”

The lizard had returned to Elizabeth’s gravestone, basking on its rough surface where the sun pierced the trees. “Perhaps you underestimated me once. Now you’re overestimating me. Prison hasn’t turned me into a saint—or any less of a sinner. I’m still just the same weak man, with a thin veil of pride. Forgiveness? So that’s what you want. Hallowed ground for absolution. First your play-thing, then your eunuch, now your priest. Is that how it’s to be?”

“No, Martin. That’s not it at all.”

“I think it is. Doesn’t what Sellick found you capable of tell you something about yourself ? Doesn’t what you did to me tell you something about the girl—about Jane?”

“What do you mean?”

“Your so-called revenge was just an imitation, a proof, if you like, that I really was her victim, not she mine. Well, you’ve got what you wanted, what you set out to get from the start, your revenge. So now, just leave me alone.” I felt strangely at ease with my own controlled fury.

“If that’s how you want it.”

“It is.”

“Very well.” She walked towards me. “I think the worst of it is that we’re both right—about each other. But tell me”—she stopped beside me—“what wouldn’t Elizabeth have given for a chance to make it up to Strafford?” I looked down at the grave.

“That’s all I’m suggesting we take—a chance with each other. It would probably never work—but wouldn’t it be worth finding out? I only ever looked for the worst in you, Martin. Along the way, the best I discovered was something really rather fine . . .

something I might have come to love if I’d allowed myself to.”

500

R O B E R T G O D D A R D

I stared at her blankly. “It’s too late, far too late. What’s between us can’t be wiped away.”

“Of course not. That’s just the point. It can divide us—or unite us.”

“How could I ever bring myself to believe a word you said?

How could I ever forget you might always be giving a courtesan’s performance?”

“Neither of us can forget—unless we try together.”

“Your memory and your mystery have shimmered at the edge of my mind since that day at Chichester when you told me what you thought of me. Now the truth’s out at last, maybe I can finally forget you. That’s all I want to do: forget you—not conspire with you in some fiction of a future.”

“The pity of it is, Martin, that this is the one time you should believe me—and the one time I can’t convince you.”

“The one time and the last time. Elizabeth offered to forgive Strafford once, but said she could never forget what he’d supposedly done. Well, I can’t forgive you, Eve, I don’t have her magna-nimity. But I’ll try to forget.”

“Do you really think you can?”

I didn’t reply, just tried to suppress in my face any hint of the truth.

“I’m staying at the Casino Park Hotel in Funchal until next week. Then I’m going to Spain, to research the Habsburg archives at Valladolid. You could contact me at the University there. They know me as Dr. Connolly.”

“You won’t hear from me.”

“The invitation’s open. I’ll be at Valladolid until the end of June.” She turned and walked away towards the gate. At the angle of the chapel wall, she paused. I looked towards her quizzically. She raised the camera to her eye and clicked the shutter. “A reminder—in case you don’t come.”

“I won’t.”

“We’ll see.” She looped the camera strap over her shoulder and walked quickly out through the gate. A few moments later came the roar of the car accelerating down the road.

I found myself running out through the gate to the road. I could see the car, a dark shape heading down the hill towards

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Gaula. Scattered rhododendron blossom was still circling in its wake by the verge. She’d gone. But I could follow—if I wished.

When I returned, I came up here to Strafford’s study, to read his Memoir again in the place where it was written, to look at Elizabeth’s photograph on the desk where it has always stood, to gaze from the window down the valley towards the sea, as all those who have lived here have done.

Evening is settling over the Quinta. The cicadas are out, scratching away at the blurred edges of the twilight. Doubt is muffled by the onset of night, decision delayed at least until another day.

Yes, she has re-entered my olden haunts. Through the years, the dead scenes, she has tracked me, and now, at last, I know why.

What has she found to say of our past? Only the promise, only the vague, bewitching echo of a dream, held out across the dark space wherein I have lacked her. So near at hand, so far from my thoughts until now . . .“I’ll be at Valladolid until the end of June.” In the months that stretch remorselessly ahead, her invitation will become harder and harder to forget. Acceptance will creep upon me in every unguarded, fatalistic moment. I know it as surely as I know my own weaknesses, as surely as she knows them.

Strafford’s face in that gathering of Asquith’s Cabinet: I see you, my elusive quarry, but I do not hear you. If you had told me what to expect from a quest after your past, I would never have embarked upon it. But you know that. Your shade, which I tracked and moved in, envelops me now in this place of your displaced being.

What would you do? I know—there is no need to say. But first, I must close the book, Strafford, yours and mine, and, with it, the timeless circle of our acquaintance. Outside, the shadows beckon. To walk into them must always be a choice of random futures. What would you do? I know—there is no need to say. It is now for me to decide.

ROBERT GODDARD is the author of eighteen bestselling novels, including
Never Go Back, Into the Blue, Play to the End, Hand
in Glove, Borrowed Time, Sight Unseen
and
In Pale Battalions.

He lives in England, where he is at work on his upcoming novel,
Name to a Face
.

If you enjoyed Robert Goddard’s

PAST CARING,

you won’t want to miss any

of his internationally bestselling novels of suspense. Look for them

at your favorite bookseller.

And read on for an exciting early look at BEYOND RECALL

Coming soon from Delta

Coming soon

The air is different here, purer somehow. The light is clearer, the edges of the leaves and the lines of the buildings as sharp as the memories. Recollection invades my senses through the unchanged brightness of this place called home. I raise the window on the evening, cool and sweetly washed by late afternoon rain. I touch the wood and test the paintwork with my thumb. I watch a rabbit, disturbed but not startled by the squeak of the sash, hop away into the trees. The direction of his leisurely retreat draws my eyes towards St. Clement’s Hill, where I can make out the roofs of Truro School, and just to the north, the white dots that could be sheep in a field but for the regularity of their spacing, sheep safely grazing rather than the headstones of the dead resting forever on a familiar hillside.

I didn’t ask for an east-facing room. I didn’t let slip my connection with Tredower House when I booked in. I didn’t even disguise my name. The receptionist was too young to remember anyway, probably too young even to care. Pure chance, then, puts me here, in this particular room, where my great-uncle kept his vast old daybed and his jumble of assaying equipment and his battered leather trunks and cases, laid out as if in readiness for a journey. Maybe he rested here, listening to the cooing of the doves and sniffing the summer air, before setting out that last time, nearly fifty years ago. Just up there, half a mile away at most, his bones are dust beneath a slab of Cornish granite. I stood beside it a few hours ago, waiting to be met; waiting, but also willing to be forced to remember. I read the inscription, cursory and reticent, declaring just as little as propriety demanded, and thought of how carefully my grandmother would have chosen the wording. “Brevity and seemliness,” I imagined her saying to the monumental mason. “His name.”
Joshua George Carnoweth
. “His dates.”
1873–1947
. “The customary initials.”
RIP
. “That, I rather think, will suffice.”

And you must have thought it would, mustn’t you, Gran? You must have been so confident, even when your own life ebbed away twenty-five years later. No cold grave on a windy hilltop for you, of course, but neat hygienic cremation. Well, some things can’t be burned, or even buried. You must have thought they could be.

But you were wrong. Only you’re not here to face that fact, are you? I am.

I was early for my appointment at the cemetery. Not by much, but early enough to recover my breath after the climb and draw some calmness from the scene. The wind was up, heralding the rain that hadn’t yet arrived. The speeding clouds shifted the sunlight around the city below me, lighting first the single copper spire of the cathedral, then its taller central tower, then the long pale line of the viaduct and the deep green fields beyond; and finally, closer to, a flight of birds above the cemetery chapel, tossed up in the breeze like a handful of shingle on a gale-ripped beach, lit and seen and swiftly lost.

The houses have crept up the slopes around the cemetery since Uncle Joshua was buried, crept up unsuspected, like some besieging enemy by night, unnoticed until suddenly perceived. The thought struck me just as I saw her approaching up the path, walking fast and straight, anonymously dressed, thinner and gaunter and older than when we’d last met.

She stopped a few feet away and stared at me, breathing steadily. Hostility, if it was there, was expertly masked. But what else would I have expected? She’d always worn a mask. I just hadn’t always known it.

“You’ve aged well,” she said neutrally. “Still off the drink?”

“As a matter of fact, yes.”

“That must be it, then. Unless it’s the effect of marriage and fatherhood.”

“How did you find out?”

“I made it my business to. Where are they—your wife and son?”

“Switzerland.”

“Handy for the banks, I imagine.”

“Is that what this is about—money?”

“What else? I’m short.”

“Didn’t they pay you enough for those imaginative memoirs of yours?”

“Not enough to keep me indefinitely in the manner I’m accustomed to.”

“You mean you’ve run through it all.”

“Something like that.”

“Well, bad luck. You’ll get nothing from me.”

“I’ll get as much as I need from somebody. You—or the highest bidder. And I think the bidding will go pretty high for the story I have to tell. Don’t you?”

“Maybe.”

“If the truth gets out, a lot of people are going to look very stupid.”

“Worse than stupid, in your case.”

“That’s why I’m willing to keep my mouth shut. At a price.”

“What price?”

“Half of what I stood to net last time. You can afford it. Just half. Isn’t that fair?”

“No, not in the least.”

“I’ll give you twenty-four hours to think it over. Meet me here this time tomorrow with your answer.”

“Why here?”

“Because this is one grave I know the exact location of.” She almost smiled then. It would have been an admission that something beyond greed and envy were at work, but the admission never quite came.

“I don’t believe you have the courage to drag it all into the open now.”

“I don’t need courage, just a lack of alternatives. I’ve had to scrape by on a budget lately, leading the kind of dull deadening life I swore I never would. Well, I’ve had enough of that, and this is the only way to escape it.”

“Isn’t it better than prison?”

“Oh, I’ve no intention of going back there. With what the papers will pay me for the truth, I can leave the country and become a different person. You know how good I am at that.”

“Yes, I do.”

“But that’s not an option for you, is it? Now you’re a committed family man. Think about it. We made a deal before. We can make another. It’s simple enough.”

“If you really believe—”

“I believe anything you say now you might look back on as rather foolish when you’ve had a chance to weigh up the options.

Take my word for it. I’ve been weighing them for a long time.”

“And I get twenty-four hours to do the same?”

“Exactly. Generous in the circumstances.” She held my gaze for a moment. Whether she felt the same strange complicity with me as I felt with her I had no way of telling, and I’d never have dared to ask, for fear of the answer. We’d set ourselves up for this years ago, by agreeing—however reluctantly—to share and conceal the truth. What is a secret without trust but a bargain waiting to be broken? “Until tomorrow?” she added.

I nodded. “Until tomorrow.”

So there it is. The threat I’ve lived with since we first struck our deal. The dilemma I’ve liked to pretend I didn’t anticipate.

Well, if it had to happen, let it happen. Here and now. There’s no more fitting place or time. And I have until tomorrow to reach a decision. Who needs more than that?

I look from the window down at the sloping flank of the lawns and listen to the roar of the traffic accelerating up the hill.

I remember a time when there was so little of it you could hear a single car cross Boscawen Bridge and labour up the road towards the Isolation Hospital. Just as I remember a time when I knew nothing of the truth about Uncle Joshua’s death except the little that the average newspaper reader on the Clapham omnibus knew. For more than thirty years, as child and man, I inhabited that happy state. Then, early one Sunday morning in September 1981, on the path near the rhododendrons down there, where my gaze lingers, I caught my first sight, partially blocked by undergrowth, of what brought that phase of my life to an abrupt and horrifying end. And set the next in motion. Moving towards this day. And tomorrow.