Past Caring - Retail

by Robert Goddard

  Each summer, Mother brought Ambrose out to visit me and we passed a few happy weeks together. Every year, Mother was a little frailer and Ambrose a little more of a man. Eventually, Mother was not equal to the journey and, in 1930, I went home – my only return visit – for her funeral. Ambrose has been out a couple of times since then; otherwise I am quite forgotten in my homeland, which is as I should want it. For the part I played as mediator in the quelling of the uprising on Madeira in the spring of 1931 I was thanked in a speech in Parliament by the Foreign Secretary. I wonder how many M.P.’s listening that day realized that the Consul referred to was formerly one of their number.

  One British resident on the island of whom I grew especially fond was that relishable eccentric, Dr Michael C. Grabham. I became a regular visitor to him and his wife, Mary, at their home near Camacha, the village north-east of Funchal which constituted the centre of the wicker industry. Grabham, who served as doctor for the area, had had the good sense to marry a member of the Blandy family and the charming lack of it to collect clocks on an island where time meant very little. He had erected a clock tower in the village and hung it with a bell from his native parish in Lancashire, which the villagers could happily ignore, and had laid a cricket pitch on the village green, which they were happy to play on in festival matches against a British exiles’ XI, for whom I played and later umpired: a far cry from Fenner’s.

  When old Grabham died in 1935, he left me a longcase clock which I had often admired and which now adorns my study. He also left me with an abiding fondness for Camacha and the valley in which it is set, full of apple blossom and willow trees, a veritable Little England free of the associations that the genuine article has for me. Accordingly, I used a bequest from my mother to purchase Quinta do Porto Novo, a delightful residence which came onto the market in that area. This sealed my resolve never to return to England and I have not once regretted the decision.

  My retirement fell due in 1941 but, by then, the Second World War was in progress. Portugal remained neutral, but diplomatic resources were stretched thin. The Ambassador in Lisbon asked me if I would stay on for the duration of hostilities and I felt it was the least that I could do. Generally, the war passed me by, save for letters from Ambrose telling me of his life in uniform. When it was all over, in the summer of 1945, he came out to stay with me and we compared our experiences of two very different wars. He also told me at that time of Barrowteigr’s virtual bankruptcy and of his intention to cede it to the National Trust. Even had I been able to bale him out – which I was not – I think I would still have seen the proposal as a fitting one.

  My successor as Consul did not arrive until March 1946, one month short of my seventieth birthday. After 27 years, I was happy to relinquish the post and retire to Quinta do Porto Novo. Since first espying the place on visits to the Grabhams, I had seen it as an ideal venue for my declining years, to be spent overseeing nothing more arduous than the wine cellar, the kitchen garden and a small apple orchard to remind me of England.

  Negligible as my Consular duties were, they gave me the habit of attending a desk, which I could not wholly abandon. Accordingly, I conceived the idea of compiling this chronicle of a life unfulfilled to occupy the days when rain fell on the fertile Porto Novo valley. Strangely, however, when it came to the point, I was reluctant to set it down on paper, feeling that nothing would be served by such an exercise, certainly not my own peace of mind. So the idea lay fallow, though only, as it turned out, awaiting its moment.

  His Majesty’s Leader of the Opposition, Mr Winston Churchill, chose to mark New Year 1950 – the start of this brave new decade – by holidaying on Madeira. I was not among the eager throng at the harbour the morning his ship docked, though I had been offered a place in the official reception party. Instead, I kept myself to myself in Camacha. I received an invitation to take tea with him at Reid’s Hotel, where he was staying, and deemed it churlish to refuse.

  I found Churchill on the balcony at Reid’s, enjoying the shade from the afternoon sun. He was gazing out across the harbour, with palm trees waving sleepily in the hotel garden beneath, a panama hat and some papers on the table before him and a large cigar clamped in his mouth. The scene was a soporific one, but when Churchill turned his eye upon me, I knew that he was still the same sharp-brained Winston that I had always known. He had plumbed the depths since last we had met – dismissed between the wars as a Germanophobe – and climbed the heights – Prime Minister and saviour of his country during the war – but looked that day at Reid’s a happy, contented old man, smiling at some secret joke.

  “Edwin, sit down,” he said. “I can’t tell you how pleased I am to see you. It’s been so long …”

  “More than thirty years,” I said, seating myself opposite him and wondering if he recalled the exact circumstances of our last meeting. Waiters bustled round to serve tea now that I had arrived.

  “Clemmie’s exploring the town, which will spare her our chin-wag about old times. You’re looking well, I must say – Madeira’s been good for you.”

  “Madeira’s good for everyone, especially an underworked, overpaid British Consul. You’re looking pretty fit yourself – how’s leadership?”

  “Between you and me, pretty deadly in opposition. I’m longing for an election so I can get back to Downing Street.”

  “It’s where you belong. We had our differences at times, Winston, but let me say this as somebody who stayed in his quiet burrow during the war – you did a damn good job. The country owes you Downing Street.”

  “Thank you, Edwin, it’s kind of you to say so.”

  “But I must confess to one reservation.”

  “I know it – the fact that they’ve made an old Tory of me!”

  “Well, it takes a bit of swallowing. I remember when you stopped being a young Tory.”

  “Time rings in its changes, you know. I hadn’t reckoned on one irony right here, though. They’ve put us in the suite L.G. once used.”

  “Yes, they would. He came with his wife in … oh, it must be 1925.”

  “You heard he married Miss Stevenson eventually – when he was eighty?”

  The comment struck a chord in my mind. Lloyd George, the old charlatan, had truly had his cake and eaten it too – Prime Minister and belted earl before his death, he had survived countless divorce scandals and lived to marry the secretary with whom he had betrayed his wife. I, who had wished nothing more than to marry the lady of my choice, both of us being free to do so, was allowed neither political career nor wedded bliss. Such was my punishment for wanting success and happiness. When Lloyd George, Churchill and I sat together in Asquith’s Cabinet forty years ago, who could have guessed that they were marked out for fame and honour whilst I was destined for the most resounding failure.

  It was too late to begrudge Churchill any of his achievement or my lack of it. He might have detected by a flicker of my eye that his mention of Lloyd George and Frances Stevenson was indelicate in view of my own circumstances, but he could be forgiven for having forgotten them. There was plenty of harmless talk for us to indulge in: his anecdotes of the mighty at war in the world, mine of the petty at peace on Madeira, our shared remembrance of the lost Edwardian age. He told me of his plans to go painting down the coast at Camara de Lobos. I invited him and Clementine to dine with me at Quinta do Porto Novo before they left and he accepted.

  In fact, the dinner engagement was never kept. News came from England that Attlee had dissolved Parliament. The election for which Churchill had thirsted was nigh. He sped home by flying boat as soon as the weather would permit.

  It was this brief interruption to my obscurity that prompted me to re-open these pages. We had not mentioned the name Couchman. We had not spoken of the past that really mattered to me or Churchill’s part in it, whatever that may have been. We had not even touched on his reasons for wanting me to come to Madeira, assuming he had any or that it was not all Lloyd George’s idea. We might conceivably have done so after s
everal glasses of malmsey at Quinta do Porto Novo – I shall never know. And that is why I felt slightly cheated by his precipitate departure and why the idea recurred to me of setting down on paper the perverse course of my life. I harboured the notion that, in the process, I might divine the flaw in my character rendering all that seemed so incomprehensible a just fate for one such as I.

  It is the autumn of the year now, and of my days, with winter in the wings. And I was wrong, as so often before. There is no lesson in any of it, unless it be that life can never be truly explicable. Injustice remains as mute as ever.

  Where are you now, Elizabeth? Do you still, sometimes, think of me? If so, what is it that you think? What did it really mean, I wonder? For I shall ever seek the truth that you denied me. My tragedy is that I shall surely never find it.

  E.G. Strafford

  Quinta do Porto Novo,

  Camacha,

  Madeira,

  October 1950.

  Two

  The skies over Gatwick were an insipid grey. The platform where I waited for the London train smelt of railways and – distantly – of asphalt. Madeira was suddenly all of its two thousand miles away and England, on an April afternoon, was, for better or worse, home. With a job to go to now, I could confront its realities with some sort of equanimity.

  I was back at the house in Greenwich, with dinner on the go, before Jerry returned from the office. I entertained him with anecdotes of Madeira in general and Alec in particular, but he was unable to disguise his relief when he heard about the job.

  “It sounds just the thing for you, Martin.”

  “I think it is, Jerry – an historian’s dream. But it means I’ll be dodging round the country exploring lines of research for – well, for as long as it takes. Which means you won’t see much of me here.”

  “Do you want to use this as a base?” It was the question I was hoping for.

  “If that’s all right by you. It’d be useful to keep my stuff here.”

  “Certainly.” Jerry had drunk more than his usual from the bottle of Madeira I’d opened – my request was well-timed. “You don’t want to carry everything around with you.” Then, as if to reassure himself: “Where will you make a start?”

  “I just need to make some notes on the Memoir. Then I’ll be off to see people mentioned in it who are still alive. And I’ll certainly go up to Cambridge to use the libraries and pick some brains.”

  It was exciting, even as I spoke of it, to think that the quest for Strafford’s secret was about to begin. The first step was never in doubt, it was straight back into my own past, to test at first hand the link which bound me to the Couchmans and the Couchmans to Elizabeth.

  It was late, too late really, when, after a stiff drink I faced up to telephoning my ex-wife.

  “Shaftesbury 4757.”

  “Hello Helen, it’s me.”

  “Martin: how are you?” Her voice was flat and apprehensive.

  “Fine. How’s Laura?”

  “Nervous. Have you forgotten she starts school next week?”

  “No, of course not.” Naturally I had, though her fifth birthday, in February, should have reminded me. Still, it was an opening. “That’s why I’ve called. Would it be okay for me to come down and see her before then?”

  “When were you thinking of?” The apprehension had frozen into a certainty: the one blot on her civilized social landscape – her ex-husband – was about to reappear.

  “How about tomorrow?” I was eager to begin my investigation and this visit was a pretext to do just that.

  After a lengthy pause and the rustling of what could have been a calendar: “All right. We’re not doing anything in the afternoon. You could look in about two.”

  “Right. I’ll see you then.”

  “Fine. I must dash now, Martin. See you tomorrow. ‘Bye.”

  The phone went down. I hadn’t expected the conversation to be as short as that, but it didn’t surprise me. Helen had never believed in making life easy for me, before or after our separation. Little did she know that I’d just come across a way of making her own life unexpectedly difficult. How difficult even I had no idea.

  I got to Shaftesbury two hours early, two trains and a bus having taken less time than I’d allowed. I’d only ever been there to visit my daughter, on sufferance, and the whole town seemed always to grudge my coming. For me, it didn’t sit mellowly on its hill above Cranborne Cross. It was always sunless and suspicious, Gold Hill and the green horizon conspiring behind a grim, grey mist.

  That day, it was the same. With time to kill, I made for The Ship Inn in Bleke Street. Usually I’d called there after visits to Archdene, not before. Today, it didn’t seem to matter if Helen guessed I’d been drinking. And The Ship was a warm and welcoming place, so I sat by the bar and drank pint for pint with a talkative tractor salesman from Yeovil.

  Elizabeth, I remembered somewhere around the third pint, had read a lot of Hardy’s poetry and, here I was, paying him the unintended compliment of opening my investigations in his very own Shaston. Not that I’d read any of his poems, only a couple of the novels, but the lines Strafford had quoted from one keep coming back to me. “Yes, I have re-entered your olden haunts at last.” I hadn’t yet, but, already, it felt as if I had.

  Haunts no, the trail yes. It led out of The Ship at two o’clock and down Tout Hill. Archdene was the smartest and last of four thatched cob cottages backing onto the hill Shaftesbury stood on – something of a well-kept antique, in fact, which was appropriate, considering that Helen’s new husband, Ralph Corbett, prowled the market towns of Wessex dealing in well-kept antiques. Even I had to admit that he had good taste and Archdene reflected it – an old cottage, yes, but expensively restored with a big garage dug out of view into the side of the hill so as not to spoil the olde worlde impression. It could have graced the cover of the county magazine and probably had. No father could object to his daughter being brought up in such surroundings, especially one with no alternatives to offer. But I did, of course.

  There was no answer to the doorbell. I looked round the side and noted, with relief, that Ralph’s Range Rover wasn’t in the garage. Then I saw Helen, near the top of the sloping garden, stooping over a vegetable row. Her hair was tied back rather severely and she was wearing jumper, jeans and gumboots – very much the country lady. I didn’t call out – wouldn’t have known what to call – but walked up the path towards her. Crocuses and daffodils were in bloom on the rockeries around the lush, terraced lawn and the vegetable garden above looked well-turned and neatly plotted. All this was Ralph’s influence. Helen was no gardener – hadn’t been anyway. But she’d always been pliable and had slipped well into her new role.

  She heard me coming and looked up with her tight little frown. She wasn’t surprised to see me but there wasn’t the hint of a smile.

  “Hello,” I said, panting from the short climb.

  “Hello Martin. Laura’s not here I’m afraid” – pre-empting any question from me. “When we agreed two o’clock yesterday, I’d forgotten that she’d be at playschool till three. They have a little group to prepare them for the real thing.”

  “That’s all right. I’m late as it is.”

  “How was the pub?” This was her way of telegraphing that it was obvious I’d been drinking.

  “Fine – Shaftesbury’s well off in that line.”

  “So I believe. But we hardly visit one.”

  “Not much time, I suppose, with all this garden to keep up.”

  “It’s certainly a busy time of the year. Come into the house and have some coffee,” she said after a pause. But there was no crack about sobering up, which was a minor victory for me.

  We walked down to the back of the house, through the extension Ralph had built and into the kitchen – flagged floors and stripped pine furniture with an old-fashioned but brand new range in the wide chimney breast, Saabatier knives and Le Creuset saucepans hung up like objets d’art, filtered coffee served in a Dunoon mug
.

  “I’ll have to go and collect Laura in half an hour,” Helen said. “Do you want to come with me or wait here?”

  “Is it far?”

  “No. Just round the corner.”

  “Let’s walk then.”

  “I’m sorry she wasn’t here to meet you.” What she really meant was she was sorry to have been alone when I arrived. Actually, it suited my purpose.

  “Never mind. It gives us a chance to talk. How’s your family?”

  “You mean Mummy and Daddy?”

  “Yes.”

  “They’re fine. What makes you ask?”

  “Just curiosity. I never wished them any harm.”

  “They’d be pleased to know that.”

  I ignored the edge to her remark and got in again before she could sharpen it. “What about your grandmother?”

  “Thriving.”

  “Good. I liked the old girl.”

  “You only met her once.” Another edge to blunt.

  “That’s true.” I dodged the issue of where. This wasn’t the time to remind Helen of our wedding. “But she was very … impressive.”

  “Still is.”

  “How old is she now?”

  “87, 88. Something like that.”

  “And still keeping well?”

  “Very, when I last saw her.”

  “Where does she live now?”

  “Still at the house in Miston. Why do you ask?”

  “Where exactly is that?”

  “West Sussex. But why do you want to know?”

  “Just curiosity.”

  “Come on. When have you ever been curious about my family? Hostile, indifferent, yes. But curious?”

  “Historians are always curious about the past.” This impersonal half-truth was my way round the acerbity that was creeping in. Whatever else, I didn’t want a slanging match.

  Helen put down her coffee with a crash. “You’re getting a bit pompous, aren’t you, Martin?” Then she noticed she’d spilt some of the coffee on the table, swore demurely and fetched a cloth. “You’re practising history now, are you?”