The waiter came to remove our plates. I had no stomach for dessert. We ordered coffee. “It still doesn’t make sense. Why did Strafford pour out his soul in that Memoir if it was built on a lie?”
“It wasn’t. An impetuous, regrettable marriage doesn’t make Strafford a bad man. It doesn’t mean he didn’t love Elizabeth, or mourn their separation as much as he claimed. It doesn’t even mean that your own theory is invalid. If Lloyd George really did want to get rid of him and somehow found out why Elizabeth had broken off their engagement, then the information might certainly have persuaded Asquith that Strafford should be decently ostracized.”
“But Hobhouse’s quote makes it sound as if Strafford’s removal was so much more contrived.”
“Useful, perhaps, as a threat to other potential opponents of Lloyd George. To anyone who didn’t know better, Strafford’s fall was exemplary – pour encourager les autres.”
“I don’t know, Eve. I thought I knew Strafford, thought I knew his mind. Now, it seems, I must think again.”
Eve reached across the table and touched my hand. “Then take time to think again.” I opened my hand and grasped hers. “Then we’ll decide what to do – for the best.” When we left the restaurant, we walked down through King’s College, past the dark, looming outline of the Chapel, to the river, and talked of Strafford again.
“I have an idea what we should do about this discovery, Martin,” Eve said, “but it’s important you should decide. Do you want to drop it – or carry on?”
“How can we carry on?”
“That’s up to you.”
“And you.”
“Let’s say both of us.”
“All right. Let’s say that.”
“Last Sunday was good.”
“Yes, it was.”
“Then let’s do something similar this Sunday. I’ll drive you somewhere – we could picnic if the weather’s fine.”
“I’d like that.”
“Well, regard that as your deadline. Tell me then what you feel we ought to do. Reveal the truth about Strafford after seventy years – or leave it buried?”
We walked across the bridge towards Queens’ Road, our hands joined now, saying nothing but pledging silently to give Strafford what he’d asked for: justice, suddenly a less pretty thing than I’d once thought.
Eve had given me, had given Strafford, a day’s grace. It was a dull, wet day in Cambridge: slate grey clouds scudded across the flat landscape. There was only one thing I could do to help me make up my mind, so I did it: immured in that cheerless guest room of Princes’ Hall, I read the Memoir through again, from start to finish, only this time acutely, unsympathetically, like an interrogator looking for inconsistencies, inaccuracies, giveaways.
You couldn’t really say I found any. Eve had been quite right. As far as it went, the Memoir left no room for doubt. But the certificate, flourished without warning from the past of a distant country, focused my attention on its fateful date: September 1900.
“Passing through Capetown in early September, I met Couch … and mentioned I would have to disappoint the van der Merwes … Couch volunteered to take my place in Durban … So it was that I arrived home in England with but a week in which to conduct my election campaign.”
The election that year had been held on October 4. That would place Strafford’s return to England “but a week” before around September 27. A sea voyage from South Africa? Say two weeks. So he’d have left Capetown around September 13. Damn: there was time enough for him to have married Miss van der Merwe in Port Edward on September 8.
“Couch volunteered to take my place in Durban.” Not Port Edward. Did he really? Presumably not. Then why say it? Unless Strafford was laying an alibi, reassuring himself that, no, he didn’t really commit the van der Merwe madness, that foolish last fling in South Africa never happened at all, couldn’t for that reason touch him so long after, so far away. Yet it did happen. I’d seen his upright, fluent, English signature on the certificate and there it was again, at the end of the Memoir, little changed by the intervening fifty years.
I paced the tiny room, glowered at the rain-lashed wall of Pembroke College across the alley from my window, and wondered: who was she, Strafford? Just some poor, pretty maid you wanted to forget? Is that what you thought? That Elizabeth shouldn’t be denied you just because of a senseless soldier’s lapse? “That was in another country, and besides the wench is dead”? Only she wasn’t, was she?
Later, I began to feel anger rising against Strafford. I felt cheated, deceived by him, a little as Elizabeth must have felt. In that mood, I went out to drink away the evening, roamed the bars and pubs whetting my resentment with alcohol. The Couchmans’ concern to keep me away from Elizabeth in her dotage, to dissuade me from reopening an old wound, suddenly made sense. More than that, it seemed a decent thing for them to do.
That, in itself, gave me pause for thought. I didn’t know Elizabeth, but I knew her son and her granddaughter – all too well. Decency was a quality they identified with what was neat and seemly. And, when drunk, I naturally thought of Ambrose, and the mysterious, threatening visitors to Lodge Cottage the spring of Strafford’s last journey home. Who would fear an old, disgraced man? Nobody. That answer wouldn’t go away and nor would the growing conviction that there was something wrong with the story – or this version of it, presented to me by somebody whose objectivity I knew to be as questionable as my own. What about that, after all? The one revelation that hadn’t been made the night before.
I raced back to Princes’ and read the South African sequence in the Memoir over again. “Couch volunteered to take my place in Durban.” Couch the coward, cheat and … what else? Did Couch go to Durban after all? Perhaps they both went to Port Edward. Who were the witnesses to the wedding? I’d forgotten to look, would have to check. But, if Couchman knew of it, perhaps even connived at it, was it he who betrayed Strafford, alerted Julia Lambourne, maybe Lloyd George as well, then casually helped himself to a distraught Elizabeth? That would explain his fear of Strafford, why he tried to buy him off, why, perhaps, he finally had him killed off. And Henry? Could I detect his podgy hand in a nasty little murder of a helpless old man?
I’d arranged to meet Eve on the Fen Causeway at noon. Neutral ground was fitting, I suppose, for an occasion that might well decide whether we joined forces or went our separate ways. I made my way to the rendezvous across Coe Fen, breathing deeply and trying to blow away a thick head. Certainly, Saturday’s rain had left Cambridge clean and fresh. The only haze left was in my mind, surrounding Eve. I couldn’t forget my dream of her – the perfect, nubile temptress. Yet, in the waking world, she was sharp-brained, giving just enough to make me want more but without dispelling one atom of her mystery.
There was another rub: the Couchman connexion. A marriage certificate, conjured like a rabbit from a hat: so convenient, so unanswerable. Alone and clear-headed in a rational moment, I questioned that. If Eve was simply doing the Couchmans’ bidding, what better than to produce a piece of paper, like a blank cheque, to buy my silence?
If that was so, I realized, Eve would lead me to a policy of inaction. Let the dead bury the dead, let Strafford and his friend or foe Couchman, with all their secrets and deceits, rest in peace. It wasn’t the historian’s line though, certainly not that of the thrusting young academic out to make a name for herself. So which line would she choose and which would I follow?
As soon as I saw the low, sleek shape of the silver MG heading my way along the Fen Causeway, I knew it didn’t really matter which line she chose. Whichever it was, I was bound, in all my knowing weakness, to follow.
We drove out along the Colchester road to the Gog Magog Hills and walked around the wooded slopes of the Wandlebury earthworks until we found a sunny grass slope to spread the car blanket against the damp of Saturday’s rain.
Eve had brought cold chicken, crisp salad and chilled white wine to lull me into well being. If that wasn’t enough, there was the dis
tant view of a village cricket match and, of course, Eve by my side. She was dressed in the white jeans and blue peasant-style blouse she’d worn the first time I’d visited her at Darwin, ten days before. Was it really only ten days? It seemed longer to me, as we sat together on the hillside, as if she’d been around me – or in my head – for as long as I could or cared to remember.
“Have you come to any conclusions, Martin?” she said.
“Let’s look at it this way.” I was thinking aloud now, tailoring my conclusions to fit Eve’s expectations. The full range of my reactions weren’t for her consumption. “I could tell Sellick that Strafford compromised himself by pretending never to have been married and that that alone explains his fall from high office. But I’m far from sure it would satisfy him.”
“Why shouldn’t it?”
I couldn’t give Eve the true answer to her question, couldn’t tell her about Ambrose’s not so fantastic claims, because to do so would point the finger at her sponsors, the Couchmans. And to do that would open a door of doubt in our relationship which I wanted to keep firmly closed. So what did I actually say? “Because, I suppose, he’s paid a high price for what would be a disappointing conclusion.”
“Surely that’s the risk he took when he commissioned this research.”
“True, but you implied we didn’t have to give up here. We could go on digging for more.”
“That’s not quite what I had in mind.”
“It isn’t? Then what?”
“What I meant was: you could use the certificate to write an abrupt but fitting finis to your work for Sellick – or we could put the certificate to work for us.” The last phrase had silent reverberations.
I looked at Eve in puzzlement. “How?”
“I said I wasn’t disinterested, Martin. I made sure you knew that. You also know I’m writing a book about the Suffragettes as pioneer feminists. I don’t want it to be an abstruse, inaccessible work. Genuine human interest would give it depth.”
“What sort of human interest?” I was beginning to catch her drift.
“A young, idealistic girl fights for what she knows to be right. She is seduced by a politician of charm and intelligence and he seems to be persuaded by her of the rightness of the suffragist cause. But he takes no practical steps to put that persuasion into effect and has all along betrayed the girl by not revealing the truth about himself. In effect, a microcosm of the problems afflicting the Suffragettes. Told to leave politics to the wiser, better sex, they find that sex incapable of organizing its own affairs, let alone the country’s. With that theme, we’d be on to something of a coup.”
“We?”
“Naturally, Martin, what I’m proposing is a partnership.”
A partnership in crime, I thought, with Strafford as its victim. But any kind of partnership with Eve was too attractive for me to reject, so all I could do was stall. “How would Strafford come out of this?”
“Badly, I’m afraid.” She leant closer to me across the blanket. “How could it be any other way, Martin? We have clear evidence of his deceit of Elizabeth. As historians, how can we close our eyes to that?”
“I suppose we can’t.” Strafford, I thought, why aren’t you here to stop me condemning you? I can’t remember you or your Memoir when Eve lies so close to me.
“Then surely the logical extension of that is to mine Strafford and his questionable Memoir for our book.” Our book – note that.
“But what do we tell Sellick?”
“Nothing, for the moment. He won’t expect to hear anything definite yet. Until he does, he doesn’t need to know that we’re moving in a different direction, does he?”
So, softly in the spring sunshine, with the taste of her wine in my mouth and the touch of her flesh in my mind, Eve led me in the direction she wanted. Who was I betraying? Sellick, Strafford or myself? All of us, really, but Sellick was far away, Strafford was dead and I, well, I was prepared to trade whatever was necessary for whatever kind of partnership Eve was prepared to offer. I leant forward and kissed her in an act of willing abandonment.
Eve pulled away with mock sharpness. “Are there any Strafford-style secrets, in your past you should tell me about, Martin?”
“None, except a poor marriage and a better divorce.”
“In that case, you’ve nothing to worry about.”
After the picnic, we strolled around the earthworked slope, hand in hand. Eve pointed out unusual specimens of orchids and I listened, not to learn more of the exotic blooms, but simply to hear more of her voice.
Whether through her concentration on the flowers or mine on her, we were surprised by stormclouds billowing in from the west and caught in a downpour on the uncovered hillside. Through vertical, drenching rain, we ran to the car and mopped ourselves down. We were soaked through, Eve’s jeans and blouse clinging to her. There was nothing for it but to drive straight back to Cambridge.
Eve dropped me at Princes’ Hall, where I changed hurriedly. Then I walked to Darwin, the sun now perversely shining. I followed the gravel path round from the Silver Street gate, past the rain-beaded lawn, and looked up at Eve’s room, where, at that moment, a curtain twitched back to reveal her, standing solemnly, wrapped in a yellow bath towel, with wet hair tumbling onto her shoulders in pleasing disarray. She caught my eye, but didn’t pull the curtain back, instead smiled and waved her hand gently in greeting.
When I reached the room, she was wearing a kimono and welcomed me with a formal, dampish kiss. She smelt of bath oil and spring sunshine, looked, if anything, even more ravishing rumpled and unready than in any finery.
“I made a pot of coffee,” she said. “Have some while I get dressed.”
I walked over to a small table by the window, where she’d stood the coffee, poured some and sat drinking it in an armchair splashed in aqueous sunlight.
On the table, next to the coffee, stood a file and some papers, including the envelope that had contained the marriage certificate and, underneath it, several photocopies of the certificate. I picked one up and looked at it with more concentration and less shock than when Eve had first unveiled it. Strafford – his name and signature – was still obstinately there, along with Caroline van der Merwe, joined by a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church at the Veltenschrude Chapel, Port Edward, Natal, in the presence of … blast, nobody I knew, no familiar ghost like Couchman, just two names which meant nothing, but, then again, no van der Merwes either, which was odd. Why was no member of the family on hand for the biggest occasion in a young girl’s life? I looked at the addresses. Strafford’s was shown as Culemborg Barracks, Capetown and Miss van der Merwe’s as Ocean Prospect, Berea Drive, Durban. I seized an atlas from Eve’s bookcase. Port Edward was a dot on the map of South Africa, about a hundred miles south of Durban – a long way to go for a wedding. With no relatives witnessing the event, it smacked of an elopement – even, perhaps, an abduction.
Eve returned to the room, wearing jeans and a sweater.
“Any clues there?” she asked, seeing me with the atlas. I told her of my tentative conclusions. She stooped by the table and poured coffee. “You could be right, Martin,” she said. “But does it really matter?” I was shocked and obviously looked it. “Let me explain.” She sat down on the couch near me. “For our purposes, it’s surely the effect, not the circumstances, of Strafford’s South African marriage that counts. The Memoir gives us his side of things, distorted to suit. What about other people’s?”
“Such as?”
“Such as Julia Lambourne. The personal papers in her archive may tell us how and why she came by this evidence.” She sipped her coffee. “And then there’s Elizabeth. I expect you realize she’s still alive.”
“Oh yes.” It sounded simple to say, though it wasn’t. This was the first time we’d spoken of the present-day Couchmans and I dallied with the idea that Eve would now volunteer her connexion with them. But she didn’t. “So what’s the next step?”
“Glean what more we can fro
m the Kendrick Archive before tackling Lady Couchman.” I had a mental picture then of Elizabeth, the Elizabeth I knew from the Memoir, grown old gracefully, serving tea and angel cake in the drawing room at Quarterleigh even as we sat debating her past in Cambridge, unaware, in her antimacassared world, of the old grievances conspiring to catch up with her. “I’ll go down to Birkbeck tomorrow and make a start.”
“What would you like me to do?”
“Keep on with the reading, Martin. I want us to be equally knowledgeable about the Suffragettes before we announce ourselves. I won’t be gone long – I’ll certainly be back for my next lecture on Wednesday.”
“Fine. I’ll be there.” It wasn’t fine, of course. I was already deciding to spend the time trying to verify the certificate, however immaterial Eve thought its details to be, and I should certainly have asked myself: if you’re prepared to let Eve trust you to carry on reading at her direction while actually following an independent line, how can you be so sure she’s really only going to London to look at the Kendrick Archive? But her persuasive talk of “announcing ourselves” – the seductive promise of a literary partnership delivering me material and emotional success on a plate – made me forget all such doubts.
Next morning, I saw Eve off at the railway station and walked slowly back to Princes’ Hall, wondering quite how I could find out more about the van der Merwes of Boer War Durban. What was waiting for me at the college, however, drove such thoughts from my head. As I strolled through the gate into First Court, one of the porters dashed out of the lodge.
“Mr Radford,” he said, “I’ve got a message for you here. I was just going to deliver it to your room.”
“Thanks.” I raised my eyebrows in mild surprise. I hadn’t expected any mail to reach me there. In fact, it wasn’t mail, but a telephone message taken by the porter. I started to read it as I walked across the court, then stopped dead as it sank in.
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