“Technically, it makes me a criminal, Elizabeth my mistress and Henry … a bastard. But it’s not going to come to that, is it?”
“Why shouldn’t it?”
“Because of Elizabeth. If you still love her – as I do – you couldn’t do such a thing to her. And if you don’t, what would be the point?”
“Revenge?”
“It rings hollow at our time of life, Edwin. As would money, if I thought I could buy your silence. No, let’s not dress it up. If you did it, revenge wouldn’t be the word. It’s too old a crime for that. Call it by its real name: malice, pure and simple – hardly a gentlemanly virtue.”
He had won, for the moment. The gambler had played his trump. He had summoned together his failing reserves of daring for one last vital bluff. If I loved Elizabeth, I would leave old scores unsettled for her sake. If I did not, what grievance had I that could justify the destruction of his family? For who would suffer most? Not Couch. No, not he, but the innocent accessories to his crime. Mockery still hung in the night, staring at me intently from the dark void between the glow-worm trails of the city’s lights. It defied me, after all the years, to sully my unjust fate with an unworthy vengeance.
“I’ll think about what you’ve said,” I announced at last. “Then I’ll decide what to do.”
Couch looked anxious. “Think about it? What’s there to think about? If you’re going to come back to punish me, you might at least get it over with.” It seemed that he, like me, lacked stamina.
“No. I owe you nothing. You left me to ponder the tragedy of my life for forty years. I’m not letting you off the hook now. I’ll think – and you can wonder.”
“How long?”
“I don’t know. As long as I need.”
“And then?”
“Then I might let Elizabeth and your family know the truth – or I might not.” I was making him suffer for the cunning of his bluff. I already knew whether I could confront Elizabeth with the truth about her supposed husband, but I had no intention of letting him know. So I turned his uncertainty against him and, by climbing from the car, served notice that he could look for no swift or easy absolution from his sins. For sins they were, too many and too manifest for me to appraise there and then. He might have guessed, on the strength of his own assessment of me, what my decision would be. But I saw no reason to spare his nerves the doubt.
“Can I drive you somewhere?” he said through the window.
“No. I’ll walk. I need some fresh air.” We stared pointedly at each other, then he closed the window and drove off quickly, the Bentley purring away into the night.
I walked slowly along the road, away from the direction Couch had taken, down towards the heart of the city, my mind full of distant memories, struggling to sharpen and sift them into clear and ordered shape. I had so long and so often rehearsed them that my inadequacy at such a moment seemed pitiful.
Not that I had long in which to mourn the pity of it. A car approached slowly from behind until its headlamps threw a stretched shadow of me across the trees flanking the road, then slowed still further to keep pace with me. It was not the Bentley, to judge by the note of the engine, but, when I turned to identify it, I was only dazzled by the lamps. I went on again and it followed as before.
After another thirty yards, I stopped again, as did the car. I turned and, this time, shouted above the noise of the engine: “Who’s there?”
Suddenly, the engine died, followed by the lights. In the moments that it took my eyes to adjust to the darkness, a figure climbed from the driving seat of the car and walked round to the front of the bonnet, where I stood. He was a burly man in an overcoat, with a whiff of cigar smoke about him, and he soon confirmed what I had already guessed.
“I’m Henry Couchman.” His voice was low and not without menace. “Who the hell are you?”
“What business is it of yours?”
“It’s my business when a stranger bursts into my house at night and upsets my father.”
“I did not burst. Your father invited me in. We’re old friends. And I repeat: what business is it of yours what passed between us?”
“And I repeat: who the hell are you?”
“Edwin Strafford. Does the name mean anything to you?”
“No more than any vagrant’s. Why should it?”
I was beginning to bridle at his tone. “Because I believe, Mr Couchman, that you have political ambitions.”
I could almost see him puff out his chest. “I’m likely to be elected to Parliament before long. But …”
“Then you should study a little political history. I once sat in Cabinet with your party leader.”
Now it was he who bridled. “Listen to me, Strafford. You forced my father to give you some kind of interview tonight. First at my house, then up here – in secret. He was obviously distressed by your visit and, since he’s not a young man, I was concerned enough to follow you. Now suppose you tell me what you compelled him to discuss for the past hour.”
I had taken my measure of Henry earlier in the day. Though I had no complaint against him, I instinctively liked him less than his father. “It was a private matter.”
“You said you were an old friend of my father – yet I’ve never seen you before.”
“Your father has.”
“My father, Mr Strafford, has many callers upon his time and his wealth. It is my duty, as his son, to sift out the undeserving and the mischievous. You, I suspect, are one of them. So what I’m telling you is: leave him alone.”
At this, I lost patience with him. “Let me tell you something, Mr Couchman. Knowing your father as I do and, having met you, I think I know the nature of your concern. I’m sure you’ve often had occasion to cover his tracks.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“What I mean is that your father’s morals could dirty your whiter-than-white image if you weren’t careful. What you really want to know is whether my business with your father has any embarrassing implications for your political aspirations. The answer is yes.”
He shot out an arm and grasped my collar. He had the build and demeanour of a bully, a fleshy arrogance that bespoke an over-indulged acquisitiveness. “You’re just a nothing, Strafford. If you’re thinking of trying to blackmail my father – or me – then you’ve got another think coming. I could …”
What he could not do was accost me with impunity. I wrenched his arm down from my collar and stepped back a pace. “Mr Couchman, this nothing may come to loom large in your thoughts. If I have threatened your father, it’s not with blackmail, but with the truth. The truth about his conduct in South Africa, the truth about the way he brought to an end my engagement to your mother.”
“What … what are you talking about?”
“I suggest you ask your father.” Fearing that I might already have said too much, I turned on my heel and walked smartly away down the road. But he was not to be disposed of so quickly.
“Strafford,” he shouted after me. “Who are you? Where do you come from?”
I looked back at him. “I was your father’s friend, Mr Couchman. I was your mother’s fiancé. I’m from a past many people want to forget. Tell your father this: that your conduct has made his position much less secure. Tell him that you inspire in me thoughts of malice.”
Leaving Couchman for the moment speechless, I strode away. A few minutes later, I heard his car turning round and roaring off in the direction his father had taken. I did not look back.
I passed the following day in solitude at my hotel. Whether pacing my room or sitting alone in the hushed lounge, contemplating racing prints on the wall, what I actually saw, what filled my mind with wistful thoughts, was the past: Elizabeth and I when we were happy together, when we were engaged to be married, before Couch walked off the boat from Bombay and back, without my knowledge, into my life.
Yet, smart as I might at the workings of Couch’s devilish ingenuity – exploiting a youthful madness to gain not just money bu
t the woman I had thought to marry – there was no denying the force of his argument that it was too late now to seek anything as crude as vengeance.
Such would have remained my view had it not been for Henry’s intervention. If Couch’s son was as contemptible as Couch himself – if not more so – then my conscience was easier. Or so it would have been, but for Elizabeth. It was of her that I largely thought during my lonely watch. Dared I risk seeing her, being tempted to open her eyes to what her husband had done, knowing what the truth might do to her?
I never, of my own accord, found the answer, perhaps because I did not need to. It found me, after a visit I received on Wednesday morning.
I rose at dawn and gazed out of the hotel window at the early morning business of London: street cleaners, delivery vans, a horse and cart drawing milk, a few prompt men of the City making their way. It was a scene I would not have recognized fifty years before, except, that is, for the faces. Hansom cabs had been swapped for taxis, morning suits and top hats for pinstripes and bowlers, but the people remained the same. War and rations, time and fashion could not wipe away the rogues’ gallery of humanity. The faces were blank or lively, set or furtive, those of vain heroes or honest knaves.
And out of them, exploding through the flexing, yawning throng, came Henry Couchman. I could tell him by the cut of his overcoat, the set of his jaw, the young man’s impulsiveness seething within the old man’s complacency. He glared up at the sign over the hotel doors, then bound up the steps. I had a caller.
Within the time it took him to travel up in the lift, there was a hammering at the door. It was not yet breakfast time and, already, I felt weary.
He did not wait to be asked in. He burst past me and stood in the centre of the room, glowering as if in expectation that I would acknowledge some form of ownership.
“Mr Couchman. What can I do for you?”
“You can leave my father alone. You can leave my family alone. You can go back where you belong.”
“And where’s that?”
“Madeira. Anywhere provided it’s far from here. You were bought off a long time ago. If what you’re after is a supplement, that can be arranged. But don’t be greedy. Go quietly.”
“You seem to be better informed than when last we spoke.”
“My father’s told me everything about you, Strafford. One thing he didn’t mention is what’s obvious to me. You’re a loser. There’s nothing for you here.”
“You think not?”
“I know it. You can’t prove any of your allegations. But … I’m prepared to pay your nuisance value and have done with you. So what’s your price?”
I crossed to the window and looked back at him. “Did your father suggest I might be susceptible to bribery?”
“I’m here on my own account And I’m not offering a bribe, just a consideration to stop you harassing my father.” He took a step towards me. “And to make it quite clear to you that, if you refuse to go quietly, I shall be forced to make you go.”
“And how will you do that?”
“I am a man of considerable influence, Strafford. For the good of my family, my business and my party, that influence could be brought to bear on you – painfully.”
“I think you’ve said enough, Mr Couchman. Intimidation and inducement may well be your stock in trade – like father, like son, after all – but they cannot touch me. I suggest you leave, before I say something you might not want to hear.”
I opened the door but he made no move. “Listen, Strafford. If you’re not on your way back to Madeira by next Monday, the consequences could be serious.” He walked slowly to the door and faced me. “Old men often have accidents – if you take my meaning.”
“Your meaning is clear-and contemptible. You’re rapidly proving to me, Mr Couchman, that your ways are in need of correction. And that I can arrange. Now get out.”
He stepped into the hall. “If you’re not gone by Monday, Strafford, you’ll be hearing from me.” His growl had turned to a snarl. It had the note of a frightened but dangerous animal.
“On the contrary. You’ll be hearing from me.” I slammed the door in his face. A few moments later, I watched from the window as he emerged onto the pavement below and strode away towards Piccadilly Circus, colliding with a passer-by as he went and appearing, from his demeanour, to blame the other for his own clumsiness. I found myself wondering what Elizabeth thought of her son. Even I could not deny Couch his engaging charm, but Henry had his father’s presumption and arrogance admixed with neither discretion nor sensitivity. If I had looked upon his power-stained face as a parent, it would have shamed me. I had to know Elizabeth’s mind.
For she was, after all, the crux of the matter, as much a victim as I was and therefore deserving of consideration even if I did not still love her, which I sensed I did. But the suspicion had grown in my mind that what I really loved was the memory of Elizabeth as she had been forty years before, not the present, remote actuality. There was only one way to put it to the test.
From my luggage, I picked out the book of Hardy’s verse that I had brought with me from Madeira; Satires of Circumstance (an apt title indeed). Elizabeth it was who had introduced me to Hardy the poet, who had been reading another of his collections – Time’s Laughingstocks (apter still) – when we met, in tantalizing secrecy, in Hyde Park all of a lost long ago. Perhaps for that reason, I cleaved to Hardy’s work as a talisman, an antidote – for all its melancholy – to the bitterness of old age.
Yet Hardy, in his endearing frailty, had not always been proof against despair himself. I perused his Poems of 1912–13 and found amongst them one which seemed to capture my feelings at that moment. ‘After a Journey’ spoke of Hardy’s return to a landscape haunted by the ghost of his dead wife and coloured by his regret for things done and undone. I too had returned to a haunted land, but, in my case, I seemed to be the ghost, to whom Elizabeth promised a form of exorcism.
Elizabeth had not been at the house in Hampstead. If I were to find her, Couch’s Sussex address (Quarterleigh, Miston) seemed likelier. Guessing that Couch might still be staying with Henry, perhaps debating how much more of the truth to tell him, I could afford to waste no time. Within an hour of Henry’s ireful exit, I was at Victoria boarding a train for Chichester.
In Chichester, I bought a map and took a local train to Singleton, a village on the South Downs. From there, it was but a Five mile walk through the lanes to Miston. Yet, when I came to step it out, the miles dragged at my feet. The nearer my destination I drew, the less I wanted to arrive.
I came as a stranger down a rough lane from the west into the village, its walls and gateways announcing themselves unremarkably through the misty rain as just another Sussex settlement, yet seeming, as they closed about me with all the indifference reserved for an unknown wayfarer, something more: a place of reckoning, a trysting ground whither I had come too late.
I sought directions at the post office and followed them to a lane behind the church. Quarterleigh was a thatched house set in its own grounds, an attractive blend of cosy cottage and country seat: a placid, pleasing abode, serene in its setting beneath the slope of the Downs. It could hardly have been less forbidding. Yet a 75-year-old man stood at its low white gates and hesitated to pay a call on the 62-year-old woman of the house. I retreated to the wall on the opposite side of the road, dismayed to find myself wet-palmed and trembling with nervousness. This was no way to present myself to Elizabeth. How, I wondered, would I react if she walked down the drive and saw me at that moment?
Fortunately, she did not. Instead, coming from the direction of the village along the lane, there appeared a rotund countrywoman with a laden basket under her arm and a bustling gait. She had the look of a housekeeper about her. When she turned in at the entrance to Quarterleigh, it seemed too good an opportunity to miss. I called out to her and hurried across the lane.
She consented, not without a suspicious sidelong glance, to my unusual request. Yes, she did keep hou
se at Quarterleigh and, yes, she would take a note to her mistress, Lady Couchman, whom she believed to be at home. It was, I emphasized, for Elizabeth’s eyes only and, if she wished to discuss its contents with me, she could find me in the churchyard. If she had not arrived by six o’clock – just over an hour away – I would leave. The note, which I had written on the train, was anonymous, but I had little doubt that she would guess its author. I had copied a verse from Hardy’s ‘After a Journey’ to announce my coming and to leave open the question of whether she would grant me an audience. The choice of Hardy would, I knew, redound to the full the echo of the verse. Elizabeth, of all people, would be able to read my questing mind between the lines.
“Yes: I have re-entered your olden haunts at last;”
(Is it really a surprise to hear me again?)
“Through the years, through the dead scenes I have tracked you;”
(Why should it be, when I have never forgotten you?)
“What have you now found to say of our past –”
(Will you not grant me one boon – to speak of that which divided us?)
“Scanned across the dark space wherein I have lacked you?”
(For it is true – I have never recovered from the loss of you.)
Would she come? Did I want her to come? I could not decide.
And then she came.
“Edwin.” It was her voice, as I would have imagined it, the insouciant lilt of youth become a mature assurance.
I turned and looked at her for the first time in 32 years. If she had become old, then old age was beauteous. Of course her hair was grey, her carriage deliberate, her bearing stately, but that was not what I saw. Her eyes fixed mine with a look that was there the day I forced an audience with a brick-throwing Suffragette. Her lips, had they not been set grimly for this meeting, could still, I knew, have mocked and delighted me with her smile. “So you came,” I said. She nodded gravely. “Thank you.”
“There’s no need to thank me. How are you?”
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