Past Caring
Page 36
I wandered through the detritus of a family home, feeling as much despair as hope. It was an ideal hiding place for anything, and that was the problem. How could I look for something specific in this vast muddle? It was the difficulty in Ambrose’s cottage magnified ten times.
Ambrose! How he’d have laughed to see me trailing Knox through a chaos his administrative mind detested: a chaos of Ambrose’s making – among others. What had he said to Nick? “Tell Martin to remember that we Straffords have lofty memories.” Not, as I’d thought, a reference to the family’s faded glory, but an old eccentric’s last joke, which I’d failed to see. Now, here I was, at his bidding. But what could I see? Everything and nothing. I laughed at the answer.
“Bit desperate, what?” said Knox, thinking he’d caught my drift.
“Yes.” He couldn’t have known how right he was.
We passed through one panel doorway into the next part of the attic. As before, an excess of riches. Under every dustsheet, behind every box, could have been the answer. But where to begin? A battered and strapped old cricket bat was propped against a hamper in one corner. Had Strafford once hit the village bowling for six with it? No. It was a boy’s bat. Perhaps he’d instructed Ambrose in its use, on his return from the Great War.
On top of the hamper was a rusty metal wastepaper bin. Inside, a spindly lampstand minus shade and bulb and an old bottle once used as a candle holder, the neck encrusted with wax. The crooked, yellowed label read STRAFFORD’S IMPERIAL PALE ALE – BEST IN THE WEST. It must have been more than a hundred years old, the contents brewed in Crediton – before the Straffords dissociated themselves from such humble trade – and drunk long ago.
My eye moved beyond the hamper. There, in the angle of a joist, stood something else I recognized: a toy castle, about four feet square, a castellated turret at each corner, a keep in the middle, arrow-slits, tiny doors and arched windows, a drawbridge, the wood of the doors painted green, the walls carefully covered with stone-patterned paper, the battlements sawn all round to an exact pattern. It was a craftsman’s joy – and that of a young boy I’d known as an old man.
A broken cobweb hung vertically from the joist. The dust around the castle had been disturbed and, yes, I could see fingermarks on the coated surface of the drawbridge. A tiny turret door sagged open on its leather hinge. The interior was dark but certainly large enough for the purpose I suspected. The drawbridge reached the height of the castle – about two feet. I judged a standard size book could have been thrust inside and longed to test my judgement. Where, after all, could have been more fitting? Ambrose’s Christmas gift from 1918 – lovingly carved by his uncle in a task to take his mind off the carnage of war.
My confidence grew with the memory of Ambrose’s letter to me. “The old bugger chose a cunning hiding place and it’s only thanks to you I looked there.” Why me? Of course. My visit had prompted him, while we took our hair of the dog in The Greengage, to recall his uncle’s mention of the castle on their own last drink there in 1951. What Strafford had remembered, Ambrose also remembered and, eventually, I did too. The perfect, hinted-at hiding place was before me, with Ambrose’s fingermarks in the dust as confirmation.
Only one thing held me back – Knox’s bemused company. “Spotted something?” he asked, noticing my rapt attention on what was, to him, just another section of the shambles.
“No, no.” My denial was instinctive. I couldn’t let him think there was anything of value to be found. He’d have laid claim to it with curatorial zeal. Once again, stealth was my only recourse. Stumbling on my prize, I had to walk calmly away from it – and return later, alone. “As you warned me: just dusty old junk.”
“Seen enough?”
“I think so.” I had. Enough to know I was on the right track. “Shall we go down?”
Knox was happy to go. To him, the attic was a door to be locked, a key on a varnished board. He insisted I have tea back in his office and sank gratefully into the chair behind his desk, like a man returning to his element.
I sustained the small talk over tea, Knox recounting how he’d stiffened the administration of the property while I eyed a certain brass key across the room and regretted not having plied him with enough brandy to make him forget to lock the attic door.
I left with a reluctance Knox mistook for pleasure in his company. “Jolly nice to have met you again, old fellow.”
“You too, Major Knox. Thanks for the tour.”
“Think nothing of it. Call again any time you’re passing.”
“Thanks. I will.”
“Next time, we’ll miss out those blasted attics, what?”
“Good idea.” Little did he know.
I went down the back stairs to the hall. The old lady was still at her desk, handing booklets to visitors as they entered.
“I trust you enjoyed the house,” she said brightly.
“Very much. Your Major Knox is a most hospitable fellow.”
“A charming man – such a gentleman.”
“I said I might call on him again.” I tried to sound off-hand. “Do you know what the best time would be?”
“Any weekday I think, during opening hours. Major Knox is a most punctual man … except Wednesday afternoons, that is. He always has Wednesday afternoons off – for his golf, you know.”
“Thanks. I’ll remember that.” There was no danger I wouldn’t. It was Tuesday afternoon. I had only to wait 24 hours and Knox would be absent from his post. The key and the attic would be at my disposal.
Lunchtime the following day: ideal, I judged, to find the administrative quarters of Barrowteign at their quietest. I followed the tour route as far as the backstairs, then headed up instead of down. The corridor on the second floor was silent, with no clack of typewriter or jangle of telephone. Knox’s secretary had evidently gone to lunch and Knox himself I knew to be out for the rest of the day.
I walked slowly to his office, trying not to creak too many floorboards. Sunlight was streaming through the window behind his desk. A snatch of childish laughter came from the garden below. There, on the board by the door, was key number twelve.
It was simple to reach out and remove it and I knew I was safe from detection if I returned it before the end of the day. Hadn’t Knox said nobody ever went up to the attics? Yet my heart pounded as I walked along the corridor towards the door leading to them. Strangely, it wasn’t the fear of the daylight robber which had gripped me, but fear of what I was now so close to discovering. The Postscript: I’d dreamed about it, debated it, run over in my mind only that morning on the bus all the permutations of what it might contain. The prospect of certainty was suddenly intimidating.
I closed the attic door carefully behind me, locked it and climbed the stairs to the windowless ante-chamber. Then into the attic proper. Sunlight split the gloom in dust-hung wedges. I threaded my way anxiously through the hoard of rubbish. There, safe in its niche by the angle of a joist, was the toy castle.
I crouched in front of it, as Ambrose must have done, and prized gingerly at the drawbridge. It stuck fast – I hesitated to wrench at it. Then, the answer: a rusty spindle imbedded in the wall of the castle porch. It turned, squeakily but effectively – the drawbridge jerked down on a string cable.
Inside, a matchwood grille representing a portcullis. And, in the other wall of the porch, another, smaller spindle. But no, this one was broken. It hung slackly, the string perished years before – or severed in Ambrose’s haste days before.
With the string gone, I could raise the portcullis by one finger lodged in the grille. I was on my knees now, peering in through the narrow gateway. Sure enough, by the dim light I could see, as I held up the portcullis, an object – a package of some kind – stowed inside. I reached in with my other hand. It felt solid and book-shaped, the wrapper vaguely waxy, tied with rough string. I eased it out from its resting place. There was a struggle to get it past the spikes of the portcullis. Then it was free – and in my hands.
It was
a waxed canvas package, securely wrapped and tied. I cursed myself for not bringing a penknife, told myself to be patient as I coaxed the knot loose. At last, the string fell away. I folded back the canvas, then an inner layer of crinkled brown paper – and there it was.
It could have been the Memoir looking back at me: the same style of book – a leatherbound, foolscap, maroon-covered tome with marbled pages, standard issue, perhaps, in the Consular Service. Unlike the Memoir, most of its pages were blank, but the first quarter or so was filled with that distinctive, copperplate handwriting in diplomatic black ink that left no doubt in my mind: Strafford had left his mark. Just when I’d begun to fear never hearing his voice again, here he was, speaking to me as only he could.
There was a sound somewhere in the attic. With a start, I snapped the book shut, sending up a cloud of dust. I coughed and cursed my nerves. It was just a mouse, scurrying among the packing cases. The door, after all, was locked behind me. Nevertheless, I felt vulnerable in that labyrinth of dusty rafters. I needed air, light and time to study my discovery. I couldn’t wait till I’d taken it back to Exeter, yet I couldn’t stay where I was.
I left the wrapping paper and string by the castle and walked over to one of the windows: a grimy fanlight admitting a sepia beam to the attic. Outside, there was a lead gully forming a gutter, a brick parapet beyond it and blue sky. The gully was broad and dry, the brightness inviting. The fanlight opened in the centre. I wrenched down the retaining bolts and pushed the two halves apart. They stuck for a moment, then swung free.
A rush of sunlight and birdsong pierced the attic. I put my head out and looked along the gully in either direction. It was quite a heat trap behind its parapet and just the airy hideaway I was looking for. I dragged over an old ottoman and, using it as a platform, climbed out through the window.
From the parapet, I had an imposing view of the garden. A few tiny figures were moving amid the fountains and clipped hedges. Beyond them, the foothills of the Haldon range climbed eastwards. The scene shimmered in a modest heat haze. It could have been painted or embroidered – a pattern of English country house life laid out like a rug. A scene four generations of Straffords could have looked at smugly: the greenery refulgent with their ownership. But not any more. The Straffords were dead, strangers were loose in their garden – one on the very roof of their house.
Not quite a stranger, Strafford – I hope I can say that. You could have done worse than have me open your book. Whoever ransacked Ambrose’s cottage, for instance. Instead, it was me, feet against the brick parapet behind the stone-faced wall of your house, back to the sun-warmed slate roof some architect designed for your grandfather 150 years ago, just so, at a lounging angle dictated by the reclining rainfall of Devon winters. It was me, with a good three hours at my disposal before I needed to worry about leaving, a vital three hours to give to you and your last, late thoughts. Perched on the apex of your ancestors, crouched at the nadir of your family fortunes, I opened your book – and a door with it, into a past still able to confound the present.
Postscript
I had not thought we would speak again so soon, fate and I. I had supposed the conclusion of my Memoir to be just that: a conclusion, permitting of no sequel, deserving of no encore. It needs not saying that I should have known better.
How came then the interruption to my unremarked and unremarkable exile on Madeira? It came explosively, like thunder on a humid afternoon. And humid it was that day, the Porto Novo valley steaming in a mist which refused to disperse before the heat of the sun. It was the day before my seventy-fifth birthday, and I, having lived to an age when nothing might be thought still to be capable of surprising me, was about to discover that life had left its greatest shock for me till last.
I was on the verandah after luncheon. Tomás had removed the coffee tray and study of the previous Saturday’s Times had not prevented me falling asleep in my chair. Once I would have brooded over the leader page or gone for a walk round the quinta to forget the nonsense I had read in the parliamentary report. Nowadays I just slept – and forgot the more easily.
I recall that, for an instant, I believed myself to be dreaming – as, mayhap, I had been – of my time in South Africa. Certainly that would account for the accent of the voice seeming somehow fitting. But then, it was not the accent which served to shock. It was what the voice said.
“Wake up – old man!” The words were brutal and barked, like an instruction, many years after I had last been instructed to do anything.
I opened my eyes and stiffened in the chair. Leaning on the other side of the verandah rails was a man I did not recognize – unusual, in itself, in the Porto Novo valley. He was a short, lean man of middle age, grey-haired but muscular, bronzed by the sun but not, I judged, the Madeiran variety. His clothes were expensive, but there was about him the look of a desperado, a gleam in his piercing blue eyes of something akin to mania. Or perhaps I would not have jumped to these conclusions had he not held in his right hand, trained across the verandah rails at me, a revolver.
“Are you Edwin Strafford?” he demanded.
“Yes.” I tried to remain calm. “And who are you?”
“They call me Leo Sellick.” The answer seemed oddly framed.
“I don’t think I know you, Mr Sellick.”
“You wouldn’t.”
“Then … what can I do for you?”
“To begin with, you can tell me if you recognize this gun.”
“Why should I?”
“Because it’s yours.”
“I don’t own a gun.”
“You did once.”
“I think not … except in the army.”
“Exactly … in the army.”
“Mr Sellick, I left the army more than thirty years ago.”
“And you lost this gun more than fifty years ago.”
“I think you’re mistaken.”
“No. There’s no mistake. You are Edwin Strafford.”
“l am.”
“And I, God help me, am your son.”
At that moment, I had no doubt that the man was mad. An armed intruder claiming to be the son I did not have could hardly be sane. Yet the fact that he was armed dictated that he be, at least, humoured. Besides, I felt an unaccountable curiosity to hear more. Perhaps it was that an old man in uneventful retirement welcomes any intrusion, however abrupt. “I have no son,” I said, with an effort at sweet reason.
“Then meet the man who thought he had no father … until now.”
“Mr Sellick, sooner or later, my servants will chance upon us here and be alarmed if they see that you are armed. Why not sit down and put that gun away? I’d rather there were no accidents.”
“There’ll be no accidents, Strafford. If I decide to kill you, it’ll be for the best of reasons.”
He walked slowly up the verandah steps and sat in the upright chair opposite me, where he evidently felt in a dominant position. He held a panama hat in his left hand and rested it over the revolver in his other hand. I struggled, meanwhile, to take stock of him. He looked and moved like many a rancher I had encountered in South Africa: lean, tough and terse, with eyes that reached as far as the Veldt. In the context of the Boer War, such men had to be watched; they might shoot a man as easily and automatically as they would a hyena. Yet Sellick was far from home and his brow was knotted with thought.
“What brought you here, Mr Sellick?”
“A piece of paper, You could say. Take a look.” He released the hat, reached into his jacket pocket, took out a folded paper and tossed it onto my lap.
It was a birth certificate and I guessed that it was his. But I had no grounds to be sure. The entry was, for all its apparent authenticity, preposterous: a fusion of names and identities which were wholly alien to each other. A stern-faced South A frican had burst into my life and flapped beneath my nose a document purporting to disprove all that I knew about myself. I sat for a moment dumbstruck by the outrageous evidence placed before me.
It was, I assumed, an uncanny coincidence. There had been another British officer in South Africa bearing my name. He had fathered a child there. Sellick was labouring under some kind of misapprehension. Yet what kind was not clear. Was he, after all, the Leo named on the certificate? What did he want of me?
“Is this,” I said at last, “a record of your birth?”
“It is.”
“Yet your name is Sellick – that of the doctor who attended the birth.”
“Correct.”
“Then please – explain.”
“It is you who should explain. But I’ll tell you a story. The part of it you don’t know.
“That is my birth certificate. But it only came into my hands this year. I was raised in the Cape Province of South Africa by a rancher named Daniel Sellick. He had a fine spread on the Great Karroo. As a boy, I took him and his wife for my parents. On my twenty-first birthday, they told me the truth, or part of it, at any rate.