Past Caring

by Robert Goddard

  Abruptly, Elizabeth rose from her chair. “If you’ll excuse me, gentlemen, I’ll telephone my daughter-in-law – to be sure my son’s on his way. We may have to dine without him.” She seemed happier to go than she was anxious about Henry.

  “Presumably,” I said, “you didn’t accept Elizabeth’s invitation in the spirit in which it was issued.”

  “Using all the new-found knowledge that the Postscript has made available to you, Martin, why don’t you tell me?”

  “The Postscript has told me nothing about you that you don’t already know yourself.”

  “You must let me be the judge of that. Your letter hinted at more than it said.”

  “It wasn’t meant to. I couldn’t say much without drawing premature conclusions. For instance, I’ve read Strafford’s account of his meeting with you in 1951, but I’m sure your account would be different.”

  Sellick eyed me closely. His brow furrowed as if he was trying to glean something from my words that wasn’t there. “As you say, I’m sure it would be.” But he wasn’t going to say how. The certainty hung in the air between us, the certainty that he hadn’t come to Sussex to bare his soul but to comb other people’s.

  Elizabeth returned to the room, looking more strained than when she’d left. “Henry set off in good time to have been here an hour ago,” she said. “I can’t think where he’s got to. We’d better start dinner without him.”

  Dora had excelled herself in a lost cause: the meal was a country cook’s triumph. Unhappily, nobody’s thoughts were on food. Sellick became less ambiguous and more overtly bitter as the evening went on, while Elizabeth bore his sarcasm with a martyr’s fortitude. Alec ate and drank in glum silence, while my interventions failed to lighten the atmosphere.

  My mind went back to the meal in Madeira with which Sellick had fêted and beguiled me two months before. How different that had been from this ashen feast in Sussex. I had the sensation that it should never have been, that we four should never have met – Elizabeth struggling to make good her husband’s wrongs, Sellick determined to inflict some harsh, hubristic lesson on any of the Couchmans left to face him, Alec embarrassed by his own complicity. As for me, Strafford’s trail had shorn me of the delusions which Sellick had exploited so well. They’d fallen away and left him, the arch-manipulator, in clear sight. I watched him, picking at the moistly textured lamb with suspicion, sipping the fine bordeaux without enthusiasm, and recognized him for the first time. Not the cultured recluse or the wealthy free-thinker who’d commissioned my research, but a keen mind narrowly focussed, in whose field of vision we struggled like specimens on a watch-glass.

  The tension tripped into dread when Elizabeth, still dignified but increasingly defensive, sought some measure of exoneration for Couch. “You must understand, Mr Sellick, that my husband, though guilty of deserting your mother, never realized that he was also deserting a son. It was not a conscious act of neglect.”

  Sellick’s eyes blazed icily. “I presume you would prefer to call it an unconscious act, Lady Couchman. Or shall we say feckless? Perhaps we could ascribe it to a fault of character common in the English officer class of the turn of the century.”

  “What fault would that be?” I asked.

  “Lady Couchman should be familiar with it: an arrogant assumption that they could go and do exactly as they pleased, without let, hindrance or any obligation to those whose lives they disrupted. We still live today in South Africa – and elsewhere – with the consequences of this peculiarly Anglo-Saxon vanity: that the Empire was your playground.”

  “You hired me as an historian, Leo, so I ought to tell you what you must know: that’s a crude distortion. How can the Afrikaaner community blame apartheid on …”

  Sellick brought his glass down onto the table with such force I thought it would break. “Forget your liberal pretensions, Martin. Concentrate on cause and effect. Why was my mother’s family singled out for massacre by Botha’s marauders in 1901? Because they had consorted with – or been duped by – an English officer who guyed their genuine political concerns and deceived their daughter for … what? Life, faith, justice? None of these. Merely amusement, merely a certain transient, self-flattering pleasure. They paid for his dalliance with their lives and my mother with her sanity. But when did my father ever even start paying?”

  A silence fell. “Never,” murmured Elizabeth. “The debt has fallen to me.”

  “If you accept the debt,” said Sellick, “you must honour the payment.”

  “Wait a minute,” I put in. “It sounds as if you’ve thought about all this for a long time.”

  “All my adult life, young man.”

  “Then are you saying that you knew for certain Sir Gerald Couchman was your father long before I wrote to you about the Postscript, long before you hired me to find out why Strafford resigned?”

  “Certainty is a luxury I have only lately been able to afford. Conviction I have long had. As soon as I read the Memoir, I guessed it must be so. I knew Strafford to have been telling me the truth and I concluded that he must have had me confined on Madeira so that he could go home to England and confront Couchman with his suspicions. But what happened? I gave you a genuine problem, though it is true I did not define the question.”

  “If that’s so, why did you let Sir Gerald get away with it?”

  “I cannot pursue men beyond the grave. Sir Gerald has eluded me.”

  “You’re being obtuse.”

  “I beg your pardon?” He bridled. In the background, at the periphery of my mind, I heard the telephone ring and Dora answer it.

  “I’m not talking about now. I’m talking about when you first read the Memoir. If you deduced that Sir Gerald Couchman was your father, why didn’t you pursue him as you’d mistaken pursued Strafford?”

  Dora came into the room. “It’s your daughter-in-law, ma’am. She says it’s very urgent.” Elizabeth hurried out. Sellick didn’t seem to notice her going, but continued to look straight at me.

  “It is you who are being obtuse, Martin. It was a year after Strafford’s death before I bought Quinta do Porto Novo, and several months after that when I found and read the Memoir. By the time I’d traced Couchman, he was dead.”

  “It really took you three years to get round to it?”

  “What are you suggesting, then?”

  “I’m not sure, but there’s something …” The conversation stopped dead as Elizabeth walked back into the room – deathly pale, suddenly wraithlike: a woman shocked beyond words. “What’s wrong?” I said. Alec jumped up and tried to show her to a chair. She waved him away.

  “That was Letty,” she said in a distracted, dreamlike tone. “The police have contacted her to say that Henry crashed his car on the way down here. He’s dead.”

  Nine

  The borderlands between credulity and revelation. Backtracking fast, but still not fast enough. It was as if I had to wind in the sequence of my life before I could reach the point where it began to pay out the line leading to a house of mourning in Sussex. And, even then, I wouldn’t have gone back far enough.

  Henry’s death wasn’t the something I’d been stumbling towards in my mental duel with Sellick but, when Elizabeth announced it, it was his face – not hers – I looked at. And for an instant – passing faster than my mind could follow but not than my eye could see – there was, in his look, not surprise, not even indifference, but satisfaction, a faint movement that could have begun a nod of confirmation.

  Death triggers a reflex of ritual and formal proceedings which swamps, for a while, too much thought. The shock of Henry going did just that to me. More than anything, I felt for Elizabeth. Whatever Henry had done, she didn’t deserve to lose him as her only reward for trying to do what was right.

  Dora came to the fore, sitting with her mistress in the lounge all night, making tea and letting her talk of Henry as none of us had known him – a child, a youth and a young man, before anybody had a right to say how he would turn out. When Se
llick seemed likely to linger, Alec pushed him to go. We stood in the hall, waiting for the taxi, only Sellick among us at ease.

  “Most unfortunate,” he said, with meaningful understatement.

  “Odd to think,” I remarked in a daze, “that you’ll never now meet your half-brother.”

  “It is always odd to think of death.”

  I looked at him sharply, but he’d prepared a face that told me nothing. “What will you do now?”

  “We will be staying at The Dolphin & Anchor Hotel in Chichester – for a week or so. When you’re ready to show me the Postscript, contact me there.” I heard the taxi pull up outside. “I’ll be in touch, Martin. Don’t forget – you’re still working for me.”

  They were gone before I could summon a rebuttal. I hadn’t, in reality, been working for Sellick since I’d met Eve and he knew that. But, as the taxi rumbled away into the night, his words stayed in my mind. Was I still, without knowing it, doing his bidding?

  Morning came – but not a good one. Elizabeth’s doctor visited the house and prescribed some sleeping pills. She went upstairs to rest. I drank coffee in the kitchen, while Dora, who’d been delegated to do some telephoning, busied herself needlessly and told me what she knew.

  “It’s a bad business,” she said. “A bad, bad business. Mr Henry … well, you knew Mr Henry. But ’e were a man of substance. Now ’e’s just … snuffed out. ’Im an’ the other feller.”

  “What other fellow?”

  “Seems there was two cars involved – head-on like. Mr Henry was overtaking a lorry on Gibbet Hill, up near Hindhead. Both drivers killed outright. Nobody’s said nothing, o’ course, but it sounds as if it was Mr Henry’s fault. ’E always was ’eadstrong.”

  “That does sound bad.”

  She leant against the table beside me. “That Mr Sellick – your friend last night …”

  “No friend of mine.”

  “Mmm. Well, I shouldn’t say it, but it seemed to me ’e brought bad luck to the house.”

  “Very likely, Dora, very likely.”

  The news had come too late for the morning papers, but it had been on the radio. About midday, I answered the door to a reporter from the Brighton Evening Argus.

  “How’s Lady Couchman taken the news?”

  “How would you expect?”

  “And you are?”

  “A friend.”

  “Fleet Street are beginning to blow this up a bit. How do you see it?”

  “As a tragic accident.”

  “They’re saying it could be suicide.”

  “Why?”

  “The lorry driver reckons Mr Couchman pulled out onto the wrong side of the road on a blind bend. Going uphill, he must have known the risks.”

  “Everyone makes mistakes.”

  “This one cost another man his life. Mr Couchman’s firm has been sliding on the Stock Exchange lately. And he resigned yesterday from the Shadow Cabinet.”

  “What?”

  He looked at me in surprise. “You didn’t know, did you?”

  What did it mean? I got rid of the reporter and tried to think. The week before, Henry had been prepared to bluff and bluster his way through anything. He’d very neatly got the better of me. Resignation and suicide couldn’t have been further from his thoughts. And yet, and yet. Twenty miles from Miston. Could he ever really have arrived? It was as if some weird determinism had forbidden it. How could he and Sellick, the doppelgängers of their father’s split life, every really meet without mutual destruction?

  Elizabeth saw me in her room that afternoon, a mellow haven of stained beams, blue fabrics and cream papering, with windows looking out across the garden and the wood beyond the brook.

  “Where has Mr Sellick gone, Martin?”

  “A hotel in Chichester.”

  She was sitting in an armchair by the window. Only her continual kneading of the wooden arm ends transmitted her state of mind. “I hoped you might say Madeira. I wish now I’d never invited him here. He came for nothing but … satisfaction.”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  She looked up at me. “Don’t worry, Martin. I don’t blame you. I don’t blame anyone any more.”

  “If only everyone could do the same.” I sat on the edge of the bed opposite her.

  “Henry wasn’t a good man. Nor was his father. But they were good to me.”

  “I know. Truly, I do now know.”

  “But at what price, Martin?”

  I wanted to refute the thought, for her sake and mine. “It was an accident.”

  “I don’t believe that and I don’t think you do. I gather he resigned from the Shadow Cabinet yesterday. Why? In what state of mind did he leave London?”

  “Who can say?”

  “Letty – if anyone.”

  “And when will you see her?”

  “Tomorrow. Helen’s collecting her from Oakment Square and bringing her down here. We’ve decided Henry should be buried here, in Miston, beside his father. The funeral will be on Friday.”

  “Do you want me to leave before they arrive?”

  “It might be best. Dora has said she would be delighted to put you up. I don’t want you to be far away.”

  “I shan’t be.”

  She gazed out of the window. “It’ll be best for Letty to come here. I gather the press won’t leave her alone. Henry’s resignation has made them suspicious. They won’t stop until they prove the crash wasn’t an accident. If they’re right – if we’re right – then it’s worse than ever, because Henry took an innocent man with him.”

  “We can’t be sure. Nobody can.”

  “Sadly, Martin, that’s no consolation.”

  Craving any action to occupy the empty hours, I slammed out of the house in the brooding stillness of early evening, intending to take the MG out for a hard drive round the lanes. When I got to it, pulled up on the gravel beside the garage, I stopped dead. There was a note wedged under one of the windscreen wipers. I tugged it free and read it.

  “Martin – Want to talk? Find me in the churchyard. E.” Was she still there? How long ago had she left the note? I raced to find out.

  She was waiting in the lychgate, leaning with her back against one of the pillars. I remember thinking, as I walked along the path towards her, of Strafford’s appointment with Elizabeth in the same place, at the same time of day, all those years before.

  When I was about ten yards away, Eve pushed herself forwards from the pillar and turned to face me. She was dressed all in black. Her look was severe, unsmiling, combatative.

  “Why are you here?” I asked.

  “To collect my property.”

  I tossed her the car keys and she caught them easily. “I’m surprised you didn’t report it to the police.”

  “Are you?”

  “You said in your note you wanted to talk.”

  “No. I asked if you wanted to talk.”

  “Okay, I will. Let’s stick with property. You took me to Braunton Burrows that day so the coast would be clear for Timothy to break into the Bennetts’ house looking for the Postscript.”

  “You think so?”

  “I do. Then, when you realized it wasn’t there, you persuaded me to hand it over to you. Only I saw you with Timothy before that could happen – and realized what a fool I’d been.”

  “If I really went to those lengths, wasn’t it rather careless of me to be seen with Timothy before the handover?”

  “Are you denying it then?”

  “I don’t have to deny anything, Martin. I don’t think you really know what you’re accusing me of.”

  “I’m accusing you of being Timothy Couchman’s property from the day you took the Fellowship. All that in Cambridge – all the literary endeavour, all the subtle come-on – was a sham. Everything I said you passed on. Every move I made they knew about. You led me by the nose.”

  “You led yourself. It was no sham. Do you really think what happened on that beach was play-acting? Do you really think I’d hoax yo
u body and soul for the sake of Timothy Couchman’s grubby little cover-up? Or is that just a way of covering up your own past? Do tell me. I’d be fascinated to hear what you really think.”

  Her eyes and her voice: icy cold on that warm, oppressive evening. Had she chosen the rendezvous to tell me something? Who was misjudging who? She stood stock still, but her look danced with the possibilities she didn’t mean me to understand.

  I didn’t speak, didn’t know what to say. With a flash of her eyes that formed a kind of dismissal, Eve moved at last. She walked straight past me without a look or a word and I watched her go as far as the kissing-gate before she looked back, just once. “I hear there’s been another accident,” she said, and then walked on.

  I was still standing in the lychgate a few minutes later when I heard the MG accelerate away up the lane. Eve had gone and, with her going, the first large raindrops began to fall on the path to the church.

  Helen and Letty were due at lunchtime the following day, so I packed straight after breakfast and walked across with Dora to her cottage – one of a terace of workingmen’s dwellings near the disused flour mill on the other side of the village. Dora was a war widow – “Mr Bates,” as she always referred to him, had gone down on a merchant ship in the Atlantic in 1941 – and she lived alone at number 3, Rackenfield, seeing service at Quarterleigh as a means of getting out and being useful. Purposeful bustle was her answer to everything, including Elizabeth’s bereavement, so accommodating me in her slightly musty back bedroom was a blessing in disguise.

  It also meant she could keep me informed about what was happening at Quarterleigh. After going there to serve lunch, she returned with delighted secrecy to tell me that Letty wanted to see me. Not Elizabeth, as I’d expected, or even Helen, but the one woman I hadn’t supposed would think even fleetingly of me at such a time.

  I walked directly over to the garden and found Letty wandering among the rhododendrons, fingering the blooms aimlessly. I called to her.