Past Caring (33 page)

“No, really. I believe it because it fits so well with some information I have. Something you won’t know about. Something that could be said to constitute evidence.”

His brow furrowed. He peered at me with his hooded eyes.

“What information?”

“All in good time.” I leant forward. “Why don’t we take a look at the crossing? You could tell me exactly how the so-called accident happened and I could see for myself. Then I could tell you what I know.”

“This is a bloody fine turn-up for the books. I’m supposed to be the storyteller, not you.” He smiled at the thought. We’d been in the pub some time—it was filling up now—and I was anxious to continue our conversation in private. The element of the unknown I’d introduced looked to have persuaded Ambrose to do the same. “Okay. Let’s go. I could do with a walk. There’s nothing to see but I’ll show you anyway. Then you can contribute your twopenn’ ’orth.”

He hauled himself out of the rocker, stirred Jess gently with his boot, seized his stick from beside the fire and led me out, greeting a dozen red-faced drinkers as he went who all seemed surprised—if not sorry—to see him leaving early.

It had grown dark outside and, though the last tinge of blue hadn’t yet left the sky, the stars were out—so much brighter than in the city where I usually saw them that I stared up at them in surprise.

“It was like this that night,” Ambrose said, so close to my ear that I started. “Still and moonlit. But it was a full moon, so there was a chalky light making everything plain as day—no weather for accidents.”

We set off back the way I’d come in daylight, down the lane out of Dewford to the main road, then over the ancient stone bridge across the river. Ambrose said nothing, as if, like me, in awe of the night. His boots grated on the tarmac, his dog pattered beside him and, somewhere, a fox barked. Otherwise, the stillness and silence were uncanny. It might have been a night in 1951, not 1977, for all the difference it made in the darkness of the Devon countryside.

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It made, of course, one big difference. There was, as we left the main drive up to Barrowteign and followed the lane to Lodge Cottage, no railway line across our path, only one of the crossing gates, serving now a different role.

Ambrose kicked up some gravel with his boot. “That’s some of the bloody hardcore,” he said. “I kept it as a drive to my garage. I built a cucumber frame out of sleepers and trained clematis round a warning sign. There’s not much else left—the gate, some fencing, the cattle grid. It doesn’t tell you a hell of a lot, does it?”

“I suppose not.” And it didn’t. To the south, the line petered out unevenly on flat ground beside the lime trees. To the north, beyond the black outline of the garage, was the blacker shape of a shallow cutting. Leaving me standing on the line, Ambrose went into the garden and unlocked his door. Stepping inside, he turned on a lamp above it which lit up the scene a little more. “What exactly happened, then?”

Ambrose walked across to the fence and leant on it as he spoke to me.

“Trains from Exeter used to come out of the cutting on a slight curve and accelerate over the crossing. They always whistled and, anyway, you got to know their times. There wasn’t really any danger. My father was unlucky. He got his car stuck on the crossing in snow and a diverted express ploughed straight into them. Just one of those bloody things, I suppose.”

“But not in your uncle’s case?”

“No. Some days the visibility’s poorer here than it was that night. And there wasn’t a breath of wind. So if he was standing here having a quiet smoke—which he did most nights—he’d have heard the train miles off and, if not, still seen it in bags of time.”

“But he didn’t?”

“You tell me. The driver saw nothing wrong till the last moment—a figure crouched low on the track. Hit him at full speed. Death would have been instant. At least it was a painless way to go.” He puffed at his pipe and the smoke made me think of the train that night, bearing down on the crossing, Strafford helpless in its path.

“Perhaps he just didn’t hear. Old men’s faculties do fail.”

“Not my uncle’s. It’s my belief he couldn’t move. At the 190

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inquest, the driver talked about seeing somebody else near the crossing—moving quickly. Not much more than a shadow. The Coroner disregarded it.”

“Where were you at the time?”

He snorted. “I was at The Greengage. The landlord then—

Ted’s father—kept pretty relaxed hours. And events had unsettled me, so I wasn’t averse to staying after time—more’s the bloody pity. While I was up there, somebody—the shadow the driver thought he saw—disabled my uncle and dumped him in the path of the train. That’s how I see it.”

“But you’ve no proof ?”

“Not a bean. Unless you can put some where your mouth is.”

He laughed, more, I think, because he felt sure I’d been joking than because he didn’t want to sound harsh.

“I think I can. You could call it your uncle’s side of the story.”

“Then come inside, young man. I’ve waited a long time to hear that.”

I shuddered slightly in the warm night air. I’d gone all the way now and committed myself to showing him the Memoir. It wasn’t at all what I’d intended in my guarded approach to him at the pub, but, somehow, the place and the person had seduced me.

Strafford had once told his nephew he could have what little there was to remember him by, so who was I to hold it back?

We went into the cottage, the entrance hall low and a little musty. Jess, who’d been waiting for us on the mat, jumped up and led the way into a small front room. There was a faint glow from the fireplace and the curtains were open on a bay window overlooking the moonlit garden and what was once the railway line.

Ambrose turned on a standard lamp and began gouging at the ashes of the fire with a poker while I looked around.

The room was crowded and dusty, more like an attic than a lounge. The wallpaper, whatever its original colour, had turned the shade of Ambrose’s tobacco. Bookshelves, fitted in each alcove, climbed to the ceiling. These, various chairs and several tea chests wedged behind the chairs overflowed not just with books large and small, but folders, sheets of card and paper, empty picture frames, newspapers, albums and portfolios. In amongst all this, room had been found for a couple of wingback easy chairs either side of the

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fire. There was a bureau by the wall with so many pulled-out drawers, used envelopes, scraps of paper, stubs of pencil, empty cheque books and stray pipe cleaners in it that the flap couldn’t have been closed in months. Amid the debris stood a glass tumbler with a shallow pool of cider in it. On a folding table behind the door stood a large, old-fashioned valve radio and a scatter of plas-tic pieces from an airfix kit. Finished articles—a Spitfire, a bi-plane and what looked like H.M.S.
Hood
—were arranged on top of a tallboy in one of the corners. There were several Indian artefacts—a carved ivory elephant, a brass casting of Kali, various trinkets and bric-à-brac—jockeying for space with some seedy-looking cacti in pots. Under the window was a round wicker basket with a blanket in it. Jess climbed in and looked quizzically at us, as if wondering why we were so active at such an hour.

Ambrose had added some smaller twigs and a log to the fire and coaxed it into some sort of life. “That’ll burn nicely now,” he announced, stooping behind one of the armchairs and raising an earthenware flagon. He pulled out the cork stopper. “D’you want a drink?” I’d had enough already but I agreed. “Sit down. Make yourself at home.” I cleared a newspaper and one of his pipes out of a chair—the upholstery pockmarked with burns and nicotine stains—and sat down. Ambrose fetched some tumblers and poured us generous measures.

“Cosy little place you’ve got here,” I said.

“Don’t soft soap me, boy. It’s a bloody tip and you know it. But Jess and I have come to like it.” He chuckled. “Besides, I keep a warmer bar than Ted.” It was true—the logs were burning nicely.

“Now tell me about what you said outside.”

“It’s here.” I patted the knapsack that I’d looped over the arm of the chair.

“What the hell is it?”

I didn’t keep him in suspense. This time, I told him the truth—about the new occupant of Quinta do Porto Nova hiring me, about Strafford’s Memoir, about what it contained and what it didn’t contain. Ambrose listened quietly, puffing at his pipe and staring into the fire. Without waiting for him to ask, I took the Memoir out of the bag and handed it to him—with a kind of reverence in the gesture. He looked at it with bemusement.

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“Is this all there is to it, then?” he asked. “You walk in—the man from bloody nowhere—and hand me my uncle’s last testament on a plate?”

“Not exactly. My arrival is, as you say . . . fortuitous. But you could’ve seen it a long time ago. It was at the Quinta waiting for you.”

“Irony, thy name is Strafford. Maybe that’s what he meant about an inheritance. I thought it was just that rambling old adobe in Madeira. I sold it without even going over to take a look—bloody shortsighted of me.” He peered at the cover of the Memoir, cradled in his lap. “One thing. This looks pretty much like the book he was writing in when he was here. Did he send it back to Madeira before he died?”

“Maybe. But there’s a discrepancy. That Memoir finishes in October 1950.”

“Hmm.” He leafed through the pages. “The old bugger’s hand—no mistake. But not the same book you say? I never found the one he wrote in while he was here. I scoured through his effects—which God knows were few enough—and couldn’t have missed it. But it wasn’t there.”

“Then what happened to it?”

“You tell me. Maybe he lost interest and destroyed it. Maybe he sent it back to Madeira and it’s been lost. Maybe it was this one and he was just amending or updating it.”

“That could be.” Actually, I didn’t see how it could. Ambrose rummaged between the cushion and the arm of his chair, fished out a battered pair of half-moon spectacles, perched them on his nose and began to read. I refilled my glass—there was a standing invitation—and thought, suddenly, of Nick and Hester. Shouldn’t I tell them I wouldn’t be back that night? “Do you have a telephone?” I asked. No answer—eyes glued to the Memoir. “Ambrose!

Do you have a phone?”

He looked up sharply. “

’Course not—tomfool gadgets.

There’s a box in the village.”

“That’s a long way.”

“Then don’t go. Shut up and leave me to read. Have another drink.”

“I just have.”

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“Typical of the ingrate young. Well, read something yourself.

God knows, there’s enough here.”

My mind was on a different tack. “Those effects of your uncle you mentioned . . .”

“Two birds with one stone. There wasn’t much—clothes I burned—a few bits and pieces. One book. Have a look at it.

Maybe it’ll shut you up.” He hauled himself out of the chair, navigated unerringly to one of the shelves and shuffled through a stack of books, clicking his tongue. “Here”—he plucked one out—“a collection of poems. That was all. We Straffords are a mawkish lot given half a chance.”

He tossed it down to me, then settled back in the opposite chair with the Memoir. I looked at the book he’d fetched—a slim, battered, well-thumbed volume:
Satires of Circumstance
by Thomas Hardy—first edition, 1914. I might have known Strafford would have chosen Hardy for his travelling companion. The titles of the poems were redolent of the mood of the Memoir: “The Going,” “Your Last Drive,” “Rain on a Grave,” “Lament,” “The Hunter,” and so on. One, “After a Journey,” had had its page marked and its title ringed in red. I read it through—wistful, allusive, elegiac like the others, but I saw no more than that in it.

Which was just one of my mistakes.

It was morning. Grey light was shafting through the grimy bay window. White ash lay in the grate. I was still in the armchair, neck wricked like it was broken, my back aching only slightly less than my head, my throat protesting at the merest swallow. So this, I thought, is a cider hangover. I kicked a half-glass of the stuff as I struggled up, spilling it on the threadbare hearth rug, cursed and hoisted the remainder up for safekeeping on the mantelpiece.

There, I was reassured to see, I’d put
Satires of Circumstance
some time during the night, probably for the same reason. The Memoir was there too.

I rubbed my eyes and coughed speculatively. My senses were beginning to work again. There was a smell of bacon frying somewhere, and Ambrose whistling tunelessly. I followed the signs out of the room, down the short passage and into the 194

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kitchen—small, low-ceilinged, flagged floor. Opposite me, the top half of a stable door stood open onto the garden. To the right, on a rickety table beneath a window, there was a large teapot, with some cups and plates—decent but old and chipped—a bottle with some milk in the bottom, a marmalade jar with a knife standing up in it like a tin soldier, a much-gouged pat of butter and half a loaf of bread surrounded by crumbs. Jess was eating from a bowl by the door, but stopped to look at me. There was a big old range in the chimneybreast to my left. Ambrose stood by it, resplendent in a spotted and stained butcher’s apron, prodding bacon, eggs and tomatoes round a vast, black, encrusted frying pan. He cocked one eye at me and stopped whistling.

“You look bloody awful,” he said. “Want some breakfast?”

“No thanks. Tea, if you have any.”

“Loads in the pot. Help yourself.” I slumped down at the table and poured some into a willow-pattern breakfast cup.

Ambrose decanted his meal onto a plate and sat down with it opposite me. “Cider disagree with you?”