Past Caring (72 page)

Those at the edges of the room moved towards the centre, eyes focussed on the Postscript. Timothy sat in a chair opposite his sister and stretched out his legs. Sellick walked behind him and took up station by the fireplace, one arm stretched along the oak beam above it, positioned as if in dominion over all of us. I stood behind Elizabeth’s chair, while Ralph joined Helen on the settee and took a clumsy hold on her hand.

Letty sat forward and peered at the Postscript. “Nothing can bring Henry back,” she said. “But I feel as if this book is in some way responsible for his death. I’d be happier if it were no longer around . . . to trouble us.”

I spoke out. “We can hardly blame Strafford for what others make of his words. Any responsibility for Henry’s death must surely rest in the present, not the past.”

“Very epigrammatical, old man,” Timothy drawled. “But what do you actually mean?”

“I mean—old man—that what may have upset Henry to the extent of causing him to crash was whoever or whatever confronted him at his club a few hours earlier. Who or what that was we don’t know.” I was speaking to Timothy, but looking at Sellick.

“We never will now,” put in Helen. “That’s just the point. I wish this whole wretched business had never started.” She shot me a glare, as if to suggest a decent hostility for Ralph’s benefit. “It’s gone far enough, for heaven’s sake. I’ve lost my father. There are press sniffing round the house. Now I hear the firm’s in trouble . . .”

“What’s this?” said Ralph. The last remark had him worried, no doubt about his own stake.

P A S T C A R I N G

445

“Spot of turbulence,” Timothy assured him. “We can ride it out easily—as long as we don’t panic.”

“The point is,” said Helen, “that we can ride it out more easily if we act sensibly where this document is concerned. Why provide our enemies with ammunition to fire at us?”

“What enemies?” I asked.

“There are lots of people who enjoy deriding those who are more successful than they are.” She was beginning to sound like her father. “What would happen if this book fell into their hands?”

“My dear,” said Elizabeth, “there’s no danger of that.”

“While it exists, there must always be that danger. Hasn’t it done so already?”

“You must mean my hands,” I said. “Well, I found it, as anyone could have. I suppose that’s your point, isn’t it?”

Helen settled back in the settee. “If the cap fits, Martin.”

She’d soon forgotten the allowances she’d made the day before.

Elizabeth tried to ease the atmosphere by shifting the emphasis. “We’ve heard nothing from you, Mr. Sellick. What have you to say on this matter?”

Sellick brought his arm down from the beam over the fireplace as if swooping across the proscenium of his personal stage.

“Well now, Lady Couchman, I don’t think you would deny that my origins represent a source of shame for your family, would you?” It sounded like a declaration of war breaking into a trivial domestic squabble and, on the faces of those least prepared for it—Helen, Letty and Ralph—there were looks of shock. But not Timothy’s—his was masked by suavity and cigarette smoke—or Elizabeth’s, to judge by the firmness of her words.

“No, I would not deny it.”

“Nor that the Postscript constitutes proof of that shame?”

“Nor that. I take your point, Mr. Sellick. My family has an obvious and vested interest in the destruction of what could be regarded as incriminating evidence.”

“So,” said Sellick, bending swiftly to the table and seizing the Postscript, “if the contents of this were publicized, you would lose your title, your family its legitimacy and Couchman Enterprises its”—he glanced at Timothy—“resilience.”

446

R O B E R T G O D D A R D

Elizabeth looked up at him calmly, where he loomed above her, Postscript in hand. “Precisely, Mr. Sellick,” she said icily.

“You hold that power.”

He lowered the volume slowly to the table, placed it at the end nearest Elizabeth and stepped back. “Then I agree that it should be destroyed,” he announced. “I wish to wield no such power. With Henry’s death, let us put it to rest.”

I stared at him incredulously. Could he be serious? For Sellick voluntarily to surrender such a powerful instrument of his will contradicted every twist of his plot to bring us to this moment, confounded everything I’d come to believe about him. From the silence which followed, it seemed others felt the same.

Except Timothy. “You’re a gentleman, Mr. Sellick,” he said.

“I’m sure we all appreciate the good sense of what you’ve said.”

Elizabeth roused herself. “If that’s what you really think, Mr.

Sellick, I can only say that I’m very grateful to you for such a generous gesture, a gesture we had no right to expect but which I rejoice you have felt able to make.”

There was unanimity in the stunned faces round the table, relief edging towards self-congratulation. To them, of course, it made perfect sense and, somehow, to Sellick also. Only I was baffled, yet bound by my earlier promise to leave the matter uncontested.

“There is no need for any form of thanks,” Sellick continued.

“If the prospect of meeting me here on Monday was in any respect contributory to Henry’s accident, I would hope the erasure of this document could serve as a token of my regret.” So well-turned, so smoothly toned and yet, I felt certain, so utterly false.

The power of Sellick’s words lay not, of course, in honeyed phrases but in the consuming eagerness of his audience to believe them. They were quick to do so, too quick for my mind to assess the significance of his concession or set it against the uncertain inferences of our earlier, unfinished conversation.

It had stopped raining. The sky was grey and still, the garden of Quarterleigh hushed and expectant in a lull of late afternoon.

P A S T C A R I N G

447

The group moved as if in some secret extension of the funeral’s ordered ritual to the incinerator behind the greenhouse. Ralph loaded it with crumpled newspaper and a few sticks of kindling, Timothy sprinkled on some petrol and tossed in a lighted match, the flames licked and spat. Elizabeth handed him the Postscript and asked him to deal with it as agreed. She might not have had the heart to do it herself or to ask me to do it for her. At any rate, it was Timothy, with a dexterity his father would have admired, who tore each page from its binding and cast it into the fire.

For a moment after entering the flame, each page remained untouched, Strafford’s fluent handwriting proudly undefiled.

Then the yellow rim of the fire’s black tide crossed the crinkling paper and consumed the firm-inked script. The smut-specked smoke drifted down the garden towards the brook, stinging my eyes as it passed.

When all the pages had gone Timothy prepared to toss the cover in after them, but I put a restraining hand on his arm.

“That’s enough,” I said. “There’s no need to make a meal of it.

I’ll take that.”

“Fair enough, old man,” he replied with a twitch of his eyebrows. “Have it as a memento. I wouldn’t begrudge you that.

After all the efforts you made to stop me getting a sight of it in the first place, it seems only reasonable.”

I took the cover from him. “My efforts were nothing compared with yours to find it.”

“I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

“Breaking into private property—that sort of thing.”

“Not my style, Martin. I think you must be thinking of somebody else.”

I didn’t answer, just shut the cover and walked quickly away into the house. Suddenly, Timothy’s squalid ploys didn’t seem to matter anymore. The loss of the Postscript left me with a feeling of desolation. It was as if I were mourning Strafford for the first time. And, like Strafford, I didn’t pause once the decision had been taken. I marched out of Quarterleigh and left the Couchmans to their own devices.

448

R O B E R T G O D D A R D

I drank the evening away at The Royal Oak and woke late at Rackenfield the following morning. The silence of the house told me Dora was out, so I slunk down to the kitchen and made some coffee. I sat sipping it, staring out at the garden in all its mundane summer charm and contemplating the end we’d made the day before with our cauterization of the Couchman family wound.

Or was it the end? It had been too easy to be believed. At the centre of my disbelief stood Sellick. His volte face had been the least expected anti-climax of all, defusing the set piece family confrontation before it could even begin to tick towards detonation. For the rest, I knew all the reasons why they would think the Postscript better burned and, indeed, why I’d agreed to support such action. It had been my selfless tribute to Strafford, my attempt to honour his final plea. Yet in its honouring I’d also betrayed him. He whose story deserved to be told had been silenced forever. I winced at the memory of it and at the taste of all I’d drunk to wash away that memory: it had done no good.

When Dora returned, she gave me short shrift.

“Decided to show yourself, I see . . . They’ve been up an’ about for hours at Quarterleigh.”

“Oh yes?”

“You’ll be able to go back there now. Helen an’ Ralph, they’ve taken Mrs. Couchman back to London, Mr. Timothy’s gone off somewheres—and, thank the Lord, that Mr. Sellick’s nowhere to be seen neither. Jus’ like ol’ times.”

“I don’t think it’ll ever be that, Dora. It’s time for me to leave Miston altogether, not go back to Quarterleigh.”

“The mistress ’ouldn’t like that. She gave us this note for you.”

She handed me an envelope and began clearing up around me. I took out the note and read it.

Quarterleigh, June 17th.

My dear Martin,

I am taking the opportunity of some evening repose after a taxing day to write these few lines. They concern what we did

P A S T C A R I N G

449

today with Edwin’s Postscript as well as another matter I shall come to later.

Believe me, I know what a wrench it must have been for you to let us burn the record of Edwin’s last thoughts. Yet what else could we do? After Henry’s death—with all its attendant circumstances—there seemed to me to be no alternative. I realize how hard it must have been for you to subscribe to the decision. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for doing so. Let us hope that Edwin—as well as Gerald and Henry—can truly now rest in peace.

I wish I could say I was certain that was so, but an un-quietness remains in my mind and time alone will tell if it is well-founded. I sincerely hope not.

My reservations are reinforced by my grandson. Before leaving here today, he asked if he might return on Sunday with an unidentified companion to “discuss one or two points over tea.” Naturally, I pressed him for details, but he declined to be specific. I could not, in all honesty, describe Timothy as a doting grandchild. Indeed, of all those gathered here today, he is the one whom I would least have expected to wish to return so soon. So his attentions are puzzling, not to say suspicious.

I wonder, therefore, if I might call upon your assistance once again. If you were here with me when Timothy and his mysterious companion called, I would feel much less vulnerable. Do come if you possibly can. I shall close in the hope of seeing you on Sunday, if not before.

With love from

Elizabeth.

This appointment surely had to indicate some new development: but on what lines I couldn’t tell. It seemed unlikely to bring comfort to Elizabeth. I gave Dora a brief note to say I would certainly be there.

I killed time and coped with doubt the usual way: too much drink. I’d become a familiar face at The Royal Oak, so was happy enough to prop up the bar there and await the unknown. If I’d 450

R O B E R T G O D D A R D

only thought or planned to better effect, things might have turned out differently. But I didn’t change my style, even when I knew I should.

Sunday afternoon: I woke with a start at Rackenfield after another visit to The Royal Oak. It was gone four o’clock and I should have been at Quarterleigh an hour before. I hurried round there.

Timothy’s Porsche was in the drive. As I entered the house, I heard voices from the lounge and went straight in.

Elizabeth looked up from her chair as I walked in. A look of relief passed across her face. Timothy was pacing the carpet in the middle of some statement. “It really does make sense . . .” He stopped when he saw me and scowled. “What do you want?”

“I was invited,” I said. “I believe you invited yourself.” Our eyes locked.

From the armchair opposite Elizabeth there came the sound of a cup being replaced in a saucer. I swung round. It was Eve, un-crossing her legs elegantly and leaning forward to put the cup and saucer back on the coffee table. “Hello, Martin,” she said.

I looked at Elizabeth. “Why are they here?”

“They have explained themselves very clearly, Martin. I only wish you’d been here when they arrived.”

“I’m sorry I’m late.”

Timothy stepped towards me. “Too much at lunchtime, old man?” I ignored him.

“I intended no rebuke,” Elizabeth continued. “I only meant that I would have valued your company and advice.”

“You’re the only one who would,” Timothy put in.

“Now that I am here—what’s happened?”

“They’ve put a proposition to me,” Elizabeth said. “Perhaps I should say an ultimatum.” I sat in the chair beside her and scanned their faces—Timothy’s vainly unmoved, Eve’s studiously uncommunicative—while she spoke. “They wish me to cooperate in the writing of Miss Randall’s book: a study of suffragism with an autobiographical contribution from me, suitably edited. Miss Randall will supply the historical insight and the literary polish.

I will supply her with the perfect example she is seeking of an

P A S T C A R I N G

451