Past Caring (32 page)

“I was certainly hoping to speak to Mr. Ambrose Strafford.”

“That’s me.”

“I thought it might be. My name’s Martin Radford. Pleased to meet you.” I put out my hand. He looked at it quizzically, then smiled and shook it. “Can I buy you a drink?”

He drained the tankard. “Wouldn’t say no.” The landlord refilled it from a cask of cider that stood on the bar.

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“I went round Barrowteign this morning. It was a fascinating tour.”

“Glad you liked it.” He didn’t look it.

“It made me curious about the history of the family.”

“It’s all in the guidebook.”

“There wasn’t much about Edwin Strafford.”

“Why should there be?” His eyes narrowed.

“They oughter’ve printed your story ’bout your uncle, Ambrose,” the landlord put in. “That’d sell a few copies.”

“Looks like Ted here’s aching to tell you all about it,”

snapped Ambrose.

“No, no,” Ted grinned. “You tell it better Ambrose.”

“What is the story?” I asked.

“Go on,” Ted said to Ambrose. “Why not tell him? I’ve heard it ’nough times—bain’t no secret what you think.”

Ambrose ground his pipe stem between his teeth and looked stubborn. The door clinked open behind me and two men came in.

Ambrose winked at me with the eye Ted couldn’t see from his side of the bar. “Don’t let us keep you from your customers,” he said.

Ted huffed off towards them. “Ted’s a bloody windbag,” Ambrose resumed. “He’d probably say the same of me. I don’t mind people knowing what I think—when I know what they think.”

A show of frankness was called for. “I’m a student of history, Mr. Strafford. Your uncle was a famous politician in his day. I thought there’d be more about him at his family home. It struck me as odd there wasn’t. In the churchyard his gravestone merely states that he died in 1951.”

“What more do you want?”

“I don’t know. I was hoping you might tell me.”

“All right, Mr. Radford. You want the gospel according to Ambrose Strafford? Then come sit at the prophet’s feet. It’s warmer by the fire.” He picked up his tankard and moved over to where the sheepdog lay asleep on the hearth. The one log on the fire was burning low. Ambrose bent gingerly, took another from the fender and propped it against the flame. The bark began to burn with a slight sizzle. He eased one foot against the dog’s rump.

“Move yourself, Jess,” he said. The dog did so without complaint.

Ambrose lowered himself into a rocking chair while I sat on a hard

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chair opposite him. “Ted’ll complain about wasting fuel, but these spring evenings still have a nip in ’em. Smell that wood?”—the new log was giving off a sweet scent—“Apple: a lovely burner. We used to have lots of apple to burn at Barrowteign.”

“But not anymore?”

“Oh, they still give me some for my little cottage. But it makes me feel like a bloody servant.” He gazed into the back of the fire, then smiled. “I can’t complain. They’ve been generous in their way. When I came home after the war, Barrowteign was in a bloody awful state: they’d billeted some Yanks there and buggered some of the best pasture with tank practice. The Trust rescued me from queer street.”

“Was your uncle no help?” I was still playing the innocent.

“He was abroad—in the diplomatic service. Didn’t know much about it. Besides, he wasn’t rolling in money himself.”

“A former Cabinet minister?” I tried to sound incredulous.

“You didn’t make a fortune in politics in those days, Mr.

Radford—any rate, not if you had my uncle’s scruples. Besides, it was a hell of a time ago. I can’t remember him as an M.P.”

“Why did he leave Parliament?”

“Don’t the historians know?” He grinned gently.

“They know he resigned from the Cabinet and later gave up his seat—but not why.”

“All he ever told me was that his fiancée broke off their engagement and he was so knocked up by it that he couldn’t carry on his duties.”

“Wasn’t that rather drastic?”

“It might seem so to you, but my uncle was a man of feeling and integrity—not like these bloody carpetbaggers we elect nowadays. And there was more to it. I know that he tried to withdraw his resignation, but they wouldn’t let him. Don’t ask me why. I don’t think he knew himself. It was as if somebody had it in for him—somebody powerful, somebody nameless.”

I didn’t take him up on this but suggested another drink and waited at the bar while Ted poured them. I looked back at Ambrose, wreathed in pipesmoke in his rocking chair, an old, eccentric figure in tweed and sheepskin. I knew from the Memoir that he was seventy and the cider alone made him look it, but his 184

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eyes were like beacons in a sometimes foggy head and he had the storyteller’s art of conviction combined with entrancement. He was, and looked, a ragbag of many things—gentleman drunk, crude countryman, aging redneck. I couldn’t trust him but I couldn’t resist him either. I knew he was drawing me on to some favoured, festering revelation and I half-knew what it must be.

But I wanted to hear him say it. Maybe I already knew I would trade for that his dead uncle’s words that he’d never heard before.

“There’s a disused railway line across the Barrowteign estate,” he began again, after a quaff of cider.

“I know,” I said. “I saw the track bed where it crosses the drive.”

“You’ve sharper eyes than I thought then.” He looked impressed. “It’s been blotted out quite a lot of the way. Never made any money, you see. It was opened in 1903, not long before I was born, and closed in 1958—just 55 years’ existence: hell of a waste of all those bricks and tons of earth the navvies sweated blood to shift. The Great Western had their reasons though. They needed a fall-back for when the coastal route was flooded. In those days they didn’t just cancel trains because of high seas, like these bloody jokers British Rail. They gouged a line through whatever was in their way as an alternative. I expect you think I’m rambling: bloody old fool, you’re saying to yourself.”

“Nothing of the kind.” Which was true, because I knew the point he was leading up to.

“Well, in those 55 wasteful years, that pipsqueak of a railway line—that over-engineered wet weather alternative—claimed three members of my family. They called ’em accidents. Death pacts, I’d say—and worse. However much the GWR paid my grandfather to cross his land, it wasn’t enough. Barrowteign’s the only flat land in this part of the valley, so they had to go through it. You put a crack express on the route in an emergency and it’s the only bit of it where he can work up any speed. And that’s how the Teign valley railway line claimed my parents.”

His eyes widened and his thin voice strained oratorically: he was enjoying himself. Of course, I’d heard it all before—and read about it in the Memoir—but Ambrose made it sound different.

That diverted express on the evening of 5 January 1911 bearing

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down on Robert’s car ceased to be a ghastly accident and became an avenging fury scenting as victim the Strafford blood line. It left Ambrose orphaned and the family maimed. Edwin became a crippled regent, the Straffords’ Fisher King, unable to lift the curse that laid them waste. “By 1951 the National Trust had taken over Barrowteign and settled me—of all the bloody ironies—in the crossingkeeper’s cottage on the railway line where my parents had been killed.

“My uncle arrived one wet evening in the middle of May—without warning. I’d thought he was in Madeira. Then, out of the blue, there he was on the bloody doorstep, just as I was lighting a pipe and thinking of stepping down here for a jar. Old Jess—this one’s mother—didn’t bark, which was unusual, so I might’ve guessed it was him—hair more white than grey, stooped but still square-shouldered. He was in his greatcoat, carrying a battered old leather suitcase. I’d not seen him for six years but somehow didn’t feel surprised that he was there. He wouldn’t say what he’d been up to, only that he’d been in London and would I mind putting him up for a while? ’Course, I didn’t mind. But he wasn’t the uncle I remembered from my visits to Madeira. All he wanted was pen, paper and silence. He had a whacking great book in his case and spent hours at a time scribbling in it. God knows what it was about. When I asked, he turned . . . well, furtive: that’s the only bloody word for it. And that was something he’d never been before. It rattled me, I can tell you.”

My ears had pricked up. Strafford, writing in his great book.

What could that be? His Memoir had finished the year before.

What, then, was this?

“He hardly went out during the day. The odd stroll after dark.

One trip into Exeter. He wouldn’t come into the village with me.

I couldn’t work it out. It just wasn’t like him. But in another way it was. The sad reflection there’d always been in his eyes was in his mind and voice too. That was the only difference. It was as if he was hiding from something, but didn’t much mind if it found him anyway. ’Course I badgered him, but he wouldn’t tell me a bloody thing. ‘It’s just a flying visit,’ he said. ‘Treat it as an old man’s farewell.’ What the hell did that mean?”

“Quite a lot, judging by what happened.”

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“Too bloody true. About a week after he arrived, he had a visitor. I came back from here one afternoon and they were in my little bit of garden. My uncle and this other chap. About the same age—but frailer, well-dressed in a cashmere overcoat, for all that it was bloody May. They were arguing. No, that’s the wrong word. There was just this cold fury between them which made me think of winter. Old men don’t argue—’cept when they’re drunk, like I do.

They haven’t the energy for it—take my word on that. But these two were at odds: no question. The stranger was bald and red in the face. I remember he looked strung between pleading and bluster.

As for my uncle, he was calm and grave—like a carved image.

“Soon as I showed up, the stranger left. He shot me a glare and made off to his car—a bloody great Bentley with a chauffeur in it—tucked away up the drive. He didn’t speak—I remember that. But it was like he was biting back some oath. As for my uncle, he wouldn’t discuss it. ‘Just a passer-by seeking directions,’ he said. Beyond that, he clammed up.

“That night though, we talked about the family and Barrowteign, about my parents—’cos he remembered ’em and I hardly did. He told me how he’d often thought it should’ve been him killed on the level crossing, not my father, him, with nothing to live for, not my father with a wife, a young son and a future.

What little he had, he said, he’d leave me to remember him by.

That amounted to a house in Madeira—I sold it. But it didn’t seem like the remembrance he had in mind that night.

“After that, he took to mooning round the crossing quite a lot.

I’d see him there as I came up the lane—like a bloody stormcrow in his flapping coat, almost like he was standing guard over something. It made me restless. And Old Jess. She’d wake in the middle of the night, barking at nothing. But was it nothing? Sometimes I’d think there were footprints in the garden where I’d not stepped, sometimes things moved, paint chipped round windows when it shouldn’t. But with a railway on your doorstep, who the hell could be sure of anything?

“The night before my uncle died though, there was something to be sure of. To settle my nerves, I’d been on the juice till late and slept like one of these logs. If Old Jess barked, I didn’t hear her. But there was some bloody commotion—a glass break-

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ing somewhere—so I turned out. I found ’em in the parlour. My uncle fully dressed and alert—as if he hadn’t been asleep—holding this young feller in an arm lock. Bulky character with an ugly, pampered face—’bout your age—lots of huff but no bloody puff to judge by the way my old uncle had wrong-footed him. He was snarling something when I came in, but I can’t remember what—I was still full of sleep. I was all for having the blighter banged up for the night at the police house. But my uncle wouldn’t hear of it. He just bundled him out with a kind of dismissive contempt. Called him a ‘worthless felon’ and this chap took off without another word. Only he was no felon. No felon I ever met dressed as well as him or got the worst of run-ins with 75-year-old men. Besides, breakins are rare enough round here now. Then they were bloody unheard-of. We both knew there was more to it. But my uncle still said nothing.

“That’s why it’s one hell of a coincidence to swallow that his death the following night, when the train hit him on the level crossing, was an accident. Like everything else about that man, there was more to it.”

“But what?”

“Murder, young man. Murder premeditated and concealed.

But murder it was—plain as the nose on your face.”

“What did the Coroner think?”

“Nothing. The man was bloody incapable of thought. All he could talk about was safety standards on unmanned level-crossings.

Strangers after dark—intimations of violence—were an unknown world to him. Anything I said was just the bloody cider talking.”

“Was there no evidence?”

“I’m not talking about evidence. I’m talking about feelings, suspicions, certainties.” He prodded his finger at me with each noun, then suddenly relaxed with a kind of deflation. “If I had some evidence, somebody might’ve listened to me.”

“It’s never too late.”

“After 26 years, young man, it’s just an old bore’s fireside story. Something to entertain strangers.” He looked wistful at the thought. I couldn’t not tell him the one thing that might alter everything.

“It’s a fascinating story. I believe every word of it.”

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“Good of you to say so.”