Past Caring (52 page)

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
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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.”

“I 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.”

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“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 African 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.

The entry read as follows. When and where born: 21st June
1901—Geldoorp Hospital, Pietermaritzburg, Natal. Name: Leo.

Name and surname of father: Edwin George Strafford. Name and
maiden surname of mother: Caroline Amelia van der Merwe. Rank
or profession of father: Army officer. Signature, description and residence of informant: F.H. Sellick, doctor attending birth, Geldoorp
Hospital, Pietermaritzburg. When registered: 24th June 1901.

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?

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“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.

“My real mother, they said, had died giving birth to me. The
doctor in attendance was my uncle, Frank Sellick, who, knowing his
brother’s wife couldn’t have children of her own , and distressed at
being unable to save the mother, persuaded them to adopt me as
their own.

“My uncle was dead by the time they told me—the flu bug of
1918 got him, doctor or not—so I only had his story at second-hand.

He’d told them that my mother, Caroline van der Merwe, was a
Durban girl who’d married a British officer in the autumn of 1900.

He’d almost immediately deserted her, only for her to discover that
she was pregnant. It was a bad time to be carrying a British officer’s
child in Natal. When Botha’s patriots invaded the province in
February 1901, a raiding party butchered the van der Merwe
household: they’d have regarded them as collaborators.”

“No doubt. They were hard times.”

Sellick glared at me. “You sit there so smug and fine, the
English gentleman in retirement—with no conception of the suffering you caused.”

“I caused none, Mr. Sellick. The people and the events you
speak of are unknown to me.”

“Spare me your denials. Listen a little longer.”

“My mother, being pregnant, was spared in the massacre—a
superstition among fighting men , as you would know, but an ironi-

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cal one in this case, since it was her pregnancy by a British officer
which marked out the family. Witnessing the slaughter of her parents and brothers drove her mad—God knows she’d suffered
enough. She was placed in the asylum at Pietermaritzburg and, so
far as I knew, died in childbirth in June of that year.

“The tragedy was remote from me and I forgot it easily, as
young men do. The land was good to us on the Karroo and we were
happy. My father—my adoptive father—died in 1938 and I inherited the place. It prospered and I’m in semi-retirement now, with
a manager to run it for me. I didn’t expect many more surprises
from life.

“Then, three months ago, I received a letter from my uncle’s solicitor in Pietermaritzburg. My uncle had placed the full facts in his
hands but didn’t want them disclosed until my mother died.”

“But you just said she died when you were born.”

“Not so, Strafford. She wasn’t so soon off your conscience. After
my birth, she remained in the asylum in Pietermaritzburg: a hopeless lunatic, mindless and forgotten. She died last December.

Amongst her few possessions was that birth certificate—and, in an
old tin trunk, this revolver, with its holster and belt, clearly stamped
as British Army issue. It’s an officer’s weapon—your weapon.”

“No, Mr. Sellick. Not mine. I’m not your father. I served in
South Africa, it’s true, but I never met a Miss . . . van der Merwe of . . .

Durban.” I had hesitated because, as I said it, the name was familiar, though not as somebody I had ever met. But Sellick misinter-preted my hesitation.

“Your very voice betrays you, Strafford. God knows why or
how, but, in your haste to desert my mother, you left this gun behind,
and she preserved it as the only reminder she had of her husband—

other than a cheap wedding ring. But don’t worry. I had the revolver
looked over by the finest gunsmith in Capetown. It’s in fully working order now.”

“I’m sure.”

“Let me tell you a little more. Let me tell you how it felt to hear
that my mother had died in a lunatic asylum without ever knowing
her son. Maybe my uncle would have told me of her whereabouts
had he lived. But my ignorance of her wasn’t really his fault, nor
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her madness, nor her tragedy. No, that was the work of the dashing
young British officer who married her and then abandoned her to
the mercy of a Boer raiding party.”

“Quite possibly. But I am not that man.”

“I’ve spent long enough tracking you down to be certain of my
facts, Strafford. My birth certificate wasn’t much to go on , of course,
but my uncle had said the van der Merwes were a Durban family
and so I went there. No sign in the Registrar’s records of a marriage
in that name in the autumn of 1900.”

“I wasn’t even in South Africa in the autumn of 1900.”

“Then when did you leave?”

“Ah . . . the middle of September, I think.”

“At last, the truth. I congratulate you. My solicitor hunted the
length and breadth of Natal looking for a record of the marriage.

Eventually, he found it. It seems you eloped with my mother and
got married in Port Edward, down in the south of Natal—obscurity suited your purpose, no doubt.”

“Mr. Sellick, it is your purpose which is obscure to me.”

“I obtained a copy of the marriage entry from the Registrar in
Port Edward. I have it here.” He threw another piece of paper at
me, which I inspected. Like the first, it was alien to me, for all that
my name and, so it seemed, my signature, appeared on it. I stared at
it in disbelief.

“When married: 8th September 1900. Name and surname:
Edwin George Strafford. Age: 24 years. Condition: Bachelor. Rank
or profession: Second Lieutenant, British Army. Residence:
Culemborg Barracks, Capetown.” The signature was uncannily
like mine. I could see why, to others, it would seem the genuine article. But it was not. Even at a space of fifty years, I could tell it for the
forgery it was. As I peered at the document, recollections and associations raced through my mind, amounting to far more than Sellick’s
threats. I could understand his anger at his father, but I was not the
man he sought. And already, I was guessing who might be, and
trembling with excitement at the clue now, at long last, given me,
the hope it held of unravelling the besetting mystery of my life.

None of this, however, was about to detain Leo Sellick.