Past Caring (56 page)

“So it amused me to lure them into debts, take them for all they
were worth, see how far I could lead them with lies. I almost miscal-culated by getting myself rusticated, but even that didn’t turn out
badly.

“Then South Africa. I saw it all as a golden opportunity for
pleasure and profit. And I was right. The army gave me plenty of
both, most of it unofficial. But it was something else as well: plain
dangerous. Colenso was a revelation to me. I mean , why did we risk
our necks at the say-so of that lunatic Buller? You know what happened—I cut and ran. I wouldn’t call it cowardice so much as common sense.

“It was a difference of perspective. My father kept me on a
short rein at Cambridge—financially. That’s what separated me
from all you clear-eyed young gentlemen. I knew the value of
money—and of life. You took it all deadly seriously, but were prepared to stop a Boer bullet just like that. And for what? So that a few
Uitlanders could get their hands on the Transvaal gold mines.

“And you? Well, Edwin , I’ll tell you now what always niggled
me about you. You had all the gentlemanly virtues like the rest of
them. But I couldn’t dupe you. You were armoured against me with
an incorruptible hide of liberal enlightenment. What was worse, after Colenso, you’d marked my card. You’d rumbled me.

“But then you still trusted me, because that was the decent thing
to do. When I volunteered to take your place in Durban , you just
said ‘Thanks very much’ and pushed off home. My nose told me this
was an opportunity for pleasure and profit not to be passed up. And
so it proved.

“When I got there, I pretended to be you just for the sake of it,
just to see if I could get away with it. The van der Merwes were
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unsuspecting sobersides—the old man a magistrate and Lutheran
lay preacher. They were all so impressed by me it wasn’t true. They
had a gruelling week of dinners and meetings arranged for me to
butter up the Dutch community. I dodged most of them.

“But as soon as I met the daughter of the house, it was a different story. Rembrandt would have died for her. Whether because I
was in a foreign country or because she was far from ancestral
Holland I don’t know, but she had a mystical lightness to her
beauty, a cool, liquid apartness. You could say it was merely lust
and I couldn’t deny it. She was twenty, always severely dressed in
drab colours at her father’s insistence, but that only made it worse.

Remember, I was no gentleman. But, in Durban , I enjoyed your
gentleman’s licence.

“Caroline fell for me readily enough but could not be seduced.

She would marry me—elope to escape her father’s disapproval—

but otherwise she would neither give herself nor could she be taken.

So, quite consciously, quite deliberately, I decided: why not? Why
not push my luck? I was, in a way, getting back at you, abusing their
hospitality and your identity, sullying your spotless reputation
which had so shown up mine at Colenso. The beauty of it was its
outrageous plausibility. Who would ever check up on a tumble in the
Veldt? Who would ever know?

“So I eloped with Caroline van der Merwe. We stole out of the
house and rode through the night to an obscure railway station. The
next day, we reached Port Edward—as far as we could from
Durban without straying into Cape Colony. I’d wired ahead to
make the necessary arrangements and the ceremony was over in a
trice. If I say so myself, it really did look like your signature on the
certificate.

“Three days later, I deserted Caroline, left her asleep at our hotel in Port Edward. I thought the van der Merwes would find us
soon and, besides, I’d got what I wanted. She wasn’t too bright, actually, inside that trusting, princess’s body. I just took my kit bag and
walked away in the middle of the night, cool and calculating as you
like. Stupidly, I’d left my revolver and harness in Durban. Well,
who elopes carrying a gun? I had to do a lot of explaining about
that. It’s strange it should turn up again , after all this time.

“Back in Capetown , I read about your election to Parliament

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and enjoyed the joke. Then the joke turned sour on me. So far from
being over, the war dragged on for eighteen miserable months. You
politicians had a lot to answer for. Still, when it was over, I was
posted to India and enjoyed it. An officer’s life was good there, before they started agitating for independence.

“I had eight good years in India. Then I ran into a spot of
bother. Caught out using mess funds to settle a gambling debt after
a run of bad luck. To save the regiment’s honour, I was allowed to
resign my commission. Best I could have hoped for, really, but it left
me down on my hunkers when I stepped off the boat from Bombay.

It was the spring of 1910.

“Lo and behold, what should I find but that you were now
Home Secretary? There I was, after ten years’ serving King and
country, penniless and unwanted in my homeland, reading in the
newspaper about what an able and accomplished minister you
made. It stuck in my throat, I can tell you.

“I thought I’d soon put my finances back on an even keel by
gambling. The cards had always been my friends. But not anymore.

A question of insufficient capital, I suppose. At all events, it went
from bad to worse and soon , so far from being penniless, I was up to
my neck in debts I couldn’t hope to pay. My luck, you could say, had
run out good and proper.

“I thought you’d like to know it was desperation that made me
turn to the certificate. I still had my copy, tucked away. It suddenly
occurred to me that evidence of the Home Secretary’s secret marriage must be worth something. But how? You were still single, so
blackmail was out of the question. Besides, I reckoned you’d break
my neck if you ever detected my hand in anything like that.

“So I had to be devious. And luck smiled on me again. A fellow
I knew from India—before the upset over mess funds—popped up
in a gambling den I used: Archie Lambourne. I cultivated him—at
first for the loans he was worth. He mentioned in passing that his
sister was an active Suffragette and, in a drunken moment one
night, he let slip what his sister had obviously told him, that you—

the Home Secretary—were sweet on a Suffragette.

“Now that set me thinking. I took more of an interest in the
Suffragette movement then , read up about their antics and their
leaders. Since they were at loggerheads with the government, since
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the suffrage was fairly and squarely Home Office business and
since I knew you were secretly consorting with one of their number,
it seemed to me that there was money to be made from that certificate. Pleasure and profit, you see. One breeds the other.

“I persuaded Lambourne to introduce me to his sister. And I
gave her a message to take to Christabel Pankhurst: that I had
damning evidence against you in which I felt sure she would be interested.

“She was. Julia Lambourne arranged an audience. I put it to
Miss Pankhurst that I had heard of your involvement with a
Suffragette. She’d already heard the same thing, apparently. I put it
to her that, having served with you in South Africa, I was in a position to know that you were a married man. I said that I had proof
and could supply it—for a fee. I cited £1000. I said that the only
condition was that you should never know the source or nature of
the information , on the grounds that you would undoubtedly seek to
avenge yourself on me. Miss Pankhurst was very cool and said that
she would think it over.

“It was a week before I heard from her again—this time via
Anne Kenney, not Julia Lambourne. We were, to put it crudely, in
business. Miss Kenney told me that evidence of the kind I claimed to
have interested not only the Suffragettes—out of sympathy for
their deceived sister—but a colleague or colleagues of yours outraged by your double-dealing.

“It was an unexpected twist. I’d expected a quick trade with the
Suffragettes, not some complex political deal. But I couldn’t afford
to quibble. Another meeting was arranged. This time I was to come
up with the goods.

“It wasn’t the kind of meeting I’d anticipated. Miss Kenney
insisted on blindfolding me in the cab. It was a shabby hotel
somewhere—some sweltering quadrant of the East End. And Miss
Pankhurst wasn’t alone. Of all people, Lloyd George was with her.

“Bit of a shaker, really. I thought at first he was going to put the
lid on it. But not at all. He and Miss Pankhurst were in league. Just
goes to show that the public doesn’t know the half of it. Anyway,
they wanted to do business. The money for the proof. Simple as that.

I was to say nothing about it, dismiss it from my mind. That was no
problem.

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“Mmm? The date? It was the longest day—June 21st, if it matters. There was quite an interrogation , but I was an old hand at
brazening it out. Besides, my impression wasn’t that they doubted
the authenticity of the document. I don’t think they really cared one
way or the other. It was a question of how it could be used.

“Secrecy seemed to suit everyone. They wanted to discredit you
without you knowing. I assumed that was because they couldn’t be
seen to have intrigued together and it was a condition of mine from
the first. We tacitly agreed that secrecy was necessary to ensure my
safety. And Miss Pankhurst said that the deceived Suffragette
should not be exposed to public ridicule. By that I took it she meant
the movement.

“Later, of course, Elizabeth told me that Miss Pankhurst had
agreed a truce with Lloyd George until the Constitutional crisis
was over, that there had been talk of a coalition led by Lloyd
George in which the vote might be given to women. Not that it ever
happened. Lloyd George must have been flying a kite, trying to get
the credit for the Suffragettes calling off their campaign.

“My luck turned that summer. The £1000 revived my fortunes.

I prospered at the card table and the race track and . . . something
else. I fell in love.

“I first met Elizabeth at a party Julia Lambourne arranged—

largely for Elizabeth’s benefit, I suspect, to draw her back into society. It was late July, I think, held at her father’s house by the
Thames out at Marlow.

“Elizabeth moved through the evening like a ghost, pale, distracted and grave. Julia introduced us, but Elizabeth hardly
seemed to see me. That evening, for the hand I’d had in breaking
her youthful spirit, I felt regret. That night I began to care.

“Later that summer, she went abroad with her aunt. I followed
and staged a chance meeting in Switzerland. We went on together to
Italy. When we returned to England, I was set upon marrying
her—honourably, permanently, respectably. It took a long time, not
just to persuade her, but to salvage her from the shadows of depression. We’d hurt her deeply, you, I and the rest, and it took a long
time to heal. And I had to change my way of life. Gambling was for-sworn. I had to become a man of business.

“Fortuitously, my father—whom I hadn’t seen in years—died
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in 1913 and left me the money with which to start up the armament
works. Even if nobody else did, I smelt war in the wind and weapons
I judged to be a sound investment. How right I was. Elizabeth and I
were married six weeks before war broke out.

“The arms business renewed my connections with Lloyd
George, who was, by then, Minister of Munitions. We had an unspoken understanding based on our previous dealings. It acknowledged the value of money. Need I say more?

“Wealth begets wealth. I found making money became second
nature. And social position? Well, for a suitably generous contribution to party funds, Lloyd George provided that for me with a
knighthood. Quite a joke, eh? Sir Gerald Couchman. I suppose I
knew enough to make it seem wise to him to keep me sweet. And
when I told him that you were back in England after the war, looking for trouble, he dipped into his pocket and catered for you too.