Past Caring (58 page)

I passed the following day in solitude at my hotel. Whether pacing
my room or sitting alone in the hushed lounge, contemplating racing prints on the wall, what I actually saw, what filled my mind
with wistful thoughts, was the past: Elizabeth and I when we were
happy together, when we were engaged to be married, before Couch
walked off the boat from Bombay and back, without my knowledge,
into my life.

Yet, smart as I might be at the workings of Couch’s devilish
ingenuity—exploiting a youthful madness to gain not just money
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but the woman I had thought to marry—there was no denying the
force of his argument that it was too late now to seek anything as
crude as vengeance.

Such would have remained my view had it not been for Henry’s
intervention. If Couch’s son was as contemptible as Couch himself—if not more so—then my conscience was easier. Or so it would
have been, but for Elizabeth. It was of her that I largely thought
during my lonely watch. Dared I risk seeing her, being tempted to
open her eyes to what her husband had done, knowing what the
truth might do to her?

I never, of my own accord, found the answer, perhaps because I
did not need to. It found me, after a visit I received on Wednesday
morning.

I rose at dawn and gazed out of the hotel window at the early
morning business of London: street cleaners, delivery vans, a horse
and cart drawing milk, a few prompt men of the City making their
way. It was a scene I would not have recognized fifty years before,
except, that is, for the faces. Hansom cabs had been swapped for
taxis, morning suits and top hats for pinstripes and bowlers, but the
people remained the same. War and rations, time and fashion , could
not wipe away the rogues’ gallery of humanity. The faces were
blank or lively, set or furtive, those of vain heroes or honest knaves.

And out of them, exploding through the flexing, yawning
throng, came Henry Couchman. I could tell him by the cut of his
overcoat, the set of his jaw, the young man’s impulsiveness seething
within the old man’s complacency. He glared up at the sign over the
hotel doors, then bounded up the steps. I had a caller.

Within the time it took him to travel up in the lift, there was a
hammering at the door. It was not yet breakfasttime and, already, I
felt weary.

He did not wait to be asked in. He burst past me and stood in the
centre of the room, glowering as if in expectation that I would acknowledge some form of ownership.

“Mr. Couchman. What can I do for you?”

“You can leave my father alone. You can leave my family alone.

You can go back where you belong.”

“And where’s that?”

“Madeira. Anywhere provided it’s far from here. You were

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bought off a long time ago. If what you’re after is a supplement, that
can be arranged. But don’t be greedy. Go quietly.”

“You seem to be better informed than when last we spoke.”

“My father’s told me everything about you, Strafford. One
thing he didn’t mention is what’s obvious to me. You’re a loser.

There’s nothing for you here.”

“You think not?”

“I know it. You can’t prove any of your allegations. But . . . I’m
prepared to pay your nuisance value and have done with you. So
what’s your price?”

I crossed to the window and looked back at him. “Did your father suggest I might be susceptible to bribery?”

“I’m here on my own account. And I’m not offering a bribe, just
a consideration to stop you harassing my father.” He took a step
towards me. “And to make it quite clear to you that, if you refuse to
go quietly, I shall be forced to make you go.”

“And how will you do that?”

“I am a man of considerable influence, Strafford. For the good
of my family, my business and my party, that influence could be
brought to bear on you—painfully.”

“I think you’ve said enough, Mr. Couchman. Intimidation and
inducement may well be your stock in trade—like father, like son ,
after all—but they cannot touch me. I suggest you leave, before I
say something you might not want to hear.”

I opened the door but he made no move. “Listen , Strafford. If
you’re not on your way back to Madeira by next Monday, the consequences could be serious.” He walked slowly to the door and faced
me. “Old men often have accidents—if you take my meaning.”

“Your meaning is clear—and contemptible. You’re rapidly proving to me, Mr. Couchman , that your ways are in need of correction.

And that I can arrange. Now get out.”

He stepped into the hall. “If you’re not gone by Monday,
Strafford, you’ll be hearing from me.” His growl had turned to a
snarl. It had the note of a frightened but dangerous animal.

“On the contrary. You’ll be hearing from me.” I slammed the
door in his face. A few moments later, I watched from the window as
he emerged onto the pavement below and strode away towards
Piccadilly Circus, colliding with a passer-by as he went and
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appearing, from his demeanour, to blame the other for his own
clumsiness. I found myself wondering what Elizabeth thought of
her son. Even I could not deny Couch his engaging charm, but
Henry had his father’s presumption and arrogance admixed with
neither discretion nor sensitivity. If I had looked upon his power-stained face as a parent, it would have shamed me. I had to know
Elizabeth’s mind.

For she was, after all, the crux of the matter, as much a victim as
I was and therefore deserving of consideration even if I did not still
love her, which I sensed I did. But the suspicion had grown in my
mind that what I really loved was the memory of Elizabeth as she
had been forty years before, not the present, remote actuality. There
was only one way to put it to the test.

From my luggage, I picked out the book of Hardy’s verse that I
had brought with me from Madeira:
Satires of Circumstance
(an
apt title indeed). Elizabeth it was who had introduced me to Hardy
the poet, who had been reading another of his collections—
Time’s Laughingstocks
(apter still)—when we met, in tantalizing secrecy,
in Hyde Park all of a lost long ago. Perhaps for that reason , I
cleaved to Hardy’s work as a talisman , an antidote—for all its
melancholy—to the bitterness of old age.

Yet Hardy, in his endearing frailty, had not always been proof
against despair himself. I perused his
Poems of 1912–13
and found
amongst them one which seemed to capture my feelings at that moment. “After a Journey” spoke of Hardy’s return to a landscape
haunted by the ghost of his dead wife and coloured by his regret for
things done and undone. I too had returned to a haunted land, but,
in my case, I seemed to be the ghost, to whom Elizabeth promised a
form of exorcism.

Elizabeth had not been at the house in Hampstead. If I were to
find her, Couch’s Sussex address (Quarterleigh, Miston) seemed
likelier. Guessing that Couch might still be staying with Henry,
perhaps debating how much more of the truth to tell him, I could afford to waste no time. Within an hour of Henry’s ireful exit, I was at
Victoria boarding a train for Chichester.

In Chichester, I bought a map and took a local train to
Singleton , a village on the South Downs. From there, it was but a

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five-mile walk through the lanes to Miston. Yet, when I came to step
it out, the miles dragged at my feet. The nearer my destination I
drew, the less I wanted to arrive.

I came as a stranger down a rough lane from the west into the
village, its walls and gateways announcing themselves unremarkably through the misty rain as just another Sussex settlement, yet
seeming, as they closed about me with all the indifference reserved
for an unknown wayfarer, something more: a place of reckoning, a
trysting ground whither I had come too late.

I sought directions at the post office and followed them to a lane
behind the church. Quarterleigh was a thatched house set in its own
grounds, an attractive blend of cosy cottage and country seat: a
placid, pleasing abode, serene in its setting beneath the slope of the
Downs. It could hardly have been less forbidding. Yet a 75-year-old
man stood at its low white gates and hesitated to pay a call on the
62-year-old woman of the house. I retreated to the wall on the opposite side of the road, dismayed to find myself wet-palmed and trembling with nervousness. This was no way to present myself to
Elizabeth. How, I wondered, would I react if she walked down the
drive and saw me at that moment?

Fortunately, she did not. Instead, coming from the direction of
the village along the lane, there appeared a rotund countrywoman
with a laden basket under her arm and a bustling gait. She had the
look of a housekeeper about her. When she turned in at the entrance
to Quarterleigh, it seemed too good an opportunity to miss. I called
out to her and hurried across the lane.

She consented, not without a suspicious sidelong glance, to my
unusual request. Yes, she did keep house at Quarterleigh and, yes,
she would take a note to her mistress, Lady Couchman , whom she
believed to be at home. It was, I emphasized, for Elizabeth’s eyes
only and, if she wished to discuss its contents with me, she could find
me in the churchyard. If she had not arrived by six o’clock—just
over an hour away—I would leave. The note, which I had written
on the train , was anonymous, but I had little doubt that she would
guess its author. I had copied a verse from Hardy’s “After a Journey”

to announce my coming and to leave open the question of whether
she would grant me an audience. The choice of Hardy would, I
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knew, redound to the full the echo of the verse. Elizabeth, of all people, would be able to read my questing mind between the lines.

“Yes: I have re-entered your olden haunts at last;”

(Is it really a surprise to hear me again?)

“Through the years, through the dead scenes I have
tracked you;”

(Why should it be, when I have never forgotten you?)

“What have you now found to say of our past—”

(Will you not grant me one boon—to speak of that which
divided us?)

“Scanned across the dark space wherein I have lacked you?”

(For it is true—I have never recovered from the loss of you.)
Would she come? Did I want her to come? I could not decide.

And then she came.

“Edwin.” It was her voice, as I would have imagined it, the in-souciant lilt of youth become a mature assurance.

I turned and looked at her for the first time in 32 years. If she
had become old, then old age was beauteous. Of course her hair was
grey, her carriage deliberate, her bearing stately, but that was not
what I saw. Her eyes fixed mine with a look that was there the day I
forced an audience with a brick-throwing Suffragette. Her lips, had
they not been set grimly for this meeting, could still, I knew, have
mocked and delighted me with her smile. “So you came,” I said. She
nodded gravely. “Thank you.”

“There’s no need to thank me. How are you?”

“Well. I’m sorry to have lured you out here. It must seem unnecessarily melodramatic.”

“Why have you come, Edwin?”

“Just to see you, one more time.”

“But why now?”

I knew then that I could not tell her, not in cold blood. It would
have been too hurtful, too callous. The time to be either, if it had ever
existed, was long past. So, to substantiate my reticence, I continued
to question , not denounce or proclaim. Elizabeth said she was happy
and content—I could tell as much from her face. I deflected her
from any discussion of what I had done with my middle age and