Past Caring - Retail

by Robert Goddard

  “I agree.” My consent was much more than colloquial.

  “Good,” said Eve with a smile I’d earned like a political favour. “Then you’ll be pleased to know I’ve made an appointment for us to see my publisher on Friday and put him in the picture as to the revised format of my book … and put you, as it were, on the strength. Then we’ll be in a position to tackle Elizabeth.”

  So that was it. The deed was done, the bargain struck, unstated, implied, like any deal that was made between Lloyd George and Christabel Pankhurst. The commodity was different – a hint that my desire for Eve could be fulfilled – but the price was the same: Strafford’s name and neck, on a plate, in a Memoir. “Let me have my way with him,” Eve was saying, “and maybe you can have yours with me.” Our eyes and words danced and dodged around the reality of the choice, but it remained there for me to see, as palpable as the night.

  When I left, Eve came down with me to the garden. She’d been cooler, steelier than for some time before and I was, though still snared by my own hopes of her, unnerved by it. We strolled to the bank of the river and looked out across the mirror-like surface. The night was still and sublimely silent. Eve touched my arm and led me down onto a landing stage beneath the weeping willows, where we could sit and listen to the water dappling against the stanchions. The empty yet illuminated Graduate Centre hummed to itself across the river while a sleepless duck quacked plaintively further along the bank.

  “After we’ve been to London on Friday, Martin,” said Eve, “I think we deserve a little relaxation.”

  “I’m all for that.”

  “A friend of mine at Girton owns a cottage on the Norfolk Broads. I have a standing offer of the use of it, since she never goes there in term-time. This might be a good weekend to take her up on it. We could go up Friday night and stay till Monday, take stock of the project, mess about in her boat and generally enjoy ourselves.”

  “Sounds delightful.”

  “It’s a charming place – wood and thatch, a lawn running down to the river, private moorings and a little dinghy.”

  “It’s all right.” I smiled. “I didn’t need much convincing. I’m sure it would be wonderful. I can’t wait.”

  “Business before pleasure, Martin. First we must go to London.”

  “Till Friday then.” I leant forward and kissed her.

  She kept her face close to mine. “As you say, until Friday.” We rose then and walked across the lawn towards the gate. “I’ll pick you up from Princes’ at nine o’clock.”

  “Okay. I’ll be waiting.”

  We kissed again at the gate, then I walked away down Silver Street while the night and Darwin College swallowed Eve, but left her, whole and bewitching, in my mind. She had, with that last proposal, softened the blow, made the bruise to my researcher’s ego easily bearable for the sake of a weekend with her, alone but together.

  Thursday, May 12th was just another day, 24 hours between me and a delicious prospect. It was cool, I recall, and wet – an interval, an interlude, a waiting time when profundity was unthinkable. But perhaps revelation often comes when you’re not looking for it, resolution when you don’t realize you need it. That’s how it was for me.

  Confined to my room by nagging rain and incipient boredom – although Eve believed me to be dutifully reading in the U.L. – I fell to playing a fatal game of what if? Strafford’s Memoir stared at me across the room, mute but accusing, so it was probably inevitable that I should think about it. I already knew I had a choice. Either the marriage certificate was a forgery – elaborate, convincing and not very likely – or the Memoir was a calculated lie – also elaborate, also convincing and, if anything, even less likely. But what if, I fell to thinking, what if both were genuine? They couldn’t be, of course, but, if they were, then, strangely, everything made a weird kind of sense. If every word of the Memoir was true as far as Strafford knew, then no wonder he was shocked and baffled by his sudden fall from grace. If the certificate was genuine, no wonder Elizabeth wanted nothing more to do with him. I’d been looking to disprove one by reference to the other. What if, instead, I tried to use them to confirm each other? I didn’t know how to go about that, but I knew it didn’t involve seeking Elizabeth’s co-operation in a piece of Suffragette hagiography that went in for cheap psychology on the side at Strafford’s expense. And that, I knew, was what Eve had in mind: an academic treatise translated into a bestseller by a travesty of the Memoir. I was offered a share of the success strictly on Eve’s terms, and it was only my obsession with her which made me entertain those terms. We were to see her publisher the next day, no doubt to consign to him the right to use the Memoir. In return, I was offered a weekend in Norfolk. It was appalling to realize that I thought it a worthwhile trade.

  Away from Eve, when I looked out of the window at the rain washing the flagstones of Princes’ Hall, against a dripping percussion of water flooding from the gargoyled spouts of ancient guttering, away from the toss of her hair, the timbre of her voice, I could see her idea for what it was and reject it. But where would I get the courage to tell her so next day? Nothing I knew about myself suggested I would find it.

  Eve had said she would collect me at nine o’clock, so I made sure I was at Darwin by 8.30. The bedmakers were still on the staircases, but Eve’s floor was quiet and, when I knocked the door, I heard her “Come in”, soft but distinct, from an inner room.

  She was at the far end of the lounge, seated at the harpsichord but turned to face the door, as if she’d just been playing, though I’d not heard her doing so on my way in. She was dressed sombrely, in a plain black skirt and matching lightweight jumper, hair tied back in a bun, her appearance severe against the pale wood of the harpsichord. She didn’t smile and she didn’t move, just regarded me with the commanding scrutiny which seemed always at her disposal and which now prevented me walking further than the doorway.

  “Martin,” she said. “What brings you here?” The question sounded like a dare, had that cool edge she usually blunted with warmth for my benefit. But not this time. It fractured the shafted morning air in the room, crystallized it as in the frozen moment of the pointilliste picture on the wall.

  “I had to come,” I replied, feeling the sentence flounder. “I’ve decided … our approach, it won’t work.” Eve said nothing, left me time and space to blunder into. “I still think Strafford was a wronged man … it seems only just to continue investigating the possibility.”

  “What exactly do you mean?” The second word was stressed with an impatience bordering on something worse.

  I walked to the window for air, feeling surprised at my own confusion, foolish in my supposed resolve. “I mean … I’m not prepared to give up the Memoir to your approach.” I looked at Eve across a haze of sunlight angling through the window between us. She raised one eyebrow, as if to ask me and herself how to interpret the word ‘Approach’ and I hurried to scotch the ambiguity. “I’m saying that … before committing ourselves to a particular line … before seeing your publisher … we give ourselves more time to make up our minds.”

  “I’ve already made up my mind.”

  A sickening perception that Eve had made up her mind, not about Strafford or her book, but about the other thing between us, the shy shadow debate in all our discussions, the delicate entertainment of an offer of love, and made it up, moreover, in a way I dreaded, made me step forward to see her clearly, drove me into some dilution of my decision.

  “All I’m saying, Eve, is let’s give Strafford the benefit of the doubt … let’s keep an open mind … together we can …”

  I reached forward to take her hand, a hopeful clutch at reassurance. But Eve jumped up and stepped away, letting the lid fall across the keyboard of the harpsichord with a crash like a gunshot. She glared at me, breathing heavily. “Don’t touch me.”

  I froze, appalled and horrified, not so much by the harsh words as the simmering revulsion in her look. What did she mean? My mind raced to answer but couldn’t.
While I flailed inwardly, like a climber seeking holds on a smooth, sheer slope, she spoke again, with a voice from the clouds.

  “I’ll give Strafford the benefit of the doubt, Martin. At least he has the decency to be dead. But there’s no doubt in your case, is there?”

  What doubt? What case? An awful answer was laughing at me across an impossible chasm. I felt as if I was falling and remembered an old dream. Running, fast as the wind, to dislodge a cackling, misshapen dwarf from my back, hearing the thud and feeling the lightness after, pausing, free at last, to gulp some air, and then, there was the dig of his claw-like hands in my shoulders, the foul stench of his breath as he whispered in my ear, “Did you think you’d lost me, Martin? Run as far or as fast as you like … you never will.”

  I must have closed my eyes for an instant, as if to still the sensation of plummeting. There was a rustle of paper and, when I looked again, Eve had thrown some old newspapers onto the seat of her harpsichord stool.

  “Never mind about Strafford’s past,” she said. “There’s yours – for all to see. Now would you like to tell me again why you left teaching, why your marriage ended? Or can’t the humble seeker after truth face it about himself?”

  I crouched by the stool and picked up the paper on top of the pile. I recognized it at once: The Kentish Courier, 6 June 1973, front page, centre right, a three-column article under the headline TAUGHT MORE THAN HISTORY: SEX SCANDAL AT AXBOROUGH GRAMMAR SCHOOL and, under that, DAUGHTER’S CAREER WRECKED BY LECHEROUS TEACHER, CLAIMS OUTRAGED PARENT. “Tom Campion, widely respected Round Table charity campaigner and Managing Director of Hammer Haulage, Co. Ltd., Axborough, spoke yesterday of his anger and outrage at the lenient treatment of Mr Martin Radford, currently suspended from his history-teaching post at Axborough Grammar School following revelations that he had used extra pre-A level tuition as cover for a sexual relationship with his seventeen-year-old pupil, Jane Campion, now undergoing psychiatric treatment and said by her father to be ‘too broken up’ to sit her examinations next week. Mr Radford, 26, a married man and father of a daughter himself, was yesterday unavailable for comment at his home, 15 Gales Crescent, Axborough, but Mr Campion, 44, protested that ‘Radford shouldn’t be allowed to sit at home on full salary when he’s answerable for the corruption of my daughter. He should be brought to justice.’ A police spokesman said yesterday, ‘Mr Campion has spoken to us, but his daughter is seventeen and therefore over the legal age of consent. This is a matter between Mr Radford and his employers.’ The Headmaster of Axborough Grammar School, Mr Hugh Wilmott, would only say yesterday that Mr Radford’s conduct had been referred to the Director of Education and that he had been suspended until a decision could be made. He hoped that Jane would still

  I didn’t want to read anymore, knew it by heart anyway. Next in the pile was the Sunday paper that had persuaded “broken up” Miss Campion to sell her lurid story for readers to salivate over with their bacon and eggs. What had been a private, irresistible obsession became a piece of public pornography. Jane, with her demure, distraught look for the cameras, honed her image as the violated victim, while Radford, the unheard actor in every tabloid sentence, couldn’t tell anyone that suspension was worse than hanging, couldn’t stop the moral orgy of retribution. Somewhere here, I knew, we’d find SUSPENDED TEACHER’S WIFE WALKS OUT, with Helen quoted in all her prurient glory: “I cannot remain – or allow my daughter to remain – with a man who has behaved as my husband has.” Whether the minor paragraph would be here, recording my eventual dismissal after the long, coiling agony of a committee enquiry, seemed more doubtful.

  I dropped the paper and looked up at Eve. “It was a long time ago,” I said lamely. “These papers make it sound … worse than it was.”

  “How would you make it sound better?”

  “I don’t know.” I stood up and wiped my hands nervously on the sides of my trousers. “That’s why I couldn’t … tell you.”

  “That’s why you lied.”

  “If you like.”

  “Well I don’t like. I’m not some adolescent for you to dazzle and bed and throw away.”

  “I never … thought you were.”

  “You thought you could deceive me and seduce me with a lie as big as Strafford’s. If we’d gone to Norfolk this weekend, maybe you’d have succeeded. But not now. Because I don’t need you or Strafford.”

  “Maybe I need you.”

  The revulsion in Eve’s eyes turned to contempt. There was no hint of mercy. “Bad luck, Martin. I’m not interested in an unemployed sex offender. Take your pathetic fantasies … and get out.”

  There was nothing else to do. I moved to the door. But there was more to say. I turned on the threshold. “I lied, Eve, because I was afraid this was how you would react to my … lapse.”

  “Is that what you call it?”

  “I’m not denying anything. But can’t I ever be allowed to forget it?”

  “Can Jane Campion?”

  “I expect she’s all right.”

  “But you don’t know?”

  “No.”

  Eve walked round and behind the harpsichord, so that the stool, with its incriminating load of newsprint, stood between us. “Exactly. You don’t want to know. You don’t want to live with the consequences of your actions. You want to smash a life, grab your pleasure and go free.”

  “It wasn’t like that.”

  “It may have been – for all you know or care. No wonder you defend Strafford. He did much the same thing. Well I want none of it.”

  I stood my ground and played the only trump I held. “I’m not alone in suppressing the truth. You never told me you were working for the Couchmans.”

  Eve’s contempt was verging now on boredom. “This isn’t a game, Martin. Just try to understand that what I’ve learned about you makes it impossible – intolerable – for me to associate with you. Please leave now – and don’t come back.”

  “One question. How did you find out?”

  “A well-wisher told me your seamy little secret, and I’m grateful to them.” She walked slowly over to the telephone on the bookcase. “If you don’t go now, I’ll have you removed.”

  I stared at her incredulously. I realized that the shock to her of the truth about me must be great. I’d learned to live with it because I’d had to – why should she? I’d lied, yes, and worse, but did I really deserve this clinical dismissal? Every gesture of Eve’s, every look, suggested that she believed I did, that, if I remained, she might actually enjoy my being turned out by porters, because degraded men don’t deserve dignity.

  If I’d been Strafford, I remember thinking, I might have stayed, argued and fought it out. But he’d had the strength of not knowing his crime, whereas I was in no doubt. From the truth, as much as Eve’s coolly threatening tone, I retreated headlong down the stairs.

  Where do you go in flight from yourself? I’d asked that before, several times since 1973, perhaps, subconsciously, even before. In the wake of exposure, publicity and disgrace, I’d even contemplated suicide. But if I’d had enough strength for that, I’d never have been weak enough to fall for Jane in the first place.

  Black Friday in Cambridge. I wandered along Silver Street in a daze, not knowing what to do or where to go. I turned off and headed south across Sheep’s Green, alongside the Granta, where, thirteen days before, I’d punted with Eve, where we’d smiled and flirted on the edges of intimacy, lied and lazed our way towards today’s bitter parting.

  Five

  I sat up all that night staring out of the window at the tangible nothing of night, neither wanting nor daring – from a fear of dreaming – to sleep. There was something else, I knew, offering none of the ecstasy I’d hoped for with Eve, none of the respectability I’d long ago forfeited, but at least a purpose, a cause, a scrap of honour. It was Strafford. His mystery had fallen to me, and if there was anything left of Martin Radford worth calling a man, this at least I could try to measure up to. What I’d been incapable of doing, Eve ha
d done for me: she’d chosen what I should do.

  Next morning, on the London train, I started thinking about something more prosaic but nonetheless irksome. Who’d told Eve about my past? Who’d been the “well wisher” she was grateful to? And why tell her? Who stood to gain by it?

  A jealous lover I ruled out. There’d been no sign of one and, even if there had been, what would he know about me? Few people remembered a nine days’ wonder four years later.

  No, the answer was clear. It had to be the only person I’d told directly about my plans for and with Eve: Alec, my loyal, trusted friend. He’d materialized without warning, questioned me, could have guessed what little I didn’t tell him and he alone knew all about Axborough in 1973 because I’d told him at the time and again since, in drunken confessionals when I’d needed to explain to somebody, as well as myself, what it had all meant. Who else would have known where to lay hands on the chapter and verse of my disgrace as well as where to find the one person who would, four years on, be as shocked by it as if it had happened yesterday?

  But why? It was the only answer which made sense and yet it made no sense. I felt entitled to know Alec and I felt sure I did. It wasn’t his style, this mean, covert betrayal. And he’d so recently shown me his customary generosity by fixing the job with Sellick.

  The train stopped at Bishop’s Stortford, but my mind accelerated through another layer of deception: the job with Sellick. My talk with Alec in the pub in Clerkenwell had threatened the basis of that job quite specifically. It had implied I was about to ditch Sellick and use the Memoir for my own purposes, notably to get closer to Eve. Never mind that I’d had second thoughts later. That had been the intention Alec had wheedled out of me. I remembered our drink-loosened chat: