Past Caring

by Robert Goddard

  “A pity,” I said.

  “Yet reassuring,” Sellick replied, “in the sense that such issues – what became of an old cache of wine? – constitute the history of this little island. It may be frustrating for Alec in his search for articles, or disappointing for an historian such as yourself, but it is comforting for a South African to live where there is no history of violence and discord.”

  “I don’t find the history of Madeira disappointing,” I said. “It seems fascinating – full of exiles and romantics.”

  “Ah yes, those footnotes to history that are often as interesting as the main theme. But perhaps that’s rather an old-fashioned attitude.”

  “Not in my view. I don’t think history should be so … so cerebral. After all, it’s only about people – greater folk and lesser folk – and what they’ve done. If history becomes more sophisticated than they were, it’s missing the point.”

  “Excellent,” nodded Sellick. “You’re clearly a man after my own heart. I’ve long suspected that most scholarship is geared to the career of the scholar, not the enlightenment of his subject.”

  “Well, that’s bound to be so,” I conceded. “Only less than dedicated scholars could put it the other way round and they, like me, wouldn’t have the energy or the opportunity to pursue the study.”

  “Not under any circumstances?”

  “Probably not. There’s no room left for novelty in history. It’s all known and understood – or misunderstood. Historians these days don’t write, they just sift the archives for refinements of existing theories.” A vein of resentment at my exclusion from the hallowed ranks of professional historians had now become pronounced. I sensed I would regret such frankness but couldn’t suppress it. Besides, though I was indeed to regret it, all of it, much later, that wasn’t the reason. There was another sensation I chose to disregard – the feeling I was being led, slowly but firmly, where I couldn’t say, but in some specific direction.

  “But,” said Sellick, “if there were something new or mysterious, wouldn’t that overcome the objection?”

  “It might provide the energy, but what about the opportunity?”

  “That would surely be created if the mystery were sufficiently fascinating.”

  “Possibly, but the hypothesis rests on the existence of such a mystery. And I would contend that the scholars solved all the remaining mysteries a long time ago.”

  “Surely not. You also said that history was about people. Think of the thousands of names recorded in the history books, never mind the millions who aren’t. There must be mysteries galore there.”

  “Yes, but those mysteries only exist because nobody’s thought them worth solving.”

  “And what would make a mystery worth solving?”

  “Well, if it concerned somebody significant, or changed the way we thought about them or their period.”

  “And where could there be such a mystery left?”

  “Where indeed?” I intended the question to be rhetorical and the silence that followed seemed to confirm that we’d reached the end of our little flight of fancy. But as the smoke from Sellick’s cigar climbed lazily towards the ceiling, it became apparent that we were to fly higher yet.

  “How about here, Martin,” Sellick said with a smile, “in this house, where we sit eating and drinking, in the middle of a mystery?”

  What mystery was this? My mind cast about for an answer, but there was none. I was a stranger there, so everything was new to me, but scarcely mysterious. I recalled the framed photograph of Asquith’s Cabinet as the oddest thing I’d so far come across and my eyes flicked up to it in its place on the wall. Sellick, sitting with his back to the picture, must have guessed what I was looking at.

  “That photograph is part of our little local mystery‚” he said. “As an historian, Martin, do you know what it is?”

  An opportunity to display my erudition drew me on. “Yes‚” I said. “I saw it before dinner. It’s a group portrait of Asquith’s Cabinet. I’ve seen it reproduced before but never a contemporary print.”

  “And do you know who they all are?”

  “Not offhand. Asquith himself, Lloyd George and Churchill are easy. As for the rest, it’s difficult to put names to faces.”

  “There’s no need, it’s done for us. Alec, would you mind handing it down to me?”

  Alec rose and took the picture down from the wall. He handed it to Sellick, who turned it over and showed me the back by the light of the candle. In a firm, copperplate hand, there was written a date: 1st May 1908, which had been underlined. Beneath that, in two groups, there was a list of names which I recognised as members of the cabinet. From the positions of the three faces I’d so far identified, I deduced that the separate groups represented front and rear rows in the photograph. Recalling that Campbell-Bannerman, Asquith’s predecessor as Prime Minister, had died sometime in 1908, I took the picture to be commemorative of the new premiership. My eyes ran along the names in the front row – the Marquess of Crewe, D. Lloyd George, the Marquess of Ripon, Lord Loreburn, H.H. Asquith, Lord Tweedmouth, Sir Edward Grey – and alighted upon an oddity. Between Grey and R.B. Haldane, no name figured, merely the one letter I or possibly the number 1. I remarked on it to Sellick. “What does it mean?” I asked.

  “It’s in the front row of names, is it not?” he replied. I agreed. “How many are in that row?” I counted the faces on the photograph – there were nine. “And how many are listed?” I counted again – only eight.

  “Of course,” I said. “It’s the pronoun I. Then this was written – and owned? – by a member of the Cabinet.”

  “Quite so.”

  I turned back to the photograph and focussed on the unidentified face between Grey and Haldane. A tall, broad-shouldered figure, handsome with a hint of arrogance in his features set off by a dashing moustache and a firm set to the jaw, younger than most of the others pictured but wearing the same sober morning dress, yet contriving nevertheless to project enterprise and initiative. I glanced along the row to Lloyd George – the shorter and stockier of the two – noting that both had a brightness of eye and a keenness of bearing that set them apart from most of their colleagues, crusty veterans, I guessed, of Gladstone’s days. This was as much as I could make out by candlelight and sepia, but I was annoyed that I couldn’t put a name to this particular face. I looked to Sellick for a clue and wasn’t disappointed.

  “Who is he, Martin, our mystery man? A promising Young Turk given his first taste of power?”

  “I’m not sure. It’s hardly my period. What was his post?”

  “He was Asquith’s new blood in the Home Office,” replied Sellick with a twinkle in his eye. If I hadn’t been so preoccupied with identification, I’d have taken more notice of Sellick’s familiarity with Edwardian politics and perhaps concluded that he was either more of an historian than he’d given me to understand or less disinterested in our subject than his manner suggested. As it was, I was busy with a mental roll-call of politicians of the time.

  “Surely,” I ventured, “Asquith’s Home Secretary was Herbert Gladstone – son of W.E. – and he was succeeded by Churchill … No, I’m wrong. Didn’t Asquith ship Gladstone off as Governor-General somewhere when he came to office?”

  “Quite right,” said Sellick. “To Canada, in point of fact, thus making way for?”

  I was there at last and just as well, for Sellick’s smile was becoming slightly pained at the edges.

  “A man by the name of Strafford. But that’s literally all I know of him – a few years of office, then nothing – a little-known figure hard to recall amid so many famous names.”

  “Little-known indeed,” said Sellick, “but in his day far from it. And not so hard to recall for those of us who live in his house.”

  “This is his house?”

  “It was. Edwin Strafford retired here from England and died in 1951. I bought it at an auction after his death and fell in love with the place. Then I began to sift through what wa
s left here and found many interesting curios, like this photograph. When I realized that Strafford had been a British Cabinet minister – which nobody here knew, or told me if they did – I found what I could about him in the history books. That was precious little, but what there was formed our domestic mystery.”

  The historian’s curiosity in me had been aroused. It didn’t surprise me that I should be ignorant of the life of such a man, but the opportunity to learn something about it in such unlikely surroundings was not to be missed.

  “What is the mystery?” I asked. We had come to the nub.

  “Put Martin out of his misery, Leo,” said Alec helpfully. “You know you’re dying to.”

  “Very well,” said Sellick. “You will have to tell me, Martin, if this interests you as an historian. As a man, it interests me deeply.” He paused to sip his coffee, then began.

  “As I say, there is not much in the history books about Edwin Strafford. The Dictionary of National Biography devotes less than a column to him. He was born in 1876, the son of an officer in the Indian Army. He went to Cambridge, then – briefly – to South Africa as a junior staff officer in the Boer War. He returned to England to fight his home constituency in Devon for the Liberals at the 1900 election and won, against the national trend. Then he climbed slowly but surely through the ranks of his party and became a junior minister when the Liberals came to power in 1905. When Asquith became Premier in 1908 he reshuffled his Cabinet and appointed Strafford Home Secretary at the age of thirty-two. It was a remarkable but short-lived rise. Two years later, Strafford resigned without explanation and disappeared virtually overnight – from the public eye at any rate. He left Parliament and became a totally private citizen – soon, a totally forgotten one also. He served throughout the First World War in the army, then took the post of British Consul here on Madeira. Later he bought this house and the quinta. He retired from the Consulate in 1946 and died five years later. End of story.”

  Sellick paused for effect. This was clearly not the end of the story.

  “Beginning of mystery,” put in Alec.

  “That’s right,” resumed Sellick. “I found what little I could glean from the history books about Strafford not so much disappointing as wholly unsatisfactory. How could a man rise so swiftly – presumably on merit – then quite simply vanish without trace and, what’s more, without apparent reason? One is familiar with scandal and failure in politics, but Strafford is tainted with neither. The passing mentions of his actions during two years in office – difficult years of suffragette and trades union unrest – are, at worst, neutral, sometimes laudatory. The only reason he is not given more extensive treatment is that he did not proceed with a political career like his contemporaries. It is as if Churchill or Lloyd George – of the same generation, both also promoted by Asquith – resigned abruptly in 1910, before either won fame as leaders of their country in war. Would that not seem surpassingly odd?”

  “With hindsight, it would in their cases,” I put in. “But who can say what Strafford might or might not have achieved if he hadn’t resigned?”

  “Precisely,” said Sellick. “No-one can say. It is a mystery. And the fundamental mystery is why a talented, ambitious man in the prime of life chose to achieve nothing when he could have achieved so much.”

  “Perhaps he simply lost interest in politics,” I proffered. “Or perhaps he found the public eye not to his taste. It’s been known.”

  “True, very true,” Sellick replied weightily. “And those were my thoughts too – an enfant terrible who burnt himself out for some prosaic reason. It seemed a pity.”

  Sellick rose from his chair and moved to replace the picture on the wall. He did so with reverential care, while I pondered the past tense in his last remark and waited for the next.

  “It seemed a pity and it was not so,” Sellick continued, resuming his seat. “As it turned out, I had been wasting my time burrowing in the reference books. I had ignored what that picture should have told me, that the answer – albeit an incomplete one – was here all the time.

  “There’s a fine old wooden desk in what was Strafford’s study – I’ll show it you later, preferably in daylight. When I was turning it out, I found in one of the drawers a large, handsomely bound volume, filled – but for a few pages – with writing in the same hand as that on the back of the photograph.”

  “What was it?”

  “Strafford’s memoir – compiled here in his retirement. It’s a highly personal statement of how he came to be buried in the diplomatic service in such an obscure spot.”

  “Does it explain the mystery?”

  “Far from it. It heightened the mystery, for Strafford does not – cannot – explain it. He recounts the circumstances of his exile, but they baffled him as much as they still baffle me.”

  “This sounds extraordinary.”

  “By any standards.”

  “May I see the Memoir?”

  “Certainly. I will fetch it now. Can I suggest that we take this opportunity of retiring to the drawing room?”

  There was no dissent. Sellick led us back through the hall to the drawing room, where the lamps had been lit in readiness for us. He went on through another door, asking Alec to pour me a drink while he fetched the Memoir.

  Alec handed me another macia. “Interested?” he enquired.

  “Very. It’s not every day one gets to see a primary source like this.”

  “There speaks the true historian.”

  “Have you seen it?”

  “Yes, but not read it. Leo’s never been so forward with it before. Maybe he thinks he’s found somebody to appreciate it.”

  Was Alec becoming sarcastic under the influence of several drinks? I’d no time to ponder the point, for Sellick returned almost at once, carrying a marbled, leather-bound tome. He waved us into deep armchairs facing the fireplace and stood, one foot on the fender, holding the book before him.

  “It’s a fair old read,” he said, “a mix of diary and recollection. There’s some irrelevant material, interesting in its own right but not strictly germane. Yet it confirms throughout that Strafford’s exit from politics in 1910 – and the events leading up to it – constituted the great disappointment of his life, in more ways than one. If you’re sufficiently interested, Martin, I’d like you to read it and give me your opinion.”

  “I’d like to very much.” My enthusiasm was genuine. As a student, I’d never excelled at wading through arid source documents, but there had never existed the motivation to do so, never the expectation of discovering something new or fascinating as a result. Sellick had promoted this document so well I could hardly have borne not to read it. There was, however, more promotion to come yet.

  “This is probably no time for considered appraisal,” Sellick said. “I hope Alec told you that you would be most welcome to remain here tonight. I would suggest that a reading of this could best be undertaken in the morning with a clear head. But never fear” – he had seen me framing a protest at this delay – “I will not leave you to lose sleep over the contents. I will tell you what I have already learnt from them. Then you will be able to judge for yourself whether mine seem appropriate conclusions.”

  Sellick sat beneath a standard lamp to the right of the fireplace and leafed through the book, cradled in his lap, as he spoke. “Strafford was the youngest of Asquith’s prótegés and easily the most handsome. He was also unattached. He was, therefore, the eligible bachelor par excellence. he had the pick of a dozen well-connected young Liberal ladies. Yet his choice fell elsewhere and – for an Edwardian Home Secretary – it fell perversely. Strafford met and came to love a young Suffragette – a captivating creature, it would seem, but scarcely the ideal bride. These were sensitive times for politicians in their private lives. Lloyd George was forever courting disaster with extra-marital adventures and mere divorce had ruined more than one politician. So how could a Home Secretary whose government resisted female suffrage consider marrying a militant young propo
nent of that cause?”

  “Difficult‚” I agreed.

  “But not impossible, if he was prepared to pay the price. Morally, he could not be reproached. All such a marriage would do is embarrass the government. So, being an honourable man, Strafford proposed to abandon his political career for the woman he loved, who, in turn, undertook to detach herself from the Suffragette cause and become a devoted wife. But the path of honour did not bring him salvation. His plan was unimpeachable, yet its execution went awry in the most mysterious manner. Strafford submitted his resignation, intending that it should immediately be followed by an announcement of his engagement. But no such announcement could be made because, but a few hours after delivering his letter of resignation to 10 Downing Street, he was rejected in the most outright terms by his fiancée. She renounced their engagement for reasons she refused to disclose and asked that Strafford should never attempt to see her again. He was devastated.”

  “As well he might be,” I said. “Why did she do it?”

  “Strafford never knew. Shattered as he was by his rejection, all he could do at the time was attempt to re-build his way of life, which he had been so busily demolishing. The day after his resignation, he called again at number 10, intending to rescind it.”

  “Intending?”

  “Yes, but it was not to be. The Prime Minister refused to hear of it, though not because he felt he was being trifled with, nor because he disapproved of Strafford’s now aborted marriage. He cited other reasons which he declined to specify but which he felt sure Strafford could guess. Actually, he could not. This was a second inexplicable rejection from a source which had hitherto shown him only favour. Strafford was beside himself with despair. He brooded over it endlessly. It became the tragedy and the mystery of his life, and prompted him to compile this Memoir, many years later, when at last he could bear to commit it to paper.”

  “That could be the sort of mystery we spoke about earlier.”

  “I think it is, Martin – a mystery worthy of an historian such as yourself. Which is why I was delighted to hear you were to visit Alec, who spoke so highly of your abilities.”