Past Caring

by Robert Goddard

  It was not Elizabeth who answered the door. It was opened too quickly – almost flung open. I was surprised, but not for long. The reason was standing before me. Henry Couchman, my celebrated ex-father-in-law, had lost none of his bloodshot pugnacity since the last time I’d seen him, eyeing me distastefully in the divorce court three years before, a proprietorial arm round his daughter then, a silent warning-off in his glare. The glare and the meaning hadn’t changed. He was the man in possession, a man of means and solid virtues confronting the disgraced intruder.

  Henry did not speak. It was one of his justly famed qualities. As a largely silent Member of Parliament, he’d risen like damp in the Conservative party, been a junior minister under Heath, commanded still an impressive majority in his constituency, did not welcome scapegrace sons-in-law. When they’d been excised from his family, he didn’t expect them to show their face again.

  I broke the silence. “I came to see Lady Couchman.” Then, stating the obvious, “I didn’t expect to see you here.”

  “I’ll bet you didn’t, my lad.” Henry’s patronizing tone was unaltered. But whereas once he could use it to make me squirm, now I had a secret advantage. An overbearing father-in-law came down a peg or two when he was also a baby who’d stared up at Strafford from his pram with blank incomprehension.

  “Is she at home?”

  “Not to you.” He almost smiled then in his superiority. Strafford was wrong, I thought. You could never have been his son.

  “Does that mean she’s here?”

  “No. She’s gone away for a few days.”

  “Where would that be?”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “I wanted to speak to her, that’s all.”

  “Now listen, Martin.” Henry puffed himself up with that familiar prelude to an overbearing lecture. “My mother doesn’t know you and doesn’t want to know you. Those of us who do know you wish we didn’t and I certainly don’t propose to allow you to bother an elderly lady. When I heard you’d be coming here …”

  “I suppose Helen told you.”

  “Naturally.” I might have known she would. Even now I could hear her daughterly tones down the telephone to Henry, concern for her grandmother camouflaging her hatred of me. If only I’d been more subtle, or sober, in Shaftesbury. But that would have been beyond me and now the damage was done. Elizabeth had been spirited away, leaving Henry to stand guard. But why? “God knows why Helen puts up with your visits. If I were Ralph …”

  “But you’re not.” Actually, I’d never seen that much difference between them. It was just that Henry was a man of more substance, so felt he had more weight to throw about.

  “By God, Martin, if I were, I’d have seen you off years ago for the bloody nuisance you are. Maybe access to my granddaughter isn’t my affair, but my mother’s peace of mind certainly is. The last thing she needs is you sniffing around.”

  “After what?”

  The question knocked him off balance. He began to bluster in his party political manner. “What … How can I say?” He seemed to recover himself. “We don’t know what you’re up to, Martin, and we don’t want to know.”

  I saw a slight advantage and tried to exploit it. “I was hoping to speak to your mother about the past – the Suffragette era. It interests me as an historian.” Henry snorted derisively. “It might interest her too. What I don’t know is why it should worry you.”

  There was a flicker of uncertainty in Henry’s steely glare. “You don’t worry me, my lad.” Strangely, that was the first moment when I felt I did.

  “Something does, Henry, sufficiently for you to whisk your mother away at a moment’s notice and lie in wait for me here.”

  “Lie in wait be damned.” His colour, which was always red, was getting redder still. “I came down here to catch up with some paperwork in peace and quiet.” Now he was making excuses. “I have better things to do than …”

  “You’ve got a funny way of showing it.”

  “Listen to me, my lad.” He advanced menacingly.

  “No, listen to me. What do you know about Edwin Strafford?”

  He stopped in his tracks. “Who?” It didn’t seem too much to imagine that he had no need to ask.

  “Edwin Strafford. A friend of your father – and your mother – at different times.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “Really? A Cabinet minister under Asquith – surely you should have done?”

  “Why?”

  “That’s what I’d like to know.”

  “There’s nothing to know. You’re talking in riddles, man.”

  “I admit that. But it’s a riddle I’m trying to solve. Edwin Strafford was once engaged to your mother.”

  “What of it?”

  “You do know of him then?”

  “I didn’t say that. I daresay my mother had many admirers when she was young.”

  “This one also fought with your father in South Africa and was later thrown over for him by your mother.”

  Henry drew closer, so close I could smell the whisky on his breath. “I don’t know what bloody fool game you’re playing, but I advise you to stop it for your own sake.”

  I knew Henry’s moods well enough to know that it would soon be time to stop. But I decided to try one other line, on a hunch. “It’s just innocent research, Henry. Nothing for anyone to feel guilty about. Edwin Strafford’s been dead for 26 years. But you did meet him once.”

  Henry wouldn’t remember the meeting I was referring to. But he reacted as if he did – that or some other meeting. “Guilty? What the hell are you implying? I’ve never met the man.”

  “I rather think you have.”

  “I’ve nothing to say to you, Radford. Get yourself off my property.”

  “All right. I’ll go quietly – for the moment.” I turned and walked as casually as I could away up the drive. It was no time to point out that Henry wasn’t on his property, but his mother’s. Or perhaps he’d meant a different kind of property – the past, a family secret, a meeting I didn’t know about. I heard him close the door firmly behind me. But I wasn’t finished with him yet.

  I walked back through the churchyard, past Couchman’s grave. He’d outlived Strafford by three years, still been on the scene when his old friend came home to England in 1951, to meet his accidental death. Had they met then? I’d touched a nerve by referring to Henry meeting Strafford. If he really had, when else could it have been?

  Back in the village, I followed a footpath that led down beside some cottages along the banks of the brook that ran through Miston. Soon, I was in a field carpeted in buttercups and daisies, with the church opposite me over the stream. I crossed a stile into a wood that grew down to the banks of the stream and followed the path through bracken and bluebells to a point exactly opposite the rear of Quarterleigh. Shaded in the dappled light of the wood, I had a clear, secure view of it. The back garden of the house ran down to the opposite bank. A conservatory was built onto the back of the house, with a paved area in front of it. To one side was the garage, with the bonnet of Henry’s Jaguar extending beyond the open doors, to the other a large greenhouse and a terraced kitchen garden. The rest of the garden, lushly grassed and flower-bedded, sloped down between rhododendron hedges to the river, where the yellow heads of daffodils merged with the waving reeds at the bank.

  I stayed where I was for a quarter of an hour or so, till I started to get cold and bored, concluded that Henry wasn’t coming out, and gave up the vigil. As I climbed over the stile out of the wood and emerged into the open, my eye was caught by a flash of light from an upper window of the house. Looking back up at it, I thought I saw a figure draw back from view and didn’t find it hard to imagine Henry peering out through binoculars that had caught the sun. If so, he’d spotted me and knew I’d been watching. But I knew something too: the Henry who’d blustered me off the premises and who might have caught me spying was a frightened man. The question was: why?

  I went back to
The Royal Oak and booked a room for the night. That evening, I sat in the bar, drank beer and played darts with the locals. I dropped the name Couchman a couple of times but learnt nothing. They knew a rich old widow lived at Quarterleigh but that was all. She was neither an eccentric recluse nor a local celebrity. The landlord remembered Sir Gerald, when I mentioned seeing his grave, as a well-spoken, free-spending whisky drinker who called regularly in the lounge bar and gave good racing tips.

  I slept soundly and woke with a clear plan. Elizabeth was out of my reach, for the moment. The only clue to follow was Henry’s denial of meeting Strafford. If they’d ever met as adults, it could only have been when Strafford came home in the spring of 1951. He’d gone then to Devon to visit his nephew – and died there. So that was where I would go, to try for weakness another part of the wall.

  During a blank weekend in London, I wrote my first report for Sellick, which wasn’t as easy as it should have been. In telling him how my search for the truth was going, I had to gloss over some of the truth that I already knew: that to the Couchman clan I was a pariah, that Henry Couchman would have resented me even if he hadn’t resented my questions. But I left Sellick in no doubt that Henry knew something and held out the hope that in Devon I might find out what.

  I wonder now, looking back, that I could have had so few misgivings about editing the truth to suit my purpose. It never once occurred to me that I was doing what I was trying to prove others had done.

  Three

  I didn’t set off for Exeter until Monday afternoon. I’d arranged to stay with friends, so there was no need to hurry. Somewhere after Taunton, the train began to wind through the deep green fields and brick red earth that spoke of Strafford’s homeland. I’d never been there with those associations in my mind before, never heard a station announcer pronounce Crediton in a Devon accent and thought that that was where old Brewer Strafford had come from. It gave the city echoes. It wasn’t any longer just the place where I spent an odd weekend with my friends the Bennetts, wasn’t just a genteel cathedral city astride the river Exe. It had acquired a past and a share of the mystery.

  From St David’s station, I walked down beside the river to the Exe Bridge – now a multi-lane roundabout, not the simple stone structure that Strafford’s car had once rumbled over on its way to Barrowteign. There I caught a bus up into the modern housing estate on the high ground west of the river, where the Bennetts lived in their proud little detached property, complete with patio doors, open plan front garden and integrated garage – a happy, suburban couple with no qualms about leading a settled, ordered existence. They never minded my gentle chiding of their domestic routines because they kept alive that played-out English virtue: tolerance. Nick and Hester had met me – as well as each other – during teacher training. I’d been Nick’s best man and he’d been mine, Alec being – as usual – out of the country at the time. But that wasn’t the sentiment that kept us friends. It was simply that Nick and Hester had stood by me during my exit from the teaching profession, had been fully aware of the circumstances but never once reproached me. When others had turned their backs, they’d invited me to stay with them for a few weeks and ride out the bleakest period. It was a kindness I’d never forgotten.

  As I came up the road, I spotted Hester kneeling on the lawn, gouging at some impertinent weed with a trowel. She was wearing dungarees that, with the long flaxen hair flowing down her back, made her look too young and delicate for the task.

  “It’s only trying to remember when it was a meadow,” I said, coming up behind her.

  Hester jumped like a startled hare – she had a gift for not hearing people coming. “What?” she cried, swinging round to look at me with her large, intent eyes – eyes that always made me think I should have married her rather than Helen – or at least tried to. “Oh, it’s you!” she said, smiling with recognition. And that earnest, trusting smile always made me think again: Hester deserved someone better than me – and she’d got him.

  She bounced up from her kneeler and delivered me a smacking kiss. “Come inside,” she said with bubbly enthusiasm. “Drag Nick away from marking for a moment.”

  Indoors, we found Nick sighing over a stack of exercise books. He looked up with a careworn, crumpled grin. “4B are bad enough without you turning up” he said. “But at least it’s an excuse to stop. How’s tricks?”

  And I told him – as best I could – while Hester started dinner and Nick treated himself – and me – to some relaxing gin and tonic and assured me how lucky I was to be out of teaching.

  “Especially,” he enthused, “when you land a cushy research number. What I wouldn’t give to be writing my biography of John Clare” – the pet project he’d never had time to start – “rather than ploughing through that …” He gestured despairingly at the pile of ink-stained books and gulped some more gin rather than select a suitable epithet. “But what brings you down here?”

  “Strafford’s family lived at Barrowteign – a National Trust property in the Teign valley.”

  “What are you looking for there?”

  “Anything I can find.”

  So he wished me luck, as did Hester, over the excellent dinner that followed. As Hester pointed out, I was looking well and sounding happy, so, temporary or not, the assignment couldn’t be bad. She was right. And so far the job had done more for me than I’d done for it. The next day gave me a chance to put that right.

  Nick gave me a lift to the bus station on his way into school next morning.

  “Have a good time‚” he shouted as I got out. “Think of me while you’re swanning around Barrowteign this afternoon.” Then he disappeared in a cloud of exhaust fumes.

  The bus that struggled up the hills west of Exeter dropped me at Farrants Cross on the Moretonhampstead road. It diverted to Dewford only on Thursdays – and this was Tuesday. But a fine spring Tuesday, so I didn’t mind wandering down the empty lane into the Teign valley, the only sound birdsong and the trickle of water seeping from the fields. To my left was a high, overgrown embankment. Nick’s map showed it as a disused railway line: the old Teign valley route that in sixty-odd years of uneconomic working had seen three accidental deaths in one local family. Who’d have thought it, to see it now brambled and benign beneath a blue sky?

  Further south, the valley opened out a little. The disused railway became just a scar across the fields beside the river that I could make out from the higher vantage of the road. Then I saw what I was looking for: a bunching of trees in parkland and, nestled in amongst them, tall slate roofs and red sandstone walls: Barrowteign, waiting unchanged to receive me.

  The road descended into a slight hollow and I lost sight of the house. Further on was a crossroads. The signpost indicated Dewford to the right, various hamlets to the left. But a separate National Trust board – BARROWTEIGN: HOUSE AND GROUNDS, OPEN APRIL 1 TO OCTOBER 31 – pointed also to the left. So I followed that, dipping down slightly between fields to an old stone bridge across the river. Just the other side, the road forked. Another National Trust board directed me to the left and there, ahead, were tall stone pillars flanking a gateway. The road led through them past a newly painted sign: BARROWTEIGN. There was no high wall, no lodge, just fir trees shading a mossy bank with new fencing along its top. I stopped between the pillars, savouring the place and the moment. Statues in the likeness of barn owls had been carved at the top of each pillar. They gazed down stonily at visitors and held a small shield between their claws. Time and weather had erased any device the shields might once have borne.

  The drive turned abruptly away from a direct route to the house, although a gated road, marked PRIVATE, continued that way through an avenue of lime trees, their leaves bright green and inviting in the sunshine. It looked to me as if that could once have been the main drive, because there were no trees shading the tarmacced route that I followed away from and then back towards the house. And if I hadn’t been on foot and looking out for it, I’d certainly have missed the shallow tre
nch – like an empty moat – that the road crossed a little further on: the railway line, bisecting the park once but now, with its fences and rails gone, its ballast all but grassed over, just a minor undulation beneath a motor coach’s wheels. I was puzzled: there was no sign at all of a level crossing or its keeper’s cottage.

  The road topped the bank on which the house stood, ran past a stable yard now serving as a car park and broadened into a gravelled square at the foot of wide stone steps. These led up to a paved area running along the foot of the house behind a low-clipped yew hedge. I paused at the foot of the steps and looked up at the building: a grand but unpretentious frontage, red sandstone with some lighter stone facing round the windows: wooden doors beneath a rose-windowed arch, the familiar stone owl now placed as if holding the lantern above the doors, tall tracery windows on the ground floor, fewer, though in the same style, on the floor above, oriel windows above that beneath the steep slate roof. Either end of the frontage stood gabled cross-wings bellied out by bay windows.

  The porch led straight into a hall, dark despite the high windows, panelled and roofed in wood, with a huge granite fireplace and, at the far end of the hall, broad, shallow stairs that led up to a half-landing, then divided either side and went on up to balconies that ran round three sides of the hall.

  An old lady perched sparrow-like at a desk by the fireplace sold me a ticket and a guidebook and said her piece. “The Hall is a Victorian imitation of medieval tradition: a place for the feudal lord to entertain his vassals. In this case, the first Mr Strafford sometimes held parties for his brewery workers here. But the tradition soon died out. The staircase is solid teak and leads to the bedrooms. You’ll find a guide in each room.”

  I thanked her and went on. On the other side of the fireplace, well-lit by the windows facing it, was a full-length portrait. There he was, founder of the family, looking just as I’d expected from his grandson’s description: a proud, stout, red-faced man, dressed in a rather faded Georgian style, posing in his own hall and grasping the lapels of his tail-coat with self-satisfied firmness. The small plate read: THOMAS STRAFFORD (1789–1867), but the picture said far more.