Past Caring

by Robert Goddard

  “In this case I do. It shows that Strafford tried to withdraw his resignation immediately after submitting it but wasn’t allowed to – something conveniently overlooked in your DNB piece.”

  “I’d heard that, but it only confirms what I think of him. Lost his nerve as soon as he realized how weak his position was. Asquith would hardly have wanted him back after that. If your Suffragette nonsense was correct, why did his ardour cool so quickly?”

  “It didn’t: he was thrown over.”

  “Then why didn’t Asquith take him back?”

  “Exactly what I’m trying to find out. I believe one or more of his Cabinet colleagues conspired to ruin his reputation.”

  “Who – and why?”

  “Lloyd George seems favourite. He tried to entice Strafford into secret negotiations with Balfour to form a coalition and oust Asquith.”

  “When?”

  “June 1910 – immediately before his resignation.”

  “Then your chronology’s out. Lloyd George did discuss the possibility of a coalition with Balfour – but not until the autumn of that year.”

  “Then either Lloyd George was lying when he told Strafford about it or we simply don’t realize how early he started exploring the idea.”

  “Or Strafford’s led you up the garden path.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Well, since you’re here at this time, do you want to be led into Hall? I’m going across.” He rose, flung his bathrobe over the back of a chair, plucked a stained and threadbare gown from the back of the door and struggled into it. I agreed readily enough and followed him out onto the court, where evening sun was shining on the cobbles – wet from an afternoon shower – and gowned figures were beginning to trickle in to the summoning dinner bell.

  Then came the first sign that Baxter was thinking about what I’d said to him. “Why should Lloyd George need to ruin Strafford,” he pondered, almost to himself, “just because he refused to participate in negotiations with Balfour?”

  “Because Strafford then knew enough to discredit Lloyd George in the party’s eyes and scupper the negotiations before they’d even started. It’s my belief Lloyd George feared Strafford’s youth and ability enough to need either his complicity – or his head.”

  Baxter stopped in his tracks and pursed his lips against his finger. “Your version has all the appeal of a skimpy garment on a beautiful woman, Radford – eye-catching, but not much use in bad weather. First, verify your source – let the U.L. take a look at it. Second, spend a few months with all the other contemporary material. Third, assemble your case. Then come back.”

  “I don’t have time for all that.”

  “Then you don’t have time for history.”

  I bit my lip and we went on into dinner. Baxter was greeted jocularly at high table; he introduced me cursorily and inaudibly. In the seat opposite us, an etiolated figure wrapped in the folds of an oversized gown measured his porcelain profile against the candlelight and raised one hand feyly in welcome. “Marcus,” he said, in a whine forgivable only for its vintage, “that you are come once more amongst us is unexpected justification for my risking again the perils of the chef’s rabbit pie.”

  “Do cut the crap, Stephen,” Baxter retorted. “Radford, meet Stephen Lamzed, our foremost art historian. Not here in your day. We poached him from King’s.”

  “Pleased to meet you.” I tried to sound non-committal.

  “Enchanted.” Somehow, Lamzed contrived to look it. His face, framed by long silver hair, was a mosaic of wrinkles, but I could have taken them for the cracked oil of an Old Master till the moment he wet his lips with the long, thin tongue of a lizard catching insects in the desert. “If you will permit me to say so, Marcus, it is too long since you last brought glad company to our table. To what do we owe the pleasure?”

  Baxter smiled slyly. “Radford’s investigating a Suffragette romance.”

  Lamzed winced. “What say you, young Radford?”

  “You could put it that way. I’m researching an episode of Edwardian history that touches on the Suffragettes.”

  Lamzed began checking the cleanliness of his cutlery. “I confess that the study of women being forcibly fed and – which is worse – shouting at men holds no attractions for me, but it is much in vogue of late. Is not the history faculty a hotbed of feminist causes, Marcus?”

  Baxter raised his eyebrows above nearly closed eyelids. “Hardly that.”

  “But am I not daily regaled with tales of the dark lady of Darwin? Is not the siren of the Sidgwick site the talk of every common room in Cambridge? And is she not a proponent of just such study?”

  “Who do you mean?” I asked.

  Baxter wrenched a bread roll in half. “He means there’s a few lecturers easier on the eye than me and one in particular who gets a good audience simply by being female and under fifty.”

  Lamzed’s wrinkles organized themselves into a grin. “Marcus, you underestimate yourself. But it is certainly the case that Miss Randall enjoys a following which, even if less academically pure than your own, is nonetheless a shade larger and conspicuously more enthusiastic.” Baxter returned the grin through clenched teeth and swayed out of the way of a bowl of soup. I waited for my own to arrive before pressing for details.

  “Miss Eve Randall,” Baxter explained, siphoning soup noisily from his spoon between phrases, “is a research fellow at Darwin. She gave a course of lectures last Michaelmas term on Edwardian protest movements. Well-received, I’m told.”

  “You didn’t hear any?”

  “They clashed with some of my own on imperialism. Stephen could no doubt give you the respective audience ratings.” Lamzed bowed in acknowledgement. “Anyway, she’s giving six more this term.”

  “Weight of popular demand,” Lamzed breathed over the table.

  “Edited highlights,” Baxter continued, “for the benefit of those too starstruck to concentrate last time.”

  “Would it be worth my going along to one?”

  Baxter let his spoon fall with a clatter into the now empty bowl and began to pick his teeth. “Why not? If you really want to work up a Suffragette angle to Strafford, you could bounce the idea off Miss Randall. I don’t think she’ll thank you for some hearts and flowers theory, though. She sees the Suffragettes as sexless Amazons.”

  Lamzed peered suspiciously at a solitary asparagus tip that he’d fished from his soup. “Wednesdays at ten,” he intoned. “Queue early to avoid disappointment.” I decided to do just that. Which was, though even I could be forgiven for not realizing it, another mistake. While Lamzed simpered on about the declining art of male lecturing – and Baxter cracked his teeth on rabbit bones – I quickened my pace down the steepening slope.

  The Sidgwick site at ten the following morning – a cool, nondescript sort of day, with a scattering of distracted students around the stark, grey blockhouses of the arts faculty. It had been a new development when I’d first been a student there – a triumph of soulless ’sixties architecture – but was now looking older than its years: concrete stained, façades peeling, extractor fans straining. I sat outside the coffee bar watching the changeover between nine o’clock and ten o’clock lectures, then filed in at the back of a crocodile of students for the one we’d all been waiting for.

  I sat at the back of the room and looked around, first self-consciously, then curiously, at the students, all busy comparing their reactions to last week’s lecture and snapping open files with excessive enthusiasm. They looked younger and more serious than I’d expected: so many pimply youths and blue stockings. But perhaps that was just incipient middle age.

  Still, there was no doubting the respectful nature of the hush that fell on the room a few moments later. A tall, elegant figure entered by a side door and walked briskly, but without hurrying, to the lectern: Eve Randall, a cool, grave beauty in a lemon dress beneath an academic gown, standing serene yet unsmiling at the head of the room. Her entrance was like a window opening in a stu
ffy room, but there was a keen edge to the breeze it let in. Her features had a fine distinction that made you catch your breath and the dark, lustrous hair curled on her shoulders with an alluring bounce, but the flashing eyes and slightly raised jaw told you the cat had claws. Not that there was any need for her to show them – the audience was in her power.

  She spoke for forty-five minutes, fluently, without notes, calmly ordering and disclosing arguments in a beguiling sequence that made you want to agree with her, made you want her to be right. Her voice and her lecturing style were like a chilled aperitif: enticing you to the main course. But the appetizer was all we got. Soon, the lecture was over and we were left with scraps of memory. For my part, the content of the talk had been inconsequential. She’d placed Suffragettes in the van of pressure politics, pioneering a way of reacting to unacceptable circumstances in a democracy. The fact that I didn’t agree with that didn’t really matter. The point was that I and everyone else there went along with Eve Randall because of her haughty, mysterious beauty – her style, her flair, her magnetism – not the logic of her thesis. “The extreme lengths of personal denial and humiliation to which these young women were driven illustrate the increasing failure of the Edwardian political machine to solve its problems. More lastingly, they removed British women forever from a Victorian walled garden and confronted them with the challenging but not always pleasing truth that they could only achieve change in society by sustained and united effort.” So she ended, until the following week, though I don’t suppose I was alone in regretting that she didn’t continue.

  A number of students – mostly girls – clustered round their idol afterwards, asking questions. I left them to it – I wanted to tackle her alone. I sat outside on a bench while the next bustle between lectures subsided. About five minutes later, the figure I’d been waiting for emerged from a side door of the hall. She walked well – I’d noticed that when she’d arrived for the lecture – and moved now gracefully but purposefully across the paved arena to the History Library – that ugly prow of brick and glass that was the site’s crowning folly of modernist architecture. I’d been there often enough in the past to guess that Eve Randall would have been allocated one of the hutch-like offices in the upper reaches of the building and, while she went up in the lift, I checked a nameboard, traced her and made my way there by the stairs.

  The door was open. A gown was draped over a chair behind the wood and tubular steel desk. The occupant of the room stood by the metal-framed window, gazing out at the red brick turrets of Selwyn College, while an electric kettle came to the boil in a corner. I tapped on the door and she turned to look at me.

  A black lambswool cardigan had been put on over her dress. It softened the donnishness but not the conviction. I put her age at about my own, but without my grey hairs or ragged edges. She looked like a woman in perfect balance: between youth and maturity, character and beauty, womanhood and professionalism. This harmony expressed itself in an easy perfection that I’d viewed from afar in the lecture theatre and admired now at closer quarters. She’d dressed demurely for the occasion, but there were voluptuous hints to the fit of her clothes that I wasn’t slow to take and her hair swayed with an almost calculated freedom as she turned her head. There was still no smile, as if the solemn scrutiny of her eyes must come before any courtesy.

  “Miss Randall?”

  “Yes.” That was all – no reciprocal question as to who I was.

  Steam gouted from the kettle to my left. “Shall I switch that off?” I asked.

  “Please.”

  I did so. “I was at your lecture and came to tell you how much I enjoyed it.”

  “Thank you for saying so. It’s good to hear.”

  “I’m sure you must have been told the same before. I believe the course has been very popular.”

  “You’ve not been before then? I don’t think I recognize you.”

  “You wouldn’t. This was my first time.”

  “Are you an undergraduate?” She looked doubtful.

  “No. I’m not at the university at all.” Then she looked suspicious. “I graduated some years ago from Princes’.” I hoped that might sound better. “My name’s Martin Radford.”

  She stood quite still for a moment. Her eyes, which had all along been intent, now stared at me. For a moment, I had the impression she was about to ask me to leave, as somebody with no business being on the premises. Instead, she slowly smiled, disconcertingly, with an air of relish. Then it broadened into something altogether friendlier and I felt at ease.

  “I was just making some coffee. Would you like some?” I agreed and turned the kettle back on. She walked across and prepared two cups. “Won’t you sit down?”

  “Thanks.” She went back and sat behind the desk. I took the only other chair available. It left me squinting slightly into the sun, with Eve silhouetted against the light. She’d arranged the furniture, I suspected, so as always to be at this advantage over visitors.

  “Do you have a particular interest in the Suffragette period, Mr Radford?”

  “More a specific one. I’m carrying out some research that has a bearing on the Suffragette cause.”

  “Really? We’re in the same business then.”

  “Not exactly. I believe you’re preparing a book on the subject.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Well, I’m not doing anything like that.” I sipped some coffee. Eve remained quite motionless. “The Suffragettes are just one aspect of my assignment. But, as an expert on the subject, you might be interested in that aspect.”

  “You flatter me, Mr Radford. I’ve amassed a good deal of information on the Suffragettes. I’m not sure I’d call it expertise.”

  “I think most people would. What do you know of Edwin Strafford?”

  “Home Secretary from 1908 to 1910. A moderate. Had he not resigned, McKenna might never have been there to introduce the Cat & Mouse legislation. The government might have coped with the situation better.”

  Now for a hunch – how much did she really know about the Suffragettes? “Or Elizabeth Latimer?”

  She repeated the name and thought for a moment. “One of the Putney set. She, Miriam Fane, Julia Lambourne and the Simey twins were followers of Christabel Pankhurst. From about 1906 to 1908 they were known as the Five Furies in Suffragette circles because of their daring stunts. They fell away after that and by 1911 – when Christabel resumed her militant tactics after a truce – Lambourne and Latimer had certainly moved into the gradualist camp and soon out of the picture altogether.”

  I was taken aback. I’d got used to Strafford cropping up in books and records but it was new to hear Elizabeth spoken of in the same way – Strafford’s Elizabeth, the Elizabeth I’d looked for in Sussex. “I didn’t realize she was so well known.”

  “She wasn’t. But I’ve gone so deeply into this that there aren’t many active Suffragettes who I haven’t heard of.”

  “What about a link between Strafford and Elizabeth Latimer?”

  She sipped her coffee for the first time. “That’s new to me. What sort of link?”

  Then I told her about the Memoir and the broken engagement, the mystery and the broken man. Baxter had predicted hostility to this hint of feminine vulnerability in Suffragette ranks but none came. When I’d finished, Eve said nothing. Instead, a timer went off on a shelf behind me and made me jump, so long had the silence been.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, without stirring. “That tells me I’m late for a seminar. I must go. But the Strafford memoir interests me greatly. Can I see it?”

  “I was hoping you’d agree to look at it.”

  “I’d love to. Could you bring it to my rooms in Darwin tomorrow afternoon? We could have a longer talk about it then.”

  She told me her room number and we agreed two o’clock. It had gone better than I’d hoped. Eve Randall was hooked and so, in a different way, was I. Still, I knew better than to spoil a good impression by hanging around. I rose to go.r />
  “Tell me,” she said, “are you a teacher?”

  The question surprised me. “No. I used to be. Why do you ask?”

  “What else do you do with history? I’ve often wondered.”

  “Not much … until a job like this comes up.”

  “A stroke of luck for you then?”

  “Very much so.” Just like, I said to myself, meeting you. I thought about our fortuitous encounter all the way back to Princes’. And the more I thought about it, the more I relished the prospect of our appointment the next day.

  Darwin College is a small, discreet graduates-only institution tucked away on an eddy of the Granta just below the Mill Pool and shielded from Silver Street by high walls. It doesn’t encourage visitors. As an undergraduate, I’d always thought of it as having the withdrawn smugness of unexplained wealth. In fact, this was the first time I’d crossed its threshold, found its miniature, punt-laden backs sheltered from prying eyes behind a wooded eyot, trod its immaculate lawns beneath the sycamores and weeping willows, entered its private world.

  Eve Randall’s room was on the first floor of the older red brick section of the college. I climbed the stairs with the copied Memoir in a fat ring binder, feeling, absurdly, the nerves of reporting ill-prepared for a supervision with a stranger. Only I wasn’t ill-prepared, so I dismissed the sensation as mere weakness and put my best foot forward.

  Eve received me in a high-ceilinged lounge with tall windows looking out across the garden to the river. Pastel shades suffused the room. Even the daffodils in a vase on the bookcase seemed to have been chosen for their pale petals. The curtains were floor-length, the carpet thickly-piled, the wallpaper a restrained matt. A large print of Seurat’s Bathers at Asnières dominated one wall. At the far end of the room, one curtain had been drawn to shade a pinewood harpsichord. Patterns – any signs of fussy femininity – were notable by their absence. Overall, the atmosphere was cool, but with a promise of softness; a sort of dignified caress.

  Unlike the day before, Eve wore perfume – faint and barely distinguishable from the flowers in the room, but heightening the sense, as she stood near me, of privilege at being admitted to this place. Nor was she concerned now to appear, as she had, formal, almost regal, in her dress. That afternoon, she could have been one of her own students in her open-toed sandals, tight, dazzling white jeans and pale blue, collarless, French-style blouse, belted at the waist. Could have been, but for the sheer quality of her looks. She wore neither make-up nor jewellery, her hair fell unbraided to her shoulders, but there was a penetration to her gaze, a hint of a nascent smile on her lips, that deprived her beauty of simplicity and added a layer of the beckoning unknown.