Past Caring
Page 44
I tried to hold myself back, but couldn’t. Eve’s words whispered in my ear, her firm yet yielding body beneath me, our exposed location on the beach, sped me towards a climax.
“Come on, Martin. Come for me. I want you to fill me up.”
“I will, Eve, I will. I can’t stop. You’re so beautiful. To be inside you is … too much.”
“Then give it all to me.”
And I did. We reached a crazy, intertwined crescendo, my hands clasped beneath her parted buttocks where they scraped a hollow in the sand with their rocking motion. I felt my spine and legs stiffen and my penis sink to the root inside her, braced myself for the climax, but, somehow, remained poised on the brink, in agonized ecstasy.
That was when Eve looked up into my eyes and smiled with a timeless satisfaction divorced from the moment. She ran her tongue along the edge of her teeth in a gesture at once familiar and forgotten, tightened the grip of her legs behind my back and, with one barely audible word – “Now” – spurred me over the top.
I burst and pumped inside her with all the helpless momentum inspired by her teasing, tasted perfection. It went on dangerously long, passing a point where I thought – for one mad, fearful moment – that I could spurt into her forever and still not wipe the trace of mocking superiority from her smile. But it did end, of course, subsiding through ever gentler throbs to a twitching quiescence. Our sweat-soaked limbs, plastered with sand, stopped writhing, but remained locked together, fused in awe of our own, frightening passion. My mind, after all the doubt and evasion, struggled to comprehend the surging force of what we’d done. Eve had devoured me.
Somehow, exhausted and satiated though we were, we got back across the beach to the shelter of the dunes and fell together into a hollow of sand. We were drained by the violence of our mating, confused by the potency of the act. As the dried heat of the afternoon moved towards an over-ripe evening, Eve fell asleep on my shoulder, one arm draped across my chest and one of her legs across mine, my ribs cushioned by the softness of her breasts. I could feel her breathing against me, could feel her limbs wrapped around mine, and the feeling was a glory in her closeness, a triumph in possessing her.
With my free hand, I began to brush the dried sand from her hip and thigh where they were propped across me. My gaze moved out across the beach to the lazy, lapping ocean, to where my clothes lay in a bundle thirty yards away. I thought I should go and collect them – but not for a while. I too fell asleep.
We returned to the world by way of a country pub halfway between Barnstaple and Exeter. The locals eyed us as if they knew how we’d spent the day. Eve nonchalantly disregarded them, let them notice us kissing, smiled disarmingly at their glares.
“What now?” I said, at a genuine loss. No conversation or social occasion seemed to measure up to the enormity of what had already taken place. Eve, smiling at me over her drink, still slightly flushed from the beach, was my dazzling goddess in a monochrome world.
“The day’s not over yet, Martin – and we promised ourselves the whole of it.”
“It’s a day I’ll never forget. But does it have to be just one?”
“That’s up to you.” Her smile hinted at an offer of something more permanent, although, even then, I didn’t think it was really up to me at all. Eve’s prerogative encompassed my future.
“If I had my way, today would last forever.”
“Perhaps that can be arranged.” I almost believed it could be, in the way that beauty verges on sorcery, in the way that love – or the hope of it – transforms life. Most of all, I nearly believed it in the way that a man cannot help staunching a fear of the worst with a naive faith in the best.
We drove through Exeter to Topsham, a picturesque, genteelly decayed outport of the city on the eastern side of the Exe estuary. There, Eve explained, she’d been given use of the house owned by the historian who’d taken her place in Cambridge. We parked in a small courtyard behind a pottery shop and made our way out onto a narrow street lined with elegant Georgian residences, punctuated unexpectedly by openings and alleyways leading to tiny, tucked away dwellings and unsuspected gardens. It was the sort of area, once the preserve of retired naval officers, where enthusiasts for whole food and cottage craft industries had moved in with a vengeance. Cats on widows’ doorsteps blinked across at feminist posters in mullioned windows.
Which category Dr Petra Sutcliffe of Exeter University fitted into was hard to say. Book End was a slender, end-of-terrace address in the Georgian sector of the street, with a rather too grandly pillared and fanlit doorway. The interior was fussily and exclusively feminine, dominated by flower-patterned upholstery on antique furniture, the works of Jane Austen, George Eliot and assorted female academics arrayed in glazed and polished bookcases.
Other influences stood in contrast to Dr Sutcliffe’s self-containment. The winding staircase and porthole windows commanding views of the estuary had a tang of whichever veteran of Trafalgar had first settled there. The scent of coffee in the kitchen, the choice of perfume in the bathroom, the open files in the lounge: they, on the other hand, were Eve’s, displayed carelessly but gracefully, with all her characteristic confidence.
“Petra’s choice of décor is beginning to depress me,” said Eve as she poured me a gin.
“How much longer do you have to put up with it?”
“Just another week. But it should be quite bearable, so long as …”
“So long as what?”
“So long as I have … uplifting company.” She handed me the glass and left her hand on mine.
“Can I volunteer?”
“I was hoping you would. The best of it is” – she smiled wickedly – “that Petra would so disapprove.” We laughed and toasted each other in gin. The chink of glasses, my ex-wife’s foible, in the sort of home she’d have made for herself if she hadn’t invested in children and county society, mocked with benign precision by one who’d perfected a combination of success and womanhood, one who understood us all better than we did ourselves.
Later we dined at a quiet restaurant in Topsham’s High Street. Dark wood and candlelight suited our mood: more subtle, less frenetic than earlier in the day, yet wine and seafood sustaining the intoxicating, maritime flavour – deep beyond plumbing, heart at odds with the surface, warmly flowing around us with a cold, ebbing undertow. The subjects we moved towards were as dangerous in their way as any carnal act. Natural, innocuous and inevitable as their discussion seemed, it constituted, in fact, a more complete surrender than any other that day.
“After what’s happened,” I said, “I don’t want to keep anything from you. Now that things have … changed … between us, you should know everything I know about Strafford.”
“Go ahead,” she said. As simple as that, so simple I could have believed she was giving me permission rather than direction.
So I went ahead – and told her everything. Looking back, I remember how unmoved – how transfixed but undismayed – Eve was by what I’d found a shattering revelation. Strafford innocent. Couchman a bigamist. Sellick implicated. Christabel Pankhurst a traitor to her cause. Eve preserved her serenity in the face of every detail.
“Your sponsor not the disinterested hotelier you thought?” she said when I’d finished.
“Hardly.”
“Mine not the injured parties they’d claim?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“And Christabel Pankhurst one of the schemers?”
“It looks like it.”
She smiled. “Quite a bombshell – for everyone.”
“You don’t look as if it is.”
“Oh Martin, you mean my book? That hardly matters. Let’s forget feminist first principles and go for the truth. I can be flexible. Historians ought to be, don’t you think?”
“I suppose so.”
“Well, you’ll hardly feel any obligations to Sellick after this. How about forming a partnership with me instead?”
“A literary partnership?”
“I like very much.”
“Good. I hoped you would. After all, you were right about Strafford and I was wrong. Where is his Postscript now?”
“Safe.”
“With these people – the Bennetts?”
“No. But secure. Don’t worry. We can collect it tomorrow.”
“Fine.” She paused. “So – what do you think happened to Strafford and his nephew?”
“To Strafford, I don’t know. But if it wasn’t murder, why are the Couchmans so upset about my investigations? As for Ambrose, it’s too big a coincidence to believe he drowned accidentally just after sending me that letter. Timothy knew about it, remember.”
“True. But do you see Timothy being able to kill a man?”
“Frankly, no. Nor his father. But there’s some connexion, I’m sure of it.”
“So what do we do about it?”
“Decide when you’re satisfied the Postscript’s authentic. Substantiate what we can, then publish – and be damned.” Did I believe that hopeful itinerary as I sketched it over the dinner table? Did I believe that Eve believed it? There wasn’t really any need to do either. For the moment, she’d stopped me caring about the end of the road. For the moment, being with her was all that mattered. The Strafford mystery was as good as any pretext – so long as we needed one.
What happened when we returned to Book End that night blended a clutch of private pleasures. The ice-maidenly historienne gave herself again to the down-at-heel outsider. A queen rewarded her subject for his tribute of the truth. An absentee hospitality was deliciously abused. A sexual act became a metaphor for a dozen other urgings and desires. I knew them all, but they made no difference. Though you know the sea is deep, the white horses still call.
And even the metaphors omitted one, crucial meaning. We sustained a continuum of which Couchman’s conduct in Durban and mine in Axborough were both part. Somehow, in our different ways, we were all accessories to a betrayal of trust. But whose betrayal? Whose trust?
We enacted a different dream, in the borrowed bedroom above Topsham’s period streets, from the one on the beach. Different – but the same, in a way. Less impulsive, more portentous. When we made love that night, a deed was done more shocking than any daring sexual refinement – though Eve’s daring did shock me, several times, before the night was out.
I knew, of course, that I was compromising Strafford as much as myself, but I didn’t know – couldn’t have guessed – what that really meant. Not that it would have stopped me. Eve, in giving herself to me, prevailed over all other considerations. My only thought to the future was to ask myself whether it would always be as it was then. Even that, as it turned out, was the wrong question. Substitute ever for always. Then I’d have been nearer the mark.
Dawn. I propped open the bedroom window and watched the estuary slither into day. A mackerel sky and the grey Exe widening towards sea. A few lights on the western shore. Gulls wheeling and screeching over the mud-steeped pontoons of the riverside. An insipid summer morning in an obscure locale. Topsham and Port Edward seemed, in that moment, the same: refuges from reality, bolt holes in some wrinkle of a coastline, hidden settings for acts which would stay with the perpetrators longer than they could ever imagine.
Behind me, elegant even in sleep, one arm over the coverlet, hair fanned across the pillow in the way – yes, damn it, in just the way – I’d dreamed, Eve held the wonder of a day I hadn’t thought to see. Well-used to disappointment, resigned to failure, I was already accustoming myself to unexpected triumph. The draw had been her far-away beauty shaped by her far-seeing mind. The prize was the mystery of her pliant flesh become familiar, that morning and every morning, become mine beyond hope.
Eve stirred and stretched and smiled – and proved she was really there.
“What are you thinking?” she said with a decorous yawn.
“Just that I never dared to hope it would come to this.”
“And now that it has?”
“Now that it has, I’m in some danger of becoming a happy man.”
Eve stepped from the bed and wrapped herself in the same dragon-patterned kimono I’d seen her in once at Cambridge – a light year’s worth of weeks before. She walked across to where I was standing by the window, put her arm round my waist and followed my gaze out over the dew-sheened roofs of the town.
“To tell you a secret,” she said, “I expected us to wake up together in Norfolk, not Devon.”
“So did I, at one point.” I smiled ruefully. She smiled consolingly. “It’s strange how things turn out.”
“Stranger than you’d think.” With that enigmatic echo, she went to make some coffee.
For breakfast, Eve cooked ham and eggs the way she’d learned in California. We ate them in Dr Sutcliffe’s intricately automated kitchen and laid plans for the day.
“The Postscript has me on tenterhooks,” Eve said, sipping her coffee while I cleared my plate.
“Easily solved. I’ll collect it this morning.”
“You could fetch your stuff from the Bennetts while you’re about it – if you want to stay.”
I smiled. “You know the answer to that.” She smiled back. “Okay. It’s a good idea. I’ll go straightaway.”
“There’s no hurry. But it would be convenient if you were out this morning.”
“Two-timing me already?” I joked.
“Professor Pollard arranged to call at eleven to discuss how I’m finding things at Exeter. I made the appointment before I knew what I’d be doing today.”
“Lucky Professor Pollard.”
“Don’t worry. It won’t take long. And the Professor must be sixty if he’s a day. But I don’t want him to jump to any conclusions on Petra’s behalf – especially the right ones. Why not take my car? You could be back by lunchtime.”
I readily agreed. A quick whirl round St David’s station and the Bennett household suited my purpose. By 10.30, I was on my way.
I collected the Postscript from the station without difficulty, relieved to find it in place in its locker. Then I drove straight to the Bennetts’, intending to collect my luggage, make a few lame excuses and return to Topsham with my booty. But it wasn’t to be as simple as that.
Nick opened the door and I could see from his expression that he was angry. In so calm a man, it was worrying.
“Martin – where the hell have you been?”
“Sorry I didn’t phone, Nick. You know how it is.” It was clear he didn’t.
“I’ll tell you how it’s been here. We’ve been bloody burgled!”
That feeling: I’d had it before. Nausea. A whirling sense of accelerating motion. Of ground slipping from under my feet. It began with Nick’s remark, splitting the euphoria of a self-satisfied morning.
We went inside. Hester was cleaning and dusting, re-arranging with excessive energy. She didn’t look happy. Their usually carefree household had an edgy, shaken atmosphere. Something had been violated and I could believe from their expressions that it was our friendship.
“What happened?” I asked.
“When Hester came home yesterday afternoon,” Nick said grimly, “she found the house had been ransacked. Drawers opened, contents all over the floor, cupboards and wardrobes emptied. It was a God-awful mess. She’s been working like a demon since then to clean it up.” He put his arm round her and she stopped what she was doing, looked for a moment pained by the memory of the experience.
“It was terrible, Martin,” she said. “Really. Not so much the mess as the knowledge that somebody had been through everything – handling my clothes, touching all our most private possessions. It makes them seem – soiled.” She shuddered.
“Was much taken?” I asked.
“Not a thing,” said Nick. He looked at me darkly. “That was the strangest part of it. Camera, stereo, jewellery – all the stuff you’d expect a burgla
r to take. Even some cash in the kitchen. All still here. Not just left, but untouched. As if that wasn’t what they were looking for.”
“Then what?”
Nick sat down. “Well, I don’t know. Do you?”
“Of course not.”
“We expected you back last night,” Hester put in.
“I’m sorry. There wasn’t an opportunity to ring. Circumstances were … fraught.”
“They were bloody fraught here too,” said Nick. “To tell you the truth, Martin, I don’t think we were burgled so much as searched. After all, as I told the police, everything we can account for is still here. There’s only your belongings that anything could be missing from.” His emphasis spoke volumes.
“I’ve nothing of the slightest value here.” A defensive, factual remark. My only valuable possession was outside in Eve’s car, safe – for the moment. But Nick was right. Their intruder had been looking for something of mine: the Postscript. It had to be. The Bennetts’ home, like Ambrose’s before them, ransacked, sullied in a frantic search for something that wasn’t there. Relief at my foresight in using the left luggage locker was overtaken by a sickening fear of the implications. I’d only told one person that I even had the Postscript. None of which was any consolation to Nick.
“We’re not fools,” he said. “We’re supposed to be your friends. Since the inquest, you’ve hardly said a word to us. Then, last night, you go missing immediately after the house is broken into. What would you make of it?”