Past Caring (36 page)

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 inconse-quential. 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

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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 redbrick 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.”

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“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.”

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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.

“Tell me,” she said, “are you a teacher?”

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

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“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 redbrick 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,

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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 un-braided 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.

She asked me to sit down on the wide, pale green couch, using my first name in a way which suggested I was being admitted to something more than just her presence, then served lemon tea in shallow Chinese cups.

“So, Martin, tell me more about the Strafford Memoir.”

As I did so, Eve sipped her tea and listened with an intent del-icacy. Was it the Memoir or me that was being examined? At the very least, it felt like both, so that I was speaking not merely for Strafford, because he couldn’t speak for himself, but also for Martin Radford, because he’d been so seldom heard.

“What Strafford never knew,” I said, “and what I’m trying to find out, was why he was rejected. So far, all I’ve got to go on is suspicion. Maybe you can give me some evidence.”

“Evidence of what?”

“Of conspiracy. I suggest that to split Strafford and Elizabeth Latimer and discredit Strafford in the process was a desire common to some members of the Cabinet and some leaders of the Suffragettes. That shared motive suggests to me the possibility of a conspiracy.”

“To what end?”

“To remove Strafford as an obstacle to Lloyd George’s ambition. To prevent Strafford depriving Christabel Pankhurst of an able lieutenant and so ridiculing the movement. To foster an alliance whose objectives were political power for Lloyd George and votes for women as a reward for their assistance.”

A butterfly passed by the open window and a punt cast off from the Darwin moorings below. Inside the room, Eve indulged her gift for silence and immobility, while I waited for her response. I’d never stated my claim so explicitly before and had 214

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partly shaped it for her benefit. To my own ears, it didn’t sound quite good enough.

“None of this fits with my perception of the personalities and motivations involved in the suffragist movement.” She paused, as if weighing the words, which hung heavily in the air. “That doesn’t mean it’s inconceivable. As one attempting to compile a definitive account of the Suffragettes’ struggle, I’d be foolish to close my mind to possibilities which are at odds with my preliminary conclusions.” Gloom had been followed by reprieve. “I’d like to read the Memoir, then tell you what I think.”

I handed the Memoir across to her and thought, in that instant, of Ambrose, whom I’d regretted even showing the document. Yet now I was happy to entrust it to a virtual stranger not because—whatever I might pretend—she was likely to put it to better use than Ambrose, but because it was the one sure way I had of impressing her. The Memoir was my passport to more of her company.

“I’ll return it within 24 hours,” she said.

“Keep it longer if you need to.”

“No. That will be sufficient.” The professional had spoken.

“Perhaps we could meet for lunch tomorrow to discuss it.”

Another pregnant pause, part of Eve’s mental and physical poise, which conveyed significance in the most trivial thought or act. “I’d like that . . . Do you have a car?”

“Not in Cambridge.” (Or anywhere else.)

“Then I’ll drive you. Suppose I were to collect you from Princes’ at noon?” She’d taken the initiative and I was happy to surrender it. I agreed and made to go.

“You have lovely rooms here,” I said, pausing by the door of the lounge.