FORTY-FIVE

This year, had he lived, my uncle Eldritch would have been a hundred. Unsurprisingly, given his fondness for cigarettes and strong liquor, he actually died more than two decades ago, after what Marie-Louise described to me at his funeral as ‘some very good years’ with her on the French Riviera. It didn’t turn out too badly for him in the end. And I smile whenever I think of him, which is probably the best tribute any of us can hope for.

I’m not far short now of the age Eldritch was when I first met him. In the thirty-two years since, our children, Rachel’s and mine, have become adults, in one case with children of their own. Most of the people I encountered during those few hectic weeks in the early spring of 1976, when Eldritch did Rachel and me the great if unwitting service of bringing us together, are, like him, dead and buried.

Of them all, only Sir Miles Linley merited obituaries in the national press. The Provisional IRA claimed responsibility for the car bomb that killed him, though the official record of his years with the British Legation in Dublin hardly seemed to make him an obvious target for them. Perhaps they knew more than they were telling.

Who might have drawn their attention to him can only be guessed at. Moira Henchy did quite a lot of guessing at the time, but failed to uncover the truth. I’ve never come to any firm conclusion myself. Conceivably, his wife could have contacted the IRA through former colleagues of her brother. But I couldn’t quite convince myself she’d have gone so far as to do that. Then there was Eldritch. He must have served his time in Portlaoise prison alongside several IRA members. And what had he said to me in Antwerp? ‘There’s only one way to get the better of a giant: hire a bigger giant.’ I never summoned the nerve to ask him outright. I knew he’d deny it. I just didn’t know whether his denial would be genuine. In my more cynical moments, I also wonder if Tate’s bosses in London didn’t simply decide Linley was more nuisance than he was worth. It would have been a fitting fate for him in many ways: to be betrayed by those he thought he could rely on for protection.

A few weeks after his murder, Simon Cardale contacted us with an unexpected proposal. He and Isolde Linley were willing to help Rachel pursue her family’s claim against the Brownlow estate after all. With Sir Miles dead, Tate and his ilk no longer had any interest in the case, so there was nothing to prevent its revival and their testimonies, even without the photographs, would come close to the proof we needed. Isolde wanted to clear her conscience and realized she could never do so while that old injustice went uncorrected.

And so Rachel achieved what she wanted just when she’d finally accepted she never would. It hadn’t been easy for us to feel our way back to how we’d felt about each other before her arrest in Belgium. There had been times, quite a few of them, when I’d doubted we ever could. But we’d managed it somehow. Love, I suppose, really does find a way. I was worried that reviving the lawsuit would spoil everything all over again, but Rachel assured me she wasn’t about to let that happen. She’d come to believe as well as to understand the truth of what I’d said to her just before the car bomb exploded that day in Basingstoke. Linley wasn’t worth ruining her life for. And nor were the Picassos.

In the event, the Brownlow estate settled out of court, paying her mother a sum of money about halfway between what the Picassos would have been worth in 1945 and what they were actually worth in 1976. That still represented a fortune, most of which she sank into a charitable foundation for Vietnam veterans with psychiatric problems. She asked Rachel and me to run it, with Joey’s assistance. It turned his life around and, I’m proud to say, the lives of many like him. You could say it turned our lives around too. We’ve extended its remit to other wars since. It doesn’t look as if it will run short of people to help any time soon.

Recently, some of the foundation’s resources have been used for a post-war development project in the Congo. It’s little more than a trial effort. The difficulties of operating in that part of the world are formidable. But it seems only right that some of the wealth Isaac Meridor took out of the country should find its way back, to do what good it can.

Earlier this year, I found myself near Haywards Heath, with time on my hands. On a whim, I diverted to Ardingly to take a look at Eldritch’s old school. It was a wet day in half-term and the place was virtually deserted. Perhaps that was why the past felt so close at hand in its dusky cloisters and empty courtyards. If the fourteen-year-old Eldritch had come running round a corner ahead of me on some fagging errand for Linley, it somehow wouldn’t have surprised me.

According to an advert I spotted on a noticeboard, a history of the college had just been published to mark its sesquicentenary; a copy was available for inspection at the senior school office. I wandered along and asked to see it.

Leafing through its glossy pages, I came across a section of potted biographies of eminent Old Ardinians, Sir Miles Linley among them. There, in a few paragraphs, was summarized a life of duty and attainment, tragically cut off when he should have had more years of his well-earned and honour-laden retirement to look forward to.

Needless to say, there was no potted biography – and no listing in the index – of Eldritch Swan. Some are remembered. And some are forgotten. But it isn’t always the right way round.