A Scandal in Belgravia (15 page)

He was there—not exactly shaking hands with a line of worshippers, but mingling with them, exchanging greetings and enquiring after families. He had fairly clearly been keeping an eye out for me, for when I emerged he came up, arm outstretched, and smiling with what seemed like genuine friendliness.

“Mr. Proctor! Nice to see you here. I recognised you in the congregation.”

“It's the television,” I said apologetically. “Politicians could be quite anonymous before the box was invented.”

“Very good thing. Makes you more accountable. What brings you to Rochester?”

“Oh, a fine Sunday and the prospect of a pleasant drive,” I lied. “And I happen to be reading
Edwin Drood.”

“Ah yes. We get a regular trickle of Droodists. And are you an Edwin dies or an Edwin survives man?”

“Ah—you put me on the spot. I haven't quite finished the re-read, but I think I'm an Edwin survives man.”

“So am I. It's a pleasure to meet a right-thinking person. Have you seen the Close?”

“I have, but I thought of taking another turn there before I left.”

“Good, you're in no hurry. You can come and take a glass of sherry with me.”

“How kind.”

“I'm interested that a retired minister should be—reduced, I almost said, which would be blasphemy locally—should feel the need of the
Drood
mystery to occupy his time.”

“Harmless, though, don't you think?” I countered with, as we entered the Close. “I don't think you've been an enthusiast for the government I used to be a member of, so you should rejoice in so harmless a hobby for me.”

He smiled acceptance of what I said.

“I work a lot with young people, and certainly I can't remember a government that has harmed the interests of young people as this one has.” He said it seriously, but I did not respond. I lost my taste for political argument the day I lost office. He smiled, acknowledging my silence. “I can see you might not want to talk about it. I don't blame you. Our last Prime Minister had a one-track mind. And it was a very narrow-gauge track.” He ushered me towards a door. “My house—my ‘residence.' No Droodian associations, I'm afraid.”

He took me through to a sitting room of elegant proportions, though of no particular distinction in the furnishings—probably it had in fact been furnished by the Church Commissioners, whose anonymous taste did little credit to men who were guardians of so wonderful an architectural heritage. On the wall, on the other hand, there was unmistakeably a John Piper (one artist I can recognise), and something I suspected might be a Sickert.

“Younger son,” Lawrence Cornwallis explained. “My brother got all the loot, and I got a few favourite pictures.
Quite right too. I've never had much idea what to do with money.”

He went to a bookcase in the corner and began pouring two glasses of sherry from a single bottle. I was reminded of my long-ago visit to Lady Thorrington, though this sherry, like Marjorie Knopfmeyer's, was unremarkable in quality. There was about Lawrence Cornwallis an air of sophistication that would not have been out of place in the Belgravia of the fifties—though it was not a worldly sophistication that he had. I think perhaps the word is not sophistication but distinction. He had a spiritual distinction that was palpable. Oddly enough his next words took me back to the Belgravia of my young manhood.

“I think you've forgotten,” he said, “but we've met before.”

The politician in me took over.

“Met you? Oh I say, do forgive me: you know in political life one meets so many—”

He was looking at me with a quizzical smile.

“Oh no—before you went into politics, at least in any big way. We met at a small party in Timothy Wycliffe's flat.”

I looked at him hard. The tiny smile was still there. I was very glad the subject had come up, but I couldn't remember meeting him, and I couldn't remember any party. Old men forget—that's the only explanation, for I have been trying very hard these last few weeks to retrieve all the memories I had of Timothy.

“As far as I remember it was an after-work party,” said Cornwallis. “I think a sort of farewell to you. There were a lot of Foreign Office people there, and a few friends of Tim's own.”

“Good Lord!” I said. “You're quite right. Now I'm beginning to remember.”

“I was one of Tim's friends, of course,” he said, gesturing me to a seat, perhaps to give me a chance to hide any embarrassment I might feel. “And by the way, to get the topic out of the
way—and how it does come up as soon as Tim's name is mentioned!—I've been celibate for many years. Since I decided to enter the church, in fact. Others make different decisions, and I don't blame them, but that was mine. I thought I'd better tell you, since the topic does so hang in the air whenever Tim and his death come up. A lot of people are a bit uneasy on the subject of gay clergymen.”

“I'm not upset by it. Why should I be?”

He raised his eyebrows and looked at me closely.

“Well, I see you at service, clearly knowing what to do, and I assume that as a practising member of the Church of England you have views on the subject.”

This was said with something of the same quizzical smile I had seen on his lips earlier. I got an odd, uneasy feeling that I had been rumbled.

“I'm afraid that much of my Church of England worship was merely formal—the local MP doing his duty. I lack the faculty of reverence or worship.”

“Was this why you were sacked from the government?”

We both laughed.

“Two of my children have it,” I hastened to add. “The faculty for worship, I mean. My twins, Fiona and Christopher. Fiona is studying for the Church—whatever you let her do—and Christopher is in the Sudan on an Oxfam project. But I'm afraid they must have got it from Ann, my wife. I am essentially secular. . . . It's odd you should bring up Timothy Wycliffe . . .”

“Yes?”

“I've been thinking a lot about him recently. Writing my memoirs seems to have brought him back to me, and now I can't get him out of my mind. Particularly his death.”

“Ah yes, his death.” Cornwallis nodded, his eyes narrowing as if in pain. “His death haunted me for many months. I'm not sure it didn't have something to do with my entering the
church. It seemed to me then so terrible—and also so surprising.”

“Ah, you too. Why?”

“People—people in general—often are unsurprised by violent deaths in homosexual circles—deaths like James Pope-Hennessy's for example. They seem to think it goes with the condition. That's nonsense, of course. It's only unsurprising if you're a homosexual with sadistic or masochistic tendencies, someone who is turned on by violence. I never saw the slightest evidence that Tim was one of those.”

“Did you come to know him very well while you were living in his flat?” I asked.

“Ah—you know about that: not as well as you might expect. I was between bed-sit and flat of my own at the time, and the invitation to spend the ten days I was to be homeless was a piece of casual friendliness to someone he knew only slightly—carnally, it must be said, but slightly. This was at the time when the whole Suez business was starting—when would that be?—around July, fifty-six. Colonel Nasser had just announced the nationalisation of the Canal. I think Timothy was caught on the hop, but it meant even then that he was working twelve hours a day or more. That meant I saw very little of him.”

“You say Tim was caught on the hop—but he wasn't on the Middle Eastern desk of the F.O. when I was there. He wouldn't have had any special responsibility for responding to Suez.”

“Sorry—I expressed myself badly. I gathered from conversations while I was staying in his flat that he was thinking of resigning his job there, but that when Suez came up there was so much extra work—for everyone, because of the need to coordinate reactions in the West—that he felt he couldn't.”

I frowned.

“I had heard that Tim thought of resigning from the F.O. at the time of the invasion, but I hadn't heard of his intending to so much earlier.”

“You resigned,” Lawrence Cornwallis pointed out. “Was Tim altogether happy and at home at the Foreign Office?”

“Well no, certainly not. He was much too much of a free spirit. But what, I wonder, did he plan on doing?”

“I've no idea. Perhaps go into business, like you.”

“I shouldn't think so. That's no more a place for a free spirit than the Foreign Office. In my case it was meant as a prelude to an entry into politics.”

“Maybe in his too.”

“I doubt it. He was essentially apolitical. People often tried to push him into politics, Conservative politics, of course, but he always managed to sidestep. I remember him once saying that in the fifty-one election he nearly voted for Anthony Wedgwood Benn, as he then called himself, because he was so dishy, and the only reason he didn't was because he felt he was unreliable.”

We both laughed.

“He was very acute,” said Lawrence Cornwallis. “Not always in his own affairs, of course.”

“You mean the boy who killed him?”

“No—no, I didn't mean him, actually. What I meant was that anyone who is as promiscuous as Tim was is bound to make love to some pretty unpleasant people from time to time. They're not looking for a relationship, they're looking for sex. Just as prostitution is a dangerous business, so is homosexual promiscuity. Particularly then, when you could find yourself blackmailed.”

“Is that what you think happened?”

“Before the murder? I've no idea. We weren't that close, and I wouldn't have been told. But if your question is: do I think he was being blackmailed by Andy, then the answer is that I don't. And for a very good reason.”

“What?”

“I don't think they'd been to bed together. . . . Shall we go in to lunch?”

I gawped at him.

“Lunch?”

“I sent back to my housekeeper that there might be two when I saw you in the congregation. I knew you'd want a good talk. I'd heard you'd been annoying your party hierarchy by going into the death of Timothy Wycliffe.”

I'd had a vague sense all through our talk that he had been playing with me. Now I knew that he had been.

“Who?” I asked.

“Told me? Wratton—Harry Wratton.
Lord
Wratton he is now, of course, now he's gone to the place I suppose you'll be going to as well before long.”

“I'm not banking on it,” I said wryly. “I'm not being a good boy. I suppose I should have banked on the network sending out a message on the tribal drums.”

“Network?” That quizzical expression came back to his face as he carved a joint of pork.

“The network of the great and good. Or is it the network of opponents of the present government? I've known many networks since that first one I noticed in Belgravia, spying on Tim, but they all operate on a similar system: the drums sending out information and warnings to people of the same cast of mind who can decipher the drumbeats. . . . But I'm getting sidetracked,” I added, as I accepted a plate of roast pork and started to help myself to vegetables. “You said you didn't think Tim had been to bed with Andy Forbes. What makes you think that?”

“Because he told me. He told me in July, when I was living there, and he told me again when I came across him by chance in the street somewhere in October. Of course it's possible the situation had changed by November when he was killed.”

“I see,” I said, eating and thinking. “That changes things. I've been assuming all along that they were lovers.”

“Timothy loved
him
—that I'm sure of.”

“You saw them together?”

“Oh yes—Andy Forbes was round at the flat one Sunday while I was staying there.”

“What was your impression of him?”

“Nice, quiet lad. Sincere, kindly, rather out of his depth in Tim's kind of world.”

“So how do you see the relationship?”

“I read it now as I read it then—Tim and I discussed it, you know. I don't think Tim understood the working-class feeling about homosexuality. In Tim's world it was very much taken for granted. You encountered it from school onwards. You know the story of Evelyn Waugh's friends the Lygons, and their father?”

“I've heard of it vaguely,” I said. “Forced out of the country by his brother-in-law the Duke of Westminster.”

“That's right. Earl Beauchamp, he was. Father of a large family, but he couldn't keep his hands off the footmen. That sort of thing would just be accepted with a shrug and a smile in the circle Tim grew up in. But it certainly wasn't in the circles Andy Forbes grew up in. There's fear, and distaste, even revulsion towards homosexuality among ordinary working-class people. I've seen it over and over again, and it's made me glad I took the decision I did, because there's so many people whom I've liked, whose views I've respected on other things, but who I know would never have been able to accept me as they did if I'd been a practising homosexual. This was something I don't think Tim understood—or at any rate, I don't think he could
accept
it. It was so . . . ungenerous that a person like him simply couldn't accept it, or believe it to be as strong as it was. So that, while I knew him, while he was in love with Andy Forbes, there always seemed to be in him . . . a sort of split.”

“You mean that he was in love with this boy Forbes, but he was—to put it vulgarly—having it off not with him, but with you and others?”

“That's partly what I meant. I wasn't the main one, by the way, not by a long chalk.”

“Was it Gerald Fraser-Hymes?”

“Who?” Lawrence Cornwallis shook his head. “I don't think I ever met anyone of that name. No, his main sexual partner at the time was Terry Cotterley.”