A Scandal in Belgravia (16 page)

“I seem to know the name.”

“You would. He was secretary for a long time of the Hatherley Trust—the pressure group that agitated for a change in the laws on homosexuality. One saw a lot of him on the box in the late sixties, when the law was changed. Eventually he became one of the ‘great and good' as you call us—though that would have been unimaginable in the fifties.”

“I'd like to talk to him.”

“Died of AIDS, two or three years ago.”

“Ah,” I said. “Things are not
that
much rosier for homosexuals now than they were in the fifties.”

“That's right. I've had to argue with people who believe it's a God-inflicted plague, punishment for the sin of sodom. One does wonder sometimes what kind of God such people imagine. . . . Some more pork?” When he had helped me and himself to more, he said: “Oh, by the way, when I thought you might be coming I looked through my old photographs.”

“Photographs?”

I felt excited. I had never thought to bring up the possibility of photographs, even with Tim's sister.

“Yes—I thought there probably wouldn't be many of Andy Forbes lying around.” He went over to the desk-bookcase under the window of the dining room and, coming back, handed me a snapshot. “It was the Sunday I mentioned. We went up to Hyde Park, to swim in the Serpentine. I was rather a keen photographer then. We got a passer-by to take that, though.”

It was a group of three, all in flannels and white or check open-necked shirts. Tim stood with his arm around Andy's shoulder, and the young Lawrence Cornwallis stood a little apart, as I imagine that, mentally, he always stood. All were
laughing boyishly, and there was about them a sort of innocence, which may seem odd, but is perhaps a comment on the fifties, vis-à-vis our own times. I peered into the face of Andy Forbes, but I could see no trace of murderer, no sense of outrage or resentment: I saw only the carefree pleasure of a healthy young man on a fine summer's day.

“Now,”
said Lawrence Cornwallis in a determined way, “if you've no more questions I want to talk about homeless young people.”

• • •

“And how was he, this Special Adviser to the Archbishop?” asked Jeremy when I got home. He had spent Sunday playing squash.

“Not at all what I expected. I'm afraid I rather look on the Church as somewhere where people can gain position and influence without possessing talent. And I'm always suspicious of the great and good. But Lawrence Cornwallis is genuinely impressive.”

“Oh, by the way,” said Jeremy, the light of mischief in his eye, “there was a phone call just before you got home. It was Lord Warboys. He obviously thought I was you—we have rather similar voices—”

“South London flattened.”

“Maybe. Anyway he rang off when he found out who it was. But I gathered he wanted to sound you out on whether you would go on some Royal Commission on Regional Development.”

“Could be interesting,” I said.

“More likely deadly beyond imagining, I'd have said. Anyway, don't go on so about the great and good. You're in danger of becoming one of them. You're a sort of political Tom cat whom the vet has operated on.”

I suppose that is one of the consequences of being a retired cabinet minister—a sort of political neutering takes place. I looked at Jeremy affectionately.

“You're so good for my ego,” I said.

I
t is strange how much one can remember simply by an act of will. I had not realized that before, perhaps because my life has been one of doing (or appearing to do) things, leaving little time to chase memories. The only time I remember doing that was soon after Ann died, one evening when the children had all gone their ways: I sat, I recall, in the living room, going through our life together, putting those last cancer-ridden months aside and trying to get a grip on the good years of our marriage, the births, the holidays, the anniversaries, hoping that she had been happy.

Now, this Monday morning, I sat in my armchair in the study and went into a long, fiercely willed meditation in which I tried to bring back all the details of that farewell party in Craven Court Mews. I had always been aware of the fact that I had been to Tim's flat on other times than that first embarrassing visit when I had so pathetically revealed my gaucheness and conventionality. Now I realized that the most important of the other times had been Tim's farewell party for me. How ungrateful of me to forget it. Gradually, little by little, details of it began to pop up in my memory. I was in such a deep brown study, submerged in that time, that I actually jumped when Jaime showed Elspeth in.

“Don't get up,” she said breezily. “Go on thinking great
thoughts. I've just got a pile of stuff on the collapse of the Heath government and your part in it.”

“I didn't have any part in it!” I protested, jumping into my instant-politician stance. “I was only the most junior of ministers at the time. I thought calling a snap election was madness. It was Carrington advised him to do that.”

“Well actually it's mostly election speeches, with you saying it was the only honest thing to do.” She seemed to take a mischievous delight in telling me that. I sometimes wonder whether Elspeth is a Conservative at all—or even conservative. Or is she just cynical from having worked on too many politicians' memoirs? “Oh, by the way,” she went on, “I'm on the track of Gerald Fraser-Hymes.”

“Splendid.”

“Nothing definite yet, but I think you'll find he's an industrialist in the Midlands. I should have more concrete info next time. Now you can go back to thinking great thoughts.”

“Actually I was remembering a party, on the day I left the Foreign Office, whenever that was.”

“January 27th, 1956,” she said promptly. “It's ringed with red in your diary. You must have been pleased to go.”

Yes, that was part of my memory of the time: I had been pleased to go. I had not enjoyed working under Eden. There were some who were very fond of him—and some, rather more, who hated him. I was too junior to be close enough to love him, and I certainly don't think I hated him. But I was very uneasy about him generally: he often treated his subordinates abominably, and he seemed to have the prima donna reactions some people get when they have been in politics for a long time. I think I had some forebodings that there was something in his character that would lead him, and perhaps the country, to disaster. I had decided to resign even before he became Prime Minister. The advent of Selwyn Lloyd as Foreign Secretary at the end of fifty-five was the last straw. Industry, I saw, was a much better stepping-stone than the
Foreign Office to a career in politics, and when I got the offer of a very good job with I.C.I., I accepted joyfully.

“You're quite right to go,” Tim said when I told him, “quite right. We're both outsiders here.”

“Outsiders?”

“Me because of my sexual preferences, you because you didn't go to a good enough school.” I must have shown my surprise, because he went on: “They may not make that clear to you, but they certainly make it clear to each other.”

He was quite right. I had been blind not to have noticed it before. You needed to go to the top four or five schools really to be acceptable to the F.O. hierarchy. The snobberies of Lady Charlotte Wray were the snobberies of the Foreign Office—the Foreign Office then, and for all I know the Foreign Office now. None of my various government posts were there, and I was glad: it would have been too much like going back, and I never like to do that. Quite apart from the fact that I would be thought not to have gone to a good enough school.

So Tim determined to have a little party for me, independent of any brief and tepid gathering that might take place at work (I remember none, but I expect something of the sort must have been put on by my immediate boss there). It had to be after work, because it was Tim's mother's birthday, and he had family commitments. It was, I now realize, her last birthday, and probably the family knew that it might be.

Tim had invited seven or eight Foreign Office people—one or two I was close to, the rest people I had worked closely with—vague figures now, who played no part in my later life. The only one I remember at all vividly was Bernard Wriothesley, who later had a variety of diplomatic postings, including one in Bucharest—he was, I believe, the man who recommended that honorary knighthood for the late Nicolae Ceausescu. He was ambitious, bright up to a point, but none too sensitive.

Tim's friends arrived in dribs and drabs, collected drinks, and mingled with the F.O. crowd. Often the two groups knew
each other, having been to the same schools, or because they were in with the same set. It was an all-male occasion, which nobody seemed to find odd. I wish I could say that I remembered Lawrence Cornwallis there, could recall any words I swapped with him, but I can't say that I do. Perhaps, impressive though he is now, he was not impressive then. Wordsworth, I have often thought, was quite wrong about the process of growing up: the child is not father to the man, nor even the young man to the mature man. Lawrence Cornwallis left no trace in my memory.

Other things, though, I do recall.

The tone of the talk I remember: it was catty. People often talk about the cattiness of homosexuals, but it is nothing to the cattiness of the people in the F.O. The latter deliver it on a much lower note—from the back of the throat, as it were, with the lips scarcely moving, and with a face blank of emotion. It could be devastating.

The talk began innocently enough: Eisenhower's prospects of reelection, the new broom which (then as now) was apparently transforming Russia. The F.O. men did not think much of Khrushchev—“a peasant” they pronounced him. I went around from group to group, feeling myself on the outside even when I was most in on the talk. Perhaps Tim's remark about how people in the F.O. regarded my school had made me uneasy—though he had not said it unkindly, or to have that effect, quite the reverse: for Tim Foreign Office people were worth being on one's guard against.

When Tim's friends predominated, the talk tended to be more arty: the new regime at Covent Garden,
The Mint
which had just been published, the film of
Richard III
(“Wonderfully camp!”). Again, I felt a little bit on the outside looking in. But I do remember that, with Tim dashing backwards and forwards fetching and refilling glasses, proffering plates of things to nibble, it was possible to talk about him, and I remember it was the Foreign Office contingent that did it most enthusiastically.
To be specific, it was Bernard Wriothesley, gazing down a long, beaky nose and looking around him with a circumspection that must have served him well later in Romania.

“The sad thing about Tim,” he said with relish, “is that he's never going to get very far up the ladder. How could he? Would you regard him as a good security risk?”

“I don't think Tim bothers a great deal about getting ahead,” I remember saying. This was the first time, as I recall, that Tim's sexual orientation was openly discussed in my presence. I was, out of friendship and because of Tim's caution, extremely guarded.

“Precisely my point. If he had any ambition he would be a whole lot more discreet—as many
are
whom I could name but won't. Tim is essentially a dilettante. That father of his robbed his children of ambition—he has so much that there's none left over for them. And
he's
a sparrow who thinks he's a nightingale.”

“I don't know Tim's brother and sister,” I said neutrally.

“Oh, I believe the sister's a lively little thing. She'll no doubt marry someone suitable and never be heard of again. Women never get anywhere in the Conservative Party. I was thinking of the brother, Brother James, frère Jacques.
The
most boring man, with a dreadful horse-faced wife. Ghastly managing sort of woman. If she gets her way James will rise to the dizzy eminence of Deputy Lord Lieutenant of Gloucester, or wherever they live. A nothing man. And Tim—who certainly isn't a nothing man—will
amount
to nothing in the end. Such a waste. Frightfully sad.”

“All you mean is,” I said, “that Tim will amount to nothing in the F.O. Probably you're right. But there are other places to distinguish yourself. F.O. men always forget that.”

“We prefer not to think of them. Obviously you have to feel that way, being on your way to the big bustling world of commerce.” (How he curled his lip as he said that!) “But the F.O., let me tell you, is what Lord John, Tim's dad, has his eye
on. Probably sent Tim to us as a stalking horse. But he'll never get it, not Tim's papa.”

“Why not?”

“Well, I could say too mediocre, but with Selwyn Lloyd as Foreign Secretary that might not ring true.” He threw back his head, withdrew his voice further into his throat, and prepared to give us a potted biography. “The fact is, he was too compromised in the thirties by his association with the Cliveden set. That was Lord John's habit—they seemed the way of the future, and he latched on to them. If Churchill and the rearmers had seemed the way of the future he would have thrown in his lot with them. As it was he went a mite too far: much too pally with Ribbentrop, talked in a public speech about Hitler's miraculous transformation of Germany—you know the sort of thing some of that lot did. Of course he became a super patriot during the war, but people don't forget. So he'll never rise above the mediocre jobs his talent fits him for, which I suppose must be a cause for gratitude. Certainly he'll never get the F.O. Which doesn't stop him
wanting
it fiercely.”

The talk turned back to Tim. Maybe I should have moved away, but there was a sort of grisly fascination in hearing Tim's assessment of his position within the Foreign Office confirmed in his own flat by people who were accepting his hospitality.