A Scandal in Belgravia (3 page)

“But your father's a public figure. You know what the papers would do if they got hold of it.”

He shrugged.

“That's something he'd have to handle. He's a politician: he can take care of himself. As to me, I'd resign from the Foreign Office. So what? No great tragedy. I'm not sure I see my role in life as a top civil servant—or an ambassador, come to that. I came into the F.O. because I like ‘Abroad' and haven't seen nearly enough of it. I can think of lots of other careers I'd just as soon take up—and probably will.”

I shook my head.

“You're underestimating the harm it would do your father's career. But it's the security aspect that worries me most.”

Tim leaned forward in his chair, smiling persuasively.

“Look, Peter: try to stop thinking of homosexuals as a group, eh? Like we were a Trade Union with a bloc vote at the Labour Party Conference. Because one homosexual was a bad security risk, it doesn't mean that we all are. We're individuals, left wing and right wing, happy and miserable, open and secret, rich and poor. Lump us all together and you prove you've got a
News of the World
sort of mind, and I don't believe you have. Think about it, eh, Peter?”

I nodded. I still felt miserable and uncertain, but I felt still more strongly that Timothy was someone whom I liked and would value as a friend.

“But you will be careful, won't you?” I insisted. “I mean, if Heinz had had access to Foreign Office papers—”

“I don't bring papers home. And if I did they'd be about matters so trivial no Russian agent would give three kopeks for them. Because that's all you and I get to deal with, isn't it? You know what—you're a worrier, Peter.”

He was right there too. That, until my recent forced retirement, was exactly what I was. I looked at my watch.

“I must go to Lady Thorrington's.”

“That's right. Never keep a Lady waiting. Be nice to her, Peter. She's a dear old thing.”

That was my first intimation that if you lived in Belgravia, even in a mews flat in Belgravia, you tended to know the other people living in Belgravia. It was at that time a sort of way-up-market village, with every other cottager a lord or lady. It also had a village system of communication and, as often as not, village standards of judgement.

I walked into the rarefied atmosphere of the Square, pondering this and much else. I found the seedy dignity of the place fascinating: I couldn't see how such an area could give off so strong a smell of money and privilege, yet undoubtedly it did.
But as I took in the place and its feel I was also meditating on the scene I had just taken part in. I think that by the time I had walked around the Square and found Lady Thorrington at number forty-nine I had already decided that in the matter of Timothy Wycliffe I was not neutral. In my still-schoolboyish but honorable way I had declared myself to be on his side.

• • •

“How's the great work going, Dad?” Jeremy asked when I came down to sherry this evening.

“Badly,” I said. I explained that I had got some kind of writer's block: that I was caught up in the early fifties, distracted by my memories of a man of no historical importance who had had little influence on my life. I told him about Tim, and described what happened that first time I went to his flat. As I should have expected, he was totally mystified.

“But what was the big deal? He was a homosexual. So what?”

“You young people have no historical sense,” I grumbled. “Homosexual practices were illegal then.”

“So was parking on a double yellow line, I expect,” said Jeremy. “Just explain to me why you were so miserable, so embarrassed. For God's sake, you must have been in your twenties by then. Long out of the nursery.”

“You don't understand,” I insisted. “It was a completely different climate then—climate of opinion, I mean. If you were caught you were put on trial, sent to jail.”

“
That
wasn't very sensible.”

“No, of course it wasn't. Everybody knew it was like locking Billy Bunter up in the tuck shop, but nevertheless that's what they went on doing. And if you didn't go to jail, there were the newspapers. You could be hounded out of practically any career. It was a different world.”

“A very nasty one.”

And of course he's right. Perhaps the reason that memories of Timothy Wycliffe have distracted me is that he sums up the transition from the world I grew up in to the world we live in now. A symbol, a symptom, a fingerpost. I have a feeling that I'm not going to be able to get away from him now.

T
he maid who came to the door of number forty-nine, Belgrave Square, was not dressed in the traditional manner, in black, with a neat white cap. Probably very few maids in 1951 were, except those in upper-class comedies, but somehow I'd imagined that Belgrave Square might still cling to the old uniform. She was dressed neatly but drably, in clothes that had seen a better peacetime, and she said “Mr. Proctor?” in an international interrogative that failed to hide her Central European accent. She looked anxiously at the envelope I was carrying, leaving me in no doubt that the papers I carried were for her.

“Lady Thorrington is expecting you.”

When she shut the door there was a rich, pregnant hush in the house. She led the way upstairs. Lady Thorrington's sitting room was on the first floor. It was furnished in so exactly the way I had expected a sitting room in Belgravia to be furnished—shabby carpets, good pieces of furniture, dull pictures—that it was the woman I noticed, or rather the women, for she had a friend with her.

Lady Thorrington was a fleshy woman, but it was friendly fat, not at all intimidating, and her open, welcoming manner did not conceal the fact that hers was a capable, direct personality, and that she usually got what she wanted. In her common
sense was allied with persistence and single-mindedness. By contrast I thought her clothes unsuitably frilly—not in the eternal schoolgirl manner of Bubbles Rothermere, just a little too partyish. I realized later that they were old clothes, let out most capably. Like her maid she was wearing clothes from the prewar era. I suspect now that many of her own clothing coupons went to the Europeans she gave her time to protecting. I remember when she died, when I was a junior minister in the Heath government, how surprised I was at the length of her
Times
obituary, and the warmth and sorrow of the addenda to it sent in by correspondents, many of them with foreign names.

“This is Lady Charlotte Wray.”

Lady Charlotte was much more everyone's idea of a
grande
Belgravia
dame.
Spare, dressed entirely in black, and dogmatic in her speech, she was not a person one would lightly consider disputing with. Whether she was as wise or perceptive as she was dogmatic I was not sure. But she was to the life what we now think of as the Wendy Hiller part.

“Business first,” said Lady Thorrington, making me wonder nervously what was to come second. She gestured me to a seat and sat down herself with a businesslike air. I took from the envelope the papers which notified the granting of residence rights to Käthe Möller and to her son and daughter-in-law Klaus and Hildegard. I explained the exceptional circumstances which had persuaded the Foreign Office and the Home Office to grant these rights. I saw Lady Thorrington nodding in a way that suggested not that she was acknowledging them to be exceptional, but that she was storing them up as loopholes for future use, for she maintained with various government departments a continuous yet courteous warfare on behalf of people they would much have preferred to keep out of the country. Finally I explained that the three would be eligible for naturalisation in five years time. Lady Thorrington leaned back in her chair.

“Most satisfactory,” she said.

“Most,”
agreed Lady Charlotte. “I shall have great pleasure in giving the news to Klaus and Hildegard.”

Lady Thorrington smiled and went to the door. I had guessed that Käthe was the woman who had let me in, and she was waiting if not listening outside. I heard uninhibited expressions of joy, and heard her tripping downstairs with an unlikely lightness in a woman of her years. No doubt she went straight to the phone to give the news to Klaus and Hildegard. The pair, I later learnt, were cook and chauffeur to Lady Charlotte Wray, but they did not stop long with her, and the last I heard of him he was Claud Miller and Conservative Mayor of Lewisham. Käthe was with Lady Thorrington until she died.

Now Lady Thorrington came back in, a smile on her face, and closed the door.

“Sherry,” said Lady Charlotte.

She said it in a downright, regal way that left no option for refusal, though it was not hers to offer. Lady Thorrington, still in high good humour, went to the decanter and glasses on the cabinet by the window and poured three glasses. The sherry was a brown, dry Amontillado, no more common then than it is today. There was no alternative—it was clearly
their
drink, and very good it was too. When I had taken my glass and sipped it in what I imagined to be the approved manner, I realized that I was seated on one side of the fireplace and that they were seated on the other side, and that both gave every appearance of being about to question me. An inquisition of Ladies! I wished myself a hundred miles from Belgrave Square.

“You find your work at the Foreign Office interesting?” began Lady Charlotte. The Commencement Anodyne. I replied in my earnest, overgrown-schoolboy manner.

“Yes, very interesting. It's such an exciting time to be starting there. Of course, I haven't got to deal with anything of real importance yet.” The moment it was out of my mouth I realized where
that
led.

“Only with tiresome old ladies whose business ought to be
conducted through the Post Office or the telephone service,” said Lady Thorrington with a smile.

“Oh— I'm sorry—of course I didn't mean—”

“Of course you meant it, and quite right too.”

We all sipped, to cover my discomfiture.

“No doubt there were others who started with you and who are also on the bottom rung of the ladder,” said Lady Charlotte. The Approach Oblique.

“Yes, of course,” I murmured. “Several others.”

“The Foreign Office, I believe, recruits its young men from all sorts of schools these days,” she went on. The Diplomatic Side-Step. “Quite democratic.”

“I went to Dulwich,” I murmured.

She nodded, as if this confirmed her assessment of the new democratic spirit in the Foreign Office. Indeed, I think I was half-inclined to accept her assessment myself, until I saw a tiny twinkle in Lady Thorrington's eye and realized how ridiculous it was. Realized, too, that Lady Thorrington kept her friend as much for her own amusement as anything else.

“Young Wycliffe started there not long ago, I believe.”

At last Lady Charlotte had come to the Approach Direct.

“Yes, he did.”

“Isn't he some kind of relation of yours?” Lady Thorrington asked her friend. Lady Charlotte gestured dismissively.

“Something. Second cousin twice removed, something of
that
sort. We are all so intermarried that you only count people as related if you actually keep up with them. And as far as the Wycliffes are concerned, my father . . . chose not to.”

It was said in a tight-lipped way. I should mention that Lady Charlotte's father was Earl of Bodmin, a generally undistinguished peer, and her husband was Julian Wray, a minor minister in a Baldwin government, a man from whom Lady Charlotte had become more or less semi-detached in the course of her marriage. He had died the previous year, and her mourning was for him. Lady Thorrington's husband had been
Ambassador in Vienna at some time in the thirties, and had sent home any number of warning messages to the British government, which it had ignored. His widow's work with Displaced Persons (what we today would call refugees, I suppose—one of the few instances of our language becoming less euphemistic in recent years) was a continuation of his.

“We saw you, in point of fact,” she now said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“We saw you and Timothy Wycliffe arrive.” She gestured to a corner, where there sat a coffee-cream coloured cat, all soft fur and pugnacious expression. “We were exercising Shai-pur in the gardens. We saw you arrive.”

The gardens were the fenced-off and locked area in the centre of the Square, exclusive to the Square's residents. There were small trees and shrubs there, providing cover. It was perfect for observing without being observed.

“Ah,” I said.

“Is he an especially close friend of yours?” asked Lady Charlotte. The voice was bright, neutral, but the question was loaded.

I had taken my decision.

“Yes, we're very good friends.”

“Yet you had not been to his flat before.”

I was unable to think of anything to say to that. Did they keep a twenty-four-hour-a-day watch on his flat? Or were they in touch with MI5, who did? After a moment Lady Thorrington took pity on my disconcertment and explained.

“As you were coming along Halkin Street from the Palace we saw that you would have walked straight into the Square if Timothy Wycliffe had not stopped you and pointed to the mews. We deduced from that that you had not been there before.”

“You would make very good detectives,” I said.

Lady Charlotte was inclined to look affronted, but Lady Thorrington nodded almost complacently.

“Yes, I think we would.”

There was a silence, apparently left for me to explain. I explained.

“We have only known each other since we both started working at the Foreign Office. When I said we were friends I meant that we were good friends at work.”