A Scandal in Belgravia (7 page)

“Three-one-oh, four-three-seven-two.”

The voice was clear, civilised, with just a trace of that upper-class drawl that Timothy sometimes affected for comic purposes.

“Is that—er—Marjorie Knopfmeyer?”

“It is.”

“This is going to sound a bit odd. My name is Peter Proctor—”

“Oh, yes—the ex-minister for whatever-it-was.”

The fact that she showed no surprise at being rung up out of the blue by an ex-cabinet minister told me that this was indeed Timothy's sister: she had mingled in cabinet-minister circles all her life.

“Minister for all sorts of things in my time,” I admitted.

“I thought I recognised your voice. It's funny how top politicians become almost family friends through television these days, isn't it? Or personal enemies. It wasn't like that when my father was in the Cabinet.”

“It soon passes though. People pass me in the street and frown slightly, trying to remember who I am.”

“Weren't you a friend of Timothy's at one time?”

“Yes, I was. I'm glad you mentioned him. As I say, this is going to sound odd. You see, I'm writing my memoirs—”

“Oh God! Poor old you! Why are political memoirs considered mandatory these days? They're always so tedious. I was forced to read Jim Prior's one wet weekend at a friend's and it was like wading through sump oil.”

“Don't sap my confidence any further. The fact is, I got stuck in the fifties, and I think the reason is I feel a sort of guilt at the thought of Timothy's death. Not because I had anything to do with it, but because I knew him, liked him so well, and yet his death made so little impression on me.”

“Suez,” said Marjorie Knopfmeyer promptly. “Everyone says the same. I remember it so horribly well: it was like being in two nightmares simultaneously.”

“Yes, I've realized that must be the reason. Look, I believe you and he were close—?”

“We were. He was just the brother every girl would want to have. Do you want to talk about him?”

“Well, yes—oddly enough I would like to. I somehow feel it might—exorcise the memories, or remove the block.”

“No need to explain. I still, now and then, meet people who feel they want to talk about Tim. He was the sort of person who affected people that way. Why don't you come to dinner?”

“That would be ideal, if it's not too much trouble.”

“I suppose you're very busy?”

“Not at all. You must know that ex-cabinet ministers are like yesterday's newspapers.”

“What about Thursday?”

“Fine.”

“Say seven thirty. I look forward to it.”

I put the phone down, with an odd lift of the heart at the thought of eating dinner with Tim's sister.

B
elgrave Square, as I said earlier, is a shadow of its former self as far as character and atmosphere go: uniform, sleek, bland. Inevitably it smells of wealth, but not of very interesting wealth. I was ten minutes early for my dinner with Marjorie Wycliffe, or Marjorie Knopfmeyer rather, so I paid off my taxi in the Square itself and walked around it in the twilight. Lady Thorrington's house had now an opaque, ungiving presence, and I saw from a tiny plaque that it was the office of a finance company. Embassies abounded, prestige offices of this and that. Probably only the Duke of Westminster can afford to live there any longer. It is not, now, a square with much interest attached to it.

Away from the Square itself there is still some style, however, and in the various little mews there is character and atmosphere aplenty. If I had not been remembering so intensely those encounters with Tim I might have had trouble finding Craven Court Mews, for I only went to his flat two or three times, but as it was I found my way there almost without thinking. It was now brightly painted, trim, almost jolly. I rang the bell of the street door and immediately heard steps clattering down the stairs.

“Hello, I'm Marjorie Knopfmeyer. Good of you to come.”

She smiled, held out her hand, then led the way up the stairs.
She was a big, untidy woman with no pretensions to fashion, in a purple dress with a shawl around her shoulders. What seized me as soon as we got into the light of the sitting room, however, was the realization that she had Tim's charm—a version of it, rather: more feminine, perhaps less brilliant, but a charm that vividly brought Tim himself to my mind. It was there in the smile, the warmth, the informality, the effortless way I was made to feel wanted and welcome.

“Could you be an angel and fix yourself a drink?” she said, waving towards a cabinet. “There are one or two things I have to do in the kitchen.”

The bottles were not from a wine merchant's: they were supermarket bottles, with the price labels still on. Where, I wondered, were the supermarkets for Belgravia? Victoria, perhaps? The King's Road? I poured myself a sherry from a standard label bottle, good but not distinguished. Then I looked around the room.

There were still things that I remembered: the glass-topped table edged in rosewood, the escritoire. Most of it, however, was new, and bore the imprint of a life in the art world. There were two largish pictures—a Paul Klee and a Lucien Freud (I did not recognise them, I should say, but looked at the signatures). There were also several watercolours. There was just one piece of sculpture, on a small table under the window: a long-legged bird, like a stork, bending forward and somehow surveying the world quizzically. It was rough, jagged, and gave an impression of human vitality.

“Do you like it?”

Marjorie was standing over by the cabinet, pouring herself a weak gin and tonic.

“Yes, very much.”

“Ferdy's. I don't surround myself with memories, it's unhealthy, but I have that piece here and one or two others in Gloucestershire. He gave me that piece explicitly—didn't just leave it to me—because I said it reminded me of him—I don't
know why: a sort of humorous disengagement, perhaps. It's all too easy to drown yourself in memories, isn't it? . . . I suppose you remember this room?”

“Yes, though I wasn't often here. I remember this table, and the escritoire . . .” I paused. “Oh yes, and I think I remember that vase. Delft, isn't it?”

I pointed to a small, delicate blue-and-white piece on the cabinet, and as I did so I noticed that Marjorie flinched.

“Yes, that was Tim's.”

“I seem to remember it from one of my later visits. I suppose he acquired it. I wouldn't have thought it his kind of thing.”

“My mother gave it to him. No, not really his taste . . .” She drank from her gin, a hefty gulp. “If you go close you'll see that it's been repaired. It was smashed the night he died. That's the thing I keep to remember Tim by.”

She walked over to the quizzical bird, and I had a sudden stab of realization how much it cost her to talk about Tim's death, even after all these years. This was not sisterly feeling, this was love. She changed the subject.

“Ferdy had charm too. I suppose I could never have married a man who didn't—not after growing up with Tim. Ferdy's was more raffish, he was more of a card, but he was like Tim in making people love him.”

“He wasn't English, was he?”

“Oh no. He gets into the books on British sculpture—which is right in a way, because he has to go somewhere, and he was never quite of that stature where nationality becomes unimportant. But he wasn't in the least English. His family were Polish Jews who moved to Germany in the twenties. Ferdy was born in Leipzig. At least they realized their mistake early on, but when they moved, in 1932, it was to Czechoslovakia. They came to Britain in 1937, when Ferdy was in his teens. They'd had money, but by then much of it was gone. I met him when I was twenty-one, soon after Tim died. We lived a racketty,
hand-to-mouth existence, but a good one. . . . I miss him horribly.”

“You didn't live here?”

“Good Lord, no. We could never have afforded to. I let it out, so it provided a regular income for us over the years. Since he died I've come here occasionally, when it's been vacant, just for a change of scene. I've been here two years now—too long: I'm not a metropolitan person, and all the friends I have here are the wrong sort. I'm longing to get back to Gloucestershire, and I will in a few weeks. I really should sell both places. They both have painful memories. But I'm too old to start afresh, and the children would certainly hate it if I sold the cottage in Barndene. . . . Look, I'll serve the soup and you can start in on what you want to know.”

Over the soup, which was onion, and very pungent, I said:

“You were close to Tim, weren't you?”

“I loved him.”

“Close right up to the end?”

She grimaced a little, as if at some painful thought.

“As I say, I prefer to think that I
loved
him, rather than that we were close. I
felt
close to him, but that doesn't mean I saw him all that often. That's one of the things that always nags at the back of my mind: I loved him, he did so much for me, so why didn't I make sure I saw more of him in that last year of his life?”

“You were in London?”

“Yes.” She grinned at me mischievously. “Don't laugh—I did the Season!”

I raised my eyebrows at her, and we laughed together.

“Well, I suppose girls like you did in the fifties. Do still, come to that, though I'm glad to say my daughter never wanted to.”

“When I did it we were still curtseying to the Queen. Can you imagine it? Poor woman—the boredom of it! No wonder she did away with it all. . . . To be fair to myself, I didn't
intend to. I wanted to go straight from school to art school . . . The watercolours are mine, by the way. I have a small reputation in a limited circle, but I do sell my work.”

“Why did you change your mind?”

“Mummy—she was very tradition minded. Certain things were done and certain other things were not done. I don't suppose that would have decided me, but she was ill, much more ill, in fact, than we realized. So when I'd got some A-levels I took a year off school, spent a lot of time with her, and in spring I did the Season and curtseyed to Her Majesty and the Duke . . . It seems an age ago!”

“Where were you living then?”

“We had a house in Kensington, and another in the constituency. My father got back to the Commons in 1950, for another West Country constituency—in what is now Avon. Actually he tried to get hold of this place.”

“This flat? From Tim?”

“That's right. Tim inherited it about the time my father got back to Westminster. Daddy said it was much too expensive for a young man in his position, sky-high rates and all that, but that it was just right for an MP to spend the working week in. In a way he was right, but I think underneath he was peeved because Aunt Julie hadn't thought of this and left it to him. Anyway Tim turned him down flat, and Tim could be very stubborn when he liked. So we had the house in Kensington, and that's where I did the Season from.”

I finished my soup, and putting down my spoon I said, “I haven't got any impression of your mother.” Marjorie nodded, pushing back a strand of grey hair.

“No . . . Mummy is difficult to explain.” She collected up the soup plates and soon came back with a large, steaming casserole. “Would you pour the wine? This is Lancashire hot-pot. A bit basic, but I don't like dinner parties where the hostess is forever flitting backwards and forwards to the kitchen. With Ferdy stopping work at unpredictable hours of the day and
needing feeding there and then I developed a repertoire of meals that could just sit in the oven waiting for him.”

“Yes—Ann had the same problem. Not many points of resemblance between artists and MPs, but that's one.”

“Did your wife like the traditional Tory MP's wife's role?”

I could be honest with someone of my generation.

“Yes, she did rather. These days one has to be apologetic about that, but she did—at least she liked being a full-time mother, and she regarded the constituency work as being a pleasant few hours' change from the domestic role.” I thought, and then added: “At least if she changed her mind about that she never told me.”

Marjorie nodded.

“You asked about my mother. The thing about Mummy was that she gave the impression that she was semi-detached, not quite with you. She had a vaguely benign air, but she seemed cocooned in some other world of her own. The constituency people would be talking to her about the rates bill or the price of school blazers and suddenly her words of agreement or sympathy wouldn't quite gell with what they were saying. It got worse as she got older, and used to irritate my father to hell.”

“Wasn't she close to her children?”

“She and I were. I never went away to school—she insisted on that. It's different with boys, isn't it? James and Tim went away to prep school when they were seven. She loved them, and they her, but even before that there'd been a nanny, of course, so it could never be what ordinary people would call close. . . . It's unnatural, don't you think, the upper-class way with children? Just too cold. I made sure I kept our two with us.”

“Yes, we did too.” I glanced at the cabinet, and ventured to bring up the vase again. “You said that vase was a present from your mother to Tim.”

She nodded, her eyes slightly wet.

“Yes, she did that in the last year of her life: went around giving people little unexpected presents—things of her own she wanted them to have. As if she knew that her hold on their memories would be as frail as her hold on life. That's why after the . . . after Tim died I had it repaired. It was shattered in the . . . attack on him. Now it's part of my memories of him and her.”

“Did you inherit this flat after Tim's death?”