Dance While You Can (22 page)

‘Oh come on now, no false modesty,’ he protested when I tried to tell him that it had been an open-and-shut case from, the beginning. ‘You wait ‘til the morning, you won’t be able to see old Raddish for the pile of briefs he’ll be carrying into your office.’

I laughed, and promised to pass my overload in his direction. Robert Lyttleton was the next to congratulate me. We saw very little of him these days, as he slogged it out at the Foreign Office, working his way towards that elusive overseas posting. Whenever we did meet, we neither of us referred to his affair with my wife, nor mine with his mother. I was glad that these near-incestuous involvements, and my jealousy, had not affected our friendship – even though I had no idea at that time just how valuable a friend Robert would turn out to be.

Now he nudged my arm and nodded towards Lizzie as she slid past us with a tray of hors d’oeuvres. ‘She’s not wearing any knickers, you know.’

‘And how would you know that?’ I enquired.

‘She showed me.’

I shook my head, not in the least surprised. ‘I take it Henry was nowhere in sight?’

‘Then you take it wrong, old chap. Henry was right there with me. In fact, he told her to do it. No, Scout’s honour,’ he said as I started to protest. ‘Henry, old chap.’ He grabbed Henry’s arm as he sailed past with Caroline. ‘Did you or did you not instruct your wife to display her private parts to me?’

‘Guilty.’ He looked at me. ‘Don’t tell me you want to see them too? I’m sure she’ll oblige if you ask. Or would you like me to make the request on your behalf?’

It wasn’t until much later that I was able to get Henry alone and ask him just what was going on between him and Lizzie. ‘Apart from a series of orgies, you mean? Very little,’ he said.

‘I assumed you were happy together.’

‘I fuck her, that’s all she wants. She’s happy.’ He was smiling as he spoke, but I knew him too well.

‘Are you seeing Caroline again?’ I asked.

‘As often as possible.’ The smile faded. ‘I should never have given her up.’

‘Then why don’t you leave Lizzie?’

‘Why don’t you leave Jessica?’

We looked at each other for several minutes before he spoke again. ‘Well, we sure made one hell of a mistake when we got into bed with those two, didn’t we? The question is, which of us is going to be the first to do something about it?’

The following morning when I arrived at chambers I found a stack of newspapers on my desk. Perhaps Henry was right, I would see a few more briefs coming my way now, and God knew I needed something to take my mind off the situation at home.

I sorted through the mail first, then picked up the papers to read them again. There was still something that unsettled me about the Pinto case, not that I seriously expected to find the answer in the press.

‘Telegram for you, sir.’ I waited for the junior clerk to go before I tore it open. You didn’t have to have lived through the war to experience a certain trepidation at the delivery of a telegram.

There were only two words to the message – two words so unexpected that my legs gave way beneath me. I was stunned, transfixed, feeling my heart slow and somersault. I tore my eyes away and turned to the window, as if expecting to find an explanation there. The distant noise of the city faded even further as I heard her voice speaking those two words. All these years had passed, and now, suddenly, today . . . I gazed down at the telegram again, my eyes hungry, wanting there to be more. Still there were just the two words:
Congratulations, Elizabeth.

I must have sat there at my desk for almost an hour, staring into space, as slowly I unlocked the doors of my memory. I could see Foxton’s so clearly that I might have been there yesterday. I heard the stampede of feet and the babel of young male voices as boys descended from dormitories. I saw the old building slumbering amid its lawns, the clearly-marked sports fields. I saw the classrooms, the dining-room, the Head’s study. Then the cottage, the surgery and the railwayman’s hut. And almost, just fleetingly . . . I jerked my head up, half expecting to see her eyes laughing back at me. But there were only the blank walls of my office in front of me, and I dropped my head in my hands. I had shut it all out for so long now, so much had happened since, and with the pain of the last few days . . .

I met Henry that evening at El Vino’s. As the day wore on and the telegram worked its way into my subconscious as well as my conscious mind, I had ground myself into a near catatonic state of frustration and resentment.

‘Two words! Two lousy words! Why doesn’t she say where she is, for Christ’s sake?’

Henry handed the telegram back. ‘So I take it you want to know where she is?’

‘Of course I do! I’m surprised you even need to ask.’

He shrugged, and let a long silence elapse before he spoke again. ‘You don’t need me to tell you how much you hurt her, Alexander. Maybe she’s afraid you’ll do it again.’

‘Then why the telegram?’

‘I think you can answer that for yourself.’ He held up his hand as I started to speak. ‘As far apart as your worlds were, you two were right for each other, you knew it, she knew it, we all knew it. Even Old Anger tried to make you face it, didn’t she, when she came up to Oxford? I suppose this is Elizabeth’s way of letting you know she still thinks about you, perhaps even that she wants to see you again. And if you want my advice, then go and find her. With everything that’s happening to you at the moment, well . . . find her before you hurt anyone else, because I think quite enough people have suffered as a consequence of your bleeding heart.’

My immediate impulse was to get up from the table and tell him just what I thought of his agony aunt routine, but he caught hold of my arm and pulled me back down again.

‘I’ll tell you this for nothing, Alexander. You weren’t the only one who missed her after she’d gone. I think about her too. And I’ve never understood why you refused to talk about her, especially to me. I’m supposed to be your best friend, for God’s sake! So, you can talk now, and you can start by telling me – because I’ve always wanted to know – why the hell you let her go so easily.’

I felt my anger diminish, only to be replaced by the onset of that burning misery I had thought never to feel again. ‘I wish I could answer that. All I know is that my father sounded so convincing. I think he even told me he had proof to connect her with those damned gypsies. I believed him when he said she’d made a fool of me; somehow at the time it all added up. But I tried to find her afterwards. You must remember that.’

Henry nodded. ‘I also remember the pride that made you give up. The same pride that has hurt so many people since. So what are you going to do now?’

‘What the hell can I do? It’s as if she’s some sort of a ghost come back to haunt me. She’s there, but I can’t touch her. Why now, after all these years, and like this?’

We neither of us had the answer to that, and the next two weeks dragged painfully by. I couldn’t concentrate on anything as visions of the past flooded my mind to drown the present. My eyes strained across busy streets, trying to pick her out amongst the crowd. Every time the phone rang, the door opened, the postman knocked . . . The agony of waiting seemed endless. My relationship with Jessica deteriorated even further. Ever since the night she had told me I was incapable of fathering children, I had taken to sleeping in another room. Jessica, I soon discovered, was seeking solace in the arms of her new mentor, Thomas Street. I didn’t care. If anything, I was glad. Jessica embodied all that was wrong with my life, and all I wanted was to get as far away from her as I could.

Then one morning I received a telephone call from my father. He wanted me to meet him at his club; there was a matter of great importance he needed to discuss with me.

My heart leapt into my throat. Had he found Elizabeth? Was he going to tell me that he had made a mistake all those years ago? My obsession was such that it didn’t occur to me that my father might want to see me on an entirely different matter.

True to form, he wasted no time in coming to the point. The Pinto case. As I listened to what he was saying, I remembered all too vividly the hollow feeling I had had when I won. Now here it was again, this time stripped of its pretence, and revealed in all its horror. Ruth Pinto had been a British agent, not a Soviet one. The information she had been ‘acquiring’ for the Eastern Bloc had in fact been given her by the Minstry of Defence – and her communist masters were beginning to suspect her. The court case had been staged to allay their suspicions and to save Ruth, for once justice had been seen to be done, after a reasonable lapse of time she would have been quietly released from prison, whisked away somewhere and given a new identity. The bottom line, my father told me, was that the pseudo-trial had been engineered to save her life. As it was, due to my ‘brilliant defence’, she had been acquitted. Her body had been found the night before in an East Berlin street.

The whole thing seemed incredible. If my father hadn’t been the Lord Chancellor I would have accused him of reading too many spy thrillers. What I wanted to know most of all was why I had not been told the truth from the beginning.

‘That’s simple,’ my father answered. ‘There were agents from the KGB in court. If you had known what was going on, it would have been bound to show in your defence. These people aren’t stupid, Alexander. The whole thing had to be conducted as a bona fide case.’

‘Then why the hell didn’t the prosecution make a better job of things? They practically handed it to me on a plate.’

‘You do yourself an injustice. What no one was prepared for was just how cleverly you would conduct the defence. Now don’t flare up. You’re still an inexperienced barrister. The brief could have gone to anyone, it just so happened that you were the one who attended the Section I at Clerkenwell. You became the obvious choice.’

‘So I was set up?’

‘No need to dramatise, Alexander.’

‘I said, I was set up.’

‘In a manner of speaking, yes.’

I drew breath to deliver my outrage, but he held up his hand to stop me. ‘The case is closed now. But there is one other thing I wanted to tell you before you read it in the press. I shall be retiring at the end of this session.’

‘Retiring!’ I echoed. ‘But you’re only sixty-four.’ Alarm bells began ringing in my head.

‘And your mother is not far past fifty.’ I was touched by his loyalty in not revealing her actual age. ‘She’s still young, Alexander, and I want to spend some time with her before it’s too late. Nothing wrong in that, is there? You should try it some time, good for the old heart.’

‘Heart? Have you had more warnings?’

‘There’s plenty of life left in this old dog yet. But yes –’ and I saw the veil drop from his eyes – ‘the doctors are insisting. And what with your mother nagging away at me too, she’ll probably do for me long before the old heart goes! I ‘ve given in. She’s won – but then women always do.’ He smiled as he spoke of my mother; they were still very much in love, even after all these years.

I swallowed hard. Though we had had our differences over the years, I loved my father.

‘Come along, old chap,’ he laughed, reaching out and clasping my arm, ‘enough of the long face, can’t have you weeping into your soup, now can we? Besides, I shan’t be going anywhere yet awhile, that I can promise you. And as for you, well, you’d better brace yourself for the public humiliation that is very likely on its way.’

Never one to pull punches was my father.

The only good thing about finding myself back in the newspapers was that it might prompt Elizabeth to get in touch with me. But the days passed, and I heard nothing.

From time to time I took the telegram out of my pocket and looked at it, vainly searching for the telephone number that wasn’t there. Henry and I met in El Vino’s every evening, ostensibly to mull over the day’s events in court, but in reality to commiserate with one another over our unfortunate marriages. Steeped in self-pity, I wasn’t backward in pointing out to him that at least he saw Caroline.

‘Not the same,’ he slurred. ‘I want her there all the time. Do you know, for the first time in my life someone else’s happiness is more important than my own. Isn’t that amazing?’

‘Isn’t that love?’

‘Don’t let’s get shlushy, old chap.’ And he got up to get more drinks.

‘Do you think Elizabeth’s happy?’ I asked him when he returned.

‘Can’t be. Wouldn’t have sent the telegram if she was.’ I knew I hadn’t wanted him to reply in the affirmative, but thinking of her, maybe alone somewhere, and unhappy, was unbearable. ‘I’m going to find her, Henry. If it kills me, I’m going to find her.’

– 18 –

Jessica was preparing the house for the big send-off we were giving Robert Lyttleton. At last he had attained his overseas posting, and would be flying to Baghdad at the beginning of the following week. It had been Jessica’s idea that we hold the party – as much, I guessed, to avail herself of another opportunity of flaunting a ‘real man’ in my face, as to say good-bye to Robert.

At various intervals during the morning she bumped open the door of my study to regale me with yet another problem that had cropped up, and enquire whether I didn’t think I should do something about it. My refusal was unvarying, and she would slam out again, hissing obscenities – under her breath so the hired help wouldn’t hear. After lunch, which was a sandwich behind the now locked door of my study, Lizzie and the florist arrived. Unable to think why it hadn’t occurred to me before, I snatched up my coat and went off to play a round of golf with Henry.

Later, when we returned to Belgrave Square with Henry boasting his victory, Jessica and Lizzie were nowhere to be found. ‘Gone shopping,’ Mrs Dixon informed us. So Henry and I decided to make a start on the champagne. By five o’clock they still weren’t back, and Henry sauntered off to Eaton Square to get his head down for an hour.

I was in my study when I heard Jessica and Lizzie come in, but didn’t bother to get up. I was going over a file that a private investigator had delivered to my chambers the day before. Not that there was anything much to read – all I’d been able to give him to go on was the telegram, and that, he discovered, had been sent from a post office in Chelsea. It heightened my frustration no end to think that she could be so close. I picked up the telegram and read it again. Then angrily I crumpled it into a tiny ball. Damn her! Why was she doing this to me?’