The Yellow Room Conspiracy (10 page)

“We don't,” said Gerry. “Michael brought it.”

There was a roughness about his tone for which Harriet had half-prepared me. “Gerry stands up to her,” she'd said. “She used to like it, but now I'm not sure. The trouble is, neither of them is prepared to manage the other one, you know, getting their own way without seeming to, that sort of thing. You've got to have a bit of that in a marriage.” Gerry's “we” was not a surprise either. I had seen little of him over the past few years, but knew he was an associate of Allwegg's and had a flat north of Hyde Park, where (Harriet said) Nancy sometimes spent the odd night, while he came down to Blatchards at week-ends. The only reason they were not formally married was that Nancy would then forfeit her alimony from Dick Felder, and without that Blatchards would have ceased to be viable.

“Have some,” said Michael, stretching for the bottle.

“Which is Gerry's glass?” said Nancy. “Heavens, he's not going to drink all that. I want him on his feet to say good-bye to people.”

Without waiting she picked up the glass nearest where Gerry had been sitting—it indeed held a hefty tot, but looked as if it had not so far been touched—and took a good swig, quite obviously not for enjoyment but as if asserting her rights to do so.

“You can put some in a tooth-mug for me,” she said. “And I mean it about Gerry staying on his feet—Mother's had it, and so's Lucy, blast her. See you later, Paul.”

We settled as she left. Michael poured me a lavish brandy and accepted my congratulations with a shrug. He had put on a lot of weight, but this seemed to have improved his looks somehow, or perhaps his facial ugliness seemed less extreme on a grosser body. His business world, mainly the acquisition and development of run-down urban property, didn't impinge on mine, but I had heard that he was doing well, and Ben's ring and dress seemed to confirm this. At other times I might have been more interested to meet him, but as it was, what with Lucy's pressing invitation to me to come to the house followed by her apparent decision to hide from me, and now finding myself expected to converse with her husband, I was in some confusion.

I knew Seddon no better than I'd done seven years earlier. Incidentally there was something about him, even before he had inherited the title, that made one inclined to think of him by his surname. The Vicky caricatures—to my mind one of that over-rated cartoonist's better efforts—invariably showed him as a ballet dancer, no matter how inappropriate the dress might be for the activity portrayed, with the lean, handsome but somehow shrewish face always in profile, the blond forelock flopping over one eye. I thought him a vain, clever, empty, ambitious man, a sort of lightweight Lord Curzon.

“We were talking about Egypt,” said Michael. “Do you still know anyone there, any Egyptians in particular?”

“Well, yes,” I said, relieved to be able to talk about comparatively public matters. As it happened I did have a regular and knowledgeable correspondent. The Armenian with whom I'd lived in Cairo was now married, with three daughters, to the eldest of whom I had stood godfather, the husband being broadminded enough not simply to accept the situation but to make me his friend. He was a journalist and novelist, politically active—twice, in fact, in prison under various censorship laws. The whole family had stayed with me on a London visit only a few months earlier. It strikes me now that Seddon might possibly have been aware of this. My friend was well enough known as an anti-imperialist of pinkish leanings to have been watched by our security forces. In fact I believe my telephone was tapped for a while following an earlier incident involving him. I assume that Gerry had told Michael about my work in Cairo.

“Do your friends believe that Nasser is anything more than a populist windbag?” said Seddon.

(There is nothing for it. Anyone of my generation will think it merely amazing that literate and intelligent people can have no more than the vaguest notion of the events surrounding the Suez Crisis, but I'm afraid this is so. I will do my best to be brief.

Suez was the British Vietnam, the farce before the tragedy for once, misconceived, inept in execution, deeply shaming, and demonstrating to the world that we were no longer either fit or able to claim any kind of world leadership. The British protégé in Egypt, King Farouk, had been ousted by a group of radical officers, inspired and soon led by Nasser. He established a charismatic hold not only on his own people but on most of the Arab world. The British authorities detested him from the start. The Americans first attempted to buy him with dollars, and when this failed to bully him by withholding them. Nasser refused to be bullied, the dollars were cut off, and Nasser was forced to accept help from the Russians [who, of course, found him no more amenable]. With his modernising projects stalled for want of funds he needed new foci for his revolution, so he started a furious propaganda war against Israel, with military build-ups along the border, and nationalised the Suez Canal company, jointly owned by Britain and France.

The British, French and Israelis contrived a secret scheme under which Israel was to make a pre-emptive strike against Egypt, and Britain and France were to invade, on the pretext of protecting the Canal as an international waterway, not telling the Americans of their plans but assuming that the fait accompli, after a swift and effective military operation, would evoke a few expressions of public disapproval accompanied by private thanks. Of course it didn't work. The military operations, apart from Israel's, were a fiasco; Nasser scuttled ships in the Canal and blocked it for a decade; he remained in power, his charisma in Arab eyes enormously enhanced; the Americans expressed genuine outrage and backed it with monetary threats which would have seriously destabilised the pound; and even before our troops had begun to withdraw the shaming details of our collusion were emerging. The Prime Minister, Anthony Eden, resigned on the grounds of ill health, and Harold Macmillan, who had been a hot-head at the start but as soon as he saw that the thing wasn't going to work contrived to present himself as a moderating influence, took over.

In parallel with all this the Hungarian uprising against hard-line communism and Russian hegemony was taking place, and the Russians were able to use our invasion of Egypt both as cover and excuse for sending in the tanks to crush the dissidents. They would presumably have done this anyway, but the Western powers were in no position to object to their bully-boy tactics.

That is a very crude outline. The conversation in the Yellow Room took place some three months before the nationalisation of the Canal, but several months after an arms deal between Egypt and Czechoslovakia by which Nasser had signalled his refusal to become wholly the creature of the West.)

“It depends what you mean by a windbag,” I said. “He's certainly more than that in Arab eyes.”

“A windbag is one whose threats and promises are without substance,” said Seddon.

“I.e. what will the beggar do, if anything?” said Michael. “Attack Israel?”

“Not if he can help it,” I said.

“Why not?” said Michael. “It would be pretty popular with your average wog-in-the-street, wouldn't it?”

“The idea might be popular. But Nasser is a soldier. He probably has a better idea than most politicians of how the Egyptian army would match up against the Israelis.”

“Are these your own notions?” said Seddon. “Or are they direct from your friends?”

“Notions, hell,” said Michael. “There's the whole bloody FO mentality pregnant in a single word. When was the FO last right about anything, tell me?”

He managed to combine geniality with considerable aggression, but Seddon smiled, unruffled. I had in fact discussed all this with my Armenian's husband during their visit. Though he was by no means a natural Nasserite, and was scornful of the possibilities of Panarabism, he was on the whole sympathetic to Nasser himself, but I had no reason to tell either Seddon or Michael anything at all about what he said or thought. Michael saved me the trouble of prevaricating.

“A revolution's like a bicycle,” he said. “If you don't keep it moving, you fall off.”

“The Aswan Dam will keep him going for a couple of years,” I said. “Provided we've got the sense to give him a bit of slack.”

“Slack?” said Seddon. “He's a pretty slippery customer.”

I was starting to say that so were we, no doubt, when Michael broke in.

“That's all balls,” he said. “We aren't going to give the bugger the slack, because Eden's going to lose his rag with him and try and smash him direct. He'll cook something up with the French, and find an excuse, and wade in. What's more he won't tell the Yanks, and they aren't going to like it. Neither Eisenhower nor Dulles can stand him, I gather. They'll jump at the chance to slap his little wrist and send him blubbing home to Nanny.”

This seemed typical of his style, both the brutal interruption and the coarse forcefulness of his views, which, however, seemed to me sensible and based on good information. And his bullying tone was largely mitigated by his manner of listening, with intelligence and attention, which seemed somehow to license him to cut one short. He and Seddon continued for a while to discuss the question, or rather, two questions: whether the Americans would not be secretly glad of Nasser being brought to heel; and what, if they didn't like it, they could do about it.

Gerry, meanwhile, said nothing at all. He seemed to have gone into a doze over his brandy until, to my relief, he rose, put his almost untouched glass on the table, and stretched. He had thickened out, I saw. He must weigh at least a couple of stone more than he used to, but he still gave that impression of lightness on his feet that I remembered.

“I need some air,” he said. “Come and see what I've been doing in the garden, Paul.”

“I haven't got any clothes.”

“I'll find you some gumboots, and a mac. We're not going through brambles. Thanks for the brandy, Michael.”

We had no need to re-involve ourselves with the other guests as the Gun Room lay immediately below King William's Room. It did, rather surprisingly, contain guns, a couple of 12-bores, a .22 and an air rifle at one end of the huge rack which had once housed the sporting weapons of the previous baron, the best of which had been sold before the war, and the remainder given to the Home Guard. Now the room was a sort of utility room for outdoor activities, containing tennis rackets, croquet sets, old hockey-sticks, and of course cricketing gear, trugs of hand-tools for Lady Vereker's sporadic gardening forays, a shelf of nostrums for horses (I remember Lucy saying there was one labelled “Old Gipsy's Gall-poultice—doesn't work”), and saws, bill-hooks, hatchets and paraffin for the Verekers' main winter activity, bonfires. Lord Vereker's gumboots were the only ones that fitted me. I felt reluctant, but Gerry laughed and told me to put them on. He found me a mackintosh and waterproof hat and we tramped out into the drizzle.

There was little at Blatchards of what most people would consider a garden, no more than a few dreary beds around the house. But out beyond the stable block (prettier, and more sensibly arranged, than the house itself) there was a biggish area of woodland and open spaces, with three small lakes, and paths winding around. Gerry showed me a vista he'd had cut through a wood, and a slope down to one of the lakes where he was clearing out a jungle of old rhododendrons, revetting the bank and replanting with more desirable varieties, I don't remember what—my passion for gardening had not yet struck, and anyway living as I do on chalky soil has let me off having to cope with the whole azalea family, I'm happy to say.

I was really much more interested in Gerry himself. Inside the house he had not made much impression, apart from his brief response to Nancy. Perhaps he had been cramped by Michael's presence. At any rate he now seemed to expand, to move and breathe freely, and to be actively excited, despite the dismal day, by his plans. I had never seen him like this before. He had always seemed to me to think of himself as somehow futureless, to have come from nowhere and to be going nowhere, and so to rely on his extraordinary speed of reaction to take advantage of whatever the instant might hold. Now he was actually talking about both past and future with relish.

“
This
,” he said, waving at the fresh-cut vista, “was actually suggested by Repton. He never did a Red Book for us, I'm sorry to say, because he realised pretty early that Lord Vereker—the second baron—was going to jib at the fees. But a sketch exists, and I've a reasonable idea of what else he might have done. What I'd really like is a cascade, but Suffolk's so bloody flat. My finances are not yet in a state where I can afford to move mountains.”

I had been struck by the “us” for whom Repton hadn't done the Red Book. Now he seemed to be inviting me to enquire further.

“You seem to have progressed beyond the molehill stage,” I said.

“Not enough, not enough. Nan, or rather Dick Felder, takes care of the house and I do the grounds. Between the three of us we get by. I imagine you're aware of why we are unable to marry—it seems to be common knowledge.”

“Harriet told me.”

“I never met Felder. He sounds not a bad chap, but naturally I'd rather not be living on his bounty.”

“I doubt if he notices.”

“Hitherto that has been the case. Have you heard about this molybdenum thing?”

“Is he in that?”

“Apparently his resources are behind it. His current father-in-law, who is the third to hold that office, has got him to back a scheme to corner the market. Felder is so used to thinking of himself as infinitely rich that he can't recognise that there are some things beyond even his resources.”

“It must be illegal, surely.”

“Arguably not, as they've set it up. But according to Michael it's not going to work, and before that happens they're going to try to make it work by shovelling in a lot more money, money that even Felder hasn't got. And then he's going to go broke.”