The Yellow Room Conspiracy (18 page)

“Are there such things as sensible marriages?” she said. “How should I know?”

“You and Gerry are as good as,” I said.

She just shrugged.

“Aren't you happy with him?” I said. “You don't have to tell me. It's none of my business.”

“One doesn't have to be happy,” she said. “Either one is coping with one's life, or one isn't. Most of the marriages I know are like that. Husbands and wives are ways of coping. Some work, some don't. Gerry and I have our ups and downs, but mostly we seem to work.”

“I thought you were besotted with him at first,” I said.

“I suppose so,” she said. “It's difficult to get oneself back into that sort of state of mind. Yes, I was, but then I wasn't. And he never was. The point about Gerry is that he's besotted with this house, and that's what matters to me. He may let me down, but he's not going to let the house down.”

I didn't know what to say. I don't think I've ever heard anyone sound so bleak. Nan lit a cigarette and sat at the top of her step-ladder, smoking and thinking.

“I took a chance with Gerry and I've lost,” she said. “Of course I didn't think it out like that, but that's what it adds up to. On the other hand, who else was there? I mean, no doubt I could have found some bloke I could stand to live with who'd take me on, but this place? Gerry and I have rows, you know. Pretty savage at times. The one thing he's never come up with to fling at me is that it isn't worth hanging on here. He's as crazy about it as we are. He's genuinely longing for the day when he's made enough of a pile to take over from Dick and marry me and start having kids. You realise that if I re-marry, bang goes my alimony? I'm not really supposed to cohabit. Dick's been very good about that, but he'd really mind if I managed a kid with Gerry when he and I couldn't.”

“I didn't know,” I said.

“So it may never happen,” she said. “Not till too late, anyway. I suppose I could leave it to one of yours, or Hattie's, or Janet's. Ben's, even, if she ever takes time off from dancing to have one. I don't think it would work. You've got to have grown up here, to fall in love with the place before you're sensible enough to realise what's wrong with it. Hattie's and Janet's aren't here enough. Timmy will have his hands full with Seddon Hall. What about Rowena? She seems to like coming here.”

“That's because she dotes on Mother,” I said. “I don't think she even notices the house. Anyway, she isn't one of us, if you know what I mean. She comes from a different tribe—Tommy's, I suppose. Tommy's a terrific prig, you know. A really nice, kind prig. I'm really fond of him, so I can say that. Rowena's only four, so you can't tell yet if she's nice or kind, but I've known almost from the day she was born that she was a prig.”

“I'm not sure children are such a good idea,” said Nan. “Hattie seems to enjoy hers, I suppose. Well, all I can do for the moment is soldier on. Lucky I like it, isn't it?”

We talked a bit more, and then she went back to work and I walked up to the stables wondering if I was being fair to Rowena. Actually I was, as it turned out, but I suppose I couldn't have known, really.

If Rowena was four when we had that talk, then it must have been about a year later that the business with Sammy Whitstable and Tommy and all that blew up, but it was still my usual pattern in spite of everything else that seemed to be happening. I drove over with the kids and Nanny, left them with Mother and went down to the house to look for Nan, who'd told me that she was trying to get the outside woodwork along the South Front and the East Wing painted in time for the wedding-party next month. I found her right up at the top of an extension-ladder doing the window of what used to be Janet's bedroom. I'd put the tea-tray down on the iron table by the arbour and gone over to hold the bottom of the ladder, which bounced horribly as she came down, though of course being Nan she'd got it safely lashed. She didn't seem to mind.

“I couldn't do that,” I said. “It makes me sick even looking at you.”

“Don't talk to me about being sick,” she said.

“Oh dear,” I said. “Trouble?”

“They tell me it's Nature's way,” she said. “I must say, I think Nature could have come up with a better way.”

We were just sitting down. I knew at once what she was talking about. I felt myself go white. She must have been watching me, on purpose, to see how I'd take it.

“I'm sorry, Lu,” she said. “I hoped you wouldn't mind. You're the first person I've told, except the doctor. And Gerry, of course.”

I didn't say anything.

“I'm sorry,” she said again. “I thought you'd got over that years ago.”

“Of course I have,” I snapped. “It's … well … I'm sorry too. I can't help it. I don't want it. Only it just comes back and bites me sometimes.”

“Ahab's ghost,” she said.

That made it alright. It was still a ghastly mess, but that was all. I could be sane about it, think about it, do my best to help. I'd better explain. Ahab was a cat from a litter which had been born at the Home Farm. He was almost wild. Father got him to deal with a plague of mice in the Gun Room, where we kept our gumboots. This was when I was fairly small. He lived under an oak chest in the passage outside the Gun Room and rushed out and bit you as you went past, but he really did deal with the mice so Father refused to get rid of him. (Father wore boots, so he was Ahab-proof.) The chest was on the far side of the Gun Room door, so it was alright about the gumboots, but when we wanted to get to the Yellow Room without going right round and up and back down the secret stair we had to climb on to a bench on one side of the chest, walk across the chest while Ahab lurked growling underneath and off on to the stairs beyond. Long after Ahab died (he picked a fight with a visiting Alsatian, and lost) we still used to do this. It was because of Ahab's ghost, we told people.

A ghost that still bit you sometimes. It was exactly right. And only one of us would have any idea what she was talking about. I sometimes think, still, that family is the only thing that really matters. Even when you're quarrelling with them they mean things nobody else can mean. Anyway it was a very important moment. It changed things, changed the way I thought and felt about things, about Gerry. I think I realised, even then, that the ghost was never going to bite me again.

“Just like that,” I said. “I'm sorry.”

“Forget it,” she said.

I poured the tea and Nan lit a cigarette and we didn't say anything for a bit. It was a blissful morning, the last dew just going, pigeons, the sound of the mower from Long Lawn. After a while I said, “I've got something to tell you. I'm afraid you aren't going to like it, especially after what you've just told me, but I think I've got to.”

She just nodded, so I started at the beginning and told her everything—everything, I mean, except about it being Teddy Voss-Thompson who'd told Paul—the dinner party Sammy Whitstable had come to, and Paul's talks with Gerry and the Mudge-woman, and the opera tickets, and the old people being frightened out of their homes, and so on. Nan didn't interrupt, but chain-smoked, lighting new cigarettes from the butts of the old ones. After a bit I noticed her other hand was pressed across her stomach as if she was trying to hold the baby in place. I stopped.

“Go on,” she said. “I think it's alright.”

So I finished. She sat and thought for a bit.

“Well, I suppose you had to tell me,” she said. “I've heard better news. Bloody Michael. You were keen on him once, weren't you? Gerry told me.”

I was appalled. I think I've said my affair with Michael is one of the things I'm truly ashamed of, and for him to go telling his crony about it, and the crony to tell my own sister … Just thinking about it now, after all these years, it still makes my blood boil.

“Michael's an absolute bastard,” was all I could say.

“He's worse than that,” said Nan. “He's some kind of monster. He's almost done for Gerry—I've been trying to get him to see it for years. He knows. That's the dreadful thing. He knows. He's always said he's so deep in that he can't get out yet without losing everything he's made. Next year, he's kept saying, or the year after. In the end I lost patience. The day after Father's funeral I told him it's this year or not at all. Of course I didn't know then that Dick was going to go broke, but at least it meant we could get married.”

“And have a baby,” I said.

“That's the carrot,” she said. “It wasn't my idea. He's always wanted one. Not just one, either. He wants to fill the house with a family, his family, but like we used to be. Funny, isn't it?”

She didn't make it sound funny.

“There's a stick as well as a carrot, I suppose,” I said.

“There better had be,” she said. “And by God if this means he's still letting Michael set him up to do all the dirty work …”

“Gerry told Paul he didn't want to involve Michael,” I said.

“I don't believe it,” she said. “Gerry wouldn't have had a clue what sort of a girl would work the oracle. Take it from me. He's still a total innocent about what goes on inside other people's heads. But Michael would have known exactly which switches to press …”

She sat still, stroking the round of her stomach. You couldn't see any kind of a bulge yet, but from the way her hand moved I knew it was there.

“It's funny,” she said. “You know, I want this baby. I want it for itself. I started off quite cold-bloodedly, jumping the gun, because I agreed we wouldn't stop at just one, and there isn't that much time. But now it's actually happening there's a great soft part of me I never knew was there, and all it wants is for the kid to have a life worth living. So for a start I'm not going to get rid of the kid; and that means if poss I'm not going to get rid of Gerry either. I know he's been behaving like a total shit, but he isn't. Not like Michael. Michael's a shit through and through, and he's taken Gerry with him into the shit-heap, but I'm bloody well going to get him back.”

I stared at her. I'd seen her once before with that look, when she still had the Ferrari and a blond brute in a Healey cut in on her and waved his hand as he went past and she sat on his tail for fifteen miles while he tried to get away and he couldn't.

“You can't always make people do things,” I said.

“I've got the stick, remember,” she said. “The next thing is to make him see I'm ready to use it. I must get hold of some really sharp lawyer, not old Wellow, he's useless …”

She sat there for a bit, brooding.

“What about Ben?” I said.

“I'll write to her,” she said, hardly thinking about it. “Ah well, back to work. I've got a paint-brush to rescue. Thanks for telling me, Lu. Don't do anything for the moment, and don't let Paul worry Gerry. I'll deal with him.”

She jumped up and strode off to the ladder. I watched her climb it, feeling sick for her again as it bowed under her weight. Then I put the tea-tray together and carried it in and washed up and went back up to the stables.

I found Mother by the mounting-block, crouched under the pony with Rowena, explaining how and why colts were gelded. Nanny's face was bright scarlet. This was pretty well all the sex-education we'd had, apart from our own Nanny telling us that babies appeared from nowhere under gooseberry bushes and a soppy picture in a book of poems showing the fairies bringing them. A week before and I'd really have screeched at her. Now I just told her to stop talking nonsense, gathered the children up and took them home.

PAUL IX

July/August 1956

A
ll Lucy told me about her talk with Nancy was that it had taken place, that Nancy was now in charge and would deal with Gerry, and the affair was no longer any business of ours. I felt it was, but in my case only marginally, and besides I was now at the critical stage of preparing my company for public flotation, which involved a series of meetings where I had to be personally present, decisions only I could take, and so on. I was glad of the excuse to take no further steps of my own. I did not ring Mrs Mudge again.

Seddon was often out of the country so Lucy had more free time than usual, but mastering the paperwork for the flotation often kept me at my desk till the small hours, so we still didn't manage more than the occasional evening together, and one night. By unspoken consent we chose not to spoil these occasions by worrying over Vereker affairs. Just before another such meeting I returned to my flat and picked up the post from my doormat. (I had left that morning well before it was delivered, to allow me to get home at a reasonable hour.) It included a heavy white envelope with a Bury St Edmunds postmark, which I opened and found an engraved invitation to a party at Blatchards to celebrate the marriages of the Honourable Nancy Felder to Mr Gerald Grantworth and the Honourable Belinda Vereker to Mr Michael Allwegg. “Luncheon, cricket, dinner, dancing,” it said. Folded inside was a printed score-card for the match, Blatchards v. Rest of World, with the names of the players on both sides and my own as scorer. I was astonished to see Seddon listed as playing for Blatchards, along with Gerry, Bobo Smith and Michael Allwegg. There was also a note in Nancy's emphatic, slanting hand: “Counting on you. Keeping a room. Please come. For old time's sake!” That was the only suggestion of anything going on beneath the surface appearance of privileged jollification. I felt, as I say, astounded. The date was already pencilled into my diary, but I had naturally assumed that it was now all off. At this point I heard Lucy's key in the door and went out into the hallway to greet her, still holding the card.

She closed the door, turned, faced me and said, “Ben and Michael were married on Saturday. In Paris.”

“Good God!” I said.

“Nan rang and told me. She's just sent out … oh, you've had yours.”

“I thought it was off already. It must be now.”

“No. And she says we've all got to be there. She's going ahead with marrying Gerry. She's got to. She's having a baby.”

“What!”

“What I said. We've got to be there. We've got to express solidarity.”

“Ben didn't show much.”

“All the more reason why the rest of us should.”

“I can think of no more uncomfortable …”

“It's only a week-end, for God's sake! Please, Paul. It's important. She needs everyone there to back her up.”

“One of your sisters has just married a man whom we have good reason to believe is criminally untrustworthy, and you are suggesting we should now support another sister in making the same mistake.”

“All I know is Nan says it's going to be all right. She knows what she's doing, Paul.”

“I will come if you insist.”

“No. I want you to come, but I don't want to make you come. We don't do that to each other.”

At this point our meal, which I had ordered from a local Italian restaurant, arrived. We ate it largely in silence, angry with ourselves and each other, until Lucy said, “Do you want Nan to ask you herself?”

“She has already,” I said. “I think my problem is that I have a feeling of being used. Gerry has been using me, and now Nancy seems to want to do the same. I don't object to being used, but I need to know how and why.”

“I'll get Nan to talk to you,” she said. “Is it all right if I give her your office number?”

“Much more chance of finding me there,” I said. “I suppose that's best.”

After that things eased, and we spent a quiet domestic evening, mostly watching TV. She had her period, which she tended to be squeamish about, so we didn't go to bed. As I kissed her goodnight in the hallway before driving her back to Eaton Square I realised with a shock how tense her body still was.

“What is it, darling?” I said. “Is there something you haven't told me?”

“Only that I'm afraid,” she said.

Nancy telephoned next day, but wrong-footed me as I was beginning to excuse myself for my apparent over-sensitivity when she said, “In a minute, but there's something else first. I want you to do me a favour. You're not going to like it, but it's important.”

“I'll do my best.”

“Lucy told you about Ben and Michael getting married?”

“Yes.”

“I'm pretty mad about it, but it's done now. Still, it's rather spoilt the original idea of our all four going off and getting married on the morning of the fifteenth, and then coming back for luncheon and the cricket match and the party after. So I've talked it over with Gerry and we've decided to clear the decks by getting married the week before. That'll make the fifteenth less of a thing, if you know what I mean. Just a cricket match and a party. Do you understand?”

“If you feel unable to cancel it completely …”

“No, that won't do. I'll explain in a minute. But listen. Gerry's got to have a best man, and I'm not going to let him have Michael, which was the original idea. They were each going to be each other's. I know you're not too pleased with Gerry at the moment. Nor, if I may say so, am I. But … well, when he asks you, will you please say yes? Are you still there?”

“Yes.”

“And wondering how you can get out of it?”

“To some extent.”

“Please don't. This is what I mean about it being important. I've got to make him understand that if he breaks up with Michael he's got friends who'll stand by him. Do you understand? I know it's asking a lot, but …”

“Have you fixed a date?”

“Three o'clock on the sixth or seventh, at Bury Registry Office. I'd got all the paperwork done for the fifteenth, but they're letting me shift.”

I looked at my diary. Both dates were hideous. I might have excused myself on those grounds alone.

“Shall we make it the sixth?” I said.

“You're a saint. Try and sound surprised when he asks you. Are you there?”

“If you keep springing things on me you must expect these silences. Do I have to sound pleased?”

“What do you mean?”

“Lucy talked to you about my recent dealings with Gerry, I think. Have you in your turn told him? That's to say, how much does he know of what I know and suspect?”

“None of that. All I've said is that he's got to get himself away from Michael. I'm still working on him, but it's going to happen. Or else.”

“Or else what?”

“Nothing. It's just a way of talking.”

“All right. About Michael—you wrote to Ben. How much did you tell her? Did you mention me, for instance?”

“No. Absolutely not. I just said I'd learnt some things and I couldn't tell her who'd told me.”

“What was her response?”

“A telegram telling me to mind my own asterisk business. Then she rushed off and married Michael.”

“Was that her idea or his?”

“No idea. I've got to go in a mo, but listen. Lu says you're iffy about the fifteenth. Please, please will you come?”

“For the same reasons that you want me to be Gerry's best man?”

“Well … yes, roughly. Please.”

“I'll be there. See you on the sixth. Good luck with everything.”

The wedding was functional, not to say bleak. Harriet was Nancy's witness, and Bobo had come too, but I had no time to talk to anyone as I'd been caught in traffic on the way down and was almost late. Gerry seemed subdued, but pleased to see me in an uncomfortable, oddly adolescent fashion, and tried to persuade me to return with them to Blatchards, but I said, truthfully, that I had to get back to London for my postponed meeting. The only other talk I had was with Bobo as we stood side by side in the public urinals. I'd been seeing him fairly frequently as his firm had been handling aspects of my flotation, but had not of course said anything about the imbroglio with Gerry, Lucy and Seddon.

“Surprised to see you here,” he said. “I'd have thought you had your hands full in London.”

“Full enough,” I said.

“How come a wily old bird like you got himself involved in this balls-aching potmess.”

I gathered he must know something about it after all. Presumably Nancy had talked to Harriet who had passed it on, but how much she'd said I had no idea.

“I can't say I'm happy about it,” I said cautiously.

“It's that shit Allwegg at the bottom of it all,” he said. “And I gather he's going to have the neck to show up at this match. I'll have trouble not shoving his ugly mug in for him.”

“You're coming?”

“I wanted to cry off—it's going to be a bloody ghastly wake by the look of it—but Harriet read me the riot act. Thank God I don't have a family—the things you find yourself doing for each other. Gerry been on to you yet?”

“He asked me to be his best man, as you saw.”

Bobo grunted dismissively—it hadn't been that he meant—but at that point a drunk came and stood in the next stall, making retching noises as he pissed. We moved out, but found Gerry waiting to say good-bye to me, preventing further questions. I drove to London very depressed.

When I saw Lucy later that week she asked me how the wedding had gone and I told her briefly, but she herself had heard no more from Blatchards and didn't want to talk about it further. I was not due to see her at all in the week before the match, as she was planning to be at Seddon Hall, and going over most days to help with the arrangements.

Having no wish to endure a minute more of the week-end than could be helped I'd said I would drive down on Saturday morning, in time for the start of the match, but on the Thursday Gerry telephoned and asked me to come on the Friday evening. He needed my advice, he said. London was sweltering, with that still, choking, late-summer heat which feels as if it must relieve itself in thunder in the next few hours, and then doesn't. The road was up, with pneumatic drills, outside my office. The newspapers, with nothing else to report, were full of stories of eight-mile jams on the roads to the coast (those were the days when mass-market holidays meant North-Sea Butlins, not Mallorca or Corfu), with Saturday mornings far the worst. I had only routine work to catch up on. Even with those excuses I think I might have refused, but though I thought Gerry's behaviour almost unforgivably bad, having acceded to Nancy's plea to help her in her attempt to remove him from Michael's influence—and though “redeem” is much too strong a word there did seem to be some moral principle involved—I now seemed to myself committed to doing all I could. I agreed, and left after lunch on Friday.

The traffic was still atrocious, so it was late afternoon as I wound along the Blatchards drive with the house, vague-seen through the heat-haze, coming and going between the clumps of trees. Despite the full-leaved branches and the difference of season and my driving a comfortable car rather than tramping in army boots, the effect was extraordinarily similar to that December afternoon, fifteen years earlier, when I had walked out from the camp with Gerry and first met Lucy. I had of course come this way many times since then, but never, I think, with the same painful nostalgia. I intend the epithet. The sensation was physical, a clutching tension in my upper chest, and hurt sufficiently for me to slow down, wondering whether this could be a premonition of heart-attack.

My car was a new Rover, with soft suspension and a quiet-running engine. At that drifting speed it made little noise, so the group on East Lawn didn't notice my arrival. So strongly, and at the same time so healingly, did they embody the ache of irrecoverable time which I had been feeling that I stopped to watch. I was in shade, under the down-sweeping branches of a blue cedar. Four of the sisters were out in the heavy sunlight practising for tomorrow's match. The contrast emphasised the time-gap. I felt myself to be looking out of the unsatisfactory present into the imagined past—a past in which their relationship to each other and to the house they lived in, unencumbered with suitors or husbands or children or business affairs, had been all that mattered in the world. There was no place for me in that world. Softly I opened the door, climbed out, and stood to watch.

They had a net up. Lucy and Harriet were wearing whites, Ben dark slacks and a yellow Aertex shirt, and Janet a grey skirt and white blouse. Lucy, properly padded and gloved, was batting, while the others bowled to her in turn. In the distance, on the far side of the porte-cochère, I saw Mr Chad on a ladder, painting the last of the windows. (Lucy had told me about Nancy's determination to get the work done before the match. It looked as if they'd just make it.)

Harriet was the least athletic of the sisters, a stolid bat and not much of a bowler. Janet was physically gifted, though erratic, and liable to get herself out with some over-ambitious shot before she was really set. She batted right-handed but bowled left, a decent medium pace with a tendency for the odd ball to cut away and take the edge. If she'd been able to control this she might have posed problems for goodish batsmen. Ben, I believe, given a boy's strength and opportunities, would have made the first XI of any public school as a bowler, but was a careless and irresponsible bat. Lucy was a fair bat, though her unthinking grace of movement perhaps made her look more proficient than she actually was.

They were taking their net seriously. I watched Lucy drive a ball from Harriet, play forward to one from Janet, and miss an attempted cut when Ben whipped one down off a full run. Something was said, teasing by the tone of it, and that must have put Lucy on her mettle, because she took a pace down the pitch for Harriet's next and hit it on the half volley with a full swing of the bat. The ball sailed away over the meaningless group of cherry trees that partly obscured that end of the facade, out of my sight behind the cedar-branches. Lucy, who had ended her stroke with the bat theatrically aloft, dropped it and put both hands over her mouth. The others turned and stood watching. There was a clash and tinkle of glass and they all burst into laughter.