The Yellow Room Conspiracy (20 page)

“Lucy?” I said.

“I didn't at first realise it, but that is what the business with the Whitstable girl has been about,” he said.

“But why Lucy?”

He stopped and looked at me. The midges haloed his large face. He was sweating lightly.

“You didn't know?” he said.

The next I remember was that I was sitting in the driving-seat of an unfamiliar car and looking in vain at the dashboard for somewhere to insert the ignition key. In front of me was a blank stone wall. Somebody was tapping at the window. It was Lady Vereker. The dream-like moment endured another few seconds, nonsensically ominous, and then the real world flooded back. I had had some kind of black-out. I could clearly remember Gerry and the swarming midges, but nothing after that. I was now in my own mind on my way to London, escaping, running desperately away, but had somehow wandered up to the stables and climbed into Lady Vereker's car which she garaged in the coach-house when she was not using it for indoor riding. I seemed to have locked the door, but had no trouble finding the catch and opening it. I climbed out.

Like many apparently scatty and irresponsible people Lady Vereker was rather good in a crisis. She didn't bother me with questions but led me into her living room, shooed several affronted dogs off the sofa and shut them out, made me lie down, and telephoned Nancy. She then made me a cup of weak, sweet tea, which I was drinking by the time Harriet and Bobo arrived to take me back to the house. By then I had physically pretty well recovered, and my main thought was still to find my own car and leave.

“What happened?” said Harriet. “Do you know?”

“No. I was talking with Gerry by the lake, and I don't remember anything after that till I was sitting in your mother's car. Don't worry. I'm all right now. I'll just pack up and go.”

“You'll what?” said Bobo.

“I've got to go back to London.”

“Bloody nonsense,” said Bobo. “You're not fit to drive, for a start. What happens if you have another black-out on the road?”

“We'd much better put you to bed and get Dr Jericho out to have a look at you,” said Harriet.

“It's very …”

“Balls,” said Bobo. “You can kill yourself and that's your look-out, but if you kill some other poor sod in the accident, then we'll be to blame for letting you go. You can give me your car-key, and any more of this bullshit and I'm going to lock you in and sleep on a mattress outside your door, and you won't hear the last of that for a while.”

They were perfectly right. I remembered the coronary-like sensation I had experienced on arrival. Though I might now feel I was up to the drive it would be irresponsible of me to attempt it. I thought of asking for someone to drive me in to Bury to catch a train, but decided that I'd prefer not to face the inevitable refusal.

Just before the stable drive turned on to the circuit round East Lawn I paused. I'd have liked to ask Harriet alone, but there was no help.

“Look,” I said, “I'm sorry, but I don't want to meet Gerry.”

“He's probably still with Nan in the Yellow Room,” said Harriet. “We'll take you up the back stairs.”

So we went round by the servants” entrance and climbed the worn steep flights. I went obediently to bed. The doctor came, a rubicund, short, grinning man who told me he could find nothing wrong. He said I had been overworking, and must rest, and forbade me to drive until I had been thoroughly examined by my own doctor. Supper was brought by a maid, but I ate very little. I didn't feel like reading, so I lay in the darkening room with the windows wide and the curtains open, trying not to think and watching the blinks of sheet lightning, eerily thunderless, flickering behind the cloud-mass. At last, but without any sense of release, it started to rain.

There was a tap at my door. I assumed it was the maid come for the tray, but when I called out Lucy slid in and came to the bedside. She tried to take my hand but I drew it away. She seemed to understand the gesture almost at once.

“Gerry told you about me and Michael,” she said.

“Yes.”

She turned and sat on the edge of the bed, staring blankly at the window. The lightning glimmered across her face.

“I should have told you myself,” she whispered. “Long ago. Long ago.”

LUCY IX

August 1956

I
haven't much to say here, because Paul's put most of it in. I think I really want to talk about Ben. The obvious question is why on earth did she agree to marry Michael, but it isn't obvious to me. Or rather, it isn't much of a question because it's the answer that's obvious. Michael could be extremely attractive, especially to risk-takers like Ben and me (he'd never have got anywhere with Harriet, for instance). He seemed dangerous, but worth it. Suppose he'd wanted to marry me, instead of just living with me for a bit, I'm sure he'd have gone about it differently and I think very likely I'd have said yes. But of course that wouldn't have stopped him being perfectly foul afterwards. I don't think he'd started being foul to Ben yet, apart from the odd little tweak and pinch just to keep her guessing, but he was going to be one day. One day he was going to tell her about me, I'm sure, but he was still saving that up, savouring it.

So why did he marry her? Well, she was glamorous and interesting, for a start; the right sort of wife for someone like him to show around. And she was a challenge. The big thing in her life was dancing, and he could have the fun of showing her who was boss by not letting her. And then of course she was a way of getting at me.

Gerry seems to have told Paul a lot of lies by the lake—no, not lies, but half-lies, all twisted and with things left out—but I'm sure he was right about one thing. Michael never forgave anybody. He was never going to forgive me. He might wait twenty years, but in the end he was going to see to it that he hurt me really badly, and the best way to do that was to hurt my family, to split us up and make us enemies of each other. And I think without us knowing it that was already starting to happen and we knew we had to stop it, and that was why we all wanted to come together that week-end and make ourselves whole again.

I know this doesn't make sense when you think that with another part of our minds we—Nan and Harriet and me, that is—were trying to get Gerry to split up with Michael, which looked like as good a way as any of making Ben into an enemy, but there it is. People are like that. You want two opposite things at the same time, with different parts of you, so you think about one of them at a time and blank the other one out, and hope. Of course it doesn't work, but you never learn.

Anyway, I'm sure Ben felt like that. She was in terrific form, alive and funny and friendly and full of Paris gossip but so obviously happy to be home and ready to make things up with Nan after letting her down by getting married in a rush, and not saying anything about it being really Nan's fault because of the letter she'd written. I can remember that Friday afternoon net as if it was yesterday, and Paul's right, it really did feel as if we'd gone back at least ten years to when things were far, far easier and anything was possible and we weren't trapped and hedged in by all the things we'd done and mistakes we'd made between. And that was a terrific shot. I can shut my eyes now and feel the swing of the bat, part of me, weightless as my own arms, and the sweetness of its smash into the ball at exactly the right moment to a millionth of a second, and the ball sailing away, and the glass breaking and Mr Chad saying exactly the same thing he always used to about us growing up …

Oh dear, I'd like to stay talking about that for ever, but I'd better get on. I was back at Seddon Hall and dressing for dinner, nearly finished, when my house telephone rang and it was Rodrigo, the butler, saying there was an urgent message for me to call home. I did. Harriet answered and told me that Paul had had some kind of a stroke or heart-attack while he was talking to Gerry by the lake, only according to Gerry it wasn't like that because he hadn't fallen down or anything, he'd just rushed away and for some reason Gerry hadn't followed to see he was alright and the next thing anyone knew he was in Mother's car trying to drive himself to London and the doctor was coming and they thought I'd better know at once. I said I'd ring back and went through to tell Tommy. (Even when we used to sleep together we'd always had officially separate bedrooms and bathrooms and dressing-rooms with a little breakfast-room between them, though we practically never had breakfast there—by the way I can't remember if I said when I was talking about the reasons for not breaking up completely with Tommy that one of them was the sheer luxury of being married to a terrifically rich, kind man.)

Tommy was brushing his forelock into the exact shape that he thought suited his profile. He didn't stop while I told him.

“You'd better go over,” he said at once.

“Oh, but …” I began, of course thinking about the dinner table where the numbers had worked out right for once without our having to do anything special about it.

“Even I have some sense of priorities,” he said. “Take a bag in case you want to stay the night.”

He really was a lovely man, in his weird way. I put my arms round him and pecked his cheek, taking care not to muss his hair.

“An illness in the family should cover it,” he said.

So I drove over, feeling very odd and churned up, but that may have been partly the weather because it was an extraordinary evening, tense as a drum, with a great black lid of cloud sitting straight overhead as if somebody was just getting ready to clamp it down. I could see almost all the way round the edges, a thin strip of clear sky above the horizon, silvery and still, except where the sun had gone down like a furnace in the west. And I thought something must be wrong with my eyes because of the way the light kept changing until I worked out that it was lightning, overhead, not bolts flashing down to earth, but sheeting to and fro out of sight above the car. By the time I reached Blatchards the rain was sluicing down.

When I got home I let myself in. I could hear a clatter and chatter from along the West Corridor so I knew they were still having supper, but I went up to Miss Bolton's Room and tapped on the door. He says he called out, but I didn't hear him. I just crept in. He was lying on his back with his arms outside the blankets and his head propped up. It was pretty dark and I couldn't see his face properly till I got nearer. Then I saw how gruesome he looked. That afternoon when I'd met him on the lawn he'd just looked jolly tired, but I knew how hard he'd been working so I wasn't surprised, but now he looked like death, with his cheeks sunk in and his eyes large and strange. I tried to take his hand but he wouldn't let me. I didn't have to guess—I knew. Gerry had told Nan, so he'd tell Paul. I couldn't imagine why, but I was certain.

Of course Paul had always known he and Tommy weren't the only men I'd ever gone to bed with, but we'd never talked much about any of the others. Sometimes in ordinary conversation something might come up, like a place I'd visited because I'd spent a holiday there with one of them, or something, and I couldn't make sense of what I wanted to say without including that I'd been there with someone and it was pretty obviously a man, but I was always as vague as possible about it because he really didn't want to know, he didn't want to make the picture in his mind, his Lucy, the girl who'd shown him how to collect the hen's eggs, lying on the brass-knobbed bed with the sunlight through the shutters making bars across her naked body, and a man—not just a vague shape but a particular man with a face you could recognise, fingers as solid as his own, leaning down over her. Still, I should have told him. It was at least half my fault.

I took his hand again and this time he let me hold it, but he closed his eyes and when I tried to say something he shook his head. I was still like that when Harriet came up for the tray. I went out into the passage with her.

“Is anyone sleeping in my room?” I said. “I've brought a bag.”

“No, you'll be alright there,” she said.

“What did the doctor say?” I asked.

“He's been overworking and he's got to rest,” she said.

“Fat chance,” I said.

“I think he and Gerry must have had some kind of a row by the lake,” she said. “That's why Gerry didn't stay with him. In fact I think Gerry probably asked him for money, and that was what the row was about. Gerry tried to touch Bobo, you know, and not just for a fiver either, just before he married Nan. You can imagine what Bobo said about that. Supper's been dire. The reason it was me called you was that Nan and Gerry were having a set-to in the Yellow Room, so they've both been less than the life and soul, and I'd no idea what was going on and couldn't stop worrying about Paul, and Bobo never wanted to be here in the first place and neither did Teddy, I gather, and all the while Janet and Ben were carrying on as if all was sunshine and laughter and not noticing anything wrong, and in the middle of it all Michael came in soaked to the skin—his taxi had broken down and he'd walked the rest of the way—but still behaving as if he was Louis XIV making a grand entrance at a court ball.”

“Where is he now?” I said. I couldn't bear the idea of meeting anyone, especially him.

“He piled himself a mountain of cold chicken and Gerry took him up to the Yellow Room,” she said.

“I don't want to come down,” I said.

“Tell Nan I'll keep an eye on Paul. Just give me that tray.”

I went to my room and finished Paul's supper, which he'd hardly touched. Then I crept along to his room and asked if he wanted anything but he just shook his head and when I kissed him good night he didn't stir, so I went away feeling utterly wretched. Nan was waiting for me, looking pretty washed-out.

“He doesn't want anything,” I said. “What's happening with Michael? I suppose you can't throw him out of the house for me?”

She managed to smile and shook her head.

“Not the moment,” she said. “I think it may be alright. I was listening behind the secret door, but I only heard bits.”

“Do you think they knew you were there?” I said.

She shrugged.

“I bet Michael did,” I said. “He's a nightmare like that.”

“I don't think it matters,” she said. “Gerry started, and he must have been saying what we'd agreed, because Michael broke in with his mouth full and said, “You'll get twelve years, at least,” and Gerry said, “Five, and about three for you, and Nan will stand by me, what's more.” We'd talked about that, you see. The whole point was to make Michael understand that Gerry wasn't afraid of going to prison if the worst came to the worst. After that Gerry did most of the talking, but I couldn't hear what he said. Michael yelled at him several times, telling him he was a total idiot, risking everything they'd worked for, but Gerry stuck to his guns. Then Michael said, “Let's have a drink. I've got to think about this.” He always brings a bottle. He says our brandy's not fit for cooking. Gerry said no –I'd told him he must, till it was over. Then Michael said, “Alright, let's look at some figures.” Then there was nothing for a bit, and then Michael said, “This is a bloody stupid notion and it won't work and you'll finish up in the shit, and you've let me down badly, but you can go to hell your own way provided you don't take me with you. I'll sort the details out Monday morning. Now I'm going to bed, and I'm going to have a much better time rogering young Ben than you've ever had with that bitch of yours.”

“I told you he knew you were there,” I said.

“It doesn't matter,” she said. “As a matter of fact Gerry and I have pretty good times when we're on speaking terms.”

“What did Gerry say?” I said.

“I don't know. He locked himself in,” she said.

“Oh,” I said.

“It's alright,” she said. “He does that. He'll have a couple of brandies and pass out, but he'll wake up in the small hours and come to bed. He'll tell me what happened in the morning.”

I still wasn't happy about it, and I don't think she was either.

“Well, good luck,” I said. “But watch out for Michael. He's totally ruthless.”

“So am I,” she said.

When she'd gone I went to bed and read till getting on midnight and then went and looked in on Paul. His bed was empty and his clothes gone from the chair. I was rushing off to look for him but it was getting chilly with the rain after the heat-wave so I went to my room for a coat to put over my nighty and I was just coming out when I heard the fifth stair creak the way it always did, so I lurked behind my door and saw Paul come creeping past fully dressed, with his shoes in his hand. I tip-toed along to check but I heard the key turn in his lock so I went back to bed and tossed and turned and listened to the rain sheeting down, and prayed that Michael had got wet enough to catch pneumonia and die. Just as it was getting light I fell asleep, deep, deep, like a drowned man, and what felt like an instant later I was woken by the fire alarm.