The Yellow Room Conspiracy (3 page)

I regarded Lord's as a bore. Whatever interest the cricket might have had was obscured by the social event. I can no more than have glanced at the Vereker party. They belonged to a world in which I had no prospect of moving, nor, then, any wish to.

The war swept that world into abeyance. Unlike most of my Eton contemporaries, who were concerned to get themselves into congenial regiments, I took no special steps and let myself be hoovered up in the general mêlée of conscription. Then there was a bureaucratic hitch, which resulted in my presenting myself at a camp at Bury St Edmunds as instructed in my call-up notice, only to be told that as far as the camp was concerned I didn't exist, and I must go home and wait for my position to be clarified. This took some weeks, with the result that I did my basic training not with the main flood of public-school leavers but with a far more heterogeneous bunch. An odd thing happened here. Having been picked on in my early days at Eton for being a Jew, I was now picked on for being an Etonian. The corporal in charge of my platoon, a sly, lively Welshman, seemed fascinated by my education. He was always bringing it up.

“And where were you at school, lad?”

“Eton, sir.”

“And they didn't teach you to wash your neck of a morning, then? You're a dirty soldier, aren't you, lad?”

“Yes, sir.”

I didn't mind. I made friends, including the corporal before long. Having been in the Eton OTC I could drill. I kept myself neat and obeyed orders, though it was clear that I was never going to be much of a fighting soldier, being physically inept and a hopeless shot. On the other hand I turned out to have a natural grasp of the needs and habits of military bureaucracy, and was soon able to work it to my advantage and to advise my friends on how to do so.

Basic Camp lasted only six weeks. Its function, apart from simple training in drill and weapons, was to assess us for posting on to whatever unit we were thought suitable for. The system could be crazily haphazard, but worked for me. My mother was Viennese and I had been brought up bilingual, adding fair French by staying with families during two summer holidays. I was not bothered about getting a commission. My object was to get into Intelligence, where I thought I might be most useful. Many weird and incompatible Intelligence set-ups proliferated as the military machine expanded, and in the nature of things suitable officer-quality staff was more available than other ranks. The officer who assessed me at the camp had a memo on his desk asking him to look out for men with almost exactly my qualifications.

“Good God!” he cried. “We have a round peg here, and a hole to match! I think we're going to win this bloody war after all!”

So I was booked for a week's Christmas leave, then to join the Signals for a wireless course near Salisbury, where I would be interviewed by someone from the organisation which had sent the memo, and if that went well move on to a secret location. Eight days before I was due to finish at Bury I spotted Gerry in the NAAFI, alone in a corner, reading. Delighted, I went over to say hello, and when he looked up he seemed as pleased as I felt. I could see from the stiffness of his khaki that it had been issued only in the last few days. The book was Demosthenes” Philippics in Greek. No crib.

“What on earth are you doing here?” I said. “I'd have thought you'd be in France by now.”

“I may very well be. What you see, Paul, is as far as I can make out a phantasm, the wrong half of a doppelganger. If I vanish of a sudden it will mean that my true self has stood in the way of a bullet somewhere in No Man's Land. Or possibly been shot for a deserter, in the attempt to unite himself with me. Has the War Office a Surrealist Department? When I leave this place will I be sent to smother the German defences with giant melted watches with ants inside them?”

“I didn't exist for a few weeks,” I said. “Then they conjured me back into being. I know I'm real. I have pay-books to prove it.”

“Ah, but I have two sets of pay-books, two numbers, two existences. There is actually pay accumulating for me somewhere so that it can formally be taken away from me after my court martial. When I collect my pay on my other pay-book they tell me that I shall have to sign a document admitting that if I turn out to be my other self I shall not have been entitled to it.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously. There are documents to prove that I was called up, trained, posted and shipped to France. Only at that point does someone seem to have noticed that I wasn't there. The first I knew of it was when two Military Policemen showed up at home and wanted to arrest me as a deserter. I was in my bath. My aunt charmed them with Marmite sandwiches, but that didn't stop them from taking me off to the glasshouse. In the end I was able to persuade someone that I had never left home and had simply been hanging around waiting to be told what to do. Now I am here. But my other self refuses to go out of existence. What are your plans for this Sunday?”

“Nothing special.”

“Care to walk over to Blatchards with me?”

“Blatchards?”

“The Vereker girls. You haven't run across any of them? How refreshing. Nancy told me to bring anyone I liked. No? I promise you, their reputation belies them. Or they it.”

I wasn't, I believe, even curious to meet the Vereker girls. On the other hand I was confident of my ability to look after myself socially. Sunday afternoons were a desert. We were let out of camp for a few hours, but looking back it is astounding how little a town the size of Bury had to offer by way of entertainment when it chose to shut down.

“It's about three miles,” said Gerry.

“All right. Thanks.”

I don't wish to give the impression that Blatchards was any kind of Brideshead, or—a mistake occasionally made in the memoirs of writers who should have known better—that the Verekers were at all similar in attitude and style to the Mitfords. To take the house first. We walked out on a dull December afternoon, just short of rain, and so still that the last few leaves seemed likely to hang for ever in the listless air. Suffolk is a closed, rolling county, without wide views inland, and with neither heights nor levels. We came to a small village, beyond whose church a weedy drive began between nondescript Georgian lodges. As we trudged through parkland the house began to emerge, but as a rectangular dark shape part-screened by clumps of trees so that it was never fully in view until we were almost on the turning-circle of gravel before the East Front, with its out-of-scale porte-cochère. It was a large house, of course, by my standards, though moderate by those of its time, around the end of the eighteenth century. I saw at once that it was nothing special. It was not only the porte-cochère which made it look as though the first Lord Vereker had simply instructed a local builder to build him a house of a certain size and left the rest to him: “Rooms? Oh, around fifty should do the trick. Look like? How the devil can I know what it should look like until I see the demmed thing? Modern, mind you, but none of these Gothick frills. Oh, get it out of a book. Lady Vereker? What the devil … oh, she'd better have a boudoir or a parlour or something, if you can get her to make up her mind. Now, about the stables …”

“Not much to look at,” said Gerry. “And it's worse inside. There isn't a picture you couldn't buy in a junk shop for twenty quid. The curse of the Verekers, passed from generation to generation, has been a uniquely boring taste. Not even positively bad, no quaint excesses of vulgarity, just the most absolutely mediocre of which their period was capable.”

“Are they like that themselves?”

“Far from it. Not the girls, at least. There is marked sexual dimorphism, as in birds, only the other way round, the males drab and retiring, the females decidedly striking.”

We were still a few paces from the door when it opened and a girl backed out, wearing Wellingtons and riding-breeches. Glossy dark-brown hair, rippling at the ends into crinkles, flowed down her shoulders over a dark green jersey with leather patches on the shoulders and a hole in one elbow. She turned, stared at Gerry for a moment with her mouth half open, took me in and laughed.

“A whole army!” she said.

She was about sixteen, lightly freckled, not merely pretty but already beautiful in an earthy-elfin style, unlike that of anyone else I've ever known, though I've caught glimpses of it sometimes in her sisters.

“The elite corps only,” said Gerry. “This is Paul Ackerley. He was at school with me. Lucy Vereker.”

“Hello,” she said. “Nan's in the library.”

“What is Nan doing in a library?” said Gerry.

“Practising ping-pong with an eye-patch.”

“Paul is a bit over-civilised, so I thought it would do him good to spend an afternoon among the Visigoths.”

“Aren't you going to ask me about the eye-patch?”

“I assume she's bet someone—your father?—that she can beat him like that.”

“Was he always as irritating as this?” she said.

“I find it restful to know there's no point in competing,” I said.

“That makes two of them,” she said. “Him and Nan, I mean. Rule One of all games is that Nan wins. Come and give me the low-down on Gerry while I get the eggs.”

At what point did I first fall in love with Lucy? There were second, third and fourth times, at least, with longish intervals between, when we met only by accident and corresponded through Christmas cards, but in that sense “falling in love” means something different from what happened that afternoon. Still, that was when everything began, as I watched her scatter corn among the chuckling, mottled birds, helped to search for clandestine nests among the bramble-stems, was shown how to ease the blood-warm eggs out from under a mutteringly indignant broody. That is my AUC, my manger-cradle, my hegira. I have wondered whether, supposing I had gone in with Gerry and met Lucy along with the rest of the family, I would have had quite the same feelings about her. I was an urban child. We lived in Wimbledon, but our whole bent was towards the centre of London and away from the increasing rurality south and west of us. I had not touched a live hen before that afternoon, or held in my palm an egg with the mother-warmth still glowingly in it. One is very easily deceived by such things. They seem to possess “reality”, a touchstone quality which must for me have contrasted strongly with the dreamlike, irrational procedures of conscription. But as I say, that was when it began, though as I walked back to camp with Gerry I cannot have thought of myself as being in any way in love with Lucy. Any of the five girls (the school holidays had just begun, so they were all there) might have been an equally good, and equally unattainable, target for my affections.

I had better describe the Verekers at this point. As a group, a family, that is. Individual traits will no doubt emerge later. I was an only child of only children, and though I had stayed with families of friends, the culture, the instinctive sociology, of a family network was almost as alien to me as the business of egg-collecting. The Verekers were a genial group. They liked each other, most of the time. They also, all the time, loved each other, perhaps more than they were ever to be capable of loving anyone else. They liked other people too, and made no apparent effort to exclude them, but however apparently welcome (even, perhaps especially, when married to one of the girls) we others remained outside that inner circle. We could feel their love for each other, like a centre of warmth, but we could not sit with them as they sat, seeing each other's faces golden in the glow from the stove. Moreover this warmth existed, and could only exist, at Blatchards. (I speak symbolically. The house could be hyperborean in winter.) Blatchards was the context of their mutual delight, necessary to it, part of it. Things might have been different if there had been a male heir, but though it was openly accepted that when Lord Vereker died Nancy would inherit, all five girls spoke and behaved as if they had equal rights, and so did their parents.

The girls were Nancy, about two years older than me (it seemed typical of Gerry that he should have attracted the attention of a girl who might be expected to prefer men several years his senior); Harriet, my age; Lucy, eighteen months younger; Janet, fourteen; and Belinda, invariably known as Ben, twelve. Lady Vereker, handsome in a hoydenish fashion and as boisterous as any of the girls, must have been in her early forties. Lord Vereker was some fifteen years older. Slight and scholarly-looking, he was never seen to read anything except
The Times
, perfunctorily, and the local paper, assiduously. He seemed a good listener, bright-eyed and eager, but though I never caught him out in an unintelligent response, his comments other than grunts of encouragement were so few that I came to wonder whether he understood all that was being said. I have met dogs with a look like that—or children watching a conjuror, unable to form any notion of how the trick might be done, simply delighted that it should be done at all.

I have fallen into the trap of introducing later impressions. I can't have had more than a few words with Lord Vereker that afternoon. We had tea in a room mysteriously named Gloucester. “Because it had to have a name” was all the explanation I was given. In any other large house it would have been the nursery, or the schoolroom, or something like that. The table was rectangular, and I was near one end with the younger girls, who chatted pleasantly about their own doings and interests. I was aware of Gerry and Nancy at the other end of the table, Nancy very lively and aggressive and Gerry coping easily with her assault and obviously enjoying himself, as if facing a good quick bowler, while Lord Vereker, seated between them at the head of the table, twitched his head back and forth like a tennis umpire.

After tea the girls were eager to play something called “The Game” which was best done four-a-side, but Gerry and I were due back at camp by six, so to my relief we had to disappoint them.