The Yellow Room Conspiracy (9 page)

“Leeds, I believe, sir,” I said. “Would you like me to check?”

“Very good of you. Very good of you.”

I went over to ask Gerry if he had Yorkshire qualifications, but Lord Seddon came tripping eagerly at my elbow so I simply introduced them and stood back to watch Gerry mastering the art of supplying both halves of a conversation, which he did with ease. Lord Seddon was clearly delighted.

I spent most of lunch in silence. We ate, parsimoniously and with vast gaps between courses, at a long black refectory table in the Great Hall. “Not enough girls to go round,” Bobo had announced gloomily as we went in. I found myself sitting next to him towards one end of the table, and naturally enough he was more interested in the female house-guest on his far side. Janet, on my right, was soon absorbed by her other neighbour's account of how he was keeping his dairy-herd free of mastitis by installing in the cowshed a special box which picked up beneficial vibrations from the planets. Time passed for me extremely slowly. After a while I noticed Gerry and Michael Allwegg in animated conversation some way down the other side of the table.

My feelings about Gerry were not straightforward. I didn't at all understand Lucy's attitude to him. She had said, once, that she wasn't in love with him, but I was aware that what had happened last night had much more to do with him and Nancy than it had with my obvious relish in tangoing with Ben. I couldn't blame Gerry for taking advantage of the dance, and the champagne, and Nancy's disaffection from Dick. None of these were things which he'd set up or worked for. He'd simply taken his chance as deftly as he'd take a catch at short leg. But this didn't make it any easier for me not to feel that he had somehow betrayed me, his friend, and at the same time angry that he should be, however unconsciously, the cause of Lucy's unhappiness. I wondered whether there was any way I could explain to him the effect he was having on two people, both of whom, I assumed, he valued.

Perhaps my perceptions were over-sharpened, but after a while I seemed to perceive that there was something unusual about the conversation he was having with Allwegg. I've had difficulty conveying Gerry's normal conversational style. On paper it looks rather on the florid side, formal and self-conscious, but one wasn't aware of this when talking with him as he did the trick so easily that with him it seemed no trick at all. He was well-mannered about it too, listening, accepting interruptions, finding something interesting to reply to banal or dim remarks, and so on. Still, without apparently wishing to do so, he usually managed to dominate any conversation. This didn't seem to be the case now, though. It was Allwegg who was doing most of the talking, while Gerry was listening with what looked like eager attention.

I never knew Allwegg well, nor wished to. It is difficult for me to be fair to him, in the light of later events. The most obvious thing about him was the combination of charm and intelligence with striking physical ugliness. Dark coarse hair, harsh eyebrows flaring upward at the outer ends, brownish pocked skin, full mouth, a jowly look even then, he appeared in that company much more of an outsider than Gerry, or even I (the two genuine outsiders) probably did, though I believe his family was perfectly acceptable, minor squirearchy from the Welsh borders. I was aware of the charm, but I have to say it is not the sort I find charming—too blatant, too willed for my taste. Will, in fact, was for me his most marked characteristic, more so even than his appearance. Some people seem to possess a sort of psychic force, stemming perhaps from a self-validating conviction of the rightness of all their beliefs and actions, which is very hard to resist. Hitler was an obvious example. They are madmen who contrive somehow to act sane, perhaps until a sudden crack-up, perhaps for all their lives. Allwegg had at least a touch of that. He was, by the way, a goodish cricketer, having captained Winchester, but had just missed his Blue. His father was a High Court judge, and he himself was reading Law at Pembroke. Most of that, of course, is later knowledge. All that I really noticed then was the effect that he seemed to be having on Gerry.

I wasn't the only one. As we were settling into the car to return to Blatchards, Ben, squeezed in beside me on the front passenger seat with Janet across our knees, twisted her neck and spoke over her shoulder.

“What on earth were you talking to Michael about, Gerry? It must have been riveting.”

Gerry laughed. Crushed though we were, without touch or eye contact, I sensed the electric tingle of satisfaction in him. The obvious thing was to put it down to his night with Nancy, and the possibility of more such nights, but it seemed in the context to be more a response to Ben's question.

“How to become millionaires,” he said.

LUCY V

1948

I
've been listening to what I said last time, and thinking about it, and wondering. Wondering, I mean, why almost at once I started to behave as if none of that had ever happened. The easiest thing is to say I just knew there couldn't be anything wrong about Gerry. Perhaps that was the hidden reason why I was so furious with them. I don't know. I'd got plenty to be furious about, without that. And you've got to remember that without me realising it I'd got pretty browned off about the kind of thing we were doing. Telling the madman about Gerry's doppelganger was the final straw. It made me start actually thinking what a nonsense it all was.

And then, oh, I suppose it was a few weeks after I'd left the Exchange I got asked to a ball at Greenwich, in the Painted Hall—terrifically glamorous, except that marble's such hell to dance on. Of course almost all the men were Navy, and at the dinner before the dance two of them had been talking about Greece. Greece was in a frightful mess just then, with communists and anti-communists killing and torturing each other, and us trying to stop Stalin getting his hands on yet another country. Both these officers had actually been there, one after the other, first when we were trying to keep the peace and then when we were trying to boot the communists out. I pretended not to be listening, but actually I knew quite a bit about what they were talking about, because we'd got a lot of files on Greece, and were always having to get them out and update them. There was a man called Mizikouros who was head of an anti-communist group on Euboea. I knew his name well, because he had a blue-tagged file which meant he'd been checked and re-checked and he was absolutely reliable, but neither of these men had a good word to say for him. According to them he was a total liar and a complete savage. One of them told a story about what he'd done to a village which hadn't come up with as much food as he'd wanted, though the villagers were pretty well starving already. It sounded just as bad as anything the Germans had done. Of course we always knew on the Exchange that nothing on the files was dead certain—Intelligence work isn't like that. But even so. I mean, Mizikouros had a blue tag!

And it seems funny now that I never talked to Paul about it either, but it didn't then. It was past, over, part of the war, unreal. I didn't want to know it any more. I remember having breakfast in his flat one morning—I should think it was several months after the Greenwich party—and he was reading the
Telegraph
but suddenly he flung it on the floor and said “Oh, honestly, how stupid can you get! They've arrested Anwal!”

I knew about Anwal. He was Sonia's husband. Sonia was the girl who'd lived with Paul in Cairo. Only a few weeks before they'd written to Paul asking if he'd be their new baby's godfather. He was terribly pleased.

“What's he done?” I said.

“Written some articles critical of the government. That makes him an agitator. If he's an agitator then so is Anthony Eden.”

“Is he a communist?”

“You don't have to be a communist to think the unspeakable Farouk isn't fit to rule your country, any more than you have to be a fascist to make a speech like Eden's last, saying much the same thing about Attlee. Of course there'll be raving red-hunters in the security services who'll point out that Anwal's been to meetings where a lot of communists happen to have been too. I've done that kind of work myself. You actually know so little for sure that you're always persuading yourself that shadows are solid.”

“Is there anything you can do?” I said.

“Write a few letters,” he said. “At least try and see Sonia's alright.”

That was an obvious chance—I mean about how wrong security people can be—but I don't think I even thought about it. Somebody'd persuaded Annie to steal a lot of files about Yugoslavia, and one of them was Gerry's, which obviously shouldn't have been there in the first place. That was all. And there was another chance a bit later, because soon after that Paul's flat got burgled. At least we were pretty sure someone had been in, though nothing was taken. It was just that Paul's so neat about everything that all his papers are always in a particular order, and they weren't. And after that we noticed there was sometimes something funny about the telephone. This was long before people started to make all the fuss about phone-tapping, but Paul thought something like that might be happening.

“My fault for writing those letters,” he said. “Now I'm a red under the bed, too.”

He didn't take it very seriously, and they let Anwal out again quite soon, but thinking about it now I wonder whether it was just that. I mean, just imagine how it must have looked to my blue-eyed madman. I was a friend of a contam, and so was Paul, and Paul had worked in the Exchange before it was the Exchange, and when he'd told me not to go out with Paul I'd deliberately done just the opposite, and now I was living with him, and he was in cahoots with this agitator in Cairo … Oh, yes, and of course I'd been in charge of the security in Files and I'd hired Annie so perhaps I'd arranged the whole business of the files getting stolen and then pretended to find out about it so as to persuade everyone that the Exchange files were hopelessly compromised … that's how that kind of madmen think.

I'm not going to say much more now. I tried to do too much last time and I had a really bad day next day, so I've got to be careful or Paul will stop me doing it at all. But I'll just tidy up to where he's got to, from my side. I had a good eighteen months (was it?) with Paul. I was happy in a restful kind of way. At first I didn't have enough money to go on paying rent, so I moved in to Paul's flat and Ben found someone else to share with. Then I got my first modelling jobs. I was lucky. I started at the top. A cousin of mine was working for Norman Parkinson and he needed two girls who might be sisters and since we had an obvious family look she suggested me. That's how the money started coming in again. Please don't think I only left Paul because I could pay the rent again now. It would have happened anyway. We both knew we were just marking time. But I did know he was going to mind a lot more than me. That made it difficult. I really don't like hurting people, even when they've earned it, and he hadn't.

Several times in my life I've had to say, “Look, I'm afraid that's it,” to a man, and I've never enjoyed it. (Alright, I've had it said to me, too, and that's no fun, either.) Long before Harriet's party I'd vaguely known it was coming. I didn't know what I wanted instead of Paul, only something stronger and wilder than his tidy, gentle, battened-down way of living. I didn't think about it then and there, but going in last again with Gerry and scraping home with me scoring the winning run—while it was happening all I thought was how terrific, as if we were back where we'd started and everything was fresh and new and I was being given my time all over again … But it's never like that, is it? Try to have the same happiness twice over, and it always goes sour on you. All evening I seemed to be getting edgier and edgier. I knew something was going to happen to spoil what ought to have been a perfect day, like the one before. That bloody tango. Ben. So young, just starting, like I used to be. I absolutely loathed myself for feeling so jealous. Yes, jealous. And not just about her being the one who was starting at the beginning when I couldn't any more, jealous about Paul. This may surprise you, because of what I've just been saying about him not being all that exciting, but suddenly he was with Ben. I don't imagine for a moment that she wanted to go to bed with him, or he with her, but there she was, in the middle of the Long Gallery, saying these things with her body, yelling them almost. And Paul answering her. They were only acting them, of course, but they were acting wildness, danger, passion—things we couldn't do for each other, me and Paul. God damn it, we couldn't even act them for each other!

And then Nan and Gerry joining in. Gerry making her tango. Nobody could make Nan do things, but he bloody well hypnotised her into dancing that effing tango with her, and everybody saw them, and I had to sit there looking as calm and sweet as the fairy on the Christmas tree and clapping when it was all over. God, I was miserable! I was sick at Ben and Paul and Gerry and Nan and myself more than anyone! Paul, of course, couldn't have behaved better when I gave him the push. I do think he might have sulked and snarled a bit. That would have made life easier.

PAUL VI

March 1956

L
ord Vereker died, appropriately, of food-poisoning. I was in two minds whether to attend the funeral until Harriet telephoned and asked me to drive two ancient cousins down from Hampstead. Both could barely walk, but they proved jovial and talkative passengers, artists, who had known not just the obvious people (Sargent, Epstein, John) but others such as Gaudier Brezska and Duchamp. So I had no time to brood about the prospect of meeting Lucy, now Lady Seddon. Though we had parted, without quarrels or recriminations, immediately after the week-end just described, I had kept up with Vereker affairs by becoming godfather to Harriet's first child, a girl. I would spend a week-end with the Smiths in Dorset two or three times a year, and see something of them in London too, as Bobo had a tiny house in Pavilion Road, just off Sloane Square.

My views on Bobo had changed, and apparently his on me. Our earlier incompatibility had been partly the effect of our different speeds of moral and social development. Thanks perhaps to my foreign blood I was an early maturer, effectively an adult at seventeen, whereas Bobo remained an adolescent lout into his late twenties. Marriage ripened him, and Harriet managed him with great skill, apart from the occasional over-bossiness. I never became a close friend of his—we still had too little in common—but we got along well enough. Though not intelligent he had a very shrewd instinct for anything to do with money, and not only invested in some of my ventures but provided me with valuable contacts in the financial world. He was a stockbroker, and did well for himself and his firm, cajoling older partners into fresh approaches. He, in a sense like me, was one of those who caught the tide.

Harriet enjoyed her domesticities, the county round and local Tory politics. It is mildly interesting that alone of the Vereker girls, and from such calculated beginnings (to judge by our breakfast conversation after the cricket match) she achieved a marriage that worked and continued to work right up to the day when Bobo, in one of his occasional relapses into his earlier style, contrived to drown them both in an idiotic sailing accident off Corfu. But that was not until the late 'seventies.

Lord Vereker's funeral was in March, the church dank, the service vapid. We sang “Fight the Good Fight” and other hymns inapplicable to the deceased. Not being a believer I tend to notice the meanings of the words I find myself singing, but the point for once struck others. While we were milling out through the porch, clasping Lady Vereker's hands and muttering the ritual inarticulacies, I heard someone at the back of the family group say in a too-loud whisper “Pity they didn't make it ‘Feed us, Heavenly Father, Feed us'!” I saw Ben giggle and Janet frown, then realised that the speaker must be Edward Voss-Thompson, at that time married to Janet, choosing this moment to live up to his reputation as the speaker of tasteless truth.

It's hard these days to remember how new and thrilling television then seemed to be; how sane and busy citizens, for instance, would cancel other engagements and drive half across a county to attend a sherry party because Malcolm Muggeridge might be going too. Voss- Thompson, though half a generation younger than Muggeridge, was somewhat in that mould, and in other ways a forerunner of David Frost, though less heavy-handed. He specialised in a sardonic tone of question which could rattle all but the most experienced flannelers and wafflers. For me there had been the extra curiosity of seeing for the first time the effect that TV exposure can have on a previously reasonable character. Not that I knew Voss-Thompson well, but I'd spent a week-end at the Smiths' when he and Janet had also been there, met him again at a couple of dinner parties at Pavilion Road, and run across him elsewhere, at Glyndebourne, for instance, both of us being assiduous opera-goers. I had liked him then, and came to do so again later, but at the period of the funeral I have to admit that I found him rather a pain in the neck, with his assumption that he was the centre of attention, and a tendency during the normal disagreements of conversation to slip into his TV style, adversarial and domineering.

In my turn I condoled. Lady Vereker, I could see, was barely holding herself together, answering every remark with a toneless “so glad you could come.” I think someone may have given her a stiff Scotch to get her through. Beyond her were further millings, and umbrellas adjusted to meet the drizzle. I was considering how to get my two charges to my car without their having to hobble too far through the murk when a voice beside me whispered, “You are allowed to look at me, you know.”

She slipped her hand into mine, as if nothing had ever changed between us. She was smiling slightly, her face passionless, but I was aware that she was at least as shaken as her mother, and that what she needed from me, from anybody, was comfort. I put my arm round her shoulders and drew her against my side. Someone was watching us. Michael Allwegg. I didn't care.

“You're coming to luncheon,” she said.

“I told Harriet no.”

The thought of meeting Lucy as someone else's wife, or merely glimpsing her across a roomful of chatterers, had seemed unbearable, so I had invented friends a few miles away with whom I'd said I would be lunching, and picking up the cousins afterwards.

“Please,” she whispered.

I nodded and she let go. I helped the cousins to my car. On the drive to Blatchards I found them extra-animated by the possibility of meeting Voss-Thompson. (To do him justice he spotted their potential, and later that year did an interview with them in their studio, hardly intruding himself at all, but allowing them to be themselves. The result was enchanting.)

The catering was below Lord Vereker's standards, but otherwise the lunch went well. There must have been at least sixty guests, almost all of them relatives and connections, who took the opportunity to bring each other up to date with family news. Such gatherings always make me realise that members of truly nuclear families like my own miss out on a large and enjoyable area of human fulfilment simply because they are not part of such a network. The food was laid out in the dining-room and most of us perched in the Saloon or Library to eat. I fetched plates for the cousins and left them deep in prattle with one of their coevals. Loading my own plate I found Nancy beside me. Unlike Lucy, she seemed not to be stricken by the event.

“Paul!” she cried and kissed me warmly. “It's been far, far too long. How are you? What are you doing? Isn't this fun? Funerals are much better than weddings for this sort of thing, don't you think?”

She was more changed than Lucy, pretty still, but wearing too vivid make-up for such an occasion. Though she had acquired no trace of an American accent I think I might have guessed from her manner and appearance that she had spent a good deal of time in the States. I knew from Harriet that she and Dick had tried to mend their marriage, and to produce an heir to the Felder fortune. That failing, they were now divorced. She had come back to live at Blatchards, and to avoid death duties Lord Vereker had handed on most of the estate to her. In the last year or so, Harriet said, Gerry had become rather more than a frequent visitor to the house.

“You've heard the big news?” said Nancy.

“I don't know. Have I?”

“Look at Ben's left hand.”

Ben, in the severest black, with a delicious little veiled pill-box hat, was a few yards away, talking with a lot of body-language to someone I couldn't see. She raised her arm, twisting the hand back at the wrist, in a gesture of dismissive scorn. A sapphire flashed on her ring finger.

“Good Lord!” I said. “Who's the man?”

“Michael Allwegg.”

“Good Lord again.”

“What do you imagine it cost? And that neat little black number, too?”

The answer in both cases was clearly a lot. I was amused that Nancy, till recently mistress of colossal wealth, should not only be impressed but be prepared to say so in such a frankly vulgar fashion.

“Do I congratulate her?” I said.

“If you want to. It isn't announced yet, because of Father's death. In fact she oughtn't to be flashing that ring about, really. You'll want to see Lucy. I don't know where she's got to. And I'm sure Gerry will want to see you. I'll find him.”

We talked a little more and separated. Lucy wasn't in the dining-room so I went to congratulate Ben before searching elsewhere. Ben kissed me, continental-fashion, a quick peck on both cheeks. Her whole appearance was almost ferociously sophisticated, but she seemed genuinely happy to see me and accepted my congratulations with a laugh. She was by now one of the senior dancers at the Moulin Rouge, with her name on the posters. I'd been to one of her shows on a trip to Paris the year before, sent my card round and gone backstage, to find her in a tiny dressing-room which she shared with another girl whose admirer had sat glowering in the corner while we talked.

“Are you going to give up dancing?” I asked.

“So Michael seems to think. I'm going to give it a rest, anyway. I've been a bit too long at the mill. I've got a message for you from Lucy. She's not feeling well and she's gone to lie down for a bit, but she says you're not to leave till she's seen you.”

“What's the matter, do you know?”

“She's the one who minded most about Father. Of course we all did, funny old thing. But ripeness is all, you know. Except Lucy doesn't think so. She's always wanted to eat her cake and have it still.”

(I've forgotten to say that part of Ben's style was to converse in such proverbial scraps and nanny-lore, giving them apparent edge and freshness because she herself looked so decidedly not ordinary. I have sometimes wondered whether she took after her father, whose brisk intelligent glance may have been almost totally deceptive.)

After that I wandered about, talked to a few people, took the cousins' finished plates away and brought their second courses, and so on, until Nancy found me again.

“Gerry's probably up in the Yellow Room,” she said. “That's his kingdom now. Do you remember the way?”

“I think so. Anyway, I'll find it. Don't bother to show me.”

“Might as well,” she said. “See he's behaving himself. Did you find Lucy?”

“According to Ben she's not feeling too well and went to lie down.”

“Bet she's just miffed with Ben for flashing that ring around. It's not Ben's fault. Mother pretty well made her. Hang on a mo.”

She darted aside to settle some minor problem, and though when she came back I tried to tell her again that I could find the Yellow Room without help she still insisted on coming. In fact I got the impression that she really wished to use the excuse to check up on Gerry in some way. We crossed the central hall, turned right down a long corridor past the drawing-room and East Room, and then at the Billiard Room turned left into the short East Corridor, past the Gun Room to the East Stairs. These led only to the two rooms above. The first was a stately but underfurnished and never-used chamber called King William's Room (nobody knew why, or to which King William it referred), with double doors at either end and four tall windows looking out over the East Lawn. Beyond the further doors lay the Yellow Room.

Once inside the Yellow Room one realised that one had not in fact come up a full storey, as compared with the rest of the house, in climbing the East Stairs. It and King William's Room occupied a sort of half-storey, because the rooms below not only lay lower than the rest of the ground floor, but also had lower ceilings. Don't ask me why. Many of the internal arrangements at Blatchards were like that, botchings and improvisations connected by strange little stairways and angled corridors behind the bleak, symmetrical facade. The room had not in fact been yellow for at least a generation. The Verekers were disappointed if newcomers failed to remark on its obvious greenness, thus depriving them of the chance to haul out some bound copies of Horse and Hound and expose the ancient saffron wallpaper behind. The books on the shelves, unlike most of those in the Library, had been bought to read at some time or other—D.K. Broster and Dornford Yates most recently, and even some Charles Williams at the upper limit of Vereker taste—and the furniture was slackly comfortable. Furthermore the gas fire really worked. Unlike the other fires at Blatchards, with their feeble supply from extended circuits, for these two rooms at the top of the East Stairs Mr Chad had at some point installed a separate run of piping, so that this was the one place in the house where one could be reasonably sure of getting warm. The other peculiarity was that whereas the two windows on its east side matched those in King William's Room, the ones on the south side began at floor level and reached only half way up the wall. They were in fact the top sections of the end two of the line of tall windows which ran the length of the south façade, and were bisected at this point by the Billiard-Room ceiling. In the north-west corner of the room, behind a false bookcase, a twisting stair led to the first true storey of the main house. These contrivances gave the Yellow Room a feeling of concealment, a private lair tucked into the apparently non-existent spaces between the other rooms of the house, like a priest's hole, though it was in fact a good-sized room.

Perhaps it was this that led Nancy, when she opened the door and disclosed Gerry, Tommy Seddon and Michael Allwegg slouched round the fire with a bottle of Hine on the table before them, to laugh and say, “Hello, it's the Yellow Room Conspiracy. Next stop, Traitor's Gate.”

The men had stopped talking and risen as we entered, so there was indeed a mild sense of some cabal being interrupted in its schemings. Seddon smiled at her remark, Michael guffawed, and Gerry paid no attention to her but waved a greeting to me and gestured towards a chair. Nancy, still apparently determined to make her mark, strode into the circle, picked up the bottle and sniffed it.

“That smells like good stuff,” she said. “I didn't know we had any of that.”