A Scandal in Belgravia (6 page)

“Oh—the Timothy Wycliffe affair.”

“The murder.”

“That's right. Sorry—did I sound heartless? I didn't mean to. I thought it might be worthwhile in this case to get facsimile copies of some of the newspapers for the relevant dates. You'll see why.”

She bustled out again, leaving a wad of complete facsimile newspapers and a smaller wad of xeroxed items from other newspapers. My curiosity pricked, I took up the top newspaper, a
Daily Telegraph.
I immediately saw what she meant.

GAITSKELL ATTACKS SUEZ “ADVENTURE”

“Treason” say Tory MPs

Timothy Wycliffe had been murdered at the height of the Suez crisis.

I remember talking to a class of intelligent eighteen-year-olds when I was Minister of Education. I mentioned the Suez crisis, and was met with completely blank looks. I explained that this was when Britain and France, on a spurious excuse, invaded Egypt to gain control of the Suez Canal, which Colonel Nasser
had nationalised. They were halted by U.S. opposition and outraged world opinion. Then I got some intelligent comparisons with the Falklands invasion. But it is interesting that Suez has not entered the folk imagination, as the Second World War has. For someone of my generation it is the watershed,
the
political event, from which all else has followed.

If I had remembered that, of course, I would have realized why the murder had had so little impact on me at the time, and why it had aroused so little interest in the newspapers. As I flicked through them one after another I found what I expected: page after page about the crisis, the storms in Parliament, the bombing of Egyptian air bases, the landing of French and British troops in the Suez zone, the reactions of the international great and good. Coverage of Timothy's death was minimal, and perhaps the report of it in the
Telegraph
can be taken for all.

MINISTER'S SON KILLED

Police confirmed last night that the man found battered to death in a flat in Belgravia was Timothy Wycliffe, son of the Minister of Planning and Public Works, Lord John Wycliffe.

In the days that followed there was nothing more of substance on the murder until the day that the Suez invasion was halted, when again the newspapers contained little except that story, as the inquest and the recriminations began. Several of them, though, did have a tiny item on the murder, of which one may again quote the
Telegraph
as typical.

MAN SOUGHT IN MINISTER'S SON'S KILLING

Police have issued the name of a man they wish to interview in connection with the killing of Timothy Wycliffe, son of the
Minister of Planning and Public Works. He is Andrew Forbes, an unemployed electrician, of Peckham.

I sat for some time, thinking. Now I had a name for the young man who, according to Harry Wratton, had left the country after the murder of Timothy. I was beginning to doubt everything anybody told me about the case because they all, like me, would have been so involved with the Suez invasion that they would have taken in very little at the time. Suez was different. Young people may read about it in history books, but they will never understand the atmosphere of those weeks. Suez was the one issue in our postwar history that left no one indifferent, whatever their politics.

However Harry Wratton did not seem to have got that bit wrong. When I sorted through Elspeth Honeybourne's little pile of xeroxed sheets (which mostly contained alternative versions of the two news items I've just quoted), I found one small item in a South London newspaper saying that the police feared that the man they wanted to question in connection with the murder of Timothy Wycliffe had left the country. They would be investigating the possibility of extradition, but they feared that he had gone to Spain, with which country Britain had no extradition treaty.

And that—so far as Elspeth Honeybourne had gone—was the end of the matter in the British press.

Andrew Forbes. I tried to remember whether that was one of Timothy's boyfriends I had met. I did get introduced to them now and again, at the theatre or opera, in restaurants, or when they met him from the Foreign Office after work. There had been one young man who made terrible scenes at the F.O. for a whole week, and I'd been the one deputed to deal with him. Tact and Diplomacy Proctor, in an early manifestation. The only other boyfriend I had more than casual words with was a man called Derek Wicklow. I remember him because of the
circumstances of our one meeting, and because he later became governor of one of our last colonies—St. Helena or Mauritius or some such place—and I remember thinking that he must have become a whole lot more discreet in his conduct since I knew him.

We met at a restaurant in Covent Garden, long gone now, called Les Tuileries—met, in fact, at the door. It was evening time, and I was with a very pushy girl called Veronica something-or-other. She was a sort of Edwina Currie figure, intent on pushing her way ahead in politics, and since I was by then making some sort of a name with the London Young Conservatives I was a minor figure on her hit list. (She never did get a parliamentary seat, by the way, let alone become Prime Minister. She married a millionaire who gave her two children and then sensibly left her, though I'm sure she stung him for enormous alimony.) When Timothy and Derek Wicklow turned up at the door to Les Tuileries at the same time as us, having failed to get standing tickets for Callas in
Norma,
I think I was a bit relieved, and jumped at Tim's suggestion that we should make a foursome. A couple of hours' verbal battering by the intense and single-minded Veronica was not an enticing prospect.

The topic of Callas lasted us through the process of ordering and waiting for the soup. Timothy had seen her first Norma and had been hoping to see her with the new Adalgisa. It was fairly typical of Timothy that he had forgotten when the first day of the new booking period was, and had found all the tickets gone by the time he remembered. Derek Wicklow had seen her in the Verona Arena on a holiday with his parents. I had just about heard of her. I doubt whether Veronica had. There was no way the topic was going to last into the soup course—people still ate soup then—because she was a single issue person (I wonder what that single issue is today: monetarism? the environment? the ordination of women?) and she
was determined at the first lull in the talking to turn the topic to politics.

“Do
you feel this government's really got a grip of things?” she asked suddenly of me,
à propos
of nothing. She had turned to me so as totally to exclude the others. I should say that at the time of this encounter Churchill had been Prime Minister again for something like two years.

“Oh—ah—well, of course they're going cautiously because—”

“But that's not what we expected of Winnie, is it? I mean, the British people didn't elect him to be
cautious.
They expected him to weigh in and knock down all those damned Socialist regulations. . . .”

I will give no more than a specimen of Veronica's conversation. It was in the steamroller syle (one to which I've become accustomed during my years in the Cabinet), and it was certainly not entertaining. As she beavered on I became aware that Timothy was right-handed and Derek was left-handed, and that their unoccupied hands were together under the table. It says something for my increased sophistication by this time that I was amused as well as disconcerted. Veronica had certainly not noticed. She was one of those people who would never notice anything about other people unless it was shoved in her face. The whole situation—Veronica droning away like a dentist's drill, the pair opposite spooning, her quite oblivious of it—was exquisitely ludicrous.

“. . . we expected so much
more,”
she concluded. “It makes you wonder whether he's really in con
trol.”

“He's in control,” said Timothy, drawling more than was his wont. “The thing you're forgetting about Churchill is that he's not really a Tory.”

This stopped Veronica in her tracks. I suspected that she had no knowledge of history. Timothy explained.

“He was a Liberal for the first twenty years of this century. In many ways he still thinks like a Liberal—social affairs, for
instance. He's an old-fashioned Conservative where the Empire, God bless it, is concerned, but if you're expecting him to abolish the National Health Service, forget it: it just isn't going to happen. . . . Golly, how
bored
I am with politics.”

“Timothy's father is in the Cabinet,” I explained. “He's had his fill of politics over the years.”

“In the Cabinet?” said Veronica with drill-like intensity and turning to him. “What's your name? Sorry, I didn't catch it.”

“Wycliffe. Timothy Wycliffe.”

“
Wy
cliffe! Oh, but I must tell you I think your father's doing an absolutely superb job—” she bent forward, nearly knocking a plate of lamb chops from the waiter's hand. Timothy managed a tiny amused smile. He knew and I knew that the Minister of Planning and Public Works had a job so humdrum that there was no way anyone could make a superb job of it. Veronica now forgot about me and gave her entire attention to Timothy, though not to the extent of giving him much chance to reply. She was quite oblivious, I noticed, when Timothy and Derek disengaged their hands to eat their meal, and oblivious too to the looks Timothy gave me that said as plainly as words: “Help!”

There was little help I could give. Veronica was one of those unstoppable forces. However after she had gone on for some minutes in effusive praise of Timothy's father it did seem to occur to her—she was not very bright—that her praise was eliciting little response, and was more than a little inconsistent with her former verdict that the government lacked grip. Accordingly she switched her tack.

“I suppose you're politically active yourself?”

It was said in an accusatory tone, as if it was the duty of all right-minded people. In the subsequent decade a young woman of Veronica's stamp would probably have said “sexually active” in much the same tone of voice.

“Good Lord, no. Not at all.”

“But really you should be! There's any number of really vital
and active organisations that you could give a hand to. The Young Conservatives are absolutely the most forward-looking political group in the country at the moment.”

“I'm sure. But I doubt if I am young enough or Conservative enough for them.”

“Oh, nonsense. You don't even have to be particularly political. For a lot of people it's mainly social—dances, parties, practically a marriage bureau!” She was getting quite roguish, in a galumphing kind of way that made me shudder. “It really is a tremendous hoot, I can assure you!”

“That's what I'm afraid of,” murmured Timothy.

“No, really, you've got the wrong idea entirely.” Veronica had shown a surprising facility in coping with lamb chops and wielding her verbal battering ram simultaneously. Now she was finished and doubly intimidating, leaning forward over the table and fixing Timothy with her basilisk eyes. “Look, the Kensington Y.C.s are having this dance next Saturday. Why don't you come along as my guest?”

It was Derek Wicklow, resourcefully, who brought Timothy the aid I had been unable to supply. He too leaned forward, putting his hand over Timothy's and speaking, not loudly but distinctly, so that he could be heard at the tables next to ours.

“Look, ducky, Timothy is fucking me, right? So you're just not in with a chance.”

Her face was a picture. Her lower jaw literally dropped open, she blinked, spluttered. At last she managed to say, “For God's sake!” jumped up from the table, and scuttled from the restaurant as if she had just been told one of us had leprosy.

We looked at each other, waited till the door slammed, and then burst out all three into uncontrollable laughter, holding our sides, our heads hitting the table as fresh waves of merriment engulfed us. I was dimly conscious of people at the adjacent table studying their plates as if they were runic tablets, then hurrying up their eating, but I only really surfaced when I became conscious of a waiter at my elbow. He murmured:

“The young lady's dessert?”

“Me, me,” said Timothy. “I'm a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles.”

The rest of the meal was wholly merry, with imitations of Veronica, periodically renewed laughter, and frequent demands to know where on
earth
I had picked her up. It is a measure of my greater sophistication that by this time I could participate in it, though I seem to remember saying at one point, “What an absolutely marvellous way of getting rid of her!” for the benefit of the adjoining tables, hoping they would believe it was no more than that. More sophisticated, but still craven, a modern person would judge, though I would remind them that homosexual acts were still illegal at that time. Eventually we rolled out into Covent Garden, still laughing, and finding it was interval time at the opera. Tim and Derek declared that they were going to infiltrate the standers and see the rest of Callas and Simionato's performance. I expect they managed it.

Looking back, that is one of my happiest memories of Timothy. He had this wonderful way of pricking pomposity, knocking down pretension, derailing the one-track minded. It seemed that he had managed to pass it on, at least temporarily, to Derek Wicklow. I suspect it was that night in Les Tuileries that gave me a healthy dislike of pushy people—though naturally, being in politics, I have had to put up with a great number of them over the years. Ann, whom I married in 1959, was a very different type.

When I had finished going through Elspeth Honeybourne's collection of snippets I—on an impulse, but one that was always going to come sooner or later—took down the telephone directory again and found the number for Knopfmeyer, M.