A Murder in Mayfair (6 page)

“When was this?”

“The first half of 1962. Before long the Profumo case swamped it as a political scandal. But talk has gone on.”

“And to you he was just ‘a nice bloke'?”

“Yes. . . . Remember I was very young. He was good-looking, or moderately so, he was a minister, a Lord.” She was serious, absorbed. She had gone back forty years, and was wrestling with her feelings as an adolescent girl. “But to be honest I don't think that really clouded my judgment.”

Somehow I was sure it hadn't. Like Miss Buss and Miss Beale, the young Margaret hadn't felt Cupid's darts. Then, as now, she looked, she considered, she judged.

“What did? I wonder.”

“Cloud my judgment? I can only suppose inexperience.”

“Tell me what sort of person you
thought
he was.”

“Ah.” She was typically unwilling to be rushed. “Not altogether easy, that. On the surface, and on paper, a very conventional figure. He'd done all the usual things a man of his class does, or did at that time. He'd been in the Brigade of Guards, he'd been a deb's delight, he'd married a wife from the landed gentry, and produced the necessary son—and a daughter, incidentally.”

“Why should a son matter? His was a courtesy title, surely, so it would die with him.”

“So it would. But his elder brother, the heir to the Marquis of Aylesbury, was . . . unlikely to marry.”

“So, on the surface, a typical upper-class scion without a rebellious bone in his body?”

“That's right. And distantly related to Harold Macmillan, like a lot of the members of his government.”

My eyebrows shot up.

“I didn't know that.”

“Either to him or to Lady Dorothy, his wife. It was said that, as Prime Minister, Macmillan liked to surround himself with people he knew. That was the polite way of putting it.”

“Well before my time, all this. It seems like another age.”

“Not so different from all those Kennedys in America,” Margaret pointed out. “Anyway the appearances in Lord John's case were a bit misleading, or so I felt anyway, with all the confidence in my judgment of a teenage secretary who had just left school!”

“What went against the stereotype?”

She drew her fingers through her hair again.

“Let me get my thoughts in order. It's ages since I've thought about him. . . . He was very considerate. Not just to me—which was remarkable enough, remembering that I was what today we would call a temp, and in no way good-looking—but all the way down the line: civil servants, office workers, cleaners, doormen. They were all fond of him—and some of the women dewy-eyed about him. He never, to my knowledge, took advantage of this.”

“Was he happily married at this point?”

“So far as anyone knew. I wondered, though. I only saw the wife once. A very English type: flawless complexion, rosebud mouth, impeccably dressed and jeweled. I thought she was
cold and hard and manipulative, but it's a type I don't usually take to.”

“It's not like you to make sweeping judgments.”

She smiled—a rather sweet smile that I'd never seen before.

“I'm being Margaret Stevens tonight, not the permanent secretary. Another thing: his class never showed. He was very open in his relationships. Class, nationality, color, never made any difference. That was very rare then.”

“Still is.”

“It is much, much more common, young man,” she said, leaning forward to speak forcefully, so I knew it was something she felt strongly about. “Dinosaurs like Alan Clarke abounded then; now they stand out . . . There's one more thing, but it's not something I
know.
”

“Yes?”

“I
think
he was a very passionate man. None of the modern words—sexy, oversexed—seems to cover it. I think he felt deeply, loved intensely, even if not wisely. I think it was the strength of his feelings gave meaning to his life.”

I wondered, not for the first time in that conversation, whether a small part of her had been in love with him.

“Have you any reason for thinking that?” I asked.

She grinned.

“None whatsoever. The intuition of a teenager—and one who had already half decided that love, sex, or whatever was not going to get in the way of a career. And it never has.”

“By the way, it's irrelevant, but what was Lord John like as a minister?”

“I was much too junior to really know. I just put typing in front of him from time to time. But going by comments in the Ministry I'd guess middling. Did his job, got things done on a limited front, not so good on wider issues, matters of principle, raising his eyes to the horizon.”

“One of those people who are better as constituency MPs rather than in government?”

“Probably so. Certainly the shock when the murder took place was very intense in his constituency. I knew someone living there, and he said that they had
loved
him. Still, in those days Conservative activists did dearly love a Lord. Now they love a successful used-car salesman more.”

“What was the constituency?”

“One of the South Coast ones, I can't remember which.”

At last I got up, really intending to go. When I had made my thanks for the meal and the evening in general, I said:

“I hope the crash course in memoir-writing hasn't been too painful. You've been a lot of help.”

She had got up, and was standing close, looking at me quizzically.

“Can I get something clear in my mind, Colin—just in my mind, where it will stay. You're looking for your natural parents?”

“Yes.”

“Having found out—what?—that you were adopted?”

“Well, that's been suggested.”

“By whom has it been suggested?”

She was definitely permanent secretary again, and with her steely eyes on me I had to come not just clean but totally clean.

“In an anonymous note. And it was a bit ambiguous.”

Her eyebrows ascended to the ceiling.

“And on the basis of that, and on my reaction to you on your first day at the Ministry, you are now building a castle in the air that your father may have been Lord John Revill?”

I shook my head vigorously and I hope convincingly.

“I'm building nothing at the moment. I'd only vaguely heard of the man before this evening. I'm going to go away,
think about what you've said, maybe try to find out more about him, and what he did, but that is all.”

“That,” said Margaret briskly, “is a hell of a lot. If you're going to do that, you know, you will need to have your government minister hat on, not your human being hat. Cool, judgmental, all that kind of thing, is what you will need to be.”

“And it's what I will be.” I kissed her. “I'll be everything you're teaching me to be.”

“Kissed by a minister! That's a first!” She laughed. “Perhaps the world really is changing for the better.”

It had been a kiss of the most genuine gratitude. But she would not have approved of the fact that as I went down her stairs, preferring to avoid the lift, I was feeling a whole new sensation. I was on a trail, and I suddenly felt it was the most important trail of my life. I hoped it was no disloyalty to my parents, but all the way home I was saying: was that the man who made me? Did a murderer help make me what I am? Was he the cause of my lifelong interest in politics? Was Lord John Revill bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh?

T
he summer recess came upon us within the week, as welcome as tall waves for surfers. Well, not welcome to all of us. There were ministers and rank-and-file MPs who were so intoxicated by power after eighteen years in the wilderness that they would have been happy if Parliament had sat indefinitely to enact a rackful of legislation which their ingenious minds had been contemplating over the long barren years of opposition. But the sensible ones, after three months of delicious political activity, took themselves off on relaxing holidays in Tuscany or the Dordogne, hill-walking in Khatmandu or coastal cruises round Scandinavia. Even those who made a rather puritanical virtue of holidaying in Great Britain found the weather had mightily improved.

I had no plans for a holiday of any sort.

This was not because I was intoxicated by power, or because I am one of those for whom a holiday is a passport to boredom. I was a huntsman, with a quarry in sight—the difference being this was not a game or sport, but something intensely, perhaps embarrassingly personal. Parliament being in recess meant that I had nobody to report to, no terriers tugging at my trouser seat—it meant in short that I had more time, even
though I regularly toiled away at the Ministry. I could never have lain on a beach, or even walked Yorkshire with George Eakin—my mind would have been wondering without the means of acting on my speculations. I remembered my promise to George to forget the whole matter, and felt the odd twinge of guilt. But I am a politician: I am used to breaking promises.

There is always awkwardness involved in calling up an old girlfriend. It's like inviting a guest to a warmed-up meal. I expect Susan felt the same, and that was why she had left plenty of time before she rang to congratulate me on my appointment to government. So I stewed over the matter, got quite clear in my mind how far I wanted to involve her, before I steeled myself, picked up the phone, and rang her at her flat in Greenwich.

“Susan?”

“Oh, Colin.”

Cool, very cool. Well, that was how I wanted it.

“Susan, were you serious about being willing to help me in the matter of how I came into the world?”

I took the ironic, flippant tone because it was the one I felt safest with, though I knew it sometimes irritated Susan when I used it in talking about serious topics.

“Of course I was. It's just up my street.”

“Well,” I had to admit, “this may not be quite what you were expecting.”

“Oh? Why? Have you made progress?”

“I
may
have. All
very
speculative, and probably not something a historian should be looking at yet.”

She immediately became the academic she was.

“I don't like the sound of that. Is this whole business robbing you of your common sense and your analytical brain, Colin?”

“No, it is not, Susan,” I said sharply. “I have good reason for what I'm asking, believe me. What I want is the best—that is the most authentic and detailed—account you can put together of the Lord John Revill affair.”

There was silence at the other end.

“You mean the murder.”

“Yes.”

Susan's voice when she had taken this in was less dampening.

“Well, well. That shouldn't be difficult. It's nicely in my period, and it did contribute to the fall of the Macmillan government. It was part of the crumbling process. Actually, going into it could be quite fascinating.”

“Good. I don't suppose there are any books on the case?”

“Not so far as I know. People may have been put off by the possibility of libel.”

“Libel? Lord John was hardly likely to return from the dead or the South American jungle to bring an action, surely.”

“No. But since there had been no criminal action, no one had been found guilty. Remember there was the nanny, with whom he was supposed to be having an affair. And of course there were the children. No question of libel there, but people may have felt compunction on their account about raking over an old affair like the Revill case.”

Now she was in fantasy land.

“Compunction? Don't make me laugh, Susan. We're talking about hacks and muckrakers. They don't feel compunction.”

“Hmmm. I suppose you could be right. It probably just hasn't attracted a serious historian. Politically it was no more than a warm-up to the Profumo affair. There were attempts to portray it as symptomatic of the moral corruption of the aristocratic circle Macmillan surrounded himself with.”

“I gather he was nepotistic.”

“Very much so, though he loved newspapers to point out he was a Scottish crofter's grandson. It made a good story, and was a case of choosing the ancestor that was most politically useful.”

“Did the Revill affair damage him politically?”

There was silence. Sue didn't give historical judgments lightly.

“Not greatly, so far as I'm aware. The public probably realized it was just a case of people who had got their lives into an emotional mess, and the whole thing had become a powder keg. It was a private matter, even though one of those involved was a politician. If there was political fallout it probably sprang from the disappearance, and the feeling that the aristocracy had closed ranks to frustrate justice taking its course.”

“There could be later newspaper stories on that angle, I suppose?”

“Could be. It sounds like a good topic for one of the color supplements. I'll look into that.”

“So you'll help me, Sue?”

“Raring to go. Do you want me to do anything on the Pinnocks as well?”

I had almost forgotten my own family.

“Only if you can do it easily. No harm in making a few preliminary moves, I suppose. But now I've got the bit between my teeth I'm fascinated by the Revill angle.”

I could almost hear Susan's mind ticking.

“You must wise me up on that when we meet,” she said carefully. “Odd how the aristocracy always gets people in, isn't it? You sound as if you're becoming obsessed with having a second identity. I'm guessing you could probably quote Iago's words: ‘I am not what I am.'”

“Thanks, Sue,” I said, to ring off—dismissively, but feeling I had been warned. “I can't say he's ever been a hero of mine.”

To give Susan her due, she got on with the work at once. It was no more than five or six days later that she rang me to say that she'd got enough material for me to make a start on.