The Yellow Room Conspiracy (12 page)

I danced with some of the men. They held me close against them, but they were pretty good, and the band was terrific. One of the men asked me how long I'd known Michael. I said off and on for years. He said (I can't do the accent), “He's a good boy. Fine lawyer. Done well for my nephew, well as anyone could of, in the circs. Just so long as he doesn't get too clever. You can tell him that, from me.”

I did, on the way home, and Michael laughed. He was pleased.

“Was all that food and drink black market?” I said.

“What do you think?” he said.

Sorry, I've gone astray. It was this business of belonging, of being a piece of property he could do what he liked with - why did we put up with it?

Of course he could be charming—I've said that. It got him off to a good start with people. But it wasn't ordinary charm. You felt that at once. There was something dangerous about it, like a purring tiger. He liked talking, and he was really interesting because he seemed to know such a lot, especially about what was going on, the real underneath reasons of things, money of course, but politics too, and arty things. He gobbled books, the way he ate. He used to lie in my bath with the hot water trickling in to keep it scalding and read a whole novel in an hour, and get out and know what he thought about it by the time he'd towelled himself down. He was interesting in another way too, in himself, I mean. You felt that there was a lot to find out about him, but you'd have to be very careful doing the finding.

He threw money about because he liked looking generous, but he could be really mean as well. It all depended on whether he thought meanness or generosity would get him what he wanted, which was usually getting someone else to do something they'd have preferred not to. One time he told me he was tired of my wardrobe and I must get myself everything new. I told him he'd have to pay for it because I was saving up to buy myself a TR2. (He knew this already.)

He said, “Don't be stupid. Just put the bills in the waste-paper basket. There's plenty of dressmakers who'd pay to be able to tell people you're wearing their stuff.”

“That's why I won't let them,” I said.

I remember how he looked at me. I knew I was digging my heels in and this was something he couldn't make me do. He knew too. And the very next week my agent told me that a series of advertisements for one of the new synthetics had been cancelled. I'd rather been counting on them. They would have been the final dollop of money for the TR. My agent was very angry about it. She said the reasons she'd been told didn't make sense. It just happened that I knew a girl at the advertising agency well enough to ring her up at home and ask her if she knew anything and she nosed around and rang back and told me that one of the directors had suddenly descended on them, though he hadn't got anything at all to do with that account, and said his wife was tired of my face. This was even more baffling, because I'd actually met the woman at the ballet one evening. Michael had introduced me to her. It was a new ballet company and he was on the board, and so was she.

She was a vague-looking, fluty-arty old girl, and I thought she'd hardly noticed me because she was so busy loving the way Michael was buttering her up.

At first I thought she must simply have taken against me then, for some reason, but then, well, I'd told Michael about the ads being cancelled and he'd pretended not to be interested, which was usual, but when I told him about the director's wife I must have caught him by surprise, because just for a flicker of a half second he gave me a furious look before he said “What balls. The man's a shit. He's just making excuses. He probably wants you for himself. I'll ask her about it.” And then he was specially nice to me for the rest of the evening.

I still don't know whether he'd fixed the whole thing up to punish me for not doing what he wanted about my clothes, but I think so now. I didn't at first. I suppose I couldn't imagine anyone being that mean, but you live and learn. But even then the whole business of him trying to make me get my dresses without paying for them was one of the things—the women at that party had been another—one of the things which were making me feel I'd better stop seeing him, if I could find a way how. That sounds stupid, but to be honest I was afraid of him. I wonder whether he had actually guessed I wanted to stop, because of the way he behaved when Tommy Seddon proposed.

Before I go on with that I'd better admit—though you've probably guessed by now—that all this was the reason why I behaved so badly at Father's funeral. That's another thing I'm really ashamed of, or rather it's part of the same thing. It wasn't even that I knew Ben was making a terrible mistake and I couldn't tell her. I'm afraid the fact is I was jealous of her, not just that she was taking on one of my old lovers, and he'd actually proposed to her, which he never had to me, though there was all that. But what I was really afraid of in my heart of hearts was that she'd be able to cope with him, understand him, not just what he was up to but what he was really like inside. She'd be the one who opened the Bluebeard door and got away with it. Anyone else and I'd have been cheering them on, but not Ben.

Well, Tommy proposed. By letter, typically. Old Lord Seddon was dead now. They found him on the West Terrace with his neck broken. He must have been climbing out to try and get to the Oval for his test match, though there was snow on the ground. So Tommy was in the House of Lords making speeches about foreign affairs and everyone was saying he was a coming man. The proposal came out of the blue though I'd been seeing a fair bit of him because Michael and he were rather cronies (though you wouldn't have thought they'd got a bit in common, but Michael was like that and so, I found out later, was Tommy) but he'd given no sign.

When the post came Michael was on his rowing machine. This was a wooden affair with enormous creaking springs which he'd insisted on bringing to my flat, where it took up most of the spare bedroom. The letter came in a lovely thick House of Lords envelope so I picked it up off the doormat and opened it in the passage to see what it was, and laughed aloud.

The creaking and puffing stopped.

“What's up?” said Michael.

“Tommy Seddon's asked me to marry him,” I said. He rowed a few more strokes and stopped again.

“Not a bad idea,” he said. “He needs a wife. You'd fit the bill.”

“What about me, for heaven's sake!” I said.

“What were you proposing to do with yourself?” he said. “Wait till you fall in love with someone?”

“That sort of thing,” I said.

“Indeed?” he said.

No, he didn't say it, he sneered it, a real lawyer's sneer, the sort that's supposed to make witnesses stammer and contradict themselves. He went on rowing. I read the letter again.

It was rather charming, old-fashioned without being pompous. He didn't say he loved me. I approved of that.

“You actually want me to marry Tommy Seddon?” I said.

“Nothing to do with me,” he said.

“If I marry anyone I'm going to be faithful to them,” I said.

“I'm delighted to hear it,” he said.

I only just stopped myself from saying something about him being tired of me, which was the sort of barmaidish kind of thing you found yourself saying, almost as if he made you so that he could despise you for it. That's what he wanted, I'm pretty sure, to despise me, and I didn't quite let him. Anyway he got off his rowing machine and came and stood over me. I knew he wasn't going to hit me—it would have been almost a relief if he had—but it was still difficult not to feel frightened.

“I've told you it's nothing to do with me,” he said. “But since you seem to want my opinion I think you would be extremely stupid not to marry Tommy Seddon. You would be as happy married to him as you would to anyone else. Your style of looks will go out of fashion in a year or two. As Tommy's wife you would have a reasonable certainty of being comfortable.”

“I'd have to tell him about you,” I said.

“He knows,” he said.

Then he went and sponged himself off with cold water and got dressed. I was running my bath so I didn't hear him leave. When I got back from work that evening I found his rowing machine and everything else of his gone, and his key on the mat. (I bet he'd had a spare cut, though, before he gave it back.)

I didn't answer Tommy's letter at once. After a few days he telephoned me. I told him I'd been very surprised and I still didn't know what to say. He asked me to dinner at his club, which was the Athenaeum. I made no bones about how unsuitable I thought I was, and the sort of life I'd been living, though I didn't mention anyone by name. He just said, “I was aware of that. I thought perhaps you might like to settle down.”

I told him I'd think about it. We went to a play or two. Our dinners together got less stiff. I heard him speak in the House of Lords, about China. He was extremely good. He showed me his house in Eaton Square, and I went over from Blatchards and spent a whole day (and it took a whole day!) going round Seddon Hall. Outside the absurd downstairs rooms it was a surprisingly friendly-feeling house, full of ingenious convenient Victorian arrangements. Perhaps it was that that made me say Yes. I made him come to bed with me before we announced the engagement, which he disapproved of. He'd never done it before, believe it or not, but we just about managed and I thought I could teach him. It's funny how easy it is to make that mistake.

The other snag was that Tommy was a Catholic. Apparently the Seddons always were, right back to the Reformation, but they didn't make a fuss about it, in fact old Lord Seddon's real religion was cricket, and most of the time it seemed as if Tommy's was foreign affairs, but deep down inside he'd got sticking-points. I was the usual automatic C of E—if I'd really bothered to think about it ever I wouldn't have believed it—and I suppose Tommy thought it wouldn't be much of an effort for me to switch over to the same sort of automatic RC one day, but all we'd agreed at the time was that though we couldn't have a full-dress Catholic wedding because of me not being one, so in the eyes of the Church we weren't really married, in his eyes we still were and he wasn't going to divorce me if things went wrong, but he wouldn't hold me to that—though of course I said Sauce for the goose and made the same promise.

So we got married in our church and had a terrific society wedding from Blatchards (which Tommy paid for most of though we let everyone think it was all Father) and we settled down and things went rather well for a bit. I got pregnant twice and had a daughter and a son. I'm afraid I was never very interested in them when they were children, but Mother was besotted on them so they spent a lot of time at Blatchards, and Harriet found a jolly Nanny for them who they soon loved much better than me, and quite right too. Years later Rowena told me she used to pray that I'd die of something quick and painless so that Tommy could marry Nanny and they could be a proper family. Actually that might have worked very well.

Paul's unfair to Tommy. He was a really nice man, completely honourable and always fair to me. There've only been two men in my life I felt I could totally trust. Paul's one and Tommy was the other. What happened a few years later was a kind of madness, coming out from deep inside him, from long ago, probably before he could remember. I sometimes think that if I'd been able to love him it mightn't have happened, but I couldn't, and that was my fault. I've never loved anyone, not like that, except possibly Father. I don't know how. It's a bit like religion. You go to church and you go to church and nothing happens so you read books about Christ's love for us all and how marvellous it is when you feel it and you try again and still nothing happens. And then you give up.

Anyway Tommy wasn't like Paul says, and not like the Vicky cartoons either. I really hated them, because at home he was friendly and funny and not at all pompous. He was good with the children, especially when they were small, and really delighted to have an heir, but for some reason he found the whole business of pregnancy terribly disturbing and second time round he stopped wanting to come to bed with me. That went on after Timmy was born, but it took me a bit of time to realise he was having to grit his teeth before he could touch me. The Conservatives had won a General Election and Churchill was PM and Tommy was Lord Seneschal, which is one of those weird left-over offices from the days when kings had proper courts. He didn't have any seneschalling to do, whatever that is, and the only thing I remember about that side of it is that if he visited Warwick all the church bells had to be rung and the Mayor had to present him with a pair of satin slippers (we got them made my size, of course). The real point was that he was a government minister, part of the Foreign Office team, and among other things helped look after FO business in the House of Lords, so he was usually late enough home to have an excuse for sleeping in his dressing-room.

PAUL VII

Spring 1956

O
ne of the still continuing tedia of having been involved in the so-called Seddon Affair is the reaction of strangers as soon as they make the connection. Two questions invariably pass through their minds: Did I meet Sammy Whitstable? Was I one of those who made use of her services? Few people in fact bring themselves to the point of asking either question, but I don't think I'm being over-sensitive. I am sure that had I been one of these outsiders I would feel the same curiosity. Notoriety has that effect. It is only human to wish to know how far reality coincides with myth.

The answers in my case are (1) Barely (2) No. I was however involved in other ways. Soon after Lord Vereker's funeral, and before my lunch with Lucy, Gerry telephoned. We chatted briefly and then he said, “Look, I don't like doing this, but I'm in a minor fix. If you can't help, or don't want to, which is much the same thing in this case, forget it. That job you did in Cairo, nursemaiding people like me, finding us things to do in the evenings …”

“Yes?”

“I take it there were some who demanded rather more exotic entertainment than I did … I'm sorry, old man. You may find this deeply unpleasant …”

Old man? I suppressed my amusement with a snort, which he misinterpreted. It was somehow typical of him to be so out of his depth in this kind of thing that his embarrassment should result in such false notes. Not that he didn't have cause for embarrassment. As he'd suggested, I might well have told him bluntly that I couldn't help him, but as it happened there was a wartime acquaintance with whom I'd had to get in touch a few months earlier, for the benefit of an unpleasant Dutchman whose help I needed.

“It's all right,” I said. “I know how you feel. One gets stuck with these things. What does the fellow want? Male or female? Not straightforward, I take it?”

“Yes, that's about it. Female.”

“Money no object?”

“Not much. I don't know what the limit might be.”

“The equivalent of shopping at Harrods, say?”

“That should do.”

“Try a woman called Isobel Mudge. You'll think you've got a wrong number—she has one of those Dresden Shepherdess voices and a remarkable command of euphemisms, but she keeps her side of a bargain. Incidentally, you'd better keep yours—she's got some pretty tough friends. Tell her Mr Charles put you on to her. If she can't help I don't know anyone else.”

I gave him the number and he started to thank me.

“Forget it,” I said. “These things happen. Incidentally, why did you need to come to me? I'd have thought in the course of your work with Michael …

“I don't want to involve Michael,” he said quickly. “But thanks. I'll pay you back some day, somehow.”

“You can get me a ticket for the Saturday of the Lord's Test. They've made a cock-up over mine.”

“Do my best.”

I barely thought about it again, being almost at once taken up with renewing my affair with Lucy. A clandestine relationship, such as ours now needed to be, is much more energy-consuming than a publicly acknowledged one. The expansion of my company, leading to the flotation to which I've already referred, had involved my acquisition of two related businesses when I could only comfortably assimilate one, but I had been forced to take on both or miss the opportunity. I had intended to leave the second one to carry on as it had been doing while I absorbed the first, but I now found that its management had been so cowed by its previous owner, a forceful but erratic autocrat, that they were unable to reach decisions on their own. To make things worse it was clear that Lucy and I were going to get very few evenings together, as hers were mostly taken up with her public duties as wife of the Lord Seneschal, and her week-ends were tied to Seddon Hall. Her solution was to enrol herself for a series of Cordon Bleu cookery classes. Seddon's chauffeur would drop her at the door every Thursday. She would go in, copy down the day's menu, leave and catch a taxi to my flat, where we might look the dishes up and perhaps attempt to cook one if I had the ingredients—I have always been a fair cook—but usually we spent most of the time we had in bed.

This was another, and I think to both of us regrettable, difference from our previous affair, which had had time in it for much pleasurable companionship, talk and silences, activities and loiterings, plans and purposes and accidents—all part of the process of being in love. Now all that there seemed to be room for was our time together in bed. That was overwhelmingly necessary, for Lucy, I came to think, even more than for me. She never referred to it, but I soon realised that there must be something seriously amiss between her and Seddon, though she always spoke of him with an odd mixture of warmth and regret. Afterwards she would take a cab to Knightsbridge, do some perfunctory shopping to account for the rest of her afternoon, and go back to Eaton Square. I would return to my desk and work late to make up for lost time, though well aware that my absences were inconvenient for my staff.

No sooner had our renewed affair begun than Lucy telephoned me at work and asked me to come to a formal dinner next day at Eaton Square. Astonished, I demurred, but she begged me.

“Tommy suggested you himself,” she said. “He's a terrible fusser about numbers, and someone's fallen out, and we've got this French minister's wife coming who doesn't speak any English and lets everyone know if she isn't enjoying herself, but she'll eat out of your hand. Please.”

“I don't think it's a good idea,” I said.

“It's all right. I promise. Or I wouldn't ask. I have to do what I can for him, don't you see? Please.”

Very uncomfortably I gave in, and found the evening much less dreadful than I had expected. The sheer formality, which was considerable—white ties and stiff shirts, medals, footmen, a partner to take in to dinner on one's arm, seating by protocol, of course—created a complete barrier, or seal, between the occasion and normal life. The minister's wife turned out to be an opera fanatic, which kept us going all evening.

“Tommy was delighted,” Lucy told me later. “If it hadn't been you it would have had to be Colonel Brent, who doesn't speak French and can only talk about breeding pointers.”

“Why did it have to be anyone?”

“It's got to be eighteen. 4x + 2 is the magic formula, so that he can sit at the head and I can sit at the foot with everyone paired off down the sides, and there isn't room for twenty-two and Tommy says fourteen looks mingy. He's a bit obsessive about numbers and things. I oughtn't to tell you this, but it makes me laugh. He has all his socks marked with a red tag sewn into one of each pair, so that he knows which foot it goes on. Some of his socks are made with separate big toes, so it makes sense with them, sort of, but he likes it done with all of them. Of course sometimes someone drops out at the absolute last minute. There was one poor chap from the ministry who slipped on the ice outside our front door and broke his ankle and Tommy was still grumbling about it at breakfast next day, saying he could have come to the dinner first and gone off to hospital afterwards. It was a joke, of course—he's a very kind man under that shell—but a tiny bit of him meant it too.”

“How did that evening go?”

“Perfectly well. Even Tommy admitted that. But he still wasn't happy.”

“You must get some pretty odd pairings with all this barrel-scraping.”

“Do we not! But he doesn't mind that, in fact he rather likes it. There's a bit of him, you see, which is in revolt against all this. I'm not sure that isn't why he wanted to marry me. He thought I could give him a kind of wildness … I don't know. Anyway, I'm sure it's why he puts up with Michael Allwegg … The trouble is Tommy says I'm to put you on my list, so you're going to have to think up some first-rate excuses if you don't want to come.”

“Have you tried Gerry? He's alone in London fairly often.”

“He came once and said never again. I'm keeping him till I'm absolutely desperate.”

“How much does your husband know? About us, I mean?”

“He knows about before, of course. We didn't try and hide it, did we? Not about now.”

“Well, I don't like it, but I'll do it if you genuinely need me. I find I have oddly primitive objections to taking the bread of a man whom I am at the same time in some sense betraying.”

“Do you really? How very strange. I wonder if I'd feel like that. All right, I won't ask you, though I'm afraid he's bound to suggest you again.”

This turned out to be the case. Indeed my success with the minister's wife meant that Seddon had now marked me down not simply as a possible stop-gap but as a useful primary guest, single, cultured, sociable and fluent in both French and German. I excused myself a couple of times on the grounds of pressure of work, but then Lucy began to worry that it might begin to seem that I had other reasons for staying away, so reluctantly I agreed to accept the next invitation.

The occasion turned out to be even stiffer than the previous one, with minor Balkan ex-royalty present, resulting in a definite air of tension which I didn't fully understand. The mix of guests contained some obvious oddities. As we settled into our places I noticed a young man on the other side of the table and two along, slight and decidedly handsome, with an air of swagger, or panache, even when seated and making the first self-introductions to the woman on his left. Neat features, pale face, blue eyes, strong black brows and well-groomed coarse black hair worn rather long for that period. I paid no attention at first, conversing during the hors d'oeuvres with the Austrian on my left and turning formally when the soup was brought to attend to my neighbour on my right. This was a Frenchwoman, the wife of a Greek diplomat, middle-aged, plain-featured but svelte, formidable, but sufficiently pleased by my speaking French to have unbent a little as I escorted her in to dinner. Now she had hardly acknowledged my approaches before she made a tiny gesture with her head and muttered,
“Le jeune homme là-bas, c'est une femme, n'est-ce-pas?”

I glanced, took a mouthful, glanced again. Yes. The girl was turned towards her far-side neighbour, so I was seeing her in profile. No doubt she was less conscious of how she might look from that angle, but even so I don't know that I would have seen through her disguise without my neighbour's prompting.

“Effectivement,” I answered. “Je pense que vous avez raison. Un pari, peut-etre?”

“De la part de qui? Notre hôte un joueur? Ii ne me semble pas le genre. Lady Seddon non plus.”

I might have expected her to be affronted, but she was clearly amused. Perhaps the intricacies of Greek diplomacy had accustomed her to off-beat events, and it was their emergence at the stuffier end of the British social scene that she found piquant. She dropped the subject and began to question me about how I had learnt my French, then moved on to further probings till the fish arrived and I reverted to the Austrian. By then I had become aware that the Frenchwoman and I were not the only ones to have noticed, and by the time the course was cleared the vague tension of the dinner party had been tightened up a notch along my side of the table, with variations of anxiety, excitement, and amusement. In the lull before the meat a footman delivered a folded note to the girl. She opened it, blushed scarlet, and was for a second or two very obviously not what she was pretending to be, in fact neither man nor woman, but a child caught out. She recovered herself, spoke briefly to her neighbours, rose, made a stiff little bow to Lucy, and walked towards the door, which was behind Seddon's place.

I had assumed that it was he who had written the note, but he seemed to realise that something was amiss only as she was coming towards him. He too rose, solicitous, perhaps thinking one of his guests was ill, perhaps worried by being about to be one short of his totemic guest-number. I'm afraid that we were all watching avidly. One stout bald man with a lot of foreign decorations had half risen from his chair for a better view. Seddon still seemed, as he accompanied her to the door, to be assuming that his guest was a man, but as he opened it for her she turned to him, put her hand on his arm and deliberately dropped her disguise. I don't know how she did it, but even from where I sat there was no mistaking that this was an attractive, indeed seductive, young woman.

Seddon started. His jaw literally dropped. For a moment the whole carapace of his diplomatic manner fell away. Laughing with teasing glee at his discomposure she slipped a card into his breast-pocket, kissed her fingers to the company and vanished. Seddon resumed his mask of calm as he closed the door and returned to the table. The rest of the evening was considerably less interesting. Naturally I asked Lucy, at our next meeting, about the incident, but she told me she wasn't supposed to talk about it so I left it alone.

A few days later Gerry rang.

“I'll be sending round your ticket for Lord's,” he said.

“Good for you. What did you make of Mrs Mudge?”

“She wasn't able to help.”

“Sorry about that.”

“Not your fault. Are you going to the new Turandot?”

“I went last night.”

“Pity. I've got two spare tickets for the twelfth. Some friends of Nan fell through. Seddon will be at this Chequers Conference so we could see if Lucy's free. Nan would be there to give the occasion respectability.”

Lucy, I already knew, would be free. With Seddon away she and I had planned to spend the night together. The offer was extremely tempting.

“I wouldn't mind hearing Turandot again,” I said. “Excellent. I'll get Nan to try Lucy.”

The seats, it turned out, were not together, but in two pairs separated by several rows. Gerry apologised and made mumblings about how we should arrange ourselves.

“I'll sit with Paul,” said Lucy firmly, and as we settled into our places she whispered, “I'm sick of creeping around.”