The Yellow Room Conspiracy (16 page)

“But you could divorce him.”

“He won't give me the evidence, and don't tell me I could use this girl. Just think of it in the papers. It would finish him—and it would be almost as horrible for me. And even if it were someone normal, you know, the sort of woman he might have met at a dinner party and fallen in love with … no, I don't mean that … if he'd really fallen in love, of course I would … got besotted with, I suppose … have you got any idea what I'm talking about?”

“Not much.”

“He committed himself to me, because he was a Catholic. He knew what he was doing, that I'd had affairs and so on. I couldn't do less, could I? I promised. I'm not going to break my promise unless he wants me to. I've always known that.”

I thought this extremely pig-headed of her, but I could see she meant it, so I held my tongue. Our second tea arrived, but she'd hardly begun on it when she looked at her watch and rose.

“I've got to go,” she said. “I'll try to talk to Tommy. And Nan. I don't know about Ben—I sort of feel it's her look-out. I'll see what Nan says. Is there anything else?”

“Yes. Most of this is, as you say, not my business, but Gerry seems deliberately to have involved me, and I've a perfect right to ask him why.”

“Oh, please don't. Not yet, anyway—not till I've talked to Nan.”

“If you say so.”

LUCY VIII

June/July 1956

I
'm going to have to do this in more than one go, because several things happened and I can't remember quite in what order. There was talking to Tommy, of course, and Nan, and something else—it'll come to me.

Anyway, talking to Tommy. We hadn't said anything much since we'd talked after the opera, just carried on as usual. Tommy was working appallingly hard. He was away quite a bit, mainly in France and America, trying to get a common front together against Colonel Nasser. It was all very tricky for him because Anthony Nutting, who was officially senior to him at the FO, disapproved of what was going on, and the civil servants at the FO were desperately pro-Arab, which meant anti-Israel, and Selwyn Lloyd, who was Foreign Secretary—I really liked him, not just because he reminded me of the man who kept the sweet-shop in Bury where we were allowed to go if we'd been good on shopping expeditions—Selwyn Lloyd couldn't afford to do too much of the plotting in case things went wrong, and Eden kept changing his mind though he really detested Nasser, and the French were impossible as usual, and the Israelis didn't care what happened to anyone else provided they got what they wanted, and there was Tommy—cold, honourable, reasonable, frightened Tommy—having to act like a shifty kind of middle-man doing dirty deals and knowing that if it all went wrong he'd be the one who got the blame. And on top of all this his marriage was a sham and he was infatuated with a call-girl.

Not that he talked to me about any of this, either. We'd have breakfast together if we were both in town or at Seddon Hall and we'd be perfectly friendly—in fact most of the time we felt like good old friends –and if we talked it would be about the children, or arrangements about cars and dinner parties. Luckily he was too busy for week-end house parties. Of course after what happened I've always been interested in Suez so I've read everything I can about it and even when the books disagree with each other I usually know enough from being on the fringe of it to have a good guess who's right and who's wrong. But at the time all I knew was that Tommy was away a lot and working much too hard and not enjoying it.

In fact I had a better idea what was going on between him and Sammy Whitstable. If he was abrupt and nervous and finished his breakfast early, then I knew he was seeing her that night, and then next day he'd be extra-friendly and relaxed and wanting to know if I was alright. I was glad it was that way round. I've sometimes wondered, suppose earlier on I'd thought of wearing men's clothes and bossing him around—Paul seems to think they went in for whips and things—oh, how can I know? In fact to be absolutely honest I've never really understood why men seem to want me as I am. Me, rather than anyone else, I mean. I just feel I wouldn't, in their shoes. Of course sometimes you can see things which seem to make sense, for instance my own Timmy instead of messing around and trying things out with different girls the way it's so easy for them nowadays struck up with an art student when they were both only nineteen and stayed with her through thick and thin. Her father was a bricklayer at an ironworks, and she still speaks like that—Staffordshire—though she's Lady Seddon now. Tommy thought he'd get tired of her and marry someone suitable, but I'd heard her talking to Timmy the way his nanny used to, as if he wasn't safe to cross the road without having his hand held … where was I? Putting off talking about telling Tommy.

There wasn't that much to it, as a matter of fact. We were at Seddon Hall, in the Breakfast Room, which was modelled on that place where Charlemagne's tomb is but surprisingly cosy despite that, and the sun was streaming in and there were kidneys and bacon and scrambled eggs and mushrooms on the sideboard, so it must have been Saturday morning. I can smell them now.

I said, “I'm afraid there's something I've got to talk to you about.”

He just nodded but he put his paper down, so he must have known it mattered.

“That evening at the opera,” I said. “Do you know why we were there? Gerry rang Paul up almost at the last moment and said he'd got tickets to spare, only when we got there we found they weren't all four together. And Nan was furious all evening, and I think that was because he'd made her come when she didn't want to. Wait. And then a few days ago we had dinner with Janet and Edward, and Edward told Paul he was doing a programme about some nasty property deals, you know, turning old people out of houses, which Michael Allwegg seems to have something to do with, and Gerry works for Michael, and Paul somehow put two and two together and next day he rang up someone he used to know who supplies call-girls because he'd given Gerry her number a bit before, and she pretty well told him that Gerry had asked her for someone special and she'd suggested your friend, and then your friend had suddenly stopped working for her and it was her friends who were trying to get her back that night in Greek Street—I'm afraid that sounds desperately muddled. Do you understand?”

He sighed.

“Well enough,” he said.

“I'm sorry. I know you like Michael,” I said.

He made a little gesture with his hand, telling me to stop talking, and then just sat there staring straight in front of him.

“Very well,” he said at last. “You were no doubt right to tell me. Now it is my turn. I have three things to contribute. All of them are security matters, so I must ask you not to pass them on to Ackerley. Do I have your word?”

“Yes, but you don't have to tell me. I just thought …”

He stopped me again.

“The first thing is about the UFTFA official who dropped out of the dinner party,” he said.

“Mikowicz?” I said. “The playboy?”

“That's the man,” he said. “You remember I was going to have him looked into? David Pottinger tells me that he is thought to be a senior agent in the Yugoslav intelligence service. The other two things are more intimate. You'll remember that when we married you were subjected to a security interview? Other checks were run on your immediate family and close friends, and very much to my surprise I was informed that two of them turned out to be what they called ‘semi-positive', that is to say not above suspicion. They were Ackerley and Grantworth.”

My mouth fell open.

“I have long regarded the suspicions of most security services as largely paranoid,” he said. “So I decided not to pay much attention, particularly as one of the reasons I was given for the suspicion of Grantworth was an obviously bureaucratic bungle involving a double identity.”

“His doppelganger!” I said. “Was it a blue-eyed madman who told you all this? If so, it was me who told him about Gerry's doppelganger. Good Lord!”

“I share your opinion of the man,” said Tommy, “though he carries a lot of weight these days. However, even madmen can occasionally be correct, and David Pottinger now tells me that Mikowicz was a senior member of the partisan group with whom Grantworth worked in the war.”

“Oh,” I said. “Anyway, I still think he's potty. His bonnet's all bees. Did he tell you I couldn't be trusted either?”

“Not in so many words,” said Tommy. “But that was the third thing.”

“And you still went ahead and married me?” I said.

“I chose to,” he said. “I felt I needed to. I wish it had worked out better.”

“Oh, so do I!” I said. “Do you think …?”

“No,” he said.

His body gave a little jerk, as though it wanted to jump up and rush out of the room, but he'd managed to stop it.

“I'm afraid not,” he said in his Foreign Office voice. “I think we have burnt our boats. I'm sorry.”

“I'm sorry too,” I said. I managed not to start crying—he'd have hated that. I thought of telling him there must be ways of building another boat, but then I thought not.

So I let him go back to his newspaper and finished my breakfast and just squeezed his hand when I left the room.

I did that yesterday. The upsetting bits are extra tiring. But in the middle of the night I remembered the other bit I've got to get in, about David Fish, so I'll do that before I go on about talking to Nan, which might be upsetting too.

Well, David rang, out of the blue, and asked me to lunch. He sounded really embarrassed about it, but he managed to make it clear that he wasn't just hoping to get things going again between him and me. He said he was in a silly mess and he needed my help. I'd always felt a bit guilty about David, as if I'd used him, twice, without him really having a say, so I agreed. He gave me directions. I had to go to a pub in the City, go through the Saloon Bar as if I was going to the loos, and then up some dark stairs, two floors, where there'd be a door with a “Private” notice on it.

I did that, getting more and more inquisitive. The bar was rowdy with large men lunching off double gins, and the stairs reeked of grease and gravy, but the room was fascinating, with really old panelling and diamond-pattern windows, the real thing with old wavy glass. You could easily imagine Restoration rake-hells getting roaring drunk in there and then going out to beat up any honest citizens who had the bad luck to meet them. David was there before me. He had taken a picture off the wall and was peering at the panelling behind it.

“Shan't be a mo,” he said, but then he made a mess of getting the picture back on its hook and I had to help him.

“The trouble is I don't know what I'm looking for,” he said. “I think we'll just have to assume it's OK. Have some lunch. It's all cold, so we don't get interrupted.”

He was gabbling, so I sat down and helped myself to cold beef and salad, slowly, to give him a chance to pull himself together. When he was ready too I smiled at him, doing my best to look wise and calm and comforting, and said, “Well, how can I help?”

“That dinner party,” he said. “Janet, your sister, she said something about what you were doing after Halford Hall closed down.”

“Janet gets pretty well everything wrong,” I said. “Anyway, I'm not supposed to talk about it.”

“I don't want you to,” he said. “I'm just hoping you can tell me somebody I can go to, because I'm in a mess.”

“What sort of mess?” I said. “I won't tell anyone else. I promise.”

“Thanks,” he said. “I'd certainly rather you didn't. Actually, I can't think of anyone else I could talk to, because you'll understand. Well, let's get it over. Earlier this year I went to Yugoslavia for a fortnight. I don't know if you remember, but I'm a Roman Empire fanatic and I didn't just want to go to the obvious places like Split, which they've started to open up. I wanted to get there before they started to spoil things with all the tourists. The trouble was, the Yugoslavs weren't at all keen. They don't like us going where we can't be watched. I wasn't getting anywhere, and I moaned about it to everyone I met, and then, out of the blue, the Yugoslav Embassy—not the Tourist Board—rang me up and said they actually wanted someone like me to go and have a look round at places which they might open up for archaeological tours, because they needed the foreign currency. They didn't just give me a visa and permits, they laid on a courier for me. Obviously that was so they could have me watched, but I didn't mind. I wasn't planning to do any spying, and I just thought it would be nice to have someone along who spoke the language, provided we got on alright. Which we did. In fact—this is what I mean about you being the only person I don't mind telling this to—Anna turned out to be a good deal more than your ordinary courier.”

He peered at me slyly through his great thick glasses, waiting for me to laugh, which I did. The funny thing about David was that though he was absolutely not an Adonis and pretty wet in most ways, he was rather good in bed—fairly simple, but enjoying himself a lot and seeing that you did too.

“Sounds like a perfect holiday,” I said.

“It was,” he said. “At least I thought so at the time. We talked quite a bit about how to get her over to England, and I was going to go back and see her again as soon as I could. I've never felt so happy. I've been purring all summer. Then a few evenings ago a chap turned up at my door and showed me a photograph, just of me and Anna having a picnic. I remembered exactly when it happened. There was this man pushing his bicycle up the path through the olives and he stopped to chat and we asked him to take our photograph with Anna's camera, so of course I assumed this other fellow came from her.”

“Was he a Yugoslav too?” I asked.

“Well, if he was, he was a terrific actor. He looked a bit like an undertaker's assistant, professionally gloomy you know, but he talked a cut above that, like an estate agent in a dingy suburb, or a solicitor's clerk, or something. Of course I invited him in. Then he took out some more photographs. Me and Anna.”

“In bed?” I said.

“And other places,” he said. “You've no idea how empty that part of the world can be. She found some wonderful beaches. I thought we had them completely to ourselves. She showed me a lot of things you can do which I didn't know. They've got pictures of all that happening, and you can always see it's me. And there's some of us just doing touristy things in front of places you can recognise and see it's Yugoslavia.”

“What do they want you to do?” I said. “Spy for them? I wouldn't have thought …”

“Nothing like that,” he said. “I don't know anything. But there was this ghastly little man—he had a great big signet ring on one hand and he kept rapping it with his knuckle and saying “Hot stuff, eh, Mr Fish. Hot stuff. You wouldn't want that coming out, would you?” I asked him what he wanted. I thought it was going to be money and I'd already decided to tell him to go to hell, but he said “Just a little co-operation, Mr Fish. Just a little co-operation on the international money markets. We're not asking anything illegal.”