The Yellow Room Conspiracy (17 page)

“No dice,” I told him. “You aren't going to find a paper prepared to publish muck like this, and it wouldn't do me much harm if you did.”

“I mean, who'd mind? It's not as if I'm married or anything. But the fellow just tut-tutted and tapped his bloody ring and said, “That's as may be, Mr Fish. But you wouldn't want Mr Jules Okers in New York, as a for instance, finding one of these in his breakfast mail with a note about it all happening on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Would you, now?”

“That shook me. It's no use my trying to explain how I earn my living, but the point is that it all depends on trust. I work on very fine margins, two or three hundredths of a point, maybe, and all over the telephone. So you've got to be sure that the chap at the other end will stick to exactly what he's said he'll do, and he's got to know the same about you. Jules Okers is one of the people I deal with in New York. He's an out-and-out anti-communist. Rabid is not too strong a word. I had no intention of letting him know I'd even been the other side of the Iron Curtain, let alone that I'd had an affair with a woman who turned out to be an agent of the secret police. Maybe I could talk Jules round, maybe not, but suppose I can't, suppose he's got even the beginnings of a doubt about me, then I'm in trouble. He'll pass the word round, and it might take me years to get back to where lam now. If ever.”

“Where did this man come from?” I said. “How did he know?”

“I've no idea,” he said. “I'm just telling you what happened. Well, it shook me when he mentioned Jules, and I let him see it—I'm not much of an actor, I'm afraid. All I could do was ask him again what he wanted. “Just you sit tight for the mo, Mr Fish,” he said. “I'll be leaving you the snaps as a reminder. Nice to see young people enjoying themselves, I always say. If you want copies, we've got the negs, right? And we'll be in touch when we need you. Don't come to the door. I'll let myself out.” And off he went. I haven't heard from him since.”

“What do you think he wants?” I said. “Did he really mean it wasn't illegal? I mean, why bother. …”

“Good Lord,” he said. “I'm sometimes not sure if some of the things I do are legal. They haven't been tested in the courts yet. The exchange controls are a total maze, but I do know my way round most of it. That's the whole point. Suppose you got wind there was going to be a great run on sterling on such and such a date, you couldn't just go to your bank and borrow a few million quid and buy dollars with it, with an option to buy your sterling back the day after the run. You'd have to come to someone like me. You'd need to put some money down—if we're talking millions, a couple of hundred thousand would do it—and then I could put the deal through for you on the back of other transactions in such a way that provided you took your profit in sterling the whole thing was still inside the rules. Mind you, I'd have to set it up. The people I deal with are extremely sharp. I can't just ask Jules Okers, say, to take a great block of sterling off me out of the blue. He'd smell a rat at once. I'd need to have been doing things before that which made it look like part of my normal pattern of dealing, and I'd have to have what looked like reasons for that pattern, and so on. I could do it, but I doubt if there are more than half a dozen other people in the City who could. They must have known that when they set this up.”

“Who are ‘they'?” I said.

“The Yugoslavs, I assume,” he said. “Probably not their central bank, more likely some security outfit operating on its own. They're always hungry for hard currency. Much more use to them, if they could bring it off, than stealing plans of the latest fighter. Anyway, it's all academic, because I'm not going to do what they want. I don't get angry very easily, you know, but I'm really angry about this. After that bastard had gone I burnt all the photographs except the one of the picnic and I sat looking at it and thinking about Anna. There was one particular beach I couldn't get out of my mind. We swam, and fooled around in the water and took our towels up onto the sand and she made a fuss about choosing a really lucky place—laughing about it, fey, excited—at least that's what I thought, only now I know she was making sure we were in a good light and at a good angle so that the beggar on top of the rocks could get a nice clear picture of us, showing exactly who I was and what we were up to, when all I was thinking was what fun we were having, and it was just us, and just for each other. I'm never going to have another holiday like that, and now I haven't even got that. They've ruined it. I don't want just to tell them to go to hell. I want to get back at them somehow.”

“I bet they blackmailed her into it,” I said.

“I've thought of that,” he said. “I hope so, but it isn't enough. How can I get them to eat their own dirt, that's what I want to know.”

“What about Mr Okers?” I said.

“That's why I came to you,” he said. “I'd still like to keep it quiet, and I'd like those negatives destroyed. But most of all I want to make things hot for whoever cooked up this idiot idea, and I thought the first place to start might be by finding someone sympathetic in our own security set-up. Do you know anyone?”

“Oh dear,” I said. “It's been a long time. Actually—I don't usually talk about this—I'm the wrong person, because I was sacked. I blotted my copybook and broke the rules and they decided they couldn't trust me any more. I do know one man who's still there. He's pretty-high up now. But I don't like him, in fact I think he's mad, and I wouldn't trust him an inch. How difficult. The only thing I can think of, and I'd have to ask Tommy first because I mustn't go behind his back, is that you could try David Pottinger. I don't know him very well, and he hasn't got any small-talk, but I think he's probably alright. He's Foreign Office, but he's the one Tommy talks to about security things. I wish I knew him better. I've a sort of hunch he might be upset about all the sex. You never know.”

He thought about it and shook his head.

“Not if it means going through your husband,” he said. “I'm sorry … nothing personal, but …”

I've forgotten to say that during our brief fling after the Ascot party David kept asking me to marry him. Now I just smiled as understandingly as I could and told him that was all I could think of for the moment, but if anything came to me I'd let him know. We talked about it a bit more, and then other things—he wanted to know all about Janet, for some reason—and only when he was helping me into my coat did he go back to the Anna business.

“You won't tell anyone about this, will you?” he said. “I mean, not anyone.”

It was the way he said it. I realised he was talking about Paul, as well as Tommy. So he must have guessed. I didn't think we'd been that obvious, or else he'd got much brighter about that sort of thing than when I'd known him before.

This is actually three days later. Paul had to go away and it was a new nurse came in, one with a button-holey eager look—I bet her lace curtains never stop twitching when she's at home—and I didn't want her listening outside the door while I was rambling on about family things. At least it's a relief having him away doing something else, not brooding and remembering and writing it down all day. The last lot he did he didn't come to bed till four in the morning. I've tried to get him to stop. I've told him I think it's bad for him. He just said, “I've got to get it over.” I feel like that too, really, I suppose, though I'm not obsessed by it the way he is. Nothing's going to be ordinary again until we've finished.

Well, this bit is going to be mainly about Nan. I'm going to have to go back, though. After I got married I still used to try and get home most weeks—back to Blatchards, I mean. When the children happened I had the excuse of taking them over from Seddon Hall to see Mother—they adored her just as much as she adored them—though I'd tell myself and anyone else who was listening what a chore it was. But even if they were ill, or Mother was away, I still used to do it, out of habit, really. I don't think I really enjoyed going that much, certainly not every time, and quite often I'd drive away feeling cross with myself, unsatisfied, like one of those dreams where you know something interesting or exciting is just about to happen and then you wake up realising you've missed it, and you can't even remember what.

Mother got a Shetland pony for Rowena, not a bad little brute as Shetlands go, only it didn't. I mean it liked standing much better than walking—not that it mattered because Rowena was far too small to do anything except perch. So I'd leave them and Nanny to the riding lessons (in the coach-house if it was raining, which Mother had cleared out much to Nan and Gerry's irritation as it meant they had to find somewhere else to store a lot of accumulated junk which no one could bring themselves to throw out) and I'd go down and see what Nan was up to now.

I think I've said something about the way people change, mostly you don't notice, only years too late you realise that Harry who you've written down as larky and odd, but worthwhile, because that's how he used to be, has actually been a bitchy, selfish old nuisance since you don't know when. But some people let you see them changing, almost on purpose, as if they were tired of who they'd been so far and now they were going to be someone else, and they wanted everyone to know, like sending out change-of-address cards.

Nan was that sort. When we were growing up she was always Top Girl, despite Harriet being the bossy one. In fact, because Mother was such a bouncer and flouncer, a sort of perpetual teenage hoyden, I think we subconsciously elected Nan to play Mother instead. She was just much more suitable. I was still a Junior when Nan left school, and Juniors were all sat down to write their letters home after Sunday Chapel, so I used to write a tidy page-and-just-over to Father and Mother and use the rest of the time scrawling page after page to Nan, and she always answered. (Mother usually forgot.)

Most teenage girls spend half their time longing to be grown up and the other half longing to slink back and be little girls again, but Nan was grown up as soon as she decided to be, poised and smart and going to dances and looking at least three years older than she really was. That made things easier for the rest of us.

Then the war came, splitting us all up, and then she married Dick and went to America and tried being smart-set rich for a bit (which I bet she did perfectly), and I still used to write pages to her every now and then and she'd always answer. And then she seemed to get bored with that and came back to England and took a deep breath and changed again. It happened just about when she set up at Blatchards with Gerry. At first she used to go up to London most weeks to be with him but she soon stopped doing that and pretty well only went up to buy things she couldn't get in Bury. She wore practically no make-up and stopped having her hair cut and permed and put it up into a bun and wore polo-necks and slacks most of the time, and so on. But she was always clean and neat, and if she had to dress up she did it properly.

In fact that was one thing about Nan that didn't change. Whatever she was doing or being, she did it properly. She was never mad about horses, like Mother, but she rode really well. And when she came back to England she brought the Ferrari Dick had given her and drove it incredibly fast, but you felt just as safe with her as if it had been a Morris Minor. And so on. So now she started taking on the sort of jobs we'd always been brought up to believe only Mr Chad could do, or you had to get in proper workmen for, because people like us didn't know how, and certainly not if we were women.

Father hated change and Mother couldn't be bothered, so when Nan moved in a lot of the rooms hadn't been decorated since before the First War. She tried a local firm, found out what it would cost and decided she and Mr Chad could do it between them, which they did. Then Gerry started complaining about the hot water in the West Wing, which was where they mostly lived because those were the nicest rooms, only the old gas-plant, which was right away in the Brew House, didn't usually produce enough gas for the West Wing boiler, so the thing about the hot water in the West Wing was that there wasn't any most of the time. Nan decided to put in a separate oil system. She got estimates and told Gerry she couldn't afford it. Gerry went on complaining. (This was their first real set of rows, at least that I was aware of.) In the end Nan bought a book and designed her own heating system. She hired a professional to check it, and then hired a retired plumber and worked as his mate until he got sick, when she took over herself—plumbing's dead simple if you've got the tools, she said—and in the end she put in two new bathrooms and a spare loo as well as the central heating, hiring the plasterers and carpenters when she needed them and firing them if they weren't any good or tried to boss her around. Then someone found dry rot in the laundry, so she gutted the building and turned it into a flat, which she let. And so on.

She always had some new project on. It kept her busy. “It stops me thinking,” she used to say. I thought this was a joke for a while, and then I realised that she meant it, because she wasn't at all happy.

We got into a pattern. I'd ring up and check she'd be around, and then I'd bring the kids and Nanny over and dump them with Mother and go down to the house and get a tea-tray together and take it along to Nan and she'd stop what she was doing and have a tea-break, and we'd talk. She needed somebody to talk to, I decided, and that must mean she couldn't talk to Gerry.

I remember once I found her with Mr Chad putting security catches onto the windows in the Rose Room. (We'd had to do the same at Seddon Hall because there'd been a rash of big-house burglaries around, and we actually had things worth stealing, Raphaels and so on, which Nan didn't.) Mr Chad tactfully made himself scarce, usually, but this time he was in the middle of an argument with Nan. I always enjoyed it when this happened because of the way they went about it, good-humoured but pig-headed, teasing, scoring points off each other, as though it was all part of a much longer argument that would never properly end until they were both dead, just like a sensibly married couple, in fact. I said so to Nan after Mr Chad had left, and she laughed.