The Yellow Room Conspiracy (22 page)

PAUL XI

Autumn 1956

I
woke in considerable pain. The whole side of my face, as well as my right arm, was burning and throbbing. My right eyelid seemed to be glued shut, and when I opened my left I could see nothing. From the sense of touch in that cheek, just discernible against the steady pain on the other side, I was aware of a dressing of some kind over my face. I moved my left hand to feel the place, but fingers caught my wrist and restrained me. Lucy's voice said, “Try and lie still. I'll send for someone. Are you terribly sore?”

My lips wouldn't articulate. I was forced to groan an affirmative.

“You're in hospital,” said Lucy. “Try to lie still. You'll be all right. Everyone's all right. We all got out.”

Somebody came and gave me an injection, morphine presumably, and the pain died and I slept. The pattern was repeated again and again. Sometimes Lucy wasn't there, but more often she was. When my hurts became more bearable and the pain-killers could be reduced enough for me to feel no more than drowsy, she read to me, and all through the six-month process of healing and having my face re-built she was with me, most hours of most days. As soon as I was well enough to pay any attention to my business, she made herself my channel for all my dealings. I had known from her rare references to her wartime work that she must be competent enough at that sort of thing, but had no idea how quick, clear and sensible she was, knowing exactly when to act on her own responsibility, and so on. My affairs, which I had left in a state of controlled tension, were by now in crisis. I just managed to restore them to decent order. There was luck involved, as always, but I know I could not have done it without Lucy's help. And I doubt if I would have healed as well as I did, or found the energy for my work, or regained my belief that there was any point in working or living, without her company. But at no point did I ask or say anything that might in any way open up a discussion of the events around Gerry's death. It was a subject far too dangerous to talk about, to think about, to remember in any way at all.

I had one relapse. It came while I was in another hospital, undergoing the drearily painful business of having my face rebuilt by skin-grafts from my buttocks. Lucy was there as much as possible. She will say that she was using the need to visit me as a way of escaping from the reverberations of the so-called Seddon Affair, then in full swing, but all that mattered to me was that she came. In the course of one visit she happened to mention that Nancy was going to be “all right” financially, because on her marriage Gerry had taken out a large insurance policy on his own life. That night for the only time I rejected a graft. I never made the connection that this news had provided me with the one missing piece of machinery for the dream-structure I had been building, starting from that first flash of intuition as I lay sprawled on the floor of King William's Room gasping the poisonous air and continuing as I came and went through the morphine haze, but never acknowledged by my waking consciousness. I now “knew” the motive for Gerry's murder.

I was too ill to attend the inquest, so gave an affidavit in which I described my talk with Gerry, saying that he had seemed depressed but not overwhelmed about his finances, but omitting of course his apparent attempt to blackmail me with threats about what Michael might do to Lucy. I said that I had fallen ill during the conversation, gone back to the house and gone to bed; that I had decided to leave early next morning for personal reasons and had telephoned for a taxi; that on reaching the Gun Room I had smelt gas, woken the household, returned with Bobo and helped him break into the Yellow Room, watched him retrieve Gerry's body, and then gone into the room myself and turned off the gas; that my intention had been to open a window, but that I could not remember doing so—indeed could remember nothing else at all until I woke in hospital. Apart from the omission referred to I was not lying. That indeed was all I remembered. It was only the shock of Lucy's question in the garden last July that allowed me the glimpse of memory that prompted my reply to her.

Instantly the door tried to close, but I knew I must not let it. Lucy is dying. There is unfinished business between us. The urgency with which I have felt compelled to write this memoir tells me that the time has come. The memoir itself is a tool for prying out into the open this thing that I have refused to look at or think about for thirty-six years, and now that I have it in plain view, what have I got?

There is a story in, I think, Oliver Wendell Holmes about how in the dentist's chair, under the influence of laughing gas, he saw with great clarity the secret of the universe, but on coming round from the anaesthetic could no longer remember it. He insisted on being given the gas again, saw the secret again and this time, with great effort, clutched it to him as he swam back up into consciousness. It turned out to be this:

Hoggamus Higgamus,

Men are polygamous,

Higgamus Hoggamus,

Women monogamous.

What I have discovered after all my effort appears to be a secret of that order. The intuition on which I acted so disastrously came to me in two parts, like the piers of a bridge, with a vague-seen structure in between. First, that everybody in the house, to judge by their reactions when I panted the news of the gas leak to them, already knew what to do. Dressed as I was, and after my breakdown the previous night, Nancy would have had every excuse for taking me for crazy when I confronted her, but she did not. Scenes like those which then took place—Nancy trying the door on the spiral stair and then setting about evacuating the house, Bobo taking the bench on his way up to the Yellow Room, to use it as a ram—had already been mentally rehearsed. My intervention was if anything a convenience, providing an uninvolved witness to the events.

Second, the episode on the East Lawn the previous evening had indeed been a charade. Lucy had struck the ball towards the house on purpose. She could not hope to hit one of the Yellow Room windows at that distance, but that didn't matter because Mr Chad, the intended witness, had his back to the scene, and Nancy, watching her moment, broke the pane from inside, threw up the window and tossed out a cricket ball she had ready. Even I, watching the flight of the ball as it started, had assumed that I'd been mistaken in its line, so obviously did the tinkle of glass attach itself to the missile. The sisters, of course, had not intended that I should be watching. Nancy had pointed me out, no doubt in some alarm, and Lucy had immediately come over to check whether I had noticed anything wrong.

The rest of the structure, which, as I say, I put together in no better than a half-waking state, and then dopey with morphine, can be summarised as follows:- If Gerry failed to come to acceptable terms with Michael, Nancy decided that she would be better off getting rid of him and taking the insurance. She was the instigator, and the perpetrator. Her sisters, acting out of that intense family solidarity I had sensed when I saw them on the lawn, had been more or less active accessories. The intention was that Gerry's death should look like an accident. The fire must seem to have been on, and then the gas failed while Gerry was in his stupor, and then to have come on again but not relit, thus filling the room with gas. There must be a reason for the fire to have been on on a summer evening. The doors must be locked, so that nobody in the house could be suspected of being involved. Another way into the room must be arranged for.

All this Nancy achieved. The only element outside her control was Gerry's actually drinking himself into a stupor, but she saw to it in her interview with him before supper that he would have every incentive to do so if he failed to break with Michael. At the same time she prepared events by spilling water over one of the chairs and putting it in front of the fire to dry. Presumably she listened outside the door while the interview with Michael took place, and failed. Perhaps Gerry then locked himself in, perhaps not—it didn't matter. If not she could have gone in and upbraided him, perhaps even incited him to drink by doing so herself, and meanwhile checked on her other arrangements. If he did, then she would have left and waited until the household was asleep, fetched Mr Chad's ladder, removed the soft putty from the pane she had broken that afternoon, turned off the gas (to judge by the charring of the chair and Gerry being in shirt-sleeves he had not done so), waited for the elements to cool and turned it on again, if necessary locked and bolted the doors and then left, re-puttying the pane into place. She was, I gather, skilled enough to do so. She would have brought a flashlight to work by. She then went back to her room and waited for the earliest moment at which it would seem proper to wake the household. She had been on her way to do so when I had knocked on her door. There were other apparently corroborating details—Bobo's participation, for instance, could be accounted for by my awareness that Gerry had asked him for money, as he had attempted to ask me, and perhaps also with the threat of some piece of knowledge Bobo would much rather not have made public—but it would be tedious to go on.

The structure does have a sort of coherence, but it is the coherence of the paranoid, in which everything that might support the delusion is twisted to fit and everything that contradicts it—in particular the sheer messiness and lack of structure in the everyday world—is ignored. Even if I allow myself a serious misjudgement of the character of one of the sisters, Nancy, and make her a monster rather than a moral tough, what about others I love, or like, or admire? What about Lucy and Harriet? And then, suppose those three were monsters, how could I imagine that they would take the risk of letting Janet play a part in their conspiracy? Or, for different reasons, Ben? And if those two were not in it, one of them at least would have spotted that the ball wasn't going to hit the window, even if the actual impact was out of sight. And then, how could anyone believe in a conspiracy which hinged on the certainty that the victim could be relied on to drink himself into insensibility at the appropriate time? And so on.

So a totally different question now arises –why did I feel impelled first to create this nonsensical structure, and then to bury it out of sight? By the same token, why did I choose to extend the amnesia surrounding the actual explosion—a normal enough response to extreme physical trauma—into the minute or two before during which I took the steps that were to destroy the house? The shock and pain buried the first, and that is mercifully irrecoverable, but I then chose to bury the second, which I have now disinterred. The answer is that I needed the act of destruction, for my own purposes, and that I invented the structure to justify it, but because the structure was no more than invention and as such would not stand the daylight of honest reason, I was forced to bury it.

I had certainly been overworking, and was possibly due some kind of a breakdown. What I took for a severe pang of nostalgia on my arrival may have been a premonitory symptom. My black-out during my interview with Gerry would then have been the true onset. My behaviour that night, the secrecy, the creepings about, the reluctance to insist on a taxi being sent for to take me away, the wish to do everything for myself, and so on, were mild manifestations, and then my so-called “intuition” and consequent burning of the Yellow Room were the full-blown products of delusion. I wanted, no doubt, to destroy the past, to destroy Gerry (though he was already dead) and thus at least symbolically wipe out the dreadful thing he had told me by the lake, but perhaps I wanted more than that. Did I in fact at some level know that the explosion in the Yellow Room was going to set off the far larger one, which effectively destroyed the whole house? I wanted, I had always wanted, in spite of my apparent tolerance, Lucy for myself alone. Other men were not really my rivals. Blatchards was. Now she could never go back there.

No wonder then, as the rest of that year went by and the next began and the outside world occupied itself, according to its interests, with the ludicrous Suez operation, and the Seddon Affair, and the uprising in Hungary—all things to which I paid at least superficial attention—I used my energies in rescuing my business from the brink and my spare time in talking to Lucy about anything and everything except our own lives, or listening to her read (Walter Scott mainly—she had a talent for the dialects), or if all else failed playing endless games of cribbage.

I was throwing earth into the grave, burying the things which I could not afford to face, what I believed her to have done, and with it, deeper still, what I myself had.

LUCY XI

1992

H
e didn't mean to end there. He'd just got to a stopping place and went out to fossick around and think. When he'd finished a bit and got it the way he wanted he used to print it out and give it to me to read, but he didn't this time. It was still in his word processor and I had to get Mrs Wrasse—she was our cleaner—to press the keys while I told her what to do so we could get it out. That was next day, or the day after—I don't remember.

He'd told me he'd be clearing leaves from the rockery if I wanted him, but he didn't come in for tea—not like him—he'd got a stop-watch in his head, though I used to tease him by saying it was in his stomach—and I went out and found him lying face down among the cyclamen. I wanted to leave him like that. I knew at once he was dead. It looked right. Just leave him lying until they were ready for the funeral—much nicer than any kind of mortuary place—but I knew I wouldn't be allowed, so I went and got help, and everybody was very kind and sorry for me, which was quite unnecessary really. It was the best thing that could have happened.

I'm in a home now. Timmy and Janice wanted me to go and live with them. I really think they meant it, and not just saying so because they felt they ought, but I said no. I want to get this boring business of dying over as tidily as possible (and as quickly as possible, I hope) and at least they're used to it here. I'm quite a lot worse already. In fact I can't always remember where I am. So before I lose touch completely I want to get this all tidied up.

I thought of asking them to burn everything Paul had written and just wipe my tapes away by putting a lot of Mozart or someone on top of them, but then I thought no. I want it finished. I don't want it all wasted. Tombstones are boring—they don't tell you anything. Dearly beloved mother of … oh, piffle! What did she smell like when she got old? Had she got a dreadful laugh? Did her old boyfriends thank their stars they'd never got around to proposing? (She could still have been really dearly beloved, despite.) No. This is all anyone is going to know about us, Paul especially. He never knew how to behave with children, so he kept in the background when they came and I don't think they'll remember him, and I shall soon be gone, and there's no one else left. But he's here alright, in these pages. Sometimes when I've been reading I've felt I could almost reach out and hold his hand.

That's what matters to me now. I suppose people will want to know what happened to the rest of us, and how Gerry got killed, and I'll do my best. Somebody said you've got to have a story, and he was right. I always feel miffed if I'm left in the air. So here goes.

The first thing was the inquest. I didn't give evidence, but Bobo did, and Nan, and Michael, and Mr Chad about the gas-plant. (Paul's wrong about that, by the way. The gas-plant was in the Brew House, because it would have been dangerous to have it in the main house, but the trouble was it was too far away and the gas didn't flow evenly, so Mr Chad's father, before the First War, put something called an equaliser tank into the cellars under the Billiard Room. It still didn't get enough gas to the West Wing, but it was OK for the East Wing, which was why the Yellow Room fire was pretty good. It was the equaliser tank which exploded in the fire.)

The family line was that Gerry's death was an accident. We all thought so anyway, except me, and I wasn't going to say anything. So without actually conspiring we agreed to play down Gerry's worries about money, and the row he'd had with Nan before supper, and so on. Only bloody Michael went and spoilt it, and he was vital because he'd been the last person to see Gerry alive. He'd arrived soaked to the skin because his taxi had broken down, and supper was almost over by then, so they'd taken a tray up to the Yellow Room, and Gerry had lent him a dressing-gown, and they'd put his clothes over a chair to dry in front of the fire. He said that Gerry was very depressed about money because of the cost of running Blatchards now that Dick Felder's alimony wasn't coming in any more, and he'd wanted to borrow a lot of money from Michael. He said he'd tried Paul and Bobo and they'd said no (I expect Gerry really did tell Michael this). Michael said he'd promised to do what he could, but it obviously wasn't going to be nearly enough. So in the end he'd taken his clothes and turned off the fire and said good-night. Of course the lawyers—Nan had one, and so did both the insurance companies—asked about this again and again. It was vital. If the fire was off when Michael left somebody must have turned it on again, and if the doors were locked it could only have been Gerry. The life insurance lawyer was an absolute terrier about it, because if Gerry had killed himself on purpose they wouldn't have to pay up. (The house insurance man was more interested in all the things Mr Chad had done, electrics as well as gas, without being properly qualified and without telling the company.)

Luckily all this happened at Bury, where everybody knew us, and Mother and Father had opened all the village fetes around for years and years, and the terrier-lawyer put the coroner's back up, and the jury's too, and they brought in a verdict of accidental death (after all Gerry could have turned the fire back on to keep warm, and it gone out after that), but the coroner did say a lot of fatherly things about getting properly qualified workmen to mess around with gas and electrics, and Mr Chad was desperately hurt, but worse still the house insurance people tried to get out of paying up. In the end Nan got her own lawyers and went after them and they had a sort of compromise, but it wasn't enough to rebuild.

Not that any of us would have wanted that. Even if they'd put up an exact replica, down to the gouged panelling in the Morning Room where Mother let old Flossie scratch, it would never have been our Blatchards. That was gone. And a good thing too—Paul's right. It took me about three years to realise it, but actually what I mainly felt about the house being burnt down was an enormous sense of release. All my life it had been summoning me back and back and back, and now it couldn't do it anymore.

I'll come back to that in a minute, but first I've got to deal with the famous Affair. (It was really bloody at the time, absolutely horrible, so I find the only way I can talk about it is by treating it like everyone else does, as a bit of a joke. Just remember, it wasn't.) The first I knew about it was when I got a message from Tommy saying he wanted to talk to me urgently, and could I be in Eaton Square for breakfast on such-and-such a morning. I'd hardly seen anything of him at all. I was officially spending the holidays with the children at Seddon Hall while he was desperately trying to get the French and everyone else to be sensible about Colonel Nasser and longing to spend any spare time he had with Sammy Whitstable, and I didn't mind leaving him a free hand for that, as it meant I could spend more time with Paul. I felt I had to. You see, I'd smelt the paraffin, and seen the way his sleeve had burnt, so I was practically certain he'd started the fire. And I'd seen him sneaking around the night before, in all his clothes, so I was as sure as I could be that he'd been up to something he didn't want us to know about, and when Gerry was killed I put two and two together.

What I thought was this. He'd gone to see Gerry late that night, because he was a bit off his rocker, and he'd found him passed out in the Yellow Room. I had no idea how he'd got in and out, leaving it locked behind him. That's what I've always longed to know about—that's what I asked him in the garden, wasn't it, that Saturday morning last summer? All I knew was that he must have, somehow. Perhaps Gerry had had to go to the loo, down by the Gun Room, and didn't lock up again when he got back … I don't know … Anyway what I decided was that finding Gerry like that he'd decided to get rid of him by turning the gas on and not lighting it. And then in the morning he'd got up early and woken us all up by saying he'd smelt gas. And then perhaps he'd thought perhaps he'd made some mistake and left fingerprints or something—I don't know what—and decided it would be safer to start a fire, only he got it wrong. He's quite right about not being a man of action. Absolutely not. I've never understood why plants grew so well for him. They were the only things he could ever make work. Perhaps it was because they were so slow.

Sorry, I've got lost. Oh yes, the thing I was most sure about of all was that he'd done it because of me. I've never been one of those people who go round looking for things to feel guilty about—quite the opposite, in fact I probably haven't felt guilty nearly enough—but I did about that, so I wanted to be there when he remembered and tell him it was all alright, it wasn't his fault, only he never did. I knew something was worrying him in a puzzled sort of way, like a dog which is being punished because it's done wrong, and it really does know it's been wicked about something and it's anxious and ashamed and sorry, only it can't remember what it was.

Well, then, Tommy sent me this message so I went up to London and spent a night at Eaton Square, and there he was at breakfast next morning opening his post so I pecked his cheek and settled down to my grapefruit and the crossword the way I'd always used to when things were better, but when I looked up I saw him watching me. I raised my eyebrows.

“Do you want a divorce?” he said.

“Oh. Why?” I said.

“I cannot divorce you, because of my faith, but you can divorce me if you wish, and I will provide you with the evidence,” he said.

“I don't understand,” I said.

“I greatly appreciate your willingness to keep up appearances over the past few months,” he said.

“It wasn't only for that,” I said.

He just nodded and went on.

“It's not going to be necessary much longer,” he said. “I am proposing to resign.”

“You can't!” I said. “I mean … Why on earth …?”

He watched me, smiling, while I burbled on aghast. Then he shook his head. The only thing I could think of was that they were trying to make him dish Colonel Nasser in a way which would be even worse for his career than refusing to do it.

“I must resign before I'm forced to resign,” he said. “My friendship with Miss Whitstable is about to become public knowledge.”

“I thought you'd been so careful,” I said.

“We had,” he said. “Or so I thought. However I was approached last week by a man who said he had information to give me. What he in fact had was photographs. He wanted a substantial sum for the negatives. I told him to go to hell. The probability is that he will now attempt to sell them to some Fleet Street rag.”

“That's extraordinary,” I said.

“Not very,” he said. “If one lays oneself open to blackmail, one …”

“That's not what I meant,” I said. “I mean, what sort of a man?”

“Like a seedy solicitor's clerk, I suppose,” he said.

“With a great big ring on his hand which he kept tapping to show he meant what he was saying?” I asked.

I don't think I'd ever seen Tommy startled before. He sat bolt upright and gawped like a schoolboy. For a moment he actually let me see what he was like inside. Then he pulled himself together.

“Has he been after you too?” he said.

“No,” I said. “It was someone else. I'm afraid I can't tell you. He asked for advice. It was because I'd been in security.”

He thought about it.

“Perhaps I should know his name,” he said. “Assuming he is to be trusted we may be able to act together.”

“I'll ask him,” I said. “But what did you say? Where did this all happen? How did he get hold of you?”

“He was waiting for me on the steps of the Athenaeum. It was a mistake on my part even to speak to him, but I was taken by surprise and allowed him an opening. As soon as I came to my senses I tore the pictures up and told him to clear off. Of course I have always been aware that something like this was going to happen in the end.”

“What did he want?” I said.

“Money, naturally,” he said. “Was that not the case with your friend?”

“It was more complicated than that,” I said. “It was help in doing something very tricky about exchange controls, and if it had worked it would have been worth, I don't know, millions.”

“That does not sound like my man,” said Tommy. “Altogether too sophisticated and grandiose. What did your friend decide?”

“I don't know,” I said. “The man was coming back, but I'll ring him up and ask, if you like. Anyway, what about us? Do you really want me to divorce you? Do you want to marry Miss Whitstable?”

“I should not be able to regard myself as divorced, though you could,” he said. “As for Miss Whitstable, no, far from it. I recognise perfectly well what is happening to me—in fact I am fascinated by the irrationality of my own behaviour. I was no more strictly reared and schooled than others of my class, but there was never any need to discipline me, because I disciplined myself. I believe I never knowingly broke a school rule. As an adult I not only observed the rules of my class and culture, but invented further rules for myself. To my colleagues, to my staff behind my back, to the public at large, I am a figure of fun.”

“And now you've found out what you've been missing?” I said.

“You don't understand,” he said. “The excitement and satisfaction of what I have been doing over the last few months depend on there being rigid rules for me to break. The whole point of my relationship with Miss Whitstable is that it is illicit. My own self-disgust provides a kind of pleasure. So does the knowledge that in the end I shall have to pay the price of public humiliation. That time seems now to have come. I shall not ask you to share it with me.”

I expect this all sounds desperately pi, too high-minded to be true, but all I know is that I felt terribly moved. He'd never talked to me like that before. I could see he was forcing himself to say these things, because he felt he owed it to me. His face was like a wooden doll, with his lips just moving up and down. I reached out and took his hand, half expecting him to pull it away, but he didn't.