The Yellow Room Conspiracy (5 page)

“Mighty are the changes time hath wrought. What does Lady V. find to do?”

“She seems to have fallen in love with Joe Stalin. She rides round the county bullying Mothers” Unions into churning out mittens for the Eastern Front. Do I have to be careful talking to you about Uncle Joe?”

“A fetish of inconceivable savagery whom my people happen to worship. It will please them to know that they have a sister-cult in Suffolk. Come to think of it, they have a noble horsewoman among their folk-heroines. She led cavalry charges against the Turks.”

“I'll tell Harriet. Maybe it will be good for a parcel of mittens.”

“You won't, will you?”

“No, of course not.”

“After the war, perhaps. What about the girls?”

This was uncomfortable ground, but there was nothing for it.

“Nancy's a WAAF, a Flight Lieutenant, Harriet says. Not that she flies. She works in the Air Ministry, in charge of a gang of women who shove toy aeroplanes around on vast map-tables so that the brass can see where our bombers have got to.”

“Any men in her life?”

“I'm afraid so, in fact she's engaged to a ludicrously rich American called Dick Felder. Or is it Fedler?”

He nodded as if he'd been expecting it.

“Harriet described him as rather a good egg. Do they all use that sort of Woosterish vocabulary?”

“About things that matter to them, yes. Where does the money come from?”

“Lumber, apparently. His grandfather was the ruffian who amassed the loot, his father multiplied it umpteen-fold, and now Nancy is proposing to use it to put new lead on the Blatchards roof.”

“Yes, of course. In Nan's case that is a sine qua non of the marriage contract. Is there any evidence whether she loves the chap?”

“Harriet discussed the question. She thinks Nancy herself isn't sure. If he can afford the upkeep of Blatchards then she is effectively forced to love him. I met a few Americans of that general sort in my last job, and I can't imagine any of them adapting to life at Blatchards in anything like the style the Verekers seem to have evolved.”

“That's also in the marriage contract. A secret clause. I think even Nancy may not be aware of it. Superficially attractive, but not easy for outsiders for more than a brief visit, I'd have thought.”

“Mine was too brief to judge.”

“You seem to have liked Harriet.”

“Very much, and rather to my surprise. I wouldn't have expected us to have a lot in common.”

“I know what you mean. There's something of the noble savage about them. The noble savage is not an open book—indeed the springs of his nobility might well appal the civilised mind. No chance of seeing Harriet here, I suppose?”

I explained about the ambulance unit. In fact I was due to meet Harriet again in ten days' time, when she'd be in Cairo on a forty-eight. She had told me bluntly that she preferred me (to, presumably, a dozen possible escorts) because my Armenian entanglement meant I could be relied on not to make a pass at her. (Naive, but in my then situation correct.) She wanted none of that sort of thing till after the war. She was on the other side of Kipling's mirror. Nothing that happened here and now was real.

We discussed the remaining sisters. Lucy had started as a Land Girl on the Home Farm, but had used her evenings to teach herself shorthand and typing and had then attracted the attention (Harriet had said she was “a stunner, these days”) of one of the senior officers running the Signals operation in the main house and was now working not there but at some kind of hush-hush sister-operation near Hemel Hempstead. Janet had left school and was working on the Home Farm while she waited for call-up. Ben was still at school.

Harriet's account had been very full and Gerry wanted every detail, so our meal was ready before we'd exhausted the subject. He then began to talk more openly than before about his own doings, rather as though he felt he now owed me something for what I'd told him. I learnt a little that might be useful to me in my own job, but what I most remember is Gerry's own attitude. He was performing a delicate balancing act manoeuvring among groups of fighters whose motives and passions he could sometimes adapt and channel to his own purposes. He endured periods of tense tedium interrupted by great physical hardship and danger. It became clear to me that he was better at the job than I could imagine anyone else being, and I sensed the same knowledge in him, together with a huge exhilaration at being so stretched, so tried, and still finding no limit to his own capacities. As the master at the cricket match had said, there seemed to be nothing he couldn't achieve. To know that of yourself might, paradoxically, become a source of self-distrust. What are these unbelievable talents for? For the moment the narrow purposes of war seemed to have provided an answer.

He drank two glasses of wine, slowly, and I offered a third.

“Better not,” he said. “I'm about on my limit, and I see your point about not wishing to wheel me home.”

“How do your partisan friends react to this, um, defect in you?”

“At first, with ridicule, now as an eccentricity. It is more of an asset than you might think. There are times when I need, as it were, to hide, while remaining physically present. What is it, by the way? I've never tasted anything like it.”

“Chateauneuf is all I was told,” I said. “There was a bedridden old Frenchwoman I had to interview about something. She wanted news of her nephew, who was supposed to be doing something with the Free French. I broke a few rules and found out that he'd volunteered to go back into France, where he'd been caught almost at once and executed. She just nodded and rang for a servant, who went and got a half-crate of these. No labels on any of them. She'd been keeping them for the nephew. Now they were no use to her and she wanted them out of her house. She said they were Chateauneuf, but the vineyard and the year didn't matter, as I'd never drink anything like them again.”

“And she was right. How much is there left?”

“A bit under a glass each. I'll withdraw my caveat about wheeling you home. Or maybe the last couple of years have given you greater tolerance.”

He shook his head but let me share the last of the decanter between us, and continued to sip slowly as we talked, still giving no sign that the wine was affecting him. There were longer silences. At one point he said “Remind me what your family consists of.”

“Minimal,” I told him. “Father, mother, self. No aunts or uncles. My English grandparents died before the war. I had grandparents in Vienna. My father tried to get them out but they refused to come. I should think Adolfs murdered them by now.”

“Do you believe all that?”

“Oh yes. It suits a lot of people who should know better to play it down, or dismiss it as crude anti-Hunism, but it's happening. I'm a Jew, remember. News comes out to us. In fact I think it's going to turn out to be a good deal worse than anyone imagined.”

Gerry nodded.

“We stopped a train,” he said. “We thought there was a Staff Officer on it, but we were wrong. There were German guards, SS, all the same, and we couldn't think why till we opened up a couple of cattle-trucks at the rear. They were full of children from a Jewish orphanage. They'd had nothing to eat or drink. Some of them were dead already. Any of them could have been me.”

“You've lost me.”

“If your family is minimal, mine is null, void, a blank.”

“I thought you had an aunt. The one with the Marmite sandwiches.”

“The appellation is honorary. She taught at my orphanage, decided I had possibilities and took me into her house, but being a maiden lady with a strong sense of the proprieties didn't adopt me. It would confuse the issue, she said.”

“Her own joke?”

“Of course. She died last year in an air raid on Leeds. There aren't many people around whom one can readily admire.”

We sat in silence, I haunted by the thought of the children in the cattle-trucks. To exorcise them I said, “Are you going to try and trace your own parents?”

He shook his head.

“My aunt looked into it,” he said. “I was literally a foundling, new-born, unwashed, wrapped in a blood-stained petticoat in a public lavatory in Leeds.”

I seemed to have replaced one haunting by another, less obviously dreadful but individual, personal, unique in its own pain. I tried again.

“Family life, as exemplified by the Verekers, must have been something of a shock to you.”

“Shock?” he said. “Revelation is nearer the mark. A new heaven and a new earth.”

In fact he spoke the line in Greek, and I had to ask my boss next day for the reference. I couldn't ask Gerry, because at that point he fell asleep. I had been watching the half-moon rise above the tumbled roof-tops while I puzzled out the gist (my Greek was still up to that then, but as a Jew the Apocalypse was not part of my scriptures) when I heard a faint thump, turned, and saw that he had passed out, neatly and with dignity, after placing his not-quite-finished glass on the wicker table beside him. When I shook him he remained inert. I waited a few minutes and tried again, without result, then telephoned a set-up we used for the more physical aspects of our work, bodyguards and frighteners and so on. They sent a couple of men with a car, though not for over an hour, during which I made several useless efforts to rouse Gerry with cold water. He never once stirred, nor had he by the time I was able to deliver him into the care of his own people, some time after midnight. They were not pleased, and nor was my boss when I told him next morning what had happened, but no long-term harm was done. Gerry continued to have a “good” war, and survived unscathed.

LUCY III

1942

I
'm not sure that this is such a good idea after all. Something funny's happening—not to me, to Paul. He shows me what he's written when he's finished a chunk. I asked. Of course I was interested. But then he said he didn't want to listen to what I'd been putting on these tapes. I was a bit miffed about that, and said so, but he said he was sorry, but he was afraid it might “contaminate his own recollections”. He feels that intense about it. And in the evening, when he puts his pen down, he just sits there as if he was in some kind of trance he had to swim slowly up out of, like divers in case they get the bends.

Paul isn't like that, for God's sake! He just doesn't get obsessed about things. But now he's sneaking off at odd times of the day when usually he'd be out in the garden, getting it all down on his word processor. He doesn't want to talk about it either, and 1 daren't have a scene with him because that will bring on my shakes and it isn't fair. But honestly, the only time I remember him at all like this was just before that last week-end at Blatchards when he was absolutely burying himself in work, trying to get his company floated, and then …

No, I'll come to that later. I've got to keep things in order.

Well, I had a good war too, though the other way round from Gerry's. I mean, I was like Harriet. For me it was time out, when nothing was real, and everyone was just waiting for it to be over so that we could start our proper lives again. Only when someone you knew got killed, then you'd find it was real after all, for a bit. But soon you'd forget.

I was lucky. I was just the right age. If there hadn't been a war, what would have happened to me? Finish my dreary school, probably go and live with a family in France for a bit to get a good accent, come home, do a season if Father could afford it, have some sort of nonsense job, I can't think what—we must have been pretty well unemployable. But as it was, because of Blatchards being taken over by an ESIU—sorry, that's short for Enemy Signals Interception Unit—and me meeting some of them, when I got called up I wangled a really interesting job, code-breaking, not at Blatchards but a place called Halford Hall, near Hemel Hempstead.

As soon as I say code-breaking you'll think I'm talking about the Enigma code at Bletchley, because that's what everyone knows about. We were trying to do the same sort of thing, yes, but in a quite different way. The simplest way to say it, though it sounds quite mad, was that we were trying to do it by telepathy. I started out as just one of about thirty girls who typed out endless lists of numbers, but a couple of times I noticed something about a number which just seemed wrong to me, I didn't know why—we'd been told to ask about that sort of thing if it came up—and I was right, so after that I was one of the people who went through the lists actually looking for joeys (that's what we called them). The women were much better at it than the men, and I wasn't bad. After a bit I could remember whole pages of numbers, not to recite straight off but enough to say “There was something like that a few columns back.” I had no idea what the somethings meant. That needed absolute superbrains.

It sounds unspeakably boring but I was happy. I knew I'd got the job first off because of my looks, but it wasn't long before I was sure they'd still have wanted me there if I'd been plain as a boot. That made life easier for me in another way. It's difficult for people to realise now what a big thing losing your virginity used to be, especially if you'd been brought up the way I had, with our whole purpose in life—no one told us this, of course, but even then I had a good idea that that was what it was all about—our whole purpose in life being like some sort of missile, like a whaling harpoon, and what we had to do was go and hunt for the right man and skewer him and reel him in so we could have more sons and daughters who could start all over again. It wasn't for us, it was to keep our kind of world going.

But now it was different, a different sea, full of all sorts of terrific fish threshing around … oh, I'm not going on with the harpoon idea or I shall get muddled. The point is that there were plenty of men at Halford Hall, and far fewer women, most of us young and unattached, so there was a lot of pressure on us. Specially on me, because I was—let's call it officer-class—and so were the superbrains we worked for, and what they were doing was very hard work, vitally important to the war effort, and mostly pretty frustrating because they spent a lot of time not getting anywhere, so there was a sort of feeling that it was our patriotic duty to help them relax. I learnt pretty soon that even cuddly old dons with photographs of their children in their wallets can't help hoping for the sort of adventure that will make them feel young and glorious again. So it was a help to me that I could do more than look decorative and just do the sort of work anyone else could do.

My best friend was Dora. We worked together. Her father was a milkman in Darlington. She had eleven brothers and sisters. She was nothing to look at, dark and square. You could tell she'd be really fat by the time she was forty. She was three years older than I was and she'd been experimenting with men since she was fifteen. That was the main thing about Dora. She was incredibly randy, and she liked to talk about it. I was shocked at first, but I soon realised that she was really a good, kind, happy person, and in the end I liked her a lot and I was sorry when they gave me a commission and put me in charge of a different section and I couldn't talk to her the same way any more. But that was later, after I'd lost the knack of spotting joeys. You could do that for a few months only, and then it left you. Difficult to explain.

I'll try, though. We worked in a cubby-hole of our own, side by side at a trestle table, and the messengers would come in with the sheets of intercepts and we'd sit and read them. Each sheet had five columns. Each column had thirty-six numbers. Each number had eight figures. It sounds completely impossible. For the first half hour it usually was. Sometimes it was all day. But most days, after a bit, the numbers began to speak, and we knew we'd got hot. That's how we talked about it. You got hot and the numbers spoke. It really was like that. The numbers became like a sort of language to us. It wasn't a language we could understand, mind you, not a word of it, but we could hear it somehow in our heads, a bit like voices, and what's more we could hear that the voices were making sense to themselves. And that way we could somehow spot when one of them said something that didn't make sense in the language. We had absolutely no idea how we did this—we couldn't explain it even to the superbrains, and of course it didn't work all the time, and a lot of the joeys we spotted weren't joeys, but enough of them were. There really did turn out to be something wrong with them.

I think the most extraordinary thing was that we needed each other, Dora and me, to do this. We'd be sitting there, reading slowly down the columns, sheet after sheet. We had two copies of each sheet and we taught ourselves to read at the same speed so we could be pretty certain we'd be reading the same number at the same time, and nothing would happen and nothing would happen and then, both at the same moment, we'd feel the tingle of the numbers beginning to speak. We didn't have to look at each other. We knew. And next, just as if our hands had been connected by a wire, we'd reach out and ring the same number, our first joey, me in green and Dora in blue. I forgot to say there was a board between us so we couldn't see each other's sheets.

We'd go on for about a dozen sheets, usually, like that, and then the voices would fade and the numbers would just be numbers and we'd know it was time for a break. Dora would light a fag and I'd have a couple of puffs and she'd start telling me in a dreamy, happy way about some adventure she'd had until she'd finished her cigarette and we'd go on. If we timed it right we could keep going like that for a whole shift.

There was one terrific morning when we spotted five joeys in two sheets. That simply didn't happen. One in three sheets was good going, but we were so singing sure that we sent them out and ten minutes later Captain Mantock came in waving the sheets to ask us had we gone mad, while Dora was in the middle of telling me about a tumble she'd had with a Chinese tailor in the back of his shop, all in among the pin-striped trousering. We had a hard time persuading him we hadn't been playing the fool, but it turned out we were right and the coding machine must have been sticking somewhere, and that was a whole piece of the puzzle firmly in place.

Well, naturally, being with Dora such a lot and hearing all the things she'd tried—I'm afraid she had to explain what a lot of the words meant, because pretty well the only sex education Mother had ever given us was all about gelding colts—naturally I wanted to try. Bother being a harpoon, I felt, and getting just one whale. I'd be missing such a lot. So the next question was where to begin, and who with. I talked it over with Dora, of course. She laughed a lot, but she took it seriously too. She liked the cook-house staff best of the men at Halford, but they were slobs, she said, and I was too good for them. It had got to be an officer. The next question was whether it ought to be somebody who knew exactly what he was doing, who'd show me how and make sure I had a good time, or somebody who'd be finding out, like me. I was all for the good time, but Dora was in favour of a finder-out. “It's more exciting that way,” she said. “Neither of you knowing what's going to happen, and you only get that once in your life so you don't want to miss it.” I said how could we be sure any of the men was still only a finder-out, but Dora swore she could tell, just looking at them. We'd pretty well settled on a rather handsome lieutenant who was in Despatch Riders—I've forgotten his name—when I decided off my own bat that I wanted Beano.

(By the way, I'm not going to talk like this about all the men I've had what are nowadays called relations with. Just take it from me it wasn't nearly as many as people seem to think. But Beano comes into the story later, and anyway the whole business still makes me smile.)

Beano was David Fish. He was called Beano because of runner beans, I think, but it might have been because he looked like a character in the comic. He was a junior superbrain—there's no way he could have been given a commission otherwise, he was the most hopeless officer you could imagine. But some of the work was the sort that even superbrains are best at before they're twenty-five, and after that their minds harden or something and they can't do it any more. Beano might have been six foot four if he'd known how to stand straight, but he didn't. Perhaps he was too thin. There's a little tree called cytisus battandieri which drives Paul mad. It has silky leaves and yellow flowers a bit like lupins which reek of pineapple and you have to grow it against a wall because it's so floppy, but Paul wants it where there isn't a wall, and however he stakes it it still manages to flop. Beano was like that. He drove CSM Barnett mad.

CSM Barnett was in charge of the weekly parade, which we all had to turn out for in proper uniform, and be inspected by the CO and march past him and so on, to remind us that we were in the army. The rest of the time we were pretty slack. The superbrains dressed any old how, battle-dress trousers and carpet-slippers and a Fair Isle cardigan with holes in it. Other ranks like me did wear uniform, but for instance Dora got away with far more make-up than she'd have been allowed in the proper army, and I wore my hair down a lot of the time. But not on the weekly parade, my goodness no. CSM Barnett would have exploded. He was an enormous man with a face like a ham and a ginger moustache which he could make bristle, the way a dog can make its hackles stand up, and he'd put his face six inches from yours and yell in a voice you could hear on the other side of the parade ground. He would yell at the officers, too. That's how I found out about Beano having gone to Eton.

“And where were you at school, Mr Fish, sir!!?”

Mumble mumble.

“Well, you're not at bleeding Eton now, sir! You're in His Majesty's Armed Forces, sir!! And in His Majesty's Armed Forces … we … stand … up … straight!!! SIR!!!”

The ‘sir' was the most insulting part. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Beano making a huge effort and drawing himself up to six foot two. I'll try him, I thought. He might know Gerry.

Dora wasn't at all keen on Beano. “He'll make a mess of it,” she said. But in the end she agreed it was better for me to try with someone I wanted than with someone I didn't and she got her friend Sergeant Hattersley in Transport to fix things. Beano was due a forty-eight-hour pass, but there was a hitch and the pass wasn't ready so he didn't get away with the main transport and Sergeant Hattersley said he'd fix him a spare truck. At that point I turned up with my own forty-eight, and of course I'd missed the transport too, so the obvious thing was for me to go in Beano's truck, only it was still in the workshop having something done to its engine. Sergeant Hattersley swore it would be along, and he'd drive it himself—he was having a lovely time, winking at me behind Beano's back and then keeping a straight face for Beano—but it didn't come and it didn't come until there was only one train left we could catch, and then it did at last, but it sounded pretty sick and half way to the station it conked out. Sergeant Hattersley just managed to get it to chug off the road into a by-lane beside a wood—I'd picked the place a couple of days before—and then he said he'd go and get another truck. He said he'd be about an hour, so we still ought to make the train.

It was a lovely May evening. We sat in the driver's cab. I asked Beano if he'd known Gerry, and it turned out he'd been in College too, but in the election above, so he hadn't known him very well.

“Besides,” he said, “I was a maths specialist, and I was useless at games.”