The Yellow Room Conspiracy

by Peter Dickinson

  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.”

  It got dark. We found some other people we both knew to talk about. I yawned and said we’d obviously missed the last train and I was going to see if there was anything to sleep on in the back of the truck. Of course there was. Beano pretended he was happy to sleep in the cab, but he didn’t need a lot of persuading that he’d be much more comfortable in the back.

  The birds woke us before it was properly light, making the usual racket. I lay quiet, feeling extremely pleased with myself. Dora had been right about David being a first-timer, but wrong about him making a mess of it.

  “Did that really happen?” he asked in a dreamy voice. “And if so, how?”

  I hadn’t realised he was awake. I’d already decided I was going to tell him. I didn’t want him falling in love or anything. He lay there, thinking about it. Then he laughed.

  “But why me?” he said.

  “I heard CSM Barnett yelling at you for being at Eton,” I said. “So I thought you might know Gerry. It was a sort of introduction, I suppose.”

  He laughed again, differently.

  “Good Lord,” he said. “Who’d have thought I’d ever owe something like that to Gerry Grantworth?”

  PAUL IV

  1944

  In 1944 I was back in London for several weeks. The desert war was over. Harriet was driving in Italy with a different unit, but had asked me at our last meeting to telephone Blatchards if I got home before she did and give them her news. (For all their closeness as a family the Verekers were among the most perfunctory letter-writers I have ever known.) My own job was in transition. The Balkans, Greece in particular, looked like becoming a raging chaos of feuds, murders and betrayals. At the same time the probability of communist regimes taking over in the area, and the nature of the problems we might then face, was becoming more apparent. My boss sent me home ostensibly to brief relevant officials on the current mess, but with private instructions to investigate the possibility of our organisation being moved to London in an expanded form to continue its work after the war was over.

  When I called Blatchards Ben answered. I explained who I was, and that I’d been seeing a bit
of Harriet in Cairo.

  “Oh ho!” she said.

  “Neither Oh nor Ho, but she asked me to ring your parents and give them the news.”

  “Which is?”

  I began to tell her, but she cut me short.

  “I can’t remember all that. It would be much better … Look, what are you doing this week-end?”

  “Not much, as far as I know.”

  “Couldn’t you come down? Mother and Father will be back, and Nan and … and in fact everyone except Harriet. They’ll all want to know. We’re moving back into the house, you see, and we need all the hands we can get.”

  I hesitated. Ben, I calculated, must be about fifteen. What was her authority to issue such an invitation, though she seemed to take it for granted? On the other hand I was tempted. I had missed Harriet in the last few months, especially since my Armenian had met and fallen in love with a young journalist who wanted to marry her. We had both agreed from the first that our relationship would belong to the unrealities of war. She had no wish to settle in England nor I in Egypt. Still, there was a vacuum in my life, not that I expected to fill it at once, and the prospect of spending time among presentable young women was attractive.

  “You can catch the same train as Nan and Dick,” said Ben. “I’ll get Nan to ring you and tell you which one. Have you got a number?”

  That was a way through, and indeed when Nancy did call she proved just as insistent as Ben. She asked whether I’d seen anything of Gerry, and I told her yes.

  “We’ll all want to hear about him, too,” she said, not seemingly embarrassed by her marriage to Richard Felder, on which I’d already congratulated her. “You really must come. That’s an order.”

  It was a joke, of course. I was senior in rank to her by some way. But she spoke like someone used to giving orders.

  We recognised each other on the platform, among the three-deep ranks waiting for our train to come in. It wasn’t so difficult for me. We were both in uniform, and a strikingly pretty WAAF officer heading towards Bury on a Friday evening had every chance of being her, but she picked me out at once too. (Later I learnt that this was a Vereker trait, not merely the memory for faces and names, but the genuine interest in the lives and concerns of people they met.)

  “So glad you could come,” she said. “We need everyone we can get on our side, to stop Mother making a mess of things. She has an absolute genius for discomfort, and Chad always does exactly what she tells him even when he knows it’s madness, so that he can shake his head about it when it goes wrong.”

  I knew from Harriet that Mr Chad was the general handyman at Blatchards, husband of Mrs Chad, notorious for her cooking. Nancy was standing tip-toe, craning back along the platform.

  “Sorry if I look a bit distraite,” she said. “I’m keeping an eye out for Dick. He doesn’t understand why trains can’t just wait till he gets here. I bet you he’ll come bellowing on to the platform just as we’re steaming out.”

  She was right. The train arrived and the mob surged aboard. Being commissioned officers in uniform we were compelled to travel First Class, but the crush was just as bad as in Third. We were lucky in that there was a door immediately in front of where we stood, so I nipped in and took a corner seat, expecting to be able to give it to Nancy and myself stand for the journey, but she insisted on staying at the door so that she could crane from the window. By the time the train moved out, only forty minutes late, we were crammed five a side, with six standing between the seats.

  “Dick! Dick!” yelled Nancy, leaning far out and waving.

  She ducked back in and opened the door. Someone was pounding along the dim platform. Already we were going far too fast to be boarded in safety. Then, effortlessly it seemed, he was on the step and inside and closing the door behind him with one hand while with the other arm he lifted Nancy off her feet to give her a long, unabashedly tongue-touching kiss, clean contrary to good order and military discipline.

  He was huge, easily the biggest man I have ever met. His uniform was the finest available cloth and clearly tailored for him, but, only partly because it had been cut taut-trousered in the American fashion it still looked as if it had been made for someone a couple of sizes smaller. Nancy introduced us when at last he put her down. He beamed down at me, an affable ogre dim against the single shaded light. I had risen, expecting Nancy to take my seat, but she said “Dick can put me on the luggage-rack,” so he reorganised the cases and swung her up, a convenient arrangement for both of them as her face was now level with his and they could whisper, and kiss during the frequent unexplained stops, leaving me to gaze at his portentously muscled buttocks.

  Bury is about sixty miles from London. The journey took nearly three hours. Lady Vereker met us at the station driving a sort of carriage, drawn by two horses, with six-foot diameter wheels behind and smaller ones in front. I sat beside her while Dick and Nancy canoodled on the back seat as we trotted briskly along dark winding lanes. (Lady Vereker, multifariously incompetent, at least knew what she was up to with horses.) We reached Blatchards well after eleven. Lord Vereker had a cold supper ready for us at the stables and hovered by while we ate, so as not to miss one syllable of praise for his cuisine. It was past midnight and had started to rain when Nancy, Dick and I carried our bags down a weedy drive to the back door of the main house, let ourselves in, lit candles, and climbed the bare servants’ stairs to the top floor. I was extremely tired.

  Not wishing to mistake my door among the dozen others along that side of the blank, sparse-carpeted corridor, I left it open when I went to the lavatory. Returning with my candle in my hand I was in the room and closing the door when a voice behind me said sleepily, “Who’s that?”

  I turned and saw it was the wrong room. The occupant of the bed was beginning to lift herself onto an elbow.

  “Don’t go,” she said, interrupting my apologies. “You’re Paul, aren’t you? You came with Gerry and I was rude to you at tea.”

  “I don’t remember the rudeness. We collected eggs, though.”

  “Did we? I was so fagged I went to bed early but I left the door open so I should hear you come, only I didn’t. Nan says you’ve seen Gerry. And Harriet, of course. Where’s my dressing-gown? You’re probably dying for sleep, but do just tell me quickly.”

  I picked the dressing-gown off the floor and gave it to her, then put my candle on the wash-stand and pulled up a rush-seated chair. Lucy cuddled the gown around her and sat like a child with her arms wrapped round her knees. Harriet had partly prepared me for her beauty, but it was still astonishing. The candle-light shadowed sideways across her face, leaving the further half almost in darkness, and glinting off the loose waves of her hair. The elfin look was much less marked than I’d remembered, but still there, though not at all fey, and her manner was down-to-earth, direct, a bit too challenging for some tastes, perhaps …

  And she was no fool. She understood, for instance, presumably from her work at Hemel Hempstead, my difficulty in telling in detail much of what Gerry was doing; but at the same time she clearly grasped the nature of it, and of my work too, things that many people, including experienced soldiers, often completely mistook.

  “You said Gerry knew about Nancy and Dick?” she asked.

  “I told him they were engaged. I don’t know if he’s heard about the marriage.”

  “How did he take it?”

  “Just accepted it, as far as I could see. I thought he was a bit depressed later that evening, but it could have been anything. When people under stress go on leave …”

  “Yes, of course. You know, I’m not sure Gerry really wanted to marry Nancy. Not like that. I mean, it’s not as simple as that makes it sound. He wants something, he wants it very much indeed, something to do with Nan, and all of us, and this house … of course it may all be different now he’s been through a war and seen so many other things … What about Harriet? No, don’t tel
l me, I can see you’re dropping. It can wait till tomorrow. Thank you for staying awake this long. I put the hotties in the left-hand bed. Don’t try the right one, it will be sopping. Yours will just be a bit damp, I’m afraid.”

  Next morning she woke me with a tea-tray.

  “You don’t get this every time you come,” she said. “It’s to make up for last night. The jug’s to shave with—there doesn’t seem to be any hot water on this floor. It’s either the ram or the gas, probably.”

  This was my first taste of the high standard of discomfort one came to regard as the norm at Blatchards—damp beds were a commonplace of wartime. The water supply depended on a “ram” at the bottom of the grove, whose working, because the drop that supplied it was not sufficient­, needed endless fine tuning by the general handyman Mr Chad. Hot water in turn depended on a private gas-plant (Victorian, like the ram), which ran off a particular sort of coking coal, not often available. Not only the hot water but all the heating of the house—mainly ancient gas fires—was run off the plant. There was never enough gas. If one turned one’s own fire on those in neighbouring rooms were liable to go out, an effect so dangerous that most of the guest rooms had their gas-taps locked into the off position. There were also a number of huge radiators downstairs in the passages and state rooms, but the only time I detected one at higher than room temperature was once in July, when Mr Chad had taken it into his head to test the system.

  Lucy put the tray down and was leaving, but she turned in the doorway.

  “By the way, do you know Bobo Smith?” she said. “He was at Eton, but he may have been before you.”

  “Unless there’s more than one of him he was Captain of Games in my house when I was a lower boy. He flogged me several times.”

  “Oh, dear. I’m afraid he’s coming. Do you mind?” “Water under the bridge.”

  “Mother asked him to help with the sofas … she says. She’s got it into her head that it’s her duty to present us with suitable young men. Do you mind if I use you as a defence?”