The Yellow Room Conspiracy

by Peter Dickinson

  The Director made them simmer down, but looking back I think B was right. Perhaps it was because of the war being over. The normal people wanted to do proper peace-time things, and left, so the ones who stayed weren’t quite normal. Anyway I suppose I was vaguely aware of feeling things weren’t quite as good as they’d been, and getting restless, and wondering why I’d agreed to stay on in the first place. People seem to think I’m a rather happy-go-lucky, slapdash, impulsive kind of person, but that’s mainly because my hair never wants to stay in place and I tend to dress any old how because … well, I suppose it was a sort of defence against them thinking of me as ‘a beauty’, as if that was all I was. And it’s true that sometimes, with important decisions (not just men) I’m apt to shut my eyes and jump in (because I’m scared, really) but with everyday things I like to know exactly where I am. When I was a small girl I enjoyed folding my clothes and keeping my room tidy, and in the same way in my job I was an absolute stickler for the rules. That’s why Files worked so well. So it wouldn’t have crossed my mind to see if Gerry had a file if I hadn’t already been pretty demoralised.

  Because that’s what I did. It was easy. I had the green tags because I kept the Security stationery in the F Block safe. They only had to be accounted for after I’d issued them. I filled one in for Gissing and faked old B’s scrawl on it and took it in with a batch of others to the Zoo. There were two ways of asking for files. If the people upstairs knew the file number, that was easy, but much more likely they’d ask for anything on the Bulgarian Commissar for Light Industry, or something like that. That depended entirely on how good the clerks were, not just looking up the Commissar’s number and getting his file out but going through it for cross-references and getting those files out, and sorting out anything else that might be useful.

  Naturally this took a bit of time, so I went back to my cubby-hole and got on with other things. Then about twenty minutes later I suppose Millie from G Block came bustling along to tell me I was wanted in the Zoo. (The girls in the cage weren’t allowed out without going through a security hoo-ha, even for a pee, so usually they called to someone in E or G for anything they needed.)

  I found F at a standstill with Sylvia in floods of tears on a stool and the others crowding around trying to comfort her.

  “We’ve lost a file,” someone whispered, “and Sylvia thinks it’s her fault.”

  Sylvia was an extraordinary girl, about my age, plain and pasty. She seemed to have decided quite early on that she wasn’t any good at anything and nobody would ever love her or value her and she was doomed to go on like that till she died. Then she’d been sent down to me from Personnel with a note to say she wasn’t any use at short-hand or typing but she’d got a good memory and I’d given her my usual tests and found it was true. More than good. Absolutely phenomenal, it turned out. She could have been in a circus, only she wouldn’t have had the self-confidence. She really loved working for us, hidden away where almost nobody could see her, burrowing through the files. Anything odd or difficult, anything we didn’t seem to have a scrap of stuff about, we’d ask Sylvia and she’d brighten up as if we’d flicked a switch and say “Oh, yes …” She’d pause for about three seconds while the machinery clicked and then she’d start to rattle off file-numbers. Computers can do that sort of thing now, though I don’t believe even a computer could do some of the weird sideways leaps Sylvia came up with. She was obsessive. I don’t believe she wanted any life outside F Block. Annie, who shared a flat with her, used to tease her by saying that if we put her in a trance and dumped her in a cupboard at night, she’d have preferred that to going home.

  There was nowhere in the Zoo to be alone so I took her off to the stationery store and told Di, the F Section head, to stand guard and settled Sylvia on to a file box and pulled another over and sat with my arm around her waist while she blubbed about it being all her fault, not noticing before, only she wasn’t supposed to open the contam cabinet without a requisition and she was sure it was there last time but that was weeks ago, and so on. My heart sank. There wasn’t anything that could have been a contam among the tags that had come down from upstairs. Sylvia blubbed on. It was a lovely file. Lots of cross-refs she’d found and entered …

  I’m sorry, I’ll have to explain. A contam was a contaminated source—somebody who’d been sending us information and now we thought might have been got at by the other side. And about the cross-refs—when someone upstairs reading the file found a connection with some other file there was a special sheet inside the cover where they entered the other file-number, and a note about it. And that’s what I’d trained my people to do. When stuff came down for filing they read it and thought about it and put in the cross-refs, and if they hadn’t got anything else to do they just read files, and did the same. That’s what Sylvia was so good at.

  Of course by now I was desperately worried. It didn’t matter that the idea of Gerry being a contam was totally ridiculous, I was still in serious trouble. Any missing file, let alone F Section, let alone a contam, I had to report. Even B Section would eventually work out they’d never sent down a requisition. Anyway, the first thing was to try and get Sylvia out of her hysterics by giving her something to do, so I asked her if she could remember any of the cross-ref numbers.

  The sobs stopped. The machinery clicked. She started to rattle off numbers.

  “You’ll have to write them down,” I said. “Don’t worry if you can’t remember them all.”

  “Oh, I can!” she said and went rattling on.

  “You’re extraordinary,” I said, still trying to cheer her up.

  “It was a nice easy name,” she said. “I don’t like Robinsons. But George Gissing—he was a writer, you know. My father read him all the time.”

  I ordered a file-check, though we didn’t mis-file, ever. There was no card in the card index. I told Di to check Sylvia’s cross-refs while I took the other files upstairs. While I was there I looked in on the Director’s secretary and asked for an urgent appointment. When I got back Di told me that three more files were missing, and so were the cross-ref sheets in the other ones Sylvia had remembered. They’d all got something to do with Yugoslavia. Sylvia, of course, was in tears again.

  I felt cold all through. Once, years later, my flat was burgled. There’d been some stuff about me in the gossip-columns, with pictures, and hints about my private life, so people knew who I was and thought they knew the sort of person I was. This man—it must have been a man—didn’t just come in and take my jewellery. He’d brought a packet of condoms and written little notes to go with them and hidden them round the flat for me to find. It was horrible. After I found the third I decided to move. It was a nice flat, but I couldn’t live there any more. But before that, whenever I found one, I immediately remembered how I’d felt looking at the files in the Zoo that morning.

  I rang the Director’s secretary and told her I had to see him at once. She said he was in a meeting, but I said I was coming up now and she had to get him out. She didn’t like it at all, but she did it. I told him what it was about and he went and cancelled the meeting and came back. This time I told him the whole story. I suppose I could have said I’d asked for the file in order to test the system, but he’d have been bound to smell a rat. He just sat there looking at me with his little piggy eyes, exactly the way Mr Chad used to look at Mother when she was making her madder suggestions. (That’s how I’m so sure it must have been the same man as Paul’s boss. They weren’t twins, but there was a terrific family likeness. They could easily have been brothers.)

  The Director was ill by then. He’d had something wrong with his blood that winter, and his skin was blotchy and yellow and his lips were blue and his voice sounded exhausted, but he was still one of the cleverest people I’ve ever met.

  “This girl,” he said. “What does she do outside?”

  “I don’t know. She shares a flat with one of the other clerks, Annie Dunwood
y.”

  “Send up her personal file,” he said. “We’ll have to run a check on all of them, but we’ll start with her. I should have known about her earlier.”

  I didn’t understand for a moment. Here I was coming up with the appalling news that someone had got into the Zoo and taken several files from the contain and removed a lot of cross-refs from other files, and on top of that that I’d been forging green tags, and he was worrying about Sylvia’s personal life … then I got it. It was just that I was so used to Sylvia that I hadn’t thought about it before. She didn’t have to take files home. She carried them around in her head. And if somebody outside realised … They’d only need to be kind to her, pretend to be fond of her, cuddle her … But she couldn’t have taken the file. I was absolutely certain it had been a terrible shock to her when she found it was missing.

  The Director was on the telephone, arranging an emergency meeting of Section Chiefs. I would normally have come to that but he looked at me and said, “I think you’d better go down and do some further checking. I’ll let you know if I need you.”

  Down in filing I found two things. Sylvia was having hysterics again and saying she’d lost her memory. And Annie Dunwoody had disappeared. Just about when the first panic had started, before I’d even shown up, she’d said she needed to go to the loo—I’ve explained about this being a nuisance—and she hadn’t come back. I checked with main security and found she’d left the building, getting on an hour before. I reported up to the Director’s office and next thing there was a team of men down in Files, poking around and questioning everyone, and I had to explain how everything was supposed to work, and answer questions over and over and over. They kept us there till after ten at night, except Sylvia, who was in such a state I made them send her home with an escort. As soon as she thought she was alone she turned on the gas oven and put her head in it, but the man who’d stayed to keep watch on her realised what was up and got her out in time.

  I only heard about that, because people stopped telling me things and I didn’t go to the Thursday Meetings any more, so I don’t know if they ever found out how Annie had smuggled the files (we found several more were missing) out of the Zoo. Looking back, I suppose the security might have got a bit slacker than I realised. That’s always the trouble with systems. The people who set them up assume they’re working the way they’re supposed to, while the people who’re actually in them are taking short cuts.

  Anyway, next thing I knew was rumours about a terrific power struggle upstairs, and the old Director resigned and the D Section Chief—that was the blue-eyed maniac—took over. Almost the first thing he did was send for me.

  He didn’t ask me to sit down. I had to stand in front of his desk while he stared at me as if he was trying to hypnotise me.

  “I have some further questions about the security lapse last month,” he said. “Grantworth, alias Gissing, is a friend of yours?”

  “He’s a friend of the family,” I said.

  “Mostly my older sister’s, I suppose.”

  “Were you previously aware of his wartime activities?” he asked.

  “Somebody told me he’d been doing something hush-hush in the Balkans,” I said.

  “Somebody?” he asked. “Mr Paul Ackerley?”

  “As a matter of fact, yes, but …”

  He interrupted me. His dead-level voice was getting on my nerves. It made the most obvious, innocent things sound sinister.

  “Another friend?” he asked.

  “He used to be more a friend of Harriet’s,” I said. “She’s another sister. But I’ve seen him several times recently. In fact, I’m having supper with him tonight.”

  “Has either of them ever asked you for any information about your work here?” he said.

  “I always say it’s too boring to talk about,” I said. “I mean, looking after the filing in a trade …”

  He interrupted me again.

  “That is not the answer to my question,” he said. “Has either of them ever asked you for information about your work here?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “What about your sisters?” he said.

  “No, not them either,” I said. “They know I work around here because I sometimes meet them for lunch and things. And I wouldn’t dream of talking about it at home because my mother is mad on Joe Stalin.”

  That was a bad mistake. He really stared now.

  “It’s just like a schoolgirl crush,” I said. “On Gary Cooper or someone. She got it during the war when he was on our side. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  It was no use. He was the kind who thinks everything means something. It was maddening, so maddening in fact that I decided I’d really give him something to think about. Gerry had told us the story once when he came over to Blatchards from Bury.

  “Anyway,” I said, “it probably wasn’t Gerry at all. It was probably his doppelganger.”

  “His doppelganger?” he said in that stupid machine-voice.

  “When he was called up they turned him into two people. You know, two army numbers, and a double set of pay-books and so on, and then they posted him to two places and tried to arrest him for being a deserter from the other one, and last I heard they still hadn’t got it sorted out. You see?”

  I think he knew I was teasing him, but there was something behind those mad blue eyes which told me I’d touched a really raw nerve. It was a sort of spy-hunter’s nightmare, I suppose, the idea of an enemy agent who can somehow turn himself into two people and actually get into your filing system like that and stay there.

  “And Ackerley?” he said at last.

  “Oh, he’s different,” I said. “He didn’t exist at all, and they made him up.”

  He’d got hold of himself by now and nodded as if he understood what I was talking about. He kept me standing there while he made a couple of notes. Then he looked up.

  “Very well,” he said. “You can go. In the circumstances you would do well to cancel your engagement this evening.”

  Now it was my turn to stare, and have to get hold of myself. As soon as I was out of the room I ran downstairs, grabbed a typewriter and wrote out my letter of resignation. Before I could take it upstairs a note came down from the Director’s Office telling me that my services were no longer required, that I must be clear of my desk by that evening, that I’d get a month’s pay in lieu of notice and so on, and reminding me, underlined, that I’d signed the Official Secrets Act. While I was clearing my desk a man called Parry came down to ask me more questions and tell me what I could and couldn’t do without getting sent to prison for breaking the Act. I used to think he was a bit of a friend, but he wasn’t now. I didn’t mind. I was absolutely furious.

  I knew I was going to be followed, so I deliberately walked the whole way home to give the man blisters. It was trying to snow, fine icy crumbs, coming on for a really cold night. The hell with them, I thought, thinking they’ve got a right to tell me how to run my life! I’ll show ’em how much I care! And he can bloody well wait out on the pavement all night!

  PAUL V

  1948

  I suppose the next significant forgathering for me was the party to celebrate Harriet’s engagement to Bobo Smith in the summer of 1948. Characteristically the central event was a cricket match, Blatchards v. The World. The World could raise only two women prepared to have a go, but all five sisters played for the house. There were no restrictions in favour of the women. The men in the Blatchards team were Lord Vereker, Bobo, and three workers from the estate and Home Farm. Dick Felder was to have played but at the last minute refused to make the trip, and, I believe, wanted to prevent Nancy from doing so. Lucy had already hinted that the marriage was in an uncomfortable state. She rang to ask if I had any suggestions for a replacement.

  “I could try Gerry again,” I said.

  “Oh, yes. Perhaps if you t
ell him …”

  “Of course.”

  Gerry was up at King’s on a scholarship. He’d won a cricket blue in his first summer but had switched from Classics to Economics for his second year (he was on a short course), effectively cramming three years” work in the new subject into one. That had meant no cricket till after the Tripos. Though that was by now done with he hadn’t wanted to commit himself to playing regularly for the rest of the summer. Tommy Seddon, a county neighbour of the Verekers who was captaining The World, had already asked me to approach him about playing, but Gerry had made his excuses, letting me understand that it wouldn’t much amuse him to stay at Seddon Hall and merely come over for the match and the party while Dick was installed with Nancy at the house itself. Lucy, of course, knew all this and indeed as soon as I spoke to Gerry he jumped at the offer, though it meant cancelling an engagement to play elsewhere.

  Mr Chad and Lord Seddon’s head gardener umpired. My unofficial position as Lucy’s lover was recognised by my being appointed scorer for both teams. I won’t describe the match, except to say that it was enjoyable, with an excitingly close finish. Ben, bowling a lively medium with a pleasant loose-limbed action, took three good wickets, one of them Michael Allwegg’s, a stocky aggressive hitter, of whom more later. Gerry opened for the House and was still there when Lucy, going in last “because someone has to”, joined him with a dozen runs still needed. This was apparently a repeat of a similar ending in the last match before the war, and there were great hurrahings when she hit the winning runs with a neat square cut. A beautiful late-June day turned into a mild dusk and starlit night.