The Yellow Room Conspiracy

by Peter Dickinson

  Despite problems at home Dick was still being generous about money, so Nancy was able to subsidise the party well beyond the Blatchards norm. Harriet, insisting that it was her engagement, had taken over the arrangements, limiting Lady Vereker’s genius for discomfort to a few minor awkwardnesses—the coats of guests could not, for some reason, be stored anywhere near the front door but had to be carried through the crowded inner hall to three different locations, and thus were almost impossible to find when guests wanted to leave. An uncle of Bobo’s in the wine trade had bought a large parcel of pre-war champagne at an auction, cheap because the occasional bottle was past it. With the import restrictions then prevailing one glass of champagne at a party was a luxury. Enough to supply over a hundred guests well into the small hours was a miracle. The band was Tommy Kinsman’s, pretty good still. We danced in the Long Gallery.

  Lucy and I had been lovers long enough for me to be able to bear seeing her in someone else’s arms, and with so many of the guests being old friends her card quickly filled. I was curious to dance with Ben, who had turned out far too tall for classical ballet and was now living in Paris and working in the chorus line of the Moulin Rouge. She had kept the angular coltish look and made it part of her style (in her fifties she used to lounge in teenager poses). She had, though, acquired a cool, amused, watchful manner which I guessed was largely defensive. We waltzed, and she was indeed good—for some reason I specially enjoy dancing with partners taller than myself.

  “Can you tango?” she said as we finished.

  “Reasonably.”

  “I’ll get them to do one.”

  “It’s not on the card, and how many people …”

  “The hell with them. What’s the point of being the daughter of the house?”

  As I’d guessed the floor largely cleared, apart from a few incorrigible shufflers, but enough other pairs at first made a go of it for me not to feel as if we were behaving anti-socially. Ben took charge. Apparently there was a tango number in that year’s show. I merely kept my end up, but it was still very exhilarating. There is something about that particular combination of discipline and panache, of drill precision not simply mastering and controlling but actually expressing the prime sexual urge, which … I don’t know. Before long the other couples seemed to be dropping out until only one pair were still dancing along with us. I was too busy keeping up to Ben’s standard to do more than register that they were Nancy and Gerry, but when we’d finished and the spectators were applauding Ben turned laughing to Nancy and said “You’ve been taking lessons.”

  Nancy was excited, bright-eyed. Up till that moment, though she had made no parade of her feelings, she had seemed to me rather depressed, presumably by her problems with Dick.

  “Not me,” she said. “Gerry did the dancing. I was a passenger.”

  “Not in a tango,” said Ben. “Can’t be done.”

  I looked at Gerry. He seemed as nonchalant as ever but he caught my eye and gave a minimal nod of satisfaction as we moved off. (Later that evening, incidentally, the floor was cleared again and Ben, in costume, did a can-can for us. It was clearly the real thing, but the applause hadn’t quite the spontaneity our tango had elicited.)

  I was due for the next dance with Lucy. I’d apologised before taking Ben off to tango, but she’d simply smiled indulgently and said “Go ahead. Have fun.” Now I found her mysteriously cross.

  “I want some air,” she said.

  “Can’t we dance first?”

  “No. Let’s get out of here. Have you got a fag?”

  She practically never smoked, knowing I didn’t like it, but I found her a cigarette and we went out into the warm night and strolled past the weeping beech into the heavy shadow of the cedar. When I put my hand in hers she twisted her fingers tightly between mine, but when I turned her and reached to put my other arm round her bare shoulders she lifted it away.

  “Oh, God,” she sighed, and started to weep.

  I had nothing to say. I tried to let go of her hand but she clutched my fingers tight enough to hurt.

  “I’m sorry, Paul,” she whispered. “I truly am sorry. I’ve been telling us both lies.”

  “No you haven’t. You’ve never said you loved me. Not once.”

  “You’ve kept count?”

  “It isn’t difficult to count up to one.”

  We walked for a while more, holding each other close in a useless attempt at comforting.

  “Stay with me tonight,” she said as we made our way back to the house. There was a convention by which we slept separately when staying at Blatchards. I didn’t feel like breaking it on those terms.

  “Please,” she said.

  “All right, but change your mind if you want to.”

  She disappeared for the rest of the evening, leaving the rest of her partners in the lurch. I got through somehow till the last guests left, around three in the morning. We still had double summertime then, so it was getting light by the time I stole along to Lucy’s room. As I was closing her door I heard a movement behind me. I waited, watching through the crack, and saw Gerry go past towards where Nancy slept.

  Lucy was awake. We held each close, like children, until after a while Lucy dropped asleep as if she’d been drugged. I lay on my back until there was a reasonable chance of breakfast, when I slipped back to my room, dressed and shaved in cold water. I found Harriet in the breakfast room looking typically healthy and kempt. I was fond of her since Cairo, and felt that because of those days we enjoyed a sort of alliance different from either friendship or love. We could be entirely open and trusting with each other. She showed me her ring, platinum, from Asprey, an aggressive diamond in an uninteresting setting.

  “Bobo chose it,” she said. “I didn’t get a say.”

  “Do you mind?”

  “Not really. I don’t suppose I’d have chosen much different. You know, about getting married and putting up with someone, I think it doesn’t much matter not having the same kind of good taste—I mean preferring baroque to gothic or something. But you’ve really got to have the same kind of bad taste. If one of you likes damask lampshades with gold tassels, then you’ve both got to.”

  She studied the ring.

  “At least it makes it pretty definite I’m engaged,” she said. “One likes to be clear about these things. I don’t know I could cope the way you and Lucy manage.”

  “It’s tricky, certainly, at times.”

  “Are you coming over to Seddon Hall for luncheon? Tommy asked me to ring him with numbers. He’s a fusser.”

  “I don’t know him that well.”

  “You should make more effort. He’s going to be Foreign Secretary one day. Everyone says so.”

  “I’d have thought if you went in for that sort of ambition you’d aim for the top.”

  “He can’t be Prime Minister because when old Lord Seddon dies he’ll inherit the title. Tommy’s got less sense of humour than anyone I’ve ever met, but otherwise he’s all right. Bobo can’t stand him.”

  “One of a fair-sized list, I imagine. I suppose it includes me.”

  “I’m working him round.”

  “Why are you marrying him?”

  “Because I’ll know where I am with him, I’ve decided. I don’t want to fall properly in love—it only seems to make people unhappy.”

  “When it’s going well there’s nothing like it.”

  “But then, whoops, and you’re miserable. Aren’t you, Paul?”

  “Things don’t look too good at the moment.”

  “I’m sorry. What about luncheon?”

  “I don’t want to wake Lucy—I think she’s going to sleep in. Find out what Nan and Gerry are doing, and if they want to go we won’t, and vice versa. Then you’ll have the same numbers regardless.”

  At this point Lady Vereker rushed in.

  “Just the t
wo of you?” she said. “You’re early. I was just going to go and tell everyone they didn’t have to get up.”

  “No, Mother,” said Harriet.

  “I thought it would be friendly.”

  “You are going to wake everyone up to tell them they don’t have to wake up?”

  “Then they can go back to sleep.”

  “Not after you’ve been round shouting at them. Will Father mind if I fry my own egg?”

  “Provided you take one from the left of the box. Oh well, in that case I might as well go and clean tack for a bit.”

  Neither Lucy nor Nancy went over to Seddon Hall. Lucy, despite her stated need for me the night before, could now apparently hardly bear to be in the same room as me, not, I guessed, out of revulsion but out of distress at her own behaviour to me. As for Nancy’s motives, anyone’s guess is as good as mine. So both Gerry and I were needed to make up the numbers.

  Petrol rationing still being in force, eight of us crammed into Bobo’s Riley, which he then deliberately drove to elicit as much by way of screams and protests as he could. At one moment, coming on to a hump-backed bridge, he was on the edge of being out of control when a child on a bicycle wobbled up from the far side. Everyone yelled. The car spun as Bobo braked. We almost overturned, but finished up facing the way we had come with our rear mudguard jammed against the stone parapet. While the child watched, quivering, we heaved the car clear and Bobo and Gerry managed to wrench the mudguard out to a point where it no longer rubbed against the tyre. After that we drove on more sensibly.

  Seddon Hall can legitimately be described as a gothic pile. Ivanhoe-inspired, it might have been an architectural sampler built to display all the possible variations of turret, battlement and machicolation available in the 1820s. Lord Seddon was on the steps waiting to greet us, not, it turned out, for the pleasure of welcoming three pretty, if dishevelled, girls under his portcullis, but because he was anxious whether Gerry was in our party.

  I had met Lord Seddon the day before, when he had spent some time at the scoring-table. He was small, wiry, bright-eyed and weirdly inarticulate. I never heard him reach the end of a sentence. Often he stopped short of the main verb. Since his thought processes were routine and his sole interest was cricket I had found conversation with him not too difficult. Now, though, when he took me aside as soon as the party had assembled for sherry in the Solar, he lost me for a while.

  “Grantworth, er …”

  “Yes, sir. I’ve known him several years.”

  “First class, eh …”

  “I should think he’ll get one, pretty certainly.”

  “Eh? No, no. Yesterday …”

  “I’ve seen him play much better bowling just as well.”

  “Got his blue, but then, I say, why …?”

  “He had to work, sir. He was doing a three years” course in one. Even so, as I say, I should think he’ll get his first.”

  Lord Seddon vented a rasping snort. There was no point in my explaining that for a penniless undergraduate a Cricket Blue plus a First in Economics might offer better job prospects than a Blue alone, but both poverty and work were probably concepts beyond Lord Seddon’s imagination.

  “Happen to know where …?”

  “He was at Eton with me, sir.”

  “No, no, where …?”

  “At his prep school, I imagine, sir. He has no family to …?”

  ““No, no, no. I mean, where …?”

  I worked it out. Lucy had already told me that Lord Seddon, though living entirely in Suffolk, maintained another house near Ripon, where all his children had been born and most of his grandchildren too, at his insistence, so that they should have birth qualifications to play for Yorkshire. In the event only three of them had been male, none anything like good enough to represent the county, and he was now, according to Lucy, waiting with some impatience for the next generation. I remembered what Gerry had told me about his being found in a public lavatory.

  “Leeds, I believe, sir,” I said. “Would you like me to check?”

  “Very good of you. Very good of you.”

  I went over to ask Gerry if he had Yorkshire qualifications, but Lord Seddon came tripping eagerly at my elbow so I simply introduced them and stood back to watch Gerry mastering the art of supplying both halves of a conversation, which he did with ease. Lord Seddon was clearly delighted.

  I spent most of lunch in silence. We ate, parsimoniously and with vast gaps between courses, at a long black refectory table in the Great Hall. “Not enough girls to go round,” Bobo had announced gloomily as we went in. I found myself sitting next to him towards one end of the table, and naturally enough he was more interested in the female house-guest on his far side. Janet, on my right, was soon absorbed by her other neighbour’s account of how he was keeping his dairy-herd free of mastitis by installing in the cowshed a special box which picked up beneficial vibrations from the planets. Time passed for me extremely slowly. After a while I noticed Gerry and Michael Allwegg in animated conversation some way down the other side of the table.

  My feelings about Gerry were not straightforward. I didn’t at all understand Lucy’s attitude to him. She had said, once, that she wasn’t in love with him, but I was aware that what had happened last night had much more to do with him and Nancy than it had with my obvious relish in tangoing with Ben. I couldn’t blame Gerry for taking advantage of the dance, and the champagne, and Nancy’s disaffection from Dick. None of these were things which he’d set up or worked for. He’d simply taken his chance as deftly as he’d take a catch at short leg. But this didn’t make it any easier for me not to feel that he had somehow betrayed me, his friend, and at the same time angry that he should be, however unconsciously, the cause of Lucy’s unhappiness. I wondered whether there was any way I could explain to him the effect he was having on two people, both of whom, I assumed, he valued.

  Perhaps my perceptions were over-sharpened, but after a while I seemed to perceive that there was something unusual about the conversation he was having with Allwegg. I’ve had difficulty conveying Gerry’s normal conversational style. On paper it looks rather on the florid side, formal and self-conscious, but one wasn’t aware of this when talking with him as he did the trick so easily that with him it seemed no trick at all. He was well-mannered about it too, listening, accepting interruptions, finding something interesting to reply to banal or dim remarks, and so on. Still, without apparently wishing to do so, he usually managed to dominate any conversation. This didn’t seem to be the case now, though. It was Allwegg who was doing most of the talking, while Gerry was listening with what looked like eager attention.

  I never knew Allwegg well, nor wished to. It is difficult for me to be fair to him, in the light of later events. The most obvious thing about him was the combination of charm and intelligence with striking physical ugliness. Dark coarse hair, harsh eyebrows flaring upward at the outer ends, brownish pocked skin, full mouth, a jowly look even then, he appeared in that company much more of an outsider than Gerry, or even I (the two genuine outsiders) probably did, though I believe his family was perfectly acceptable, minor squirearchy from the Welsh borders. I was aware of the charm, but I have to say it is not the sort I find charming—too blatant, too willed for my taste. Will, in fact, was for me his most marked characteristic, more so even than his appearance. Some people seem to possess a sort of psychic force, stemming perhaps from a self-validating conviction of the rightness of all their beliefs and actions, which is very hard to resist. Hitler was an obvious example. They are madmen who contrive somehow to act sane, perhaps until a sudden crack-up, perhaps for all their lives. Allwegg had at least a touch of that. He was, by the way, a goodish cricketer, having captained Winchester, but had just missed his Blue. His father was a High Court judge, and he himself was reading Law at Pembroke. Most of that, of course, is later knowledge. All that I really noticed then was the effect
that he seemed to be having on Gerry.

  I wasn’t the only one. As we were settling into the car to return to Blatchards, Ben, squeezed in beside me on the front passenger seat with Janet across our knees, twisted her neck and spoke over her shoulder.

  “What on earth were you talking to Michael about, Gerry? It must have been riveting.”

  Gerry laughed. Crushed though we were, without touch or eye contact, I sensed the electric tingle of satisfaction in him. The obvious thing was to put it down to his night with Nancy, and the possibility of more such nights, but it seemed in the context to be more a response to Ben’s question.

  “How to become millionaires,” he said.

  LUCY V

  1948

  I’ve been listening to what I said last time, and thinking about it, and wondering. Wondering, I mean, why almost at once I started to behave as if none of that had ever happened. The easiest thing is to say I just knew there couldn’t be anything wrong about Gerry. Perhaps that was the hidden reason why I was so furious with them. I don’t know. I’d got plenty to be furious about, without that. And you’ve got to remember that without me realising it I’d got pretty browned off about the kind of thing we were doing. Telling the madman about Gerry’s doppelganger was the final straw. It made me start actually thinking what a nonsense it all was.

  And then, oh, I suppose it was a few weeks after I’d left the Exchange I got asked to a ball at Greenwich, in the Painted Hall—terrifically glamorous, except that marble’s such hell to dance on. Of course almost all the men were Navy, and at the dinner before the dance two of them had been talking about Greece. Greece was in a frightful mess just then, with communists and anti-communists killing and torturing each other, and us trying to stop Stalin getting his hands on yet another country. Both these officers had actually been there, one after the other, first when we were trying to keep the peace and then when we were trying to boot the communists out. I pretended not to be listening, but actually I knew quite a bit about what they were talking about, because we’d got a lot of files on Greece, and were always having to get them out and update them. There was a man called Mizikouros who was head of an anti-communist group on Euboea. I knew his name well, because he had a blue-tagged file which meant he’d been checked and re-checked and he was absolutely reliable, but neither of these men had a good word to say for him. According to them he was a total liar and a complete savage. One of them told a story about what he’d done to a village which hadn’t come up with as much food as he’d wanted, though the villagers were pretty well starving already. It sounded just as bad as anything the Germans had done. Of course we always knew on the Exchange that nothing on the files was dead certain—Intelligence work isn’t like that. But even so. I mean, Mizikouros had a blue tag!