The Yellow Room Conspiracy

by Peter Dickinson

  Nan was that sort. When we were growing up she was always Top Girl, despite Harriet being the bossy one. In fact, because Mother was such a bouncer and flouncer, a sort of perpetual teenage hoyden, I think we subconsciously elected Nan to play Mother instead. She was just much more suitable. I was still a Junior when Nan left school, and Juniors were all sat down to write their letters home after Sunday Chapel, so I used to write a tidy page-and-just-over to Father and Mother and use the rest of the time scrawling page after page to Nan, and she always answered. (Mother usually forgot.)

  Most teenage girls spend half their time longing to be grown up and the other half longing to slink back and be little girls again, but Nan was grown up as soon as she decided to be, poised and smart and going to dances and looking at least three years older than she really was. That made things easier for the rest of us.

  Then the war came, splitting us all up, and then she married Dick and went to America and tried being smart-set rich for a bit (which I bet she did perfectly), and I still used to write pages to her every now and then and she’d always answer. And then she seemed to get bored with that and came back to England and took a deep breath and changed again. It happened just about when she set up at Blatchards with Gerry. At first she used to go up to London most weeks to be with him but she soon stopped doing that and pretty well only went up to buy things she couldn’t get in Bury. She wore practically no make-up and stopped having her hair cut and permed and put it up into a bun and wore polo-necks and slacks most of the time, and so on. But she was always clean and neat, and if she had to dress up she did it properly.

  In fact that was one thing about Nan that didn’t change. Whatever she was doing or being, she did it properly. She was never mad about horses, like Mother, but she rode really well. And when she came back to England she brought the Ferrari Dick had given her and drove it incredibly fast, but you felt just as safe with her as if it had been a Morris Minor. And so on. So now she started taking on the sort of jobs we’d always been brought up to believe only Mr Chad could do, or you had to get in proper workmen for, because people like us didn’t know how, and certainly not if we were women.

  Father hated change and Mother couldn’t be bothered, so when Nan moved in a lot of the rooms hadn’t been decorated since before the First War. She tried a local firm, found out what it would cost and decided she and Mr Chad could do it between them, which they did. Then Gerry started complaining about the hot water in the West Wing, which was where they mostly lived because those were the nicest rooms, only the old gas-plant, which was right away in the Brew House, didn’t usually produce enough gas for the West Wing boiler, so the thing about the hot water in the West Wing was that there wasn’t any most of the time. Nan decided to put in a separate oil system. She got estimates and told Gerry she couldn’t afford it. Gerry went on complaining. (This was their first real set of rows, at least that I was aware of.) In the end Nan bought a book and designed her own heating system. She hired a professional to check it, and then hired a retired plumber and worked as his mate until he got sick, when she took over herself—plumbing’s dead simple if you’ve got the tools, she said—and in the end she put in two new bathrooms and a spare loo as well as the central heating, hiring the plasterers and carpenters when she needed them and firing them if they weren’t any good or tried to boss her around. Then someone found dry rot in the laundry, so she gutted the building and turned it into a flat, which she let. And so on.

  She always had some new project on. It kept her busy. “It stops me thinking,” she used to say. I thought this was a joke for a while, and then I realised that she meant it, because she wasn’t at all happy.

  We got into a pattern. I’d ring up and check she’d be around, and then I’d bring the kids and Nanny over and dump them with Mother and go down to the house and get a tea-tray together and take it along to Nan and she’d stop what she was doing and have a tea-break, and we’d talk. She needed somebody to talk to, I decided, and that must mean she couldn’t talk to Gerry.

  I remember once I found her with Mr Chad putting security catches onto the windows in the Rose Room. (We’d had to do the same at Seddon Hall because there’d been a rash of big-house burglaries around, and we actually had things worth stealing, Raphaels and so on, which Nan didn’t.) Mr Chad tactfully made himself scarce, usually, but this time he was in the middle of an argument with Nan. I always enjoyed it when this happened because of the way they went about it, good-humoured but pig-headed, teasing, scoring points off each other, as though it was all part of a much longer argument that would never properly end until they were both dead, just like a sensibly married couple, in fact. I said so to Nan after Mr Chad had left, and she laughed.

  “Are there such things as sensible marriages?” she said. “How should I know?”

  “You and Gerry are as good as,” I said.

  She just shrugged.

  “Aren’t you happy with him?” I said. “You don’t have to tell me. It’s none of my business.”

  “One doesn’t have to be happy,” she said. “Either one is coping with one’s life, or one isn’t. Most of the marriages I know are like that. Husbands and wives are ways of coping. Some work, some don’t. Gerry and I have our ups and downs, but mostly we seem to work.”

  “I thought you were besotted with him at first,” I said.

  “I suppose so,” she said. “It’s difficult to get oneself back into that sort of state of mind. Yes, I was, but then I wasn’t. And he never was. The point about Gerry is that he’s besotted with this house, and that’s what matters to me. He may let me down, but he’s not going to let the house down.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone sound so bleak. Nan lit a cigarette and sat at the top of her step-ladder, smoking and thinking.

  “I took a chance with Gerry and I’ve lost,” she said. “Of course I didn’t think it out like that, but that’s what it adds up to. On the other hand, who else was there? I mean, no doubt I could have found some bloke I could stand to live with who’d take me on, but this place? Gerry and I have rows, you know. Pretty savage at times. The one thing he’s never come up with to fling at me is that it isn’t worth hanging on here. He’s as crazy about it as we are. He’s genuinely longing for the day when he’s made enough of a pile to take over from Dick and marry me and start having kids. You realise that if I re-marry, bang goes my alimony? I’m not really supposed to cohabit. Dick’s been very good about that, but he’d really mind if I managed a kid with Gerry when he and I couldn’t.”

  “I didn’t know,” I said.

  “So it may never happen,” she said. “Not till too late, anyway. I suppose I could leave it to one of yours, or Hattie’s, or Janet’s. Ben’s, even, if she ever takes time off from dancing to have one. I don’t think it would work. You’ve got to have grown up here, to fall in love with the place before you’re sensible enough to realise what’s wrong with it. Hattie’s and Janet’s aren’t here enough. Timmy will have his hands full with Seddon Hall. What about Rowena? She seems to like coming here.”

  “That’s because she dotes on Mother,” I said. “I don’t think she even notices the house. Anyway, she isn’t one of us, if you know what I mean. She comes from a different tribe—Tommy’s, I suppose. Tommy’s a terrific prig, you know. A really nice, kind prig. I’m really fond of him, so I can say that. Rowena’s only four, so you can’t tell yet if she’s nice or kind, but I’ve known almost from the day she was born that she was a prig.”

  “I’m not sure children are such a good idea,” said Nan. “Hattie seems to enjoy hers, I suppose. Well, all I can do for the moment is soldier on. Lucky I like it, isn’t it?”

  We talked a bit more, and then she went back to work and I walked up to the stables wondering if I was being fair to Rowena. Actually I was, as it turned out, but I suppose I couldn’t have known, really.

  If Rowena was four when we had
that talk, then it must have been about a year later that the business with Sammy Whitstable and Tommy and all that blew up, but it was still my usual pattern in spite of everything else that seemed to be happening. I drove over with the kids and Nanny, left them with Mother and went down to the house to look for Nan, who’d told me that she was trying to get the outside woodwork along the South Front and the East Wing painted in time for the wedding-party next month. I found her right up at the top of an extension-ladder doing the window of what used to be Janet’s bedroom. I’d put the tea-tray down on the iron table by the arbour and gone over to hold the bottom of the ladder, which bounced horribly as she came down, though of course being Nan she’d got it safely lashed. She didn’t seem to mind.

  “I couldn’t do that,” I said. “It makes me sick even looking at you.”

  “Don’t talk to me about being sick,” she said.

  “Oh dear,” I said. “Trouble?”

  “They tell me it’s Nature’s way,” she said. “I must say, I think Nature could have come up with a better way.”

  We were just sitting down. I knew at once what she was talking about. I felt myself go white. She must have been watching me, on purpose, to see how I’d take it.

  “I’m sorry, Lu,” she said. “I hoped you wouldn’t mind. You’re the first person I’ve told, except the doctor. And Gerry, of course.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “I’m sorry,” she said again. “I thought you’d got over that years ago.”

  “Of course I have,” I snapped. “It’s … well … I’m sorry too. I can’t help it. I don’t want it. Only it just comes back and bites me sometimes.”

  “Ahab’s ghost,” she said.

  That made it alright. It was still a ghastly mess, but that was all. I could be sane about it, think about it, do my best to help. I’d better explain. Ahab was a cat from a litter which had been born at the Home Farm. He was almost wild. Father got him to deal with a plague of mice in the Gun Room, where we kept our gumboots. This was when I was fairly small. He lived under an oak chest in the passage outside the Gun Room and rushed out and bit you as you went past, but he really did deal with the mice so Father refused to get rid of him. (Father wore boots, so he was Ahab-proof.) The chest was on the far side of the Gun Room door, so it was alright about the gumboots, but when we wanted to get to the Yellow Room without going right round and up and back down the secret stair we had to climb on to a bench on one side of the chest, walk across the chest while Ahab lurked growling underneath and off on to the stairs beyond. Long after Ahab died (he picked a fight with a visiting Alsatian, and lost) we still used to do this. It was because of Ahab’s ghost, we told people.

  A ghost that still bit you sometimes. It was exactly right. And only one of us would have any idea what she was talking about. I sometimes think, still, that family is the only thing that really matters. Even when you’re quarrelling with them they mean things nobody else can mean. Anyway it was a very important moment. It changed things, changed the way I thought and felt about things, about Gerry. I think I realised, even then, that the ghost was never going to bite me again.

  “Just like that,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Forget it,” she said.

  I poured the tea and Nan lit a cigarette and we didn’t say anything for a bit. It was a blissful morning, the last dew just going, pigeons, the sound of the mower from Long Lawn. After a while I said, “I’ve got something to tell you. I’m afraid you aren’t going to like it, especially after what you’ve just told me, but I think I’ve got to.”

  She just nodded, so I started at the beginning and told her everything—everything, I mean, except about it being Teddy Voss-Thompson who’d told Paul—the dinner party Sammy Whitstable had come to, and Paul’s talks with Gerry and the Mudge-woman, and the opera tickets, and the old people being frightened out of their homes, and so on. Nan didn’t interrupt, but chain-smoked, lighting new cigarettes from the butts of the old ones. After a bit I noticed her other hand was pressed across her stomach as if she was trying to hold the baby in place. I stopped.

  “Go on,” she said. “I think it’s alright.”

  So I finished. She sat and thought for a bit.

  “Well, I suppose you had to tell me,” she said. “I’ve heard better news. Bloody Michael. You were keen on him once, weren’t you? Gerry told me.”

  I was appalled. I think I’ve said my affair with Michael is one of the things I’m truly ashamed of, and for him to go telling his crony about it, and the crony to tell my own sister … Just thinking about it now, after all these years, it still makes my blood boil.

  “Michael’s an absolute bastard,” was all I could say.

  “He’s worse than that,” said Nan. “He’s some kind of monster. He’s almost done for Gerry—I’ve been trying to get him to see it for years. He knows. That’s the dreadful thing. He knows. He’s always said he’s so deep in that he can’t get out yet without losing everything he’s made. Next year, he’s kept saying, or the year after. In the end I lost patience. The day after Father’s funeral I told him it’s this year or not at all. Of course I didn’t know then that Dick was going to go broke, but at least it meant we could get married.”

  “And have a baby,” I said.

  “That’s the carrot,” she said. “It wasn’t my idea. He’s always wanted one. Not just one, either. He wants to fill the house with a family, his family, but like we used to be. Funny, isn’t it?”

  She didn’t make it sound funny.

  “There’s a stick as well as a carrot, I suppose,” I said.

  “There better had be,” she said. “And by God if this means he’s still letting Michael set him up to do all the dirty work …”

  “Gerry told Paul he didn’t want to involve Michael,” I said.

  “I don’t believe it,” she said. “Gerry wouldn’t have had a clue what sort of a girl would work the oracle. Take it from me. He’s still a total innocent about what goes on inside other people’s heads. But Michael would have known exactly which switches to press …”

  She sat still, stroking the round of her stomach. You couldn’t see any kind of a bulge yet, but from the way her hand moved I knew it was there.

  “It’s funny,” she said. “You know, I want this baby. I want it for itself. I started off quite cold-bloodedly, jumping the gun, because I agreed we wouldn’t stop at just one, and there isn’t that much time. But now it’s actually happening there’s a great soft part of me I never knew was there, and all it wants is for the kid to have a life worth living. So for a start I’m not going to get rid of the kid; and that means if poss I’m not going to get rid of Gerry either. I know he’s been behaving like a total shit, but he isn’t. Not like Michael. Michael’s a shit through and through, and he’s taken Gerry with him into the shit-heap, but I’m bloody well going to get him back.”

  I stared at her. I’d seen her once before with that look, when she still had the Ferrari and a blond brute in a Healey cut in on her and waved his hand as he went past and she sat on his tail for fifteen miles while he tried to get away and he couldn’t.

  “You can’t always make people do things,” I said.

  “I’ve got the stick, remember,” she said. “The next thing is to make him see I’m ready to use it. I must get hold of some really sharp lawyer, not old Wellow, he’s useless …”

  She sat there for a bit, brooding.

  “What about Ben?” I said.

  “I’ll write to her,” she said, hardly thinking about it. “Ah well, back to work. I’ve got a paint-brush to rescue. Thanks for telling me, Lu. Don’t do anything for the moment, and don’t let Paul worry Gerry. I’ll deal with him.”

  She jumped up and strode off to the ladder. I watched her climb it, feeling sick for her again as it bowed under her weight. Then I put the tea-tray together and carried it in and washed up and wen
t back up to the stables.

  I found Mother by the mounting-block, crouched under the pony with Rowena, explaining how and why colts were gelded. Nanny’s face was bright scarlet. This was pretty well all the sex-education we’d had, apart from our own Nanny telling us that babies appeared from nowhere under gooseberry bushes and a soppy picture in a book of poems showing the fairies bringing them. A week before and I’d really have screeched at her. Now I just told her to stop talking nonsense, gathered the children up and took them home.

  PAUL IX

  July/August 1956

  All Lucy told me about her talk with Nancy was that it had taken place, that Nancy was now in charge and would deal with Gerry, and the affair was no longer any business of ours. I felt it was, but in my case only marginally, and besides I was now at the critical stage of preparing my company for public flotation, which involved a series of meetings where I had to be personally present, decisions only I could take, and so on. I was glad of the excuse to take no further steps of my own. I did not ring Mrs Mudge again.

  Seddon was often out of the country so Lucy had more free time than usual, but mastering the paperwork for the flotation often kept me at my desk till the small hours, so we still didn’t manage more than the occasional evening together, and one night. By unspoken consent we chose not to spoil these occasions by worrying over Vereker affairs. Just before another such meeting I returned to my flat and picked up the post from my doormat. (I had left that morning well before it was delivered, to allow me to get home at a reasonable hour.) It included a heavy white envelope with a Bury St Edmunds postmark, which I opened and found an engraved invitation to a party at Blatchards to celebrate the marriages of the Honourable Nancy Felder to Mr Gerald Grantworth and the Honourable Belinda Vereker to Mr Michael Allwegg. “Luncheon, cricket, dinner, dancing,” it said. Folded inside was a printed score-card for the match, Blatchards v. Rest of World, with the names of the players on both sides and my own as scorer. I was astonished to see Seddon listed as playing for Blatchards, along with Gerry, Bobo Smith and Michael Allwegg. There was also a note in Nancy’s emphatic, slanting hand: “Counting on you. Keeping a room. Please come. For old time’s sake!” That was the only suggestion of anything going on beneath the surface appearance of privileged jollification. I felt, as I say, astounded. The date was already pencilled into my diary, but I had naturally assumed that it was now all off. At this point I heard Lucy’s key in the door and went out into the hallway to greet her, still holding the card.