The Yellow Room Conspiracy

by Peter Dickinson

  She closed the door, turned, faced me and said, “Ben and Michael were married on Saturday. In Paris.”

  “Good God!” I said.

  “Nan rang and told me. She’s just sent out … oh, you’ve had yours.”

  “I thought it was off already. It must be now.”

  “No. And she says we’ve all got to be there. She’s going ahead with marrying Gerry. She’s got to. She’s having a baby.”

  “What!”

  “What I said. We’ve got to be there. We’ve got to express solidarity.”

  “Ben didn’t show much.”

  “All the more reason why the rest of us should.”

  “I can think of no more uncomfortable …”

  “It’s only a week-end, for God’s sake! Please, Paul. It’s important. She needs everyone there to back her up.”

  “One of your sisters has just married a man whom we have good reason to believe is criminally untrustworthy, and you are suggesting we should now support another sister in making the same mistake.”

  “All I know is Nan says it’s going to be all right. She knows what she’s doing, Paul.”

  “I will come if you insist.”

  “No. I want you to come, but I don’t want to make you come. We don’t do that to each other.”

  At this point our meal, which I had ordered from a local Italian restaurant, arrived. We ate it largely in silence, angry with ourselves and each other, until Lucy said, “Do you want Nan to ask you herself?”

  “She has already,” I said. “I think my problem is that I have a feeling of being used. Gerry has been using me, and now Nancy seems to want to do the same. I don’t object to being used, but I need to know how and why.”

  “I’ll get Nan to talk to you,” she said. “Is it all right if I give her your office number?”

  “Much more chance of finding me there,” I said. “I suppose that’s best.”

  After that things eased, and we spent a quiet domestic evening, mostly watching TV. She had her period, which she tended to be squeamish about, so we didn’t go to bed. As I kissed her goodnight in the hallway before driving her back to Eaton Square I realised with a shock how tense her body still was.

  “What is it, darling?” I said. “Is there something you haven’t told me?”

  “Only that I’m afraid,” she said.

  Nancy telephoned next day, but wrong-footed me as I was beginning to excuse myself for my apparent over-sensitivity when she said, “In a minute, but there’s something else first. I want you to do me a favour. You’re not going to like it, but it’s important.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  “Lucy told you about Ben and Michael getting married?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m pretty mad about it, but it’s done now. Still, it’s rather spoilt the original idea of our all four going off and getting married on the morning of the fifteenth, and then coming back for luncheon and the cricket match and the party after. So I’ve talked it over with Gerry and we’ve decided to clear the decks by getting married the week before. That’ll make the fifteenth less of a thing, if you know what I mean. Just a cricket match and a party. Do you understand?”

  “If you feel unable to cancel it completely …”

  “No, that won’t do. I’ll explain in a minute. But listen. Gerry’s got to have a best man, and I’m not going to let him have Michael, which was the original idea. They were each going to be each other’s. I know you’re not too pleased with Gerry at the moment. Nor, if I may say so, am I. But … well, when he asks you, will you please say yes? Are you still there?”

  “Yes.”

  “And wondering how you can get out of it?”

  “To some extent.”

  “Please don’t. This is what I mean about it being important. I’ve got to make him understand that if he breaks up with Michael he’s got friends who’ll stand by him. Do you understand? I know it’s asking a lot, but …”

  “Have you fixed a date?”

  “Three o’clock on the sixth or seventh, at Bury Registry Office. I’d got all the paperwork done for the fifteenth, but they’re letting me shift.”

  I looked at my diary. Both dates were hideous. I might have excused myself on those grounds alone.

  “Shall we make it the sixth?” I said.

  “You’re a saint. Try and sound surprised when he asks you. Are you there?”

  “If you keep springing things on me you must expect these silences. Do I have to sound pleased?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Lucy talked to you about my recent dealings with Gerry, I think. Have you in your turn told him? That’s to say, how much does he know of what I know and suspect?”

  “None of that. All I’ve said is that he’s got to get himself away from Michael. I’m still working on him, but it’s going to happen. Or else.”

  “Or else what?”

  “Nothing. It’s just a way of talking.”

  “All right. About Michael—you wrote to Ben. How much did you tell her? Did you mention me, for instance?”

  “No. Absolutely not. I just said I’d learnt some things and I couldn’t tell her who’d told me.”

  “What was her response?”

  “A telegram telling me to mind my own asterisk business. Then she rushed off and married Michael.”

  “Was that her idea or his?”

  “No idea. I’ve got to go in a mo, but listen. Lu says you’re iffy about the fifteenth. Please, please will you come?”

  “For the same reasons that you want me to be Gerry’s best man?”

  “Well … yes, roughly. Please.”

  “I’ll be there. See you on the sixth. Good luck with everything.”

  The wedding was functional, not to say bleak. Harriet was Nancy’s witness, and Bobo had come too, but I had no time to talk to anyone as I’d been caught in traffic on the way down and was almost late. Gerry seemed subdued, but pleased to see me in an uncomfortable, oddly adolescent fashion, and tried to persuade me to return with them to Blatchards, but I said, truthfully, that I had to get back to London for my postponed meeting. The only other talk I had was with Bobo as we stood side by side in the public urinals. I’d been seeing him fairly frequently as his firm had been handling aspects of my flotation, but had not of course said anything about the imbroglio with Gerry, Lucy and Seddon.

  “Surprised to see you here,” he said. “I’d have thought you had your hands full in London.”

  “Full enough,” I said.

  “How come a wily old bird like you got himself involved in this balls-aching potmess.”

  I gathered he must know something about it after all. Presumably Nancy had talked to Harriet who had passed it on, but how much she’d said I had no idea.

  “I can’t say I’m happy about it,” I said cautiously.

  “It’s that shit Allwegg at the bottom of it all,” he said. “And I gather he’s going to have the neck to show up at this match. I’ll have trouble not shoving his ugly mug in for him.”

  “You’re coming?”

  “I wanted to cry off—it’s going to be a bloody ghastly wake by the look of it—but Harriet read me the riot act. Thank God I don’t have a family—the things you find yourself doing for each other. Gerry been on to you yet?”

  “He asked me to be his best man, as you saw.”

  Bobo grunted dismissively—it hadn’t been that he meant—but at that point a drunk came and stood in the next stall, making retching noises as he pissed. We moved out, but found Gerry waiting to say good-bye to me, preventing further questions. I drove to London very depressed.

  When I saw Lucy later that week she asked me how the wedding had gone and I told her briefly, but she herself had heard no more from Blatchards and didn’t want to talk about it further. I was not due to
see her at all in the week before the match, as she was planning to be at Seddon Hall, and going over most days to help with the arrangements.

  Having no wish to endure a minute more of the week-end than could be helped I’d said I would drive down on Saturday morning, in time for the start of the match, but on the Thursday Gerry telephoned and asked me to come on the Friday evening. He needed my advice, he said. London was sweltering, with that still, choking, late-summer heat which feels as if it must relieve itself in thunder in the next few hours, and then doesn’t. The road was up, with pneumatic drills, outside my office. The newspapers, with nothing else to report, were full of stories of eight-mile jams on the roads to the coast (those were the days when mass-market holidays meant North-Sea Butlins, not Mallorca or Corfu), with Saturday mornings far the worst. I had only routine work to catch up on. Even with those excuses I think I might have refused, but though I thought Gerry’s behaviour almost unforgivably bad, having acceded to Nancy’s plea to help her in her attempt to remove him from Michael’s influence—and though “redeem” is much too strong a word there did seem to be some moral principle involved—I now seemed to myself committed to doing all I could. I agreed, and left after lunch on Friday.

  The traffic was still atrocious, so it was late afternoon as I wound along the Blatchards drive with the house, vague-seen through the heat-haze, coming and going between the clumps of trees. Despite the full-leaved branches and the difference of season and my driving a comfortable car rather than tramping in army boots, the effect was extraordinarily similar to that December afternoon, fifteen years earlier, when I had walked out from the camp with Gerry and first met Lucy. I had of course come this way many times since then, but never, I think, with the same painful nostalgia. I intend the epithet. The sensation was physical, a clutching tension in my upper chest, and hurt sufficiently for me to slow down, wondering whether this could be a premonition of heart-attack.

  My car was a new Rover, with soft suspension and a quiet-running engine. At that drifting speed it made little noise, so the group on East Lawn didn’t notice my arrival. So strongly, and at the same time so healingly, did they embody the ache of irrecoverable time which I had been feeling that I stopped to watch. I was in shade, under the down-sweeping branches of a blue cedar. Four of the sisters were out in the heavy sunlight practising for tomorrow’s match. The contrast emphasised the time-gap. I felt myself to be looking out of the unsatisfactory present into the imagined past—a past in which their relationship to each other and to the house they lived in, unencumbered with suitors or husbands or children or business affairs, had been all that mattered in the world. There was no place for me in that world. Softly I opened the door, climbed out, and stood to watch.

  They had a net up. Lucy and Harriet were wearing whites, Ben dark slacks and a yellow Aertex shirt, and Janet a grey skirt and white blouse. Lucy, properly padded and gloved, was batting, while the others bowled to her in turn. In the distance, on the far side of the porte-cochère, I saw Mr Chad on a ladder, painting the last of the windows. (Lucy had told me about Nancy’s determination to get the work done before the match. It looked as if they’d just make it.)

  Harriet was the least athletic of the sisters, a stolid bat and not much of a bowler. Janet was physically gifted, though erratic, and liable to get herself out with some over-ambitious shot before she was really set. She batted right-handed but bowled left, a decent medium pace with a tendency for the odd ball to cut away and take the edge. If she’d been able to control this she might have posed problems for goodish batsmen. Ben, I believe, given a boy’s strength and opportunities, would have made the first XI of any public school as a bowler, but was a careless and irresponsible bat. Lucy was a fair bat, though her unthinking grace of movement perhaps made her look more proficient than she actually was.

  They were taking their net seriously. I watched Lucy drive a ball from Harriet, play forward to one from Janet, and miss an attempted cut when Ben whipped one down off a full run. Something was said, teasing by the tone of it, and that must have put Lucy on her mettle, because she took a pace down the pitch for Harriet’s next and hit it on the half volley with a full swing of the bat. The ball sailed away over the meaningless group of cherry trees that partly obscured that end of the facade, out of my sight behind the cedar-branches. Lucy, who had ended her stroke with the bat theatrically aloft, dropped it and put both hands over her mouth. The others turned and stood watching. There was a clash and tinkle of glass and they all burst into laughter.

  I moved into the open. The ground-floor windows seemed intact. Then I saw the starred pane in the second one along on the upper floor—one of the Yellow Room windows. That was a considerable shot, a six on most grounds. I must have completely misread the flight of the ball, or perhaps the force of the blow, having seen grace and timing but evidently not having allowed for Lucy’s wiry strength.

  There was a movement behind the broken window, as somebody climbed onto a chair to reach the catch. In the pause I heard the sisters still laughing, with the appalled but delighted laughter of children who have broken the rules. The sash slid up and Nancy leaned out.

  “No pocket-money for a month! Any of you!” she called.

  Her tone was mock-severe, but she too was laughing. My perception of the scene, I found, had changed. I was now mostly conscious of its falsity. I felt that the five of them were making a concerted attempt to regress to an earlier period when the family was united and happy, and it then struck me that this might be part of Nancy’s scheme for dealing with Gerry, to suggest that it was still possible for him too to return to that lost Arcadia and make a fresh start. Well, if so, she was wrong, and naively wrong. Time doesn’t work like that, and if she had summoned the rest of us to take part in the same charade, we were in for an even more uncomfortable week-end than I had imagined.

  Also, if that was the case, what part was Ben playing? Or was she perhaps joining in unawares, merely wishing to heal her own rift from the others by this regression?

  “Somebody go and get Mr Chad,” called Nancy.

  “Coming, coming,” he answered, ambling along past the porte-cochère to inspect the damage. “But aren’t you girls a bit old for this type of horse-play, then?”

  The response was another burst of laughter, still false to my ears.

  My move into the open had brought me into Nancy’s view. She waved and pointed. The others turned, and Lucy came loping across, mannish in her pads and thus more feminine than ever.

  “Wasn’t that a terrific shot!” she said.

  “Not the best place for a net if you’re going to cart the bowling,” I said.

  “We always have it there. It’s the only bit of East Lawn anything like a decent pitch. I’m not facing Ben on a ploughed field, thank you. And Mr Chad keeps spare panes ready cut. Isn’t it hot? It’s supposed to thunder tonight, according to the wireless.”

  “And clear up for tomorrow?”

  “Fingers crossed. Nan’s put you in Miss Bolton’s Room. I hope that’s all right.”

  “Fine,” I said.

  (Miss Bolton had been a quasi-mythical governess who had educated Lord Vereker’s elder sisters. The threat of her return had still been used as an incentive to virtue when Lucy’s generation were in the nursery.)

  “I wish I could stay, but we’ve got the Rest of the World to dinner and I’ve got to go back,” she said.

  “The Rest of the World and his wife these days, I suppose.”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  She sighed, looked at me, ageing right up into the present as she did so, and bent to unbuckle her pads.

  The family had already had tea, but Harriet brought me a fresh pot. By the time I took it out on to East Lawn to watch the net continue Lucy was gone, but had been replaced by both Nancy and Gerry. Ben was now batting, and Mr Chad had his ladder up to the Yellow Room window, where he was already puttying in a fresh pane.
I was drinking my second cup when Gerry left the net and came over.

  “Glad you could make it,” he said. “Tolerable drive?”

  “Barely.”

  “Sorry about that, but it would have been worse tomorrow. Finished? Come and have a look at the lake.”

  I put my cup down reluctantly and walked beside him towards the Plantations. I had no idea what was going to come up in our interview, but knew I was not looking forward to it. As we passed the stables he nodded up and said, “Lady V’s had another fall. Off a horse, this time.”

  “Lucy told me. Something wrong with her balance, I gather. She can’t be much over sixty.”

  “Fifty-nine. We’re going to have to find someone to be with her all the time.”

  “How’s she going to like that?”

  “Not at all. She’s still under the impression she’s safe to drive. She’s got enough energy to power a battleship, only the controls are disconnected.”

  “It’s a worry for you.”

  “Two worries. First, what to do about it. Second, how to pay for it. What about you? How’s your flotation going?”

  “Just about ready to slide down the slipway.”

  “All the shares taken up?”

  “Good as. Bobo’s people wanted a higher price, but I wasn’t going to risk anything being left with the underwriters.”