The Last Goodnight

by Howard Blum

  But her concern was nothing compared to how sorry Betty felt for herself. After meeting his family, she realized that Arthur was an actor, too. He had clothed himself in artifice and invention. And he had played her as deliberately as she had deceived him.

  NO SOONER HAD THE COUPLE returned to Washington than Arthur was posted to New York. He wasn’t there long, however, before he received news of his next appointment. It was the sort of promotion for which he’d long been hoping. The Foreign Office was sending him to Santiago, Chile, to head the embassy’s commercial office. And for further heady proof that his star was at last rising, there was Arthur, his face grimly set in a pose apparently meant to suggest the unwavering imperial authority that resided in the members of His Majesty’s diplomatic corps, in a photograph on the front page of the London Times’s foreign supplement.

  Arthur could not believe his good fortune. After all his diligence, he told Betty, he was finally getting his just rewards. He also, no doubt, congratulated himself on the social efficacy of his well-made marriage. It must have, he could easily have believed after all the fuss the Washington papers had made of his wedding, impressed his stuffy ruling-class bosses. They now had reason to view him with a newfound respect and, if their admiring glances at Betty were any indication, even pangs of envy.

  He had triumphed, and perhaps this victory was sufficient. Perhaps it allowed him to be at peace with the trade-off he had made. If he had to give up his son in exchange for these blessings—as well as the richer ones that might come his way in the future—well, who could now blame him for feeling it had been a necessary sacrifice? Perhaps he even believed that his success proved that he had made the right choice.

  THE COUPLE SAILED FROM NEW York for Valparaíso, Chile, in September 1930. Betty, just twenty years old, did not share her husband’s excitement. On the long ocean voyage, she told Hyde, she kept wanting to grab Arthur by his lapels and demand, How could you? But then she knew she would have to ask herself the same anguished question, and she just couldn’t find the nerve.

  Instead, she kept all her guilt and disappointment locked deep inside her. It ate away, destroying, ravaging, until she had no choice but to acknowledge her own complicity in the unforgivable decision that had changed her life. She stood alone night after night on deck, her body pressed against the rail and her eyes fixed on some distant point on the horizon. Now she was capable of anything.

  Part III

  “Hidden in My Yesterdays”

  Chapter 12

  IT WAS THEIR THIRD FULL day in Ireland. Betty and Hyde had driven out of Dublin the previous morning and spent a night in the high-spirited company of some of Hyde’s literary friends. Still a bit thickheaded from the evening’s festivities, they were now standing high above Dublin Bay, hoping the fresh, cool sea breezes would be the elixir they needed.

  Their perch was on top of one of the fifty or so Martello towers, built a century ago as fortifications to protect the Irish coast from an invasion by Napoleon’s army. But this stone tower near Sandycone had its own much celebrated significance. It was here that James Joyce had set the opening chapter of Ulysses.

  The novel began with two friends walking up the tower’s “dark, winding stairs” to the rooftop gun platform, the very climb Betty and Hyde made. Joyce’s characters, too, had also stood at the edge of the parapet and looked out at the bay; the “snot-green sea,” Joyce, with a cruel humor, had called it. And the similarities, life broadly—very broadly, he acknowledged—imitating art, had emboldened Hyde.

  In the days that followed their arrival in Dublin, Hyde had been waiting for Betty to plunge back into her story. He’d offered hints, had tried subtly coaxing her, but she had simply refused to bite. During his former life in the covert world, he’d learned a few tricks. Don’t push, says the handbook. Plant the seeds, and eventually the target will get around to talking. But Hyde apparently was beginning to have his doubts about these facile operational wisdoms. Betty, he perhaps suspected, was too shrewd—and too willful—to be nudged into anything not of her own volition.

  He understood her reluctance; “History is a nightmare,” Joyce had wisely remarked in Ulysses, the line suddenly popping up in Hyde’s memory now that the book was in the center of his thoughts. He could imagine Betty’s regrets, and the anguish of reliving them. But if she didn’t pick up her tale soon, then all would be lost. So much for his ever writing this book, let alone making the windfall he so desperately needed.

  Betty and Hyde visited the Martello Tower in Dun Laoghaire, which is the location of the first scene in James Joyce’s Ulysses.

  Hans Wild/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images

  Hyde could not let that happen.

  Now, standing on the parapet, he recalled how on that very spot Joyce’s Buck Mulligan had badgered a reluctant Stephen Dedalus to talk. “What is it?” Mulligan had demanded when his friend hesitated. “Cough it up.” And now, with no other options apparent, and doing his best to keep his frustration in check, Hyde too chose this moment to be ruthless. He no longer cared what old ghosts haunted Betty; she too would have to “cough it up.” He resumed his interrogation.

  AT THE SAME TIME BETTY’S own sharp questions were piercing her mind, giving her pause. Why had she taken a lover? Was it simply vengeful, a spiteful act meant to hurt Arthur in Chile? Perhaps it was being twenty-one years old and still needing to feel the hot-blooded excitement that comes with an animating passion. Or maybe, as she liked to tell herself at the time, she was in love. But then again, she could just as well have been searching for something that remained unclear to her, even as she doggedly chased after it.

  As she silently reviewed the possibilities, she would explain in her memoirs, she knew that any of them could have been her motivation. Or, no less probable, at the crucial moment they could all have come together, a conspiracy of logic pushing her, a young bride in a foreign land, toward that act of betrayal. But she was unwilling—and unprepared, she also realized—to share these thoughts with Hyde.

  Nevertheless, she must have realized that she had to answer his questions; if she refused, the rest of their trip would be a disaster. And she had so much riding on it.

  She finally picked up her story just where she had left off: the zealous newly appointed commercial secretary and his elegant young wife, a mountain of their luggage stacked in the baggage car, making their way by slow train through the mauve-brown foothills of the looming Andes until they arrived at last in Santiago.

  And, no doubt relieved, Hyde was now as mute as any case officer listening behind a two-way mirror. He just let her talk.

  Chapter 13

  FOR ANYONE WHO LIVED IN Santiago—anyone of the diplomatic class, that is, Betty quickly amended as she resumed her story—life in the city in the early 1930s was “gay and vivacious.” It was a good time and a good place to enjoy many pleasures. And after the dowager gentility of Washington, Santiago was an exotic adventure. There were leafy, tree-lined boulevards, lush gardens, open-air markets where dark-skinned Indians sold strange delicacies, smoky clubs where young couples danced, waving their handkerchiefs in the air to mimic lustful roosters approaching eager hens, and everywhere one looked, nestled edge-to-edge like a chain of dominoes around the city, rose the tall peaks of the Andes. To this day, after a night of drinking, Betty couldn’t help wishing she could restore herself with a hot bowl of caldillo de congrio, the joltingly spicy fish stew that had never failed to cure even her worst hangovers.

  The Packs quickly settled into their new life. The British pound went far; their apartment was spacious, and opened onto a brightly planted terrace where they could sit with a glass of wine and watch a blazing sun set over the Andes. Another domestic blessing: a platoon of obliging servants was quickly recruited for an absurdly low fee to do the housework. It was all very comfortable.

  As a child in Cuba, Betty had learned a smattering of Spanish, and the language came back to her like a cherished memory. Building on this foundation, it w
asn’t long before she was speaking in a fluent and, even more impressive, accentless Spanish. Arthur had a gift for languages too. With his customary diligence, he applied himself, and within months he was effectively cozying up to the local tycoons in their native tongue.

  “The Commercial Secretary to the British Embassy, Mr. Arthur Pack,” the London Times noted in one dispatch, “gave a luncheon today to a large number of local businessmen and representatives of the press and made a speech pointing out the necessity of confidence in the future and drawing attention to the fact that the services of the Commercial Secretariat at the Embassy were at the disposal of those in any way concerned in commerce with Great Britain.”

  And of course there were parties. Lots of parties. Not long after the couple had moved into their new home, Arthur, surely proud to show off his young bride, hosted a twenty-first-birthday party for Betty. The city’s entire diplomatic corps was invited. The champagne flowed, a band played, and Betty looked gorgeous in the Latin moonlight. It did not take long for the new arrivals to be asked everywhere. Or for Betty, who flittered about like a preening cat waiting for the touch of a warm hand, to attract ardent glances wherever she went.

  Each day Arthur would go dutifully off to the embassy, making it a point to arrive by nine sharp. Wrapped up in his new responsibilities, he would not return till after dark. Betty’s calendar was marked up with luncheons and teas with the embassy wives, but this routine swiftly grew tedious. Most of the women were as old as her mother, and more discouraging, as proxy representatives of the crown they went about with a prissy, too often tyrannical watchfulness that also reminded her of Cora. She desperately needed something to fill the long days before the sun set, the parties began, and the champagne corks popped.

  For a while, riding helped settle her building uneasiness. “I had always been passionately fond of horses and riding,” Betty told Hyde, “and rarely a day passed in Chile when I was not in the saddle. Sometimes I rode almost from morning to night.”

  Then she discovered polo. “It was considered rather daring and even eccentric for a woman in those days,” she explained, and that, of course, made it even more fun. “Chilean women, at least those who were married, seldom went out on horseback. Indeed, they were discouraged from doing so by their husbands, as riding was supposed to prevent them from having children.

  “I was not a particularly good polo player,” she acknowledged. “But at least I was up to match play.” And galloping across the field in her tight white jodhpurs, Betty was the center of attention at every club chukka.

  BUT EVEN ALL THIS ENERGETIC activity was insufficient to soothe Betty’s vast restlessness. So when the opportunity presented itself at the polo club, she decided she might as well take up another bit of sport.

  “It was during this period,” Betty related matter-of-factly to the man who planned to write her story, “that I had the first love affair in my married life. . . . He was a rich Chilean called Alfredo, the head of a big nitrate company. He was also an experienced lover, very gentle and kind.”

  Looking back at the relationship, its long-extinguished heat and intensity suddenly once again almost palpable, Betty tried to justify her actions; she spoke to Hyde, but she was also trying to come to an understanding in her own mind. “I think I poured out on him all my love for my father, for my son, the love I had hoped to find with Arthur.” And if that easy logic was not totally convincing, she came up with another convenient rationale, one that would serve her well through the years: “I was madly in love with him.”

  For nearly a year Betty, with never the slightest pang of guilt or so much as a hint to an oblivious Arthur, transferred her loyalty to her lover. As covertly as any spy going off on a secret mission, she snuck off for her rendezvouses. Then, without warning, something happened that brought Betty to her senses. And at the same enlightening time she picked up still another piece of intelligence that she’d rely on in the field: the pattern of deceit is a circular one.

  “One day,” she told Hyde, “I happened to see Alfredo with a well-known Chilean woman.” Betty, who was well versed in body language, knew at once that this woman was also Alfredo’s mistress.

  Betty was filled with rage. Nevertheless, she hid her fury under a cloak of good manners. She spoke reasonably and sensibly, the very model of a woman of her class and breeding. Yet even as Betty, full of an icy reserve, challenged Alfredo, asking to know the truth, it never occurred to her that poor Arthur might very well have put the same anguished questions to her.

  “He swore that he did not love her and that he loved only me,” Betty continued. But his assurances were irrelevant. Her anger had solidified into cool resignation. “I did not want him anymore after that and told him so. That was the end of the affair.”

  In its place, despair filled her like a terrible sickness. “I was totally disillusioned. My son Tony had been taken from me and my first genuine love affair was smashed. I didn’t have a very sanguine view of life.”

  BUT BETTY WAS RESILIENT. SHE was her marine father’s daughter, and she would soldier tenaciously on. She would not surrender, she chided herself. And just like that, she explained to Hyde, she woke up one morning and decided her period of mourning for the lover she had lost and the son she had abandoned had gone on long enough.

  At the same time, Betty intuitively understood that to put the past behind her, reinvent herself and move forward, she would need to don a new disguise. So not for the last time, she tried on a pose she’d thought she’d abandoned for good—the dutiful wife.

  She would, she recounted to Hyde, stand by Arthur’s side. She would make the Foreign Office take notice of her husband’s steadfast service. Hand in hand, a couple, they would serve king and country. She’d find consolation, as well as a sense of purpose, in the unambiguous rightness of her marital commitment.

  To Betty’s credit, no actress ever threw herself with more vigor into such a demanding and unnatural role. Tall, regal, and beguiling, she stood with her husband at every diplomatic reception. She laughed appreciatively at the stiff jokes of Sir Harry Chilton the dry-as-dust British ambassador. She pretended it was all good facetious fun when a diplomat in his cups or a confident polo player moved in close to her and suggested in a breathy, ardent whisper that they meet the next day for a drink. And now that she was once again sharing only her husband’s bed, she told herself it would be pointless not to enjoy his caresses or reciprocate.

  And oh, the rewards of a life lived by marching in step with the crowd! Could it have been, she remembered asking herself with genuine astonishment, that her mother had been right all along? Perhaps it was not too late for her to start over. For within a year she received tangible proof that her performance had been a rousing success. Arthur’s name appeared on the New Year’s Honors: he was to be given the Order of the British Empire.

  As a child she had written a fanciful description of the glittering ball her father had attended in Buckingham Palace in 1903. “Days Bygone,” the ten-year-old had called her story. Now those days were no longer bygone, and the present offered the sort of storybook sparkle the young girl had imagined. For there was Betty, a tiara balanced on her blond head, wearing a long, flowing pale dress that made her look like a Hellenic deity descended from the heavens for the occasion, curtsying low to King George V as Arthur received his OBE at Buckingham Palace.

  Twenty-three-year-old Betty, presented at court. This portrait would later hang in the Wardman Park Hotel, in Washington, DC.

  Churchill Archives Center, Papers of Harford Montgomery Hyde, HYDE 02 011

  In one more earnest attempt to flesh out her new identity, Betty, while in England and with her husband at her side, went to see her son in Dorrington. It had been two and a half years since she had held Tony in her arms, and the young boy greeted the strangers with bewilderment and apprehension. He had been raised by the Cassells, and in his child’s mind it probably was incomprehensible that anyone other than the kindly doctor and his doting wife wer
e his parents. Betty’s optimistic plan was that she and Arthur would take their son out for a drive, and in the process begin to repair all the damage that had been done. But the outing quickly shattered into irreparable pieces.

  “He was terrified and immediately started screaming and screaming,” the Cassells’ daughter remembered. “It took ages to calm him down. After that he developed a stammer which I always thought stemmed from that incident.”

  The Packs would remain in England for another three months, but Betty, even as she tried to live up to the demands of her newfound domesticity, could not find the will to visit her son again. Instead, she did her best to persuade herself that Tony was happy with his foster parents. Her presence would only be disruptive.

  And whatever small pangs of maternal disappointment that had stubbornly lingered were soon assuaged. Just months after the couple returned to Chile, a delighted Betty received further confirmation of the rightness of the new life she was living: she was pregnant. Her belly grew large, and this time she rejoiced as she felt the life growing inside her. This pregnancy was not her secret. It was her pride.

  A daughter, Denise Beresford Pack, was born on New Year’s Eve, 1934.

  Denise, Betty vowed, would be her second chance. She would be the child Betty would never abandon.

  Betty’s infant daughter Denise Beresford Pack, born in 1934.

  Churchill Archives Centre, Churchill Archives Centre Miscellaneous Holdings, MISC 86

  THEN JUST AS SUDDENLY AND impetuously as it had begun, it all fell apart. It was as if, Betty told Hyde, she woke up one morning, looked in the mirror, and saw a face branded by her own deceptions. How could she have believed there was any honor in a life built on lies, with a husband she didn’t love? Her duty was to herself. Her allegiance was to her own anarchic nature.