A Scandal in Belgravia

by Robert Barnard

  “Not at all, old boy. A vote,” said Jim Butterworth, with professional heartlessness. With an abrupt change of emotional key he added: “But you wouldn’t really want to upset a fine old man like that by publishing ancient scandals about his son, would you? Think it over, Peter.”

  I sighed.

  “Jim, I have tried to explain to you that I have said nothing at all about publishing.” By now I was thoroughly nettled by his dimness and pomposity, so it was probably with malice that I added: “You were at Eton with Timothy, weren’t you?”

  I had found that out from Who’s Who. Under “Butterworth, Lord,” it had said “b. 20 Jan. 1927; Educ. Eton.” He spluttered magnificently at what was common knowledge.

  “I say, really old boy—what are you suggesting? I hardly knew the man— Years apart—”

  “You were born the same year.”

  “Different houses. Never mixed in the same set at all.”

  “He had a very remarkable personality. Immensely likeable. I’m sure you knew of him.”

  By now poor Jim was nearly purple, and puffing. He sank his voice to a mere whisper.

  “Well, yes, certainly I knew of him. And the fact is that he had a certain—reputation. Don’t like speaking ill of the dead, you know: de mortuis nil . . . desperandum—”

  “—nil nisi bonum—”

  “Right. Exactly. But the fact is, young Wycliffe got in with a set quite early on—a set of older boys. Boys that . . . that the decent chaps wouldn’t touch with a bargepole. Of course that meant they protected him—very useful for Timothy. But it was always felt there must be a certain—”

  I wondered whether to risk quid pro quo, but suggested: “Service offered in return?”

  “Exactly, old boy. Hit the nail on the head. And with the benefit of hindsight, we were obviously right, weren’t we?”

  “Maybe, maybe. But to get back to what we were talking about: the Wycliffe family.”

  “Well, of course they’re the Redmonds, you must know that. Grandfather was Marquess—and the current man’s Tim’s cousin. Rather a dim soul, I believe. Never comes here.”

  That, I suspected, was Jim Butterworth’s criterion for dimness in a Lord.

  “I meant Tim’s immediate family—”

  “Did I hear you talking about Timothy Wycliffe.”

  It was Lord Wratton, a Liberal peer (I suppose he calls himself a Democrat peer nowadays, which sounds even worse than a working one). I had known him as Harry Wratton in the House, a very hard-working and well-liked Liberal MP who had been forced to resign during a long illness. I was pleased to see he now looked healthy enough, for I had always got on well with him, in that across-the-floor way that precludes any real intimacy or confidence.

  Jim Butterworth shot me a furious glance that said “Now look what you’ve done,” and bustled away. He had remembered that he was busy.

  “You weren’t at Eton with Tim, were you, Harry?” I asked, turning to him with one of those resigned smiles that showed that we both knew Jim Butterworth to be an ass.

  “Good Lord, no. Well above my station, I’m glad to say. That particular sort of misery is reserved for the well-heeled. No, I knew him at home. The Wycliffes’ home was in Bristol then, you know. Very substantial, inclining to the grand, and actually running to a butler, who doubled butling with Air Raid Precaution work—all this only a few hundred yards from our street of semi-detacheds.”

  “Ah! I’d always assumed, somehow, that they had some minor country house somewhere or other. I suppose Bristol was where Lord John’s parliamentary seat was.”

  “That’s right—that was the seat he lost in ’45. Though the home wasn’t actually in the constituency, which didn’t have anything grand enough—still, it was near enough to pass muster. We somehow fell in with each other in vacation time, Tim and me.”

  “How?”

  Harry Wratton frowned.

  “Do you know, I can’t remember. Some perfectly natural way, because it was only after we’d known each other for some time that I realized I ought to be rather impressed by the fact that he was an Etonian. In fact it never struck me until much later that friendships between Etonians and a gang of grammar-school lads just didn’t happen as a general rule.”

  “When was this?”

  “Right at the beginning of the war. We were just about into our teens, I remember that, but a lot of the kids in our gang were younger. It was the time when all the children were spotting spies—anyone with a foreign accent or pince-nez glasses was marked down right away, and sometimes tracked for hours. I expect most of them were Jews, poor sods. Timothy changed all that. He announced that we were looking for Fifth Columnists.”

  “That was rather inventive,” I said, the period suddenly very vivid in my mind. “In Dulwich we’d heard the term, but I’m not at all sure that we knew what it meant. We stuck with boring old spies.”

  “Timothy explained it to us. He said it was the most apparently respectable and upright who were Fifth Columnists, and they were devoted to undermining the war effort and national morale by subtly spreading gloom and despondency, preparing the way for a German occupation. It was great fun—all the local pillars of the community were under suspicion, and at least it took some of the heat off the poor guys with the pince-nez and funny accents.”

  “That was just like Timothy. He always came up with the unexpected.”

  “That’s right. And always such fun. The other times, when he wasn’t around, what I remember is the poor food, the bombs, my father being away in North Africa. But when Timothy was around all I can remember is the fun.”

  “He never, er, at that stage—”

  “The homosexuality thing? No. I had no idea until long after—not till I worked in London at Liberal HQ in the mid-fifties. Oh no, he never brought that home with him.”

  “You’re assuming it started at Eton?”

  “Well, it’s pretty bloody probable, isn’t it?” He grinned at me, and I realized that now I was an ex-minister and he was practically an ex-politician we could become friends, in a way that would never have been possible before. “Anyway, I overheard most of what that prat Butterworth was saying. When he sinks his voice to a whisper he can be heard all over the Chamber. Don’t let him talk about Tim as if he were a problem or a scandal. He was a joy.” He started to move away. “Sorry to have interrupted. Hope I didn’t make him scurry away before you got what you wanted.”

  “No wait, Harry. I was asking Jim, but you can probably tell me. There was a brother and a sister, wasn’t there?”

  He pondered.

  “Let’s see. Tim was a younger son, like his father. There was just the one elder brother, and he certainly didn’t mix with us. I’m trying to recall any impression of him. . . . A little stiff, I think, formal, certainly not as bright as Tim. . . . I think maybe Tim’s outgoingness embarrassed him or bothered him. I certainly don’t remember them as being close.”

  “And the sister?”

  “Ah, that was different. Marjorie—but she wasn’t a Marjorie at all. I always think of Marjories as being dull, conventional girls. This one was a kid sister, years younger, and the apple of Tim’s eye. Of course she idolised him. She was one of our gang almost from the start. A real charmer, and very bright.”

  “So you were in and out of each other’s houses?”

  “We-ell, it wasn’t quite like that. Tim’s wasn’t the sort of house kids would be in and out of. Or maybe we just didn’t have the confidence to treat it like that.”

  “You felt socially inadequate?”

  “Certainly Tim never made us feel that. But deep down we must have known we were. I mean, say the subject of homosexuality had come up. The fact is, we probably would have gawped and said, ‘Yer what?’ There are millions of ways of revealing gaucheness, and I should think we displayed all of them.”

  “What about the mother?”

  Harry Wratton wrinkled his forehead again.

  “Do you know I hardly remember her.
Certainly not forbidding, as the father inevitably was—being a lord, and an MP, and very much a local figure. But she—the mother—was not particularly warm or welcoming. . . . Somehow I have the impression of someone who wasn’t really there. . . . Certainly her children, or the two younger ones, were infinitely more vital than she was herself.”

  “How long did all this last?”

  “Oh—three or four years. As long as the war. Things were beginning to draw us apart by then. It was just a holiday friendship in any case—it had to be renewed every time the schools broke up. Then Sir John lost his seat in the 1945 election, the family moved, and that was that. I imagine Timothy did his national service about that time. So we never managed to make contact again. But I still look back on him with affection. He was a wonderful person—so enthusiastic, so alive.”

  He’d used the word I had used. The saddest possible word.

  “Any idea what happened to the brother and sister?”

  “No idea at all. . . . Wait a minute, though. The sister married an artist fellow. One read about him now and then on the arts pages. No, not an artist, a sculptor. That would be decades ago—heaven knows if they’re still married. What was the name? Foreign name, I know. Maybe Jewish . . . Knopfmeyer? Would that be it? Name mean anything to you?”

  I shook my head.

  “I’ve never been much good on the visual arts.”

  Nor on most of the other arts, I’m afraid, though my son Reggie at one stage tried to civilise me, and Jeremy is continuing the process. I’m an old-fashioned books man, I think.

  “Well, I think it’s a name people know,” Wratton continued, “people who are into sculpture. . . . Anyway, why this interest in Timothy all of a sudden? I mean, he was a marvellous person, but why now?”

  “I want to find out what happened to him.”

  “He was murdered by one of his boyfriends. Everyone knows that.”

  “How do they know? Was there a trial?”

  “Oh no. I would have remembered if there had been. I think the boy left the country—got away entirely.”

  I nodded. Maybe that was why I had so few memories of the case—there had been no trial. I didn’t remark, as a former Home Office Minister, that according to him “everyone knew” something that had never been tested in court.

  When I got home I idly took down the telephone directory and looked up the name Knopfmeyer. There were three. One was Knopfmeyer, M, and her address made my heart stop. She lived at 4 Craven Court Mews.

  5

  A MEAL in COVENT GARDEN

  I have not mentioned Elspeth Honeybourne, my research assistant for the writing of my memoirs. She was recommended—almost passed on—to me by Raymond Hadleigh, a cabinet minister on whom the Prime Ministerial axe had fallen in 1984, and who wrote his memoirs immediately afterwards. Elspeth is a treasure: efficient, versatile, enthusiastic. She comes to my home one day a week to put my papers in order for whatever topic I happen to be dealing with at that time, and for the rest of the week she hovers around in libraries, mainly the London Library and the British Library’s newspaper section in North London somewhere. Jeremy pretends to believe that she has ambitions to be the second Mrs. Proctor, even Lady Proctor, but I know that is not the case: she has what cant phraseology calls a “stable relationship” with a solicitor in South London.

  Elspeth is happy now that I’ve hopped to a point where I have a position, however lowly, in government. It gives her much more to go on. She has a scrapbook which Ann started keeping soon after we were married, but she supplements this from the sort of newspapers we never took. From 1972 onwards I was answering questions in the House, putting out statements on this and that, making the odd formal speech, and she can pick them all up in national and local newspaper reports. (How exciting I found all that sort of thing then, how stale and routine it all seems now!) I also gave her, last week, the name of Timothy Wycliffe and the year of his death, and asked her to pick up anything she could on it.

  Today she bustled in, all plump and smiling, refused a cup of coffee (wisely, for I would have had to make it myself, it being my Filipino couple’s day off), and then started setting out a great wad of photocopies on the lead-up to the Sunningdale Agreement on Northern Ireland, in which well-intentioned but abortive initiative I played a small part. We went through them, I suggested one or two further avenues of enquiry, and when we were finished she opened her briefcase again.

  “Oh—the Timothy Wycliffe affair.”

  “The murder.”

  “That’s right. Sorry—did I sound heartless? I didn’t mean to. I thought it might be worthwhile in this case to get facsimile copies of some of the newspapers for the relevant dates. You’ll see why.”

  She bustled out again, leaving a wad of complete facsimile newspapers and a smaller wad of xeroxed items from other newspapers. My curiosity pricked, I took up the top newspaper, a Daily Telegraph. I immediately saw what she meant.

  GAITSKELL ATTACKS SUEZ “ADVENTURE”

  “Treason” say Tory MPs

  Timothy Wycliffe had been murdered at the height of the Suez crisis.

  I remember talking to a class of intelligent eighteen-year-olds when I was Minister of Education. I mentioned the Suez crisis, and was met with completely blank looks. I explained that this was when Britain and France, on a spurious excuse, invaded Egypt to gain control of the Suez Canal, which Colonel Nasser had nationalised. They were halted by U.S. opposition and outraged world opinion. Then I got some intelligent comparisons with the Falklands invasion. But it is interesting that Suez has not entered the folk imagination, as the Second World War has. For someone of my generation it is the watershed, the political event, from which all else has followed.

  If I had remembered that, of course, I would have realized why the murder had had so little impact on me at the time, and why it had aroused so little interest in the newspapers. As I flicked through them one after another I found what I expected: page after page about the crisis, the storms in Parliament, the bombing of Egyptian air bases, the landing of French and British troops in the Suez zone, the reactions of the international great and good. Coverage of Timothy’s death was minimal, and perhaps the report of it in the Telegraph can be taken for all.

  MINISTER’S SON KILLED

  Police confirmed last night that the man found battered to death in a flat in Belgravia was Timothy Wycliffe, son of the Minister of Planning and Public Works, Lord John Wycliffe.

  In the days that followed there was nothing more of substance on the murder until the day that the Suez invasion was halted, when again the newspapers contained little except that story, as the inquest and the recriminations began. Several of them, though, did have a tiny item on the murder, of which one may again quote the Telegraph as typical.

  MAN SOUGHT IN MINISTER’S SON’S KILLING

  Police have issued the name of a man they wish to interview in connection with the killing of Timothy Wycliffe, son of the Minister of Planning and Public Works. He is Andrew Forbes, an unemployed electrician, of Peckham.

  I sat for some time, thinking. Now I had a name for the young man who, according to Harry Wratton, had left the country after the murder of Timothy. I was beginning to doubt everything anybody told me about the case because they all, like me, would have been so involved with the Suez invasion that they would have taken in very little at the time. Suez was different. Young people may read about it in history books, but they will never understand the atmosphere of those weeks. Suez was the one issue in our postwar history that left no one indifferent, whatever their politics.

  However Harry Wratton did not seem to have got that bit wrong. When I sorted through Elspeth Honeybourne’s little pile of xeroxed sheets (which mostly contained alternative versions of the two news items I’ve just quoted), I found one small item in a South London newspaper saying that the police feared that the man they wanted to question in connection with the murder of Timothy Wycliffe had left the country. They would be investigating the pos
sibility of extradition, but they feared that he had gone to Spain, with which country Britain had no extradition treaty.

  And that—so far as Elspeth Honeybourne had gone—was the end of the matter in the British press.

  Andrew Forbes. I tried to remember whether that was one of Timothy’s boyfriends I had met. I did get introduced to them now and again, at the theatre or opera, in restaurants, or when they met him from the Foreign Office after work. There had been one young man who made terrible scenes at the F.O. for a whole week, and I’d been the one deputed to deal with him. Tact and Diplomacy Proctor, in an early manifestation. The only other boyfriend I had more than casual words with was a man called Derek Wicklow. I remember him because of the circumstances of our one meeting, and because he later became governor of one of our last colonies—St. Helena or Mauritius or some such place—and I remember thinking that he must have become a whole lot more discreet in his conduct since I knew him.

  We met at a restaurant in Covent Garden, long gone now, called Les Tuileries—met, in fact, at the door. It was evening time, and I was with a very pushy girl called Veronica something-or-other. She was a sort of Edwina Currie figure, intent on pushing her way ahead in politics, and since I was by then making some sort of a name with the London Young Conservatives I was a minor figure on her hit list. (She never did get a parliamentary seat, by the way, let alone become Prime Minister. She married a millionaire who gave her two children and then sensibly left her, though I’m sure she stung him for enormous alimony.) When Timothy and Derek Wicklow turned up at the door to Les Tuileries at the same time as us, having failed to get standing tickets for Callas in Norma, I think I was a bit relieved, and jumped at Tim’s suggestion that we should make a foursome. A couple of hours’ verbal battering by the intense and single-minded Veronica was not an enticing prospect.

  The topic of Callas lasted us through the process of ordering and waiting for the soup. Timothy had seen her first Norma and had been hoping to see her with the new Adalgisa. It was fairly typical of Timothy that he had forgotten when the first day of the new booking period was, and had found all the tickets gone by the time he remembered. Derek Wicklow had seen her in the Verona Arena on a holiday with his parents. I had just about heard of her. I doubt whether Veronica had. There was no way the topic was going to last into the soup course—people still ate soup then—because she was a single issue person (I wonder what that single issue is today: monetarism? the environment? the ordination of women?) and she was determined at the first lull in the talking to turn the topic to politics.