A Scandal in Belgravia

by Robert Barnard

  “Do you feel this government’s really got a grip of things?” she asked suddenly of me, à propos of nothing. She had turned to me so as totally to exclude the others. I should say that at the time of this encounter Churchill had been Prime Minister again for something like two years.

  “Oh—ah—well, of course they’re going cautiously because—”

  “But that’s not what we expected of Winnie, is it? I mean, the British people didn’t elect him to be cautious. They expected him to weigh in and knock down all those damned Socialist regulations. . . .”

  I will give no more than a specimen of Veronica’s conversation. It was in the steamroller syle (one to which I’ve become accustomed during my years in the Cabinet), and it was certainly not entertaining. As she beavered on I became aware that Timothy was right-handed and Derek was left-handed, and that their unoccupied hands were together under the table. It says something for my increased sophistication by this time that I was amused as well as disconcerted. Veronica had certainly not noticed. She was one of those people who would never notice anything about other people unless it was shoved in her face. The whole situation—Veronica droning away like a dentist’s drill, the pair opposite spooning, her quite oblivious of it—was exquisitely ludicrous.

  “. . . we expected so much more,” she concluded. “It makes you wonder whether he’s really in control.”

  “He’s in control,” said Timothy, drawling more than was his wont. “The thing you’re forgetting about Churchill is that he’s not really a Tory.”

  This stopped Veronica in her tracks. I suspected that she had no knowledge of history. Timothy explained.

  “He was a Liberal for the first twenty years of this century. In many ways he still thinks like a Liberal—social affairs, for instance. He’s an old-fashioned Conservative where the Empire, God bless it, is concerned, but if you’re expecting him to abolish the National Health Service, forget it: it just isn’t going to happen. . . . Golly, how bored I am with politics.”

  “Timothy’s father is in the Cabinet,” I explained. “He’s had his fill of politics over the years.”

  “In the Cabinet?” said Veronica with drill-like intensity and turning to him. “What’s your name? Sorry, I didn’t catch it.”

  “Wycliffe. Timothy Wycliffe.”

  “Wycliffe! Oh, but I must tell you I think your father’s doing an absolutely superb job—” she bent forward, nearly knocking a plate of lamb chops from the waiter’s hand. Timothy managed a tiny amused smile. He knew and I knew that the Minister of Planning and Public Works had a job so humdrum that there was no way anyone could make a superb job of it. Veronica now forgot about me and gave her entire attention to Timothy, though not to the extent of giving him much chance to reply. She was quite oblivious, I noticed, when Timothy and Derek disengaged their hands to eat their meal, and oblivious too to the looks Timothy gave me that said as plainly as words: “Help!”

  There was little help I could give. Veronica was one of those unstoppable forces. However after she had gone on for some minutes in effusive praise of Timothy’s father it did seem to occur to her—she was not very bright—that her praise was eliciting little response, and was more than a little inconsistent with her former verdict that the government lacked grip. Accordingly she switched her tack.

  “I suppose you’re politically active yourself?”

  It was said in an accusatory tone, as if it was the duty of all right-minded people. In the subsequent decade a young woman of Veronica’s stamp would probably have said “sexually active” in much the same tone of voice.

  “Good Lord, no. Not at all.”

  “But really you should be! There’s any number of really vital and active organisations that you could give a hand to. The Young Conservatives are absolutely the most forward-looking political group in the country at the moment.”

  “I’m sure. But I doubt if I am young enough or Conservative enough for them.”

  “Oh, nonsense. You don’t even have to be particularly political. For a lot of people it’s mainly social—dances, parties, practically a marriage bureau!” She was getting quite roguish, in a galumphing kind of way that made me shudder. “It really is a tremendous hoot, I can assure you!”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” murmured Timothy.

  “No, really, you’ve got the wrong idea entirely.” Veronica had shown a surprising facility in coping with lamb chops and wielding her verbal battering ram simultaneously. Now she was finished and doubly intimidating, leaning forward over the table and fixing Timothy with her basilisk eyes. “Look, the Kensington Y.C.s are having this dance next Saturday. Why don’t you come along as my guest?”

  It was Derek Wicklow, resourcefully, who brought Timothy the aid I had been unable to supply. He too leaned forward, putting his hand over Timothy’s and speaking, not loudly but distinctly, so that he could be heard at the tables next to ours.

  “Look, ducky, Timothy is fucking me, right? So you’re just not in with a chance.”

  Her face was a picture. Her lower jaw literally dropped open, she blinked, spluttered. At last she managed to say, “For God’s sake!” jumped up from the table, and scuttled from the restaurant as if she had just been told one of us had leprosy.

  We looked at each other, waited till the door slammed, and then burst out all three into uncontrollable laughter, holding our sides, our heads hitting the table as fresh waves of merriment engulfed us. I was dimly conscious of people at the adjacent table studying their plates as if they were runic tablets, then hurrying up their eating, but I only really surfaced when I became conscious of a waiter at my elbow. He murmured:

  “The young lady’s dessert?”

  “Me, me,” said Timothy. “I’m a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles.”

  The rest of the meal was wholly merry, with imitations of Veronica, periodically renewed laughter, and frequent demands to know where on earth I had picked her up. It is a measure of my greater sophistication that by this time I could participate in it, though I seem to remember saying at one point, “What an absolutely marvellous way of getting rid of her!” for the benefit of the adjoining tables, hoping they would believe it was no more than that. More sophisticated, but still craven, a modern person would judge, though I would remind them that homosexual acts were still illegal at that time. Eventually we rolled out into Covent Garden, still laughing, and finding it was interval time at the opera. Tim and Derek declared that they were going to infiltrate the standers and see the rest of Callas and Simionato’s performance. I expect they managed it.

  Looking back, that is one of my happiest memories of Timothy. He had this wonderful way of pricking pomposity, knocking down pretension, derailing the one-track minded. It seemed that he had managed to pass it on, at least temporarily, to Derek Wicklow. I suspect it was that night in Les Tuileries that gave me a healthy dislike of pushy people—though naturally, being in politics, I have had to put up with a great number of them over the years. Ann, whom I married in 1959, was a very different type.

  When I had finished going through Elspeth Honeybourne’s collection of snippets I—on an impulse, but one that was always going to come sooner or later—took down the telephone directory again and found the number for Knopfmeyer, M.

  “Three-one-oh, four-three-seven-two.”

  The voice was clear, civilised, with just a trace of that upper-class drawl that Timothy sometimes affected for comic purposes.

  “Is that—er—Marjorie Knopfmeyer?”

  “It is.”

  “This is going to sound a bit odd. My name is Peter Proctor—”

  “Oh, yes—the ex-minister for whatever-it-was.”

  The fact that she showed no surprise at being rung up out of the blue by an ex-cabinet minister told me that this was indeed Timothy’s sister: she had mingled in cabinet-minister circles all her life.

  “Minister for all sorts of things in my time,” I admitted.

  “I thought I recognised your voice. It’
s funny how top politicians become almost family friends through television these days, isn’t it? Or personal enemies. It wasn’t like that when my father was in the Cabinet.”

  “It soon passes though. People pass me in the street and frown slightly, trying to remember who I am.”

  “Weren’t you a friend of Timothy’s at one time?”

  “Yes, I was. I’m glad you mentioned him. As I say, this is going to sound odd. You see, I’m writing my memoirs—”

  “Oh God! Poor old you! Why are political memoirs considered mandatory these days? They’re always so tedious. I was forced to read Jim Prior’s one wet weekend at a friend’s and it was like wading through sump oil.”

  “Don’t sap my confidence any further. The fact is, I got stuck in the fifties, and I think the reason is I feel a sort of guilt at the thought of Timothy’s death. Not because I had anything to do with it, but because I knew him, liked him so well, and yet his death made so little impression on me.”

  “Suez,” said Marjorie Knopfmeyer promptly. “Everyone says the same. I remember it so horribly well: it was like being in two nightmares simultaneously.”

  “Yes, I’ve realized that must be the reason. Look, I believe you and he were close—?”

  “We were. He was just the brother every girl would want to have. Do you want to talk about him?”

  “Well, yes—oddly enough I would like to. I somehow feel it might—exorcise the memories, or remove the block.”

  “No need to explain. I still, now and then, meet people who feel they want to talk about Tim. He was the sort of person who affected people that way. Why don’t you come to dinner?”

  “That would be ideal, if it’s not too much trouble.”

  “I suppose you’re very busy?”

  “Not at all. You must know that ex-cabinet ministers are like yesterday’s newspapers.”

  “What about Thursday?”

  “Fine.”

  “Say seven thirty. I look forward to it.”

  I put the phone down, with an odd lift of the heart at the thought of eating dinner with Tim’s sister.

  6

  THE LITTLE SISTER

  Belgrave Square, as I said earlier, is a shadow of its former self as far as character and atmosphere go: uniform, sleek, bland. Inevitably it smells of wealth, but not of very interesting wealth. I was ten minutes early for my dinner with Marjorie Wycliffe, or Marjorie Knopfmeyer rather, so I paid off my taxi in the Square itself and walked around it in the twilight. Lady Thorrington’s house had now an opaque, ungiving presence, and I saw from a tiny plaque that it was the office of a finance company. Embassies abounded, prestige offices of this and that. Probably only the Duke of Westminster can afford to live there any longer. It is not, now, a square with much interest attached to it.

  Away from the Square itself there is still some style, however, and in the various little mews there is character and atmosphere aplenty. If I had not been remembering so intensely those encounters with Tim I might have had trouble finding Craven Court Mews, for I only went to his flat two or three times, but as it was I found my way there almost without thinking. It was now brightly painted, trim, almost jolly. I rang the bell of the street door and immediately heard steps clattering down the stairs.

  “Hello, I’m Marjorie Knopfmeyer. Good of you to come.”

  She smiled, held out her hand, then led the way up the stairs. She was a big, untidy woman with no pretensions to fashion, in a purple dress with a shawl around her shoulders. What seized me as soon as we got into the light of the sitting room, however, was the realization that she had Tim’s charm—a version of it, rather: more feminine, perhaps less brilliant, but a charm that vividly brought Tim himself to my mind. It was there in the smile, the warmth, the informality, the effortless way I was made to feel wanted and welcome.

  “Could you be an angel and fix yourself a drink?” she said, waving towards a cabinet. “There are one or two things I have to do in the kitchen.”

  The bottles were not from a wine merchant’s: they were supermarket bottles, with the price labels still on. Where, I wondered, were the supermarkets for Belgravia? Victoria, perhaps? The King’s Road? I poured myself a sherry from a standard label bottle, good but not distinguished. Then I looked around the room.

  There were still things that I remembered: the glass-topped table edged in rosewood, the escritoire. Most of it, however, was new, and bore the imprint of a life in the art world. There were two largish pictures—a Paul Klee and a Lucien Freud (I did not recognise them, I should say, but looked at the signatures). There were also several watercolours. There was just one piece of sculpture, on a small table under the window: a long-legged bird, like a stork, bending forward and somehow surveying the world quizzically. It was rough, jagged, and gave an impression of human vitality.

  “Do you like it?”

  Marjorie was standing over by the cabinet, pouring herself a weak gin and tonic.

  “Yes, very much.”

  “Ferdy’s. I don’t surround myself with memories, it’s unhealthy, but I have that piece here and one or two others in Gloucestershire. He gave me that piece explicitly—didn’t just leave it to me—because I said it reminded me of him—I don’t know why: a sort of humorous disengagement, perhaps. It’s all too easy to drown yourself in memories, isn’t it? . . . I suppose you remember this room?”

  “Yes, though I wasn’t often here. I remember this table, and the escritoire . . .” I paused. “Oh yes, and I think I remember that vase. Delft, isn’t it?”

  I pointed to a small, delicate blue-and-white piece on the cabinet, and as I did so I noticed that Marjorie flinched.

  “Yes, that was Tim’s.”

  “I seem to remember it from one of my later visits. I suppose he acquired it. I wouldn’t have thought it his kind of thing.”

  “My mother gave it to him. No, not really his taste . . .” She drank from her gin, a hefty gulp. “If you go close you’ll see that it’s been repaired. It was smashed the night he died. That’s the thing I keep to remember Tim by.”

  She walked over to the quizzical bird, and I had a sudden stab of realization how much it cost her to talk about Tim’s death, even after all these years. This was not sisterly feeling, this was love. She changed the subject.

  “Ferdy had charm too. I suppose I could never have married a man who didn’t—not after growing up with Tim. Ferdy’s was more raffish, he was more of a card, but he was like Tim in making people love him.”

  “He wasn’t English, was he?”

  “Oh no. He gets into the books on British sculpture—which is right in a way, because he has to go somewhere, and he was never quite of that stature where nationality becomes unimportant. But he wasn’t in the least English. His family were Polish Jews who moved to Germany in the twenties. Ferdy was born in Leipzig. At least they realized their mistake early on, but when they moved, in 1932, it was to Czechoslovakia. They came to Britain in 1937, when Ferdy was in his teens. They’d had money, but by then much of it was gone. I met him when I was twenty-one, soon after Tim died. We lived a racketty, hand-to-mouth existence, but a good one. . . . I miss him horribly.”

  “You didn’t live here?”

  “Good Lord, no. We could never have afforded to. I let it out, so it provided a regular income for us over the years. Since he died I’ve come here occasionally, when it’s been vacant, just for a change of scene. I’ve been here two years now—too long: I’m not a metropolitan person, and all the friends I have here are the wrong sort. I’m longing to get back to Gloucestershire, and I will in a few weeks. I really should sell both places. They both have painful memories. But I’m too old to start afresh, and the children would certainly hate it if I sold the cottage in Barndene. . . . Look, I’ll serve the soup and you can start in on what you want to know.”

  Over the soup, which was onion, and very pungent, I said:

  “You were close to Tim, weren’t you?”

  “I loved him.”

  �
�Close right up to the end?”

  She grimaced a little, as if at some painful thought.

  “As I say, I prefer to think that I loved him, rather than that we were close. I felt close to him, but that doesn’t mean I saw him all that often. That’s one of the things that always nags at the back of my mind: I loved him, he did so much for me, so why didn’t I make sure I saw more of him in that last year of his life?”

  “You were in London?”

  “Yes.” She grinned at me mischievously. “Don’t laugh—I did the Season!”

  I raised my eyebrows at her, and we laughed together.

  “Well, I suppose girls like you did in the fifties. Do still, come to that, though I’m glad to say my daughter never wanted to.”

  “When I did it we were still curtseying to the Queen. Can you imagine it? Poor woman—the boredom of it! No wonder she did away with it all. . . . To be fair to myself, I didn’t intend to. I wanted to go straight from school to art school . . . The watercolours are mine, by the way. I have a small reputation in a limited circle, but I do sell my work.”

  “Why did you change your mind?”

  “Mummy—she was very tradition minded. Certain things were done and certain other things were not done. I don’t suppose that would have decided me, but she was ill, much more ill, in fact, than we realized. So when I’d got some A-levels I took a year off school, spent a lot of time with her, and in spring I did the Season and curtseyed to Her Majesty and the Duke . . . It seems an age ago!”