A Scandal in Belgravia

by Robert Barnard

  “Where were you living then?”

  “We had a house in Kensington, and another in the constituency. My father got back to the Commons in 1950, for another West Country constituency—in what is now Avon. Actually he tried to get hold of this place.”

  “This flat? From Tim?”

  “That’s right. Tim inherited it about the time my father got back to Westminster. Daddy said it was much too expensive for a young man in his position, sky-high rates and all that, but that it was just right for an MP to spend the working week in. In a way he was right, but I think underneath he was peeved because Aunt Julie hadn’t thought of this and left it to him. Anyway Tim turned him down flat, and Tim could be very stubborn when he liked. So we had the house in Kensington, and that’s where I did the Season from.”

  I finished my soup, and putting down my spoon I said, “I haven’t got any impression of your mother.” Marjorie nodded, pushing back a strand of grey hair.

  “No . . . Mummy is difficult to explain.” She collected up the soup plates and soon came back with a large, steaming casserole. “Would you pour the wine? This is Lancashire hot-pot. A bit basic, but I don’t like dinner parties where the hostess is forever flitting backwards and forwards to the kitchen. With Ferdy stopping work at unpredictable hours of the day and needing feeding there and then I developed a repertoire of meals that could just sit in the oven waiting for him.”

  “Yes—Ann had the same problem. Not many points of resemblance between artists and MPs, but that’s one.”

  “Did your wife like the traditional Tory MP’s wife’s role?”

  I could be honest with someone of my generation.

  “Yes, she did rather. These days one has to be apologetic about that, but she did—at least she liked being a full-time mother, and she regarded the constituency work as being a pleasant few hours’ change from the domestic role.” I thought, and then added: “At least if she changed her mind about that she never told me.”

  Marjorie nodded.

  “You asked about my mother. The thing about Mummy was that she gave the impression that she was semi-detached, not quite with you. She had a vaguely benign air, but she seemed cocooned in some other world of her own. The constituency people would be talking to her about the rates bill or the price of school blazers and suddenly her words of agreement or sympathy wouldn’t quite gell with what they were saying. It got worse as she got older, and used to irritate my father to hell.”

  “Wasn’t she close to her children?”

  “She and I were. I never went away to school—she insisted on that. It’s different with boys, isn’t it? James and Tim went away to prep school when they were seven. She loved them, and they her, but even before that there’d been a nanny, of course, so it could never be what ordinary people would call close. . . . It’s unnatural, don’t you think, the upper-class way with children? Just too cold. I made sure I kept our two with us.”

  “Yes, we did too.” I glanced at the cabinet, and ventured to bring up the vase again. “You said that vase was a present from your mother to Tim.”

  She nodded, her eyes slightly wet.

  “Yes, she did that in the last year of her life: went around giving people little unexpected presents—things of her own she wanted them to have. As if she knew that her hold on their memories would be as frail as her hold on life. That’s why after the . . . after Tim died I had it repaired. It was shattered in the . . . attack on him. Now it’s part of my memories of him and her.”

  “Did you inherit this flat after Tim’s death?”

  “Yes. Apart from several bequests to friends he left everything to me.”

  “Was the will made shortly before he died?”

  “Not particularly . . . Oh, you mean did he half expect to die as he did? No, I’m sure he didn’t.”

  “I just wondered whether he had recently acquired a boyfriend who was particularly violent, and he thought he should put his affairs in order.”

  “No, the will was made in 1953. . . .” She began crumbling her bread. “I met him, you know.”

  “Who? The boy who—?”

  “Killed him. Yes. I said I met Tim very little in the last year, and that’s true. Oh, of course we were together about the time of Mummy’s death, which was July, but naturally we weren’t talking much about him. But one time that year when I did meet him, he was with that—that creature.”

  “Tell me about him.”

  She swallowed, put her plate aside, and thought.

  “I call him a creature, and yet I didn’t dislike him at the time. It must have been June, before Mummy died, because I’d been to a ball at the Ritz—predictably dire. I seem to have spent that entire spring and summer escaping from crushingly boring events like that. There were three or four of us who had come away for a bit and drifted along Piccadilly. I remember the air still had a twilight feel to it, so it can’t have been too late. And suddenly there was Tim and this man Andy Forbes. He introduced me, of course, but I didn’t remember him until the police showed me a picture of him.”

  “What was he like?”

  “Physically? He was about twenty-one or -two, well-built, rather basically dressed. Pretty much what you’d expect of a young man who was an electrician, and from the provinces.”

  “Unemployed electrician it said in the papers.”

  “Right. Otherwise my impression was that he was straightforward, not too well educated, rather embarrassed, but fond of Tim. End of impression, I’m afraid.”

  “What did you talk about?”

  “Oh, Tim and I talked about the awfulness of doing the Season, about Mummy’s health, whether Daddy was being kind to her—he was, on the whole, but you couldn’t bank on it. Naturally Andy Forbes didn’t have much to say on those subjects, which is probably why I didn’t get any strong impression of him.”

  “What had they been doing?”

  “Been to a John Wayne film, I think. Not to a gay club, I’m sure. Andy Forbes didn’t look at all a gay club sort of person. Did they have them then?”

  I shrugged and spread out my hands and we both laughed.

  “Did you ever meet any of his other boyfriends?”

  “A fair number. There had been a time, a year or two earlier, when I was backwards and forwards to his flat. Some I liked, some I wasn’t keen on—just as you’d expect, because he had a pretty motley assortment of friends. Tim was infinitely tolerant.”

  “There was no common denominator?”

  “No, none at all. I certainly didn’t get the impression he went for the tough, brutal kind.”

  “No, I didn’t either. Though . . .” I stopped myself. A memory had come into my head that I didn’t want to tell Marjorie about. I amended it to: “though I only met a few of them. He was very promiscuous, I know that.”

  “Yes, he was. Homosexuals were then, weren’t they? I mean, people like Britten and Pears may have seemed to have something like a marriage, but they still hopped into bed with anything that offered. I don’t know why it was like that. Since it was against the law you’d have thought that would have been more dangerous, make you more open to blackmail.”

  “A taste for living dangerously?” I hazarded. “Dancing on the volcano’s edge?”

  “You may be right. But I never got the impression that Tim had any sort of death wish, did you?”

  “Not at all,” I said firmly. “He loved life, and wanted to go on living it.”

  “Yes, I agree. Anyway, I’m not in the business of judging other people’s way of life.”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “That was Tim’s, and as far as I could see he got a lot of pleasure out of it.”

  “Right up to the time he died?” I wondered. “I didn’t see much of him in his last year either.”

  “Did you not? I didn’t realize that.”

  “I left the F.O. and went to work for Imperial Chemical Industries.”

  “Ah. Well, as far as I know he did. I don’t think there was any change in
his life-style. Actually the last time I saw him he was troubled, but it wasn’t anything personal.”

  “When was this?”

  “Just two days before he died. I mentioned the meeting with Andy Forbes, and then Mummy’s death. I don’t remember any real meeting with him between the funeral and that last time—any meeting when we could really talk. I started at the Slade in September—rather against Daddy’s wishes—and I was taken up with the new life, new friends. Then came Suez. It took something to make art students politically active in those days, but Suez did it.”

  “Yes. I was thinking the other day that was the one thing since the war that involved just everyone.”

  “That’s right. Which side were you on?”

  She was looking at me with sharp, intelligent eyes. I laughed, a bit shamefaced.

  “I was a wobbler. I knew it was wrong, but I was too much of a party man to stand up and say so. The story of my life. I expect if it had been a rip-roaring success I’d have convinced myself by now that I was for it all along.”

  “I was against it, of course. Almost all young people were. When I met Tim I was in some sort of ragged procession on the way from the Houses of Parliament to a big meeting in Trafalgar Square. He was walking down Whitehall—on the way from the Admiralty or somewhere. I was on some sort of high, I think—you know how tense we all were then—and I dropped out of the march and ran over to him. I started shouting at him ‘Why don’t you resign? When are you going to stop this mad government killing people?’—God, how embarrassing to remember that now!”

  “We all did pretty silly things at that time.”

  She laughed.

  “Except you, apparently. I’m sure you wobbled very discreetly.”

  “What did Tim do?”

  “He took me by the arms, stopped me waving my fists, and said very quietly: ‘Stop behaving like a political harridan and start behaving like my sister.’ It got through almost at once, and I felt very ashamed. Then he said: ‘Yes, I agree I can’t stay at the F.O. after this. But this isn’t the time to go. And when I go I’ll go quietly. You’re making your protest over this. You’re quite right to. I’m not a free agent, though. I’ll be making my stand over something else.’ Then he kissed me, said ‘Love you,’ and went on down Whitehall. I suppose I went on up to the meeting in Trafalgar Square—I really don’t remember. There were so many meetings at that time.”

  “And that was the last time you saw him?”

  “Yes. James spoke to him on the phone next day, but none of us ever saw him again.”

  “What did your brother speak to him about?”

  “The family was in a bit of a flap, afraid that he was going to do something that would embarrass my father. Not that I was—that was exactly what I wanted him to do. Anyway James phoned him, and Tim said pretty much what he had said to me: that it would be wrong to make a futile gesture while British troops were involved. I’d told them that’s what he felt, but Tim reassured them. Daddy was Minister of Planning and Public Works at the time—not a high-profile job, but high enough for it to have been an embarrassment to the government if Tim had resigned from the F.O. and talked to the newspapers about why.”

  “Your brother James—I get the impression that he and Tim weren’t close.”

  “Oh, do you? No, I don’t think that’s quite true.” She collected up plates and pottered around in the kitchen while she thought. When she came back she said: “They weren’t close in temperament, of course. James is a much more conventional, buttoned-up character. Frankly he’s never had an original thought in his life. But I think James always admired Tim—his originality, his fun, his openness. He was at Eton with him, which can’t have been easy at times—”

  “No, indeed.”

  “—but James was always loyal to him, defended him when he needed it. Elder brothers aren’t always so supportive at public school. Have you read Trollope’s Autobiography?”

  “I have. Quite horrific.”

  “There was only a couple of years between James and Timothy, and they always talked to each other, got advice from each other. I would have said in that sense they were close.”

  “Though it was you that Tim loved.”

  She smiled gratefully.

  “Yes, I suppose so. I was the one he gave most time to, took most trouble over. If I didn’t grow up into the typical deb I have Tim to thank for that. Tim was somehow apart, the one person in our family I could look at and say without hesitation: he is a real person, he is not locked in by prejudices and conventions, he doesn’t live by Daddy and Mummy’s assumptions—or anybody else’s assumptions—he lives life to the full, and in his own way. Maybe if I’d not had Tim as a brother I would never have married Ferdy. Daddy was not pleased at the thought of a slightly mad Central European Jew as a son-in-law I can tell you!”

  “But you got your own way.”

  “I got pregnant!” She smiled at the memory, which was clearly not at all shameful or painful to her. “That was in 1960, before the legalisation of abortion. He had us down to the Registry Office in no time!”

  There was one more thing I had to ask about.

  “Do you have any memories of the day of the murder?”

  She looked down. We were eating apple pie by now, but I realized she had eaten very little of the meal she had cooked. This was the difficult part for her, the actual murder. She spoke slowly, carefully, as if even now she had to exercise restraint, for fear of breaking down.

  “Of the day of the murder, nothing. It happened in the evening, and I was at another of those damned Suez demonstrations. He . . . he wasn’t discovered till the next morning. I’ve always had nightmares of him lying there, not quite dead. It was the cleaning woman discovered him, when she came in at nine.” She pointed towards the door, and I could see that her hand was shaking. “He was lying over there. He’d been horribly battered, then finished off by one terrible blow to the back of the head. Things were smashed all around him, the phone was off the hook, there was blood on the floor.”

  She put her face in her hands and closed her eyes.

  “Don’t go on if it’s too painful.”

  “No, no, I’m all right. . . . That’s my memory of it. I never saw him, of course—James identified the body, and I didn’t come here for weeks afterwards. Then, when it was in the hands of agents who were letting it for me, I forced myself to come. Everything spoke of him—it was horrible—and I was just letting myself out when I looked down, and over the stained floorboards there was a patch of brown—the blood the cleaner had been unable to get out. It was years before I could come back here. . . .” She swallowed and shook her head sadly. “And now I live here, cool as you like, and all my friends say, ‘Belgravia—how grand!’ and days and weeks go by without my thinking of him.”

  “Time heals.”

  “Time deadens, anyway . . . And yet always in the back of my mind there is that insistent feeling of betrayal, of my having failed him. And above all that sense of waste. I don’t know what Tim would have done with his life, but I do know one thing: he would not have been negligible.”

  I nodded agreement. And I was suddenly seized with the notion that, ex-cabinet minister as I was, with—as the commentators say—solid achievements to my credit, I was somebody who had wasted his life. Marjorie had hit on the word. I was negligible.

  7

  A VIOLENT REACTION

  I realize that even now I know nothing about Timothy’s murder.

  Oh, I know he was battered to death, presumably by Andrew Forbes, but that’s about it. I could, perhaps, have pressed Marjorie Knopfmeyer, but her distress was so evident, still, after thirty-four years, that I shied away from the subject. In any case I doubt that she had much more to tell. Timothy’s murder had fallen on her as such a sudden and a stunning blow that I had the impression that at the time she had shut her mind to the details. The fact of the death was so terrible that she had not wanted to know too much about the manner of it.

  One
of the advantages of having been a minister in several departments of government is that you have contacts—and often contacts who owe you favours—in all walks of life. Anyone who has been at the Home Office will have contacts with the police. As a matter of fact, since in my time there I had a fair amount to do with Northern Ireland I have still what might be described as a light police guard. Unfortunately the policeman who generally represents this vague official concern for my well-being is a torpid young man, and I could not imagine his being of any use to me in the Wycliffe matter (I can’t imagine his being any protection against an IRA attack either, come to that). After my forced retirement I used him once or twice as a driver, but his conversation was so insipid and inhibited that even this perk was one I found I preferred to give up. Now we do no more than greet each other.

  In my mind I went through the various police officers I know, and eventually I rejected all the serving officers in favour of a retired one. It was a matter of their likely reaction: serving officers can often regard requests from politicians as political pressurising, and they may react either in a hostile manner or a fawning one. With a retired officer I would have something in common. I had always got on well with Superintendent Sutcliffe, and though he has been retired now for two or three years, I guessed that he still had good contacts at Scotland Yard. What was more, I had his home address.

  “Mr. Proctor, this is a surprise.”

  He had answered the phone after it had rung several times. He is a long, lean man with a tired moustache and something of the beagle in his expression. I pictured him as having come to the phone from trimming and tidying in his garden. I also pictured him as asking himself what on earth I could want from him, and he confirmed this by adding: “You do know I’m retired?”

  “You and me both,” I said. “If you call it retirement when you get the push.”

  “I did hear you were offered Northern Ireland,” said Sutcliffe, with a trace of a chuckle in his voice.

  “Being offered the Northern Ireland Secretaryship is like being told to dig your grave before you are shot,” I said. “Metaphorically speaking, of course. Anyway, for my sins I’m writing my memoirs.”