A Scandal in Belgravia

by Robert Barnard

  “Is it difficult to talk about?”

  “Yes. . . . Very difficult.”

  “Shall I ask questions?”

  “We can try it that way. I don’t know if you’ll ask the right ones—the ones that might make you understand.”

  “Where did you meet?”

  “That’s easy. A theatre in Leicester Square. They were showing The Man Who Knew Too Much. Tim had seen the earlier version—he went to film clubs and that, I just went to the pictures. Anyway, we started talking.”

  “Was he chatting you up?”

  “No . . . Yes . . . It’s difficult to say, really. He probably chose the seat next to me because he liked the look of me. He probably had bed at the back of his mind because it usually was. No disrespect to him. But he was also genuinely friendly, genuinely enjoying chatting with a stranger. Certainly as far as I was concerned I was just chatting with a nice fellow.”

  “So he didn’t make any . . . sexual signals?”

  “If he had I wouldn’t have received them. As far as that went I was completely green.”

  “Yes. I was the same when I first knew Tim.”

  “So that was it. We had a drink afterwards in a pub in St. Martin’s Lane.” He smiled reminiscently, as if he was talking about another world. “Of course I’d realised by then that he was completely out of my class. If I was bothered by anything—if I felt at all awkward about being with him—it was about that. That’s why I was surprised when he telephoned.”

  “He contacted you?”

  “Oh, of course. I’d never have thought of contacting him, though he did give me his card. He rang me at the BBC. . . .” Andy Forbes paused and thought. “I said just now I was completely green as far as homosexuality was concerned. Thinking it over that can’t have been so. I don’t just mean playground jokes. I’d naturally come across it at the BBC. People brushing against me once too often, the hand on the behind, the veiled invitation. But that was always showbiz people—obvious homosexuals. You could either laugh or get aggressive, but it was all sort of outside you, not part of your life. With Tim it was different.”

  “Yes. I felt that.”

  “Gradually we started going around a bit together—films, football matches, restaurants. I went to my first live play with Tim. I took him round his first television studio. And I went to his flat . . . It was like another world.”

  “Did you feel jealous?”

  “Jealous?” There was no hesitation in his vigorous shake of the head. “No, I’m sure I didn’t. You couldn’t be jealous of Tim. I think I just thought: I’d like something like this one day.”

  “I think some of the boys he picked up did feel jealous.”

  “I wasn’t a boy he’d picked up. I was a friend. I knew Tim. I knew he worked hard, didn’t flaunt his money . . . In fact, I never knew if he was wealthy or not, only that he’d inherited this flat in a posh part of London.”

  “And all this time there was no sex?”

  He turned to look at me.

  “How did you know that?”

  “Someone told me.”

  “The newspapers had a different story. It upset my family no end. . . . But it’s true. There was the odd advance—sort of ‘why don’t you try it?’—but I just stamped firmly on it and said I wasn’t interested. But of course I knew by then that he was a homosexual, and that he slept around a lot.”

  “And that didn’t worry you?”

  He thought for a moment before answering.

  “I think it must have. I enjoyed a lot going around with him, being taught about films, food, living the high life in a mild sort of way. But I think it did worry me, because I remember saying to one of the guys at work: ‘There’s this chap I know who’s a homosexual, sleeps around like nobody’s business. They’d clap him in jail if they could get him on a charge.’ I shouldn’t have mentioned him. After that there was a lot of jokes about arse-bandits, poofs, pressure on me to prove I was one of the blokes, hetero as they come. You know how it is. . . .”

  “Yes. But there must have been pressure from Tim in the other direction.”

  “Not at first. We went around, I met his friends—some of them I liked, some disliked, as you’d expect. The ones I disliked tended to be lame ducks he looked after, or limpets. I even met his sister one night—a lovely girl. Tim was very fond of her, like I was—am—of mine. . . . I was enjoying myself, enjoying life . . . Then—”

  His face was screwed up. He was obviously finding this difficult.

  “Yes?”

  “Then I realized he was in love with me.”

  “How?”

  “Looks. The way he treated me compared to the way he treated the guys he just slept with casually. Eventually he told me: ‘You do realize I’m in love with you, don’t you?’ ”

  “How did you react?”

  He smiled shyly.

  “What was that old stand-up comic’s line? ‘I don’t wish to know that.’ It was a bit like that, though I was—or thought I was—a lot more sophisticated then than when I’d come up from Nottingham. I think I said: ‘I know. I’m sorry, but it’s no go.’ ”

  “You didn’t think about stopping seeing him?”

  “No. I suppose you find that surprising. I think I stood him up a couple of times, to cool it, but no. I liked him. . . .” He put his head in his hands. “Of course I know now that’s what I should have done. God knows I know it now! Everything would have been different . . . but then it hardly occurred to me.”

  “When was this?”

  “When it came out into the open? Oh, about a month before the . . . before it happened. Tim was very busy at work, I remember, and for a week or two that helped to cool it. But he was also very mixed up with a pal of his, a chap called Terry Cotterley, with plans to set up some kind of—I don’t know—club or organization, to press for reform of the law on homosexuality.”

  “Yes, the Hatherley Trust—a sort of pressure group.”

  “Oh, did it get set up? I didn’t know. Anyway, I wasn’t too happy about that. Seemed to bring it all too much out in the open for my liking. I wondered whether I wouldn’t have to drop Tim if he did go and work for them. . . . Anyway, cooling it didn’t really work after a time. Tim was still working at full pressure—it was the lead-up to Suez—but any free time he had he’d telephone me, get me to see him. I was sorry for him. He was like a kettle that was boiling away and no one would take it off the stove. He was against the Suez thing, but he was working for the government that was doing it. . . . Then there was me.”

  “Was he pressuring you?”

  “Yes . . . Yes, after a time that’s what he was doing. Pleading with me to ‘try it.’ Saying I just couldn’t understand it if I hadn’t done it. That he knew I was fond of him, and that it was natural to go to bed with him, if only to please him. All of it was true in a way, or true for him. I was so sorry for him. I was really torn apart. That’s how the situation was the day he died.”

  He jumped up, his face gleaming with sweat.

  “I need a drink.”

  15

  The NIGHT in QUESTION

  He scooped up his grandchild from the sandpit and went into the house. I remained on the seat in the sun for a minute or two before following him. He was holding the child effortlessly on his shoulder and pouring himself a drink.

  “Want one?”

  I nodded. He poured from a bottle of bourbon and handed me the glass. The little girl on his shoulder started whimpering, made restless by his restlessness, and he put her on the floor. Then he fetched her a soft toy, gave it to her tenderly, and stood watching her for a bit. I wished I had a grandchild I was as familiar with, and as good with. When she was playing away happily and crawling around the floor with her bear he gestured towards two armchairs at the shady end of the sitting room.

  “That day began like any other,” he said, nursing his glass in his hand. “It was a Thursday. There had been people living in Tim’s flat on and off over the summer—”


  “Lawrence Cornwallis and Gerald Fraser-Hymes.”

  “Right. I think I remember the names. I have a picture of Fraser-Hymes in my mind as a rather furtive man, not at all Tim’s type, except that he didn’t have types, and made friends of all sorts—friends and lovers. . . . Anyway, there was no one living with him at the time, but he was expecting Terry Cotterley over. Soon after I arrived—mid-morning—Terry phoned to say his mother was ill and he wouldn’t be coming, so we were alone for the day.”

  “How did Tim come to have a free day?”

  “He’d been working practically twenty-four hours a day for two weeks, including the previous weekend. Nearly everybody at the Foreign Office had been, he told me. Tim said he’d been given the day off because they didn’t trust him and they were planning something really underhand, but I think he was partly joking. So we went as we often did to Hyde Park, and we talked.”

  “What about?”

  “Oh, Suez, of course. Being given this day off made Tim think they didn’t consider him reliable. Not just because he was against it—lots of people in the F.O. were that—but because he was a homosexual. It didn’t actually worry him very much. He was intending to resign. But he did want to talk about it. Oh, then we got off that subject and talked about this trust thing that Tim was going to work for . . . but all the time I was conscious of pressure.”

  “On him or on you?”

  “On me. Well, both, really. Tim was under intense pressure—I’d never known him so tense—and walking with me in the park was a way of letting it escape, relaxing, refreshing himself. But pressure on me too. He had me to himself, and he was going to use the opportunity. On the walk it was mainly a matter of little physical things—taking my hand, putting his arm around my waist—all very brief, because of course though it was November there were other people around. And also because he knew it embarrassed me. But it all amounted to pressure on me. . . . I felt so sorry for him.”

  “What did you do next?”

  “We went back to the flat and Tim cooked something light for lunch—scrambled eggs, omelet, something like that. The wireless was on, I remember: a record request show on the Light Programme, with a lot of soupy love songs. Tim was relaxing, becoming so happy in my company. I knew I did him good just by being around . . . I could feel myself slipping.”

  “Into going to bed with him?”

  “Into—I don’t think I really knew what. So far there’d never been anything more than little things—the sort of things Tim had gone in for on the walk that day. If he’d tried anything more I’d pushed him away, and that had been enough. I was very naive, and I don’t think I’d sorted out in my mind what I’d let him do, and what I wouldn’t. All I knew was I couldn’t hold him off any longer like I had been doing.”

  “Did Tim realise this?”

  “I think so.” He looked at me straight, with a sharp glint in his eyes. I was glad to see he could discuss the matter without going all shamefaced. He was a grown-up person now. “Tim didn’t always get people right,” he said. “He was too nice, too hopeful. But about bed he was very sharp. He was terribly happy over lunch—radiated it. Then he cleaned the plates away. I went on sitting there. Suddenly I felt his hands on my shoulders, and down the front of my body. I thought: this is it, and I let myself be taken into the bedroom and undressed. I don’t think I ever saw Tim so happy.”

  Andy Forbes took a big swig of his bourbon and stood up, walking around the room, playing for a moment with Emma. What bothered him I suspected was his own violence, not his sexual encounter with Tim. When he came back he was calmer.

  “You won’t want a description of what happened next. At any rate I’m not going to give you one. I don’t think I know any longer what my feelings were—whether I liked it, whether I hated it. It’s been blotted out by what happened later. I know we were in bed for two hours or more, and that Tim was ecstatic, even when he was just holding me. He told me, and I could see it, feel it. Eventually we got up, talked about other things, walked to Victoria Station to buy some cigarettes, did a lot of very trivial and normal things. We came home and listened to the news—there’d been tremendous uproar in the House of Commons that day. And all this time, when I was apparently behaving normally, something was building up in me, and Tim didn’t know it, didn’t even sense it.”

  “What was it? Revulsion?”

  “No, not that. I don’t think it was that. But it may have been a sort of . . . resentment. I think it began when I lay there with him in bed. I thought: this is it. I’ve done it. I’ve crossed the river of no return. That’s what it felt like. And the next thing I thought was: he pressured me into it. It wasn’t my will, it was his. I think I did love Tim in a way, but it wasn’t that way. It was his personality, his style, his funniness. He was lovable, but I felt he’d used that, consciously—used it to make me do something I didn’t want to do. That’s why I felt resentment.”

  “Did you feel . . . cut off, in a way?”

  He nodded vigorously.

  “Yes. That’s what I did feel. All the time we were making love it was there, festering up inside me—this feeling that it was he who had made the choice for me, and that now I was somehow apart. I began thinking of my family. You may think that’s pretty pathetic in a man of—what was I?—twenty-four. But I’d always respected my mum and my dad, accepted what they believed in. I wasn’t someone, then, who thought things through for himself. They were decent people and I tried to imagine myself going home to them and saying: ‘Look, I’m homosexual, and I’m sleeping with this guy whose father is in the Cabinet’ . . . It was just fantastic, impossible. Yes, I know, it’s something a lot of people have done, especially these last years, but I couldn’t have done it, couldn’t have told them. And if I couldn’t tell them, what did that say about what I’d just being doing with Tim? . . . All this is bloody naive, I know.”

  “Not at all,” I said. “It’s probably how I’d have felt too at that age.”

  “Then, just before we had dinner, there was this phone call from Terry Cotterley. A new idea for this pressure group he and Tim were setting up. And I sat there listening to Tim talking and I thought: ‘This is me, this is my future.’ A special case. Someone who people snigger about in pubs, someone who has to press for what he does to be made legal. A minority. It was as if at a stroke I’d been cut off . . . was adrift. Someone a bit apart from everyone else—friends, family—because what he does is different. I’d always seen myself as an average guy, and now suddenly I wasn’t. . . . I don’t pretend I was thinking clearly. That was the whole problem—I couldn’t. Now, when I try to put it into words it sounds wrong, because I wasn’t a words person then, and what I’m describing was a gut reaction. It was all welling up inside me, and it all came back to that feeling that a choice had been made for me, and it wasn’t my choice.”

  He got up and poured himself another drink. I had barely touched mine.

  “The next bit is even more difficult to explain.”

  “The fight?”

  “It wasn’t a fight. He didn’t resist. I beat him up.”

  He came over and sat down again, looking bleakly back through a long time-tunnel.

  “We ate—steak and salad. We washed up. I went and sat down in one of the armchairs. The conscious part of me was saying ‘I want to go home. I want to think this over.’ But underneath that there was only this great swirling mass of feelings—resentment, anger, feelings of betrayal, of having been tricked . . . a sort of black rage. And when he came over behind me again, like the first time, and bent down and kissed me and asked me to come to bed, I shouted: ‘You don’t know me at all, do you?’ ”

  “What did you mean? That he didn’t understand you?”

  “Partly. That he couldn’t understand my feelings—my prejudices, if you like—because he came from another world. He said: ‘Of course I do. I understand. It’s strange first time, but you did enjoy it, and you’ll soon get used to it.’ And I shouted: ‘I won’t get used to it! Y
ou don’t understand me. You don’t understand how I feel. You say you love me, but you don’t know me at all. You don’t know how I’d feel about people knowing, about my family knowing.’ He went on fondling and said: ‘Why do you have to think all the time about other people?’ And I thought: ‘It’s easy to ignore what other people think about you when you have money, self-confidence, position . . .’ ”

  He stopped, and I said nothing, letting him take his own time as he looked back down that dark tunnel.

  “He ran his hand down my body, and when he . . . when he got to my prick I was seized by a blind rage. I jumped up and I turned round and I hit him—savagely across the head. That ought to have been enough to release me from the rage, but it wasn’t . . . I somehow couldn’t stop. I kept shouting ‘You don’t know me—you don’t know anything about me,’ and sometimes, ‘You don’t own me.’ And I kept hitting him. He didn’t resist—he just put up his hands to shield himself, and ran to the other side of the sofa or table. That made it worse. It was as if somehow he was saying he was better than me, had higher standards. I feel so ashamed I can hardly explain it even now. I caught him near the cabinet by the door and I banged his head against it. A vase thing fell off it and smashed to the floor. I looked at him and he was bleeding and his legs were crumpling up. He looked at me as if to ask ‘Why?’ and then he collapsed to the floor, stretched out facedown. . . . I looked down at him. The picture of him lying there bleeding is on my mind, like a snapshot. It comes to me in the night and I wake, sweating.”

  “How did you feel then?”

  “I don’t know . . . Not ashamed. Angry. With this self-righteous feeling that he’d asked for it.”

  “What did you do?”

  “That’s the horrible thing. Nothing. I did nothing to help. I just turned tail and banged out of the door, down the stairs and out.”

  “And you never saw him again?”

  There was a silence.

  “I saw him again. . . . I ran into the Square, then out to the Hyde Park underground. Kennington was my nearest stop, and I had a fair walk from there. I’d thought everyone would be looking at me on the underground but no one did. There wasn’t a mark on me. Somehow it was that that brought home to me what a monstrous thing I’d done. On the walk home I tried to ring Tim, and got the ‘busy’ signal. I thought that must mean that he was all right. My landlady was watching the telly, and I got up to my flat without having to talk to her. By then it must have been about half past nine. I made myself a cup of coffee, then I sat down and I thought and thought. Eventually I felt overwhelmed by shame.”