A Scandal in Belgravia

by Robert Barnard

  “Dreadful crew. No style. No style at all.”

  There was malice in the voice, vitriol even, that was unaccountable and frightening.

  “Yes,” I said meekly. “I suppose we do lack style.”

  “Still a minister, are you?”

  “Not any longer.”

  “Rats leaving a sinking ship.”

  “Thrown off, actually,” I said. Then I added, trying not to be cowed: “Though I’ve often wondered what a sensible rat on a sinking ship is supposed to do if not leave.”

  “I was thrown off a sinking ship. . . .” The voice was now brooding, thick with grievance, and it seemed to reach me through aeons of time, heavy with rancour and vindictiveness. I was conscious of James Wycliffe tiptoeing out of the room, no doubt making his escape from an encounter that was not bearing out his notion that his father would be “tickled pink” by a visitor from the world of politics. The voice droned on.

  “That bounder Macmillan . . . ungrateful swine. . . . He’d have done anything to save his own skin. . . . Still, he had style. Eden had style. Churchill had style.”

  “I served under Selwyn Lloyd,” I said to redress the balance. It was the wrong thing to say. I was astonished by the furious hiss from the chair.

  “I should have had that job! I should have been Foreign Secretary! It’s what I’d prepared myself for all my life! I was kept down in piddling jobs—Minister of Planning, Minister for Local Government. Beneath me! . . .” The fury in the voice was chilling. But then he seemed altogether to cast a chill on the warm, sunny room. The head withdrew itself within the blankets for a moment. The voice was more normal when he said: “You were in the Foreign Office?”

  “Yes, under Morrison and Eden, then under Lloyd.”

  “Lloyd! I should have gone there!”

  “I worked with your son Timothy.”

  “Rotten apple . . . no loyalty . . .” I was suddenly conscious of dark, venemous eyes turned towards me, transfixing me. “You the chap that’s been going round asking questions?”

  This really pulled me up sharp. I had no answer prepared.

  “Yes.”

  “Damned interference. No business of yours.”

  “He was my friend.”

  “I know all about Tim’s friends.”

  “Friend, not lover. . . . How did you know about my questions? Your children don’t.”

  “Dereham picked it up when we were at the House of Lords. Told me about it on the way home. Chuckled. He knew a thing or two that he shouldn’t have known. . . . Dereham’s dead. They think I haven’t taken it in, but I have. I know he’s dead . . . be dead myself before the year’s out. Then you can write what you like. Until then you’d better be damned careful!”

  He seemed to have shrunk further into the rugs, and it was as if the vicious tones were issuing from a dark hole. I tried to talk normally to the hole, as if I were interviewing the old man on the telephone.

  “You had a row with Timothy just before he was killed, didn’t you?”

  “James and Caroline been talking?” He pulled himself round painfully and looked at me. For the first time I saw full-face and felt the vicious power of his eyes. I seemed to be shrivelled by a rage and a resentment that had been preserved intact over the decades. “They said nothing to the police. They’re mediocrities, but loyal ones. Caroline has all her wits about her.”

  “You had a row about the job Tim was going to take, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “You thought it would be . . . bad publicity for you?”

  “Should have thought that was damned obvious. Every time he made a statement to the press, spoke on the wireless or television—if they’d let him on there, which I doubt, because they had different standards then—it would have been ‘said Mr. Timothy Wycliffe, son of the present Minister of Planning,’ ‘son of the Local Government Minister.’ . . . It would have been ruinous. He should never have thought of it. The boy had no sense of loyalty.”

  “It was something Tim felt strongly about, something he thought was very important.”

  “More important than my career? That says something about his judgement, doesn’t it? I didn’t notice the laws had much effect on the way he lived his life. Or most of his friends either. But he was willing to jeopardise everything because of his piffling little campaign for queers.”

  “Jeopardise your career, you mean.”

  “That’s what I said. He was my son. It should have been important to him.”

  I felt a wave of depression, as if my dim political career and his dim political career had somehow coalesced. On the lawns outside a little group of people had come into view. The old man’s children had been joined by his great-grandson, a stocky, genial boy in dirty Wellington boots and a heavy khaki pullover. He looked normal and well-disposed, and I marvelled at how little of this man’s consuming malevolence seemed to have passed down to his descendents. The boy and James had been carrying with difficulty a massive object covered by a tarpaulin, and now, supervised by Marjorie, they set it up on its base. Caroline said something to James and glanced towards the house, but he shook his head, pulled at her sleeve and directed her attention back to the statue. They all began to pull at the tarpaulin.

  “You can do nothing about it, you know.”

  The voice came with whiplash scorn from the pathetic bundle of humanity in the chair. The rugs, the voice, the venom—I was suddenly reminded of Grandfather Smallweed, and was tempted to give him a good shake-up to prevent his disappearing entirely into the rugs. I needed some sign of my physical superiority to counteract the scorn, the poison, and above all what lay behind them—a note of triumph, as if he were scoring one last victory—a victory over me.

  “You can do nothing at all. I’m ninety . . . ninety-something, failing a bit in my mind—though nowhere near as much as they think. . . . No one would do anything at all.”

  “I know.”

  “Soon I’ll be meeting the maker I’ve never believed in. . . . I’ve been a regular churchgoer all my life until recently, but I’ve never had any time for that stuff. . . . Such nonsense! Like a child clutching on to any old hand for security. . . . We come from nothing and we go to nothing. . . . I don’t give a damn for your questions. There’s nothing you can do. I’m not afraid and I’m not ashamed.”

  “Tell me how the quarrel ended, then.”

  “It ended with his threatening me. That’s what that fine young man whom everybody loved did: threatened his own father.”

  “Oh?” This was new, but it tied up with something I’d thought about before: it had never seemed to me that Tim’s job with the Hatherley Trust was enough. I asked eagerly: “What did he threaten you with?”

  “I’m not going to tell you.” He turned painfully again to look me straight in the face, and there was an unpleasant smile of derision on his face, as if he were teasing me: teasing me because I could do nothing with his confession, but teasing me too because there was something that I would never know, however much I might probe. He reminded me of a school bully—not the sort who enjoyed beating or beating up his juniors, but the sort who tormented them in much more subtle ways. He tormented me by dangling further information in front of me. “It was something he overheard one day, when he was a young boy. It was his birthday. He and his mother were waiting outside my study—Tim was to get my present to him. That was the way we did it with all the children. They didn’t knock because they heard me on the phone. So they just stood there waiting, and they heard what I was saying on the phone.”

  “And that was what Tim threatened you with?”

  “Yes. Damnable treachery.”

  “And you and he had never talked about it till the day before he died?”

  “Never.” The vicious eye glinted in the firelight. “Evelyn and I did, once or twice. She was a pathetic, conventional creature. I think she went and wept on Dereham’s shoulder too. There’s no other way he could have known. What fools women are! A butler! But Tim neve
r let on when he came in for his present, nor for a while after. But I gradually realised I didn’t have his respect. Imagine it: a boy of twelve looking at his father and judging him! As if he could understand. I came to hate that look. . . .”

  “But he never brought it out into the open?”

  “Never, until all those years later.”

  “And you decided to kill him?”

  “Of course I didn’t, you fool!” The voice held immeasurable scorn. He was a man who had a deep need to feel scorn. “But I wanted to kill him.”

  “No, that’s right. You didn’t decide to kill him until you got his phone call, did you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “The phone call intended for Marjorie.”

  “That’s right. They loved each other, those two. Nobody ever realised—but then they thought his nancy boy had killed him—that his first instinct would be to call Marjorie, or failing her James. She was out at some damned demonstration, and James and Caroline had gone down to Gloucestershire to test feeling in the constituency.” He paused. “So he got me.”

  There was, horribly, relish in his tone.

  “And it was perfect, wasn’t it, in circumstances and time?”

  “Perfect.”

  “I used to get the Suez angle wrong,” I said, keeping my voice normal, free of anger. “I used to think the coincidence that it happened during Suez was the reason I and everybody else remembered so little about it. That was to get it the wrong way round. The fact is that it was only during Suez that it could have happened at all—you could almost say it happened because of Suez.”

  He nodded with a smile that was almost complacent. I went on:

  “Because only during Suez could it be done practically without publicity. Any other time and the popular newspapers would have blazoned it on the front pages: ‘Minister’s son killed by male lover.’ ‘Another homosexual scandal in the Foreign Office.’ As it was it became a tiny item tucked away on an inside page.”

  “He was a fool!” The old man rasped it out. How he loved calling people fools! “He should have said nothing when he heard me answer. He knew he had threatened me the day before. Forfeited the right to consider himself my son. Instead of which he said: ‘I’m hurt. I need help.’ My heart leapt up in me. I said: ‘What’s happened? Who’s hurt you?’ And he said: ‘A friend.’ Then he blacked out. A friend! Pathetic little pervert! I knew at once what had happened. He had made up my mind for me.”

  Outside on the lawn they had got the tarpaulin off the statue. A human figure, seemingly a child of the air, but hurtling through it to his destruction. From his arms hung tattered fragments of wings, remnants of his aspirations and hopes. It was a figure of dazzling vitality, of movement, and of terror. From the way the little group stood around it I had the impression that they all, even Caroline, were impressed.

  “It was nearly half past nine,” said the voice from the chair, still with that teasing quality underlying its bitterness. “I’d been about to leave, to vote in the division at ten. Three-line whip, Labour censure motion. I could do what I’d decided to do and still get to Westminster for the vote. I took the key Marjorie had for the flat—I knew where it hung in the kitchen. I drove from Kensington to Belgravia in five minutes and left the car in the Square. But I took the jack from the boot. It was the only heavy thing I could think of on the spur of the moment. I slipped into the mews, went up the stairs and opened the door. . . .”

  He stopped—for breath, not for pity.

  “Was Tim still passed out?”

  “No. He was lying there on the floor, sobbing. I’ve never in my life seen anything so unmanly. A grown man crying because he’d had a fight with his boyfriend. An out-of-work electrician! To think I’d spawned that. . . . I’d put the jack down on the landing outside. I took it up, brought it down in one blow on his head, then I made sure he was dead and took the jack back to the car. I made the division lobby and voted. On the way home I threw the jack in the Thames. It was all perfectly simple.”

  “Simple,” I said. “You make it all sound a matter of course.”

  “It was.”

  “If Andrew Forbes had been charged, would you have confessed?”

  The sunken face smiled scornfully.

  “Don’t be childish.”

  “You felt no remorse at all?”

  “None whatsoever.” He was both challenging me and telling the truth. Challenging my bourgeois code, yet being truthful about his lack of one. He felt superior to others not only in what he thought of as his greater intelligence, but also in his lack of moral scruples. He was a superior being, a man who could—who did—stand outside conventional codes. “The boy, as I said, was a rotten apple. He had to be thrown out of the barrel. And he’d threatened me—his own father!” He paused. The eyes glinted again in the firelight, pinpoints of malicious light. “And you’ll never know what he threatened me with!”

  Something stirred in me—some memory, a collection of memories. As I stood there watching him in his empty triumph they jumped and danced together in my mind, and they made a pattern.

  “I don’t believe Tim threatened you. Threatening wasn’t Tim’s style at all.”

  “He did, as good as.”

  “I think you accused him of disloyalty—you’ve used the word over and over today. And I think Tim said something like: ‘Disloyalty—that’s a thing you know all about.’ ”

  There came over his face an expression not of fear, but of petulance, as if I had spoilt his game. He feared he was going to be baulked of his triumph. He said nothing.

  “Tim would have been twelve in 1939.”

  I had seen Tim’s birthdate in the Peerage, but I’d forgotten it. But I remember Tim saying, “I’m a Virgo, believe it or not.”

  “Was he twelve, perhaps, on or around the third of September 1939?”

  Still he said nothing, though he pouted. I heard in my ears Harry Wratton’s voice: “Tim said the most apparently respectable and upright people were Fifth Columnists.”

  “So Tim and your wife were waiting outside your study door, and they heard you talking to—who was it? All the way to Ribbentrop in Berlin? Or the German ambassador in London? And you were assuring him, were you not, that the declaration of war was a great mistake, that you’d be doing all in your power to get the two nations together again, that you’d be putting Germany’s point of view quietly to the people running the country, that the person Europe should be fighting was Stalin—all the stuff people like you had been saying for years. Only you went on saying it. That was it, wasn’t it?”

  “It was the only policy that made sense. You wouldn’t expect a boy of twelve to understand that!”

  “I don’t think the man of twenty-seven understood it either. He regarded you as tantamount to a traitor.”

  “I told you: the boy was a fool.”

  “Then I’m glad to think of myself as a fool alongside him. And it was for fear of his talking that you killed him, wasn’t it?”

  He fixed me with his bright, terrible eyes. His voice came with a mad intensity.

  “It would have been the end to me, the end of my political career.”

  I remembered that Lord John Wycliffe had been dismissed, along with six other cabinet ministers, in Harold Macmillan’s Night of the Long Knives in 1962.

  I shivered. Then I turned on my heels and left the room.

  Out on the lawns they were still admiring The Fall of Icarus. As I approached I caught a glance from Caroline Wycliffe that was shot through with fear and uncertainty. It told me that she, at least, had some suspicions of what had happened that November night in 1956. I kept my face blank of all expression. I was introduced to her grandson Ben—a frank, endearing boy with a cherubic face, not unlike my son Christopher’s. I stood looking at the statue—the vital, plummetting body with its singed wings. There was in it a wonderful sense of energy, but also one of waste. Marjorie looked at me, and I nodded slightly.

  “Father was all right?” ask
ed Caroline, a tremor in her voice.

  “Perfectly all right. Quite au fait with things. We had a good talk about politics in the fifties.”

  • • •

  It was not until yesterday night, after I got back from Avon, that I could bring Jeremy up to date.

  “And there was no shame when he talked about it?” he asked.

  “None whatsoever. If anything, satisfaction.”

  “You’ll write that book, won’t you?”

  “Yes, I think I will. The man will be dead before the year’s out, and he knows it.”

  “I think you should. But the Wycliffes will fight you every inch of the way.”

  “I’m sure they will. The James Wycliffes anyway. But Caroline Wycliffe has suspected and kept quiet about it. I don’t have a great deal of sympathy with her.”

  “It will set the record straight.”

  “I think I owe it to Tim. And to Andy Forbes.”

  “It will be a lot more interesting to write than the memoirs.”

  “Infinitely more. To write and to read. And there doesn’t seem any more useful work in the offing. No whiff of a peerage. No more mention of that place on the Royal Commission. It seems I’m still not forgiven at Number Ten.”

  Jeremy looked up at me smiling.

  “It’s not that, you know. Surely you must have realised? You’re not considered a good risk any longer. They’ve found out about us, Dad.”

  I wish he wouldn’t call me Dad. It underlines the gap in our ages. My children all call me Pop.

  “I expect you’re right,” I said.

  I put my arm around him and we went up to bed.

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  A City of Strangers

  Death of a Salesperson

  Death and the Chaste Apprentice

  At Death’s Door

  The Skeleton in the Grass

  The Cherry Blossom Corpse

  Bodies

  Political Suicide

  Fête Fatale

  Out of the Blackout