The Diplomat's Wife

by Ridpath, Michael

  His grandmother’s rudeness shocked Phil, but Sir Cyril took it in his stride.

  ‘As blunt as always, I see, Emma. Have you never met Penelope? We’ve been married ten years now.’

  ‘No, I haven’t. I think Roland did.’

  ‘Sure to have. Perhaps we can rectify that while you are here. Where are you staying?’

  ‘The Ritz.’

  ‘Jolly good. I’ll be in touch. I am sorry about Roland. And that I wasn’t able to attend the funeral. I think I was in BA at the time.’

  Emma smiled.

  ‘Your grandfather was a fine man,’ said Sir Cyril to Phil. ‘Are you thinking of joining the diplomatic service?’

  Phil looked confused. He had no clue what he wanted to do after university, beyond ensuring it wasn’t insurance. He suddenly realized this was ‘the old boy network’ in action, and was a bit surprised to see it involved him.

  ‘Oh, don’t worry about Philip,’ said Emma. ‘He can find his own job when the time comes. That’s not why we’re here. I just wanted to look around the place again. It was an interesting time.’

  The ambassador examined Emma carefully. Then he smiled. ‘It was certainly that.’

  They spent half an hour chatting about people in Paris in the 1930s, before the ambassador took his leave. But he suggested that they wander around the embassy, accompanied by Miss Stott, who, it turned out, was not just a secretary, but a modern-day third secretary. She was blonde and long-legged, and really quite attractive, Phil couldn’t help noticing. Twenty-five, at least. Way out of his league, obviously.

  Miss Stott immediately realized, diplomatically, that Emma wanted to do the explaining, and kept quiet and listened as they walked around the embassy.

  It was extraordinarily elegant, if not opulent. Known as the Hôtel de Charost, it had been purchased in the early nineteenth century by the British government from Napoleon’s sister, Pauline Borghese, and still retained the ambience of a city palace, imperial rather than royal. The overall effect was a mixture of French grandiosity and British pomposity, which Phil found overwhelming. Everywhere you looked there were delicate chairs, ornate lamps, brilliantly polished tables, extravagant flower arrangements, grand portraits of grand diplomats and melodramatic classical landscapes. The prevailing colours were gilded yellow, polished brown, and green and crimson fabric. The Hôtel de Charost had been home to a succession of peers and knights of the realm, in a line from the Duke of Wellington to Sir Cyril, all of whom had dined for England.

  Emma led the way outside to a semi-circular courtyard. ‘This used to be the stable block,’ she said, pointing to a block emblazoned with two fine stone horses above its entrance. ‘Before they turned it into the Chancery. Has that changed?’ she asked the third secretary.

  ‘Oh no,’ she said with a smile. ‘The funny thing is, I always wanted to work in a stables when I was a girl.’

  ‘This is where all the work gets done,’ Emma said. ‘Roland had his office here on the top floor.’

  They went around the side of the house to the garden. This was a little patch of England in the middle of Paris. Lawns, ancient spreading trees, beds of roses and exuberant borders of other flowers that Phil couldn’t name. All was quiet behind the garden’s high walls. The only signs of the city outside were the top of a gilded dome and the tip of the Eiffel Tower in the distance. The Faubourg Saint-Honoré itself was a relatively narrow road for Paris, certainly not one of Haussmann’s grand boulevards, and it was extraordinary how this oasis of calm and beauty could exist right next to it, in the midst of the Parisian bustle.

  Emma could see what Phil was thinking. ‘I know. Amazing, isn’t it? Do you mind if we sit here for a while?’ she asked Miss Stott.

  ‘Of course. I’ll leave you to it. I’ve got one or two things to catch up with back in the Chancery.’

  ‘Nice girl, don’t you think, Philip?’ said Emma with a grin.

  ‘Yes, Grandmother, I thought she was very nice,’ he replied with fake primness.

  ‘Glad to see you have good taste. When Roland and I were here, they would never have allowed a woman to be third secretary. I hope she goes far. Maybe one day in thirty years’ time you’ll come back to Paris and she’ll be ambassador. I like the northern accent too.’

  The shade of a large chestnut protected them from the afternoon sun, birds mumbled lazily from the bushes, and the leaves around them rustled in a gentle breeze. Emma lit a cigarette.

  ‘Now, Philip. I need to tell you about Paris.’

  Eleven

  May 1936, Paris

  * * *

  I was remarkably undiplomatic for a diplomat’s wife. I tended to say what I thought. If a question came into my head, I would ask it. If someone was evasive, or claimed to know something when they clearly didn’t, I would point that out. Poor Roland hadn’t anticipated that. I think he thought with my languages and my inquisitiveness I would be able to hold my own in conversation, and indeed I could. I know some diplomats actually liked me. But then again, some didn’t.

  One of those that didn’t was the ambassador, Sir George Clerk. He was known for his charm and his urbanity. He seemed to me to be lazy and a little bit stupid. I think he realized I thought this, and unsurprisingly he didn’t appreciate such lack of respect from a twenty-one-year-old.

  Poor Roland.

  What was worse, his wife liked me. Lady Clerk was a nutcase. The previous ambassadress, Lady Tyrell, had also been a nutcase, but Lord Tyrell had been able to keep her away from Paris. This had raised eyebrows locally, so the Foreign Office had insisted that Lady Clerk be present in the embassy with her husband. They detested each other.

  She was crazy, but I liked her. She was a painter and a sculptor. She set up shop in a room at the top of the building that had previously been occupied by a third secretary. She was also a faith healer. To the annoyance of the ambassador, all kinds of odd people would tramp through the embassy to see her: models, patients, fellow artists. I once bumped into Marc Chagall on the stairs on his way down. She offered to heal my twisted ankle for me, but I refused. I modelled for her once, naked, which was probably a little bit stupid on both our parts, but fortunately I couldn’t recognize myself in the resulting picture, and I assume no one else could either. Roland never knew.

  Poor Roland’s job was to keep tabs on her at all times, so that the ambassador could make sure he never bumped into her. Roland frequently acted as an intermediary, passing messages about domestic arrangements between husband and wife. It was absurd.

  Most of the other embassy staff were polite to me, as were their wives, who I suspected thought me a queer fish. Only Cyril Ashcott was friendly. I think he found my faux pas amusing, which was perfectly all right with me. He was a third secretary, and at twenty-six he was the nearest in age to me. He followed the ambassador’s lead in enjoying the good life that Paris had to offer, but perhaps not in exactly the same way.

  Roland worked hard. He was first secretary, which meant he organized everything. He was clearly very good at his job, and well respected by the embassy staff and the wider diplomatic corps in Paris. We were invited to countless functions, where he gently prodded me into behaving a little more diplomatically. He was popular; I was tolerated, mostly, although I must have said something particularly nasty once to a Japanese diplomat without realizing it, for all the Japanese seemed to loathe me. I didn’t like them much either, or what they were doing in China.

  Roland explained that while my assessment of the Chinese situation might make sense, it was exactly the kind of opinion I should keep to myself.

  Despite all the parties and all the diplomatic chatter, I was lonely. Can you be lonely if you don’t really mind it? Perhaps I mean I was alone. Roland worked long hours at the embassy, and naturally I couldn’t possibly be allowed to get a job – that was frowned upon for a diplomat’s wife – so I had the days and most of the evenings to myself. Of course, I read. I obtained a reader’s ticket to the Bibliothèque nationale, I disco
vered the American Library on the Rue de Téhéran and I spent a lot of time and quite a bit of money at an English-language bookshop on the Rue de l’Odéon on the Left Bank. I found plenty of good books to read, and so I was content.

  But I missed Hugh so much. I missed him because he was my brother and I loved him and he was dead. I missed him because I had no one to discuss my reading with: without him it had all become strangely purposeless. I missed him because I wanted someone to tell about all that I saw and heard at the embassy.

  I did talk to Roland about my reading, and we certainly gossiped about the embassy, but it wasn’t quite the same.

  I saw my mother frequently. She had taken to getting her dresses made at great expense in Paris, at Schiaparelli’s, and she was constantly coming for fittings. She had a number of friends in Paris, and she sometimes stayed with them, or at the Crillon, but never with me. She usually took me out to dinner, with Roland if he was available. I tried once to speak to her about Hugh, to remember him with her, but she was having none of it.

  I had questions about Hugh. About his renunciation of communism. About the car accident. About the mysterious American woman. Why had he been on Dockenbush Lane? Was he really a spy? Had he really been murdered by the secret service?

  I had thought Hugh was the person I knew best in the world, and then suddenly, right after his death, all that had been thrown into doubt. If I couldn’t answer those questions, did I know who he truly was? What kind of sister was I?

  It unsettled me. It gnawed at me.

  I told myself such speculation was preposterous, and tried to force it out of my head, but my questions needed answers more sensible than Freddie’s drunken ravings.

  So I was pleased when I received a telephone call from Dick. He was in Paris and he wondered if he could drop by and see me.

  * * *

  He came for tea at our flat, a first-floor apartment with big shuttered windows that let in masses of sunlight. We lived in the Rue de Bourgogne, a quiet street near Les Invalides on the Left Bank. Dick wore grey flannel trousers, an open-necked shirt and a jacket with elbow patches. He looked so badly dressed and so English. I rather liked that. The embassy staff were all beautifully turned out at all times, the men in black coats and striped trousers from Savile Row, the women outfitted by local Parisian dressmakers.

  Dick seemed pleased to see me too. He was writing a novel about the downfall of capitalism and had decided that Paris was the place to do it. He was planning to stay for three months.

  We talked about Orwell’s Down and Out, which he too had read and claimed as the inspiration for his own novel, and then I asked him what was uppermost on my mind. I did that in those days. I still do that now.

  ‘You remember what Freddie said at Hugh’s funeral? That Hugh was a spy for Russia and that the secret service killed him? Was there any truth to that?’

  Dick snorted into his cup of tea, a good English bone-china cup received as a wedding present from Roland’s aunt. ‘Absolutely not! Total tosh. Freddie talks absolute rot, especially when he’s tight. He was tight, you know?’

  ‘I thought perhaps he was.’

  ‘Appalling behaviour, I’m afraid. I say, you haven’t been worrying about that, have you?’

  ‘I’m afraid I have, rather. You see, Hugh and I had had a dreadful row the evening before he died. I told you about that – he claimed to have given up on communism – but it didn’t make sense to me. And I don’t know what he was doing on that back lane.’

  ‘Did the police have any suspicions?’

  ‘No, but they wouldn’t if the secret service had killed him, would they?’

  Dick put down his cup. ‘I don’t know much about the secret service, but I don’t think they murder people whom they suspect of being spies. They try them and hang them. That’s different.’

  He looked right at me. ‘And I really don’t think Hugh was a spy. I wouldn’t necessarily know for sure if he was, but I suspect I would have an inkling. I had none.’

  I listened and sipped my tea. ‘Tell me about him,’ I said. ‘What was he like at school?’

  Dick took out a pipe. ‘Do you mind?’

  I shook my head and lit up a cigarette.

  ‘Everybody liked him,’ Dick replied as he filled the bowl with tobacco. ‘As at most schools, there was a split between the arty types, the “aesthetes”, and the hearties who played rugger, but Hugh seemed to span that. He played cricket and he wrote poetry and rebellious essays. The beaks liked him too.’

  ‘And which were you?’

  ‘I suppose I was an aesthete. I shared a study with Hugh in the Upper School. But Freddie was the one the hearties really loved to hate. He would wear silk scarves around his wrist and quote obscure Latin poetry at them. They loathed it.’

  ‘But Hugh and Freddie were good friends?’

  ‘Very good friends. I think Hugh admired Freddie’s rebellious streak. The way he didn’t care about authority. They started a magazine together, The Light of Youth. I contributed. Bad poetry, earnest essays, satire that we thought frightfully clever. It was banned in the end, but they gave it a good run.’

  ‘Is Freddie a homosexual?’ I asked.

  Dick looked shifty. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Was my brother a homosexual?’

  Dick blushed. I wasn’t sure if that was because he was embarrassed discussing the subject with a young lady, or if he was hiding something.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘At least I don’t think so.’ He paused, puffing on his pipe. ‘No, I’m sure not.’

  ‘Sorry, I’m embarrassing you,’ I said. ‘Given all the books I read, I couldn’t help coming across homosexuality. I couldn’t possibly ask my parents about it, but I could ask Hugh, and he explained all. But there’s one thing I never understood. If you are a homosexual, does that mean you will always like just men, or can you change?’

  Dick smiled nervously. ‘I’m not sure I completely understand that either. Many of the boys who experimented with it at school are now frightfully keen on girls. Others, like Freddie, have no interest in women at all.’

  ‘And my brother?’

  ‘He liked women. I think he always did. I really don’t think there was anything physical between him and Freddie, if that’s what you are asking.’

  ‘I was thinking more about Kay.’

  ‘He was desperately keen on her. He never mentioned her to you?’

  ‘No. I wish he had. I find it hard to forgive him for keeping her a secret from me. Who is she?’

  ‘She’s an American, from Chicago originally, I think, but then she moved to Vienna where she studied German. She went from there on the same Intourist trip as Freddie, Hugh and me. Hugh and she hit it off right away. After the trip, Hugh returned to London and they wrote to each other. Then she got herself a position as an assistant to an Austrian photographer in London, and moved there to be with Hugh. Hugh and she saw a lot of each other.’

  ‘Did you know he had asked her to marry him?’

  ‘No. I’m a bit surprised. But I can’t imagine she would lie about something like that.’

  ‘What did you think of her?’

  ‘She’s very attractive in an odd way. She’s earnest and sincere. Self-taught. A little like you. Perhaps that’s why Hugh liked her.’ Dick reddened again. ‘Sorry. That came out wrong. But I told you before how frightfully proud of you Hugh was.’

  I smiled reassuringly. ‘That’s all right. What about Hugh’s communism? Had he really given it up? Did he ever actually join the party?’

  ‘When we went up to Cambridge in 1929, everyone was talking about poetry. By the time we did our finals, everyone was talking about Marx. It all changed. And it was the crash that did it, first on Wall Street in 1929 and then the banks in 1931. Capitalism is broken, that’s clear now. Suddenly socialism seemed the answer, or even communism.

  ‘Freddie was at Trinity reading History, but he switched to Economics so that he could be taught by a don named Maurice Dobb.’

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sp; ‘I remember that name. Hugh mentioned him in his letters.’

  ‘He’s a Marxist, and he taught Freddie all about dialectic materialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Then Freddie joined a dining club called the Apostles – it’s supposed to be secret, but everyone knows about it. Keynes is the president, you know, the economist?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Hugh was at King’s, Keynes’s college, and Freddie soon got him in. I was never a member, but I believe the idea was that someone gave a paper at each dinner and it was discussed. A lot of the undergraduate members were taken with Marxism, and they began to spread it around the university. Very effectively: we were all receptive. A former coal miner started the Cambridge University Socialist Society, and we all joined – I think they have a thousand members now. Freddie joined the Communist Party and got his little green party card, but I don’t think Hugh ever got around to it.’

  ‘Did you sign up?’

  ‘No. Almost. My father is a vicar, you may remember. He had a parish in rural Hampshire, but the General Strike made him think, and he asked to be transferred to a mining village in Durham. Which he was. It was quite a shock to the rest of the family. It wasn’t just that we were middle-class southerners; those villages are very Methodist – the Church of England is the enemy. But my father did a good job. I learned to play the trombone and the miners let me play in one of their bands. The poverty shocked me, the houses, the children going down the mines at fourteen, the coal dust everywhere.

  ‘So I listened to the likes of Maurice Dobb, and I read the essays and the books, and I stayed up till two in the morning drinking college port and discussing Lenin. But I found the atheism of Marxism a problem. I still think “love thy neighbour” is the commandment to live by. Atheism appealed to most of the communist undergraduates; they believed the Church of England was hypocritical. That’s certainly what Hugh thought.’

  ‘All right, I understand,’ I said. ‘That’s how Hugh became a communist, but why did he give it up? He suggested to me that it was after your trip to Russia, but I remember him coming back from that more fired up than ever.’