The Yellow Room Conspiracy Read online

  We were both standing up by now. I went over to him and he let me kiss him and didn’t flinch, and then I went and shut myself up in my own room and cried till it was time for my hair appointment.

  I have this theory about Englishmen—not all of them, but a lot of them. Tommy was just an extreme example. Their absolute top fear, worse than pain or sickness or death or danger or anything like that, is Being Found Out. There’s a quotation somewhere about fame being a spur. It isn’t fame, it’s shame. It doesn’t even have to be their own shame. You go to the cinema with them and what really twists them up isn’t the dreadful bits, the woman learning her son’s been run over or the old black man getting lynched, it’s the place where the villain gets shown up in front of everyone. Even men with no imagination at all, you’d have said, seem to be able to imagine that happening to themselves. But then, at the same time, there’s something in them which makes them feel they ought to be found out. They remember silly things they did or said when they were schoolboys and cry them aloud in their sleep, because they still haven’t been found out and punished for them, so they’re still being haunted by them. I don’t know. I don’t understand myself, so I don’t see how I can be expected to understand anyone else, but I think I knew what Tommy was talking about when he said it was the risk that mattered. That’s one of the things that hurt so much.

  PAUL VIII

  June 1956

  Several weeks went by. I remained as busy as ever, with neither time nor capacity to pay attention to anything much outside my own affairs, that is to say my work and my involvement with Lucy. She told me that she and Seddon had agreed to keep up appearances for the time being, but in private to do as each wished. She told me bluntly that she was not prepared to divorce him for my sake. I had expected this, but was still disappointed. We seldom talked about that side of her life, but then she always had a great capacity for keeping different relationships in separate compartments. For instance, when Janet rang and asked me to supper, saying that Lucy would be there, she gave no hint of being aware that Lucy and I had resumed our liaison, let alone that I was expecting the invitation.

  I knew Janet least of the sisters—that is to say, I had been in her company least. On the other hand, in the sense of understanding what she might be like as a person, I felt I knew as much as I needed to. She remained markedly her mother’s daughter, boisterous and opinionated. The opinions were different, but the refusal to base them on any rational, or even arguable, process, was the same.

  “I think Teddy married her because she’s such a joke,” Harriet had once said, and indeed on the times I’d seen them together they had conducted themselves as if they were playing the lead roles in a light-comedy musical about a wildly ill-matched couple who yet loved each other. His manner became exaggeratedly solemn and sardonic and hers extravagantly whimsical. I once saw her at a cocktail party plait some carnations from a vase into a chaplet and creep up behind him and crown him with them, and then fling her arms round his neck and whisper in his ear. He had reached back and patted her rump absentmindedly, as one might that of a hound, and gone on with his conversation. If this sounds painful, the sort of behaviour one would prefer to take place in another room, or preferably another county, it wasn’t, at least in the early years of their marriage. They seemed so happy with each other that one had to be in a bad mood not to regard what they did as an expression of high spirits, which they wanted us all to share. But by hindsight the joke may already have started to wear thin as Voss-Thompson’s TV role, introducing him as it did into the entourages of glamorous and powerful people, presented him with alternative attractions. Outwardly Janet’s rowdy domesticities seemed still to suit him, and though he had a small flat near the TV studios in Lime Grove he made every effort to get back to Hertfordshire for the night, if possible. They had one daughter, and Janet was now visibly pregnant again.

  That night we dined at their flat. Lucy and I arrived separately. She had not yet formally told even her close family what was going on, though Gerry seemed to be aware of it and had, presumably, told Nancy. The other guests turned out to be an American television producer called Mary Twill, and David Fish. I had not met her before, but David I had met occasionally, a tall, slight but still somehow rubicund man my own age, already balding, with a manner of stooping towards one and peering through thick spectacles, beaming with interest at whatever trivialities one might have found to tell him. I remembered him by sight from Eton, but knew him mainly as a protégé of a family friend of the Verekers, an enormously rich and tactless woman called Biddy Trollope, one of those characters with a lot of old friends who value them but admit that they need a considerable amount of tolerance to do so, while outsiders, such as myself in Biddy Trollope’s case, cannot imagine why the friends bother. Fish was a money-shoveller, in his own phrase, expert in shifting enormous sums of currency round the globe in order to take advantage of minimal currency fluctuations. The job is now a commonplace, one for the caricature yuppie, but in those days he was a rarity, and his interest in his work seemed more scholarly than ambitious. I had thought him a dull dog, but he had surprised me once by talking with eager excitement about some of the later Roman Emperors.

  Despite the smallness of their flat the Voss-Thompsons had a separate dining-room, a cramped space which might have been meant for a child’s bedroom but was now largely occupied by a circular table which we had to edge past to get to our places. The food was then served by Janet going round to the kitchen and passing the dishes through a hatch behind Edward’s chair. Despite this awkwardness the meal was well-organised, straight Elizabeth David, with some good claret.

  I sat between Mary Twill and Janet, with Lucy opposite me between Edward and David. Neither of us got much share of the conversation. Learning that I was not involved in television or films Miss Twill at once wrote me off as a nonentity, receiving any overtures from me with impatient disdain and snatching Edward’s attention at the first opportunity. Edward caught my eye once and made an apologetic gesture, but continued to treat her with a respect just short of deference. I assumed he wanted something from her. On my other side Janet, between her disappearances to the kitchen, seemed to be compensating for her earthy rotundity by a particularly extravagant feyness, interrupting conversations, seizing them like a puppy with a blanket, and dragging them off in unwelcome directions. (She was always capable of getting hold of more wrong ends of a stick than most people.) Fairly early on she had tried to do this with Edward and Miss Twill, and had actually seemed abashed for a few seconds when Edward had shut her up. After that she concentrated on preventing David and Lucy having more than three coherent sentences of conversation together. By hindsight I guess that she was conscious of her marriage being in difficulty and was attempting, clumsily, to exaggerate a role that had formerly seemed to please, and to make herself more interesting, or at least more noticeable.

  She needed no excuse at all for these intrusions. At one point, coming back from the kitchen, she leaned over and spoke in a stage whisper into David’s ear.

  “Be careful what you say to Lucy. She was a spy in the war.”

  David for some reason blushed.

  “As a matter of fact we knew each other in the war,” he said.

  Janet made her eyes enormous.

  “Were you a spy too?” she said. “How desperately glamorous.”

  “I’m afraid I just did heavy math on codes,” said David.

  “Oh, I know all about that,” said Janet. “We had that sort of stuff in our house too. That’s not spying. But after that Lucy went off to London and was a real spy, you know, seducing ambassadors and things.”

  David giggled uncomfortably.

  “Janet’s talking nonsense,” said Lucy. “I signed the Official Secrets Act, so I don’t talk about it, but …”

  “They’d put you in the Tower if you did,” said Janet. “Then we could all come and visit you disguised as our servants
and smuggle you out.”

  “Provided you were the one who stayed behind,” said Lucy.

  “Oh, yes, and have Possum born in the Tower!” said Janet. “I bet you get special privileges if you’re born in the Tower, like being allowed to wear odd shoes in the Queen’s presence. Have you got any special privileges yet, David? Or do you have to wait till you’re an alderman?”

  And so on. It was a thoroughly uncomfortable meal. At one point Lucy caught my eye and smiled commiseratingly. She was looking especially serene, so I guessed that she too was finding things awkward, though she must have been well used to Janet’s style.

  In those days it was still not unusual, even at supper parties for as few as six, for the women to withdraw before the coffee was served, leaving the men “to their port”. This they did, to Miss Twill’s obvious irritation, but we didn’t leave them much longer than they would have needed to make use of the bathroom. As we rose to join them Edward said, “Do you mind going ahead, David? I’ve got something I have to talk to Paul about.”

  David shambled amiably off and Edward closed the door. “I need some advice and possibly some help,” he said. “I’m afraid this has got to be confidential.”

  “I’ll do my best,” I said.

  “You’ve known the Verekers as long as anyone, and what I need is an objective view. I’ve come across some stuff in the course of my work which I’m not quite sure how to handle. Have you ever heard of John and Mary Driver?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Ostensibly they run a pub called The Wooden Leg in Wapping, but that’s a front. Really they’re the bosses of a thoroughly unpleasant organisation, mostly protection and prostitution. Drugs, of course. They’ve got several of the local police on their pay-roll, and there’s at least a suspicion that someone higher up in the force is finding it worth his while to look the other way. Driver is an ex-pug and she was a tart. The story is that he fell for her, and she used him to take the pimp who’d been running her off her back. After that they set up together, offering some of her friends in the trade the same service, and simply went on from there. He’s not just a muscleman. They’ve both got brains and ambition, and they’re just about as ruthless as each other. They’re doing well. They give parties, lashings of champagne these days. Dinner-jackets and ballgowns. And they’ve got the sort of dangerous glamour that attracts a certain kind of apparently successful citizen. We’ve got a photograph of … I’d better not tell you who … dancing with Mary Driver. Quite a few surprising people have been seen down that way.”

  “Anyone we know?”

  “I’m coming to that. Straight crime isn’t really our line. We got on to them because we’ve been looking into a housing racket. We started off thinking it was a comparatively minor local scandal which might do to fill out a magazine programme one evening. There was this small company which had bought up a few run-down properties covered by the Rent Acts, full of tenants paying only a pound or two a week, and they’d been harassed into leaving so that the company could do the houses up and sell them at a whopping profit.”

  “It’s bound to happen when you get a market as distorted as the Rent Acts have produced.”

  “Yes, but what made this different was the nature of the harassment. Usually the victims are only too happy to tell the world their wrongs, but these people were really frightened. It was almost impossible to get them to talk. But we found one brave old biddy who not only told us about the men who’d come round and what they’d said and done, but because she happens to be one of an immense and prolific clan who all live a mile or two apart in a great swathe across North London, she knew of several other places where exactly the same thing was beginning to happen. Even the same men coming round. At that point we got really interested, and started putting more people on to the story. We made connections both up and down. First, the frighteners appeared to come from the Driver organisation. Second, the landlords were never individuals but always small companies, recently registered. Their addresses were those of a number of East End solicitors, acting on behalf of clients whose names they refused to reveal. The Directors were nominees, never available for interview. That seemed to be a blank wall. The only thing we had to take us further was some research at the Land Registry which showed that two separate lots of properties had been previously owned by Michael Allwegg’s company.”

  “That could be a coincidence. He seems to have bought and sold fairly extensively.”

  “Yes, but there’s one more connection. One of our chaps managed to get himself invited to a party of the Drivers. They like the attention, you know. He’d been at Cambridge just after the war, and was a serious cricketer. He recognised Gerry Grantworth.”

  I said nothing for some while. I felt I should have been astonished, but wasn’t. A few connections formed in my mind.

  “I believe Gerry is an old friend of yours,” said Edward.

  “Yes.”

  “So what’s your line?”

  “I shall have to think. Are you going to make these allegations public? If you do, you’ll be laying yourselves open to colossal libel damages, I’d have thought. What you’ve told me doesn’t sound enough to go on.”

  “It isn’t. I don’t know what the official line will be. I’m taking myself off the programme, for obvious reasons. My own guess is that we won’t be able to name names, but that we’ll create enough of a stir for the names to start coming out. Look, I’m taking a risk telling you at all. If you now tell Allwegg or Grantworth, then there is a serious danger that they will take out injunctions and prevent the programme being shown. I don’t want that. In my view, this is a vicious piece of exploitation of helpless people. On the other hand, I need advice. Allwegg is about to marry Ben, and now Janet tells me that Nancy and Gerry are to get married at last.”

  “No!”

  “On the same day, Janet says. Nancy rang her up this morning.”

  “But what about the alimony?”

  “Felder is going broke and it’s no longer being paid. The details were beyond Janet. Look, I’ve got to get back to that frightful woman, before she starts throwing furniture around. The thing is, if these allegations are true, I strongly believe that they ought to be made public. At the same time I don’t want Janet’s sisters waking up one morning and finding out what they’ve let themselves in for.”

  “Couldn’t Janet talk to them?”

  I knew as I said it the proposal was ludicrous. Edward merely shrugged.

  “I don’t know how close you are to Lucy these days,” he said.

  “I’ll think about it,” I said. “I shall have to think about it in any case. I’ve never liked or trusted Allwegg. Gerry is, as you say, an old friend, in the sense that I’ve known him a long time, but we’ve never been intimate. I may decide I have to tell him some of what you’ve told me, but if I do I’ll let you know first. There’s one or two enquiries of my own I can make.”

  “Be careful,” he said. “These people are extremely vicious.”

  I remembered saying something of the sort to Gerry earlier, when I had put him on to Mrs Mudge. Edward had the door open and was waiting for me, but the thought made me pause a moment in my stride. Then we went through and joined the others.

  We found Miss Twill on the point of leaving, outraged by Edward’s ten-minute absence. Edward seemed unperturbed, switching on charm and pouring her a large Scotch. Lucy and Janet embarked on a discussion, full of Vereker references, thus impenetrable to outsiders, about the care of their old Nanny, who after a lifetime of adapting herself to the whims and extravagances of her employers was now making up for lost chances by being a disruptive influence in the old people’s home where they had placed her. This left David and me together, so I took the chance to ask him whether he knew anything about the collapse of the Felder fortune. Rare metal futures were not his area of expertise, but apparently Felder’s wallowings had created up
heavals elsewhere, so David knew enough about it to explain that in his efforts to drive the price of molybdenum up Felder had illegally raided a number of trusts (Nancy’s presumably included) where he had sufficient clout with the trustees to make them do as he wanted. I then shamelessly pumped him for his views on the various currencies whose movements might affect my business until a BBC car arrived which Edward had arranged to take Miss Twill home. She was staying at Brown’s, and as David had rooms in Albany he took the chance of a lift. I formally offered to drive Lucy back to Eaton Square, and she kept up the charade and gratefully accepted.

  As soon as we were alone she said, “Gerry’s going to marry Nan.”

  “So I hear.”

  “On the same day as Ben and Michael. Same filthy cricket match! And I’d been looking forward to it!”

  (A fortnight or so earlier I’d received a note from Nancy saying that Ben was to be married from Blatchards early in September, in the morning, so that they could hold a celebratory cricket match in the afternoon and have a party in the evening. I was to come and score.)

  “You are not enthusiastic?” I said.

  “I could spit! Let’s talk about something else.”

  Next morning I telephoned Mrs Mudge.

  Ten years later, it will be remembered, she was briefly a popular media figure following a police raid and a prosecution for living on immoral earnings. She must by then have been well into her seventies. She had always born a mild resemblance to Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, and for her court appearances deliberately dressed to enhance the likeness, spoke in much the same voice, and tended to use the royal “we” when referring to herself. Most people assumed she was doing this for laughs, as part of the sexual/satirical revolution which was then in full swing, but I guessed she had begun the act not as a tease but in an attempt to emphasise her own respectability and social worth, though she was then quite bright enough to recognise the effect she was having and to broaden her pastiche into caricature. She was always deeply interested in the doings of the Royal Family, and was known to long to number one of them among her clients. I believe she used to hint that Edward VIII, when Prince of Wales, had been at least friendly, which is possible, since in those days she used to run a little smart-sleazy hotel and was a pet, rather in the manner of Rosa Lewis, among some of the raffish rich.