The Diplomat's Wife

by Michael Ridpath

  And so they did. The stable yard had been turned into a playground, a pair of wonky football posts defied the summer term on the lawn, classrooms had been built in the walled garden, but a square of grass survived, lined on one side with a border of flowers of different shapes and sizes and on the other with an arbour bearing a massive green plant.

  ‘Ah, they’ve kept the wisteria!’ said Grams. ‘A couple of weeks ago this whole thing would have been purple.’

  ‘It’s very pretty,’ said Phil. His enthusiasm for gardens lagged way behind his grandmother’s, but even he could appreciate the beauty of the setting.

  They walked over to the arbour. ‘Let’s sit here for a bit,’ she said as they approached one of those benches engraved with the name of a past pupil which adorn all schools. They looked out over to the moor rising not more than a couple of miles away. They could hear the rustle of a brook at the bottom of the garden, and in the distance the squeals and cheers of small boys playing cricket.

  ‘Are you sorry you came?’ Phil asked.

  ‘No,’ said Grams. ‘Well, partly. But I wanted to see it. I needed to see it.’ She sighed. ‘I loved it here. At least when I was a child. I’m not sure I came back here at all after about 1939. Until Sarah and I had to sell it.’

  ‘Why was that?’

  ‘You’ll find out,’ Grams said. She turned to her grandson. ‘I think I need to begin my story, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘We’ll begin here, the weekend Hugh died.’

  Chapter 4

  February 1934, Chaddington Hall, Devon

  I WAS NINETEEN, and I was waiting to get married. To whom, I had no idea.

  The project had started the year before, my first season. My mother and I had decamped to our London house in Hill Street in Mayfair. Several weeks were given over to Mama visiting the mothers of other debutantes and both of us trying on a series of dresses, before the gruelling schedule of ball after ball began. Although I was her raw material, my mother was strangely confident. My elder sister Sarah’s season had been a triumph; she had nabbed Tubby Partington-Smythe, a skinny cavalry officer who was the son of a marquess and a genial, considerate young man who had fallen instantly and heavily in love with her. They were now married – happily married. Although my mother considered me not nearly as good a catch as Sarah, she felt I had nice eyes, and her dressmaker could make something of my full figure. Although unfashionable, quite a few men liked a full figure, apparently.

  And I was clever, she said. A much smaller number of men would like that.

  The whole thing was the disaster I had expected it to be. The balls involved dance cards, which were carried around by the debs. The dance cards were filled in with the names of young men. Or not.

  In my case not.

  My mother soon got fed up with sitting out dances with me, and I ended up with a girl called Edwina, the daughter of an ambassador to a Balkan country who had seen the world and was interested in it. Her figure was ‘full’ top to toe, and she had unfortunate buck teeth, so she and I spent a lot of time together on the edges of the balls, much to Mama’s annoyance. The one good thing was that eventually I got to go to Buckingham Palace to see the king. That was fun.

  But now I was stuck in Chaddington Hall, with nothing but the library and Tallow, my beautiful grey mare, to amuse me.

  And my brother Hugh, whenever he put in an appearance.

  Luncheon was over and I was sitting in the small drawing room, reading my book, waiting for him to arrive from London. The small drawing room had a good view of the drive. Hugh was arriving ‘some time after luncheon’, and I was excited.

  Sure enough, his dark blue Riley sped up the drive. I rushed out to meet him, overtaking Jecks, the butler, on the way.

  Hugh waved and hopped out of the car, before giving me a hug. He was short for a man, about my height, with thick dark hair, blue eyes and a wide, wide smile that he now bestowed on me. He was desperately good-looking, according to the debs and their mothers, so Mama had come under pressure to procure him for a number of the balls last summer. He had liked Edwina too.

  ‘Ciamar a bha an turas agad?’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Ciamar a bha an turas agad?’ I repeated.

  ‘Ah!’ Hugh gave me a wide grin. ‘Bha turas math agam,’ he replied. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t recognize your Gaelic pronunciation.’

  ‘I was just guessing,’ I said. ‘It’s difficult when you only have a textbook to go from.’

  ‘Not bad, then,’ said Hugh. ‘I’m impressed.’

  I grinned. Hugh had written to me that he had started learning Scots Gaelic for the fun of it, and I had wanted to surprise him. ‘I got Hatchards to send me MacLaren’s Gaelic Self-Taught. It’s fiendishly difficult, isn’t it?’

  ‘It is,’ said Hugh. ‘Which makes it more fun, don’t you think?’

  Unlike Hugh, I had never been to school. My parents had employed a succession of tutors and governesses. I had learned French and German from them. Hugh had taught me Latin and Greek, or at least got me started, and with Hugh’s help I had had a bash at Italian. We both loved languages and were good at them, but Gaelic was a cut above the rest, even Greek.

  Mama came down to greet her son, but Papa remained snoozing in his business room. Jecks took Hugh’s suitcase up to his bedroom, and Hugh glanced at the sky.

  ‘After that drive, I’d love to get some fresh air before it gets dark. Do you want to come with me, Ems?’

  ‘Rather!’ I said. Twenty minutes later we were crossing the brook at the bottom of the garden and heading across the fields towards the moor. It was a cloudy damp February day, and the top half of Dartmoor merged into the grey. The going was muddy, especially by the gates where the red South Devon cows had churned up the red south Devon soil. Hugh headed for a gully scored into the flank of the moor, from which a stream tumbled down to join the brook that ran by the Hall. It was a walk we had both done many times.

  ‘Have you read Down and Out in Paris and London?’ I asked. ‘George Orwell. I’ve almost finished it. It’s really very good.’

  ‘I’ve heard good things about it.’

  ‘Did you know that tramps are called tramps because they have to spend all day tramping from one parish to another? They are not allowed to spend more than one night in a parish. It’s beastly!’

  ‘I think I did know that,’ said Hugh. ‘And it does sound beastly.’

  ‘Mind you, Paris is just as bad. The restaurants there are like the Black Hole of Calcutta, at least for the kitchen staff. I’m not sure I could bear to eat a meal there. Do you know this man Orwell?’

  ‘I haven’t met him,’ Hugh said. ‘I think Orwell isn’t his real name. It’s Blythe or Blair or something. And I believe he went to Eton.’

  ‘Really? I find that disappointing.’

  Our father had attended Eton and loathed it. Which is why he had sent Hugh to a public school in Wiltshire instead. I had imagined George Orwell as a crusading man of the people – certainly not someone who could have touched his relatives for the odd fiver if he was in real trouble.

  ‘How is the cramming going?’

  ‘All right, I think.’ Hugh was cramming for the Foreign Office exam, which involved spending most of his days at an establishment near the British Museum, brushing up on his languages and learning economics and history.

  ‘Are you confident? For the exam?’

  ‘As confident as I can be,’ said Hugh. ‘But it’s frightfully competitive. Last year they only took the top seven out of eighty-two applicants.’

  ‘Well, I’m sure you’ll pass,’ I said. And I was. Top seven was easy for Hugh.

  ‘What are your plans?’ Hugh asked.

  ‘I have no plans. I’m waiting for a big fat husband to come down the chimney.’

  ‘Is Mama making you do the season again this summer?’

  If a deb failed to snare a husband in her first season, the rule was she could have another go th
e following year. ‘She’s trying. But not as hard as I would have expected. I think she may have given up.’

  ‘Good. It really isn’t your thing, is it?’

  ‘They’re all chumps, Hugh. Every single one of them.’

  Hugh laughed.

  We crossed a stile into open moorland, and the path pointed steeply uphill, along the edge of the brook. We were both panting. The gully stretched up into the mist.

  I felt outrageously happy, being with my brother, alone, up on the moor we both knew so well. I started to sing: ‘Oh, ’tis my delight on a dirty night, to bomb the bourgeoisie!’

  It was a song Hugh had taught me when I was fifteen. He laughed and joined in as we climbed.

  ‘I think we should stop here,’ he said at last, panting.

  So we paused and turned to look back at Chaddington Hall in its wooded valley, two plumes of smoke twisting up in the still, damp air, the parish church squatting a short distance from it.

  Hugh took a deep breath. ‘I do miss this. Especially after London.’

  I glanced at my brother. ‘I do have a plan. But I’ll need your help.’

  ‘Oh yes?’ Hugh grinned at me, as if expecting an idea that was a little odd.

  He got one.

  ‘I’d like to visit the Soviet Union.’

  ‘What! Mama and Papa would never let you.’

  ‘But you went last year.’ Hugh had gone for three weeks with two old friends from school and Cambridge.

  ‘Yes. And they didn’t like that much either.’

  ‘Well, if they let you, why shouldn’t they let me? And don’t say it’s because I am a girl.’

  ‘Because you are a girl.’

  ‘I told you not to say that!’

  ‘I know you did, but it’s true.’

  ‘It may be true, but it’s wrong.’

  ‘It may be wrong – it is wrong – but where are you going to get the money from if they don’t give it to you?’

  ‘I’ve been saving up. And . . .’

  ‘Yes?’ Hugh looked at me suspiciously.

  ‘And maybe you could lend me some? When my fat husband comes down the chimney I can pay you back.’

  Hugh didn’t say yes. But then he didn’t say no either. ‘You can’t go by yourself.’

  ‘Well, that’s the other thing you can help me with. Could you put me in touch with people? Women, preferably. You must know heaps of people who’d like to go.’

  Hugh set off down the hillside. ‘I’ll lend you the money – no, I’ll give you the money, as long as you promise not to tell Papa where it came from. Or anyone else for that matter.’

  ‘Oh, you are a darling!’

  ‘And I can give you the names of a couple of people to write to. But you must keep my name out of it. You see . . .’

  ‘What?’ I asked. I didn’t like the sound of Hugh’s voice. ‘What is it, Hugh?’

  ‘I know you are not going to like this, Ems, but I’ve changed my mind about a few things. Political things.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You see, as I’ve got a bit older, I’ve come to realize that some of my thoughts on politics were a little naive. Fine in theory – admirable in theory – but not practical in the real world.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘I’m still a socialist. I believe in helping the poor. It’s just I’m no longer sure that communism is the right way to do it.’

  ‘But . . . Hugh! What about all the stuff we’ve talked about for the last couple of years? The books you’ve made me read! I read the whole of Capital, for heaven’s sake! You’re not saying that’s naive?’

  ‘I suppose I am a bit.’

  ‘Well, what about Russia? You came back saying the Soviets have really got the answer. Everyone is equal. The farms are modernizing. The Five Year Plan is bringing prosperity. You saw it with your own eyes!’

  ‘We saw a lot of starving people in Russia. And they lock a lot of people up. Dick came away with a different opinion; I think he may be right.’ Dick was one of the two old school friends who had travelled with Hugh.

  ‘Those were all kulaks, you said!’

  ‘Maybe. But, as Dick says, kulaks are people too.’ Kulaks were rich Russian peasants whom Stalin had accused of profiteering off poor Russian peasants. ‘Warnes of Tumphill Farm is a kulak. Why should he starve?’

  We trudged down the hill in silence, as I tried to make sense of it. Tumphill Farm was one of the most successful farms on the estate, and Mr Warnes was generally admired for his expertise. I liked Mr Warnes; everyone did.

  And if that’s what the Soviets did to the kulaks, think what they had done to the landowners. Like us.

  But that wasn’t the point! I had to recognize I was being brainwashed by my class when I should be worrying about the people, the masses.

  ‘Is it because you are applying for the Foreign Office?’ I asked. ‘You don’t want them to think you are a communist?’

  ‘That may be part of it,’ Hugh said. ‘I knew you would be upset. You don’t have to change your mind.’

  ‘Why? Because it’s all right if I am naive?’

  ‘No. Because it’s all right if you make up your own mind. It might even be a good thing.’

  That last comment stung me, and I spent the whole time until dinner stewing. It stung because it was true. I was and always had been totally dependent on Hugh for my education, and hence for my opinions. So I agreed with him. Probably always. Which, as he said, was probably not a good thing.

  But what choice did I have? My parents had refused to allow me to go to school. Although he never came right out and said it, my father seemed to think that money spent on educating girls was money wasted. My mother seemed to think it was positively harmful, especially for me. She was suspicious of my reading, of my love of learning new languages, of the awkward questions I had been asking people since the age of five. She lived in fear of me becoming a ‘bluestocking’, one of those females to be pitied who went to university, scared off eligible men and reached premature old maidenhood at thirty. Sarah was my mother’s model of what a young woman should be: witty, charming, well dressed, an excellent horsewoman, capable of conversing with anyone, but unburdened with too much education. Sarah had made a fine marriage.

  Why couldn’t I be more like Sarah?

  I often wondered that myself. I loved my sister, and I agreed with my mother that she was a great catch for the lucky Lord Tubby. But I was different. Hugh understood that.

  Hugh was my window on the world of ideas. He brought them back with him from school or university, smuggled them into the house and unpacked them to show to me. Poetry – Kipling at first, then Hardy and Swinburne, and now Brooke, Eliot, Yeats and Pound. Literature – Dickens, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Hugo, Zola; and then Bloomsbury: Woolf, Forster, Strachey – some of whom Hugh had actually met. He brought me languages, economics, history, even physics.

  It wasn’t just Hugh, it was also my grandfather, whom I barely remembered, but who had stocked our wonderful library with many of the tools I needed to follow where Hugh led.

  In Hugh’s second year at Cambridge, he had become interested in socialism and then communism. So I had read Marx and Engels, articles by Lenin, and The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism by George Bernard Shaw. I read about the General Strike, the breakdown of capitalism in 1929, the Hunger Marchers from Jarrow, the rise of Mussolini in Italy and Hitler in Germany. I shared my brother’s anger at all this. I wanted to do something about it – but stuck in Devon I didn’t know what I could do, apart from read and learn.

  And now he tried to tell me it was all naivety.

  I felt betrayed. I felt angry. I felt used.

  It wasn’t just that. I felt that a bond between me and my brother had snapped. Until that moment, he and I were two young twentieth-century right-thinking rebels together in a nineteenth-century household of obsolete aristocrats. Now there was just me.

  I felt abandoned.

  I slun
k off to the library until it was time to change for dinner. I was late to the drawing room to welcome our guests, Sir Ivor and Lady Growcott, who lived about ten miles away, and Roland Meeke, a diplomat who had taken a cottage on the estate for a couple of weeks to go hunting. The purpose of the dinner was ostensibly to introduce Mr Meeke to the Growcotts, but was of course really to introduce him to Hugh. The scheme had been cooked up by Mama, who had urged Mr Meeke to come down to Devon, tempting him with the use of one of our hunters, in the hope of helping her son become a diplomat.

  The Growcotts, affable gentry pushing sixty, I had known since childhood, but I had never met Mr Meeke before. The first thing I noticed was how dark he was: black hair, black eyebrows, deep brown eyes, even his skin was an unseasonable shade of brown. He was about the same height as Hugh, but whereas my brother was broad of shoulder and face, Mr Meeke was slim: narrow face, thin fingers, delicate gestures.

  And charm. Oodles of effortless charm.

  It was quite difficult to charm me in those days, and Mr Meeke didn’t seem to try. We were seated next to each other at dinner. I was curious about a diplomat’s life, a curiosity springing from those hours of conversation with my friend Edwina, and Mr Meeke did not disappoint. He came from a diplomatic family; like Edwina his father had been an ambassador – he’d served in Vienna and Brazil. Mr Meeke’s first posting had been to Prague and, after a couple of years in Whitehall, he was about to head off to the embassy in Paris. He had a couple of weeks’ leave before he went, and he wanted to get in some foxhunting.

  Before I knew it, I had agreed to ride around the estate with him the next morning.

  ‘Do you think the Schutzbund will succeed against Dollfuss?’ I asked him.

  Mr Meeke blinked at the sudden change of subject, a small smile flickering beneath his narrow moustache.

  ‘I think the socialists are falling into a trap,’ he replied. ‘Dollfuss is provoking them so that he can come down hard on them. It will give him an excuse to lock up their leaders and ban the socialist parties.’

  ‘Do you approve of Dollfuss?’

  ‘No. But I don’t approve of the Schutzbund either.’ We spent several minutes discussing the details of Austrian politics, before Lady Growcott ‘rescued’ him. I am sure that’s what she thought she was doing, although it seemed to me that Mr Meeke was interested in my opinions, even if they were gleaned from no more than a careful daily reading of The Times. But perhaps he was just being charming.