The Yellow Room Conspiracy

by Peter Dickinson

  I dare say that sounds terribly ordinary. Probably a lot of little girls have the same sort of feelings about their fathers. Not that Father did anything to encourage me, as far as I know—in fact I remember feeling pretty frustrated sometimes because he didn’t always remember which one I was. All I can say is it was extremely strong—in fact it was a lot more like being “in love” than sometimes since when I’ve persuaded myself I was in love with some man or other. And it went on for years. I’ve never talked to any of the others about it, of course—I was too ashamed.

  But what’s it got to do with Gerry? I think I can see a sort of pattern, though I don’t know if it will make sense to anyone else. I suppose it depends on whether they can understand how much that cricket match meant. We all knew it was the last one, the end of everything, because there was a war coming. Father said we were all going to die of poison gas. Not that he did anything about it, apart from moving some camp beds into the cellars and laying in an immense stock of dog-biscuit, because he said it didn’t go mouldy as fast as human food. Everyone talked about the war as if it was certain, so we knew that even without the gas it was all over, and nothing would ever be the same again. Goodbye, Blatchards. Goodbye, happiness. Goodbye, being fenced off from horrible things. (Mind you, we’d never been rich. There were servants, of course, but they didn’t get paid much and there weren’t nearly as many as Blatchards had been built for, thank heavens. Father was always thinking of ways to save money, which usually cost more in the end. I remember how delighted Ben was when she shot up and couldn’t wear Janet’s cast-offs any more. There was a particular green dressing-gown which had gone through all five of us, and Mother was furious when we ceremonially burnt it, because she’d noticed that the Rector’s collie was going bald and she’d been going to offer it to him as a dog-coat.)

  Sorry. The cricket match. One of the boys staying to play for the World had tried to make me let him come to my room the night before. I was used to boys wanting to kiss me, but this was different. He wasn’t a lot older than I was, but I could tell he knew what he was up to. He’d done it before. I was frightened. I had to get Nan to tell him to lay off. (No use asking Mother or Father, of course.)

  And then there was the match, and me going in last, all wound up, and Gerry at the other end, who really could do anything and did know everything (everybody said so) and being my partner, just us two—not even anyone else to come in if one of us got out—and paying proper attention to me, the me inside, not this face, this shape, but the person who was his partner and was helping him win the match—so totally different from the boy who’d tried to come to my room, so much what I wanted …

  I suppose it explains the crush, but I don’t know that it helps about the way the crush came back, like shingles … and I suppose there was knowing I couldn’t have him because he belonged to Nan, the way Father belonged to Mother … So I’d be doing something, some job, or living with some man—both maybe—and gradually, without me noticing, there’d be this feeling building up that this wasn’t what I really wanted, because what I really wanted was … was … and still I wouldn’t understand, only this sort of vague hunger, until something triggered it off—that time Gerry showed Nan how to tango was the worst, and that was after a House v. World match too, come to think of it—and it would burst out, or rather it wouldn’t burst out because there was nowhere for it to go, this furious, hurt, crazy jealousy for something I knew I couldn’t have and certainly didn’t want with any of me that was left still sane …

  I suppose … That’s what I tell myself now, anyway.

  Does that make sense? Remembering that we aren’t clockwork? No wheels going round, cogs fitting into other cogs, only this mess of currents and swirls, pushes and pulls, soft as water, strong as an opened sluice, making us what we are?

  I’m not sure.

  I meant to say something about Paul, but I’m too tired.

  PAUL III

  1943

  I spent what time I could with Gerry during my remaining few days at Bury. A definite empathy seemed to develop between us, and a rebalancing of our relationship. Hitherto I had felt myself to be almost totally overshadowed by him in everything he did, and no wonder, but now to my surprise I found an area in which I was very much more competent than he was. Gerry turned out to be hopeless at grasping how the military machine functioned. As a result I was able to help and advise him in useful ways.

  We exchanged home addresses, I went on leave and then reported to Salisbury, only to find that the Intelligence set-up which had wished to recruit me had lost out in the cannibal competition with similar rivals, and that particular future was closed to me. I was now in the Royal Signals, so was posted on to Catterick for more orthodox training, but after a few weeks in those bleak northern barracks I was sent for to London, my file having seeped through the cannibal digestion to reach a desk whose occupant had decided that his own organisation might have a use for me. Thus my time in Intelligence began. I was always a bureaucrat, never an agent. I found the work interesting, and was good at it. My name appears in the indexes of several official and unofficial histories of British clandestine activities, but never with more than a couple of minor entries.

  During this time I corresponded erratically with Gerry. We made one attempt to arrange a meeting, but without sufficient determination on either side to overcome minor obstacles of timing. In one of his letters, however, he mentioned his boredom and frustration with regimental life—this would have been after Dunkirk but before Rommel’s campaigns in Africa. My organisation had a touchy relationship with SOE, but I got on well enough with some of their people and suggested Gerry as someone they might have a use for—intelligent, hardy, good at languages, and conforming to a stereotype of the British gentleman, then thought likely to impress simple-minded peasant partisans. Again, this is a step that Gerry would not have known how to take for himself.

  I had consulted him, of course, and he wrote to say he had been taken on. Our correspondence ceased, and I heard no more from or of him until late in 1943, when I was in Cairo. Greece and Crete had fallen and the desert campaigns were largely over. We knew by then that the war was won, and my organisation had transmogrified itself yet again, and was now chiefly concerned with building a base of contacts and information which might allow Britain to influence, if not control, events in south-eastern Europe in the aftermath of war. We existed, we believed, as a result of one of Churchill’s momentary whims, expressed in a memo: “We must now he looking forward. Trouble has always brewed from the Balkans. Storms that engulfed Europe began as thunder-clouds in those remote passes. We must know what is going on there. Let me see your proposals.” Well, something like that.

  There were already half-a-dozen feuding agencies, all more or less deluded by their own preoccupations, supporting various partisan groups and running agents and intelligence out of different countries. Our task was to assess and collate what they came up with, and since we were not in immediate conflict with any of them, and since my boss had a genius for dealing with the several types of maniac who ran them, they were for the most part more cooperative than might have been expected. My work was largely files and committees, but from time to time agents would come in to Cairo for what is now called a de-briefing and a rest, and at some point we would talk to them, and I would take them out for an evening on the town, or whatever they regarded as a good time, presenting myself as the junior dogsbody who got landed with that sort of task. Their own organisations let us do this largely because we had funds, and this allowed them to use their own entertainment budgets for other purposes. Some agents wanted drink and a woman, or a boy; some the pyramids by moonlight; some an evening’s bridge. My most exotic achievement was to muster four performers of adequate standard for my then charge to play Schubert and Handel quintets with. The idea was that they should relax with me. I wasn’t there primarily to pump information out of them, but to try to form a judgment of the d
epth and bias of the information they were bringing in.

  Most agencies concealed the true names of their people, for obvious reasons, so there was no way that I could have known, when summoned by my boss to meet a Major George Gissing, that I was going to be confronted with Gerry Grantworth. We both laughed. My boss watched us unsmiling, the piggy little eyes in his big blank face glancing back and forth.

  “Lieutenant Ackerley, Major Gissing,” he said. “You have, I gather, met.”

  “In the far show of unbelievable years and shapes that flit, in our own likeness, on the edge of it,” said Gerry.

  The quotation was presumably a fluke, my boss being a Kipling fanatic, but at the same time it seemed an affirmation that Gerry hadn’t changed in his capacity for getting things effortlessly right. My boss nodded.

  “In that case I won’t keep you,” he said. “Thank you for your help, Major Gissing. Have a good time. Let Paul know if there’s anything we can do for you, in any way.”

  We left.

  “Just two pips, Paul?” said Gerry. “I’d have thought you’d be running your own show by now.”

  “My rank’s a bit variable,” I said. “How would you like to spend an evening?”

  “Talking,” he said at once. “How are you set up here?”

  “I’ve got a flat. Is that what you mean?”

  “Perfect. If it suits you, that is. Or is there someone else there?”

  “She’s gone north for a family wedding. Lamb chops and a bottle of burgundy. Oh, no, of course …”

  “A glass of decent wine would be agreeable. Possibly two. My head has grown a little stronger with the years. But if I venture on a third you’ll need to hire a barrow and wheel me back to the hotel.”

  “I hope not. Your people will assume that I’ve been trying to get you to tell me things they’d rather you didn’t.”

  “Isn’t that your job?”

  “Not really. I’ve seen a rather uninformative file. You’re in liaison with a group of pretty intransigent Reds on the Albanian frontier. That’s all. This way. There’s supposed to be a car for us.”

  I was living in the Armenian quarter, on an upper floor of one of those yellow, apparently unplanned vast shambling houses above an alley too narrow for vehicles. The driver dropped us at the corner. I could sense Gerry’s wariness as I led him between two bead-workers’ stalls and into the courtyard, where I shouted for Farzi. Farzi’s eldest daughter, a demure fourteen-year-old, appeared and explained that her father had not expected me back and so was smoking and already sleepy. I gave her the chops I’d bought on the way home and told her what I wanted. She nodded and stalked off to see to it herself. Gerry didn’t relax till I had settled him into a chair, facing eastward out over rooftops and a minareted skyline.

  “You’re looking a bit worn,” I said.

  It was true. The changes of puberty are the ones that get the literary attention, but there is another set between adolescence and manhood which I find more interesting. Though the muscles harden and the mouth firms up, more takes place in the character and mind. Between one page of a notebook and the next a poet stops writing his Juvenilia and finds his own voice. Or whatever. For those of my exact generation the war became a rite of passage, marking and reinforcing this change. The effect in the case of Gerry was to my eye very marked. He was obviously fit and well. He walked with a spring, and his body, when I had lurched against him as the driver took a corner Cairo-style, had felt as hard as a wooden idol, but the lines of his large face were deeper-etched than a normal three years would have worn them, and even when he smiled I sensed that he had every face muscle under control.

  “With cause,” he said. “You described my cohorts as intransigent Reds. The epithet at least is correct. They are elemental thugs. The more intelligent of them want power, because they want power. The others just like killing people. I spend my time persuading them to kill Germans, rather than the set of elemental thugs on the next mountain.”

  “It sounds hairy.”

  “They’ve had me in front of a firing squad only once, and that wasn’t serious. They wanted to see how easily I scared. Things are more comfortable now. We’ve brought off a couple of useful operations, saved each other’s lives a few times, and so on. But it doesn’t mean that if things took a certain kind of wrong turning it mightn’t be the firing squad in earnest.”

  He stopped, having heard the movement on the stair before I did. Farzi’s daughter and her younger sister brought in peppermint tea and served it solemnly. Gerry looked out at the yellowing sky and I studied him. His file had been more detailed than I’d implied. One of the operations he’d referred to had been the complex ambush of an armoured column, with three feuding partisan groups having to be persuaded to cooperate. The risks, not only from German bullets, must have been appalling. It was clear that to achieve anything the liaising agents had had to lead from the front. One of them had died. Gerry didn’t speak again till the girls” soft tread had fluttered down the stair.

  “Let’s get it over before we start on the wine,” he said. “What else do you want to know?”

  “Nothing specific. Only if you come across anyone who you think is likely to have influence and whom we could in the long term trust.”

  His laugh was a snort.

  “Someone bright enough, you mean, to perceive interests beyond his inherited feuds and alliances, honourable enough to keep his word to us, naïve enough to believe that we will do the same for him?”

  “That’s about it, though it might always be in our interest to keep our word. I see you’ve gone native.”

  There was always a tendency for agents of his kind to see things—their local campaign, of course, but also the war at large and global politics beyond—from the viewpoint of the people with whom they were sharing their lives and dangers. Indeed that was pretty well a precondition of their acceptance among these people. It merely made their individual reports trickier to assess, and skewed the attitudes of the outfits they worked for.

  “I must have been born native,” he said. “I find I understand these people a good deal better than I understand my own.”

  “Natural enough,” I said. “Did you ever finally get rid of your doppelganger, speaking of the incomprehensible?”

  He was puzzled a moment, then laughed.

  “Not utterly,” he said. “An occasional document pursues me from the War Office, so he still has his dusty existence among their files. I have a fantasy that some day I may find him useful. I suppose I should feel uncomfortable to continue to have two existences when others have ceased to have even one. Tommy Havers, I heard.”

  “Yes. He trod on a mine at Alamein.”

  “I’m sorry. I expect you miss him.”

  “Yes and no. That bit of Kipling you quoted applies. Even a serious friendship becomes somehow less real.”

  “I don’t know that I have any serious friends. A couple of my thugs, maybe. Otherwise there are just people I happen to know. Heard anything from Blatchards?”

  As it happened, I had. One of the odder phenomena of the desert war was an ambulance group set up by the formidable wife of a senior general. The medical staff were Free French, the orderlies British conscientious objectors—mostly Quakers of scholarly disposition—and the drivers a group of girls who before the war would have been parading themselves at the posher end of the marriage market. These last used to swirl into Cairo on leave, treating it as an exotic extension of the London Season—dances, dinners, gossip, riding. With their family connections and rarity value they could command almost any escort they chose. A colleague of mine was besotted on one of them, who, on one of her leaves and (I guessed) because some more amusing engagement had fallen through, agreed to dine with him, but to forestall a tête-a-tête told him she was bringing a friend and he must bring one too. I was his, and Harriet Vereker was hers.

  “He
llo,” she’d said at once. “You came with Gerry one Sunday, didn’t you? And didn’t he look dire in that uniform?”

  We’d hit it off rather well, though not in any romantic fashion, my affections being then fully engaged by my Armenian, and later in the evening Harriet had deliberately separated us from the other pair as we were moving off to find somewhere to dance.

  “I think he’s rather sweet,” she’d explained. “And Sue’s a greedy little so-and-so. She just wanted a free meal. I think we should give him a chance to get his money’s worth.”

  This, incidentally, was typical of Harriet, a severe judge of character and a great arranger of other people’s lives. My colleague’s evening went well, apparently. He lived in a daze of content for weeks, and was convinced I had arranged the separation for his benefit. Harriet and I had found a French-run cafe with umbrellas on the pavement, and had drunk Pernod and sweet muddy coffee into the small hours while she talked eagerly of Vereker doings. Thus I was now able to bring Gerry up to date.

  “Blatchards has been taken over by some kind of Signals show—at least Harriet says it’s sprouted aerials all over the home paddock and motor-bikes roar down the drive at three a.m. Lord and Lady Vereker are living in the stables …

  “In loose boxes? She’d like that.”

  “There’s some kind of groom’s accommodation they’ve done up. Lord V. has learnt to cook. Harriet says he’s rather good.”

  “He couldn’t conceivably be worse than Mrs Chad.”