The Yellow Room Conspiracy

by Peter Dickinson

  “It is my task in life to interpose myself between the Verekers and their admirers.”

  “Harriet too? Why you? You don’t look totally safe to me.”

  “In general I’m not, but it happens that in Cairo I was. What does Bobo make of your mother’s plans?”

  “Too keen for comfort. Breakfast’s at the stables in twenty minutes. Don’t be late. Father will sulk if you keep his scrambled eggs waiting.”

  I enjoyed the rest of the week-end, at first because of the malicious pleasure of thwarting Bobo Smith, to whom I had taken a renewed dislike. He was in the Coldstream, had seen a good deal of fighting and won an MC, and was now on sick-leave after a fairly serious shrapnel wound in Italy. The loutish air he’d had at eighteen had now been replaced by run-of-the-mill, blue-eyed, tow-haired good looks. He got on well with Dick Felder, both playing the game of male competitiveness hard, with much abuse and laughter. He was polite with Lord Vereker but had no idea how to deal with Lady Vereker’s anti-capitalist tirades, interspersed as they were with material from different fields. A local MFH was a particular enemy of hers because as a coal-owner he was an oppressor of the workers and as a hunting man he was not co-operating with the hunt with which she herself rode. Bobo would have preferred to ignore my presence, but was unable to because of Lucy’s ingenuity (aided by Janet and Ben) in seeing to it that there was always an adequate reason why she and I should be doing one thing while Bobo used his greater strength and reach elsewhere.

  Later the nature of the pleasure changed. At least something happened between us, though I made no attempt to give it expression in conscious tone or gesture, let alone touch. Her beauty was a bit inhibiting, not merely because of my awareness that she must get a lot of almost automatic advances made to her and might welcome a respite, but also—this is going to sound banal and ridiculous—a feeling on my part that she was too good for me, out of my class, a show piece, as if with a little tasselled rope round her and a notice saying “Do not sit on this chair”.

  (This feeling was to endure. For most pairings the exigencies of wartime accelerated affairs but with us it took twenty-one months, on my last leave before demob, and even then Lucy made the running:

  “Do you want to sleep with me?”

  “Only if you yourself really want to. Not just out of kindness to me.”

  She looked at me for a while under the dimmed light of the passage. Beyond its arch crumbs of snow were falling through the moonlight.

  “Not just for that,” she said, with a twitch of a smile. “Come in.”

  Later she tried to tell me that all she’d meant had been that she was getting cold.)

  The two other girls had appeared in the course of Saturday, Ben in mid-morning, having slept in because it was still the first week of school holidays, and Janet for lunch, having finished her morning stint on the farm. Janet took after her mother, bouncy, horsy and given to strong opinions which were difficult to discuss, let alone refute, because the reasoning on which they were based was impenetrable. Ben was already different from the other four, though she had some of Lucy’s features—the high cheekbones and tear-drop eyes—without more than ordinary good looks. She was long-limbed, determined, quiet, but with a knack of breaking valued objects, one that she retained throughout her life. She had already made up her mind she was going to be a professional dancer.

  The Signals outfit which had occupied the main house had left a few weeks earlier and Lady Vereker and the girls were insisting on moving back in. Lord Vereker made a show of reluctance, how genuine I was unable to decide—he probably enjoyed the diminished responsibilities of life at the stables. Lady Vereker had decided during her exile on certain improvements, or rather rearrangements of inconveniences, in the way the house was used, which the girls now set about thwarting, Nancy because she had better ideas and the other three because they wanted to restore everything as far as possible to the exact state in which it had been on 2 September 1939. The damage caused by the soldiers had been moderate by military standards. (I know of another house where complete rooms of Jacobean panelling, as well as banisters and doors, had been stripped to feed the men’s fires one cold winter.) Still, alterations had been made, doorways blocked or opened, partitions built and so on. It rained drenchingly most of the time. Bobo and Dick would trudge down from the stables carrying, say, a tarpaulined chest-of-drawers, having been told by Lady Vereker which room she wanted it in. At the front door Nancy or one of the others would countermand their orders, so they would dump it under the porte-cochère and Lucy and I would lug it into the house. Then Lady Vereker would arrive, dishevelled and shouting for one girl or the other, her voice echoing away down the corridors, and fresh disputes would erupt. The whole move took place in an atmosphere of delighted disagreement, an infectious communal excitement in which my own increasing exhilaration with Lucy’s company probably went unnoticed.

  An interesting struggle began for the soul of Mr Chad, out of which I got extra enjoyment because he reminded me strongly of my boss back in Cairo, with the same large suety face, small sharp eyes, and slow movements and speech. He was mostly engaged on tasks such as removing the unwanted partitions, but would stop at once when asked by Lady Vereker to tackle some chore she’d just thought of (probably trivial, certainly secondary) until Nancy discovered him at it and sent him back to the partitions. If anything he seemed rather to enjoy his role as moral battleground.

  I found Nancy impressive, if alarming. She had a clear head for details, and a combination of charm and will-power which allowed her to get away with what in someone else might have been an intolerable level of bossiness, but I have to say it crossed my mind to wonder how Dick Felder would cope with this when he was back on his home ground.

  By Saturday evening the bulk of the carrying was done. Lord Vereker had spent the afternoon in the kitchens preparing a celebratory supper, greatly to the resentment of Mrs Chad. Furthermore he had unlocked the cellars and brought out several bottles of 1926 Chateau Beychevelle, astonishing by Blatchards standards. The Signals people had decided that the ancient wiring of the house was inadequate for their purposes and had installed their own generators, which they had taken with them, leaving the electricity disconnected, so we ate and spent the rest of the evening by candle-light. Lord Vereker dozed by the fire while the rest of us played cards, vingt-et-un for matchsticks first and then racing demon—not at all my kind of activity, though it turned out I was no worse than Dick and Bobo, we three regularly scoring minuses while the girls and Lady Vereker, in a frenzy of competitiveness, notched up thirties and forties. Because none of them would trust the others I kept the score. Bobo and Dick became irritable, Dick because he wanted to take Nancy off to bed and Bobo because he didn’t enjoy not winning. They began to disrupt the game by playing the fool, and blatant cheating.

  The second time this happened Nancy said, “If you can’t play properly you’d better not play at all.”

  It was a moment of ice, of exclusion. Dick shrugged, not understanding.

  “Why don’t you two see if the billiard table’s still all right?” said Lady Vereker, in tones she might have used trying to distract small children.

  They left, taking with them the bottle of Scotch Dick had brought as a house-present. Lucy glanced at me.

  “I’ll just score,” I said, happy to be wherever she was. “You can tear each other’s throats out.”

  In a lull of shuffling the packs between the intensities of play Janet said, “I say, there’s eight of us, not counting Father. We could play The Game tomorrow!”

  “Oh, yes!” said Lucy. “But Father’s got to, too. First time back.”

  “I’m afraid I’ve asked Teddy Voss-Thompson for luncheon,” said Lady Vereker.

  “Oh, Mother!” said Janet. “He’s dire!”

  “And he’ll be bringing a friend.”

  “Oh, Mother!”

  The friend
turned out to be a shy, busty, scarlet-lipped young woman. Edward Voss-Thompson, whom I got to know later, while he was married to Janet, had had TB at Winchester and walked with a swinging limp. Even then he gave an impression of the quiet but relentlessly questioning intelligence that was to become his stock-in-trade. He was also clearly very ambitious. Having escaped conscription because of his hip he had broken the Wykehamist mould by refusing a scholarship to New College and joining Picture Post as a trainee journalist. He was short on small-talk but in no sense dire, Janet’s protest having been her normal response to any guest invited by her mother.

  Despite his hip he was a better games-player than I, so they played five-a-side while I scored and refereed. There are several accounts of The Game in memoirs, so I shall not describe it here, apart from reminding readers that it was played in the Long Gallery, originally designed for the second Lord Vereker for pictures he proposed to collect on his Grand Tour, which he never aroused himself sufficiently to embark on, and eventually used to house the trophies of big game shot by the girls” grandfather. The noise made by a wooden polo-ball and the Verekers in those echoing acoustics was unbelievable, and at the same time expressive of the rather pure but inward-turned enjoyment the Verekers derived out of their mutual activities.

  Lucy had a complex bus-and-train journey back to Hemel Hempstead and left in mid-afternoon. We tried to find some way of meeting before I returned to Cairo (she seemed as interested in doing so as I was) but were unable to make it work. I managed to telephone her once before I left.

  My mission had been a success, and almost as soon as I got back to work preparations began for our transfer to London. Then my father died, and I was able to apply for early demob, to keep the business going, so I was never involved in the actual move. Of course, as soon as I was in London again I began my long, slow courtship of Lucy, but was soon aware that I was one of a number of contenders whom, for her own purposes, she preferred to keep on an equal footing with each other. I found this irksome but understandable, and was forced to accept it.

  LUCY IV

  1945-48

  Well, this is absolutely extraordinary! I had no idea. We’ve never talked about that sort of thing, but it must have been the same man. Paul’s boss, I mean, and mine. It’s not as much of a coincidence as it seems because of what was happening around then, and it wasn’t a very big world. Intelligence, I mean.

  I’d better go back to where I left off, looking for joeys with Dora. After a bit I lost the knack. Actually Dora lost it first and I couldn’t get the same whatever-it-was with anyone else so I gave up too and they sent me off to get a commission and put me in charge of training other girls to do it, only by then the people over at Bletchley had really got their machines going and shown that was a better way of doing things than the way we’d been sweating our guts out over, so we all got shifted over to what they called information analysis. The superbrains left and the language nuts arrived, funny foreigners with chips on their shoulders about their countries being given away by Churchill and Roosevelt, and if I’d been them I’d have been just as furious about it. It meant enormous mounds of paper which had to be sorted and filed and cross-referenced. The cross-referencing was the really important bit, because it was all a matter of linking one bit of information from one place with another bit from another place. For instance, there was this Russian everybody was pretty sure was some kind of KGB expert, only they didn’t know what he was an expert at. He kept getting posted to embassies in Eastern Europe for a few months and then leaving. Easily my best filing clerk was a girl called Sylvia—I’ll talk about her later. She didn’t even know that the people upstairs were specially interested in this man, but off her own bat she spotted that three not-very-important­ people—communist officials the Russians were supposed to be friends with—had died of scarlet fever while this chap was there. And then of course we found other places where it had happened.

  I’ve shot on. That was later, after we’d moved to London, when the system was really working. It was my system. I set it up. Filing doesn’t sound at all glamorous, so when we were making the change-over they just said “We’ll need a lot of women to do the filing,” and because I happened to be in charge of a lot of women I was put in charge of filing, and luckily I got it right. Then, of course, they found how vital it was, just about when I was due for demob, so they asked me to stay on. In fact I pretended to get demobbed and told everyone I was getting a job in something called the Anglo-Balkan Exchange which arranged trade deals with places like Budapest and Sofia—we actually had a department which did that, for show. They moved us up to London, into an old linen warehouse near the Elephant and Castle and teamed us up with another lot of Balkan experts who’d been working on our sort of thing from Egypt. My job was to finish setting the system up and then keep it going and pick people who could do it—almost all women—and train them and fight like hell when anyone from outside thought he—it was always a man—thought he knew a better way of doing it.

  Then in the evening I’d go back to my flat which I was sharing with Ben who was in dance school now, and just mug in front of the gas fire with a book, or go out with some man, or go to one of the dances which were just starting up with almost nothing to drink and half the dresses made of furnishing fabrics because clothes were still rationed. There were social diaries in The Tatler and Queen and gossip columns in the dailies so I sometimes got photographed, you know, ‘sharing a joke’, and all my people in Files were thrilled when that happened. Almost as good as knowing Princess Margaret, one of them told me.

  We had Open Files and F Block Files. The Open Files were about things like timber exports and politics and so on, and anyone upstairs could requisition them. But there was tight security on the F Block Files, which we kept with the F Block Clerks in a locked cage, which of course we called the Zoo. If someone upstairs wanted one of these he had to send down a green tag countersigned by his Section Chief, and I took the tags into the Zoo myself, and then I collected the files when they were ready and took them up myself to get them signed for. We all thought the system was very tight. I’d been on the working group which had set it up, and it hadn’t struck any of us that there was one weak link in it, and that was me. I would trot to and fro holding these precious things and fret about getting them back. (B Section could be as careless as a small child. I remember laying into the B Section Chief at a Thursday Meeting about it. He wasn’t used to being talked to like that by a woman, and young enough to be his daughter what’s more, so he got pretty huffy, but he was wrong and I was right so I didn’t give a bean.)

  One day the lift stuck with me in it. It was four hours before they got me out, and it was terrifying. The workmen would bang away and the lift would judder down a few inches and stop with a jerk and I got more and more certain that next time it was going to the bottom with me in it. It was a closed box, like a coffin. They’d yell at me was I alright and I’d yell back yes, but I wasn’t. To stop myself going mad I started to read the files.

  They were about some different groups of resistance fighters in Yugoslavia and Albania and what they’d been doing in the war. It actually was rather thrilling, because some of the papers were sheets torn out of notepads with handwritten reports by the British officers who’d been liaising with them. You could almost smell the danger. There was quite a bit I didn’t understand, of course, with all the different initials of different groups, and the political parties and so on, but it did take my mind off what was happening to the lift. I read right through the first file and started on the second. I’d hardly begun when I turned a page and realised I was looking at Gerry Grantworth’s handwriting. It was signed “G. Gissing, Capt” but it couldn’t be anyone else’s. I knew it as well as I knew my own. When I’d had my original crush on him I used to find excuses to write to him and I’d carry his answers round tucked into my bra. He had beautiful writing, very square but flowing and easy—I’ve always envied it. And now I actua
lly felt I had him there in the lift with me and I wasn’t frightened any more. How old was I? Twenty-three? Grown up, anyway, sensible, trusted, in charge of thirty other women. It sounds ridiculous, but it was like that. When they got me out I was calm and smiling and everyone said how brave I’d been.

  I haven’t really got an excuse for what happened next. I suppose I was getting a bit fed up with the job by then, without realising it. I’d taken it on because I’d started it and wanted to see it through till it was really working, and it was now, and there wasn’t anything else special I wanted to do, and Father couldn’t afford to give me an allowance I could live on in London, and besides it was a real job. It felt important. I was good at it.

  But then, somehow, it began to get dingy and pointless, at least to me. The people changed—even if they were the same people, I mean. I think it was because of the secrecy. If you’d asked them, I suppose they might have said they were becoming more professional, but looking back I think they’d got too caught up, obsessed. It was their little world, and they were the only people who understood it, and everyone else was an outsider. For instance I remember a row at the Thursday Meeting, which we had so that all the Section Chiefs knew what the others were up to and didn’t get in each other’s way. That was the theory, but of course they all wanted to tell as little as they could and find out as much as they could. The row was about something which was happening in Romania, and my enemy from B Section and the D Section Chief started accusing each other of being the reason why something out there had gone wrong. (I know I signed the Official Secrets Act, but it was a long time ago, and I’d better explain that by then some of the Sections were running their own agents in these countries. They weren’t supposed to, but they did.) B was a large untidy man who put on an old-buffer act and took snuff, but was really pretty sly. D was an exercise fanatic with the brightest blue eyes I’ve ever seen. He always returned his files same-day, in perfect order. He had a way of speaking in a slow, absolutely level voice, which made him sound as if he was the only reasonable man in the whole world. It was maddening. It certainly got B’s goat that morning, and at one point he stood up and snarled, “Why don’t you go over and work for the KGB? You’d really feel at home there!”