The Yellow Room Conspiracy

by Peter Dickinson

  “That would take some building these days,” I said.

  “It’s three and a half miles long,” said Gerry. “Parts of it are not too bad. It goes the whole way round. A sort of curate’s egg-shell, you might say. Anyway, it’s going to have to wait.”

  “Are you going to have a problem with death duties?”

  “Like the wall—parts of it are not too bad. That’s to say the old boy made some provisions in good time, and some not. We could have done with him lasting another couple of years. I haven’t done the sums yet, but I think we should just about manage. How are things with you?”

  Since he had been so open about his affairs I explained about mine. I had in fact been extremely busy, and looked like being more so. Companies, like most human organisations, are only to a limited extent controllable, and though I still then wholly owned mine and could in theory do what I liked with it, in practice it had its own momentum which I did my best to guide. For the past year, after a difficult patch, we had been expanding, and were now at a stage where I knew it was impossible not to expand further, so I was now in the process of transforming what had hitherto been a private concern into a public company. I had already been barely able to cope with my work-load, and the next few months looked like being a very severe strain. Luckily, having no personal commitments, I could work as many hours as I could stay awake. Lord Vereker’s funeral was my first social engagement for weeks.

  “Sounds as if you could do with a break,” said Gerry. “You can live only so long at that kind of stretch. Do you remember that evening in Cairo, in your flat? I was thinking about it only the other day. It came to me out of nowhere, for no reason, vivid but somehow detached …”

  “My whole war now seems a bit like that.”

  “Yes. In my case it was also an episode outside what I was then doing, so I’m seeing it through a double lens, so to speak. Do you miss that time?”

  “Not at all. I had a very comfortable war by most people’s standards, but it doesn’t belong. It’s like a chapter which the printers have managed to bind into the wrong book.”

  “I don’t know when I shall ever feel as alive as I did at times in the mountains.”

  “I think I can imagine that. Have you kept up with any of those people?”

  He stopped and looked around. We were coming back by a different route and had reached what seemed to me a nondescript bit of scrubby woodland. The path was squelchingly muddy at this point.

  “The South Lake’s about there,” he said, pointing. “I think there’s a spring somewhere under here. The question is, if I opened it up a bit so that you could see through, would I get a pleasing rill, or a stinking bog?”

  “A bog’s more likely on this soil, I’d have thought. Can we keep moving? I promised to take the cousins back before dark, and Lucy left a message for me not to go till I’d seen her.”

  He grunted and moved on. The path narrowed to single file, so we walked for a while in silence. I don’t think it’s hindsight to say that I felt uneasy. There was something about Gerry’s manner, about his apparently relaxed affability, that seemed forced, calculated. There are some lines of Patric Dickinson about Coleridge, and how his path inevitably lay downward from the clear heights of his early achievement:

  For he was water, though the rock compel

  And shape that first fantastic falling glory.

  Gerry as a boy and young man had had something of that. Now he seemed to me more like the cascade he said he wanted for the garden, for which, hidden somewhere, there would have had to be a pump to force the water up to the height from which it would then descend over the landscaped boulders. Perhaps it was the association with Michael Allwegg, perhaps the process of money-making for money-making’s sake, perhaps even the let-down of achieving his heart’s desire (and then what?), but I found to my disappointment that I was not actually liking him as much as I used to.

  As we came abreast he said, “According to Nan things are a bit sticky between Lucy and Seddon at the moment.”

  “Oh?”

  “That’s all I know.”

  “Thanks for the warning. Apparently she’s not feeling too well, and went to lie down.”

  “That’s a way of putting it. In fact she went off to her old room in a huff with Ben for being so uppity about her engagement to Michael. Lucy didn’t know. Ben arrived only late last night and told us the news at breakfast, and Lucy came direct to the church from Seddon Hall. There’d been a bit of palaver at breakfast about whether Ben should wear the ring. She hadn’t intended to of course, but Lady V got one of her bees in her bonnet and insisted that Lord V would have wanted her to, but Lucy wasn’t appeased.”

  “I think she may have minded about Lord Vereker more than the others.”

  “Very likely. What do you make of Michael?”

  “You tell me. I hardly know him.”

  “I’m prejudiced. I suppose I’d have found something to do if he hadn’t taken me on, but I can’t think what. Schoolmaster? But it’s he in a way who’s made all this possible. He wasn’t at Eton, but if he had been you’d barely have noticed him. He got a third at Cambridge—wasn’t interested in doing better. If he’d tried he might have scraped a 2.1. He’s not got that sort of brain. But in other ways I should think he’s the cleverest chap I’ve ever met. He’s brilliant at people, for a start. He seems to know exactly what they’ll stand, what’ll make them jib or go along. He can work twenty hours a day, but he never seems stressed or stretched. Suppose you gave us each a complex report to read and then examined us on what was in it, I’d score a good deal higher than Michael on the details, but when it came to the inner significance of the report, and how it related to other information we’d learnt in the last few months, he’d come up with aspects which even the examiners hadn’t thought of.”

  “I wouldn’t have thought he was very easy to work with.”

  “Not too bad, provided you can put up with the occasional tantrum. He’s got a remarkable head, don’t you think? I keep half-remembering­ some portrait I’ve seen—in the Louvre, was it?—Renaissance, anyway. Should be Mantegna but isn’t. An unknown gentleman. One of those petty warlords, many-sided, dangerous to cross, as straightforward in their aims as they were subtle in their dealings …”

  “What were their aims?”

  “Power, of course.”

  He laughed and lengthened his stride. We found Lucy and Harriet under the porte-cochère, waving good-bye to a car. As it crunched away across the gravel Lucy turned to me, not looking at Gerry.

  “Where have you been?” she said. “I thought you’d run away.”

  “Walking the wet woods,” I said. “I hope you’re feeling better.”

  “I’m fine. How long can you stay?”

  “I have to get your cousins back to Hampstead in time to watch Voss-Thompson perform this evening.”

  “Don’t tell me Ivy and Bella have a set!” said Harriet. “I’d have thought they were far too high-minded.”

  “I bet they sneak round and watch the neighbours”,” said Lucy. “We must meet soon, Paul. It’s been far too long. Have you got your diary? I’d better warn you, I’m determined to learn to cook.”

  “Breaking the habit of a lifetime?”

  “Now that Father’s dead I don’t feel so threatened. Hang on a mo. …”

  Between further farewells we managed to fix a date. It is astonishing how calmly one can conduct oneself under such circumstances. I had a physical sensation as of a forcefield surrounding me, and another her, not so powerful that we couldn’t have broken through and touched, but making that a definite, willed decision, with consequences too serious to risk. The feeling was very unpleasant. Meanwhile the departing guests stood around under the porte-cochère waiting for whoever was driving to fetch their car into its shelter. Curtains of raindrops dripped from its roof onto the gravel. Most of Lucy’s
evenings were taken up with Seddon’s official engagements, and her free ones didn’t coincide with mine. In the end I agreed to take time off from work and come to lunch. As we finished and I moved towards the door to look for the cousins my eye caught Gerry’s. He had remained outside, as a kind of honorary host, assisting the farewells. He raised a friendly hand, not actually a thumbs-up gesture, but suggesting one.

  Because she couldn’t easily oust the cook from the kitchen in Seddon’s town house in Eaton Square, Lucy borrowed a flat from a friend. She had prepared a three-course meal—soup, chicken ragout and apple pie. The soup wasn’t bad, but the chicken was too salty to swallow. She looked across the table at me, puckering her brow in mock distress, and then I saw that she was genuinely weeping. We rose. I came round the table. The force-fields, barely noticeable on my arrival but establishing themselves at full strength by the time we’d sat down, dissolved.

  When we were eating the apple pie, somewhere around half past four, she sighed and said, “I want you to know that I’ve tried to be faithful. I really have tried.”

  LUCY VI

  1949-56

  Now I’ve got a gap to fill. Heavens, it must be seven years! A mass of things happened, but not a lot that matters any more—in fact some of it seems just as dreamy and unreal as the war. I spent the first half of it being a fashion model. Even now, if you asked people about that time and what it was like, anyone who was at all interested in clothes would mention the New Look, of course, but what they’d actually think about is me. I was the face. I was on the cover of Vogue or Harpers every other month, looking untouchably cool and classy in front of the Eiffel Tower or Mount Etna or somewhere. It meant I made more money than I’d ever dreamed of, all for myself. I didn’t know what to do with it, so I spent it having fun in obvious ways. In fact I went pretty wild for a bit, or at least I tried to. I mean I kept looking for wildness and not getting there, somehow. I’m not going to go into details. You can imagine them if you want to, but just remember this wasn’t now. It was the late “forties, a cold, hard time with the war supposed to be over but all the boring things we’d put up with because of the war still going on—rationing and shortages and not being allowed to take any money when you went abroad, and so on. And it was like that the way people behaved. Things you’d hardly bother to put in a letter now made newspaper headlines then.

  Anyway rackety life didn’t suit me and it was bad for my skin, so I settled down a bit. Among other things I began going home more often. Some time around then Father finally bit the bullet and handed the main house over to Nan and moved back into the stables and settled down to try and live for another seven years so there wouldn’t be any death duties, but Mother had managed to make the spare room at the stables so uncomfortable that I almost always slept at the house, in my old room looking out over the park. Nan had divorced Dick Felder by now and come back to live at Blatchards full time, and it wasn’t long before Gerry moved in with her.

  It’s surprising how little I minded about this. I had the odd sick twinge, just to remind me, like an illness you know might come back one day, but I don’t suppose that happened more than two or three times altogether. Actually I didn’t see that much of him. He was often away, and I usually ate at the stables because Father was miffed if I didn’t, and so on. Besides that … oh, it happens to us all. When you’re young the people you care about seem extraordinary, vivid, different from anyone else, and that’s how you go on seeing them, long after they’ve stopped being like that, if they ever were. And then, when you’re quite old you realise they’re mostly pretty ordinary, and some of them are dreadful bores, and what’s more they’ve been that way for years only you hadn’t noticed. We were all so used to Gerry being amazing that we still thought of him like that. The trouble was, there wasn’t anything for him to be amazing about any longer, so he wasn’t really. And I think he knew.

  I talked to Paul about this right at the beginning, after that morning in the garden, before we started doing it this way. Paul’s idea is that Gerry never knew what he was for, why he’d got all these gifts, and he needed a why, so he chose Blatchards. Only he got it wrong. He thought it was the house, but it wasn’t. It was us, our silly family which mattered so much to us. That was what he wanted. I knew Gerry didn’t have a family, but I never realised what an utter orphan he was until Paul told me. I suppose that might explain something, in a clockworky kind of way. I don’t know.

  Then of course there was Nan, who was always a tremendous tough. Partly she was made that way, I suppose, and partly she’d had to learn to stand up to Mother’s nonsenses, and protect the rest of us from them. Gerry liked acting as if he was Master of Blatchards, and Nan went along with him in public, but she wouldn’t let him touch anything in the house except the two upstairs rooms in the East Wing, the Yellow Room and King William’s Room. Those were Gerry’s domain. All the rest of it was hers. That’s why he started taking such an interest in the garden, because she let him do pretty well what he liked there, and she wasn’t interested. They were a funny couple, come to think of it. I never caught them being lovey-dovey with each other when they thought they were alone. They were like two actors acting a relationship because they need each other—Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, for instance—and can put it over like nobody’s business when they’re on show, but aren’t even friends in their private lives.

  Anyway I didn’t mean to go into all that. What I was trying to say was that I didn’t mind Gerry living at Blatchards. I didn’t think about it then, but now I suppose that by then I knew in my heart of hearts I didn’t actually want Gerry—all I wanted was a sort of idea of him—so it suited me having him around but obviously belonging to Nan. He was different. I mean, I usually had a man of some sort or other in my life. I was never any good at living like a nun. In fact I find myself rather boring, alone. I like somebody to be with. I don’t mean just to sleep with, though that’s important (if ever I start a religion of my own I’ll make Dora a saint), but to talk to and do things with and grouse at. Society, help and comfort, like the marriage service says, only you don’t have to be married to get them. You’ve still got to work at getting it right, though. Not just a couple of weeks and stop—even if you know they’re not going to last for ever, they’re still commitments, and one of the most important things is to learn to call them off as soon as you realise they’re not going to work, before anyone gets hurt. Well, hurt more than you can help.

  That happened to me with David Fish. Biddy Trollope had invited a party for Ascot and David was one of them, looking more Beanoish than ever in a grey topper and tails. He’d never been to the races before, so we had to show him the ropes and he got terribly interested in the mathematics the bookies used to fix the odds. On the second day he told us he’d thought of a betting system, so we each chipped in a fiver and took turns to put the bets on so the bookies wouldn’t realise it was the same person, and by the end of the day we’d turned fifty-five pounds into six hundred and something. It was raining, but we didn’t mind. We stood under the awning of a tent, all absolutely hysterical, while people went squelching about outside, telling each other we’d never have to work again. The only person who wasn’t happy was Beano. He’d got all the money in his hands, in pound notes, and he was just staring at it and shaking his head.

  “It’s far too much,” he explained. “There must be a flaw in my assumptions. Ah, well, back to the drawing-board.”

  And he hunched even further down into his tail coat and began peering round as if he was looking for a litter-bin to put the money in, and then looking sheepish and surprised at the way we were falling about. Even Biddy Trollope, who’d inherited half a county as well as several coal fields and shipyards and so on, and always behaved as if money came out of the air, was more interested in our winnings than Beano was. She slapped him on the back and said, “Well, if you can’t think what to do with it, David, we’ll all go out to dinner and Cook can have the night off.�
�� We finished up dancing at Hatchett’s at four a.m. and I took David home. The trouble was this time he fell in love with me.

  At least he thought he did. I made the mistake of assuming because of what had happened at Halford Hall he’d realise this was meant to be another time like that (it never is) and I didn’t spell things out to him as much as I should have. I simply had no idea anyone could be so naive as he still was. He was living in digs somewhere up by Euston, and Biddy had run across him in a train going north and got talking and asked him to Ascot because she needed a spare man. He’d hired his topper and tails. He had a pretty good job—something complicated to do with foreign currency and how you get round the rules without breaking the law, which was what everyone was trying to do those days—so he was earning plenty of money and he couldn’t think of anything to spend it on, which was why he was travelling First Class, which was why Biddy had assumed he was the sort of type she could invite to Ascot, but that was all. There wasn’t anything else about him. I mean that. Nothing. Having him around was like having a gawky great dog which doesn’t have any interests in life apart from meals and walks and sitting by your chair with its head on your knees and gazing adoringly at you and drooling. I stood it for a couple of weeks and then I sat him down one evening and talked to him like a grandmother and told him why it wasn’t any good. I’m afraid all my friends probably heaved a sigh of relief.

  I suppose I’ve got to say something about Michael Allwegg. I’d known him vaguely for a bit, because he’d been at Winchester with Tommy Seddon and Tommy was a neighbour. He was in the Rest-of-the-World team for Harriet’s engagement party, but I’d hardly talked to him then. About 1950, I should think, Tommy had a dinner party before the Hunt Ball, and I sat next to Michael. (Old Lord Seddon was still alive, but he’d gone ga-ga and was living in the West Wing with a couple of nurses to look after him. He was still perfectly spry, but he kept trying to escape to open the batting for England in the Oval Test.)