The Yellow Room Conspiracy

by Peter Dickinson

  Nancy joined us.

  “What’s happening?” she said.

  “I think it’s over,” said Lucy.

  She was shuddering. Gerry had helped the girl to her feet and was handing her her wig, which had fallen off. Without it, even in the bad light, I could see that she was indeed the one who’d been at the Seddons’ party. She looked white and shaken. The man who’d been with her came up, spoke briefly to Gerry, took her by the arm and led her away into a side-alley.

  The street, as I’ve said, was far from deserted. A dozen people must have seen what happened, and as Gerry came back to us one or two of them applauded. He responded by raising a hand, rather as he might have done on coming off the cricket field after a successful innings. At that moment an empty cab came by, I hailed it and we climbed in.

  “That was extraordinary,” said Nancy.

  “Don’t let’s talk about it. Please,” said Lucy.

  For once she allowed her distress to show, so we did as she said. Only while she and Nancy were “powdering their noses”, as we used to call it, at the restaurant, I got a chance to ask Gerry how he happened to show up so opportunely.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I was inquisitive. So was Nan.”

  “Just as well,” I said. “I take it you saw who the man was?”

  He shrugged, but his look made it clear that he too had recognised Seddon. At this point the women returned. Nancy had not been in a good temper earlier and was in a worse one now. Lucy was silent throughout the meal, while I merely wanted to be alone with her and discuss what we’d seen. But Gerry was in tremendous form, so to anyone watching us it must have seemed that we were all having a good time.

  Even back at my flat Lucy was unwilling to talk about the episode. During several wakeful patches I was aware of her also lying there, still, tense, miserable. When I moved a hand to comfort her she held it for a while and then let go, obviously wanting nothing more. At breakfast she said, “What am I going to do, Paul? Go on, tell me. You can’t make it any worse.”

  “I’d have to know more, in areas you’ve asked me not to talk about.”

  “That’s over. Go on.”

  “Well, for instance, where did the girl come from in the first place? How was she invited to your dinner party?”

  The question seemed to steady her, putting her on to known ground.

  “UFTFA,” she said. “It stands for—let me work it out—oh, yes, Universal Friendship Through Folk Art—you know, great festivals of healthy young things in national costume bouncing around to ukulele music.”

  “Funded by the CIA and riddled with Russian agents, or vice versa.”

  “I expect so. Somebody told us the Princess was interested in that sort of thing so we asked the Director along. We’ve had him before. He’s rather amusing. He’s a Yugoslav called Mikowicz, and apparently he was a frightful thug in the war but now he’s having a lovely time spreading friendship through folk art and wallowing in the flesh-pots of London.”

  “Is he a communist?”

  “Officially, I think, but he’s a ferocious snob. He wouldn’t have minded at all having ex-royals there. They weren’t UFTFA’s ex-royals, anyway. Anyway he rang up pretty well at the last minute and said he was ill and he’d send his assistant along, but it turned out the assistant was a woman and my secretary said it had to be a man because of the numbers, and he wuffled a bit and said all right and he’d send the details round. That’s all I know.”

  “It seems a curious procedure.”

  “Well, you know what Tommy’s like about numbers.”

  “That’s not what I meant. I imagine some enquiry has been made about why the girl was there.”

  “Officially it was a practical joke, and Mikowicz has promised to sack the chap who set it up. He absolutely grovelled to me on the telephone.”

  “And unofficially?”

  “That’s what I’m supposed not to talk about.”

  “If it was a deliberate ploy to get the girl into your house for some reason, then that would involve someone knowing you would want a replacement for a guest who dropped out. That’s what I meant about it being a curious procedure.”

  “I’m still not supposed to talk about it.”

  “I’m sorry, but you asked me what you should do, and the answer partly turns on what you believe to be the girl’s motives. You see, I have a distinct impression—it was slight at the time but it’s grown stronger since—that the object of the girl being at your party was that she should make herself known to your husband.”

  “Oh! Well … Do you really think so? That’s not …”

  She broke off.

  “Not the official theory?” I said. “All I can say is that’s what it looked like. He’s in an extremely vulnerable position. And if that’s what’s going on it must at least affect your attitude, I’d have thought. It’s none of my business, except indirectly.”

  “No. Well, but … You think I ought to tell him?”

  “He may already be aware …”

  “I still ought to.”

  LUCY VII

  Spring 1956

  I’ve decided the only thing is to get this over. That sounds a bit grim, though actually I’d be rather enjoying it if I wasn’t so bothered about Paul. There’s something badly wrong—much wronger than I realised. He’s got very silent. If he notices, he makes an effort and starts to chat, but he can’t keep it up, and he reads to me still in the evenings, but I can tell that what he really wants is to sneak back to his word processor and get another few pages done. Even on lovely sunny days, when he ought to be out—he always says if you don’t get things right in the autumn you’ll notice all next year—out doing things like taking cuttings and getting at those horrible little spurges before they seed, he shuts himself up in his office and taps away. And he isn’t enjoying it at all. It’s something he’s forced to do, as if he was hypnotised. And he won’t talk about it either. He just says, “Let’s get it done, and then we can think about something else.” So I’ve got to do my bit.

  I’d better explain about the dinner party where Sammy Whitstable showed up pretending to be a man. It makes me sound so stuffy, turfing her out like that. But you’ve got to remember it wasn’t a private party—it was part of Tommy’s job. It was always going to be sticky, because we weren’t supposed to be having anything to do with the old Yugoslav royals in case we offended General Tito but we still were trying to keep odd sorts of anti-communists happy by pretending to take them seriously, so, in spite of what I’ve just said, yes, it was a private party, in case the official Yugoslavs objected, but we let the Prince and his lot make out that it was official by us all wearing medals and things, so the one thing we couldn’t afford was an Incident, with notes flying to and fro and it all coming out into the open, but we’d been warned that some of the anti-reds were hoping for an Incident, which they could make a public fuss about, and certainly I’d already found out before we sat down that the Prince was in a decidedly prickly mood, so … well, that’s why I decided I’d better ask the girl to push off. It’s not the sort of thing I enjoy. And that’s why I didn’t think there was anything odd about Tommy wanting to hush it up and play it down afterwards. It didn’t matter who’d managed to smuggle the girl in. It could have been someone on the Prince’s side, or it could have been someone on the Reds” because of course all those organisations were absolutely riddled with agents. But I was so obsessed with keeping the Prince quiet that it never even struck me as possible it might have anything to do with Tommy.

  Well, then, talking to Tommy. He really had been at Chequers all day, discussing Colonel Nasser with the French, and he’d come up for the opera and a few hours afterwards (I suppose) and gone back in the small hours, so I didn’t see him till we were having breakfast the day after that. Of course I’d been trying to think of ways of starting in on it, and I was putting it off by le
tting him get his post opened and feeling more and more nervous when he looked up and said, quietly, “I believe you have resumed your liaison with Paul Ackerley.”

  I looked back. I couldn’t read what he was thinking. “You saw us at Covent Garden,” I said.

  Something flickered. He hadn’t realised I’d seen him there.

  “You were with that girl,” I said. “The one who came here pretending to be a man.”

  “Yes.”

  You’ve got to remember I knew Tommy pretty well. He wasn’t difficult to cope with provided everyone kept their manners and stayed polite. Within those rules you could say almost anything you liked, accuse him of all sorts of unspeakable crimes … that sounds ridiculous, because of course Tommy wouldn’t have known an unspeakable crime if he’d seen one, personally. He was absolutely painfully upright. But in his job people were always telling him how badly Britain was behaving about something and accusing him of going along with it. I can remember how nice he once was to an American Jewish woman who seemed to believe we’d actually wanted the Holocaust to take place and now we were trying to help the Arabs carry on with the job. She was extremely angry about it, but she managed to stay inside Tommy’s rules, so Tommy was polite and reasonable though she wouldn’t see reason, and told me afterwards he’d rather liked her. But other people, I mean, there was an Australian who was upset about something he said we’d been doing at Woomera—that was the missile place—and he may have been right but he had a chip on his shoulder about the English, especially ones with titles, and he was so rude and personal that Tommy went completely cold and official and they both finished up loathing each other … so, you see, I knew if I wanted things to work out I mustn’t get emotional, or say I thought the girl was a tart, or anything like that.

  “I don’t blame you,” I said.

  He slit an envelope and glanced at the letter before he said anything. Then he spoke without looking at me.

  “Nor I you,” he said. “It is perhaps through my deficiencies that our marriage has failed to function as it should.”

  “That’s not fair,” I said. “On you, I mean.”

  “Let’s not go into questions of blame,” he said. “They are in my experience invariably jejune. Tell me, for how long have you been seeing Ackerley again?”

  “Since Father’s funeral,” I said. “I don’t know, I saw him outside the church in the rain, and I suddenly felt … I know you can’t go back, it’s never the same. But I really had tried to be faithful to you, Tommy. I really had. I wanted to.”

  “I know,” he said, and began to read the letter properly, so as to give me time to get a hold on myself. I’d been almost over the edge, but I managed to pull back. He looked up as soon as I was ready.

  “The question is, how shall we now proceed?” he said. “You have been very tactful so far. I take it that your allowing yourselves to be seen together at Covent Garden was not deliberate.”

  “That was an accident,” I said. “Nan was supposed to be chaperoning us, but our seats weren’t together.”

  His head jerked up.

  “Nancy was there?” he said. “And Grantworth? I hadn’t realised. So you saw the episode in Greek Street?”

  “I’m afraid I wanted to be sure it was really you,” I said. “We followed you. Paul gave Gerry a note telling him to meet us at the restaurant, but he said he was inquisitive, so he came along behind us. We didn’t realise he was there till he ran past. It was lucky he did, I suppose …”

  I trailed off, because I could see he’d stopped listening. He was staring at his plate with his head on one side. After a bit he looked up.

  “Will you think about this and answer carefully,” he said. “I want you to tell me exactly how it was that you noticed my presence at the opera. Were you told I might be there, for instance? Was I pointed out to you by anyone?”

  “No,” I said. “I just happened to recognise the girl. Do you mind if I ask you some questions about her?”

  “In a minute. Go on.”

  “Well, first I just noticed her,” I said. “I mean, she was doing her best to be noticed. Then just as the lights went down I saw her pointing us out to whoever was with her, and there was something about the way she did it—I don’t know what, but it made me think I must have seen her, and after a bit I realised when. Of course I was inquisitive, so I kept an eye on her in the second act, and I saw her say something to whoever was with her, and he leaned forward for a moment and I just caught a glimpse. I still wasn’t sure it was you. That’s why we rushed round to catch you.”

  “I see,” he said.

  “Did she just happen to notice us?” I said. “I mean, there were a lot of other people there.”

  He smiled at me, charming but sad.

  “The fact is, you catch the eye,” he said. “My companion is the type of woman who automatically scans a gathering for rival beauties. And of course the moment she’d spotted you she recognised you.”

  “You were going to tell me about her,” I said.

  “Her name is the one she used at the party,” he said. “Sammy Whitstable. She has claims to be an actress, but it would not be unfair to describe her as a call-girl. She has some education and is not unintelligent.”

  “Does she wear men’s clothes often?” I said.

  “For preference,” he said, “though not for the obvious reasons.”

  “Did you just ring her up and say “Let’s meet”?” I said.

  “I gave myself the excuse that I was interviewing her,” he said. “The morning after the party I discussed the incident with David Pottinger, who felt we should know at whose instigation she had put on that charade. He proposed to send our security people round, but for reasons which you will no doubt think obvious I decided it would amuse me to talk to her myself. She had left me her card.”

  “What did she say?” I asked.

  “She had done it for a bet,” he said. “You’ll remember she was supposed to be Mikowicz’s assistant from UFTFA. Now she told me he was simply a friend of hers—by which I imagine she meant a client—and he was complaining about the boring functions he had to go to when he could have been spending the time with her. She offered to go in his place.”

  “They wanted to send a woman at first, but we said no,” I said.

  “It was her idea that she should come as a man,” he said.

  “Do you think that’s true?” I said.

  “Knowing her, quite likely,” he said. “At least it seems a more plausible hypothesis than that she was planted there to cause an incident. Don’t you think so?”

  “I was having such a sticky time with the Prince that I can’t tell,” I said. “But listen—I talked about all this with Paul. I hope you don’t mind, but …”

  “I would sooner you hadn’t, but I suppose it was inevitable,” he said. “Well?”

  “He was at the dinner party, remember,” I said. “He says he got a strong impression that the real reason she was there was to meet you. He says she was sort of seizing her chance when you said good-bye to her at the door.”

  He’d been opening another letter, but stopped.

  “She herself wanted to meet me?” he said. “Or some third party wanted her to?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Someone else, I suppose.”

  “Why should anyone want that?” he said.

  “Look what’s happened,” I said. “You’ve got an awful lot to lose if anyone found out, Tommy. There must be lots of people who’d like to have some kind of hold on you.”

  “You are suggesting that somebody, some foreign agent, say, planted Miss Whitstable at our party in the hope that I would become emotionally entangled with her?” he said.

  “Not like that, of course. They just wanted you to meet, and then it would be up to her,” I said. “How else is she going to meet you? You don’t go to ordinary par
ties. Do just think about it. Isn’t there something you could do to find out without bothering the girl? The UFTFA man would have to be in on it, wouldn’t he?”

  “David was having a check run on him,” he said. “I will see if anything has come of it.”

  He started to gather up his post.

  “We still haven’t decided what we’re going to do,” I said. “Rub along, I suppose.”

  “You don’t want a divorce?” he said.

  “I promised, remember? Sauce for the goose,” I said. “Anyway, I don’t think I could face the fuss.”

  “Certainly I would be very grateful if we could, as they say, keep up appearances,” he said. “I do not fully understand what is happening to me. I find, to my shame, that I am obsessed by this girl, but presumably the infatuation will pass. I have seen it happening to other men and felt nothing but pity and contempt for them. Now it is my turn.”

  You know, I don’t think I’d ever liked him so much. I felt really warm and protective towards him. I wish I could have told him so.

  “In that case enjoy it while it lasts,” I said. “Have fun.” He shook his head.

  “‘Fun’ is the wrong word,” he said. “The experience is, if anything, painful. Painful but irresistible.”

  “In that case, be careful,” I said.

  “Again you mistake,” he said. “Obviously one takes superficial precautions, but the risk itself is what matters. The risk to everything I have and am and desire and value. Believe me, I can see my own madness with perfect clarity, and yet I know I shall persist in it.”