White Mischief

by James Fox

  Abdullah sat on a chair at the end of a dark corridor of bare cream and white walls, dressed only in a kekoi, his naked breast and belly bulging in front of him. Wedged in a wooden grille above the door to his room were his only two visible possessions—a toothbrush and a copy of the Qur’an.

  The room was rented, and the bed, the sole piece of furniture in the room, was covered in rags. High up on the wall, almost out of sight, were some cheap Indian prints. At first Abdullah’s speech came in slow, lazy mouthings, very indistinctly, and he was obviously in some pain. My friend gave a long explanation. Abdullah began to look embarrassed, becoming even more listless. Then he produced one crucial hint to the knowledge he possessed. Brdughton, he said, was a good walker, a strong man. But he, Abdullah, was ill, he needed medicine. Would we come tomorrow?

  We crossed the creek again and, took the day off, lunching at the Ocean sports club and dining at the old settlers’ retreat, the Mnarani Club at Kilifi. The next morning, we bought pain killers and fruit, then loaded the two grinning boys into the car. They brought us this time to the market where Abdullah was sitting at the corner of a small clothes stall, wearing a shirt and holding a cane.

  Overnight, Abdullah’s manner had developed some resolution. I realised that I had taken it almost for granted that he would talk to me after all the trouble I had taken to find him. And I was wrong. It was quite clear, he said, that we wanted to know all about the Erroll murder. “I’m old,” he said. “She [Diana] is old too, but she’s got money … It is a very heavy matter. I don’t remember anything. I don’t even remember Delves Broughton. I don’t remember him any more. It’s a long time ago. I’ve forgotten.”

  Abdullah thanked us for the medicine, and the fruit we had brought for the children. He said, “Please don’t be unhappy that I haven’t said anything.” He put his wrists together, in the gesture of a prisoner, then made the gesture of knifing. This was the price to pay for speaking. “This is a very heavy matter,” he repeated. Abdullah was scared and he was deadly serious. There was no more to be said.

  23

  LADY DELAMERE

  Diana, Lady Delamere, and I first met face to face in the doorway of her London apartment, somewhere behind the Ritz Hotel, in late May of 1981. With a thumping in my heart that I imagined to be audible in the deadly quiet of the carpeted eighth-floor corridor, I had rung on her doorbell. I was on the point of turning back towards the lift, relieved to have any excuse, when the door was opened by a diminutive maid dressed in black, striking, it seemed, a crouched and fearful pose. I later discovered that she was addressed, like Wilks before her, by her surname, Peterson. I gave my name and Peterson disappeared from the doorway. The heart thumping had now turned to hammer blows inside the rib cage, and I began to imagine a bitter poetic justice for my brash intrusion: I would collapse with a massive thrombosis in the doorway as she came to greet me, unable even to mouth the first question. But turning up unheralded had been the only possible way to approach Diana, and even to arrive at this unpromising moment had required some planning.

  I had discovered by chance, through her network of English friends, that Diana was coming to England for the York races in May, and would be staying with a friend in Yorkshire. At the end of the second day’s racing, when I imagined she would be well installed, I rang her host and asked to speak to her. I was told, to my consternation, that she was still in Nairobi. My informant had been wrong.

  Now I had to explain, albeit in the most general terms, to her somewhat suspicious host—who was also a Kenya landowner—why I wanted to speak to her. He warned me that she would never talk to me about her life in Kenya, and suggested I write her a formal letter of request. For this he gave me her London address—a significant step forward—in the apartment block behind the Ritz Hotel but, as it turned out. provided the wrong flat number. Earlier in the conversation he had also produced, by way of correcting me, the exact date of her arrival. Having now alerted her protective friends, and thus Diana herself, a whole three weeks too soon, my only hope was to wait and chance my luck at her door on the date in question. Letters and telephone calls, once again, would have ended the affair instantly.

  The few daily flights from Nairobi arrive in the morning in London, within an hour or two of each other. When the day came. I picked on the flight with the greatest delay, added an hour or two for jet-lag and siestas and decided that 4 p.m. was the right moment to strike. In the meantime I dragged out a Chinese lunch with a friend, and for further moral encouragement rang my publisher, whom I knew had once been a fierce encyclopaedia salesman. He told me that the door would open and the face would say, “What do you want?” He always used to reply, “That’s exactly what I’ve come to talk to you about.” He said that this had never failed.

  To the porters talking in the hall, more as a password than an enquiry. I said, “Lady Delamere” as I passed. One of them replied, “Eighty-two”: I had been on my way to forty-three.

  There came to the door, that afternoon, one of the most striking women I have ever seen, wearing an immaculately cut Eton-blue peignoir with blue ribbon bindings along the edges, and with long gold chains strung from her neck. She was younger-looking than I expected, her face longer and leaner than it had been, the ice-blue eyes as penetrating as ever. Any trace of travel fatigue had disappeared under the perfect make-up, though she was not expecting a guest. Dazzled by this apparition, my memory of this first conversation, as I introduced myself, is almost non-existent. I was an author … certain characters … Kenya … grateful for a few minutes’ talk. Lady Delamere held the door half-way open. She said she had only just arrived; the flight had been exhausting. Also, she never talked about her private life and didn’t think she could be of any help.

  I had thought about and speculated on Diana for years: she had become a figure of intense fascination, forever out of reach, who would take her secrets to the grave, leaving a tantalising story untold. If we could ever have talked, even for five minutes, my obsession, at least, would be appeased, and here I was at her door, as if in a recurring nightmare in which I cannot explain myself—the words won’t come, she doesn’t recognise me and, slowly, the door closes, shutting out the last chink of light. But this was reality and Diana said, “Well, I can’t leave you out there in the hall. You’d better come in.”

  The rented apartment was furnished in a dull imitation of elegance. In the drawing room Diana’s daughter, Snoo, was sitting in the armchair. Several photographs of Tom Delamere were already in place in the bookshelves. The contents of Diana’s handbag were spread across the carpet. “I’m in a bit of a state,” she said. “I’ve lost my pills.” My heart racing, I offered to search for them, imagining all three of us crawling around on the carpet. The pills, as it turned out, were for her heart trouble.

  She repeated that she couldn’t be of any help to me. She had often been approached to write something—even quite recently by a “charming” London publisher, but had always refused. “I’d rather die,” she said. Why didn’t I write about Tom, a dear, sweet, kind man? Would I like to talk now, to explain what I was after? I said, “Yes,” and hastily retracted. The first rule had always been that we should be alone. I took the risk of suggesting an appointment five days later, and Diana agreed.

  Already I was struck by her charm and ease of communication, and the instant friendliness. But I was aware that this impression might not last.

  When we met the following week, Diana was wearing four strings of pearls, each row separated by diamond buckles on either side of her neck, and impressive diamond earrings. She wore little black shoes with vertical straps, and a black cocktail dress with long sleeves and a long, tight skirt. It made her look slim and tall and showed off her fine figure. Indeed, the disarming perfection of her appearance gave her the imposing look of some great priestess. The exigencies of such haute couture were, however, soon apparent: the action of reaching into a low cupboard for a bottle of tonic water forced her into a parody of a curtsey, knees and l
egs scissoring like a foal struggling to its feet.

  As on the first occasion with the handbag, there had been another minor domestic crisis at the moment of my arrival. Peterson, unused to the hand-shower, had severely drenched herself, fighting to bring it under control. Her dress was now drying by the electric fire and Peterson herself was temporarily hors de service.

  Diana complained of the cold of London in late May. She invariably went out, she said, in a fur coat; the central heating in the block had been switched off on principle at the beginning of May, and she had bought the electric fire which was now drying out Peterson’s uniform. This reminded me of Antonia Fraser’s observation about Mary Queen of Scots and Diana Delamere sharing the chill of the femme fatale. Diana said that most of her day had been taken up with visiting heart specialists. In 1968 she had had a heart attack which had developed into angina. Now the doctor had told her that she couldn’t live at the altitude of Soysambu for more than a month at a time, which she found “awful.” She had even been told that she shouldn’t go marlin fishing. She had told the doctor that it was a terrible winter for fishing anyway.

  Her language suggested the 1930s. On the telephone, which rang incessantly, she asked a friend to dinner. “Are you a Wheeler’s girl? … Do you like fishy?” Discussing the work and effort needed to keep her wardrobe up to standard, she said, “Am I just to let myself go?”, and later, discussing, also on the telephone, the merits of a fashionable hat maker, she said, “One doesn’t want to pay £1,000 for an apple with an arrow, through it, you know.” She was busy with her social life, the race meetings, the charity dinners (“One has to buy something, otherwise it looks dreadful”), the weekends and the visits to the doctor. They had told her to take it slowly, not to get upset (a glance in my direction). She would not be going to Ascot. “I can’t go to Ascot without Tom,” she said to a friend. “I’m going to dirty Ascot.” (Presumably the Saturday of Royal Ascot week, when, in the absence of Royalty there is no requirement for formal dress.)

  Clearly none of the descriptions had done her justice. By the standards of that same world—even of the dense snobbery of the 1930s, when many of the descriptions had originated—she struck me as a woman of considerable style, distinguished and impressive. When I touched on the subject of snobbery and in particular the use of the word “common,” her only reply was, “Do people still use that word?” She was neither cold nor hard, although she was very much in control of her surroundings. There was, in addition, something exciting about her—a quickness, a wit and a sense of courage. Certainly she had been a danger to her rivals. “A talent for enjoyment and bringing out enjoyment in others”: Connolly had put it precisely.

  But she had a reputation as a formidable and fierce opponent if you dared to cross her. It was almost the secret of her survival, and I might have expected at any moment to be shown the door. In particular, everyone who knew her well said the same thing: she had never spoken one word about the events of 1941, even to her close friends, and she never would. It was her unbending rule never to mention it, or to have it mentioned. In that small Kenyan community, if she had let slip the smallest detail, it would have filtered back over the years. It never had.

  Our several conversations were conducted in an atmosphere that was charged with wariness and potential conflict. I told her at the first meeting that I wanted to write about Erroll, but only for what the story revealed about Kenyan society at a certain moment, and not for the purpose of “rehashing a scandal.” For a writer, I said, it was an irresistible story and always would be, and Broughton in particular was a worthy central character for a novel. This was not a novel, but it might turn into a book of characters as much as anything, and furthermore it would correct some myths, especially about herself. “I don’t care a bit about that,” she said. “They’ve always been murmuring and I don’t …” She swept her arm in front of her, leaving the phrase unfinished. “I didn’t do it, if that’s what you think,” she said.

  I said that for my generation she was a figure not of scandal but of glamour. She replied that that didn’t interest her. I showed her a letter from a friend of hers (typed and with the name removed), praising her and saying how extraordinary it was that such an operatic story with all the stock characters could have happened in real life. Diana said that she too was amazed it had happened. She thought it was “something that only happened to housemaids.”

  She told me immediately that she did not want the past revived. She would oppose me if I wrote about her. She would “go for me,” she warned; she would alert her lawyers to watch my publisher. She said that someone I knew well—she gave no name—had advised her, in the intervening five days, to put an injunction on any book, and not to see me, but to refer me to her lawyers. But there was nothing to put an injunction on, she said, and she never took such advice without seeing for herself. She always made her own decisions about people.

  And yet, as we talked, it was she, apparently, who felt the obligation to put me at ease. She offered me a whisky. “You probably need one.” She herself took a Russian vodka with a slice of lemon. Once, in the middle of a sentence which I felt would bring the conversation to breaking point, she stopped me and asked, “Do you like these? One can only eat them if one’s not going out,” and handed me a tin of garlic nuts. Then, almost as if to explain her reluctance, she said, suddenly, “There are only two men I have ever loved in my life. Tom Delamere and …” (she paused for a few moments)—“Joss.”

  “I always felt that it was because of me that he was killed, although he probably would have been killed anyway. He was that sort of man. I was desperately in love with Joss. It was the first time I had been in love in my life.”

  She then began to talk hesitantly about the past. I am sure it was the first time for forty years that she had been able to discuss these traumatic events with someone for whom nothing needed to be filled in or explained. She told me that if Tom Delamere had been alive it would not have been possible. They had made a pact never to talk publicly about anything. I repeated my fascination with Broughton as a character, and told Diana what I felt he must have been like. “I think Jock probably did do it,” she said. “He was slightly mad at the time. I went down to South Africa to get Morris to defend him and he told me that from Jock’s reactions he thought he had the first signs of a serious brain disorder. Jock never admitted to me that he had done it, but he never denied it either.”

  Did she and Joss suspect nothing from Broughton’s behaviour before the murder? “I must have been very naive. I was very young. In retrospect of course it was wrong to take it on face value.” Joss’s attitude, she said, was that Broughton was an old-fashioned gentleman giving his word. He never suspected otherwise. She felt it was awful to treat Broughton like that and she couldn’t go through with it, but Joss insisted that the marriage pact should be taken seriously and that it was her life and happiness that mattered.

  Diana then repeated the conversation with Gwladys, almost exactly as it appears in the transcript, when Gwladys urged them to go ahead with the romance. Support and approval from the older generation helped Diana make up her mind. Would Erroll have gone through with the marriage? What about the problems of divorce, the rule at the time that three years must elapse before divorce could be granted? She was so madly in love at the time, that it never occurred to her to behave otherwise. There would have been some way round it.

  Did she remember anything of the murder night? Did she not hear Broughton coming back in? She couldn’t think why she didn’t hear it. When something very unpleasant happens, an iron shutter comes down and you can’t recall anything, she said. But she did remember that Broughton had given her careful instructions to come in through the french windows, not through the front door, and had given her those keys. Somehow the keys had got muddled up and she couldn’t get in that way and went instead to the front door. Broughton had also told her on no account to wake him when she came in. He had taken a sleeping pill and didn’t want to be distu
rbed. He would be very upset if he was woken, and that was understandable, she said.

  I said that I thought it odd that soon after the murder she had gone with Broughton on safari. The reason for that, she said, was that she was frightened living in the house at Karen with Broughton. He was having terrible nightmares and would walk around the outside of the house and look at her through the windows. There was something especially frightening about his face looking through the glass, or the open window. She wanted to get out in the open, with some white hunters to protect her. That was why they took J. A. Hunter along.

  The trip to India and Ceylon after the acquittal, she said, was “a nightmare. A nightmare. I was so upset and so unhappy that nothing mattered to me, if you know what I mean. I didn’t feel anything. I felt I had to set him up on his feet again. I don’t know whether he was set up.” It was the stress of all that, she believes, that had caused her coronary twenty years later.

  “He was the most evil man,” she said. “He sent me a letter trying to get me to return to England with him. It was appalling. I took it straight to the Attorney-General.” I asked whether he had tried to blackmail her. She said, “Yes. But there was no possibility.”

  She said she knew nothing about Broughton’s involvement with the theft of the pearls in Cannes, or that it was one of her own party who had taken them. I told her they had been found in a tree in Doddington Park after the war. “What you say shakes me to the core,” she said.