I staggered back to the club at ten the next morning and there was Steven, in his dressing-gown, looking daggers at me.
“Where the hell have you been?” were his first words. “Wylie was here at nine saying you’d arranged to go shopping. And Clover rang at nine-thirty, asking for you. I didn’t know where you were. I told them both you were at Meakin Street. Were you?”
“What’s it to you?” I said to him.
“I don’t like being put at a disadvantage like that,” he told me, so I told him, “You’re just a snob, Steven. You wouldn’t be worrying if two dustmen had come round asking for me.”
“It’s irresponsible to say you’ll go somewhere –” he said and then he peered at me. “Were you at Meakin Street?” he asked. “No – if you’d been at Meakin Street you wouldn’t be back here at ten. Anyway, from the look of you, if you were there I was at midnight mass in Westminster Cathedral last night. What’s going on?”
I just thumbed my nose at him. To tell the truth I felt uneasy about all this but I was buoyed up by sheer sex, I suppose. And Steven saw it all. He said sharply, “Bridges. It’s Bridges again, isn’t it? You stupid bitch – don’t think I’m going to cover up for you with people I know.”
“You know them,” I said, just as sharply. “But don’t forget, Steven, if you ever get in any trouble, they won’t know you.”
And he flinched as if I’d hit him. Then he pulled himself together and said, “Don’t forget you’re due at Lowton at the weekend. They’re counting on you.” Then the phone rang. He went to answer it. There was an urgent conversation. It was something to do with some photos of Wendy Valentine and someone in the Foreign Office. The kind they call compromising. And a third party was threatening to show them to the papers, so they had to be bought back but the snag was how to raise the money. Fact is, poor Steven was losing his grip on the situation by that stage. The empire was starting to topple. The weekend at Lowton was cancelled quickly, for example. For no special reason. Poor old Steven had put the girls into some funny spots – Wendy Valentine was knocking off a Russian diplomat and an MP at the same time and, for light relief, this dodgy West Indian drug dealer, and everybody was starting to get interested. That was why Steven’s old friends started creeping back into the woodwork and why there weren’t going to be any more invitations to country houses.
Anyway, after this call Steven had just poured himself a brandy – at ten in the morning, and he was never a hard drinker – when there’s a knock at the door and in come the men from the Special Branch. You could always recognize them in those days by their white belted macs. They’re harder to spot now but at that time they always looked like army officers off duty just strolling along to the club. And Steven had a quick word with them in the kitchen and they disappeared. Just like that. My turn to ask, “What the hell’s going on here?”
Even then he didn’t realize the extent of the cop-out going on around him. He said, “A little local difficulty. A mistake, really. I’ve told them who to see.”
“Special Branch,” I said. “What’s it all about?”
He said, “Lord Clover wants to set you up in a flat.”
“Give up the job?” I asked him and he told me Clover wanted me to live in a flat overlooking Highgate Woods and he’d pay me £3,000 a year, which was a lot of money. And I said no.
Steven was furious. He told me it was a wonderful opportunity and I was stupid to refuse it. And I told him no one was going to bang me up in a flat in Highgate with no job and miles away from my child. I told him, “If I wanted to live in a harem I’d go to Arabia.” He had another brandy and then I spotted what was going on and I asked him, “You’ve made a deal with Clover, that’s right isn’t it? I have to be got safely out of the way so I won’t talk.”
“Clover very much wants this,” he said.
I said, “Well – it’s serious for you, isn’t it? Because if I refuse he may get angry and that’ll ruin your friendship?”
“Worse than that,” said Steven Greene. He meant Clover would take away his protection, as well as his friendship. I didn’t know how bad it was all going to get. I just thought all he’d lose was a few perks and a friendship with a man I knew as a short, fat man in his shirttails, going on and on about Cabinet secrets while I lay motionless on a couch with nothing on, pretending to be a famous picture, the Rokeby Venus. So to save him a small loss I was supposed to sign on for countless months, even years, of being something like a slave. So I said no, again.
“You’re a bloody little fool,” he told me. Even he didn’t know completely what the outcome would be for him.
I was back with Johnnie again, so I wasn’t thinking straight. We spent the morning pottering around that flat, with the phone ringing all the time and neither of us had any idea what other calls were being made from studies and panelled offices all over town, or who was having a few words with who else over the steak and kidney pie and claret. Levers were being pulled all over the place and Steven was going to get caught and mangled in the machinery. It didn’t happen all at once, though. In fact the first thing that happened was at night, the same night, like a French farce. Steven was out and Johnnie and I had gone out and had a bit to drink and come back to the flat in South Molton Street, sneaking up the stairs hoping not to be seen. And we were asleep when the bedroom door opened and in came Clover, in a dinner jacket and cries out, “To think I was going to give you everything – and now this!”
Johnnie struggles up in bed and said, “Who the fuck is this?” I struggle up and say, “I can explain. Let’s try to –” when, oh dear, oh dear, in come the Rose brothers. First thing Johnnie does is leap out of bed and put on his trousers. Everyone’s shouting. Clover was the first to leave, seeing an undignified scene in progress and not wanting any part in it and then, needless to say, Arnie Rose evicts me, sacks me and, for good measure, evicts Steven Greene, who comes in on the scene innocently, saying “What’s going on?”
Looking back you can see it was a set-up. Only the Roses could have seen me go upstairs with Johnnie and then let Clover follow on up, with a key supplied by them. A minute later they burst in and get Steven and all of us out of the flat. The truth is, someone had told them it would be safer to get Steven off their premises. That Johnnie was there, and there’s a triangle involving Clover and that Steven was involved with all of us was not the real reason for asking him to go. They’d been tipped off that having Steven about might bring trouble down on them and they had too much to hide. They couldn’t afford publicity, investigation and speculation too close to them. I think the chance is that whoever manoeuvred the Roses into evicting Steven hoped that he would just go and disappear. But it was too late. Already the foreign papers were on to Wendy’s fun with the Russian agent and the parties Steven had been arranging for people in high places – the ones with the whips and the masks and all. He hadn’t said much about that to me, not after I’d been so amazed by Charlie Markham’s antics. But by now too many people were curious and Steven showed a lack of tact and savoir faire. He stayed instead of going. He had offers of country cottages in Ireland and a studio in Paris – but he hung around and that was his downfall. I’m still surprised I got so little interference. As I say, Clover found me later on in the flat where I was living with Johnnie and then sent me money to shut up. It was funny – he’d always looked like a comic figure to me but when he came to the flat I suddenly saw somebody with power, the landlord, the lawmaker. He just sat there talking and Johnnie listened, not saying a word – like I say, it was funny.
About that time they were trying Wendy Valentine’s West Indian for something or other and I thought – just get out, Clover, and leave me in peace. It was frightening in a way because I had the idea that if I looked as if I might start talking something nasty would happen to me. I was glad when he left saying I could call on him at any time. Then I got the shakes. I thought it was nerves but it was the start of pneumonia.
It was my father who managed to keep Mary’s
name out of the affair. Fortunately she could be represented as a person living at the flat in South Molton Street because she worked at the club downstairs. And Clover and Wylie had both been careful to keep their relationships with her reasonably discreet and I gather a short meeting between the pair reassured each of them that the other was no keener to publicize the story than he was himself.
When Steven Greene’s trial, for procuring and living on immoral earnings, came along in January Mary was well out of the way, like so many others. At the same time my father joined the Labour Party. He told my mother one night at dinner. She was perfectly amazed. She looked at him as if he had gone mad. She asked him why. He said he had no idea. It was an impulse. Fortunately, my mother’s family had had its share of eccentrics. There was a great uncle who had fought with the anarchists in Russia during the Revolution, another uncle, a bishop, who had turned to Rome, and the usual less public madmen most families contain when you look closely. She therefore took my father’s conversion to socialism in her stride and wrote to me in Oxford that she had much enjoyed having Aneurin Bevan to tea. “I was completely charmed by him,” she said in her letter. “He is so like a big, well-fed pussy cat, with well-sheathed claws. And he was so very clever. But of course I am still alarmed by your father’s eccentricity and I am afraid that if he becomes more extreme there may be difficulties ahead.” I imagine she thought he might take to singing “The Red Flag” in the House of Lords or meeting Soviet agents on Hampstead Heath at night. In fact he did nothing more than canvass during the following General Election and remain close friends with Bevan until the politician’s death a few years later.
It was after that important meeting where he offered me a chance to join what I suppose I must call the family firm, that he told me what had happened around the time of Greene’s trial. By that time I had, with great astonishment, accepted the offer and was undergoing my real initiation into the job, which included instruction in the long-running serial he drily called L’Affaire Waterhouse. “It cost me something in terms of calling in moral overdrafts, and the asking of favours to keep that silly girl out of court,” he told me. “And the worst of it was that before and during the trial I discovered I was washing my hands more frequently than necessary. Even I, with no faith in psychiatry, couldn’t avoid seeing the significance. It also confirmed your mother’s suspicions that I was going off my head. But it was just as well she was in hospital with severe pneumonia during the trial – Mary Flanders, I mean – because God knows what she might not have done if she had been let loose.”
“What’s she doing now?” I asked him.
“Living with a man who buys and sells houses,” my father told me. “She won’t marry him, of course, won’t settle down and have a family like a normal woman. I’m sure of that if I’m sure of nothing else.”
His tone was so comically discontented that I laughed and quoted, “Spirited but uncertain-tempered,” which was the auctioneer’s description of a mare we had once bought, but re-sold because she bit, balked in order to throw her rider into hedges and ditches and broke her stall to pieces one night.
“Not entirely her fault, I suppose,” my father went on in the same depressed tone. Looking at the files in the case always had a bad effect on him. “Nevertheless, I doubt if any good will come of it.”
“You can’t be sure,” I told him.
“Oh, this isn’t the end,” he told me. “This affair has been bungled from the first – year after year has passed while we all hoped we’d seen the end of the story. I doubt it. I’m beginning to wonder if any of us will come out of this with a whole skin.”
Of course, we spoke in the summer of 1958, when the sensational events of the previous year were still fresh in all our minds. Admittedly, it had left behind a lingering feeling that many secrets had not emerged and many people had been unfairly protected. By then one MP had resigned and one man had committed suicide, but no one thought the whole truth had been told and many thought that more might leak out. Small wonder my father was thinking at that time in terms of further discovery and revelation.
The arrival of Clover and the Roses to find Molly in bed with Johnnie turned out to have taken place on Guy Fawkes’ Night – “Indoor fireworks,” as Molly remarked later. Next day she moved in with Johnnie Bridges about half a mile away from Frames.
The flat, in a tall block, was luxuriously furnished. There were soft sofas from Heal’s, expensive flock wallpaper and many cunning lighting fixtures and mirrors. Johnnie’s tenancy, which had lasted several months, had already put a stain on the carpet here and a burn on a table there. Nevertheless, Molly felt she had gone up in the world.
For Molly, jobless and without her two persistent clients, it was a holiday, a honeymoon. The catastrophe at the club had been a blessing in disguise. Jaded by a sex life as gruelling as a forced march and always short of sleep, now here was love, luxury and leisure. For a few weeks the London streets, misty, foggy and damp, were springlike. And Johnnie, lying about the flat in his dressing-gown or going with her to shop, or to restaurants, or to the cinema, was happy, too. He had, at last, dissolved the partnership with the Roses and been paid back his share in the club. He said he had not been happy since they had parted, and she knew that in a way it was true. He asked her to marry him. She said that she would, after Christmas, and knew that he was disappointed. He wanted her to say she must marry now. But as she had told him she would marry him she had looked over his shoulder, to where the fog swirled outside the long net curtains and heard an ambulance wailing in the street. She was afraid. She loved him but she did not trust him.
As soon as she could she went to see Steven Greene. He was now living with Wendy Valentine in a small two-roomed flat in a tall house in Bayswater. As she came in he shunted her quickly into the bedroom, but not before she had seen a very beautiful woman sitting on the sofa in front of a low table in front of the gas fire in the sitting-room. Her shining black hair was pulled back from her face and held at the back with a velvet bow. She had pearls round her throat. She sat tapping long red nails on a tarot card and staring at the others, which were laid out in a circle on the table. Mary sat on the unmade double bed in the other room looking at herself in the dressing-table mirror. While Steven was in the other room, talking to the woman, she lay back – and fell asleep.
She dreamed of fire, again, and the French tune and then of Allaun Towers. She dreamed she was running across a meadow full of green, half-grown corn. She woke to find Steven Greene sitting on the end of the bed. There was some murmuring from the other room. “What’s up?” she asked. “You hiring the place out to fortune tellers?”
“Something like that,” he told her. His face was pouchy, and his eyes, which had some fresh lines round them, were dull.
“You look bad,” she said frankly. “You’re only thirty-two and you look forty. You need a break. Why don’t you get out of London for a holiday? I came to ask if you wanted a loan. Johnnie’s flush and I’ve got a bit of money off selling a necklace. You can have a couple of hundred, if it helps.”
“I’ve got enough, thanks, Moll,” he said. “If the smarter elements are staying away for a while we can always keep going on fortune-telling and low sex.”
The murmuring stopped in the other room. The front door closed. “Steven, I’m leaving,” called a woman’s voice.
Steven and Molly came out of the bedroom. The dark-haired woman had her coat on, “Thanks for the use of the room,” she said. “I suppose you’d like your fortune told, dear,” she said to Molly.
“No thanks,” said Molly. “I don’t believe in it.”
“Please yourself,” said the woman. Looking at Molly she said, “Funny – most girls like a reading, especially if it’s free.”
“I don’t like the idea we can’t do anything about things,” declared Molly. Her eye caught Steven Greene’s and she said, “You’ve been at it, haven’t you? And you don’t like what you heard? You should give it up. This is what you sell to th
e punters.”
The dark woman was annoyed and told her, “You’d be surprised if I mentioned the names of some of my clients. They have confidence.”
“I didn’t mean that,” said Molly. “Anyway, it’s none of my business.” But after the woman had gone she looked at her friend and said, “You’re a fool, Steven. You don’t want to go in for all this mumbo-jumbo. You’ve had a setback, that’s all. You don’t have to sit here with the curtains drawn frightening yourself to death with tarot cards. A load of your posh so-called friends have dropped you. They’re more scared than you are, you can bet on that. For one thing, you’ve got the goods on them – you could get a fortune from the News of the World for your revelations about sin in high places. You could blackmail them half to death – there’s a lot you know they wouldn’t want their wives, innocent daughters, shareholders or fellow aldermen to hear about.”
“I couldn’t do that,” he said.
“No – because you’re supposed to be a gentleman. How do you think they got to be gentlemen? Somebody in the family did a few murders, or betrayed his king, or sold him his daughter – that’s how they got there and that’s how they’re prepared to stay there. Very convenient for them that you practise what they preach.” She added, “In the meanwhile you’re doing them a real favour by sitting there like Christ taking a break from carrying his cross. Stops you from rushing about causing trouble – means the Special Branch and everybody else knows where to find you. I bet this house is watched.”
All The Days of My Life Page 32
