A Scandal in Belgravia

by Robert Barnard

  We strolled down the mews, which was paved with cobblestones and decidedly shabby, with walls that needed repainting and windows needing repointing. We were still in the era of shortages, remember, and the era when the well-heeled preferred not to show it. Timothy put his key in a door and led the way up some narrow, stuffy stairs. We passed immediately through the tiniest of hallways into a room wonderfully light, the walls washed pale blue, the furniture slim, modern, elegant—a table of rosewood and glass, chairs that looked as if they would wrap themselves round you when you sat down, and a few traditional pieces: an elegant escritoire against the wall, a long Regency dining table, a couple of family pictures. My memory—it is one of those scenes from that time that remain imprinted on my mind, and will be until I die—is of lightness, airiness, and of a brilliance that somehow laughed at the suburban clutter and knobbiness of the rooms in the detached Dulwich residence in which I had grown up. This was the perfect setting for Tim.

  I became conscious, as my mind photographed this room, of the noise of water.

  “Oh Lord, Heinz is still here,” said Tim. He raised his voice. “Heinz—the boat train goes in an hour!” He turned to me with an open smile. “Coffee?”

  I nodded nervously, suddenly wishing I hadn’t come. As he moved towards the little kitchen that I could see through the door at the far end of the living room the shower was turned off in the bathroom. Seconds later a boy appeared. He was perhaps nineteen or twenty, very fair, and sturdily built. Apart from a towel over this shoulder he was quite naked.

  “Sorry!” he said when he saw me, and disappeared through another door.

  I sat down on one of those spare, shapely chairs, and wondered if there were two bedrooms, and if Heinz was sleeping in the main one. I immediately cursed my naiveté. Of course he was sleeping in the main one. If Timothy was a man who went with guardsmen into the bushes in the park he would not invite handsome foreign boys to his flat and then sleep in chaste isolation.

  “Heinz is a friend of mine,” said Timothy, appearing at the door into the kitchen.

  “Oh yes?” I muttered miserably. “Is he German?”

  “That’s right. He’s from Dresden.”

  I nodded, as neutrally as possible. Then suddenly I was struck by a terrible thought, and I jumped up and faced him.

  “Dresden? But that’s in—”

  “East Germany? Do you know, I believe you’re right.”

  And grinning broadly he turned back into the kitchen.

  Weakly I sat down again, denied a confrontation. I felt stunned and angry. For God’s sake, East Germany! And here I was, brought into a ménage with an aristocratic Foreign Office diplomat and a young East German homosexual. I remember actually blushing at my predicament. All my middle-class and conservative instincts rose in horror. If he didn’t think about his own career, then he might have thought of mine. I blamed him bitterly, forgetting the warm glow I had felt at mingling in circles far above my own.

  The bedroom door opened again. Heinz was clothed now, in flannels and a red check shirt, with a khaki knapsack on his back. He looked now like a very ordinary, nice young man. He called out “I go,” and Timothy hurried from the kitchen to see him off. There was a large mirror on the wall in front of me, and I saw the two of them, in the hallway, put their arms around each other and kiss passionately on the lips.

  The phrase old ladies use, “I didn’t know where to put my face,” is really a very apt cliché, and vividly conveys how I felt. I wanted my whole body to disappear, to crumple itself up into a little ball and hide itself away under the sofa, but above all I wanted my face to be put somewhere out of sight, where its flushed, miserable embarrassment would not give away my feelings.

  The door shut, and Tim moved insouciantly back to the kitchen.

  “Do you like the flat?” he asked, with a voice full of ironic amusement, as he came back with the coffee.

  “Very much,” I stammered, as normally as possible. “It’s very . . . unusual. Stylish. It’s . . . it’s not the sort of furniture you see around these days.”

  Tim nodded, still with a smile on his lips.

  “I got most of it from an aunt,” he said, sitting down and pouring two cups of coffee. “She bought it in the twenties and thirties—you know, Bauhaus stuff, and imitations of it. She was something of a high-flyer, member of a rather fast set. Then a boyfriend was killed right at the start of the war, and suddenly she got religion. Sort of Anglican-cum-theosophy. For some reason she didn’t think the furniture suitable any longer. She got herself a lot of heavy oak stuff, with thick tablecloths more like altar cloths—very good for séances, I suppose.”

  “How odd,” I contributed in an unnatural voice.

  “The eccentricities of our noble families! But I shouldn’t mock her—she was very good to me. She died last year in the smog epidemic, and I came in for this flat as well.”

  He was walking round the room now, coffee cup in hand. I sat there, oddly close to tears, working up to something.

  “It’s a lovely room,” I muttered.

  “Yes. But it’s an interesting story, isn’t it? It shows how people regard their furniture: as a sort of stage set, to show off their view of themselves.”

  “So what does that make you?” I asked, marching through the conversational door he had opened.

  “Frank?” Tim hazarded. “Open? Free as air.”

  “You staged all that, didn’t you?” I blurted out suddenly.

  “Staged?” He stopped beside me and stood smiling down, but not ironically now.

  “You staged that scene with Heinz. To bring it all out into the open.”

  Tim sat down and sipped his coffee.

  “I thought Heinz would be gone, as a matter of fact. He’s a dear boy, but he has no sense of time. When he wasn’t I . . . I took advantage of the fact. I had been wondering whether to say something over the last week or two. As it was I just behaved as I would have if you’d not been here.”

  I looked down into my coffee cup, feeling desperately gauche, as indeed I was.

  “Why did you want to bring it out into the open?”

  “Why not? You’re the closest thing I have to a friend at the F.O. I don’t like having secrets from my friends.”

  “Wouldn’t it be better—”

  “To keep it firmly under wraps? I don’t think so.”

  I was angrily conscious that I was being given a secret, and a role, that I had not asked for and was most unwilling to accept. At last I spoke out, looking him full in the face.

  “For God’s sake don’t pretend you haven’t heard all the things people are saying about Guy Burgess. Or read what the newspapers are saying.”

  “Well?”

  “This . . . sort of thing makes you a security risk.”

  “Peter, I am not Guy Burgess. I’m Timothy Wycliffe. You don’t believe all negroes are the same, do you? Or Jews? Why should you believe all homosexuals are?”

  “But it leaves you wide open to blackmail!”

  “Come off it: blackmail is a danger if you’re a secret homosexual. And that’s what you’re trying to persuade me to be. And, by the by, there never was a less secret homosexual than Guy. I’d heard about him and his antics long before I joined the Foreign Office. Burgess spied for Russia because he was—still is, presumably—a communist, not because he was blackmailed into it.”

  “But your father’s a public figure. You know what the papers would do if they got hold of it.”

  He shrugged.

  “That’s something he’d have to handle. He’s a politician: he can take care of himself. As to me, I’d resign from the Foreign Office. So what? No great tragedy. I’m not sure I see my role in life as a top civil servant—or an ambassador, come to that. I came into the F.O. because I like ‘Abroad’ and haven’t seen nearly enough of it. I can think of lots of other careers I’d just as soon take up—and probably will.”

  I shook my head.

  “You’re underestimating the h
arm it would do your father’s career. But it’s the security aspect that worries me most.”

  Tim leaned forward in his chair, smiling persuasively.

  “Look, Peter: try to stop thinking of homosexuals as a group, eh? Like we were a Trade Union with a bloc vote at the Labour Party Conference. Because one homosexual was a bad security risk, it doesn’t mean that we all are. We’re individuals, left wing and right wing, happy and miserable, open and secret, rich and poor. Lump us all together and you prove you’ve got a News of the World sort of mind, and I don’t believe you have. Think about it, eh, Peter?”

  I nodded. I still felt miserable and uncertain, but I felt still more strongly that Timothy was someone whom I liked and would value as a friend.

  “But you will be careful, won’t you?” I insisted. “I mean, if Heinz had had access to Foreign Office papers—”

  “I don’t bring papers home. And if I did they’d be about matters so trivial no Russian agent would give three kopeks for them. Because that’s all you and I get to deal with, isn’t it? You know what—you’re a worrier, Peter.”

  He was right there too. That, until my recent forced retirement, was exactly what I was. I looked at my watch.

  “I must go to Lady Thorrington’s.”

  “That’s right. Never keep a Lady waiting. Be nice to her, Peter. She’s a dear old thing.”

  That was my first intimation that if you lived in Belgravia, even in a mews flat in Belgravia, you tended to know the other people living in Belgravia. It was at that time a sort of way-up-market village, with every other cottager a lord or lady. It also had a village system of communication and, as often as not, village standards of judgement.

  I walked into the rarefied atmosphere of the Square, pondering this and much else. I found the seedy dignity of the place fascinating: I couldn’t see how such an area could give off so strong a smell of money and privilege, yet undoubtedly it did. But as I took in the place and its feel I was also meditating on the scene I had just taken part in. I think that by the time I had walked around the Square and found Lady Thorrington at number forty-nine I had already decided that in the matter of Timothy Wycliffe I was not neutral. In my still-schoolboyish but honorable way I had declared myself to be on his side.

  • • •

  “How’s the great work going, Dad?” Jeremy asked when I came down to sherry this evening.

  “Badly,” I said. I explained that I had got some kind of writer’s block: that I was caught up in the early fifties, distracted by my memories of a man of no historical importance who had had little influence on my life. I told him about Tim, and described what happened that first time I went to his flat. As I should have expected, he was totally mystified.

  “But what was the big deal? He was a homosexual. So what?”

  “You young people have no historical sense,” I grumbled. “Homosexual practices were illegal then.”

  “So was parking on a double yellow line, I expect,” said Jeremy. “Just explain to me why you were so miserable, so embarrassed. For God’s sake, you must have been in your twenties by then. Long out of the nursery.”

  “You don’t understand,” I insisted. “It was a completely different climate then—climate of opinion, I mean. If you were caught you were put on trial, sent to jail.”

  “That wasn’t very sensible.”

  “No, of course it wasn’t. Everybody knew it was like locking Billy Bunter up in the tuck shop, but nevertheless that’s what they went on doing. And if you didn’t go to jail, there were the newspapers. You could be hounded out of practically any career. It was a different world.”

  “A very nasty one.”

  And of course he’s right. Perhaps the reason that memories of Timothy Wycliffe have distracted me is that he sums up the transition from the world I grew up in to the world we live in now. A symbol, a symptom, a fingerpost. I have a feeling that I’m not going to be able to get away from him now.

  3

  A GROUP of NOBLE DAMES

  The maid who came to the door of number forty-nine, Belgrave Square, was not dressed in the traditional manner, in black, with a neat white cap. Probably very few maids in 1951 were, except those in upper-class comedies, but somehow I’d imagined that Belgrave Square might still cling to the old uniform. She was dressed neatly but drably, in clothes that had seen a better peacetime, and she said “Mr. Proctor?” in an international interrogative that failed to hide her Central European accent. She looked anxiously at the envelope I was carrying, leaving me in no doubt that the papers I carried were for her.

  “Lady Thorrington is expecting you.”

  When she shut the door there was a rich, pregnant hush in the house. She led the way upstairs. Lady Thorrington’s sitting room was on the first floor. It was furnished in so exactly the way I had expected a sitting room in Belgravia to be furnished—shabby carpets, good pieces of furniture, dull pictures—that it was the woman I noticed, or rather the women, for she had a friend with her.

  Lady Thorrington was a fleshy woman, but it was friendly fat, not at all intimidating, and her open, welcoming manner did not conceal the fact that hers was a capable, direct personality, and that she usually got what she wanted. In her common sense was allied with persistence and single-mindedness. By contrast I thought her clothes unsuitably frilly—not in the eternal schoolgirl manner of Bubbles Rothermere, just a little too partyish. I realized later that they were old clothes, let out most capably. Like her maid she was wearing clothes from the prewar era. I suspect now that many of her own clothing coupons went to the Europeans she gave her time to protecting. I remember when she died, when I was a junior minister in the Heath government, how surprised I was at the length of her Times obituary, and the warmth and sorrow of the addenda to it sent in by correspondents, many of them with foreign names.

  “This is Lady Charlotte Wray.”

  Lady Charlotte was much more everyone’s idea of a grande Belgravia dame. Spare, dressed entirely in black, and dogmatic in her speech, she was not a person one would lightly consider disputing with. Whether she was as wise or perceptive as she was dogmatic I was not sure. But she was to the life what we now think of as the Wendy Hiller part.

  “Business first,” said Lady Thorrington, making me wonder nervously what was to come second. She gestured me to a seat and sat down herself with a businesslike air. I took from the envelope the papers which notified the granting of residence rights to Käthe Möller and to her son and daughter-in-law Klaus and Hildegard. I explained the exceptional circumstances which had persuaded the Foreign Office and the Home Office to grant these rights. I saw Lady Thorrington nodding in a way that suggested not that she was acknowledging them to be exceptional, but that she was storing them up as loopholes for future use, for she maintained with various government departments a continuous yet courteous warfare on behalf of people they would much have preferred to keep out of the country. Finally I explained that the three would be eligible for naturalisation in five years time. Lady Thorrington leaned back in her chair.

  “Most satisfactory,” she said.

  “Most,” agreed Lady Charlotte. “I shall have great pleasure in giving the news to Klaus and Hildegard.”

  Lady Thorrington smiled and went to the door. I had guessed that Käthe was the woman who had let me in, and she was waiting if not listening outside. I heard uninhibited expressions of joy, and heard her tripping downstairs with an unlikely lightness in a woman of her years. No doubt she went straight to the phone to give the news to Klaus and Hildegard. The pair, I later learnt, were cook and chauffeur to Lady Charlotte Wray, but they did not stop long with her, and the last I heard of him he was Claud Miller and Conservative Mayor of Lewisham. Käthe was with Lady Thorrington until she died.

  Now Lady Thorrington came back in, a smile on her face, and closed the door.

  “Sherry,” said Lady Charlotte.

  She said it in a downright, regal way that left no option for refusal, though it was not hers to offer. Lad
y Thorrington, still in high good humour, went to the decanter and glasses on the cabinet by the window and poured three glasses. The sherry was a brown, dry Amontillado, no more common then than it is today. There was no alternative—it was clearly their drink, and very good it was too. When I had taken my glass and sipped it in what I imagined to be the approved manner, I realized that I was seated on one side of the fireplace and that they were seated on the other side, and that both gave every appearance of being about to question me. An inquisition of Ladies! I wished myself a hundred miles from Belgrave Square.

  “You find your work at the Foreign Office interesting?” began Lady Charlotte. The Commencement Anodyne. I replied in my earnest, overgrown-schoolboy manner.

  “Yes, very interesting. It’s such an exciting time to be starting there. Of course, I haven’t got to deal with anything of real importance yet.” The moment it was out of my mouth I realized where that led.

  “Only with tiresome old ladies whose business ought to be conducted through the Post Office or the telephone service,” said Lady Thorrington with a smile.

  “Oh— I’m sorry—of course I didn’t mean—”

  “Of course you meant it, and quite right too.”

  We all sipped, to cover my discomfiture.

  “No doubt there were others who started with you and who are also on the bottom rung of the ladder,” said Lady Charlotte. The Approach Oblique.

  “Yes, of course,” I murmured. “Several others.”

  “The Foreign Office, I believe, recruits its young men from all sorts of schools these days,” she went on. The Diplomatic Side-Step. “Quite democratic.”

  “I went to Dulwich,” I murmured.

  She nodded, as if this confirmed her assessment of the new democratic spirit in the Foreign Office. Indeed, I think I was half-inclined to accept her assessment myself, until I saw a tiny twinkle in Lady Thorrington’s eye and realized how ridiculous it was. Realized, too, that Lady Thorrington kept her friend as much for her own amusement as anything else.