A Scandal in Belgravia

by Robert Barnard

  “Young Wycliffe started there not long ago, I believe.”

  At last Lady Charlotte had come to the Approach Direct.

  “Yes, he did.”

  “Isn’t he some kind of relation of yours?” Lady Thorrington asked her friend. Lady Charlotte gestured dismissively.

  “Something. Second cousin twice removed, something of that sort. We are all so intermarried that you only count people as related if you actually keep up with them. And as far as the Wycliffes are concerned, my father . . . chose not to.”

  It was said in a tight-lipped way. I should mention that Lady Charlotte’s father was Earl of Bodmin, a generally undistinguished peer, and her husband was Julian Wray, a minor minister in a Baldwin government, a man from whom Lady Charlotte had become more or less semi-detached in the course of her marriage. He had died the previous year, and her mourning was for him. Lady Thorrington’s husband had been Ambassador in Vienna at some time in the thirties, and had sent home any number of warning messages to the British government, which it had ignored. His widow’s work with Displaced Persons (what we today would call refugees, I suppose—one of the few instances of our language becoming less euphemistic in recent years) was a continuation of his.

  “We saw you, in point of fact,” she now said.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “We saw you and Timothy Wycliffe arrive.” She gestured to a corner, where there sat a coffee-cream coloured cat, all soft fur and pugnacious expression. “We were exercising Shai-pur in the gardens. We saw you arrive.”

  The gardens were the fenced-off and locked area in the centre of the Square, exclusive to the Square’s residents. There were small trees and shrubs there, providing cover. It was perfect for observing without being observed.

  “Ah,” I said.

  “Is he an especially close friend of yours?” asked Lady Charlotte. The voice was bright, neutral, but the question was loaded.

  I had taken my decision.

  “Yes, we’re very good friends.”

  “Yet you had not been to his flat before.”

  I was unable to think of anything to say to that. Did they keep a twenty-four-hour-a-day watch on his flat? Or were they in touch with MI5, who did? After a moment Lady Thorrington took pity on my disconcertment and explained.

  “As you were coming along Halkin Street from the Palace we saw that you would have walked straight into the Square if Timothy Wycliffe had not stopped you and pointed to the mews. We deduced from that that you had not been there before.”

  “You would make very good detectives,” I said.

  Lady Charlotte was inclined to look affronted, but Lady Thorrington nodded almost complacently.

  “Yes, I think we would.”

  There was a silence, apparently left for me to explain. I explained.

  “We have only known each other since we both started working at the Foreign Office. When I said we were friends I meant that we were good friends at work.”

  “Ah.” Lady Charlotte’s voice had a ring of satisfaction. She prepared the Thrust Deadly. “Because that young man does have a great many friends.”

  “I’m sure he does.”

  “Unsuitable friends.”

  I sipped my sherry, plucking up courage.

  “He has not asked me to advise him on his choice of friends.”

  “Don’t—” began Lady Charlotte, but Lady Thorrington interrupted her.

  “Of course you think us interfering old busybodies. And you’re quite right. What else is there to be at our ages? The fact is, it’s not just us. The Square is beginning to talk. The place is full of people who know his father, and naturally they take an interest in young Timothy.”

  “For the past week,” said Lady Charlotte, her voice sinking to a sort of bass hiss, making her sound like an asthmatic cat, “he has had staying at his flat a young German.”

  “The war is over,” I said.

  “I am not referring to the war. I am referring to unnatural vice. To someone of my generation young German boys mean only one thing: that poet chappie and his friend, mixing with the lowest of the low in the bars of Berlin.”

  “Auden,” said Lady Thorrington. “W. H.”

  I breathed an internal sigh of relief. They seemed to know nothing about Heinz’s East German origins.

  “I’m too young to know anything about that,” I said. “I expect if that side of Berlin survived the Nazis coming to power it must have been flattened in 1945. It is rather hard to imply that young German men should be shunned just because of some poet twenty years ago, isn’t it?”

  “Of course people would not be talking—even people in Belgravia would not be talking—if the young man were not one of a succession,” said Lady Thorrington. “That is what we are so worried about. Young Wycliffe is such a likable young man, or seems so.”

  “He is.”

  “Bad blood,” said Lady Charlotte. Lady Thorrington shook her head, smiling gently.

  “I’ve always said that there are bad people and bad upbringings, but no such thing as bad blood,” she said. “Or good, come to that. What we felt—”

  “Yes?”

  “—was that perhaps you could give him—not a warning, of course we have no right to give him that—but if you could just tell him that people are talking—”

  “I see. Could we be a little more open about this? What exactly are they saying?”

  Lady Charlotte clicked her tongue, as if she felt that she had already been more than sufficiently explicit. But Lady Thorrington said: “That Timothy Wycliffe is a homosexual who consorts with extremely dubious young men, and that if he continues to do this openly he will ruin his career in the Foreign Office.”

  I set down my sherry glass, and thought for a moment. Then I picked my way carefully through this minefield.

  “We have just . . . in point of fact . . . been talking about that. And I think I can say . . . that Timothy is aware of the dangers . . . and I would guess too that he realizes that people are talking.”

  Lady Thorrington nodded, but Lady Charlotte looked most dissatisfied and said: “Is that all you’ve got to say? Do you mean you haven’t warned the silly fellow?”

  “Lady Charlotte, Timothy Wycliffe is slightly senior to me in the Foreign Office, and immensely superior to me in experience, worldly wisdom, and almost anything else you care to name. Any warning that could be given I have given. Now what he does is up to him.”

  “Then can’t you do something practical? Find some nice young gel for him?”

  I caught once more a glimmer of amusement in Lady Thorrington’s eyes, and I was saved from having to reply when she said:

  “I imagine there were girls aplenty throwing themselves at him when he was at university. If he didn’t get interested then, I don’t imagine he will now.”

  Lady Charlotte shook her head.

  “Where did he go to university?” she demanded of me.

  “Cambridge, I believe.”

  “Ah! I knew there was something.”

  I was mystified at the time, though I realize now that people in the know were already beginning to get suspicious of Cambridge. I should add, to avoid adding further obloquy to that much-maligned university, that Timothy Wycliffe once told me that he was a regularly practising homosexual by the time he was fifteen, at Eton. (Eton, it sometimes seems to me, gets off very lightly from the sort of generalizations that Cambridge falls victim to.) Anyway, nobody could accuse Cambridge of making Timothy Wycliffe a spy, for he never was one.

  By now it seemed to me that I had put up with their inquisition as long as I reasonably could be expected to. I finished my sherry and stood up.

  “I really must be going. You’ve been most hospitable.”

  “Nonsense. We’ve grilled you unmercifully. But our intentions were at least half-way good. Charlotte is interested in him because he is—remotely—family, and I’m interested in him because I’ve met him once or twice, at parties and so on, and he seemed an exceptionally ni
ce and able young man.”

  “He is.”

  When I had responded to Lady Charlotte’s stately farewell, my hostess followed me down the stairs, and it was she, not Käthe, who let me out. At the door she gave me a grin that was almost girlish as she said:

  “You handled that very well.”

  It was the first compliment I ever received on my tact and diplomacy. In after years, as my political career burgeoned, I received many, so much so that I began thinking of myself as Tact and Diplomacy Proctor—a dull stick, I felt. As I walked down the steps and out into the Square I thought about it, preening myself mildly.

  The Belgrave Square of those days was very unlike the place as it is today. Now it is very uniform, spotlessly well-kept, and smells of Tenants’ Associations and Keeping Up Property Values. It is all a little unreal, like a film set. Then, as I said earlier, it was a place where genteel shabbiness predominated over discreet smartness: there was a whiff of many different kinds of wealth, though solid, titled, Conservative English wealth still was in the ascendent. As I walked around it and up towards Hyde Park Corner I meditated on the scene I had just played a part in. These people all knew each other, or of each other. Often they were connected in some way with each other: by family or marriage, by business connections, by political activity. They were connected with each other and they protected each other. They formed a tightly knit group which felt that, united, they could take on the world. Or, maybe, rule the world. The scene I had just been a part of at Lady Thorrington’s had been an example of them protecting their own.

  There was, the more I thought about it, an ironic ambiguity about Tim’s position. He was more exposed than he would have been anywhere else in London, because he was surrounded by people of his own kind. On the other hand, those people, for that very reason, were bent on protecting him. I suppose you could say that on balance the situation worked to his advantage: the conduct of his private life never became anything worse than a scandal in Belgravia. Except, of course, briefly, when he was murdered.

  4

  LORDS A-LEAPING

  I have found a way out of my writer’s block.

  Really it’s only an avoidance mechanism, but avoidance is something politicians become good at. I have decided to forget about my doings in the fifties and sixties: my years in industry, my marriage, the four years in the Commons from ’62 to ’66. Instead I have leapt ahead to my return to the Commons in 1970, the first years of the Heath government, and my first taste of office, after the reshuffle of 1972. I have just been writing about my first days as a junior minister at the Home Office—waxed lyrical, in fact: said that the joy and pride I felt when I was offered the job could only be compared to my elation when my elder son Reggie was born. Have I gone over the top there? Compared the ridiculous with the sublime? From the point of view of me, today—yes I have. But from the point of view of me, then? I fear not. From the first I was always a politician who wanted office, wanted to get things done. And the doing of these political things filled my life quite satisfactorily for many years, though it is true that by the time I left office—was relieved of my office—I was feeling like an old man in a dry month.

  Now the writing is coming easily again, and somehow the decision leaves me free to pursue the wraithe of Timothy Wycliffe—who he was, how he lived and how he died.

  I know how he died, of course. I know what people in the party say when the subject comes up: “Remember that son of Lord John Wycliffe? Done to death by his boyfriend. Terrible. Tragic.” And as often as not they will add: “It only goes to show—” without specifying what. But beyond that I know nothing: simply the bare facts of the death of someone I counted as a friend, someone whose joy in life, frankness, and openmindedness I admired and—I hope—allowed to influence me. Today I got down my Burke’s Peerage and looked up his father. It’s an old one, but it does. Lord John Wycliffe, younger son of the Marquess of Redmond, was given a Life Peerage in 1971 as Baron Edmonton, but this is too late for my Burke. He gets in as a younger son, and his children are listed as James (b. 15 Jan. 1925, m. Caroline Weatherby 1950), Timothy (b. 2 Sept. 1927; d. 1956) and Marjorie (b. 4 March 1936). An inch and a half of a line in a reference book—Timothy’s life in digest form. Yet somehow Housman could not have made it more pathetic.

  I had an appointment at the House of Lords today with Lord Butterworth, who is one of the government’s Deputy Whips in the upper house. He got junior office at the same time as I did, and there was a minor matter connected with that time I wanted to talk over. I was told he could see me on Wednesday, today, but that he would be frightfully busy, and I’d have to catch him on the wing in the lobby some time between two and three. Even as plain Jim Butterworth he had been rather a self-important little twit, and it was clear ennoblement had not changed him.

  So there I was, soon after two, in Pugin’s lovely little lobby, hanging around and exchanging salutations with friends—as often as not ex-ministers like myself, men who, after years of being threatened with the axe, had finally felt it fall. It makes for a cheery yet slightly uneasy camaraderie between us. One of them merrily waved and shouted, “See you here soon, eh?” There have been rumours of a Life Peerage for me, and counterrumours too. The then Prime Minister was known to be displeased when I decided to resign my seat shortly after being relieved of office, thus forcing a by-election in which we did badly. I don’t care much either way. I have more than enough to do, with my business interests, the various worthy bodies I am on the boards of, my memoirs. I would not be an active member of the upper house. Indeed, an active Lord seems to be almost a contradiction in terms.

  Though in fact I soon became aware that this was a very busy day indeed for the Lords. People were bustling everywhere, and I kept recognising the faces of people I had believed, and in several cases hoped, had died years ago. Most of them were old, or gave the impression of long disuse. It just had to be one of those days when Bertie Denham was bussing (or rather Rollsing) in decrepit peers from the backwoods to ensure the passing of a particularly unpopular piece of legislation. I had my Times with me and managed to turn it to the Parliamentary page. I was right: the Lords were debating the Student Loans question.

  And that of course was the burden that was sung by Jim Butterworth when finally he bustled up.

  “Peter! Wonderful to see you again! Sorry I can’t spare more than a few moments, but you see how it is.”

  I might have been a constituent whose support he valued but whose company he could dispense with. I felt a pang: how totally our positions had been reversed from the time when I was a Minister and he could be expected to lard any exchanges with a coating of fawn. I suppressed the pang as soon as I felt it: it is a far, far better life that I live now . . .

  I put my little problem concerning my early office under Edward Heath, and he confirmed various impressions in my mind. I’ll say this about Butterworth: he’s a twit, but a twit with a good memory. He was just shifting from foot to foot, preparatory to going about his business of whipping in the noble geriatrics when he hit on an unlucky topic.

  “Memoirs going well, old chap?”

  His expression said “Please don’t tell me,” but I was annoyed by the “old chap” which expressed a matiness there certainly never had been between us and I replied: “Not bad, now that I’ve jumped a few years forward. I’d somehow got hung up on an old friend of mine, Timothy Wycliffe.”

  He swivelled back to face me, caught on the wing. For the first time I had his full attention.

  “Timothy Wycliffe?”

  “That’s right. Lord John Wycliffe’s son. We were at the F.O. together in the early fifties.”

  “But what on earth are you writing about him for?”

  Jim Butterworth’s face was contorted, as if with distaste.

  “I didn’t say I was writing about him. In fact, thinking about him was preventing my writing anything for a time.” He wasn’t taking it in. It was like talking to a very perturbed brick wall. I added: �
�What’s all the fuss about?”

  He spluttered, his face going even redder than normal.

  “Well really, old boy, I don’t think you’re entirely naive, are you? You know very well where the government stands in the polls at the moment. And if there’s one thing that always endangers a Conservative government it’s a sex scandal.”

  That was true, though I am sometimes inclined to wonder, knowing my former colleagues, whether the present government is not more likely to be brought down by a financial rather than a sexual scandal.

  “Timothy Wycliffe died over thirty years ago,” I protested. “He wasn’t an MP, nor even a Conservative at the time I knew him.”

  “His father was an MP and a minister. You know perfectly well the sort of mud people throw at us whenever there’s a scandal in high places. The media pretend to support us, but they go after that sort of thing like pigs after truffles. I’d have thought that you of all people could have seen that that’s an affair that is still best kept under wraps.”

  I shrugged. Jim Butterworth is the sort of person it is hardly worth arguing with. He’s like the woman in the Thurber story who was not to be convinced by mere proof. It was his undoing as a junior minister.

  “I expect that’s where I shall leave it. There’s no reason nowadays why anyone except me should be interested in Timothy. I was wondering about his family. I don’t remember when his father died.”

  “Died? He’s not dead! He’s here.”

  “Here?”

  “In the H— Oh my God! Keep your voice down. There he is.”

  I turned to where he was looking. Coming from the direction of the Chamber, on his way to the Dining Room, was a very old, shrunken peer, walking very uncertainly, and aided along by someone I took to be a fellow peer only marginally less decrepit. I could only see the side of his face, but I had the impression of a strong face now caved in, of a robust body now shrunken and tremulous. I could feel the hackles on the back of my neck rising. I was reminded of Mrs. Alving at the door to the dining room. Like her I shivered and said: “Ghosts!”