A Scandal in Belgravia (19 page)

Nothing would persuade me to drive in the States, so hiring a car was out. There was no option but to take a taxi to the address given in the folder Reggie had handed me. (The report, by the way, was admirably full, specifying the length of time Frank Andrews claimed to have been in the States—over thirty years—and details of his wife Grace and his children, his business career, and so on. The report mentioned the visits every two or three years of his sister, either with her husband
or with one or other of her children. It said specifically that he had no criminal record, nor did any of his associates in the San Diego area have any suspicion of a criminal past. The report was signed Noel P. Rosegarden, which struck me as an odd name for a private detective—though no odder than Pinkerton, I suppose.)

I asked the taxi to set me down ten numbers short of Frank Andrews's address, and stood waiting for him to drive off. It was rather a pleasant area—prosperous if not affluent, each house surrounded by a good garden, plenty of trees, with a view out to the intense blue of the Pacific, where yachts and warships mingled peaceably and the sea melted into the sky. The houses themselves were one-story, unimaginative but comfortable—looking not unlike the houses in Australian suburbs. The air was warm but fresh. I walked slowly down, watching and listening to the sounds—commercial radio here, children playing there. Slowly I approached 1468 Riverside Drive, taking my time, keeping cool and collected. Like the other houses, it was a one-story, with a little archway over the front door and a laburnum tree in the small patch of front garden. A low hedge surrounded it in the English manner, and I walked past the gate and round the corner, so that I could see it had a good stretch of lawn and flower beds at the back, as well as a stunning view of the harbour. I walked along by the hedge, taking in the flowers and shrubs, the air of peace and comfort. I stopped with a start when I realized the garden was not empty.

A middle-aged man was playing in a sandpit by the back door with a small child. He was stocky, well set-up, and only just beginning to gain flesh. He was playing tenderly with the tot, but when I involuntarily stopped his eye was caught. People walk around less in America, and I think that was what made him look at me—our eyes, in fact, met. There was a pause of just a second or two as I wondered what to do, and
then he got up and walked over, extending his hand over the hedge.

“I think you must be my fate,” he said.

For all my resolutions about keeping cool I found myself totally at a loss, as once I was years ago when I was accused on television of lying, and all I could do was splutter. Faced with his calm directness all I could do now was mutter “not at all” and “please believe I have no intention—” My idiocies came out as splutter. He was the one who was cool.

“You must be Peter Proctor.”

“That's right.”

“My sister sent me a newspaper picture.”

“But you never thought of . . . taking flight?”

“Good Lord, no.” He gestured deprecatingly. “I'm much too old to take flight. I've lived with this a long time, and always at the back of my mind there was the feeling that one day, somehow, somebody was going to come up and confront me with it. Do you know I've never once been recognised in the States? Not a tourist from Nottingham saying I reminded him of someone, nor a technician from the BBC scratching his head and wondering. I'm glad it's happened like this—something big, a confrontation, rather than something awkward and petty. Oh no—I'm not running away.”

He spoke with an American accent, but it may have been the sort of accent, like Alistair Cooke's, that sounds American to British ears and British to Americans. Certainly there was the odd expression now and then in his speech that reminded me of his long-ago origins. It was an attractive blend—but there was a great deal about the man that made me think I understood Tim's feelings towards him. There was a tough, uncompromising side to him, but there was also, still, that blinding honesty that his sister had spoken of. I suspected that he had done well in business, but not
too
well: the honesty, beyond a certain point, would have prevented that.

“I'll let you in the front door.”

I walked round and he let me through a house that was well, but comfortably, furnished, with family mementos and photographs dotted everywhere—on shelves, television, piano. There was a conventional but convincing painting of a pretty woman hanging over the fireplace that I took to be his wife.

“Grace has taken the older grandchildren to the aquarium. I'm standing duty with Emma. We're lucky—our eldest girl is married to a naval man and lives in San Diego. Something to drink? Coffee? Beer? Orange juice?”

“Orange juice sounds like a good idea.”

He put some halved oranges into a fearsome machine, which after great heavings and groanings produced a glass of rich yellow liquid. He put sugar in it and handed it to me.

“Who exactly are you?” he asked. “I'm sure I should know, but I don't. And what is your interest in this?”

It was said in that direct, honest way that made me uncomfortable.

“I was a cabinet minister until a year ago. I worked for a time with Tim in the Foreign Office. I'm writing my memoirs, and it was that that got me interested in his death.”

“Did I ever meet you in the old days? Were you one of his boyfriends?”

I shook my head. Both of us, miraculously, were perfectly unembarrassed.

“No, I was never that. But I was a friend. I think Tim trusted me.”

He nodded and led the way out into the garden. He took two toys from a little pile, and went down on his haunches and tenderly started the little girl playing with them. He waited, watching her, then took me over to a garden seat and sat down.

“Tim trusted me too,” he said. “That's a bitter memory to have. . . . Surely Tim can't figure much in your memoirs? He was never an important man.”

“No. It's not that he was important to me in a political sense—”

“He wouldn't have liked your government, would he?”

“No. . . . It's more in a personal way he's important. . . . His presence disturbed me, if you can understand that. The memory of him—his gaiety and honesty—wouldn't go away.”

Andy Forbes nodded, looking down the length of the garden and the years.

“You know, for years now I've tried to think of him as he was earlier, not . . . not on that last day. I think that's what he would have wanted. . . . Yes, I know people are always saying that to justify doing any damned thing they feel like doing, but I
do
think that's how Tim would have liked to be remembered. Tim was never morbid, didn't dwell on things . . .”

“Tim accepted things—himself, other people,” I agreed.

“People here—in America, in California in particular—love analysing themselves, going to shrinks, getting into groups for therapy. It doesn't seem to help them very much. Me, after a time, I just said: that's something that I'm going to have to put behind me. It was heartless, maybe, but necessary. And I have put it behind me. That's why I can remember some of the happier times with Tim.”

“Is it difficult to talk about?”

“Yes. . . . Very difficult.”

“Shall I ask questions?”

“We can try it that way. I don't know if you'll ask the right ones—the ones that might make you understand.”

“Where did you meet?”

“That's easy. A theatre in Leicester Square. They were showing
The Man Who Knew Too Much.
Tim had seen the earlier version—he went to film clubs and that, I just went to the pictures. Anyway, we started talking.”

“Was he chatting you up?”

“No . . . Yes . . . It's difficult to say, really. He probably chose the seat next to me because he liked the look of me. He probably had bed at the back of his mind because it usually was. No disrespect to him. But he was also genuinely friendly,
genuinely enjoying chatting with a stranger. Certainly as far as I was concerned I was just chatting with a nice fellow.”

“So he didn't make any . . . sexual signals?”

“If he had I wouldn't have received them. As far as that went I was completely green.”

“Yes. I was the same when I first knew Tim.”

“So that was it. We had a drink afterwards in a pub in St. Martin's Lane.” He smiled reminiscently, as if he was talking about another world. “Of course I'd realised by then that he was completely out of my class. If I was bothered by anything—if I felt at all awkward about being with him—it was about that. That's why I was surprised when he telephoned.”

“He
contacted
you?”

“Oh, of course. I'd never have thought of contacting him, though he did give me his card. He rang me at the BBC. . . .” Andy Forbes paused and thought. “I said just now I was completely green as far as homosexuality was concerned. Thinking it over that can't have been so. I don't just mean playground jokes. I'd naturally come across it at the BBC. People brushing against me once too often, the hand on the behind, the veiled invitation. But that was always showbiz people—
obvious
homosexuals. You could either laugh or get aggressive, but it was all sort of outside you, not part of your life. With Tim it was different.”

“Yes. I felt that.”

“Gradually we started going around a bit together—films, football matches, restaurants. I went to my first live play with Tim. I took him round his first television studio. And I went to his flat . . . It was like another world.”

“Did you feel jealous?”

“Jealous?” There was no hesitation in his vigorous shake of the head. “No, I'm sure I didn't. You couldn't be jealous of Tim. I think I just thought: I'd like something like this one day.”

“I think some of the boys he picked up did feel jealous.”

“I wasn't a boy he'd picked up. I was a friend. I knew Tim. I knew he worked hard, didn't flaunt his money . . . In fact, I never knew if he was wealthy or not, only that he'd inherited this flat in a posh part of London.”

“And all this time there was no sex?”

He turned to look at me.

“How did you know that?”

“Someone told me.”

“The newspapers had a different story. It upset my family no end. . . . But it's true. There was the odd advance—sort of ‘why don't you try it?'—but I just stamped firmly on it and said I wasn't interested. But of course I knew by then that he was a homosexual, and that he slept around a lot.”

“And that didn't worry you?”

He thought for a moment before answering.

“I think it must have. I enjoyed a lot going around with him, being taught about films, food, living the high life in a mild sort of way. But I think it did worry me, because I remember saying to one of the guys at work: ‘There's this chap I know who's a homosexual, sleeps around like nobody's business. They'd clap him in jail if they could get him on a charge.' I shouldn't have mentioned him. After that there was a lot of jokes about arse-bandits, poofs, pressure on me to prove I was one of the blokes, hetero as they come. You know how it is. . . .”

“Yes. But there must have been pressure from Tim in the other direction.”

“Not at first. We went around, I met his friends—some of them I liked, some disliked, as you'd expect. The ones I disliked tended to be lame ducks he looked after, or limpets. I even met his sister one night—a lovely girl. Tim was very fond of her, like I was—am—of mine. . . . I was enjoying myself, enjoying life . . . Then—”

His face was screwed up. He was obviously finding this difficult.

“Yes?”

“Then I realized he was in love with me.”

“How?”

“Looks. The way he treated me compared to the way he treated the guys he just slept with casually. Eventually he told me: ‘You do realize I'm in love with you, don't you?' ”

“How did you react?”

He smiled shyly.

“What was that old stand-up comic's line? ‘I don't wish to know that.' It was a bit like that, though I was—or thought I was—a lot more sophisticated then than when I'd come up from Nottingham. I think I said: ‘I know. I'm sorry, but it's no go.' ”

“You didn't think about stopping seeing him?”

“No. I suppose you find that surprising. I think I stood him up a couple of times, to cool it, but no. I liked him. . . .” He put his head in his hands. “Of course I know now that's what I should have done. God knows I know it now! Everything would have been different . . . but then it hardly occurred to me.”

“When was this?”

“When it came out into the open? Oh, about a month before the . . . before it happened. Tim was very busy at work, I remember, and for a week or two that helped to cool it. But he was also very mixed up with a pal of his, a chap called Terry Cotterley, with plans to set up some kind of—I don't know—club or organization, to press for reform of the law on homosexuality.”

“Yes, the Hatherley Trust—a sort of pressure group.”

“Oh, did it get set up? I didn't know. Anyway, I wasn't too happy about that. Seemed to bring it all too much out in the open for my liking. I wondered whether I wouldn't have to drop Tim if he did go and work for them. . . . Anyway, cooling it didn't really work after a time. Tim was still working at full pressure—it was the lead-up to Suez—but any free time
he had he'd telephone me, get me to see him. I was sorry for him. He was like a kettle that was boiling away and no one would take it off the stove. He was against the Suez thing, but he was working for the government that was doing it. . . . Then there was me.”

“Was he pressuring you?”

“Yes . . . Yes, after a time that's what he was doing. Pleading with me to ‘try it.' Saying I just couldn't understand it if I hadn't done it. That he knew I was fond of him, and that it was natural to go to bed with him, if only to please him. All of it was true in a way, or true for him. I was so sorry for him. I was really torn apart. That's how the situation was the day he died.”