The House of Rumour (31 page)

Quite by chance Clarissa had seen something of Fleming in town. She was an old friend of his wife; Ann Fleming,
née
Charteris, granddaughter of the 11th Earl of Wemyss, once widowed, once divorced, now on her third marriage, a formidable creature of London society and its most impressive hostess. Her parties brought together the elite of cultural and political life. She was elegant and imperious, with a sharp and outrageous tongue. Clarissa confided to me that she found Ann more than a touch frightening.

The Flemings had set up house in Victoria Square and on the night we were invited there the guests included Cyril Connolly, Lucian Freud, Hugh Gaitskell and Teddy Thursby. But no sign of Fleming. As it got late the drawing room became packed with people. I found myself standing out in the hallway. Clarissa was in the heart of the throng, looking on as Ann Fleming told a joke to James Pope-Hennessy. I heard the front door slam and someone brushed past me, calling a terse greeting to the hostess, then turning to mount the staircase.

‘Come and join us, Commander!’ a voice shouted above the drone.

The man sighed and shook his head. As he looked up I saw it was Fleming.

‘Good Lord, Trevelyan,’ he said. ‘What on earth are you doing here?’

‘I was rather hoping to see you.’

‘Sorry. I can’t abide these gab-fests. No place for our sort of talk. Come to lunch at Boodle’s.’

We made a date and he thundered upstairs. I wandered back to the doorway. Ann Fleming was telling everybody about the routine at their house in Jamaica.

‘Well, darling, I’m in one room, daubing away with a paintbrush, and he’s in the other, hammering out the pornography.’

Over lunch Fleming confided to me that it stung a little that Ann and her literary friends rather looked down on his novels. And despite achieving some commercial success, he felt trapped by his own creation.

‘He began as a sort of empty alter ego,’ he said of his central character. ‘I mean, I even gave him a slave name. But now he’s becoming the master.’

He shrugged and made a small wave of the hand, indicating that we should change the subject. He lit another cigarette. I noticed then how much he was smoking. He seemed constantly wreathed in fumes, smouldering away.

He wanted to talk about the
Rote Kapelle
or Red Orchestra, a series of anti-Nazi espionage rings that had operated in Germany in the early years of the war. He was working out the background for a Russian character in his new book, a spymaster who would have had dealings with the Red Orchestra. We discussed the theory that one of the networks was a Service operation to get Ultra decrypted information about Operation Barbarossa to the Soviets in a way untraceable to our code-breaking system and in a form that might not be dismissed by Stalin as British disinformation.

‘This would have been just before the Hess flight,’ I said.

‘So?’

‘Perhaps the Service was also using the Red Orchestra to send messages to the Deputy Führer.’

Fleming smiled.

‘That’s an amusing idea,’ he said, as if it were an idea for one of his plots. ‘A faked astrological chart giving him the most auspicious time for his mad mission. A soothsayer insisting that he must go now, before it was too late!’

We laughed.

‘Of course,’ Fleming went on, in a lowered tone, ‘there was a Gestapo round-up of all the astrologers a month after he landed in Scotland. It was called
Aktion Hess
.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. So if you were to find somebody who had been picked up in that
and
had a connection to the Red Orchestra, then you might be on to something.’

He gave me that bloodhound look of his. One was never really sure how serious he was. After lunch we wandered out on to Pall Mall: a bright boozy day, a truant afternoon. Fleming broke into a wheezing cough. All at once he looked haggard, his noble face drawn and blotched, his blue eyes dulled to grey. I stupidly asked if he was all right.

‘Yes, yes,’ he snapped, lighting up another of his hand-made cigarettes. ‘He’s killing me, that’s all.’

I didn’t know what he meant but laughed almost out of politeness. As we parted, he told me that he was off to his place in Jamaica the following week.

‘You must come and visit some time,’ he called out as a parting shot.

At this point my career in the Service was on the rise. I’d just been promoted to section chief of a new department at Head Office. A more permanent job in London meant that Clarissa and I had to decide what we were going to do about our fragile marriage. I begged her to let us give it another try. We got a charming flat in Cheyne Walk with a view of the river. Clarissa once said that she liked to watch the tide go out, because it gave her the promise of escape if things went wrong.

Then she got pregnant. It was like a miracle. It seemed as if everything now would be all right. She had desperately wanted a child and this finally seemed to prove my worth as a husband.

When she miscarried I couldn’t help feeling that this was some dreadful judgement on us both. She had an awful time of it and for a while she was quite ill. I felt helpless, overwhelmed by grief and guilt. In a pitiful way it brought us closer than we had ever been. But only for a while. Once she had recuperated Clarissa grew cold and distant to me. And I became anxious in her presence, wary of any kind of intimacy.

I threw myself into work. There was plenty to do. A comprehensive restructuring of a Service that had been riddled with defections, double agents, security leaks. In an atmosphere of rivalry and suspicion all the best intelligence officers were keeping their heads down. And when there wasn’t quite enough to keep me occupied at Head Office, I pursued my amateur obsession with the Hess case and Operation Mistletoe. My senior position gave me access to all manner of files and documents.

In the meantime Clarissa got used to my coming home late. She knew that the Service insisted I be on call at all hours. I’m sure she suspected I occasionally played away, just as I presumed she had an opportune affair now and then. Discretion was our unspoken rule. I tried not to even think about what my wife might be up to. And what I did hardly counted as infidelity. I hadn’t even planned it.

I’d often go for an evening drink with some of my staff but one night, after working into the early hours of the morning with an officer on secondment from Counter-Subversion, I ended up in a seedy after-hours club in Paddington. There was a cabaret of sorts: girls took turns to dance on stage or mime to gramophone records. They then sat out in the audience at the end of their ‘act’. It was obviously a knocking shop, but there was something more than usually exaggerated in the make-up and demeanour of the tarts as they plied their trade.

It was just when my colleague gave me a nudge and a knowing smile that I realised what was going on. The illusion was suddenly revealed, yet still intriguing. They were all female impersonators, and very good ones too. This was a silly entertainment for my fellow officer, at most a voyeuristic pleasure. I laughed along with him heartily as we got mildly drunk together. But a fortnight later I went back there on my own.

I found that I liked the uncertainty, the ambiguity. It made sense of that unsettling feeling I’d had in Malaya all those years ago. It was the pretence as much as anything, the act of disguise. I didn’t feel I was being unfaithful because what I was doing wasn’t entirely real. I certainly didn’t consider myself homosexual. I think you’ll find that most men who occasionally have sex with male transvestites feel the same way. It was a game: colluding in someone else’s deception, escaping from one’s own self. There’s an unbreakable code within, like that curious line that Iago utters at the beginning of
Othello
:
I am not what I am
. I’ve long since given up trying to decipher myself. Curiosity becomes its own definition.

This activity was a high-level security risk, of course, and at a time of the greatest paranoia in the Service. And I enjoyed the danger and the sense of transgression. But I wasn’t stupid; I didn’t do it too often. That made the whole thing more rare, more interesting. I took few risks and was diligent in covering my tracks. My sense of duty made me careful. And my marriage kept me stable. I was determined to save it and I endeavoured to spoil my wife whenever I could. I suggested a proper holiday, which we hadn’t had in years: three weeks in Jamaica with a visit to the Flemings while we were there.

In February 1963 we flew to Montego Bay Airport. We felt the heat as soon as we stepped off the aeroplane. That thick, slightly sweet smell of the tropics hit us, that familiar scent from when we had first disembarked at Singapore, which brought back memories of when we were young and in love. Our plan was to spend a week at the Flemings’ and then explore the island a bit. We picked up a hire car and set off for their villa at Oracabessa. Once we had left behind the hotels and cement villas of Montego, we were on a winding road through tumbling countryside, jungle interspersed with cane fields and mangrove swamps. Green hills that sloped gently into coves and headlands, a bright-blue sea diffusing into the horizon. We passed porched wooden houses and one-roomed shacks, whitewashed Baptist chapels with signs exhorting each passer-by to repent for the end is at hand. We smiled at each other, knowing that we’d made the right choice going there.

It was over fifty miles to the Flemings’ house. An idyllic place, built on a cliff overlooking the sea with a sunken garden and steps leading down to a beach of pure white sand and deep clear water. After we had showered and unpacked we joined Ann and Ian for cocktails and they showed us around their little estate. That evening Violet, their black cook and housekeeper, served us lobster and curried goat and rice. We retired early, just after sunset. As we said goodnight Ian was leaning against the railing at the bottom of the garden, looking out to sea and smoking incessantly, his aquiline profile patrician and melancholic, vigilant as darkness fell.

The night pulsed with tree frogs and cicadas as we made love. It was as tentative and romantic as it had been in the early days of my first colonial posting. A moment saved from time.

But though we felt briefly blessed in coming to Jamaica, it was soon clear that staying with the Flemings was a terrible mistake. There was a palpable tension between them and we were drawn into the conflict, as guests so often are, used as witnesses or referees in an endless round of accusations and point scoring. It made us realise that perhaps things weren’t so bad between us but it was awkward and embarrassing.

His body battered by serious heart disease, his ego bruised by continued criticism of his writing, Ian felt that Ann was cold and lacking in affection towards him. Ann in turn thought that Ian had become spoilt and insufferable with the success of his novels. She felt that he was now overly content with the adulation he received and no longer appreciated the challenge of their relationship. Both suffered deeply from the other’s infidelities and took little account of all the sacrifices they had made for one another.

One day we drove out to Port Maria with Ann. Ian stayed behind to write. On our way back we went by a large white bungalow on a headland overlooking the harbour. Ann gestured vaguely at it, deliberately averting her eyes.

‘That is the house of Ian’s Jamaican mistress,’ she declared. ‘You may look, but I cannot.’

Another morning when we found Ian breakfasting alone in the garden, he confided to us: ‘I’m utterly exhausted by Ann’s ceaseless complaints and wounding attacks on me. I’m ill and I’m desperate. I need a little compassion.’

Finding ourselves constantly in the crossfire grew tiresome but that night in our room my wife seemed in a mischievous mood.

‘It’s said that they used to like whipping each other.’

‘Clarissa, really.’

‘Oh, come on. Everybody knows. I heard that when they stayed at Willie Maugham’s at Cap Ferrat they used up all the towels, running them under the tap and taking turns to flog one another with them. You think I’m shocked by such things, don’t you, darling?’

‘Well—’

‘Nobody’s completely normal, I know that, Marius,’ she said pointedly. ‘And I think I know what their problem is now. You see, before, they were acting it out. Playing out all that anger and resentment. Now it’s become real. They should play things out more.’

She turned and gave me a knowing smile.

‘Everybody should play things out more, shouldn’t they, darling?’ she demanded in a tone that offered hope for us yet. ‘Otherwise they end up killing each other.’

As the week wore on Ann tended to confide her feelings to Clarissa just as Ian vented his to me. He liked to drink and smoke late into the night.

‘I tried to kill him off, you know,’ he told me as we drank bourbon together. ‘I’m even writing his bloody obituary this time but it won’t do any good. I even had him in a health farm in one book, just so I could go and relax. But he won’t lie down. He’ll kill me first.’

And I remembered the strange remark he had made that afternoon on Pall Mall. He was talking about his hero, his fictional creation. His other self.

‘I punish him with pain. He punishes me with pleasure,’ he went on. ‘You see, like him I drink too much, smoke too much. Rush around in a constant state of nerves. Wear myself out. Except here. Here I write him and count the cost of the damage he has done me. Maybe it’s just guilt.’