amazing agility.
I was quite enjoying the job, Antonia finished the sentence to herself. Looking down at the box filled with books that stood beside her desk, she noticed that the one at the top bore the title, The Greatest Secret. It had been placed on top of Greenmantle. Had it been there earlier on? She had the feeling that it hadn’t. Underneath the main title was written, No one who reads this book will ever be the same again.
4
Six Characters in Search of an Author
There are some events, Antonia reflected, of which each circumstance and surrounding detail seem to stay with us for the rest of our lives, even though we may have convinced ourselves we have forgotten all about them – and so it was with the drowning of little Sonya Dufrette. As she started leafing through her twenty-year-old account that evening, everything came back to her with stark clarity, in vivid Technicolor, as though it had all happened only yesterday. (She had found the folder containing it at the back of the bottom drawer as she had known she would. It was something else, some other papers, that had caused the jamming – not that that changed anything.)
What she had written was more than a mere account. Some of it read like a diary, some like a story. She leafed through the pages. She had actually researched the main protagonists’ backgrounds, she saw with surprise. Twiston, she had made clear, had once belonged to the Jourdains, who were Lady Mortlock’s ancestors, not Sir Michael’s. She had recorded her thoughts and feelings on various subjects. She had described the river, the oak tree, the hideous hollow and the outfits worn by Lena and Veronica. She had mentioned the fact that Major Nagle smoked Egyptian cigarettes out of a monogrammed Asprey’s slide-action silver case. She had told how Sonya loved ‘Lavender’s Blue’ to be sung to her. She had even quoted Tennyson. It was curious how many details had managed to impress themselves on her mind, but then, she supposed, she must already have decided that she wanted to be a writer.
It had been the month and the year of the royal wedding. July 1981. Antonia had been married for eight years – happily, or so she had believed. Her son David had been six and a half and she had intended to take him with her to Twiston, Sir Michael and Lady Mortlock’s country house outside Richmond-on-Thames. Lady Mortlock had assured her it would be perfectly all right as there was going to be another child there. A little girl who was the same age as David. However, at the eleventh hour she had decided to leave David with her mother in Hatfield. She had persuaded herself that she needed a proper break.
Things might have been different if David had been able to go with her. David had been extremely mature for his age. He would never have allowed Sonya to walk down to the river by herself – never. He’d have been aware that there was something wrong with Sonya, that she was not like other children. He would have been very protective of her, Antonia felt sure. Richard too had been invited and Antonia had dearly wanted him to be there, but he had had to go to France on a business trip. (It was only later, much later, that she learnt the truth, namely that he had been at a hotel in Reading with his mistress of the moment.)
She had been included in the weekend party at Twiston as a matter of course. She had already been spending time there helping write Lady Mortlock’s family history. She saw she had described Twiston as the best sort of doll’s house come to life – a masterpiece of Jacobean exuberance, all mellow red brickwork, elaborate chimneys, extravagant gables, fantastical griffins and gargoyles.
She had become very fond of both the house and its owners, Sir Michael and Lady Mortlock, then in their late sixties. Tall, imperious, austere, Lady Mortlock looked like the headmistress of a girls’ public school and indeed had been one until some six years earlier. She was always impeccably turned out – she had worn a very desirable silk dress on the day of the royal wedding – and was noted for her acerbic wit. Her father, Frederick Jourdain, had been a famous if controversial consultant who specialized in rare blood diseases. In the 1930s he had become a dedicated believer in the ‘German miracle’ and he had managed to infuse (some said ’infect‘) his daughter with some of his pet theories. It wasn’t a subject Lady Mortlock was ever willing to discuss, though Antonia had seen books on eugenics and euthanasia on her study bookshelves, even one favourable account of the Final Solution. Lady Mortlock had also been extremely interested in the welfare of the several girls who came to clean the house and had tried to help them in various ways, but had not met with any great success. Antonia had observed the girls put their heads together, whisper and giggle. Not a very happy woman, Antonia had decided.
Sir Michael had retired from his top MI5 job only the year before, but was already showing signs of mental and physical decline; the once keen intelligence was no longer in evidence and he had turned into an amiable old buffer who pottered about his house and garden dressed in shabby country tweeds, cigar in hand, and liked nothing better than to sit reading P.G. Wodehouse or simply dozing in the sun, like an ancient lizard.
It was Sir Michael who had invited the Dufrettes, a decison which had angered Lady Mortlock so much that, in a rare outburst, she had referred to it as ‘extremely ill-judged, bordering on the feeble-minded’. Lawrence Dufrette had been working in MI5, in what, prior to his retirement, had been Sir Michael’s department.
Antonia had never met the Dufrettes before, but they already held a fascination for her. (The allure of the freak show?) Lady Mortlock had warned her to expect the worst. Lawrence she had described as ‘cranky and cantankerous’ while she had been positively horrified at the prospect of having Lena stay at Twiston. A previous visit had been termed a ’disaster‘. Apparently Lena had smoked between courses and had nearly started a fire by dropping her cigarette amongst the sofa cushions and leaving it there. She was fat and slovenly, far from bright, indiscreet. The derogatory epithets had rolled off Lady Mortlock’s tongue. Lena and Lawrence had little regard for anyone and invariably conducted their rows in the most public manner imaginable. The LL double act, somebody had called it.
Lawrence Dufrette had already carved a reputation for himself as a maverick and something of a loose cannon – by all accounts a picaresque and eccentric figure on the fringes of the Old Establishment. From Burke’s Landed Gentry Antonia had discovered that Dufrette was born in 1930, the elder son of Jasper Dufrette, a landowner and high court judge in Malaya, and Millicent Herbert. He had been educated at Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read history. He served as a lieutenant in the Intelligence Corps in 1951 and was stationed for a while in post-war Berlin. His extensive knowledge of heraldry had led to his appointment as Bluemantle Pursuivant of Arms and, consequently, he played an important role in many great state occasions. At the Coronation in 1953 he had been standing near the Throne – ‘closer than all but the great officers of state’, as Harold Nicolson had put it in his diary.
Another diarist, society photographer Cecil Beaton, had described young Lawrence Dufrette’s appearance in some detail. ‘With his light blue eyes, sand-coloured hair, quartered tunic of scarlet, blue and gold and sombre stockings, holding the two Sceptres in his pale ivory hands, he was the perfect work of art. He has a long, pale, lovelorn face. He seems to be burnt with some romantic passion.’ Dufrette had been the Earl Marshal’s press secretary throughout Coronation year.
He had been given a job at the College of Arms and might even have become Chester Herald, but, in Lady Mortlock’s words, ‘Lawrence’s absurdly haughty and cavalier attitude to his colleagues and irresponsibility over money led to his enforced resignation. He thought he was better than all of them put together. Primus inter pares. That kind of rot… He hasn’t improved with age. You should hear how he talks about his colleagues in MI5. Men of straw, operating in a blizzard of displacement activity! I don’t see how Michael puts up with it.’ At the start of his career in the Intelligence Service, he had been considered brilliant but eventually caused consternation with his erratic and unpredictable behaviour. He also developed an obsessive interest in conspiracy theories.
The Babylonian brotherhood, Antonia suddenly remembered. What was the Babylonian brotherhood?
Sheikh Umair had described Dufrette as ‘a clever but extremely dangerous man. Talks about flogging and hanging and bloody foreigners and niggers – equally to shock and to get a reaction, I think. He has a strong exhibitionist streak. He carries a gun. He said he needed to protect himself against his enemies. He pointed the gun at my head and made a popping sound. It is exceedingly difficult to know when he jokes and when he is serious, but then that is a very English kind of thing, isn’t it?’
Enemies… Antonia looked up with a frown. One enemy at least… The incident at breakfast. (She had given an account of it somewhere later on.) Dufrette quarrelled with one of the other guests. Some military type. Stocky and pouchy-eyed, small trimmed moustache, great heavy hands, amazingly well-tended fingernails the colour of
