The House of Rumour A Novel

12

the hanged man





My first job in the Service and my last. There’s always a danger of giving random events undue significance but it was hard not to see a pattern in the Hess case. His flight marked a curious apex in the rise and fall of the Third Reich; his death now becomes part of the Cold War endgame. But years of study have rendered little of substance or meaning. Perhaps he merely represents something of my generation of intelligence. A Secret Service tradition that went from fighting a war we had to win to facing off a war that we could never allow to happen. Now it appears that the latter game is over too. By all accounts the Soviets were finally ready to let him go. Then suddenly his suicide. Eric Judd calls Hess the Hanged Man, which seems an appropriately mysterious symbol. Because whatever you believe, there was an occult aspect to this case. After all, what ‘occult’ means is to be hidden or obscured.

What you have to remember is that none of us involved in the affair ever knew the whole story. I for one was only ever told about a plan to reactivate our tame Nazis in the Link, that pitiful bunch of Fifth Columnists run by the Political Warfare Executive, and even that was quickly aborted when Joan Miller’s cover was blown. Everyone close to it picked up strange clues and hints that something very odd might have transpired but nothing could be proved or verified.

It’s true that after the capture of Hess in Scotland, Commander Fleming did issue a memorandum recommending Aleister Crowley as an advisor in his interrogation. But there is certainly no record that the Great Beast played any part in a scheme by elements within the Service to lure Hess over. And if any of the files of Operation Mistletoe ever see the light of day, they will probably merely hint at a vague disinformation campaign that used faked paranormal material to provoke the superstitious elements within the enemy. It was certainly part of our broader strategy. The Political Warfare Executive eventually employed its own astrologer, the rather absurd Louis de Wohl, who was given a captain’s rank on the understanding that this was a mere payroll technicality. He caused great embarrassment to our department when he was spotted in Piccadilly, sporting a very shabby uniform that he had acquired for himself. The colonel in charge of our section said he looked ‘just like an unmade bed’.

In the spring of ’42, Fleming came to Political for a liaison meeting. He was putting together a special commando unit for intelligence gathering. It was then that he told me about the queer book titled Swastika Night that he was certain had in some strange way predicted Hess’s flight to Scotland. He had even interviewed the author, who turned out to be a woman writing under a male pseudonym.

In 1985, an American publisher, the Feminist Press, reissued Swastika Night and revealed its author as Katharine Burdekin. I got hold of a copy and found that there was indeed a reference (on page 87) to a character called Hess leaving the Nazi inner circle and travelling to Scotland. It seemed an odd coincidence.

The next time I saw Fleming was in Normandy in ’44, just after the D-Day landings. I was with a reporting unit at Carteret where the Allied armies were regrouping before advancing to the north-east. He was with this commando squad he had formed, the 30 Assault Unit. He called them his ‘Red Indians’. I remember that bloodhound expression on his face. Handsome, dashing, keen for the fray. His battledress just a bit too clean and well tailored.

We got a chance to inspect the huge rocket installations the Germans had left behind: vast concrete bunkers, launch pads and gantries. We walked around dismantled missile parts, nose-cones and finned engine assemblies. In retrospect it was like the setting of one of his books. As we picnicked on K-rations amid futurist ruins, I asked him what he intended doing after the war. I nearly choked on my Spam when he replied: ‘Why, write the spy story to end all spy stories.’

For a moment I had a vision of him telling some imaginative account of Operation Mistletoe. I was professionally appalled but personally intrigued by the possibility of someone making sense of one of the greatest mysteries of the war. Perhaps it would make sense only as fiction. Maybe Fleming had worked out some sort of key to it.

It was a full ten years before his first book came out. I scanned it for any obvious clues but soon realised what a futile task it was to chase after hidden meanings in novels. Granted, the figure of ‘M’ in Casino Royale is clearly Maxwell Knight: everyone in the Service knew him as such (Fleming even gives him a Chief of Staff named Bill, just as Knight had). This was telling since really Fleming had dealings just with Knight over Mistletoe. And Joan Miller is certainly the template for the attractive assistant that Bond flirts with. Most playful of all was the obvious use of Crowley as inspiration for the villain Le Chiffre (French for cypher). But then this would hardly be the first time the Great Beast had been turned into a fictional character. And there was nothing else in the book that even hinted at any solution to the puzzle of Operation Mistletoe. I have to say that I was more than a little disappointed.

I was by then married to Clarissa Devereux, the third daughter of the Lord Marshalsea. It had been a brief engagement, just after the war when everything seemed hopeful. It’s shocking to think now how innocent we were, especially of sexual matters. Soon after our honeymoon I was posted to Kuala Lumpur as Security Liaison Officer to the Colonial Special Branch. It was the time of the Malayan Emergency and I was co-ordinating psychological warfare and propaganda strategies in the counter-insurgency against communist terrorists.

Clarissa took to the tropics at first. It was a big adventure for both of us and for a while it seemed like paradise. She spent a good deal of time and energy making our house beautiful. Most expat residences tended to be a little dreary, filled with gimcrack furniture, gaudy ornaments, tiger skins and the like. She supervised the decoration herself and made our bungalow bright and spare with clear lines. We had a long spacious veranda and a well-tended garden. Beyond it wild and lush foliage thickened along the bank of a broad and gently flowing river. Clarissa loved the astonishing natural world that surrounded us. When we could she liked to trek through the pathways in the jungle, to bathe in a nearby river pool so clear that one could see the golden sand of its bed.

But security was very tight for most of the time we were there. The communists were targeting rubber planters. Barbed wire went up around our little compound. She began to feel trapped. Clarissa had a charming obsession with Eastern mysticism but she soon found that colonial society was actually quite dull and suburban. Once the novelty wears off one can feel trapped in a sort of exotic boredom. I had my work, of course; I was absorbed by it. But Clarissa grew tired of the languid routine, the dreary cocktail parties.

It was all very disappointing for her and I couldn’t help much. There had been a spark to our marriage at first, but that’s all it was, a flicker that could so easily go out. I tried everything I could but I don’t suppose anyone would find my company particularly exciting. Intelligence work does tend to make men dull and introspective.

She began a prolonged flirtation with a handsome veterinary surgeon attached to the Commissioner-General’s office. Alan Munro was charming, sensitive and, above all, interesting. He knew most of the native fauna and could describe it exquisitely; he played the piano and read poetry. After six months of this I finally challenged her. I couldn’t blame her for having an affair but in my professional pride I could not bear being deceived.

‘But, darling,’ Clarissa assured me, ‘Alan’s queer. I thought you knew that.’

I did not but the thought of it suddenly unsettled me. Clarissa noticed it almost at once.

‘This business about Alan has really upset you, hasn’t it?’ she asked me later. ‘I didn’t think that you were particularly anti.’

‘No, I’m not.’

‘What then?’

I couldn’t say. It was a sense of uncertainty, something disjointed and fugitive. Like a fragment of encrypted intelligence. An awkwardness developed in our relationship. We bluffed our way through our time in Malaya, keeping up appearances and following the pattern of a well-bred marriage. There were other postings: to Beirut, Cairo, Berlin. But each move in the Service seemed to consolidate the distance between us. Clarissa spent more and more time back home. When I finally returned to London, what was left of our shared life had all but reduced to the politeness of strangers.

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.’

He poured another drink, lit another cigarette.

‘You’re like me, Trevelyan. A staff officer. Sticking pins into maps and sending men into danger. From a desk. A handler: yes, that’s what I thought I was doing, handling another agent. But he’s ended up running me. He’s the revenge for all the men I’ve sent into danger.’

I wanted to ask him about this but he changed the subject. He was keen to talk about current intelligence concerns and Service gossip. The conversation quickly turned to Cuba. It was Jamaica’s nearest neighbour, after all, and it had only been three months since the Missile Crisis had nearly blown us all to kingdom come.

We agreed that American policy towards Castro had been a disaster. All the CIA’s interventions and black ops had only forced Cuba closer to the Soviets.

‘They should have set about deflating Fidel, rather than building him up as a threat to world peace,’ Fleming suggested.

‘I’ve always found that the Americans lack a little finesse in negritude. They’re not very good at lying. Too bloody sincere.’

‘They should have found a way of ridiculing Castro. I said as much to Kennedy.’

He explained rather sheepishly that the president of the United States was something of a fan of his novels and that they had met when he was still a senator.

‘I told him that they should generate black propaganda, purportedly from the Russians, informing them that atomic testing in the region had caused beards to become radioactive and advising them to shave them off, thus undermining the whole revolution. One of their security advisors actually thanked me for my idea with a completely straight face. They don’t seem to realise that you need a sense of humour. And a sense of luck.’

‘Luck?’

‘Good fortune, yes. That’s what it mostly relies on, isn’t it? You have to find a way of using it. Take Cuba. You know what happened when Castro marched into Havana and gave his first televised speech in front of the cheering crowds? Two doves appeared. One perched itself on his shoulder. Now, in Santería, the Cuban version of voodoo or whatever, that meant he had the protection of the gods and was all-powerful. I mean, imagine being able to engineer something like that?’ He smiled. ‘Political power is largely a matter of superstition. Intelligence too. Magic, some of it.’

‘Like Operation Mistletoe?’

He let out a wheezing laugh and stood up, swaying a little.

‘Too late for that now. We’ll talk more tomorrow.’

The following night Fleming gave me his final word on the Hess affair.

‘You remember what Winston said? “In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.” That’s what worked so well for us. Perfidious Albion, yes, we’ve always been good at that. Our lies were better than theirs. Some of it was Maxwell Knight’s fantasy. M believed in some of that mumbo-jumbo so it appeared convincing.’

‘Stalin was sure that the Service had a part in the Hess flight.’

‘Yes, and we know now how well informed he was about British Intelligence. But I’m not so sure, you know. Crowley had some occult contacts in Germany that we used but nobody was sure if they actually had an effect. What did you find out?’

‘Not much.’

I told him that I’d managed to track down an astrologer and pyschic who had been some kind of voice teacher. Astrid Nagengast had been arrested during Aktion Hess and also had a record of being connected to a Munich section of the Red Orchestra. Along with some occultists she had been interrogated and detained in Sachsenhausen concentration camp for two months.

‘What happened to her?’

‘She survived the war and went to live in California.’

‘You could go out there and see her.’

‘Perhaps. But, you know, once you start investigating that part of the world it becomes more and more absurd. Crowley had something of a cult out there for a while, of course, but it’s easy to get carried away with conspiracies and all kinds of nonsense.’

Fleming poured us both another drink.

‘I circulated a paper for Naval Intelligence in 1940 titled Rumour as a Weapon,’ he said. ‘I wrote that we had the ammunition; we just needed the device to direct it. In Political you called it the Black Game or negritude. Later I found my own name for it. For where it all belonged. The House of Rumour.’

‘The House of Rumour?’

‘At the centre of the world where everything can be seen is a tower of sounding bronze that hums and echoes, repeating all it hears, mixing truth with fiction. It’s from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. A lovely image, don’t you think?’

‘It is, rather.’

‘And that’s what every intelligence service is, at its heart. It’s been the same since classical times. It was from the House of Rumour that the Trojans learnt that the Greeks were coming. An advance warning system. And we knew that Germany was planning to invade Russia and that’s what would save us. But we had to make sure. So there were all manner of phony peace feelers to help convince the enemy that they might not have to fight a war on two fronts.’

‘Like Operation Mistletoe?’

‘Perhaps. Though we’ll never be sure if it really had any effect. I think it was mostly good fortune. And bad luck on their side. You have to remember that in the end the Trojan War was won by deception and counter-intelligence.’

‘Oh yes, the wooden horse. Particularly nasty piece of negritude.’

‘Another phony peace offering. Well,’ he sighed, ‘we still need the House of Rumour. To make sure our own Trojan War never takes place. I mean, we had a bloody close shave last October.’

And that was the last time I spoke to Fleming about the case. He died the following year of a massive heart attack. Looking back, I think it was from that night on that I began to stop chasing after the affair. The myths and conspiracies continued to circulate but I chose to conclude that it was more likely that the Deputy Führer was deranged and had acted on his own.

The most ludicrous theory that I came across about Hess was that a doppelgänger had flown in his place. An absurd hypothesis with scant evidence or explanation, yet one that presented a compelling image: the double, that great theme of fiction and intelligence. And of two worlds, too – a splitting of possible outcomes. Fleming told me that there were only two crucial moments in any life (and he used this conceit in the title of the novel he was working on): that of birth and death. But by then he was facing the end. Now, it’s nearly all over for me too. I’m left with the final mystery of the Hanged Man. Just why was a ‘suicide note’ planted on him?

In the last two days of our stay the bad feeling between the Flemings became almost unbearable. Ian became tetchy even with me. I had been told that if I went for a morning swim, I was to make a detour around the front of the house because he didn’t like anything passing in front of his view out to sea at that time. It was then that he gazed out at the ocean and thought about what he was going to write that day. Well, I forgot and he bawled me out for it.

Later he was in a more sombre mood. He said that the greatest sadness in life was the failure to make the one you loved happy. He told me of his quantum theory of affection: that if not a single particle of comfort existed between two people, then they might as well both be dead.

And Clarissa was shocked when Ann confessed to her that being with Ian was like living with a wounded animal and at times she simply wanted to put him out of his misery.

‘Of course,’ she added with a cold smile, ‘I still love him, you see.’

So it was with great relief that we left the following morning. There were breezy farewells and promises to meet up back in London. Behind the clenched smiles and alert eyes, one felt the murderous intensity between them. It made one almost fearful to leave them on their own together.

We had gone only two or three miles when Clarissa realised that she had left a bracelet behind.

‘Can’t we get them to send it on?’ I reasoned.

‘For goodness’ sake, Marius, it belonged to the duchess.’ She meant her grandmother. ‘It’s a priceless heirloom.’

I turned the car around and drove back to the entrance to their driveway.

‘Please,’ pleaded Clarissa, ‘will you go? I don’t think I can bear going back there. It’s on the table in the garden.’

As I approached the house my first thought was to walk around the side but that would mean passing Ian’s window and interfering with his precious morning view. So I went up to the front door and knocked. It was off the latch so I let myself in. There was no sign of Violet the housekeeper. As I passed through the living room I heard a fearful row. The sound of violence, of blows, of cries of pain and harsh oaths. It was coming from the Flemings’ bedroom.

The door was ajar. I readied myself for the ghastly task of coming between them, of breaking up some pitiful domestic fight. But as I gently pushed at the door I saw the two of them standing naked, Ann armed with a riding crop, Ian with a thin bamboo cane, gleefully taking turns at one another. They were utterly oblivious to my presence in the doorway. The air sang with the swoosh of their thrashing, with loud yelps, exquisite insults and obscenities.

I turned on my heel and swiftly made for the garden to retrieve Clarissa’s bauble. Then around and back out to the driveway. I felt a spring in my step as I made my way back to the car. My mind still vivid with the image of them, the look of sheer joy beaming from their faces. The pure, bright energy of it. I remembered what Clarissa had said those few nights before and I found myself laughing out loud. Who knows what true happiness is? It’s the greatest mystery of all.