Jake Arnott - The House of Rumour

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.’