The Last Goodnight Read online

  “‘Because I am blue,’ was the answer.

  “‘I don’t think you are blue. You seem rather lively,’ I quietly put in.

  “‘Ah, that’s because you’re with me,’ he laughed.”

  And Betty, although at ten she didn’t quite know what to make of it, couldn’t help noticing that the army lieutenant, always courteous, always attentive, doggedly trailed her throughout the week-long voyage.

  Then, after the Thorpes’ time in Hawaii and their year in Europe was over, the family returned to the States, and Betty was packed off to boarding school in Wellesley, Massachusetts. Here she found further proof of the strong spell she cast over older men. Betty was a fourteen-year-old at Dana Hall School, and yet for reasons that left her rather puzzled, a fortyish naval officer assigned to the Italian embassy in Washington would regularly fly to Boston and then drive miles north to see her.

  He first met Betty at a reception the Italian ambassador gave to honor the prodigy who had written Fioretta, and was charmed. After that delightful encounter, it seemed quite reasonable to the commander to travel frequently to Wellesley, as the adolescent without a trace of guile told her diary, “for tea and conversation.”

  “It was always,” Betty would remember as she tried to fit this piece into the complicated puzzle of her life, “three orders of cinnamon toast for me, and our conversation was very very profound: love, philosophy, destiny. You know, all very juvenile. He took a rather sweet, paternal interest in me.”

  Or at least, that was what the young girl had thought at the time. But looking back on it now, Betty couldn’t help but acknowledge what, however unarticulated, was also clearly going on. More amused than critical, she conceded to Hyde, “I think his interest had a sentimental side to it as well. He was very taken with my blonde curls and used to call me his Golden Girl.”

  It wasn’t long, though, before her own heart was taking the initiative, racing with its own stirrings. Betty would always remember, she now shared with Hyde, one wonderfully wishful moment. It was her first conscious seduction, and even if it was unconsummated, at least in any orthodox way, it was her initiation into a previously unfamiliar joy.

  It was the last day of Easter vacation. Thirteen-year-old Betty, already dreading the return trip to Dana Hall, was morosely spending it at the Chevy Chase country club outside Washington. Leaving her family in the dining room, she wandered aimlessly about. For no particular reason, a tennis match caught her eye. It was a fast match, well played, and a boisterous group of young diplomats—Spaniards, she judged—were cheering the players on.

  The ball flew back and forth over the net, but she had abandoned any pretense of following the volleys. From her first look, she was transfixed by one of the players. He was tall and dark, and when he swung his racket a lock of jet-black hair fell over his forehead and the hard muscles in his arms, chest, and legs coiled. Betty stared at him openly, willing him to notice her. It never occurred to her to be discreet.

  When the match ended, the players gathered their rackets and walked off the court toward their scrum of friends. Betty remained standing outside the fence, still silently begging him to notice her, still fixing him with a look, an intensity, she had not known she possessed. Only it went unacknowledged.

  Or so she had thought. For just as he was about to head off to the clubhouse, he turned directly toward Betty, locked eyes with her, and flashed a dazzling smile. Then in a gesture that would be forever stored in her romantic heart, he offered a deep, gallant bow. A moment later he was gone, walking off with his crowd of boisterous friends.

  He never said a word, but none was necessary. Betty no longer had any doubts about her power—or what she could do with it.

  “MY LOOKS ARE BETTER THAN I hoped,” Betty, not boasting, simply giving testimony as she might in a court, told her diary. “God was kind in that at least.”

  With similar objectivity, the teenager had already worked out a careful, self-aware strategy for dealing with the opposite sex, one that was as practical as it was shamelessly manipulative.

  “I have strong emotions. I have too much love. I love and love with all my heart, only I have to appear cool. The men are the ones who change. . . . I know that if I love too much I risk losing their respect and admiration for they only seek the joy of telling of a conquest.”

  Having figured this all out, fourteen-year-old Betty decided she was ready to take her first lover. That summer the family had settled into an oceanfront cottage in Newport, and she might have lost her virginity to any of several boys hanging around the yacht club. But trying to wish herself in love, she had chosen, she confided to Hyde, “an old gentleman of twenty-one, who belonged to a well-known family whose names often appear in the Social Register. . . . He was unashamedly poetic and passionate—which was a great change from the St. Paul’s and St. George’s boys. We were both lonely and we met only twice before the ‘love affair’ was over.”

  Although brief, the liaison was empowering. The Betty who returned to boarding school that fall was more confident, more self-assured. She had tapped into a new realm of experience, the “Grand Passion,” she called it, and it had offered a way to assuage all her “terrible restlessness.” Now desire drove her. And restraint seemed pointless.

  “So many things have happened to me,” Betty, now fifteen, confessed to her diary after eight months of silence. “So many affairs of the heart, so many thoughts, ideas and changes in me that I have sometimes thought I was a different person and have not always been in charge of my emotions. I have not written every day because I know I can never relive the feelings and experiences.”

  And what were these unexplainable feelings, these indescribable experiences?

  “The greatest joy,” she would later explain, taking a stab at putting her turbulent emotions into words, “is a man and a woman together. Making love allows a discharge of all those private innermost thoughts that have accumulated. In this flood, everything is released.”

  In her heart a woman, Betty was still required to wear her boarding-school jumper. But she didn’t mind. She always liked a disguise.

  “THE BUDS” WAS HOW THE Washington society writers referred to the city’s annual crop of debutantes. It was a reporter’s shorthand that, while a bit snarky, also acknowledged something more respectful: these well-bred young ladies were poised to open up to the full bloom of their womanhood. And when they blossomed, they would go off and marry no less well-bred husbands and assume their preordained places in the carefully manicured garden that was Washington society.

  Just days before she turned nineteen, in November 1929, Betty had her debut with a bouquet of other young “buds” at a thé dansant orchestrated by Cora at the grand house on Woodley Road. The Great Depression was tightly squeezing most of the country, but the Thorpes and their jolly circle of well-heeled friends were largely unaffected. The next day the Washington Post oohed and aahed at all the pretty dresses and dutifully listed the names of the distinguished families in attendance. With this send-off, Betty, golden hair and luminous green eyes, so poised, so intelligent, the offspring of such solid, respectable stock, had her social future assured.

  Betty, aged 18, 1929.

  Churchill Archives Centre, Churchill Archives Centre Miscellaneous Holdings, MISC 86

  To Cora’s great delight, the parlor mantel was soon crowded with a row of invitations inviting Miss Elizabeth Amy Thorpe to a whirlwind of dinners, dances, and teas. Betty would go, and she inevitably received a good deal of attention from the intrigued young men. But it soon became apparent that she was not another of the tentative and precious “buds.”

  “I’d come to dinner,” recalled one would-be suitor, still a bit baffled after all these years by the complex spell Betty cast, “and inevitably I’d find her surrounded by a complete circle of boys. Certainly she was a beautiful girl, but the fact is she was far more reserved than most of them. She had dignity. . . . You always felt that coming-out parties and hen-lunches weren’t really
her cup of tea. She was fully grown up at nineteen, far more adult than we were.”

  Another man, one of the young diplomats who had spent some time making the rounds on the Washington social circuit with this same glittering crowd, was also struck by how different Betty was from the other girls. He was certain he had her pegged:

  “There was always about her that look of challenge, something that seemed to be permanently daring one to do something with her—whether it was to play polo, go on a midnight picnic, or just leap into bed with her.”

  In the course of her debutante year, many young men accepted her tacit challenge. There was a sort of mayhem in Betty’s restlessness. She didn’t have affairs; she had encounters. And now, looking back at that uncentered time, her memory grew selective; she had forgotten more boys than she remembered. Nevertheless, she conceded to Hyde, the young diplomat didn’t have her wrong. She had leaped into any number of beds.

  But somewhere in the rush of Christmas parties, she met a man and, to her own surprise, gave him her heart too. Bursting with this new, all-consuming passion, she wrote in her diary,

  I think I cannot quite understand

  The depths of wanting unfulfilled desire,

  And hating you to touch my hand

  When embers die where there once was fire.

  It was the sort of ardent, romantic musings many a young woman would scrawl late at night in her diary. Yet for Betty it was a lot more. The words were heartfelt. They commandeered her world: she refused to let any desire go unfulfilled.

  Soon, however, Betty discovered that there could be consequences for such lack of restraint. And in the aftermath of this unsettling realization, she swiftly made the decision to launch her first fully conscious clandestine mission. Intuitively, she understood that it would by necessity need to be what those in her future profession called a “false flag” operation: her target could never know the truth, or he would certainly never cooperate.

  The tactical problem: Betty was pregnant, and she was not sure who was the child’s father.

  Chapter 10

  GRAVELY, BETTY UNDRESSED AND CLIMBED naked into the bed. She pulled the duvet up to her neck, only to decide it might be more effective to lower it a bit. Her skin was soft and smooth, and she could see no reason to hide it. Then, as she related to Hyde, she “lay back and waited.”

  It was, she went on, the second night of a weekend house party deep in the Virginia hunt country, a green and horsey bit of aristocratic paradise an hour or so drive beyond the Washington city limits. The house, as she remembered it, was columned and big, and an allée of ancient oaks lined the approach. A patchwork of open fields stretched in all directions. And it was here that Betty, after much thought, had chosen to launch her operation.

  In any mission, timing is all. Even as a novice Betty apparently understood this, and from the day she realized she was pregnant, she’d been searching for her moment. But the days anxiously flew past, and still no opportunity seemed to offer itself. Worse, the longer she waited, the more she began to doubt herself. Was she hesitating because she didn’t have the nerve?

  Perhaps she tried telling herself that she was being prudent, that she was merely trying to identify the course that held the greatest promise of success. But when she looked in the mirror after climbing out of the bath, she had to know it would not be too long before she was not the only one to notice how her figure was ripening. And then all would be lost. It would be too late.

  It was in the midst of this troubled interlude that Betty heard about the weekend one of the girls was planning at her family’s stately place in Middleburg, Virginia. After she received her invitation, without trying too hard she discovered that he had been invited too. At once all her vacillation ended, and in its place a sudden excitement kindled. The decision to move forward had been made at last.

  On the chosen weekend, she proceeded carefully; her tradecraft was very deliberate. The first day she was flirtatious, but not ostentatiously so. She wanted him to get comfortable with the idea of her. When she brushed carelessly against him, she hoped it would send his thoughts racing. But she did not want him to grow too confident.

  On the second day, she spent a good deal of time over predinner cocktails talking intently to another boy, laughing loudly at his jokes. At dinner, as luck had it, he was on the opposite side of the table; it would have been easy to shoot him an occasional glance. But she refused to bestow that blessing. Instead Betty talked with great animation to the man on her right; and then with even greater liveliness to the man on her left. Betty never looked at her target, but all the time she hoped he was watching her, and growing envious as she seemed more and more remote. She wanted him to tingle with disappointment.

  After dinner, while the others played bridge or sat with their brandies in front of the fire, Betty excused herself. She said she was exhausted and wanted to lie down.

  That morning she had risen at first light, hours before breakfast, and begun her surveillance. Her observation post was the doorway of her room; from this vantage, she could survey the entire corridor. If another early riser emerged from one of the bedrooms, she had her cover story ready: Oh, I just forgot my comb. You go ahead. I’ll be down in a minute. Then she’d hurry back into her room until the houseguest made his way down the stairs to the dining room. When she was certain he was out of sight, she resumed her post.

  Still, there were several close calls; at one point—the awkward moment still vivid in her mind—two very confident young men spotted Betty and pestered her to join them for breakfast. It took all her tact to turn them down without causing a scene. Then finally she saw him leave his room.

  His gait as he headed downstairs was brisk, as usual; he was a man who seemed perpetually to be hurrying off on some important affair of state. Betty now had the crucial intelligence: she knew which of the many doors that lined the corridor was his.

  By the time dinner was over that evening, it had been a long day’s patient wait. She’d done what was necessary to coax her plan along. Now she launched her mission.

  She headed directly to his room and put her hand on the doorknob, only to be seized by what must have been a moment’s panic. What if it was locked? That possibility hadn’t occurred to her, and the would-be secret agent filed away another early lesson: all contingencies must be considered before the plunge is taken.

  But this evening luck was once more with her, and the door opened easily to her touch. Her clothes flew off, and she hopped into his bed. Alone with her thoughts in the big bed, she willed him to come soon.

  There is no record of what Arthur Pack said when he entered his room. Or, for that matter, what explanation Betty offered. But of course none was necessary. All that Arthur needed to know was that the naked woman in his bed was determined to give him a night to remember.

  Two weeks later, while they were riding on horseback through the woods of Washington’s Rock Creek Park, Arthur proposed to Betty. She had enough ingenuity to act surprised, but she was also shrewd enough not to hesitate. She accepted immediately.

  “Suddenly I was engaged,” Betty would tell Hyde, as if still finding it hard to believe. “I don’t think for a minute he was in love with me. I know I wasn’t in love with him. It was as if it was all happening and I had nothing to do with it. I went along with the events like a sleepwalker.”

  Arthur, too, would look back on their courtship with bewilderment.

  “There she was in my bed,” he told his sister. “What could I do?”

  Betty and Arthur’s official engagement announcement

  Churchill Archives Centre, Churchill Archives Centre Miscellaneous Holdings, MISC 86

  THE DISMAL TRUTH, THOUGH, WAS that Betty was not the only one running a deception. And not for the last time, she’d been fooled too.

  Whether consciously or not, she had selected Arthur Pack because, in broad but still resonating ways, he reminded Betty of her adored father. Age was one factor; Arthur was more than twice as old as th
e nineteen-year-old girl. And the nearly twenty years between them might as well have been several lifetimes; Arthur had come of age being gassed on the frontlines of a war.

  Still, the chasm of years between them was probably only a small factor in Betty’s mental equation. What she saw in Arthur, as she would explain in the letters she wrote after their marriage, was the sort of substantial fellow who, with his rock-hard jaw, military mustache, and rigid backbone, belonged, at least in her mind, to an idealized class of men of means and breeding who chose a career in public service. This was how she saw her father, the brave gentleman soldier. She was convinced that Arthur Pack, former army officer now serving with His Majesty’s Foreign Office, was another hero cut from the same bolt of pin-striped cloth.

  But Arthur was not who he appeared to be. Scratch the diligently polished brass surface, and the core was solid lead. Each day he put on his artful disguise and hoped no one would see through it.

  His people, as he referred to them, were not nearly as grand as he worked so hard to convey. He had grown up in a council flat outside London, the son of working-class folk. His education stopped at grammar school. Yet he had found the confidence to take the civil service exam and, no less of an accomplishment, had the intellect to pass the demanding test. His reward—an appointment as a clerk in the General Post Office.

  His future prospects were limited. In the British civil service, grammar-school lads were routinely dismissed with a sneer; the path to success was paved with family connections and the imprimatur of an Oxbridge degree. After a year of striving, Arthur became an officer of His Majesty’s Custom and Excise. It was a promotion that was as menial as it was dull.

  The war gave Arthur another chance, but he paid a high price for his new opportunities. He joined the Civil Service Rifles and was sent straight off to France. After a rough year in the trenches, he’d earned an officer’s commission and been gassed more times than he could remember. His lungs finally collapsed. Diagnosed with double pneumonia, he was dispatched home on medical leave.