The Last Goodnight Page 7

  Arthur had suffered permanent damage, but he was rewarded with a promotion to captain. Then, despite a fitful recovery, he was shipped off to the States as a machine gun instructor to help prepare the newly mobilized US army for the war in Europe. When his regiment went to France, Captain Pack traveled with them, serving once again on the frontlines.

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

  Arthur Pack during his stint as a United States Infantry machine gun instructor, 1917.

  At the end of the war, Arthur presented this new version of himself to the Foreign Service examiners, and now, as an officer and a gentleman, he was accepted into their rarefied ranks. But he quickly found out that in the class-conscious corridors of diplomatic power, his chances for advancement were still meager. He complained bitterly to his sister that grammar-school boys, no matter how hard they tried, had as much chance of working their way up in the Foreign Office as the proverbial camel’s being squeezed through the needle’s eye.

  Then in 1925 he received a posting as acting commercial secretary to the embassy in Washington, DC. It was a junior post, and a lowly one for someone whose service file was filled with five years of enthusiastic evaluations, but Arthur was elated. Like so many Englishmen who come to America, he was convinced that an ocean away from his humble origins, he could reinvent himself in the image to which he had always aspired.

  And he pulled it off. He was Capt. Arthur Pack, ret., with both a staunch military bearing and an impressive war record to reinforce his rank. His position in the embassy was vague enough to sound, to the uninitiated at least, like something of consequence. He had worked hard on his accent, and to American ears it sounded sufficiently plummy; no one would ever have guessed that he’d grown up in a council flat. And he spent every penny of his thousand-pound salary, and then borrowed more, to convince people he was a proper Savile Row English gentleman.

  The American hostesses loved him. Whenever a spare man was needed, Arthur Pack, the very eligible British bachelor, was invited. This was the prize catch Betty thought she was seducing.

  And Arthur, what did he see in Betty beyond her good looks and sexual energy? Of course either might have been reason enough for many men to propose marriage. Arthur, however, was a practical, very disciplined individual, and passionate excesses were not part of his nature.

  But he was ambitious. In return for his proposal, he would be entering a union with a woman who would bestow on him all that he had so long coveted—wealth, a good family name, and an easy social grace. A marriage to Betty Thorpe would allow him to leave his past irrevocably behind.

  As things worked out, neither of them got what they had expected.

  “WASHINGTON DEBUTANTE TO WED BRITISH DIPLOMAT,” read the prominent headline in the Washington Post society page. The wedding, the article reported, would be held that summer.

  But it was only two hasty months later, on April 29, 1930, for reasons that the society pages never thought to probe, that Betty Thorpe and Arthur Pack were married in the Church of the Epiphany in downtown Washington. “The first International Wedding of the year” was how one paper described the event. The church was elaborately decorated with palms and lilies, and both the American and British flags were draped from the church’s stone arches. In attendance were ambassadors from fifteen countries, senior State Department officials, six senators, and the sister of the vice president, as well as most of Washington society.

  Cora was delighted. She had been increasingly despairing as, perhaps inevitably, stories of Betty’s wild ways made their malicious way back to her. Yet now she couldn’t help but utter an audible sigh of social satisfaction at the prospect of her daughter marrying a British diplomat. None of Arthur’s family could attend; regrettably, they were too occupied with important work in England, he had explained. In truth, he had not invited them.

  Betty was a lovely bride. A circlet of orange blossoms, the society page gushed, held her rose-point veil in place, and she wore a high-waisted gown with a flowing train of ivory silk taffeta. Not reported by the press, though, was that on the morning of the wedding a seamstress had to loosen the gown’s waist to disguise the bride’s growing belly. Or that just days before the ceremony the bride had no choice but to reveal to both her mother and her fiancé that she was carrying his child. And once she’d made that confession, Betty did her best to convince herself it was true.

  “MR. PACK AND HIS BRIDE will spend their honeymoon in Europe,” the Washington Post informed readers of the society page. “They will be abroad for about five months, returning to Washington in October, after making visits to England, Scotland and on the continent.”

  But the paper had it wrong. It was not a honeymoon. It was an escape.

  Betty on April 29th, 1930—her wedding day.

  Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-101779

  Chapter 11

  MANY BRIDES OF BETTY’S ERA and upbringing were unprepared for the lush pleasures they might experience on their honeymoon. But for Betty, who could be quite philosophical about anything that transpired in the bedroom, the shock was of another kind entirely. On their first night aboard the liner to England, she realized that she detested the man she had married.

  Alone at last, no more lingering guests to amuse, no more sentimental dockside good-byes to exchange, the exhausted newlyweds took refuge in the tight confines of their absurdly small stateroom. After all the demands of the wedding, after having for one last docile time done her best to be her mother’s proper daughter and not give in to any sudden irrational whim and sneak off with the best man, Betty hoped to grab a few blessed moments’ rest before it was time to dress and join the captain’s table for dinner. But Arthur had other plans.

  The idea had been brewing ever since he’d learned that Betty was pregnant; nevertheless, with typical prudence, he’d decided not to say anything until after the marriage vows. If he shared his plan before the wedding, his willful fiancée might call the whole thing off, and that would have been an appalling embarrassment. But both the ceremony and the reception had run their course with a restraint and dignity that had lived up to all his socially ambitious dreams. The radiant young debutante, the object of fascination to so many men, was now officially Mrs. Arthur Pack. There was no longer any reason, he felt, to restrain himself. So without warning, Arthur made his speech.

  Betty’s memory of precisely what Arthur said that evening had been dimmed by the passing years. But still, when she brought the chilling moments up once more in her mind to share with Hyde, his words, or at least the gist of them, grew clearer. And she had no trouble recalling his steely voice as it filled the tiny stateroom, his pitch alternatingly fierce, then ruminative, then indignant.

  Life is responsibility, he began as soberly as if on a pulpit rather than standing by the opened Murphy bed. He had responsibility to his position, and, for that matter, to his king and his country. He refused to walk away from those duties. He refused to have all that he had worked for destroyed. He refused to lose everything because his new bride was pregnant.

  Betty was confused; she didn’t comprehend what Arthur was trying to say. Or perhaps, she later would realize, she did not want to. If she put her mind to it, the implications would be too horrifying.

  Arthur was relentless. Now that he had started in, he had no intention of being vague. With an interrogator’s shrill precision, he hammered away: Once the baby is born, how long will it be before people do the math and realize that we’d been having an affair prior to our marriage? How long before people deduce that you were already pregnant when you stood in your white wedding dress in the church in front of God and all of Washington? How long before Sir Esme Howard—the Roman Catholic moralist who as ambassador sat in stern judgment over the embassy’s staff—calls me in and announces that my behavior was inappropriate for a representative of the crown, and I should consider myself sacked forthwith? Even if he somehow escaped such an
ignominious end to his career, Arthur ranted, there’d be an indelible black mark on his record. Any chance of his moving up in the Foreign Service hierarchy would be gone.

  Staggered, Betty tried to argue that his logic was “far-fetched.” It seemed “improbable”—no, “ridiculous,” she swiftly corrected—that anyone, let alone the British ambassador to America, would bother themselves with ascertaining the date of their child’s conception.

  But by now Arthur seemed to be in a full panic. His voice rode over her words. I did the right thing by marrying you, he said with a pride that even decades later still struck Betty as both self-righteous and self-serving. I accepted your declaration that I was the father of the child, he went on pointedly, for the first time implying that there was a scent of doubt. Now, he insisted, you must do the right thing. “You must get rid of the baby.”

  “Get rid of the baby?” Betty finally repeated. At that moment, it must have seemed easier to be bewildered, to pretend not to comprehend.

  An abortion, Arthur explained, fierce and succinct.

  Betty, no doubt, could have had the fetus aborted when she’d first learned she was pregnant. For reasons she never articulated—fear? a belief in the sanctity of life? a wishful vision of motherhood?—she’d decided not to go down that path. Instead, she had devised another strategy. Only now her carefully executed plan was falling apart.

  But it was not too late. A woman with a fighter’s temperament, Betty could have refused her new husband’s demand. Or she could have argued. Even pleaded. Yet she chose not to respond; in truth, perhaps she was too stunned. All she could do, she would recall, was fix her new husband with a deep and accusatory stare.

  Finally, she said it was getting late. They should start dressing for dinner. The captain was expecting them.

  Why did Betty surrender? Was she afraid of Arthur? Intimidated by the hulking ex-soldier looming over her and shouting in his parade-ground voice? Or was she feeling guilty? That she had trapped Arthur into this marriage? That she had lied to him about his being the father of the child? Or possibly she simply didn’t want the child. To this day, Betty conceded to Hyde, she remained uncertain of her motives. All she knew—and four decades had done nothing to dull the sharp edge of her anger—was that from that moment on, she despised the man she had married.

  THE NEWLYWEDS HID OUT IN a rented cottage in Bignor, a tranquil storybook village in Sussex with winding country lanes, giant yew trees that had been standing since the time of William the Conqueror, and a constant background melody of chirping birdsong. Arthur found the house after a succession of London doctors refused to perform an abortion. It would be too dangerous, the obstetricians all agreed; the pregnancy was too far along.

  In time, Betty would learn that all safe houses were alike, and this one was no exception—the isolation, the well-stocked fridge and bar, and the waiting, the endless, empty waiting.

  Dear parents, Betty wrote in a succession of bravely cheery letters. We take long walks on Bignor Hill. We sit in the ancient churchyard and find comfort in the peace and quiet. Today as we strolled across the South Downs we could smell fresh sea air rising up in the distance from the Channel.

  To Hyde, though, Betty told a less fanciful story. Arthur had insisted that Betty go riding with him every day. “But not at a normal gait,” Betty remembered bitterly, “not galloping or anything like that. . . . He made me ride out of tune with the horse to joggle me up. He also made me skip rope, jump off walls, in fact, anything to bring about an abortion.”

  At night, Arthur drew steamy hot baths for his new bride; his wishful theory was that Betty’s immersion in the nearly scalding water would cause her to lose the baby. After one of these painful sessions, a woozy Betty managed to climb out of the tub, but fainted as she tried to steady herself.

  She quickly regained consciousness, but decided she’d had enough. Betty was scared; she had begun to worry that she might not survive the ordeal. She demanded that Arthur take her back to London to see a doctor. If he didn’t accompany her, she would go alone.

  At the end of the examination, the concerned obstetrician sternly confirmed Betty’s own diagnosis. If she didn’t immediately confine herself to bed, her own health, possibly her life, could be in jeopardy.

  The next day Betty checked into the Wellbeck Street Clinic, a private nursing home. She would rest, and await the birth of her child.

  ARTHUR, HOWEVER, REMAINED UNDETERRED. WHILE Betty was confined to her bed, he came up with another plan. In the personal columns of several national dailies, he placed the identical terse notice: Foster mother required for newborn whose parents have been posted abroad.

  He received a stack of replies, and with a well-practiced bureaucrat’s gimlet focus scrutinized each of the candidates who hoped to take on the care and raising of his child. In the end, he settled on a couple who lived in the Shropshire village of Dorrington. The husband was a country doctor, and that conjured up an agreeable image of a well-educated, decent man of modest yet sufficient means. And the letter written by his wife had a polite, very English formality that he had to have found appealing; it was easy to imagine her as a cozy housewife who put the kettle on at four and tended her garden. But no doubt best of all, a doctor and his wife in distant Dorrington would have absolutely no ties to the Foreign Office. His secret would be safe.

  He wrote back to the Cassells asking a few humdrum questions, more for propriety’s sake than out of any real interest, and suggested, apparently without any embarrassment, that he pay a monthly support fee for the child that amounted to little more than pin money for the couple. When the doctor’s wife swiftly replied to his questions with a thoughtful punctiliousness and, no less pleasing, also agreed to his financial terms, his mind was set. Without even consulting his wife, he sent off the letter agreeing to hand over their child to the Cassells.

  In the early hours of October 2, 1930, Betty gave birth to a boy, Anthony George. No announcements were made, and the information Arthur reluctantly provided for the statutory birth registration was deliberately vague. He listed his occupation as “Economist.” His address was simply “Westminster.”

  Ten days after the boy’s birth, Mrs. Cassell took the train into London and retrieved the infant from Betty, who had brought it back to the Wellbeck Clinic. On the morning of the exchange, Betty thought the hardest thing she would ever have to do in her life would be to give her son to another woman. But returning empty-handed that afternoon to the rented flat in Queen Anne’s Gate, the bedroom still sweet with the baby’s fresh new smell, proved even more difficult.

  She told herself—relying on the same convenient logic she used in a belated letter to her mother, announcing the birth—that she was not surrendering her son forever. She tried to convince herself that once Arthur’s career was on track, once they were settled in a home, she’d reclaim her son. But looking back at her decision, she knew these were rationalizations, and facile ones at best. Betty could no longer delude herself. The larger truth was now undeniable: she did not want to have to pretend each day that Tony was Arthur’s son.

  THE NEWLYWEDS STAYED IN ENGLAND for a few more weeks, and now, unencumbered, they had time for socializing. Arthur invited Eleanor, an old girlfriend, to tea. He had been quite serious about her, and had proposed marriage while she was up at Oxford. After giving the matter some thought, Eleanor had rejected his offer. “My main concern,” she would say, “was that he was so much older than me.”

  Another possible ancillary concern was that Eleanor, who came from landed people in Cheshire, was more discerning than the easily bamboozled Americans; despite the diplomat’s mufti, she might have suspected Arthur to be not quite a gentleman. But nevertheless she was curious to meet his American wife, a woman who, Arthur had snidely boasted, was even younger than Eleanor.

  “She was a ravishingly lovely creature,” Eleanor, now Lady Campbell-Orde, recalled. “Very tall and slim and fair. I could easily see why he fell for her. Her coloring was superb and
she was quite extraordinarily pretty.”

  As Arthur, teacup in hand, sat and listened, the two women had a long chat. Eleanor found she was taken by Betty’s “great charm and poise.” And she expressed polite concern when Betty, rather offhandedly, revealed that she had recently been in the hospital.

  At that moment a gale-force storm of anxiety must have swept through Arthur’s entire being. But clearly Betty was only playing with him. She offered no further explanation of why she’d been hospitalized, and Eleanor was too English to ask. To what was no doubt Arthur’s colossal relief, his secret remained buried. There was no mention of the son they’d just abandoned.

  A few days later, as their honeymoon was about to end and the return voyage to Washington loomed, Arthur decided that he should not leave England without seeing his family. At his sister’s small house in Forest Gate, Betty was introduced to his mother, his sister Rosie—now Mrs. Rivett—her husband, and their teenage daughter.

  Over tea, Arthur told stories about the important work he was doing at the embassy in Washington. Betty answered all their openly fascinated questions about life in America. It was a pleasant afternoon, and it went quickly. It was over before the newlyweds ever got around to mentioning the boy—the grandson, the nephew, the cousin—now living with strangers not much more than an hour’s drive away.

  Looking back on the visit, Arthur’s niece would remember the occasion as a glamorous, even exciting interlude: “We were all bowled over by Betty, her exquisite beauty and great elegance.”

  But Rosie, Arthur’s usually doting sister, had misgivings. Betty was “so lively and passionate, yet married to Arthur who found it difficult to show emotion.” In truth, she “felt sorry for Betty.”