The Last Goodnight Page 9

  As Hyde listened intently, Betty explained that she’d taken inventory of the many charades she had acted out in her attempt to recast her life, and each had offered only evidence of her colossal foolishness. She renounced them all.

  She put an end to all the artifice, all the interior restrictions. She was done wearing the painted smile of a diplomatic geisha. She’d no longer deny that she was attractive, or run from the gifts this blessing offered. There would be no restraints on her high-flying spirit. She would soar. And she would never, never, never again share a bed with a man who repulsed her and not scream that it was a sentence in hell.

  Morose, she recalled the events of the past year, and under the weight of her heavy scrutiny, they all collapsed. Even her day at the palace, she complained to Hyde, had been tainted by the tacky faux diamond bracelet Arthur bought her and insisted she wear on her wrist to meet the king. And as for the baby, well, the girl was better off with her nurse. If she had to listen to any more of the child’s incessant screeching, she was afraid she might send Denise off to the Cassells too.

  Yet just as Betty began to descend deeper into this low, increasingly dangerous mood, Arthur received word that he was to be transferred to the British embassy in Madrid. It was a senior appointment, and he swelled with pride.

  For Betty, the news was her salvation. As she told Hyde: “It was a big thrill. . . . I felt prepared for the realization of a long-held dream.”

  Chapter 14

  WAS IT FATE? BETTY HAD always dismissed that notion as too narrow, even a little silly. Her worldview, a product of her practical Minnesota roots, was active and spontaneous: you seize the moment; you make things happen. But after the shock of her encounter in Madrid, all her steady, self-sufficient philosophy fell apart. For Betty, once more deeply in love, was certain that it had been meant to be; forces beyond any logic or reason had long been at work to make it happen. Although still baffled by it all, Betty nevertheless insisted to Hyde that “the guiding hand of Destiny” must have been shoving her along.

  Up to that transforming moment, her days in Spain had been filled with a willed brightness. Stung by her disappointments in Chile, she was determined—once again!—to put her life back in order. Her first self-appointed task was to make a new home.

  Within days of their arrival in Madrid in the spring of 1935, Betty found an airy, high-ceilinged apartment a short stroll from the Prado. With an intentional symbolism she did the place all up in white—white walls, white carpet, and plush white upholstery. It would be the blank canvas upon which she would create their new domestic life. Betty, who lived a roller-coaster life measured out in dramatic endings followed by even more dramatic new beginnings, told herself that in this new home she would enter into a truce with Arthur, and as husband and wife they would work together to raise their daughter. And as with all of Betty’s pledges, she meant it—at least at that moment.

  During those first months in Madrid, her resolve held. She was the charming embassy wife at the afternoon bridge tables, the golf outings, the staff picnics in the green meadows of the Sierra de Guadarrama, the late-night diplomatic dinners. But even as she slipped into a sedate, accommodating version of herself, she couldn’t help feeling that Spain, tempestuous, romantic, full of a fiery Latin excitement, was beckoning, urging her to join the merry fiesta celebrated beyond the embassy gates. So perhaps it had always been only a matter of time before Betty, so susceptible to passion, was diverted. But what was surprising, Betty related to Hyde, was how she found her way into the Spain she had always imagined.

  It happened—as would another significant event years later in Warsaw—on the manicured grounds of a country club. This first encounter was at the Club Puerta de Hierro, a lush green oasis of privilege a short drive from downtown Madrid. The helpful wife, Betty had driven to the club to pick up Arthur. He’d have finished his round of golf with, as he’d told her that morning, a Spanish diplomat he’d originally met in Washington, and by now he’d be sipping his first martini.

  Betty was scanning the tables on the clubhouse terrace for her husband when her search stopped abruptly. Standing with his back toward her was a man with broad shoulders that tapered down to a bullfighter’s narrow waist and long, athletic legs. It was an incredibly evocative pose; he was as motionless as a statue, yet at the same time his presence was charged, rippling with a graceful power.

  But even more arresting, in just that moment’s glance Betty was certain there was something familiar in his stance. She knew she had seen him somewhere before. And that once before she had experienced an identical rush of emotions. Somehow, she understood in a startling flash she recalled to Hyde, this man was “hidden in my yesterdays.”

  Then he turned around. In that instant she was once again a teenager home from boarding school silently pledging her heart to the handsome Spaniard with the bright smile on the tennis court, the gallant Adonis who had bowed low in homage to her. Here he was again. Destiny, she’d always believe, was giving her its blessings, coaxing her on.

  In the next moment, further proof that this totally improbable reunion was meant to be, Arthur, as if on cue, appeared. And he was introducing the living, breathing embodiment of all her worshipful teenage daydreams.

  “Betty, this is Señor Carlos Sartorius,” Arthur announced. “He was one of the young lads at the Spanish embassy when you were in the schoolroom.”

  At last armed with a name, and no longer a demure schoolgirl, Betty studied Carlos openly. The years had added distinction and assurance to the jauntiness of youth. But the wavy hair, the twinkling dark eyes, and the incredibly white, cheerful smile were as wonderful as ever.

  “Well,” she said playfully, “I wasn’t in the schoolroom all the time.” She was too proud to admit that a decade later she still remembered him. Yet at the same time, she was hoping to trigger Carlos’s memory.

  She needn’t have worried; her magic was as strong and as persistent as his. He too vividly remembered their moment at the Washington tennis court. And as Arthur listened, mute, helpless, and very much the odd man out, Carlos offered up a confession: he had gone back the next day to look for her. “And before I could find you, I was called back to Spain and I have been here ever since.”

  Betty cherished his words.

  Still, all her seductress’s instincts seemed to be telling her not to pounce. She hid behind coyness. “And thinking only of me all those years, I hope,” she said breezily.

  But Carlos refused to banter about important things; an aristocrat and a gentleman, he knew when to be sincere. His words were spoken with an utter seriousness, and they left Betty thrilled. “Some first impressions stay new and freshen one’s whole life.”

  For a long, deep moment the two of them looked at each other in silence. It was as if they were both lost in their memories, both wondering what this reunion meant.

  Then Carlos, no doubt suddenly remembering that Betty was a married woman and that, even more sobering, her husband was there too, regained his equilibrium. He now spoke with the easy fluency of a diplomat.

  “Señora,” he said with a gay charm, “you take ten years to get here and then you bring your husband who is a warm friend to my family. What, in honor, can I say? What to do? Well, I shall fetch my wife Carmencita and we will drink champagne to the old days and to the new ones too. And then you will both join us for dinner.”

  And so there was champagne, and then more champagne, and then dinner, and then of course more champagne.

  “We must begin your Spanish education somewhere,” Carlos said as the four of them sat at the dinner table. “You will find Spain a very good schoolroom, I think. And perhaps with your husband’s permission, I could fulfill the requirements as a teacher?”

  Betty liked the idea. “My knowledge is very superficial—all on the surface. Perhaps you will teach me about Spain and the Spaniards? I don’t want to live here on the surface,” she said truthfully.

  Carlos quickly agreed. “You will find it diffic
ult, I think, to live on the surface in the company of Spaniards. We do not understand this way of existing. That is why we’re the despair of the Anglo-Saxons. What you call dramatics, we call the very truth!”

  Carlos went on talking all through dinner about the Spain, the “real Spain,” he called it, that he would show the Packs. He seemed determined to cool the mood that had spontaneously ignited when they were introduced.

  Betty, who knew a bit about keeping important secrets buried, went along with this operational maneuver. This was tradecraft she had perfected over the years. But it didn’t matter how the conversation meandered, or where it aimlessly flowed. It was too late. The damage had already been done.

  THERE WAS NEVER A BETTER, more informative guide. Good to his promise, Carlos introduced the Packs to Spain. With his wife along to complete the foursome, they went about like old friends. He took them to bullfights, shooting weekends at country haciendas, and endless rounds of sparkling parties where you could count on mingling with a fun-loving crowd of Spanish nobles. Night after night, their long evenings on the town ended at Jimmy’s Place, the jaunty Scotsman at the piano playing soft love songs as the couples danced cheek-to-cheek, a river of champagne flowed, and the dawn lit up the dusty streets of Madrid.

  All the time, as the four friends went about together, as they played their roles in this happiest of friendships, Betty recounted to Hyde, both Carlos and she knew what was really happening. They could feel the tension between them twisting tighter, building and building until it was near to bursting. He would look for Betty across the crowded room at a party, and she would know in an instant, her green eyes drawn to him like a powerful magnet. When the couples exchanged partners on the small, smoky dance floor at Jimmy’s, Carlos held Betty tight in his strong arms. Yet at the same time, they pretended to themselves, to their spouses, that it wasn’t happening. That it wasn’t inevitable. This was, Carlos no doubt felt, the only reasonable way to behave; and Betty, who knew how to run an operation, let him go on for as long as he could.

  When they finally became lovers, they discovered that the waiting, the weeks of torturous restraint, had made the release of all their pent-up emotion a wild blessing. Their passion was dizzying. In all her life, Betty had never known such an overwhelming love.

  Madrid, especially Carlos’s Madrid, was a small city, and discretion was difficult. People would see them together, see how they looked at one another, how they slyly let their fingers linger when Carlos lit Betty’s cigarette, and the talk started.

  Betty, always reckless, was beyond caring. But Carlos had a senior position in the Spanish Air Ministry. He worried about his career. And he was convinced his wife and Arthur did not know about the affair. He hoped to keep things that way.

  Carlos rented a small penthouse apartment on the northern fringes of the city, in a neighborhood where they wouldn’t be recognized, where they wouldn’t need to pretend. It was a place to live their secret lives.

  They would pass their mornings waiting impatiently for the afternoons. Then they would make their separate furtive ways to the apartment. The bedroom opened onto a narrow terrace. As they lay in bed together, wrapped in one another’s arms, the sun setting in the distance over the purple Guadarrama mountains beyond the open terrace doors, Betty felt that life was at last sublime. Of all the safe houses she would know, this would always be the sweetest.

  Yet they both understood from the start that their relationship was doomed. This was Spain, a country whose ebullience existed side by side with strict ritual. Carlos, the head of a distinguished and wealthy family of Roman Catholic aristocrats, could never get a divorce. He could never turn his back on his heritage or his family.

  The knowledge that a future was impossible served to intensify every moment in the present. They relished their hours together in the bedroom of the small penthouse. If they could not have more time together, they would have it all now.

  IN THAT WAY, HER DAYS made large by passion and subterfuge, by love and deceit, Betty lived an exciting year. Then, in January 1936, Betty took ill. Or at least that was how she explained it to Arthur. She said she had a gynecological problem and needed to see an obstetrician in London.

  Arthur did not press for details, and neither did Betty’s circle of sophisticated Spanish friends when she announced her trip. They were convinced they already knew why she was running off to an Anglo-Saxon doctor: she was pregnant, and wanted an abortion. If this were true, as it very well might have been, it was one more secret that would be forever locked away in the classified operational history of her life.

  What is known, and what she very willingly told Hyde, was that despite her impending obstetric procedure, she had a very jolly trip to London. She made the journey with a group from the embassy returning to England for home leave, and accompanying this party—the life of it, Betty would affirm—was Lord Castlerosse.

  Valentine Castlerosse, to his self-proclaimed delight, was a rarity: by birth a haughty aristocrat with an inherited title and a stately home, he was by profession an ink-stained Fleet Street journalist. His “Londoner’s Log” column in the Sunday Express was required reading for England’s smart set and anyone else who enjoyed eavesdropping on the wanton exploits of those in society. Another seeming contradiction: he was a gluttonous Tweedledum of a man, built like a 265-pound sand castle. Yet he was also an inveterate womanizer, waddling famously across London from one bedroom to another.

  Valentine Castlerosse, journalist by trade and aristocrat by birth, who befriended Betty and introduced her to Lord Beaverbrook.

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  What also distinguished him—and this was undoubtedly the secret of Castlerosse’s success—was his quick wit and brash, mischievous charm. A society doyenne out to get revenge for some slight approached him at a party, tapped his massive waist-coated belly with a catty finger, and snarled, “If this stomach were on a woman, I would think she was pregnant.” Without missing a beat, his lordship drawled back, “Madame, a half-hour ago it was on a woman and by now she very well might be pregnant.”

  When Betty was introduced to Lord Castlerosse in the dining car aboard the train taking the group through Spain and then into France, he consumed two liters of whisky in the course of the dinner and seemed none the worse for the experience. That intrigued her. And when the cool beauty across the table—who, naturally, had his attention from the moment she’d boarded the train—tried unsuccessfully to light her cigarette with a box of Spanish matches and in her frustration quipped, “This is the only thing in Spain that doesn’t strike,” a friendship was born.

  “I’m going to use that in my column,” he promised. And true to his word, he did.

  They grew very close on that trip, enjoying each other’s company immensely. Then, as Betty recovered from her medical problems, they spent a lot of time together in London. He would escort her to Quaglino’s, where they dined on mountains of oysters and drank magnums of Dom Perignon. He confessed that his wife, infuriated by his latest indiscretion, had locked him out of his home and consulted her solicitors. In turn, Betty confided a bit about her own tumultuous life, her perpetual restlessness, the agony of being locked in a loveless marriage to a staid, pin-striped Foreign Service functionary. In that way, through mutual revelations fueled by wine, circumstance, and a shared waspish candor, they got to know a good deal about one another.

  It was on one of their last evenings together, when Betty was wrapping up things in London before going back to her complicated life in Madrid, to the unsteady world she shared with her husband and her lover, that Lord Castlerosse arrived for cocktails at her hotel. Tonight, he announced mysteriously, they would be dining with a friend.

  The cab took them to 13 Cleveland Row in Mayfair, a big white brick pile known as Stornoway House. Who lives here? Betty asked, intrigued by the size of the mansion. “My boss,” said the lord. “The Beaver.”

  Lord Beaverbrook, the self-made Canadian millionaire who owned the Express
and had served as Britain’s minister of information in the last war, had a small group at his table that night. He seemed, though, to focus all his attention on Betty. Not that she was particularly surprised; Betty had long ago grown accustomed to that sort of scrutiny from men.

  Still, she did find some of his questions, as well as his persistence, a bit odd. He went on about her people, her father’s military service, her husband’s work at the embassy, how she passed her days in Spain, her affection for the country she had acquired through marriage to a British citizen. That’s what journalists do, Betty reminded herself. They ask questions. And Betty being Betty, she found no reason to dodge her host’s assault. She replied with candor, as well as her usual easy, self-deprecating charm.

  When they were leaving, Lord Beaverbrook escorted them to the door. “Everything you said she’d be,” he told his columnist and good friend. “Only more beautiful.”

  Lord Beaverbrook, the British newspaper tycoon who recommended Betty to Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service.

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  It was not long after that fateful evening that the Beaver had a word with one of his many friends who worked at 54 Broadway, just off Victoria Street in London, the operational headquarters of the Secret Intelligence Service. Whether his approach was over an intimate lunch at his club or through a carefully worded handwritten note has long been forgotten. But, as was duly recorded in the files of MI6, Lord Beaverbrook had done a round of talent-spotting over dinner.

  He saw in Betty Pack a young woman from good stock with beauty, intelligence, daring, and, as Castlerosse had made clear, a shaky moral compass. No less appealing, her husband’s job was tailor-made to offer the best sort of cover; her diplomat’s wife passport was the real thing.

  All the unsettled young woman needed, he suggested knowingly to this senior member of the Service, was a great and noble cause to which she could pledge her talent and her allegiance.