The Pigeon Tunnel (31 page)

I saw him crouching in his cell, too, on the edge of his bunk with his mortgaged head in his hands, a proud young man who'd never in
his life gone hungry or washed his own socks or made his own bed, thinking of his three pious doting sisters and two adoring parents, his mother heartbroken and forever wringing her hands and asking God, ‘Why, why?' in her Irish brogue, and his father a former mayor of Poole, an alderman and Freemason. Both serving Ronnie's time with him in their minds. Both turning prematurely white-haired while they waited for him.

How could Ronnie bear knowing all that while he stared at the wall? With his pride and prodigious energy and drive, how did he cope with the confinement? I'm as restless as he was. I can't sit still for an hour. I can't read a book for an hour unless it's in German, which somehow keeps me in my chair. Even at a good play, I long for the interval and a stretch. When I'm writing, I'm forever bouncing up from my desk and charging round the garden or up the street. I've only to lock myself in the loo for three seconds – the key has fallen out of its hold and I'm fumbling to get it back in – and I'm in a Force 12 sweat and screaming to be let out. Yet Ronnie at the prime of his life did serious time – three or four years. He was still serving one sentence when they slapped some more charges on him and gave him a second, this time with hard labour or, as we might call it today with our horrible misuse of the word,
enhanced
incarceration. The stretches he did in later life – Hong Kong, Singapore, Jakarta, Zurich – were, to the best of my knowledge, short. Researching
The Honourable Schoolboy
in Hong Kong, I came face to face with his ex-jailer at the Jardine Matheson tent at Happy Valley racecourse.

‘Mr Cornwell, sir, your father is one of the finest men I ever met. It was a privilege to look after him. I'm retiring soon and when I get back to London he's going to fix me up in business.' Even in prison, Ronnie was fattening his jailer for the pot.

I am in Chicago, supporting a lacklustre campaign to sell British goods abroad. The British Consul General, with whom I am staying,
hands me a telegram. It is from our Ambassador in Jakarta telling me that Ronnie is in prison and will I buy him out? I promise to pay whatever needs to be paid. To my alarm, it is only a few hundred. Ronnie must be down on his luck.

From the Bezirksgefängnis in Zurich, where he has been imprisoned for hotel fraud, Ronnie telephones me, reversing the charges. ‘Son? It's your old man.' What can I do for you, Father? ‘You can get me out of this damned jail, son. It's all a misunderstanding. These boys just won't look at the facts.' How much? No answer. Just an actor's gulp before a drowning voice delivers the punch line: ‘I can't do any more prison, son.' Then the sobs that as usual go through me like slow knives.

I asked my two surviving aunts. They spoke the way Ronnie spoke when he was young: in light, unconscious Dorset accents that I really like. How did Ronnie take it, that first stretch? How did it affect him? Who was he before prison? Who was he after it? But the aunts are not historians, they're sisters. They love Ronnie, and prefer not to think beyond their love. The scene they remember best was Ronnie shaving on the morning of the day the verdict was to be announced at Winchester Assizes. He had defended himself from the dock the previous day and was certain he would be home free that evening. It was the first time the aunts were allowed to watch him shave. But the only answer I get from them is in their eyes and dropped words: ‘It was terrible. Just terrible.' They are talking about the shame as if it were yesterday rather than seventy years ago.

Sixty-something years back I had asked my mother, Olive, the same question. Unlike the aunts, who prefer to keep their memories to themselves, Olive was a tap you couldn't turn off. From the
moment of our reunion at Ipswich railway station, she talked about Ronnie non-stop. She talked about his sexuality long before I had sorted out mine, and for ease of reference gave me a tattered hardback copy of Krafft-Ebing's
Psychopathia Sexualis
as a map to guide me through her husband's appetites before and after jail.

‘
Changed
, dear? In
prison?
Not a bit of it! You were totally
un
changed. You'd lost weight, of course – well, you would. Prison food isn't
meant
to be nice.' And then the image that will never leave me, not least because she seemed unaware of what she was saying: ‘And you did have this silly habit of stopping in front of doors and waiting at attention with your head down till I opened them for you. They were perfectly
ordinary
doors, not locked or anything, but you obviously weren't
expecting
to be able to open them for yourself.'

Why did Olive refer to Ronnie as
you
?
You
meaning
he
, but subconsciously recruiting me to be his surrogate, which by the time of her death was what I had become. There is an audiotape that Olive made for my brother Tony, all about her life with Ronnie. I still can't bear to play it, so all I've ever heard is scraps. On the tape she describes how Ronnie used to beat her up, which, according to Olive, was what prompted her to bolt. Ronnie's violence was not news to me because he had made a habit of beating up his second wife as well: so often and so purposefully and coming home at such odd hours of the night to do it that, seized by a chivalrous impulse, I appointed myself her ridiculous protector, sleeping on a mattress in front of her bedroom door and clutching a golf iron so that Ronnie would have to reckon with me before he got at her.

Would I really have struck him on his mortgaged head? Might I indeed have killed him, and followed in his footsteps to prison? Or just given him a hug and wished him goodnight? I'll never know, but I have played the possibilities in my memory so often that all of them are true.

Certainly Ronnie beat me up, too, but only a few times and not with much conviction. It was the shaping up that was the scary part: the lowering and readying of the shoulders, the resetting of the jaw.
And when I was grown up Ronnie tried to sue me, which I suppose is violence in disguise. He had watched a television documentary of my life and decided there was an implicit slander in my failure to mention that I owed everything to him.

How did Olive and Ronnie first get together? I asked her this question in my Krafft-Ebing period, not long after that first remembered hug at Ipswich station. ‘Through your Uncle Alec, dear,' she replied. She was referring to her estranged brother, her senior by twenty-five years. Their parents were both long dead, so Uncle Alec, a grandee of Poole, Member of Parliament and fabled local preacher, was her effective father. Like Olive, he was thin and bony and very tall, but also vain, a natty dresser with a great sense of his social importance. Appointed to present a cup to a local football team, Uncle Alec took Olive along with him, in the manner of one schooling a future princess in the exercise of her public duties.

Ronnie was the team's centre forward. Where else could he possibly play? As Uncle Alec moved along the line, shaking hands with each player, Olive trailed behind him, pinning a badge to each proud breast. But when she pinned one to Ronnie's he fell dramatically to his knees, complaining she had pierced him to the heart, which he was clutching with both hands. Uncle Alec, who on all known evidence was a pompous arse, loftily condoned the horseplay, and Ronnie with impressive meekness enquired whether he might call at the great house on Sunday afternoons to pay his respects – not to Olive, naturally, who was socially far above him – but to an Irish housemaid with whom he had struck up an acquaintance. Uncle Alec graciously gave his consent and Ronnie, under cover of wooing the maid, seduced Olive.

‘I was so lonely, darling. And you were such a ball of fire.' The fire, of course, was Ronnie, not me.

Uncle Alec was my first secret source and I blew him sky high. It
was to Alec that I had secretly written on my twenty-first birthday – Alec Glassey,
MP
, care of the House of Commons,
Private
 – to enquire whether his sister, my mother, was alive and, if so, where she might be found. Glassey had long ceased to be an
MP
, but miraculously the Commons authorities forwarded my letter. I had asked Ronnie the same question when I was younger, but he had only frowned and shaken his head, so after a few more shots I gave up. In a two-line scrawl Uncle Alec advised me that I would find her address on the attached piece of paper. A condition of this information was that I should never tell ‘the person concerned' where I had it from. Stimulated by the injunction, I blurted out the truth to Olive within moments of our meeting.

‘Then we must be grateful to him, dear,' she said, and that was all.

Or it
should
have been all, except that forty years later in New Mexico, and several years after my mother's death, my brother Tony informed me that on his twenty-first birthday, two years before mine, he, too, had written to Alec, had taken the train to Olive, hugged her on the No. 1 platform and probably, thanks to his height, achieved a better grasp than I had. And he had debriefed her.

So why had Tony not told me all this? Why hadn't I told him? Why had Olive told neither of us about the other? Why had Alec tried to keep us all apart? The answer is fear of Ronnie, which for all of us was like fear of life itself. His reach, psychological and physical, and his terrible charm were inescapable. He was a walking Rolodex of connections. When one of his women was discovered to be consoling herself with a lover, Ronnie went to work like a one-man war room. Within an hour he had a line to the wretched man's employer, his bank manager, his landlord and his wife's father. Each was recruited as an agent of destruction.

And what Ronnie had done to a helpless erring husband he could do to all of us tenfold. Ronnie wrecked as he created. Every time I am moved to admire him, I remember his victims. His own mother, freshly bereaved, the sobbing executrix of his father's estate; his second wife's mother, also widowed, also in dazed possession of her
late husband's fortune: Ronnie robbed them both, depriving them of their husbands' savings and the proper heirs of their inheritance. Dozens, scores of others, all trusting, all by Ronnie's noble standards deserving of his protection: conned, robbed, ripped off by their knight errant. How did he explain this to himself, if at all? The racehorses, parties, women and Bentleys that furnished his other life while he was gulling money out of people so helpless with love for him that they couldn't say no? Did Ronnie ever count the cost of being God's chosen boy?