A First Look at Robert Harris' New Thriller Precipice

Chapter One 

Late one Thursday morning at the beginning of July 1914, a young woman with dark wet hair strode long-legged from the Serpentine in Hyde Park along Oxford Street towards Marylebone. In one hand she carried a cream linen sun hat, in the other a damp bathing costume and a pair of silk stockings rolled up inside a navy-blue towel.

Although she was evidently in a hurry, she did not break into a run – the pavements were too hot and crowded for that, and besides, being seen to exert herself was never her style. But she did walk quickly, tall and slim, her head erect, and in such a purposeful manner that most people instinctively cleared out of her way.

It was shortly after noon when she rounded the corner into the grand Georgian terrace where her parents had their London residence. On the opposite side of the street, the postman had made his midday delivery and was standing on the step, in front of the double-fronted, white-stuccoed mansion, checking his bag.

With luck, she was just in time. 

She crossed the road, wished him good morning, slipped around him, beneath the portico, through the wide front door and into the stuffy midsummer gloom of the hall.

The mail still lay in its wire basket.

She managed to extract the familiar envelope moments before a manservant emerged from the depths of the house to fetch the post for her father. She hid the letter in her hat, handed over the rest, started up the stairs, and was halfway to the landing when her mother, Lady Sheffield, called from the morning room: ‘How was your swim, darling?’

Without breaking step, she shouted back, ‘Heavenly!’

She closed the door to her room, dropped her swimming things, tossed her hat onto the dressing table, lifted her dress over her head, and threw herself down on the bed.

Lying on her back, she held up the envelope between both hands.

Hon. Venetia Stanley, 18 Mansfield St., Portland Place, London, W.

She worked her finger beneath the flap, tore it open and pulled out a single sheet of thick notepaper, folded in half and dated that day.

2 July 14

I am in rather better spirits this morning – thanks mainly to you. I hope I did not depress you unduly yesterday.

You were very dear and sympathetic, and helped me as you always do. I am truly grateful in my heart of hearts. I suppose at this moment you are plunging in the water somewhere in the company of Lady Scott. I have a rather drab day before me, including an interview with the King at 4.30. Ottoline asked me to dine there tonight so it is possible I may have a glimpse of you . . . Bless you darling.

It was unsigned. Recently, he had taken the precaution of not using her name or his own.

She read it again. He would expect an immediate reply, and would fret if he didn’t get one, even though nothing of any significance had happened to her since she saw him yesterday. She carried the letter over to the dressing table, sat down, studied herself without interest in the mirror, and took out a sheet of paper. She unscrewed the top of her fountain pen, thought for a few moments, and then began to write rapidly.

I am just back from an invigorating swim in the Serpentine with Kathleen. Her energetic crawl put my languid breaststroke to shame. Remarkably, we managed to pass an entire hour without any mention of her late husband or even the South Pole – surely a record? The water was deliciously cool, if crowded. What a summer this is! – almost as hot as three years ago. I am so happy you are more cheerful. You will find a way through this Irish tangle, you always do. Dearest, I can’t come to Ottoline’s tonight as I’ve promised Edward & the Cossack I’ll join their midnight river trip from Westminster to Kew. You know I’d much rather be with you. But I’ll see you tomorrow. All my love.

Despite the speed of composition, her distinctive stylish calligraphy was clear as print. She too didn’t sign her name. She blew on the glistening black ink, addressed the envelope – Prime Minister, 10 Downing Street, London, S.W. – added a penny stamp, and rang for Edith, her maid – German Swiss, reliably discreet – to take it to the post box. There were twelve deliveries a day in London in 1914. It would be in his hands by mid-afternoon.

*

His reply reached the house at eight o’clock as she was descending to the hall to greet Maurice Baring, her escort for the evening. She heard the flap of the letter box. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Edith go to the wire cage.

‘Hello, dear Maurice.’ She extended her hand. He was rich, forty, balding, a man of letters; indeed, a published poet (Forget-me-Not and Lily of the Valley, 1905 – now, alas, forgotten). He was wearing white tie and tails with a red carnation in his buttonhole. When he bent to kiss her fingers, his soft moustache brushed her wrist; she could smell his delicate lime pomade. Earlier, Lady Sheffield – baffled by her daughter’s modern ways and increasingly concerned about her marriageability at the age of nearly twenty- seven – had asked if she was sure she would be ‘safe’ with him.

‘Mama, I’d be safe with Maurice if I was stranded with him naked on a desert island for a year.’

‘Venetia!’ ‘But it’s true!’

Edith waited until her mistress was on the doorstep before slipping her the letter under cover of adjusting her dress. She opened it sitting next to Maurice in the back of his car. A short note, it was headed 4.15 p.m., which meant he must have scribbled it either before he left Downing Street to see the King, or while he was at the Palace waiting for his audience.

Don’t if you can avoid it beloved go on this infernal river trip but do come to Ottoline’s. Couldn’t you even manage dinner there? It would be so nice. But if that is impossible I look forward to seeing you there later on. Do try. Your own 

She frowned. Infernal river trip . . . He might be right. She had had her doubts about it, ever since she accepted the invitation, albeit for reasons different to his. The trouble with boat parties in her experience was that while one could get on them easily enough, it wasn’t nearly so easy to get off them, and there were few things in life she detested more than feeling trapped.

Maurice must have registered the change in her expression. ‘Trouble with an admirer?’

‘I don’t have admirers, Maurice, as you well know.’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t be so sure about that . . .’

She didn’t much care for the tone of the remark, nor for the somewhat toothy leer which accompanied it. Dear God, had she been on the shelf so long even Maurice might be contemplating a pass?

She said, ‘I suppose it’s too late to chuck this whole boat trip business and go to Ottoline’s instead?’

‘What a peculiar thing to say! We haven’t been invited to Ottoline’s. And besides, the river will be fun. Everyone will be there.’

By everyone he meant ‘the Coterie’, as they called themselves, or ‘the Corrupt Coterie’ as the press preferred it – two dozen or so friends (the number fluctuated according to some mysterious collective judgement as to who was ‘amusing’ and who ‘a bore’) who went around together, sometimes to the Café Royal, occasionally to the music hall or a boxing match in the East End, most often to the Cave of the Golden Calf, a basement nightclub near Regent Street.

‘Yes,’ she said dubiously, ‘I suppose everyone will be.’ She stuffed the letter into her purse and snapped the clasp.

She was not one of the Coterie’s leading spirits. She did not drink like Sir Denis Anson, the young baronet who could down two bottles of champagne before the evening even started, or take drugs like Lady Diana Manners (‘the most beautiful woman in England’), who liked sniffing chloroform. She wasn’t an intellectual like Raymond Asquith, whose father the Prime Minister had written the letter in her purse, or independently rich like Nancy Cunard, the shipping heiress, who was only eighteen. She went along with them to alleviate her boredom, to annoy her mother, and because nothing they got up to shocked her. And there was another characteristic that drew her to them: not cynicism exactly – although Raymond, the oldest and the wittiest, certainly was a cynic – but rather a curious sense of detachment from life. She felt as if nothing really mattered: not them, or the world, or even herself. They all felt rather like that.

It was in this familiar spirit of indifference that she surrendered herself to whatever the night might bring, borne along in silent luxury inside the cocoon of Maurice’s Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost; first to a dinner for six at the Russian Embassy in Belgrave Square given by Constantine Benckendorff, ‘the Cossack’, the son of the ambassador, who had organised the river trip with Edward Horner, Raymond’s brother-in-law; and then on afterwards in the Rolls again to the river, where the others were converging from their own separate dinner parties – sixteen guests in all, debouching from cars and taxis – Claud Russell and Duff Cooper, both diplomats at the Foreign Office, each clutching a brace of Bollinger rescued from Duff’s mother’s table, and Duff’s sister Sybil Hart-Davis, and Iris Tree, a model and actress, who took her clothes off a lot, and Jasper Ridley who was a barrister and married to the Cossack’s sister, and Raymond of course, and his wife Katharine, and Edward Horner her brother, another young lawyer . . .

They kissed and embraced and chattered on about what fun they were having – the young women in their different dresses as brightly coloured as birds of paradise, the men in their mono-chrome uniform of black tailcoats, white tie and top hats – pouring down the flights of stone steps from the Embankment to Westminster Pier, watched by a curious crowd of onlookers leaning against the parapet. And Venetia went with them, gathering her green silk gown in both hands so that the hem didn’t brush the ground.

The boat was more impressive than she had expected, a lengthy Victorian pleasure steamer big enough for fifty passengers, named King. A tall funnel rose between fore and aft decks strung with coloured Chinese lanterns. Reflected orbs of lemon, lime and pink shattered and re-formed on the black sheen of the oily water. It was a hot night – bright, still, with a half-full moon. Through the windows of the central cabin, she could see a buffet supper laid out amid flickering candelabra and ice buckets stuffed with champagne. A quintet of musicians in the prow, hired from Thomas Beecham’s orchestra at Covent Garden, struck up ‘By the Beautiful Sea’, the hit of the summer, just as Big Ben, its round yellow clock-face illuminated like a second moon, chimed eleven.

Denis was the first to board, running up the gangplank, swinging round one of the poles from which the lanterns were suspended, and then climbing up onto the railing. He crouched on the narrow handrail for a moment then slowly rose to his full height, wobbling between the deck and the river, stretching out his hands until he had gained his balance. The spectators on the Embankment applauded. He turned precariously and began to move towards the stern like a tightrope walker, cautiously putting one foot in front of the other, toe to heel. When he reached the end, he turned to face the pier. For a quarter of a minute, he stood there, silhouetted against the river and the lights of the opposite bank, swaying on the edge of disaster.

Diana said, ‘Oh, Vinny, look at Denis – he can’t be that drunk!’

‘He’s very drunk,’ said Venetia, ‘otherwise he wouldn’t be doing it.’

Suddenly he threw up his hands and fell backwards onto the deck and disappeared. They all laughed and cheered, apart from Venetia. What a pointless young bore he was, she thought. In that instant she made up her mind.

‘Maurice, I’m awfully sorry, but I don’t feel well. Would you forgive me if I slipped away?’

‘Oh no, really? Must you? Such a shame . . .’ He looked around. The others were queuing to board. She could tell he longed to join them, but was too much of a gentleman to desert her. ‘I’ll just tell everyone, then I’ll take you home.’

‘No, you stay. I don’t want to spoil your evening. Could I ask your driver to take me back?’

‘Of course – if you’re sure?’

‘Will you give my apologies to Conny and Edward? I’ll call you tomorrow.’

She realised she was slightly drunk herself. She climbed the steps carefully without looking back, even when Raymond called her name and made it sound like a reprimand: ‘Venetia!’ She felt both guilty and exhilarated, as if she was leaving a bad play at the inter- val. Behind her the boat’s steam whistle gave a brief warning toot. When she reached the Embankment and looked down at the river it had started to pull away from the pier. She put her bare elbows on the cool stone parapet and watched it for a while – the Chinese lanterns, the figures moving around on deck, the strains of the band, the laughter and singing carrying clearly on the summer air:

By the sea, by the sea, by the beautiful sea,
You and I, you and I, oh how happy we’ll be . . .

She lingered until the boat disappeared under Westminster Bridge, then went in search of Maurice’s Silver Ghost. Five minutes later she was gliding up Parliament Street, past the entrance to Downing Street. Along the dark side road, the red rear lights of a motor car glowed, and it occurred to her that he might just be returning from dinner. She thought of asking the chauffeur to pull over and set her down but banished the idea at once. She was tipsy. It might not be him. And even if it was, it would never do.