by Lawton, John
11
On the Monday he was discharged and given over to the care of his physician. He’d known Anna Pakenham for years. They’d met, he thought, in 1940 or ‘41. She’d been the longest serving of Kolankiewicz’s assistants out at the Hendon Laboratory. She’d put up with his abuse, his bad manners and his foul English in exchange for the wealth of knowledge he possessed. She had finished her MD after the war, served a couple of years in the fledgling NHS and soon found she was better suited to Harley Street, where she had practised these last five or six years. It had been a negotiation getting her to be his doctor. He needed her for the same reasons he needed Kolankiewicz – for the certain knowledge that Stan and the Yard would never learn one iota of what went on between them.
‘It’s a bit, you know, iffy,’ she had said, ‘taking a lover as a patient, BMA rules and all that. Medical ethics. Hippocratic stuff, gross moral thingie.’
He had said, ‘You sound just like my sisters. . .’
‘God forbid.’
‘Never the right word if there’s a thingie to be found. However, the word you want is turpitude. Gross moral turpitude. And if anyone in your practice gives a toss about it I’ll be amazed. You can’t tell me Paddy Fitz plays by the rules?’
‘Troy, I doubt very much whether my senior partner knows there are such things as rules. Or if he does he’ll have the same cavalier attitude you do, that rules were made for idiots.’
She had taken him on all the same. And when their affair had ended some three years ago she had not turned round and said, ‘Get yourself another doctor.’
On the Monday morning she arrived at the Charing Cross as he was dressing, stuck her head through the screens. ‘Oh, good. You’re awake. You’ve been asleep every time I’ve called in. Still, you’ll be needing a lot of sleep.’
‘Is that a professional opinion?’
‘Yes. I’m signing you off sick.’
Troy beckoned her into the privacy of the screens. ‘How long?’
‘As long as it takes.’
‘Has Onions been on to you?’
‘Yes. He wanted me to talk to you about retiring.’
‘And?’
‘I said I wouldn’t waste my breath, that I’d sign you off sick for as long as you were sick, and after that you were his problem not mine.’
‘Thanks,’ Troy said.
‘No need, Troy. All I did was tell the truth. If I could get you to quit I would. But I can’t, can I? Now, shall we go?’
She had kept one hand behind her back as they had talked. Now she brought it forward, clutching a rubber-tipped National Health walkingstick. It seemed to Troy to be one symbol too many – it scrawled ‘cripple’ across his conscious mind. She read his mind. ‘Look at it this way, Troy. It’s too near for an ambulance. The cabbies would think we were pulling their leg asking to go two hundred yards. So it’s shanks’s pony and your little wooden friend. Look at it this way, you’re leaving under your own steam. Not the way you came in, after all.’
For a moment Troy could hear that triple bang inside his head. For a moment he could feel the inertia of going head over heels into goodnight. Blown in could so easily have been blown out.
Anna lifted his left hand, placed the crook of the stick in it, held out her own left arm for his right.
‘Lean on me.’
But he never would.
As they came down the narrow end of Goodwin’s Court he saw a pile of what he thought might be suitcases outside his own door. Closer, they appeared to be the first odd components in a matching five-piece set of pink lady’s luggage, the set Foxx had equipped herself with the summer they met, for a weekend in Paris and beyond.
‘I think this is where I leave you,’ Anna said.
‘To be left by two women simultaneously. Is this a record?’
‘I don’t know, Troy, but it’s hardly a laughing matter.’
As Anna turned and walked off, Foxx appeared in the doorway with the largest of her cases.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I was sort of hoping to be done and dusted by the time you got back.’
‘You’re serious, then?’
‘What on earth would make you think I wasn’t?’
She ducked back inside, like an animal darting back into her cave. Except the cave was his cave. For a moment he could see nothing as his eyes adjusted to the light, he could just hear the sound of her banging about more loudly and more quickly than he thought necessary for the simple job of packing.
‘You’ll have to send some stuff on, if that’s not too much trouble.’
She wasn’t even looking at him. She was bent over the last of her cases, vainly trying to crush whatever square peg it was into the almost round hole. T-shirt, American blue jeans and pony tail. A sight, he thought, for sore eyes. And the only part of him that didn’t feel sore was his eyes. They felt lunar, lagunar – moony and watery at the same time, as most images swam gently in front of him. Not enough to make him vomit, but enough to give the less than fond illusion that what he saw was somehow not real.
‘I can’t manage the LPs. Too many and too heavy.’
‘You don’t have to manage anything.’
Now she looked up at him, sweeping the errant ponytail from one eye. ‘Eh?’
‘You don’t have to go.’
‘Going to make me stay then, are you? You know, Troy, that might involve actually saying something along the lines of “Please stay” or “I’d like you to stay” or, if you were feeling really bold you might say, “Please don’t leave me.”’
Troy said nothing.
‘Go on, Troy. Ask me, just ask me to stay. But you bloody well won’t, will you?’
Troy said nothing.
‘I thought as much. You shit, Troy, you complete and utter shit.’
Foxx barged past him and slammed the last case down on the pile just as a cabman came up the yard to say, ‘You ready now, Miss?’
Troy said to her back, ‘Where will you be?’
She had the two smaller cases, one in each hand, as the cabman picked up the bigger three and set off back down the yard. One more flick of her head and the ponytail took its desired place as a mane bouncing halfway down her back.
‘There’s a flat over the Kingly Street shop. A storeroom or two at the moment, but I’ll soon get it tidied up. Well … as the agent said to the sword-swallower, “Don’t call us, we’ll call you.”’
He watched her all the way to the kink in the alley, watched her till she passed out of sight. It seemed terribly familiar, but he couldn’t pin down who he had watched walk out of his life in quite this way. He went inside, closed the door, resorted to the English panacea – put the kettle on – and, while he waited for it to boil, leafed through a pile of thirty or forty long-playing records she had left. Some were their joint taste – the Elgar and the Delius, the Debussy and the Fauré. Some was his taste thrust at her – Little Richard. Some was her taste thrust at him – Elvis Presley. And some was a taste she had that he’d never acquire in a thousand years: American crooners of the Ratpack variety. It seemed to him that he held in his hands the modern, the fifties equivalent, of lovers’ keepsakes. If they’d been a couple of generations older, he would be finding wild flowers they had pressed into the endpapers of a book of poetry on some idyllic ramble through the English countryside in the years before the Great War – lovers from a novel by D.H. Lawrence. Instead they had music, pressed pieces of plastic, and none the shabbier for that.
12
His brother phoned. ‘Not good news, I’m afraid.’
‘Just spit it out, Rod.’
Troy heard him sigh. To Troy it was second nature telling people that someone they knew/loved/hated was dead. Went with the job, and he had long ago ceased to use the ‘spare your feelings’ line. Now he merely wondered who.
‘Hugh died last night.’
Hugh – their brother-in-law, husband of sister Sasha, Viscount Darbishire, umpteenth of that line. Troy had known him twenty-five years and
never found it in him to like the man.
‘I didn’t know he was. . .’ The penny dropped. ‘Good Lord, what am I saying? How did he do it?’
‘I wasn’t aware his intention was that obvious, but he hanged himself in the garage. Surprised me, I can tell you.’
‘Did it with the old school tie?’
‘Freddie, for Christ’s sake, the man isn’t even cold yet.’
‘How’s Sasha taking it.’
‘Sanguine, I’d say. Surprisingly sanguine.’
Half an hour later he was able to put the same question to his sister Masha.
‘Barking. Absolutely fucking barking. I look at her and wonder if she’ll ever come down from it. I look at her and think, Good bloody grief this woman is my twin! If Rod thinks she’s “sanguine” – bloody silly word if you ask me – it’s because he sees what he wants to see or he catches her in her quiet moments. Truth is she’s cock-a-hoop. She’s been let out of a loveless marriage. No messy divorce. No shyster lawyers.’
‘Was she contemplating divorce?’
‘Don’t be naive, Freddie. She was contemplating shooting the bastard. She has every day for years, as we both know.’
‘And in a few days’ time we will all attend his funeral, speak well of the dead and mourn him as a missed husband and father.’
‘Won’t we just? If I were you I’d turn off your irony button.’
Troy was right: it was a matter of days. The coroner opened the case and closed it minutes later with a discreet misadventure verdict. It was so hard in England to commit suicide as a form of statement. The general public must have at least been mildly baffled at the number of accidents while cleaning a shotgun, and quite what legitimate purpose might be served by anyone putting a rope around his neck, the other end around the main roof truss, then swinging out into nowhere must have been utterly perplexing. There had to be easier ways to reach the cobwebs, after all. And, less than cynical, Troy concluded there had to be easier ways to meet your Maker.
The funeral took place forty-eight hours later.
Hugh, Umpteenth Viscount Darbishire, was one of a breed that had become much commoner since the war – the impoverished toff. The country pile had long since become just that, a pile of bricks in a field. The family fortune had been squandered by his father, the late Umpteenth-Viscount-but-one, and Hugh had preserved as much of the style of the English aristocracy as he could, on very little of the substance. The money was all Sasha’s. After the war Hugh had played on the old school tie, with which he had not thought to hang himself, and become ‘something in the City’, as well as, of late, picking up his measly stipend for attending the Lords and voting on things about which he knew bugger all and, worse, occasionally speaking on things about which he knew bugger all. He had never made money, so the funeral took place at Mimram, in the small cemetery attached to the village church of St Job, patron saint of one or two of the worst things in life, in the Troy family plot. Living off his wife even in death.
The Fat Man picked up Troy in the Bentley and drove him out to Mimram. It was rare to see him togged out like a gentleman’s gentleman, but there was no denying he fitted the part. Black, stripes and a cavernous bowler. But there it stopped. There was no holding the passenger door open, no standing upright as though on parade. He simply told Troy to ‘shift yer ‘arris’ and get in. It was a pleasant drive through the burgeoning English countryside in summer, and a pleasant hour spent on the joys of the Gloucester Old Spot. How Lord Emsworth could even keep Whites baffled Troy – as, indeed, he thought it must baffle all Mr Wodehouse’s readers. The thought sent him off at a tangent of fantasy. Would he one day turn into Lord Emsworth? He already kept pigs and felt as though his life was a plague of sisters. What else did Fate have in store for him? The forgetfulness of the classic English duffer?
‘We’re there.’
‘Eh?’
‘We’re there. You was off in one of your little dazes again.’
‘Was I?’
‘I wouldn’t worry none. It’s not the blow to yer ‘ead. You’ve always done it. I reckon that’s where you get some of yer best ideas. Just daydreamin’ an’ such. Now. Can you manage?’
‘Not crippled yet.’
‘Good. Cos I ain’t comin’ in with yer. Can’t abide churchianity. I’ll just sit out ‘ere with me Pig and Pigeon Gazette. You just wobble yer way back when it’s all over. There’ll be a bit of a do I ‘xpect?’
‘Oh, yes, there’ll be a do all right. In fact, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the funeral baked meats did not supply the wedding feast.’
‘Eh?’
‘Hamlet. On the haste with which his mother remarried.’
‘The mad tart’s thinkin’ of marryin’ again?’
‘Not quite. But she won’t be in mourning for long. If I were a betting man I’d be putting money on hours not weeks.’
Troy was last to arrive and picked his way down the gravel path to find two blokes leaning on spades in the shadow of a yew, having a swift smoke before filling in the grave. Fifty yards further on the blackclothed backs of most of his relations were visible. The brother, the sisters, the endless nieces and nephews, the short, rotund figure of his Uncle Nikolai, the taller, effortlessly elegant figure of his brother-in-law, Lawrence. The unfamiliar figure of the vicar – Troy had not met the vicar, any of Mimram’s vicars, in years. This chap could be the new incumbent or an old stager for all he knew.
He’d missed something, clearly, but the vicar was still droning on, and he found a place in front of Rod and behind Sasha’s younger son, Arkady. Looking around the boy, since it was impossible to look over him, Troy saw his sisters side by side, holding hands as one might expect of sisters, twins especially, at a time like this – but what, he thought, was the large American-style carpet bag at Sasha’s feet? A small handbag, slung across one arm, stuffed full of hankies, weeping for the use of, might have seemed appropriate. But then Sasha wasn’t weeping. She was looking around rather blankly. She stared straight at him for a couple of seconds. No expression of grief, or joy or madness. And then it hit him. When had Sasha ever done what might be deemed appropriate?
Sasha stepped forward, stopping the vicar mid-mumble with a raised hand like a copper on point duty. ‘It’s time,’ she said, ‘to whizz past the platitudes of received wisdom and -’
From behind him Troy heard his brother’s muttered, ‘Oh, bloody hell.’
‘- lay to rest the man I knew, rather the man we all wish he was.’
She opened the carpet bag and took out what appeared to be a pipe. ‘Cultures there are,’ she went on, ‘that hold dear the belief that the departed, dear or not, have use in the next world for goods and chattels that have been of use to them in this. Indeed, if I am to believe my little brother, there are sects in India which prescribe that the widow should immolate herself upon the same pyre as the burning remains of her late husband. Suffice to say I shall not be entertaining you in quite that fashion. So, Hugh, dearest, puff on your pipe, be it in heaven or hell.’
Sasha lobbed the pipe into the grave, where it thudded off the coffin with a hollow bang. Troy watched what little blood remained in the vicar’s cheeks drain to leave a tuberculoid hue.
Sasha took out an old cloth cap in a tweedy sort of pattern. ‘Saturdays would not be Saturdays without you in your cloth cap.’
It, too, flopped down into the pit. As did a copy of last year’s Wisden, a couple of golf balls, several novels of the Bulldog Drummond variety, a couple of old 78s by the comic singer Frank Crumit – a man who had found it in him to sing the joys of the prune and the errant ways of a golf ball – Hugh’s old school tie (Troy had been wondering when it would put in an appearance), a copy of Horse and Hound, a pewter tankard bearing Hugh’s initials, a badger-hair shaving brush … It was, all in all, thought Troy, a representative, if far from complete, itinerary of what Sasha hated about Hugh.
At last she pulled forth the final item. A Second World War issue Webley revolver.
The unison communal intake of breath was like a pantomime breeze rattling the leaves.
‘With this gun my husband single-handedly held off the entire German army at Dunkirk. To listen to him tell his war stories, as one so often had to, was to realise what British pluck and British bullshit were all about. That dear Hughdie was stationed in Camberley at the time of Dunkirk never caused the slightest hiccup in the telling of the tale.’
Sasha approached the grave as though intending to lob this last item into hell with Hugh. Instead she took aim at the coffin, and blew a hole in the lid. And as though not content with this, she then leapt down into the grave, legs spread for balance, took the gun in both hands and began to empty it into the late Hugh. By the third shot the vicar and most of the mourners had fled. Troy found himself at the graveside with only Masha to turn to.
‘Rot in hell! Bastard, bastard, bastard!’
And with the sixth shot, the final cry of’bastard’, the gun was empty and so, it seemed, was Sasha. All passion spent.
There was silence. The birds had scattered. The cemetery seemed suddenly empty. Troy looked around. Rod had retreated to a safe distance, the two gravediggers peered round the yew tree, wide-eyed and gob-smacked.
‘Don’t just stand there. Give me a hand out, you two.’
Troy and Masha each extended an arm and pulled Sasha out. She tossed the gun over her shoulder, one last thump down in the grave, and beckoned to the gravediggers. ‘Come on, you dozy buggers. I’m not going to bury the bastard myself, am I?’
Then she turned to Troy. ‘Shall we go home now?’ And smiled.
She slipped an arm through her sister’s and wandered up the path more as though coming from a picnic than from an act of madness. Troy followed, reached into his pocket as he passed the gravediggers and bunged them each ten quid. ‘Two things,’ he whispered. ‘Not a word to anyone, and that gun stays where it is.’
‘Done,’ said the diggers, with all the deference of greed, and Troy followed on, to find the Fat Man perched on the wall, exactly as he had said, reading his copy of the Pig and Pigeon Gazette, oblivious to all that had happened. That which might wake the dead, of which there were plenty at hand, had not penetrated his self-absorption.