Blue Rondo (aka Flesh Wounds)

by Lawton, John

  He was rummaging under the sink when the telephone rang and Goldblatt’s voice said, ‘Mr Troy? Dick Goldblatt. I’m at Claridge’s. There should be a black cab at the end of your street by now. I have Mrs Cormack’s cases packed. The man in the cab will escort her straight to Heathrow.’

  Troy went out into the court, looked over his shoulder and called to Kitty. ‘Kitty, a moment, if you would.’

  ‘What? Can’t it wait until I’ve had a drink? What’s so . . . ?’

  Troy walked off towards the end of the alley. Kitty followed, high heels clacking on the paving stones, saying, ‘What are you up to? Troy, what’s going on?’

  There was a black cab, the driver standing by the luggage space where the passenger door should have been. When he saw Troy approach he opened the back door and stood by it uncomfortable, unsure of his pose, neither cabbie nor footman.

  ‘Troy?’

  ‘Get in the cab, Kitty.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Get in the cab.’

  Kitty stared at the cab, stared at Troy, and said a simple ‘Bollocks!’

  She turned and took a step back into Goodwin’s Court. Troy seized her hand intending merely to stop her rather than pull her back, but it was she who pulled. One swift jerk on his hand and they had swapped places – Troy with his back to the court, Kitty with her back to the cab; the streetlamp, perched on its iron bracket high on the corner wall, cast a dim yellow light upon her.

  Another swift tug and she had him by the shoulders, another and her hands held his head, straining against the light to see his expression.

  ‘What? What do you want?’

  He knew she could not see the look in his eyes. He could see hers clearly. Big green emeralds fit to burn holes in his skull. Betrayal.

  ‘What? What do you want from me, Troy?’

  And a voice within the cab spoke. ‘Kate.’

  Kitty’s head jerked as though she’d been stung – just a fraction, a movement almost electrical, as though resisting looking over her shoulder – then her head bowed, her forehead touching his. Her hands retraced their ascent, slid to his shoulders, from his shoulders to his arms, gripping tightly as though she was about to shake him as Alice shook the Red Queen. The final onset of reality.

  A long, long sigh.

  ‘Oh, God, Troy what have you done? What have you done?’

  She wrapped her arms round him. He could not but reciprocate. She whispered in his ear, voice cracking, ‘You silly sod; what have you done?’

  She kissed him on the ear. It really was a kitten after all.

  He could not have prised her off, but the strength left her. She left him. Turned her back on him and walked to the cab. Stood stooping, staring into the black interior.

  ‘Kate. Get in. We’re going home.’

  Troy looked over the curve of her back. Calvin Cormack sat on the edge of the seat, one arm outstretched to Kitty. Troy had not set eyes on Cormack since the war. He’d lost all his hair now, gained a few pounds in weight – and the sadness in his eyes matched the sadness Troy had found in Kitty’s the day she had turned up on him in London all those weeks ago.

  ‘Kate. Please get in.’

  She took his hand. Delicately, none of the ferocity with which she had held on to Troy – fingertips barely touching. It was like ballet: he pulled on the invisible thread, she flowed in beside him. There was no embrace. She took her seat next to him, looked once at Troy then turned her head away. Cormack, too, looked at Troy, the sadness overwhelming now, smiled once, seemed about to speak but didn’t. Then the cabman closed the door, muttered, ‘Evenin’, guv’ner’, and in seconds the cab rolled away down St Martin’s Lane. Troy watched it as far as Trafalgar Square. As it passed the Duke of York’s theatre half a dozen bulbs burst in the illuminated sign, showering the cab in a fine rain of broken glass.

  Troy went home. Put the vodka back under the sink. Lifted the piano lid and played through Brubeck’s ‘Blue Rondo A La Turk’. Noteperfect. For the first time. Note-perfect. But what was note-perfect in jazz? Lifeless. No brilliant corners. It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got. . . He recalled his wife’s definition of jazz – ‘Bum notes that work’ – and closed the lid.

  120

  Troy liked the open door. It was a characteristic he’d inherited from his mother. Once the weather was tolerably warm the door to the house would be propped open. She’d even done this with the Hampstead house in his childhood, oblivious to the risk. He supposed he did it to let light and air into what was, after all, a poky little house forged out of the structure of a Georgian shop – indeed, it still had the shopfront – but part of him wanted the serendipity of street life, to see who might pass, who might look in, who might drop in. It was the natural nosiness that had made him a copper in the first place.

  He was organising himself early in the evening of 8 October to drive out to Mimram and vote. He had never registered in London and always voted for his brother. For a year or two after the war he had even been a member of the Labour Party out of nothing more than loyalty to Rod. What he could never dare to tell him was that he’d let his membership lapse. He was searching for his car keys when he heard a footfall on his doorstep, and turned to see his sister Masha, a large shopping bag of groceries at her feet, a nervous smile upon her lips. It was unlike her ever to buy anything so practical as food. She shopped, but always for clothes, always for herself. Troy could see a tin of baked beans in tomato sauce on top of the bag. He’d never known Masha to buy baked beans in her life. It was prosaic. It was dull. It was ordinary. Masha didn’t do ordinary.

  Curious.

  ‘Expecting rationing to make a comeback, are we?’

  ‘I have a larder to fill. A family to feed.’

  And curiouser.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘I’m taking Lawrence back.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘I’m taking Lawrence back. Good bloody grief, that’s the wrong way round, isn’t it? I drive him away. He has an affair, the only affair of his married life, at a time when I think I’ve lost count of all my infidelities to him. But that’s the way it is – he’s asked me to take him back. I should be begging him to take me back.’

  ‘So he and Anna have—’

  ‘I didn’t ask what had happened. But I rather think it’s been over for a week or two. Do you think she’ll take it badly?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know,’ said Troy.

  ‘Ten or more years of an on-off affair and you don’t know how she reacts to breaking up?’

  Troy said nothing.

  ‘I’ll try to make it work. I’ll try to be everything I haven’t been these last twenty years. A wife to my husband, a mother to my children. Do you know, it never occurred to me to think how the kids reacted to my behaviour? Lawrence had to walk out before I saw the look in their eyes. Katya’s fourteen now. I doubt there’s much about her parents’ behaviour that escapes her. I’ve been so bad, so very, very bad. It amazes me that she doesn’t pass judgement on me. Although there was implicit judgement in her words when Lawrence left. “Don’t worry,” she said. “Daddy’s not like you.” If I’d been using half my brain when she said that I should have been scalded. Once I knew what she meant, how she saw me, I was scalded. I’ve done rotten things, you know.’

  Of course he knew.

  ‘I rather think it’s part of being one of two. Together Sasha and I were capable of things we might not have dared separately. I suppose I should have seen the writing on the wall long ago. She and Hugh drove each other mad. He was barking long before the end and she’s not much better now. I think I conspired with her to make him mad. All the lies I told for her, all the lies she told for me, all the times I pretended to be her. But, you know, Freddie, she isn’t me. I knew that once and for all at the poor bugger’s funeral. I just couldn’t admit it. We who were one weren’t any more. I could feel her peel away like a snake sloughing off the old skin. Perhaps she’ll spend the rest of her life on the fragile branch of her own luna
cy. Perhaps Lawrence and I still stand the chance she and Hugh never gave each other. Perhaps I had to do something so completely rotten, so utterly unspeakable that it would be enough to make me stop. To make me see myself for what I am.’

  ‘The road to Damascus?’ said Troy.

  ‘No, that was St Paul and seeing God and all that, wasn’t it?’

  ‘I don’t think there was much that was saintly about the man until that moment.’

  ‘Then perhaps that is it. Road to Damascus it is. And you?’

  ‘I haven’t seen the blinding light, if that’s what you mean. I haven’t heard Jiminy Cricket chirp in my ear either.’

  ‘Really, Freddie? After what you’ve just done?’

  ‘When you said we shouldn’t tell anyone I agreed with you. Silently, but agree I did. I also rather thought that meant we wouldn’t be discussing it either.’

  ‘I wasn’t talking about the night we spent together, Freddie. I can only blame myself for that. You, as ever, were passive in your consent, as I often think you are in all your morality. Your trick is to let things happen. To let things take their course. I’ve known quite a few of your girlfriends say exactly that over the years. “Freddie doesn’t try too hard”, “Freddie never comes to you, you have to go to him” – that sort of thing. I wasn’t talking about us at all. I was talking about those two blokes you killed in the East End.’

  ‘As I said, Masha, I have seen no blinding light. If I live to be a hundred I doubt my conscience will ever twinge about the Ryans.’

  When she’d gone, kissed him sisterly upon the cheek and left with her new burden, Troy scribbled a note to Anna at her house in Bassington Street and dropped it into the pillar box in Bedfordbury: ‘Get over him. And when you do, call me. T.’

  121

  Troy drove out to Mimram. It was the first time he’d driven without Mary McDiarmuid since the night Rork had been killed. It was not like riding a bike – he had forgotten so much of what natural drivers liked to take as instinct. He heard himself crunching through gear changes, and learned from the honking of half a dozen motorists on the North Circular Road that his steering was none too good either. But it had symbolic value – to be back at the wheel of his own car, with no need for glasses and to drive as badly as the law allowed.

  The polling station at which his card told him to present himself was the Blue Boar in Mimram village. The political machine had taken over the snug, a room scarcely big enough for the job – a good queue would see people lined up into the street, just as there were now. He found himself standing behind Frank Trubshawe, clutching his helmet as if it was a flowerpot full of something precious. Troy peeked over – it was full of leeks, freshly dug and caked with earth. Trubshawe had been harvesting them. They were early this year. Troy’s didn’t look as though they’d be ready for Christmas. Trubshawe turned to see who was being so nosy, looked at Troy, looked up at the gathering clouds in the dusky sky and said, ‘Looks like it’s finally breaking.’

  Troy looked up. He was right. The heatwave and the Indian summer that had blended almost seamlessly into it were coming to an end with the brewing of a mighty storm, a burgeoning mass of bulbous nimbostratus, glowing silver at the edges, that threatened at any moment to form a face to huff and puff with.

  ‘Never known a year like it,’ Trubshawe said, then added, ‘Of course I have, roaring summers, baking summers, but you know what I mean. It’s been a year this has.’

  ‘Indeed I do, Mr Trubshawe. It has been a year.’

  Troy wondered if Trubshawe would make any reference to the matters they might be deemed to have in common, the ‘ambergooities’, which had made the year what it was far more than the weather had, but he didn’t. He was off-duty, and it was typical of Trubshawe to have a clearly defined sense of on and off duty. When Troy suggested they move round to the public and have a drink Trubshawe, being off duty, agreed, and they passed an hour discussing what little else they had in common: the cultivation of the leek – Trubshawe had taken first prize with his leeks at the last Mimram horticultural show, and Troy had managed the feat the year before; the husbandry of the pig – Trubshawe lined up with Lord Emsworth in keeping Whites; and the quality of the local brew, in which Troy successfully faked an interest.

  Troy wondered if the taking off of the copper’s helmet had not been just for a handy receptacle, not just the mereness of symbolism, whether Trubshawe might not have developed a trick Troy had never managed at any point of his life both before and since he had become a copper: could out of sight really be out of mind?

  He was home well before ten. He knew the way things were going for Labour, and thought better of putting on the television. It was still ‘new’ and he had not and never would get used to it. He lit a fire in his study, switched the wireless to the Third Programme – a concert recorded the month before at the end of the Henry Wood Proms, snippets of Delius, A Song of Summer and one of those things he wrote in Florida that still sounded more English than American, that made Troy think of that last, lazy, casual, illicit, erotic night with Foxx – no, out of sight was almost never out of mind. He settled back in an armchair, saw the black clouds roll by his window, heard Delius drowned in thunder, rain pelting down like shrapnel on the rooftops, waited for the greater storm to burst within the hustings.

  Cid came in just after midnight. ‘I’ve had enough. I made my excuses and left.’

  ‘I’m sure Rod can stand on a podium without you.’

  ‘I feel rotten about it. You know, loyal wifie at his side as he makes his victory-cum-thank-you speech and all that. God knows, I’ve done that every time since – when? 1950? But not tonight. Not the mood he’s in. I left Nattie behind with a rosette and told her to look supportive. In a bad light the press might even think she’s me. You know, it’s at times like this it crosses my mind – how much more of this can I put up with? I have fantasies of “Nice day at the office, dear?” “Oh, yes, Spiggot and I ordered a job lot of paperclips and Wiggins has been promoted to regional manager,” and I say, “Jolly good darling. It’s Cook’s day off so I caught the 12.15 into Chipping Burnley, had lunch at the Kardomah, changed my library books, bumped into Mary Moppet, bought a leg of lamb, came home and made shepherd’s pie. It’ll be ready in half an hour.” And then I put his slippers on for him and he does The Times sodding crossword over a dry sherry and the whole world starts to look like the closing scenes from Brief Encounter, “Oh, Cid, you’re such a silly old sausage” – anything, anything so mundane, anything so cripplingly, mind-rottingly normal would be better than having to go through all this … all this … all this fucking shit.’

  It was so unlike his sister-in-law to speak ‘Troy’. She had wrestled with the words before giving in to them, and when she had she reminded him of no one quite so much as Kate Cormack. ‘Would you like a drink?’

  ‘No, Freddie. I’d like to go to bed and wake up to find we’re in power at last. But that isn’t going to happen so I’ll settle for a good night’s sleep instead. They’re expecting a result before three. If you’re staying up, try and keep Rod up until rage has given way to guilt. Let normal service resume. He’s always more amenable when he’s feeling guilty.’

  ‘You married the right brother. I don’t do guilt.’

  ‘So you tell me. Night-night, Freddie.’

  Rod came home in fury at two-thirty in the morning. ‘We’re going to lose. We’re going to fucking lose!’

  ‘But you’re OK? You won?’

  ‘I won, Labour’s lost. What bloody use is that?’

  Troy had a bottle of Château Margaux Grand Cru 1945 uncorked and breathing by the fire. He handed a glass to Rod. ‘Drown your sorrows.’

  Rod took one swig and kept right on course. ‘Three victories in a row, and each time the buggers increase their majority. That’s – that’s unprecedented. What the bloody hell do we have to do to get elected? What do we have to do? If we promise them jam tomorrow then we’re tight-fisted Reds asking them to pay for a futu
re they can’t even imagine. If we say jam today, then they tell us we’re cooking the books and can’t possibly pay for jam today without asking them to pay higher taxes. What do the British want? What do we have to do?’

  ‘Have you thought of changing your name to “the Conservative Party”?’

  ‘Freddie, if all you can do is take the piss I’m going to knock your fucking block off!’

  ‘No, there’s two things I can do. I can pour wine and I can vote. I came up to vote for you, if you recall.’

  Rod swigged, handed his glass back to Troy, said, ‘Fill ‘er up, waiter.’ And flopped into an armchair, wrestling with his tie. When it came loose he leaped up again, tore off both tie and jacket, stamped on both and flopped back down with his hand out for the wine glass. ‘And I’m grateful, believe me, I’m grateful. It’s just that’s it’s all so . . . fucking deadly.’

  Troy sat down opposite. It was too good a claret to swig. He rolled it around on his tongue, hoping Rod would slow down and get rat-arsed at a more civilised pace.

  ‘You know – it was Ike. He fucked it for us. Macmillan got a joint telly broadcast. All I got was a lawn littered with fucking golf balls. Ike made him look like . . . Like what, for God’s sake?’

  ‘A statesman.’

  ‘That’s it. A statesman. What every sodding PM wants to be – more than a politician, a statesman. And Ike handed it to Mac on a plate.’

  ‘Perhaps next time you should get the President to come over and root for you.’

  ‘Next time. 1964? Good God, Freddie, that’s like a science-fiction number. 1964 isn’t five years away, it’s an age away. We’ll all be bloody robots by then – tin hearts, tin brains, tin cocks. 1964 -Jesus Christ! Do you know, I can still remember the first year I was conscious of having a tag to it. I was five. I’d drifted through life, the longest part of life, it seems, with the outside world scarcely touching me. Knew it was there, out there on the horizon somewhere, things like the King dying – the old man took me to watch the parade . . . Can’t remember a sodding thing about it, wish I could, the Kaiser was there, the Tsar, all those Balkan monarchs who got kyboshed – but, no, the first year I can remember as a year is 1914. I remember asking him, “Dad, what year is it?” and the answer, “1914, my boy. The second of January.”’