Old Flames (Frederick Troy 2)

by Lawton, John

  In public he deferred to the nominal head of state, Bulganin, and took an impish delight in back-seat driving. In private he bawled him out, shouted at him, called him stupid and told him to the nth detail what to say. He was scarcely better behaved towards his son Sergei, a twenty-two-year-old, slim, quiet version of his father, hidden behind what appeared to be National Health spectacles, who smiled pleasantly at everyone and seemed as eager to please as a boy scout.

  But what really put Troy off him were the jokes. Troy thought of himself as a man with a sense of humour, but Khrushchev’s jokes struck him as tasteless and adolescent, as though he were striving too hard to outrage.

  The first evening they did a mind-boggling, whistle-stop tour of the sights of London, faster than an American senator running for reelection in the boondocks, pressing the flesh while double-parked. The Royal Festival Hall, that stirring example of the British Soviet School of Architecture; dark, brooding, ancient Westminster Abbey; sublime St Paul’s, a surviving Wren masterpiece in the midst of a sea of wartime ruins; and the floodlit white walls of the Tower of London at dusk, with its red and black romance of beefeaters and ravens. All in less than two hours.

  At the RFH Khrushchev appeared singularly unimpressed. He looked at the prices on the bar tariff and said he’d come back on pay day when he could afford it. Not bad, thought Troy, some sense of the wage packet if nothing else. At the Tower, informed that, according to legend, the empire would cease when the ravens left, Khrushchev quipped that he couldn’t see any ravens in the first place. Nelson putting the telescope to his blind eye. A few smiles were forced but no one laughed. Hardly offensive, but Troy began to wonder if the man had any tact.

  At St Paul’s—a building known to still even the arid souls of atheists like Troy—the old Dean showed them the vast dome, in an eerie silence of muted voices and leather footsteps, and remarked with some pride that this was the spot on which a German incendiary had landed in 1940, how the cathedral had been saved, the damage repaired, and how London had lost seventeen of its precious Wren churches. Khrushchev blithely remarked that the Dean wouldn’t have to worry about repairs when the Russians dropped ‘the bomb’.

  He did not need to qualify the term. ‘The Bomb’ was ‘THE BOMB’. Not HE or incendiary, not 500lb or a ton, but megatons—a word still virtually incomprehensible to most people, often paraphrased in multiples of Hiroshima: twenty Hiroshimas; fifty Hiroshimas. The same town atomised time after time in the power of metaphorical fission. In his mind’s eye Troy saw tiny atolls in the South Pacific going whumpf and disappearing from sight beneath the icon of the times, a colossal mushroom cloud.

  The Dean looked blankly at Khrushchev. The presence of an interpreter, the passage of words through a second language and a second voice, seemed somehow to deflect the sense of just who had spoken, to deflate the sense of menace and the contrivance at outrage. Bought the time for tact that Khrushchev himself could not muster. The Dean led off, taking them in search of John Donne’s memorial. Just behind his right shoulder Troy heard a muttered ‘Jesus Christ’ from Mulligan.

  Troy rapidly lost count of the number of trips they had made. He seemed to be in and out of Claridge’s and Number 10 three or four times a day; and each evening he would dutifully report to Cobb, usually telling him that Khrushchev had said nothing of any significance within earshot. Or did MI5 and MI6 really want to know that he had thrown a tantrum when he couldn’t find a diamond cufflink, or that he complained constantly about the tea? And that on one occasion Troy had found him crawling around the bedroom of his suite on all fours, and had been unable to tell whether this was another search for the missing cufflink or capitulation to the effects of his favoured drink, red pepper vodka?

  On the evening of the second day, Downing Street had given a formal dinner for their guests. B & K met C & A, former Prime Ministers Churchill and Attlee, and the Leader of the Opposition, Prime Minister-Apparent Hugh Gaitskell. The Night of the Nobs, as Clark put it.

  It was an easy shift ‘doing’ Downing Street. One simply escorted the Russians there, handed over to the highly visible uniformed coppers and shuffled into a side room to sit out the occasion in something resembling a bad version of a dentist’s waiting room. Nothing to read and nothing to do.

  ‘What’s that?’ said Troy as a uniformed copper pushed the door to.

  ‘It came yesterday, sir.’

  It looked like a ten-foot-long wooden spoon.

  ‘It’s a ten-foot-long wooden spoon, sir. It was left on the doorstep. The PM ordered it brought in at once before the press saw it. We’re to get rid of it as soon as the Russians are safely out of the country.’

  Troy looked at the label attached to the monstrosity.

  ‘From the League of Empire Loyalists. We fear it may not be long enough for tomorrow’s dinner.’

  ‘What do you think it means?’ asked the copper.

  ‘Isn’t it obvious?’ said Troy. ‘A long spoon to sup with the devil.’

  There had been a curious reception for the two emissaries of Satan, from the minute the train slid into Victoria station; and a curious form of protest. And what they both had in common was that they were lukewarm. Neither welcome nor dissent seemed to have feeling or meaning to it. Neither could muster a crowd large enough to cut through the roar of the traffic. This particular protest lacked wit. Whilst the duty copper might be the dimmest of flatfoots, and possibly the only person in Britain who had not heard the cliché, it was a symbol so obvious as to be pointless. The cliché of clichés. The League of Empire Loyalists were hardly typical of the British, a nation of non-joiners; but at the same time they were—the nation of non-joiners was also the nation of endless committees and self-appointed bodies. This was simply the silliest of many, the association of old men who had failed to grasp the way of the world since 1945. As Rod put it, describing so many of the institutions of the country from the Carlton Club to the magistracy, just another League of Little Men.

  Molloy, with the practised skill of a career copper, had perfected the knack of sleeping bolt upright. Clark, as ever, had a book. Troy was the one who was bored. He wondered if he could get away with stretching his legs. He opened the door quietly. There was a hum of voices, a solitary young copper standing in the hallway. Troy expected a reprimand, but the man simply nodded and said a quiet, ‘Evenin’, sir’, as though Troy had every right to be wandering about. Emboldened by this he strolled as casually as he could up the staircase past endless portraits of previous incumbents from Walpole via Palmerston and Disraeli all the way to Churchill, to the first floor and the reception rooms. The hum of voices grew louder. English and Russian. He could hear someone almost shouting, and deduced that this was translation for the deaf. He was gazing out of a front window when a door behind him opened, the volume surged and he saw what he momentarily took to be an elderly waiter shuffling towards him. It was not an elderly waiter; it was an elderly Prime Minister, a portrait come to life.

  ‘Harumgrrum werrumbrum,’ said Churchill.

  Troy understood not a syllable. What could the former leader of the western world, the undisputed Heavyweight Champion of the Second World War, possibly have to say to him?

  §9

  The following evening, just before dusk, they took a launch down the Thames from Westminster Pier to Greenwich, one of the pleasantest trips London could offer. It had its effect. A man who talked nineteen to the dozen had shut up by the time they slid under Tower Bridge. Khrushchev did what any man with the slightest poetry in his soul would do. He stared. London changed from the dwarfing magnificence of St Paul’s, hogging the horizon with not a building to equal it for height or breadth, to the dark depths of the East End, a skyline slashed by the blades of cranes and derricks, shoreline fretted by a hundred wharves and harbours, flashing with the rumpled black-and-red sails of countless Thames barges motionless in the Pool of London. As they rounded the Isle of Dogs, the hill of Greenwich came into view, the complex, eye-baffling beauty of the Ro
yal Naval College, the distant outline of the Observatory perched on the hilltop, dividing East from West along an utterly arbitrary line. What better symbol could there be for this entire visit?

  Khrushchev preached the new gospel of peaceful coexistence to the Senior Service, spoke of the speed of the arms race, described the Ordzhonikidze, the ship that had brought him to Britain, as state of the art technology that would be out of date within a matter of months. It seemed to Troy to be a sound argument. Depending on how you read it, it was a warning to us all or a threat to the West. Khrushchev tipped the scales, and added that the Russians had no wish to ‘push you off the planet’. But then that in turn implied that they had the power to do so.

  Within minutes of him resuming his seat Troy heard Khrushchev offering to sell the Ordzhonikidze to the First Sea Lord.

  ‘Buy two, and I’ll throw in a submarine for free,’ he said in best adman parlance.

  The Englishman looked utterly baffled by this. He had no idea whether to take it as a joke or to name a price. Troy had no sympathy with such men, and on any other occasion it might have been a good wheeze, a good ruffling of the feathers of these imperial peacocks; but Troy found the menace that lurked just beneath the surface of this unruly schoolboy behaviour too hard to stomach. Three days of jokes and he was beginning to think there was no such thing as a joke that didn’t have hidden depths just like an iceberg. Perhaps the joke was the defence of the underdog? Coming from the topdog it seemed brutal, bullying and boorish.

  Only minutes later Khrushchev turned his sights on the Chief of the Imperial General Staff. ‘One day,’ he said, ‘one day soon we will be able to put nuclear warheads onto guided missiles. Believe me, it will change the face of warfare.’

  Troy knew from the look on the man’s face, as the interpreter put it into English, what was coming. His expression was the blinking, startled blankness of shock.

  ‘I find that,’ the interpreter reported back to Khrushchev, ‘a shocking suggestion.’

  Khrushchev shrugged a little. ‘It may well be,’ he said. ‘It is nonetheless the future.’

  The baldness of truth or the nakedness of threat? And once more Troy’s sympathies swung. Khrushchev’s party was over forty strong. They had required an entire floor of Claridge’s, they were trucked out for all the interminable public functions in varying combinations in a logistic nightmare requiring a convoy of limousines, and enough coppers to mount an invasion of Latvia or Lithuania. Khrushchev meant to show off Russia with an eighty-legged advertisement. Prominent in that advert were Messrs Tupelov and Kurchatov, known respectively for their work on supersonic flight and atomic physics. If not to rub home the possibilities in the conjunction of the two, why else had Khrushchev brought them? To be shocked was the utmost naiveté. The man was CIGS. To be shocked was crass stupidity. If we too were not going to put our nuclear weapons onto rockets and aim them at the cities of our enemies, why else had we gone to the trouble of hijacking the German rocket scientists? Why, even now, was Werner von Braun, inventor of the V2, holed up in some American laboratory if not to invent a rocket capable of carrying a nuclear warhead? Or did this man really think that we could fight another war as we had fought most of the others, by sending a gunboat out to one mutinous colony or another, or an expeditionary force to a troubled ally—was the word ‘Imperial’ in his title so brain-befuddling that he could not see the world as it had been reborn in fire at Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

  Both sides bored him rigid. He got into the habit of never being without a book or newspaper. Prompted by the Greenwich trip, he dug out an old copy of The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad, in which a child is blown to pieces unwittingly carrying a bomb to the Observatory. Every time he was shuffled into a side room at Number 10 or stuck in Khrushchev’s suite at Claridge’s he would read a few more pages of Conrad and scan the newspapers. Occasionally the two worlds would meet. The world in front of his eyes would be reflected in the remote world-out-there, the world-in-print: thirty thousand dissidents released in Poland; Soviet Admiral of the Fleet Kuznetsov sacked; Stalinist Politburo member Andrei Vishinsky denounced for his part in the show trials of the thirties; the head of MI6 to be replaced. This was oddly timed. Why now of all times? And of course the newspapers did not name the new man. Troy made a mental note to ask Rod the next time they met. Rod could not resist a bet, and Troy had a vague memory of him putting ten bob on some chap called White, or was it Black?

  On the Saturday, out at Harwell, the Atomic Research Establishment, Khrushchev hit rock bottom in Troy’s esteem. Establishment was an odd term; it concealed more than it revealed about the true nature of the place. But, in part, it was a factory, and being such had factory workers. As the visiting party sped around in their white coats, they would pause like passing royalty for meaningless banter with the working man.

  The working man departed from the script. A large man, northern accent, gentle face, huge hands, which he, playing the part to the hilt, was found wiping on a rag as the party approached. Troy had no idea what job he did in this complex of concealment—it seemed to him that the only reason they were here was to shove the notion of ‘atomic’ down Khrushchev’s throat. All the way there Troy had heard him ask, ‘Is this a factory, now? I asked for more factories.’

  Khrushchev shook the working man’s hand.

  ‘Pleased to meet yer,’ the working man said.

  Then he looked at his hand, palm up, checking the level of grease and dirt.

  ‘Yer’ll not have to mind the muck,’ he said. ‘Honest toil, after all.’

  He smiled. Khrushchev smiled at the translation. For a moment they seemed to be on the same wavelength.

  ‘I’m a Union man meself,’ the working man went on. ‘Man and boy. Joined when ah were sixteen.’

  Khrushchev clearly found this less than fascinating, but continued to smile.

  ‘Ah wanted to ask yer, like.’

  His eyes strayed off to the accompanying faces, seeking authority. He looked at Troy, Troy pointed discreetly to the young chinless wonder from the Foreign Office who had trailed after them all day looking lost.

  ‘I mean, it’s OK ter ask ’im a question, in’t it? ’E dun’t mind answerin’ questions.’

  The FO wonder looked nonplussed. Khrushchev’s interpreter whispered it rapidly in his ear. Khrushchev said, ‘Da, da,’ syllables so simple as to be comprehensible across any barrier, and gestured with his hand. A flicking, upward motion that seemed to Troy indicative of his dwindling patience.

  ‘When are you going to have free trade unions in the East?’ the working man asked at last, without a trace of the hesitation that had dogged him up to now.

  The FO man gasped audibly. He’d obviously been expecting something about the price of cabbage, or Khrushchev’s recipe for a bloody Mary. The interpreter, a man who seemed to exercise no censorship on anything put to him, rendered it precisely for Khrushchev. It was, Troy thought, the first sensible question anyone had asked. Khrushchev didn’t walk off in outrage. Nor did he attempt an answer. He behaved like a politician; did what any politician, in any country, would do. He ducked it.

  ‘We’ll get nowhere if we start criticising each other. Consider our point of view and we will consider yours.’

  Which meant absolutely nothing.

  ‘He’s just another damn politician,’ Troy told Charlie when Charlie phoned to ask ‘how things were going’.

  ‘What did you expect? The new Messiah?’

  ‘No. I just . . . I just thought he’d be . . . well . . . different.’

  ‘Oh, he’s different all right,’ said Charlie.

  And Troy found himself wondering whether he could wait long enough to find out how different.

  §10

  By the Monday following, as they piled into black Daimlers once more for dinner with the Labour bigwigs at the Commons, he found an old Hollywood phrase lodged in his mind: ‘Who do I have to fuck to get off this picture?’

  But as they entered the Harco
urt Room to be greeted by Hugh Gaitskell, suddenly Troy realised the turn the evening was about to take. The big picture was about to start. All they’d had till now was Pearl, Dean and Younger and a short from the Three Stooges. Tonight they were showing in Cinemascope.

  Gaitskell held out his hand. The interpreter rattled off his few words of greeting. Then Gaitskell said, ‘Allow me to introduce my Foreign Affairs spokesman, Rodyon Troy.’ And before the interpreter could get his twopenn’orth in, Rod was shaking hands with Khrushchev and chatting to him in his flawless, old-fashioned, pre-revolutionary, upper-crust, Muscovite-accented Russian.

  Khrushchev’s eyes flickered between Rod and Troy. The subtle, perfect double-take of a comedian. Jack Benny eyeing Rochester could not have done it better. Rod was taller, stouter, older than Troy, but the family resemblance was inescapable: the thick mop of black hair, the ebony eyes, the full mouth.

  Rod led Khrushchev off into the room. He shook hands with odds and sods from the Shadow Cabinet, scarcely seeming to listen to the routine Russian rattle of Rod’s Who’s Who in the Labour Party. As he gripped the hand of Shadow Chancellor Harold Wilson, Khrushchev’s piggy eyes shot Troy a reproachful glance, and he knew that whatever happened, the return to Claridge’s would not be pleasant. Perhaps there was a God after all? Perhaps his wish had been granted, his cover blown—and in the morning Cobb would kick him off the job?

  A Commons waiter appeared suddenly at his side.

  ‘Mr Troy, sir. We’ve put you at the top table. Next to Mr Brown. Your sergeants at opposite ends of the furthest table. Mr Cobb said you should be spread out across what he called the field of vision.’

  God, Cobb was an idiot. Full of jargon and fury. Signifying bugger all.

  ‘Good,’ Troy said. ‘When Manny Shinwell pulls out his sawn-off shotgun I want to be certain of catching him in a crossfire.’