Old Flames (Frederick Troy 2)

by Lawton, John

  The question did not seem to either of them to require an answer.

  ‘Stalin regarded anyone who had allowed themselves to be captured by the Germans as a traitor. He ordered returning prisoners of war to be interrogated, and an arbitrary number of them to hanged. Guilty or innocent, he did not care; but enough should be hanged to let the people know the power of their leader. This man, Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev, hanged his fellow countrymen in countless numbers. His denunciation of the monster Stalin comes ten years too late to be believed.’

  In the midst of the hubbub, the room-filling buzz of ardent hacks whose hands had quickly tired of clapping, there opened up a silence which seemed to engulf the three of them.

  ‘There’s no such thing,’ Rod said gently. ‘It can never be too late. Khrushchev has done now what was right. Regardless of what he might have done in the past.’

  Again the heaven-bound, world-weary, earth-sent sigh.

  ‘Regardless?’ he queried. ‘I find it impossible to disregard such things. What he did then is surely indicative of what he will do next. My country—our country, though I know you boys haff never seen it—has become a country of programmed change. Each change is a rewriting of the history of what has gone before. Each change has meant a new set of victims, a new herd of scapegoats to be staked out in the sun. Do you really think this will be different? Do you really think this is anything we haff not seen before? There may not be show trials—that, after all, would seem to run against the grain of what the man is saying—but for all that do you not think that heads will roll? That purges will surely follow, that there will once more be disposable people, that the little people will suffer? In sloughing off the guilt of a generation onto one man, Khrushchev has accepted the cult of personality even as he would seem to reject it. But the one man is dead so the burden will fall on those who served him. Little people.’

  ‘Apparatchiks,’ said Troy.

  ‘People,’ said Nikolai.

  ‘Apparatchiks,’ said Troy.

  ‘People like you and me. Little people, caught in the tide of a history they could neither make nor unmake.’

  ‘Don’t ask me to care about apparatchiks,’ Troy said, ignoring the slow pressure of Rod’s foot on his. ‘There’s nothing on earth could make me care.’

  If nothing else, Troy had seized the old man’s attention. He had lowered his eyes from heaven and was looking at Troy with a deep sadness in his eyes.

  ‘Perhaps,’ Nikolai said slowly, ‘perhaps, they are not people like you and me. Perhaps I am wrong. What distinguishes us from them but the matter of choice? And if there was one thing your father’s genius did for us all, to say nothing of his money, it was that he gave us choice. Me as much as the two of you. These are people who know no choice. If I were Khrushchev’s head of KGB, I would not bank on collecting my pension, but if I’d been one of his apparatchiks, as you insist they are, under Josef Stalin, I would now fear for my life. Believe me, heads will roll. This denunciation is but prelude to another purge. The dead will pile up in heaps uncountable yet again. This is not freedom. Your man is wrong about that. This is the false dawn before the new nightmare. We are a long way from freedom.’

  Rod seemed flabbergasted, speechless, but had stopped treading on Troy’s foot in the vain hope of shutting him up.

  ‘You know,’ said Troy, picking his words brutally. ‘You might as well ask me to care about the fate of the guards at Auschwitz.’

  Nikolai got to his feet, shrugged off Troy’s unanswerable remark. He made his way slowly, painfully, towards the door. He stopped. The very posture, the angle of his head and body, betrayed the action of memory at work. Then he turned and spoke, looking at them with a sad air of mourning about him, his voice scarcely audible.

  ‘I considered all the oppressions that are done under the sun: and behold the tears of the oppressed, and they had no comforter; and on the side of their oppressors there was power; but they had no comforter.’

  The old man’s voice rose, the softness of tone vanishing in a burst of anger, hammering out the verse with a hard emphasis.

  ‘Wherefore I praised the dead which are already dead more than the living which are yet alive. Better is he than both they, which haff not yet been, who haff not seen the evil work that is done under the sun.’

  Nikolai walked slowly out, leaning heavily on his walking stick, and did not look back.

  ‘Good God,’ said Rod. ‘What was that? Lear on the blasted heath?’

  ‘It was the Old Testament,’ Troy replied. ‘Don’t ask me which book. Even old atheists can’t escape their upbringing.’

  ‘Do you think we’ve upset him?’

  ‘Yes—but for once I don’t care. He can’t ask us to shed a tear for the jobsworths of Russia. I couldn’t give a damn about his apparatchiks any more than I could about all the spooks from Torquay to Timbuctoo and back again. And I cannot conceive of the force that could make me. He’s wrong, and that’s all there is to it.’

  §23

  He lunched with Inspector Wildeve, who yawned his way through canteen meat and two veg and seemed to hear very little of what Troy had to say. Troy did his best to sort out what mattered from what did not. Jack could complain till he was blue in the face about a workload that kept him from his bed until four in the morning, there was little Troy could do about that. With a fortnight’s leave due to him—the first since Christmas—he did not intend to let Jack’s whingeing deflect him from it. What mattered was that he had clicked with Clark, that Clark had significantly eased the workload of which he complained so bitterly. Indeed, towards the end of a bowl of canteen rice pud, and a cup of murky tea, Jack was willing to admit that his Yard duties had kept him at it until only midnight, after which he felt like some fun and had squandered sleep and salary in a West End nightclub. Jack had been slow growing up. He was thirty-six, a bachelor, and burning the candle at both ends, much as he had done when he and Troy first met nearly fifteen years ago. Troy was not sympathetic. He did not frequent the clubs of Soho, and only occasionally ventured into its pubs.

  In the evening, on his way home, after a desk-clearing operation designed to leave him unmolested for the next fortnight by anything more demanding than a pig or a parsnip, he just fancied a pub, and a drink, just the one in each case. What he did not fancy was walking so much as twenty yards out of his way to find one. And so, eight-thirty found him pushing open the side door of the Salisbury.

  The usual patrons of the Salisbury were out-of-work actors. Loud voices and sweeping gestures were the house style. On a bad night you had to fight your way in through a few dozen monologuing, name-dropping hams, and the occasional stage door Johnny waiting for the stage door to open in a couple of hours’ time. The man at the bar in the creased white shirt was singular in his stillness and silence. It was the doyen of stage door Johnnies—Johnny Fermanagh. Troy almost turned on his heel and walked out, but the poise of the man, the concentration in his stillness, stirred his curiosity. He walked over to the bar. Johnny stood with his palms on the bar, arms braced straight, head down, staring intently at an empty pint glass and a full shot glass of whisky. So, he was on beer and a shot. A textbook example of how to get roaring pissed in the shortest possible time.

  Johnny did not move. Did not seem even to have noticed Troy.

  ‘What’s up?’ Troy said to the barman.

  ‘Don’t ask me. It’s been going on for more than an hour.’

  ‘What has?’

  Before the barman could answer Johnny let out a strangled cry, his head shook and his right hand crept slowly out towards the glass of whisky, then with the speed of a hungry snake he knocked it back in one, slammed the glass back on the bar and groaned like a beast in pain.

  ‘Aaaaaghhhhhhh! Nya, nya, nya. Yeworrayeworrayeworra. Same again, Spike.’

  The barman topped up both glasses. At last Johnny seemed to have noticed Troy.

  ‘Freddie, old horse. Stick around, I’ll be with you in a jiffy.’

&
nbsp; He hitched up his shirt-sleeves by their silver armbands, pulled his tie down an extra inch or two to dangle at the third button and reassumed the pose. The face twitched a little as he sought composure, then the right hand aimed at the pint, sank it in a single, ten-second gulp, and once again he proceeded to stare at the shot glass.

  Spike spoke confidentially to Troy. ‘Thing is, Mr Troy. He’ll eyeball it a while, then he’ll scream, then he’ll knock it back, and then he’ll look like it chokes him and order another. This is round four. Seconds out.’

  ‘Do you think there’s a point to it?’

  ‘Search me.’

  Minutes passed. Troy could hear a ham in the back of the room doing what sounded like a bad impression of Robert Newton, punctuated by the constant clink of glasses and the ever-present cry of ‘Darling’. Johnny pulled back, still staring at the glass of whisky. Slowly he drew himself up into some sort of drunk’s dignity, and waved the glass away with his hand.

  ‘Done, done. Get thee behind me, single malt! Take it away. Take it away!’

  ‘Did I hear you right?’ said the barman.

  Johnny reached up to the pegs and was slipping on his jacket.

  ‘Yes, yes. I’m through with the demon drink. Give it to one of these poor thesps. Drink it yourself. I don’t care.’

  He turned his sights on Troy once more.

  ‘Tea, tea,’ he said. ‘Let’s go to your house and drink tea.’

  ‘On the slate, Johnny?’ the barman asked.

  ‘No,’ said Johnny. ‘No more slate. No more tick. No more mañana. Tell me the sum outstanding and I shall write you a cheque at once.’

  He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a Mullins Kelleher chequebook, its cheques the size of a pocket handkerchief, its script a florid pre-war copperplate.

  ‘Twelve pounds, three shillings and ninepence, Johnny.’

  Inwardly Troy winced. Who in their right mind would run up a bill that size just for booze? But Johnny wrote out a cheque, tore it off the stub as though he relished the sound, and presented it to Spike with a flourish.

  ‘Free,’ he said. ‘Free, free, free.’

  He turned, aimed for the door and walked his drunkard’s crooked walk to the street. Troy followed, wondering what this could be about. Rather than giving booze away, it was Johnny’s habit to scrounge it off anyone with the price of a round. Troy did not think he’d ever seen him walk away from a full glass before.

  ‘There’s the rub,’ said Johnny. ‘The very point. The glass was full. I am not.’

  They crossed St Martin’s Lane, into Goodwin’s Court and up to Troy’s front door.

  ‘Not full, perhaps, but pissed just the same,’ said Troy with his hand on the key.

  ‘Pissed, pissed—but hardly the same.’

  ‘Do I get a prize if I spot the difference?’

  He let Johnny flop into an armchair while he put on the kettle. He could have his cup of char and then Troy would throw him out.

  ‘What are you up to?’ he asked as he poured.

  Johnny pulled himself back from reverie, smiled, gazed into his cup and looked up at Troy, dark eyes lost in a messy forelock of black hair. He swept the hair from his eyes, a gesture Troy had seen his sister perform so many times.

  ‘Any fool can give up the booze when he’s sober.’

  Not a bad point, thought Troy.

  ‘The trick is to give it up with a glass in front of you. If I can walk away and leave a glass on the bar, then I know I can go the whole damn hog. D’ye see?’

  ‘I see that it gets you tight of a Friday night, just like any other Friday night.’

  ‘It’s the only way, the only way. You order beer and a shot. You drink the beer. Only when you can leave the shot glass full and walk away with the beer inside you do you know that you’ve got willpower, and without willpower you’ve got bugger all.’

  ‘But you had to drink four pints to get there.’

  ‘Four pints and three shots of malt!’

  ‘Which is why you’re pissed.’

  ‘Absofuckinlutely. Pissed? Of course I’m pissed. But never again. That’s it. Finito!’

  ‘Drink your tea,’ Troy said.

  Johnny sipped at his cup of Best Orange Pekoe and pulled a face.

  ‘I’m going to have to get used to this, aren’t I?’

  ‘You’ve made your bed,’ Troy said. ‘What puzzles me is why?’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Johnny.

  ‘Do you know I pulled your record from CRO a while back? Just to see how many times you’ve been done for Drunk and Disorderly.’

  ‘Go on. Amaze me.’

  ‘Fifty-seven times.’

  ‘I should copyright it. Sue the blokes who can the beans.’

  Johnny thought his joke hilarious and disappeared into a drunken cackle.

  ‘Do you remember your first?’ Troy asked.

  ‘Could I forget it? November 1934. My first term at Oxford. Courtyard of Wadham. Climbed in late. Bit of a tussle with a porter. The beak fines me five bob for D & D, the college stings me for a guinea and reminds me I’m pissing all over traditions going back as far as my great-great-grandfather and blahdey blahdey blah.’

  ‘Instead,’ Troy went on, ‘you’ve set up a twenty-two-year tradition of reckless pissery.’

  ‘And now it’s over.’

  Johnny pushed himself up from his seat. Propped himself up on the mantelpiece, breathing deeply and making an effort at sobriety. He stared into the wall only inches from his eyes.

  ‘If you’d had my old man, Freddie, you’d have been a piss artist too.’

  ‘What is it that makes you finally want to bury the old bugger now? He’s been dead eleven years.’

  Johnny drew a deep breath. Turned to look at Troy.

  ‘The love of a good woman,’ he said.

  The trouble with clichés is that they all begin as truth. Only excess of use ever leads one to think that they are other than true. Every so often, against the odds, someone will use one with a straight face, or a straight pen, and with a bit of luck and the wind behind them they will disinter the original truth long since buried. Troy knew he should not laugh—not so much as a snigger. Johnny, transparently, believed every word of his cliché. But what woman in her right mind, good or downright malevolent, would take on Johnny? Some title-grubbing, gold-digging hag who’d put up with a raving husband in exchange for being addressed as Marchioness? Some sorry-for-drunk self-martyring silly cow?

  ‘Might I ask who?’

  ‘Can’t tell you, o’ man. Wish I could, but I can’t.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Do you, Freddie? Do you?’

  ‘A married woman, I take it?’

  ‘Oh. You do see. How d’ye know?’

  ‘Just guessing.’

  ‘Give me a little while to get things sorted. I just need a while. Or truth to tell she needs a while, not me. Just to get sorted. Then I’ll tell you. I’d love to tell you now. But I can’t. It’s all over between her and her husband. They’ve been out of love for years. But she has to tell him, you see. She has to tell him. I can’t say anything until she does.’

  A friend could say only one thing. And Troy was a friend, wasn’t he? This was how he had come to regard Johnny by a process of attrition. Frequency and familiarity wearing away hostility. The friend as furniture? A dozen variations, but only one essential thing for a friend to say. Two of them sprang readily to mind.

  ‘Well done, Johnny. Congratulations.’

  Johnny smiled and blushed. He really seemed to be happy, far from his common condition.

  ‘I’m very happy, Freddie. She makes me happy. I haven’t felt like this since I was a boy.’

  Troy envied this. He was never at all sure that he was happy. Certainly no other person made him happy.

  ‘And I wanted to ask you . . .’ Johnny let the sentence trail off. ‘I wanted to ask you . . . about Diana.’

  Mentally Troy began to ease him out. As quickly as he could he
would physically ease him towards the door, out into the courtyard, out into the street. Out.

  ‘About you . . . and Diana.’

  ‘Johnny. You and I have known each other for ten years.’

  ‘Have we?’

  ‘You came up to me in the Muleskinners’ Arms in the autumn of 1946. “I know you,” you said. “You’re the bloke that killed my sister.”’

  ‘Did I? I must have been out my skull. I’m most awfully sorry.’

  ‘Think nothing of it. It is, after all, true. I did kill your sister. I cannot change that. But ever since you have assumed, it has been implicit in your conversations with me, that Diana and I were lovers. I have never said any such thing. None the less you have assumed it. It is a fixture in your mind, much as, until tonight, you were a fixture in half the bars in Soho. Why now, Johnny? Why do you choose to ask me now?’

  ‘I have to know. Really, I have to know.’

  Troy said nothing.

  ‘I have to know that . . . somebody else can feel as I do. I don’t want to think that this is a delusion peculiar to me. I’ve lived my life apart. Never been in the mill of things. A drunken lord, a music hall joke. There’s hardly ever been a dash of normality about me. I don’t know what’s real. I don’t know what I should feel. Only what I do. I’m left, after years of a bent existence, craving normality, about which I know bugger all, wishing to God I could grow up, straighten up, and fly right. And I don’t know if I’m the only man ever to feel this.’

  This, Troy thought, was why we read novels and poetry. To know that what we thought and felt were not total solipsisms of the mind and heart.

  ‘Ask one of the marrieds, Johnny. We have plenty of friends who are married.’

  ‘Name one.’

  Troy could not.

  ‘You can’t do it because we haven’t got ’em. Most people we know are like you and me. The marrieds paired off donkey’s years ago. Who sees them any more? Who among us keeps the company of married men? I have to know. I have to know that you can feel as I feel. Otherwise I’m stuck inside of it like a starfish in a glass paperweight. A world of my own. That’s the achievement of twenty-two years of reckless pissery. Help me, Freddie.’