Old Flames (Frederick Troy 2)

by Lawton, John

  Troy picked up another.

  ‘Nora Schwartz. Born Chicago, 10 June 1911.’

  ‘Nah. Don’t like the name. If I’d been born Nora Schwartz I’d’ve changed it. Betty Boop, Minnie Mouse, anything but Nora Schwartz.’

  ‘Larissa Dimitrovna Tosca. Born New York, 5 April 1911. This is yours. And it’s still valid. This must be a fake. It’s only four years old.’

  ‘No. It’s real. And Tosca’s my real name too. It was all immigration could make of my old man’s name. My last passport ran out in ’52. I just took it to the American Embassy in Lisbon and got a new one.’

  ‘But the Americans think you’re dead. You died in a bloodbath in Orange Street in 1944.’

  ‘Yeah. But apart from the guys I worked with at the time, why should anyone know that? Just ’cos you filled in a few forms at Scotland Yard and posted ’em off to Grosvenor Square? Troy, the world is not that efficient. Who matches births to deaths? It’s the same as getting a ringer. You show up with the right face and the right papers, who gives a damn?’

  Then, the penny dropped. He should have seen at once. Such a simple solution. The right face, the right papers, who gives a damn?

  ‘Look. I think I’ve found the solution.’

  ‘Aha?’

  ‘You have to become British. We get you a British passport.’

  ‘How do we do that?’

  ‘You have to marry me.’

  ‘Not the cutest proposal I ever received, I can tell you.’

  ‘You have to marry me, because marriage confers citizenship. And once you’re a citizen you can apply for your own passport. You enter Britain as Mrs Frederick Troy, British subject. Tosca no more, Greta no more. We’ll marry in Vienna. We’ll have to wait a few days, quite possibly more than a week, while the embassy issues a passport to you. Then we go into England through the back door.’

  ‘Back door?’

  ‘Ireland.’

  ‘Why Ireland?’

  ‘Because there’s no immigration control between the republic and the mainland. And we fog the trail by stopping over at the Isle of Man. Ships from there are not counted as international. We dock at Liverpool at a domestic berth. No customs, no passports, and hence no reason for any of your spooks to be watching.’

  ‘It’ll work?’

  ‘If we can get into Vienna without being spotted, yes.’

  ‘And then what, a plane to where? Dublin?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Tosca stared at the carpet, then she looked him in the eye.

  ‘Mrs Frederick Troy.’ She enunciated the words very slowly.

  They lapsed into silence. He filled it.

  ‘It’s just a convenience.’

  She stared at him.

  ‘It doesn’t mean anything.’

  ‘Liar,’ she said.

  She scooped up the passports and clutched them to her chest.

  ‘It’s OK. I’m game. But I don’t see how we can work this scam from this side of the Channel.’

  ‘I have a friend,’ he said.

  ‘Aha?’

  ‘At our embassy in Vienna. Are you known in Vienna?’

  ‘Nah. I never played Vienna. Too many goddam spooks.’

  She fanned the passports out like a hand of cards and spread them on the carpet.

  ‘Who am I?’ she said.

  ‘You’d better be yourself. That’s a risk we have to take. The entry stamps on your passport would be useful, and the marriage and hence the citizenship will only be valid if you’re Larissa Tosca. I can’t marry you as Minnie Mouse or Betty Boop. There’d be no point. You have to enter Austria and marry as yourself.’

  ‘I understand. But what I meant was, “Who Am I?” Capital W, capital A, capital I.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Nor me. That’s why I’m asking, Troy. Who Am I?’

  §29

  Gus Fforde was a rogue. A rogue, a wag and an old friend. He and Troy and Charlie had been schoolboys together. Charlie was the leader, Troy and Dickie Mullins very much the NCOs, and Gus the inspired, reckless subaltern. Fforde it was who had taught Troy how to disable a car by shoving a potato up the exhaust, how to blow out the down-pipe on a lavatory cistern with gun-cotton so that the next poor sod to flush the bog got a free shower, and how to catapult stink bombs in chapel. Of these, Troy had only found the first to be of any lasting value.

  Fforde was also First Secretary at Her Britannic Majesty’s Embassy in Vienna, capital of the newly reconstituted Austria—its democratic government only weeks old, the Russian and American troops that had been there since 1945 having departed a matter of months ago.

  ‘A passport, you say?’

  ‘Yes, Gus. For my wife.’

  ‘She’s not English then?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Okey doh. And when did you get married?’

  ‘Tomorrow. You can be a witness if you like.’

  ‘Freddie, there wouldn’t be anything . . . how shall I say? . . . untoward about this, would there?’

  ‘Untoward, no. Downright dodgy, yes. In need of discreet assistance from an old friend, yes.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Fforde. ‘What are old friends for?’

  Fforde did his bit. Witnessed a civil wedding, pronounced Tosca, even with her haggard look and pancake make-up, to be ‘a stunner’, discreetly intervened when the clerk raised the vexatious matter of ‘residency’, popped the champagne and served the Sachertorte in the lobby of the Sacher Hotel, and rushed through a British passport, asking no questions and stepping lightly over embassy staff who remarked that it was all a little irregular.

  ‘Speaking of the irregular,’ he said. ‘Seen anything of Charlie lately?’

  Troy thought about it.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Wish I had. But I don’t think I’ve set eyes on him since April.’

  ‘I have,’ Fforde went on. ‘He was through here only a week or two back. All nods and winks, nothing definite. Wouldn’t tell me a damn thing. Do you think he’s still at it? After all these years, I mean.’

  What are old friends for? Fforde had been immeasurably good to Troy. God knows, this whole thing could rebound on him, and a lesser friend would have told Troy to go home and sort it out there. But Troy’s debt to Gus could not include such truths. It seemed odd that in his position he did not know, but if he didn’t Troy could not be the one to tell him. Of course Charlie was still at ‘it’. And ‘it’ was something Troy would not go into. He shrugged it off and mourned the days when they had all told each other everything. What were old friends for?

  §30

  It was a smooth crossing. Over the Irish Sea. Aboard the Maid of Erin, out of Dublin, bound for Liverpool via Douglas I.O.M. Within sight of the Isle of Man, not far off the uninhabited southern island, the Calf of Man, they stood at the rail watching the gulls circle, and the herring boats bobbing in the distance.

  ‘Give me the gun,’ Troy said.

  ‘What? I mean why?’

  ‘Just give it to me.’

  Tosca looked around, checked no one could see, took the gun out of her handbag and slipped it to him palm to palm. It was so small he could conceal it almost completely in his hand. He looked around, exactly as she had done, and dropped the gun over the side into the grey surf.

  ‘We don’t need guns,’ he said.

  ‘We don’t?—No—I guess not.’

  ‘Now,’ he said. ‘Let’s agree on a story.’

  §31

  He stopped the Bentley in the curve of beech trees, resplendent in their bottle green, the late June sun glinting off their leaves as from a thousand tiny mirrors. The house was just visible beyond the curve, a quarter of a mile or so in the distance.

  Tosca said, ‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley.’

  He looked at her, surprised and pleased that she knew an English novel, that she knew anything that wasn’t Huck Finn—she was always reading Huck Finn—but she wasn’t smiling.

  ‘Is this poetry or pre
monition?’ Troy asked.

  She flapped a dismissive hand at him.

  ‘Oh, don’t mind me. It’s just—well—it’s just that that’s what it looks like to me. Y’know, Hollywood England, green shires on a back lot.’

  So, she had not read the book after all, she was merely remembering the Hitchcock film—Olivier, darkly romantic, and George Sanders playing yet another supercad.

  ‘I wouldn’t mind,’ he said. ‘But Joan Fontaine so mangled those opening lines.’

  ‘She tried, baby. We all do. Now, do I get to meet Mrs Danvers?’

  ‘If you’re going to take the mick—’

  She leant her head on his shoulder and elbowed him until he put an arm around her. He slipped his foot slowly off the clutch and let the car crawl gently up the drive in first, steering as little as it needed with the fingertips of one hand upon the wheel. For a moment or two it was plausible, the seductive lie that this was the opening page of a lasting romance. Every bone in his body wanted it to be true, and every cell in his brain told him it wasn’t.

  ‘Of course you can meet Mrs Danvers,’ he said. ‘But you mustn’t let her play with the matches.’

  Mimram to him was a series of shapes and spaces, colours and sequences arranged in transparent time—a glass onion. The house of childhood, still visible through adulthood, nestled at its core, laid out in the order in which he had discovered it.

  Tosca pulled a face at the stuffed black bear standing in the hallway.

  ‘Jeez, but he looks moth-eaten. I mean, does he have to stand there, like the first thing you see when you come in the door?’

  True, he was ugly as sin, had lost one eye, one ear and seemed daily to lose more and more of his stuffing, but to Troy he was Boris the Bear. He had stood on the same spot since 1919, and Troy saw no reason why he might not be found on the same spot in 1969. One of Troy’s earliest memories was of Boris wearing a tin hat and waving a Union Jack on the first Armistice Day. He had worn a red poppy every November ever since; someone, not always Troy, remembered to pin one on him. He was part of the structured maintenance of childhood, as, indeed, was so much of the paraphernalia of the living house. In the main drawing room, the blue room, a battered Congolese carving of a Pygmy mounted upon an ebony elephant, the human figure far, far larger than the animal, had stood in the fireplace longer than he could remember. Sasha had nicknamed it Minnie, as a child. Once Troy had moved Minnie from the left-hand side of the fire to the right, only to see Sasha, on her next visit, move the figure back, without comment, or, Troy thought, consciousness. He would have difficulty explaining things like this to Tosca. The sheer solidity that the old man had placed around them, the spun, set spidersilk of airy nothings—his genius, as Nikolai had put it, for wrenching choice out of necessity. Tosca had lived her life out of a suitcase—three countries, a dozen passports and countless cities. Her cry of ‘Who am I?’ was not one he had ever asked of himself. He had doubts by the score; he knew Rod did too, and if they ever rose to any level resembling self-knowledge it was possible the sisters would too. He knew who he was; he was a Troy. And the best protection he could give her was to make her one too. If she would but accept.

  ‘Pick a room,’ he said to her, as he dumped their bags on the first-floor landing.

  ‘Whaddya mean, “Pick a room”?’

  ‘You did say you would like your own room.’

  ‘I know—you gotta give me some time. I mean I—’

  ‘No, no I wasn’t arguing with you. I’m saying pick any room that isn’t occupied. Make it your own.’

  ‘Any room?’

  ‘Any that isn’t occupied.’

  ‘Well, how many are there?’

  ‘I’ve never counted, but I should think between fifteen and twenty.’

  ‘How do I know which are occupied?’

  ‘Slippers at the foot of the bed, dressing gowns on the back of the door, and the ones that aren’t will probably smell a bit mothbally.’

  She wandered from room to room, every step and word echoing around the empty house. She took a liking to Masha and Lawrence’s room, bathed in the rosy western light of late afternoon, tinting the off-white walls Masha favoured with a wash of pink, and for a moment he wondered whether he might not have to persuade his sister to swap, but on the south side of the house she plumped firmly for a small dark room with faded wallpaper and a view of the river and the willows.

  ‘It’s kinda my size. You know what I mean? Well, you ever lived in a Moscow apartment, you would.’

  ‘Yes. I know. It was my room when I was a boy.’

  ‘You grew up in this? This was where you read Winnie the Pooh, sat up nights with Kennedy’s Shorter Latin Primer, and jerked off to dreams of Carole Lombard?’

  ‘Sort of. But I had a preference for Barbara Stanwyck.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘I took my father’s room at the end of the war. It’s next door. Look, why don’t you bathe and change. It’s been a hellish journey. I’ll rustle up some tea, and then we can look over the rest of the place.’

  He had not contrived the situation, but once it had arisen he could not deny the familiarity. Tosca up to her tits in a bathful of bubbles, teacup in hand, blathering away at him; him sitting on the bog seat, partly listening partly daydreaming, his mind drifting between present and past. This was how things had been. This simple juxtaposition with a naked, garrulous woman had set like gelatine in the mind as one of his ‘fondest’ memories. And he dearly wished he had a better word than ‘fond’ for it. It had ended in blood, hers and his, and half his left kidney blown away.

  Tosca stretched out a leg to soap and he saw the unmistakable marks of cigarette burns—the scars would be permanent—and the arm that held the soap still bore bruises that had faded to medicinal yellow. Again he wondered, how hard had they hit her for the marks to last the best part of two months? He could not ask again until she was ready to tell. God only knew whether he had the tact to discern such a moment.

  Dressed, powdered, perfumed and, he thought, quite possibly pleased, he led her from room to room, each one still in the soft, powdery, floral colours in which his parents had found it in the summer of 1910, five years before his own birth. Each colour had been maintained, restored. The blue room, the largest drawing room on the south-west corner of the house—Tosca paused over the scratches on the window, where Sasha had carved her and Hugh’s initials in the glass with the diamond of her engagement ring—Alexandra Troy and Hugh Darbishire—AT & HD, entwined above a heart and the date ‘30th Jany 1933’.

  ‘Time and chance do that to you,’ said Tosca, tracing out the letters with her fingertips. ‘Make you look like a romantic fool, before you can so much as blink.’

  ‘Eh?’

  “January 30th 1933”—the day Hitler became Chancellor of Germany.’

  He waited to see if she would elaborate. She didn’t. But he thought he knew what she meant—the lives of little people measured against the mark of history. What mattered at the time seen with the devastating benefit of hindsight. Sasha had meant to etch the date of her engagement into glass for ever, and inadvertently achieved a different commemoration, of an event that would eclipse any other that day.

  Troy threw open the doors to the smaller red room, with its bay window where a Christmas tree stood every year. And the rest of the year, his mother had often sat in the bay sewing or lace-making or working at any one of a dozen quick-fingered hobbies that ruined her eyes by the time she was seventy. To the pink room—not so much pink as washed-out sainfoin magenta; to the yellow room—primrose and cowslip, ‘Patent Yellow’ to the discerning eye; through the deep Prussian of the dining room, through the layers of the onion to his father’s study, its colour a dark, obscure nothing, a faded something.

  At some point his father had lined the room with bookshelves, and when they had been filled, he had stuffed books into cupboards and when they too had filled, he had left books in piles on the floor, where they stood to this day. And in
front of the books he had piled anything that caught his fancy. Three long-case clocks of differing height—remarkably, Troy now thought, like the Amsterdam skyline—which no one had ever managed to synchronise. A complete orrery—complete but for the undiscovered ninth planet—in brass, which no one had wound and set in motion in years. A harmonium whose leather lungs had long since perished. A player piano on which the hands of Gustav Mahler, Igor Stravinsky and George Gershwin could be brought to life from a punch-paper roll. A large, hand-painted, flaking, plaster of Paris globe on an iron pedestal, depicting the world in pastel colours as it had appeared in the days of empire and eagles. Extinct countries like Austria-Hungary, Imperial Russia, and no hint of neogeographic entities such as Yugoslavia. The existence of Poland was a mystery to the boy Troy, a country which came and went like the little man in the weather house, now you see it now you don’t, and which, since his father’s death, in its most recent incarnation, had leapt bodily some five hundred miles to the west. The old man had used the globe and his stamp album to teach Troy geography and history. His stamp album ran from a plethora of penny reds and the young head of Queen Victoria to the inflated millions on the denominations of the Weimar Republic, to the tasteful browns of Hitler’s portrait, via vanished confederations of British East Africa, and the oddly colourful stamps of South Sea islands, where the head of George V could be found offset by palm trees and giant tortoises. Troy wondered, did the king have a tortoise at home with him, grazing the lawns at Buckingham Palace? And the naming of places puzzled him. Who was Gilbert? And were he and Ellice married? And did they have children after whom other islands might be named? The spelling of Yugoslavia, with its interchangeable J or Y, had taken him an age to learn.

  ‘I’m almost sorry to waste your time,’ his father had told him. ‘I doubt it will be there long. You cannot invent a country. If you can invent yourself you’re doing quite well enough.’

  Tosca’s gaze came to rest on the wall between the windows, just above the desk.

  ‘I ain’t seen one of those in years.’

  He could not make out what she was looking at, but then she reached up and took his father’s gun off the two wooden pegs that supported it on the wall. It was a large, heavy, semi-automatic pistol.