Old Flames (Frederick Troy 2)

by Lawton, John

  The maître d’ at the Wellesley greeted her like a lost sister. Madamed her to death. Showed the two of them to a table on the terrace. When the sound of his leather soles on the floorboards had died away, there was only the murmur of the room inside and the deeper, rhythmical murmur of the sea below them.

  ‘I do hope,’ Madeleine said, ‘that you’re not a meat and two veg followed by spotted dick man.’

  ‘I’ve never been a spotted dick man in my life.’

  ‘Good—then I’ll order for us.’

  She raised an arm. A waiter hurried over to her.

  ‘We’ll have the lotte, new potatoes, mangetout, green salad, followed by the crème caramel, and I think the ’47 Château Lattre de Tassigny.’

  ‘Nothing to start, Madame Kerr?’

  ‘No, just bring the claret straight away.’

  Troy admired her panache. He was paying, but she was calling the shots and meant to prove it to him.

  ‘Red wine with fish?’ he asked.

  ‘Do you really believe all that tosh? Don’t you think it’s all part and parcel of the dreadful English snobbery, the curse of class? Surely freedom means having what you want when you want it?’

  It was a startling little speech. He had seen his father glug best claret from a tea cup, seen him drink Pouilly-Fuissé with roast beef, seen him eat cheese with jam, seen him eat Christmas dinner still in his dressing gown. Of course she was right. The old man had spent much of Troy’s childhood proving the same point. ‘How do you think the English came to control half the planet, my boy? You know. The red bits on the map that the buggers are so inordinately proud of? With an army? Until 1915 they had never had conscription, nor had they maintained a large standing army, nor do they to this day. With their navy? Well, it helps to rule the waves, but it does very little to keep order in the hills of northern India or in the deepest jungles of Burma and Malaya. No—Britannia rules with her civil service. It is an empire of bureaucrats, of assistant district commissioners, of pen pushers and rule-writers. And thus are the rulers ruled, for they end by making as many rules for themselves as they ever did for the rest of us. Hence, your Englishman, hidebound, class-bound, who, given the freedom to have what he wants, will merely ask what the rules permit him to have.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t suppose I do.’

  The wine waiter appeared with two bottles of claret, and whipped out his corkscrew.

  ‘No,’ Troy said. ‘We only ordered—’

  Madeleine’s hand waved him down.

  ‘He knows me. He knows what I usually have, don’t you, Jean-Paul?’

  She smiled at the waiter. He smiled back politely, uncorked the second bottle and left them to it. She poured. Knocked back almost half her glass in a single mouthful and looked at Troy.

  ‘Well,’ she said.

  ‘Well?’ he said.

  ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘Well—it’s perfectly simple. What was Cockerell up to, and for whom?’

  She set down her glass, just for emphasis.

  ‘No. Not now. Not tonight. It’s not a simple question, as well you know. Tomorrow we’ll go up to London. You give me an hour or so to myself, then we can meet up and I’ll answer all your questions. There’s just one or two things I need to do first. Ask me anything else. Anything at all.’

  Troy was flummoxed. He had felt sure that this entire rigmarole was leading somewhere. Now, he couldn’t think of a question innocent enough.

  ‘How did you meet him? Here, in Brighton?’

  ‘No. Brighton had nothing to do with it—at least not then.’

  She took a huge gulp of red wine and denied him the prompt.

  OK. Think of another.

  ‘You’re not from here?’

  He winced inwardly. It was a line from a bad chat-up routine.

  ‘No. I’m from Deeplydullshire. My father, God rot ’im, is a village GP in Berkshire. I’d done my degree at Bristol—my father would have preferred it if I’d done a commercial diploma in shorthand and typing, joined the civil service and hooked a diplomat for a husband. But I didn’t, I kicked the dust of Berkshire off my heels and settled in London. That’s where I met Ronnie.’

  She had finished her first glass—he had not even touched his—and reached for the bottle.

  ‘I met him at the Embassy.’

  Alarm bells rang in Troy’s head.

  ‘Embassy? Which embassy? The Russian embassy?’

  ‘No—silly—the Embassy Club in Bond Street. It was four years ago. The week the King died. I’d been stood up. A chinless wonder from the Grenadier Guards—Billy or Bobby something—he was squiffy when he called round for me. Swigged whisky from his hip flask all the way there in the cab, disappeared into the loo ten minutes after we got there and I never saw him again. I was stuck at our table, no cigarettes, no money. Then this dapper little chap came up and asked me to dance. It was Ronnie. He moved so beautifully, such confidence, so light on his little feet. Nice looking too. I’ve always liked older men. I was twenty-five, he’d be about fifty. Just the right gap, wouldn’t you say?’

  Troy had no opinion. But, then, the question didn’t seem to require an answer. He may have broken his wrist crank-starting the woman but she was rolling smoothly now.

  ‘We sat out the next dance. He bought me a martini and I was desperate for a ciggy by then, and he took out two from his cigarette case, put them in his mouth, just like Humphrey Bogart. Lit up both and passed one to me. I thought that was so good mannered. So romantic.’

  Troy was getting puzzled. Not only did he not believe this woman was pushing thirty, he did not see how one gesture could be commended as good mannered and romantic at the same time. Romantic, he thought, usually wasn’t much bothered by any notion of manners. And the voice. Something was not quite right. It had a languid beauty to it, but something seemed to lurk beneath it—the hint of a lost accent?

  ‘The next dance was slow and gentle, and I felt his hand slide down to my bottom. So I did what a good girl should. I pulled it back up twice and let him have his little victory the third time. And he said—looked me right in the eyes—he had such lovely pale blue eyes—and said, “You’re not wearing any knickers, are you?” Of course—I wasn’t.

  ‘We spent the night together. I had this beautiful little flat just off the Kings Road in Chelsea—but I had also had two flatmates. So Ronnie took a room at the Imperial. Mr and Mrs Kerr. It was divine. He spoilt me rotten with little touches of luxury. I could ring room service and ask for anything I wanted.’

  Troy was more puzzled. He had begun to realise that she spoke like an advertisement. It did not seem to be a vocabulary of real responses, more an acquired surface of phrasing. A veneer over whatever, if anything, she felt, over whatever, and it had to be something, she was. The Imperial was not a hotel he would have chosen as a way to impress a new lover. It might once have been luxurious, but the last time he visited anyone there it struck him as long past its best, shabby even. A man with the money Cockerell had, and he knew from the bank statements he was not skint even in 1952, could have afforded the Dorchester in Park Lane, or Claridge’s in the heart of Mayfair, and would have had little need of the Imperial, tucked away in its corner behind the British Museum.

  ‘After that I saw him every time he came to London.’

  ‘How often was that?’

  ‘About once a fortnight, I suppose. Then one day, a couple of months later, he rang me the second time in a week. Said he was back in London, and would I meet him at Victoria. I had to drop everything and dash.’

  ‘Everything?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘You had a job?’

  ‘Well—yes. Of course I had a job.’

  ‘So, what did you do?’

  ‘I worked for a scientist.’

  ‘A scientist?’

  She ostentatiously drained her glass of red wine and held out her hand for him to refill it. If it was meant to wrongfoot him it almost worked. Too lon
g in the company of women like his sisters, who had long since surrendered the formality of waiting for the man—as Madeleine herself seemed to have done until now—left him wondering for a second what she meant by the gesture. He topped her up and returned to the point.

  ‘What sort of a scientist?’

  ‘A boffin. You know, hush-hush. I was his private, personal assistant.’

  ‘Private and personal?’

  ‘Look—do you want to hear about how I met Ronnie or don’t you?’

  Troy nodded. He had lost nothing. She would not answer. There was no answer.

  ‘Anyway—you listening?—we went to Brighton. Bit of a surprise really. I’d been there once or twice before the war, when I was little. I’d always loved Brighton. I don’t know how Ronnie picked up on that. To this day I can’t remember ever telling him that. It’s . . . it’s . . . exotic. Isn’t it?’

  Was it? He had never thought of the word as applicable to anywhere in the British Isles. Exotic? It could hardly describe the natural. It was man in his setting that made for the exotic. He thought of the places he loved: the view from his own verandah, willows, pigs and bats, but that was not exotic; the chiselled beauty of Ben Bulben, the most magnificent mountain west of the Alps, but that wasn’t exotic either. Exotic was, according to cliché, dark, dusky, heady with spices—cinnamon and sandalwood—redolent of a market in Tangiers, in a thousand shades of brown, where every wild splash of red and yellow told. It wasn’t Brighton. Brighton was the red and yellow of saucy postcards and the brown of warm beer. It was a step up from Blackpool or Skegness, but it wasn’t Biarntz or Monte Carlo. You might toy with the notion on a warm summer’s evening as you passed the Prince Regent’s Pavilion, but you’d never actually mistake the place for the Taj Mahal. What was the woman on about?

  ‘We had lunch, and we walked on the beach. He told me all about himself. I knew some things, of course. You couldn’t not know certain things about a man after eight weeks together. But that day he told me everything. And in the end he told me his wife wouldn’t divorce him.’

  ‘You knew he was married?’

  She sighed in mockery.

  ‘You can tell a man is married just by looking at him!’

  Try me, he thought. Go on, guess. But he said nothing.

  ‘I told him I didn’t care. Then he said, let’s take another stroll before the sun goes. But I knew as he said it there was something . . . something he wasn’t telling me. As though I could sense a surprise. But I like surprises.’

  She pointed out over the balcony towards the Channel, glittering in the light of a silvery moon, to the West Pier jutting out into the water.

  ‘We were down there. Right at the end. It’d be late summer, I suppose. Late afternoon, early evening, but not quite dark. We were standing at the end. And Ronnie said to me, “Get your tits out. I want to see your tits.” So I took off my jacket and I took off my blouse and stood there looking out at the sea. “Turn around,” he said. “I want you to look at me.” Well, I knew the pier wasn’t deserted. We’d passed enough people on the way down. But I turned around, and there was a middle-aged couple with a dog sitting there. And I heard something from the woman like, “Well I never. Come on, George.” And she dragged the poor old bloke off. He walked sideways like a crab all the way back just to be able to look at me. There was only one other person left. A really old woman in a plastic mac, putting away her knitting. “Lean back on the rail,” said Ronnie. “Flaunt it. I want you to flaunt it.” So I did. And the old woman came up to me and said, “Nice titties, dear. I used to have a pair just like those. Mind you’ll catch your death of cold.” Then she turned to Ronnie and said, “Lovely titties, don’t you think, dear?” And shuffled off.’

  This was not the same man. This could not be the same man. This was not Arnold Cockerell. Yet it was. Was this the magic of a change of name? A simple shuffling of words, but as powerful as a sea change? Cockerell into Kerr. Weasel into lounge lizard. Frustrated little man, drearily thumbing a dirty magazine, into a pervert of preposterous imagination. A man with style, an élan of sexual provocation.

  Madeleine showed enough sensibility to pause in her story while the waiter set the fish in front of them, but it scarcely broke the stride of the tale.

  ‘I slipped my blouse back on and he walked me up Cavendish Hill. A little surprise, he told me. Wasn’t so little. It was 2 Chatsworth Place. “Is it yours?” I asked as he showed me round. “No,” he said. “It’s yours.” And then he bowled me over again. Took me next door to number 3 and said, “This is yours, too. Spread your wings, my lovely.” It was the way he said it. “Spread your wings, my lovely.” So I did. I went back up to London. Told the girls I was leaving the flat. Gave in my notice at work and moved to Brighton. All that autunm the builders were in. Ronnie let me do anything I wanted. A wall here, a doorway there. And of course—I let him do anything he wanted.’

  She ran her index finger around the rim of her glass and then sucked it slowly, pulling it back and forth, smiling as she did so, and looking at Troy with eyes full of mischief.

  ‘Ronnie never forgot the night we met. He said he knew I was the woman for him the minute he found out I’d no knickers on. So—I went everywhere without underwear. Ronnie’s tickled my fanny or fingerfucked me in half the restaurants in Brighton.’

  He had never heard the word ‘fingerfucked’ before. Its meaning was explicit. Its existence perfectly logical. It was the kind of word which—if she knew it—his wife would use. But he had never dreamt of such a word, nor that he would hear the notion it represented so neatly summed up in a single word—it was a single word, wasn’t it?—on the lips of a middle-class Englishwoman.

  ‘Tell me,’ he said. ‘Did he ever . . .’

  ‘Yeeeeeeees?’

  ‘Did he . . . well . . . did he ever ask you to . . .’

  ‘Wear a rubber suit?’

  ‘Well, no . . . actually I was going to say . . . did he ever ask you if he could wear a rubber suit? His frogman suit, to be precise.’

  ‘Oh—we both wear them. We had his and hers wetsuits. You know—with holes in all the right places.’

  She glanced down, a quick, unbelievably coy tilt of the eyes groinward, then she bunched up her breasts into an alpine cleavage with her hands, picked up her fork and returned to her meal as though everything she had said and done in the last couple of minutes had not been wholly outrageous.

  Yet again her glass was empty. They were into the second bottle. He did not wait for the prompt. He topped her up and resigned himself to the fact that she was going to get pissed as quickly as she could.

  §67

  The tide was high. The gentle breeze of evening was chilling with the coming of night. She slipped off her shoes and dropped them on the sand.

  ‘Are you coming in?’

  ‘A swim?’ He sounded incredulous.

  ‘A paddle, stupid. Or did you think I was going to strip off and dive in?’

  ‘Wouldn’t surprise me,’ he said.

  ‘Touché.’

  Troy watched her walk to the edge of the sea and stand where it was hardly ankle deep, barely washing over her feet. He heard the shrill squeak of delight as the cold water touched her blood.

  Just under the sea wall was a solitary deck chair, a lost lamb missed by the deck chair shepherd. He pulled it upright, sat in it, watching her wade farther out until the water crept up to the hem line of her dress. And beyond. By the time she was through, the dress would be sodden.

  He felt, he realised, the beginning of a reluctant admiration for Cockerell. He had got what he wanted: the classic, but often impossible dream of a double life. And it worked. Or at least it had worked for the best part of four years. Janet Cockerell surely gave him something or he would have left her long ago, and he did not for one second believe the line Cockerell had spun Madeleine about ‘my wife won’t agree to a divorce’. Janet Cockerell had never mentioned the prospect. Indeed, part of his idea of Cockerell was that the m
an enjoyed the double life, and without the wife it would have been singular, enjoyable—he looked at Madeleine in the moonlight, practically up to her hips in the water, arms outstretched like a crucifix, singing a wordless song to herself, beautiful, bizarre and pissed—hugely enjoyable, but singular. He could imagine the delight it had given Cockerell to sit with his wife amid the straining verbal violence of marriage and recall the last time he had fingerfucked his mistress in public. The weasel’s revenge. It was bloody nigh perfect. ‘What you want, when you want it.’ Heartbreak Hotel with room service.

  Madeleine hopped from one foot to another, splashing madly and shouting something.

  ‘Ow, ow ow ow!’

  Troy left the chair and met her at the water’s edge.

  ‘Bloody fucking hell. What kind of a bastard—’

  She leant heavily on his arm and bent back her left leg.

  ‘What kind of a bastard leaves bits of glass on the beach?’

  He sat her down, where the sand was drier, and looked at the soles of her feet.

  ‘Not glass,’ he said. ‘Shell.’

  ‘Hurts just the same.’

  ‘It’s in deep.’

  ‘Then for God’s sake pull it out.’

  He could get no grip on the fragment. It would need tweezers. He locked his teeth onto the broken edge of the shell, pulled back and spat out a sliver of shell over half an inch long.

  She sighed with relief. He still had hold of her foot. Before he could let go she said, ‘More. Just a bit more.’

  Troy said nothing.

  She propped herself up, her arms straight out behind her, her hands flat on the sand.