by Lawton, John
He shaved, dressed, felt through his hair to the ridge of torn skin and dried blood left on his scalp by the bullet, and rummaged around in the small drawer set beneath the mirror on the hallstand. House keys, car keys and at the bottom, gathering dust onto its thin film of protective grease, a pair of gun-metal grey lock-picks. He took out his handkerchief, wiped them clean, slipped them into the pocket of his jacket, and caught sight of himself in the mirror. He felt at the scabrous ridge once more. It had ceased to hurt days ago, but he knew damn well that even if Wildeve had not imposed idleness upon him the medics would have, and if Kolankiewicz knew that he was about to cheat medicine once more—‘fuck with the head,’ as he would undoubtedly put it—he would call him smartyarse, call him crazy and explode with Polish anger.
He collected the Bentley. Drove down to Brighton. Picked the lock on the door of Madeleine Kerr’s house. Stole four of her best outfits. Shoes to match. A suitcase to hold them. And was back in London by four in the afternoon. By six o’clock the next morning he was in the Bentley once more, driving north up a deserted Marylebone Lane, out of the Smoke, out of Cobbett’s Wen, out in the direction of Watford and the Black Country and the Potteries and Manchester and the far-flung North. What the South, in all its imperial snobbery, still called the Provinces. England, Troy had learnt long ago, had few greater insults than to call you provincial. It implied you still wore woad.
§80
Clearly they were savages. It was a little after noon. He had just found St Clement Street, Lower Broughton, and was parked outside number 25. Before he had even pulled the key from the ignition a grubby face had pressed itself up against the window on the driver’s side—nostrils flattened against the glass. Another head popped in at the open window on the passenger side.
‘What kind of car is this Mister is it a Cadillac or a Packard or a Ferrari it’s a big un in’t it I’ve gorra dinky of a Caddy an a Packard an a Ferrari.’
The sentence had no pauses. An acute grammarian could not have driven in a comma with a sledgehammer.
Troy looked at the child—nine or ten at the most—full of curiosity, devoid of all knowledge.
‘It’s a Bentley,’ Troy told him, trying very hard not to feel foolish.
‘Bentley?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is it posh is it?’
‘If you like.’
‘D’thee mek dinkies of it?’
Troy waved the other child off the glass and opened the door. Over the top of the car the voluble child was just visible, craning upward, marginally short of climbing on the bodywork. A third savage had appeared from nowhere and was undertaking a personal test of the springs in the left-hand wing mirror with the flat of his hand. Behind him the vast bulk of Onions had appeared in the open doorway of number 25. A blonde, beautiful, sad-eyed girl of ten or so peeped round him at hip level.
‘Probably,’ Troy said to the boy.
Onions roared.
‘Clear off. The lot of you!’
It had no effect. In the canteen at Scotland Yard grown men would leap to their feet and spill their pudding at such a sound from Onions. Indeed he had once seen Onions simply yell Constable Agnew’s name only to see Agnew shoot bolt upright, recite his national service rank and number and click his heels together on the ‘Sir!’, deluded by the force of Onions’ delivery into believing for a moment that he was back in the Army. They all looked at him, the newcomer even paused momentarily in his technical test of the mirror, but they also ignored him.
‘I’ll mind your car for a tanner,’ said the first child.
‘OK,’ said Troy.
The boy held out a hand.
‘C. O. D.,’ Troy said.
‘Yer what?’
‘Cash on delivery. If the car’s still here when I get back you get your sixpence.’
The boy shrugged his acceptance of the terms. Onions reached behind the house door, groping for his jacket. Jackie Clover stood on the step, the thin boundary between home and street, quite possibly the only one in the terrace that had not been freshly donkey-stoned, and scrutinised Troy. It was a disturbing gaze. Trying so hard to look as deep into Troy as she could. Surely she had no memory of him. It had been so long ago and she so small. She would not speak to him. Did not speak to Onions as he ruffled her hair and told her to tell her mother that they’d ‘gone down the Grosvenor’. As they passed the Bentley Onions clipped the boy at the wing mirror round the ear without even looking at him.
§81
Onions ordered bread and cheese. A pint of mild each. Muttered that he had eaten nowt but his own cooking for three days. The barman slapped a doorstep of a slice in front of each of them. Silently Onions spooned a sticky brown pickle onto his plate, bent his back and shoulders into it and ate ravenously. It reminded Troy of the scene in Great Expectations when Magwitch, played by Finlay Currie, gorges himself out on the marshes with the food Pip has stolen for him. Was Valerie really that bad a cook? He’d never eaten a meal prepared by her; they’d always eaten out. He occasionally thought that this had been essential to the relationship. Even more than wanting to be fucked, Valerie wanted to be wined and dined. Life with Kenneth could not have been a box of delights. Even less so when he had returned home and whisked her from a backstreet in Shepherd’s Bush to a backstreet in Salford.
Troy could stand the sound of stolid munching against the faint hum of lunchtime chatter no more.
‘Had Kenneth been long in Cyprus?’ he asked.
Onions unhunched from the food and looked across the table at him. There was relief in the stony eyes, their bright blue flattened to slate with grief and tiredness. He was glad Troy had broken the ice.
‘Nobbut a fortnight. Went out there about the middle of the month. Bugger all notice. His entire squadron just told to pack and get on board a transport. Weren’t even told where they were bound. Our Valerie found out where he was when she got a postcard. That was Friday. Telegramme came Saturday. Could be worse. Could have arrived before the damn card, I suppose.’
Troy could not eat. Would not have touched the beer in any case. He knew Onions well enough to know the explosion could not be far off.
‘I mean. I ask yer. What in God’s name was he doing there? What were British tommies doing in Cyprus?’
‘Do you really want to know?’
‘I wouldn’t be askin’ if I didn’t, would I?’ Onions snapped.
Troy knew that he could only let loose the wrath of Onions; he could not control or diminish it. He could only leach it and watch it flow down. It seemed to be what he should do.
‘Cyprus has nothing to do with it,’ he said. ‘The nationalists have been bumping off the odd swaddie every so often, just like the Jews did in Israel under the mandate a few years back. That’s just coincidence.’
‘Ken died for a coincidence?’
‘Yes. He wasn’t there for any reason that matters to Cyprus, Cyprus is a floating island, the great Mediterranean aircraft carrier. A handy spot to launch the invasion of Egypt.’
‘Jesus. Jesus,’ Onions whispered.
Had he really not worked it out for himself? It was hardly more than six weeks since Nasser had seized the canal. Wasn’t it obvious? Couldn’t every sentient being in Britain see that we were heading into war?
‘It’s like . . . it’s like Ken’s death doesn’t count.’
‘Not to Eden it doesn’t.’
‘Eden?’ Onions looked baffled by the word.
‘He means to have Nasser. To humiliate him on the world stage.’
‘He’s mad.’
‘Yes. Rod swears the man is certifiable.’
There was a pause. Troy felt the mood swing again. The softness of shock and incomprehension rising toward anger once more.
‘He’s the Prime Minister!’
‘Yes.’
‘I voted for the bastard.’
Troy should not have been shocked by this. The phenomenon of the working-class Tory was as English as morris dancing and the L
ast Night of the Proms. It was simply that he and Onions never talked politics, at least not domestic politics. He was, true to class, slightly in awe of it all, the party hardly mattered, he was unduly respectful of Rod whenever he came to the Yard. Yet the truth was clear. Stan had not voted for Eden, he had voted for Churchill through Eden, who in the eyes of men like Stan was no more or less than Churchill’s shadow. That Churchill had to be booted from office almost gaga by his own party would be a mystery to Stan. Not worth the time it took to find it credible. Troy had seen this for himself. Waiting for Khrushchev at Number 10 he had bumped into Winston in a corridor, somewhat the worse for drink and by far the worse for age. Troy had no vanity that he would remember him. They had met a dozen times at his father’s dinner table, but that had been during the wilderness years, the best part of twenty years ago, but he did expect that a man in full possession of his faculties might just remember where the bog was in a house he had occupied for the best part of ten years. He had shown him to the right door, and mimed zipping up his flies when the old man emerged agape with his shirt tail flapping like an elephant’s ear.
‘What the bloody hell are we doing in Cyprus? What in God’s name have we got to do with the Gyppos? It’s like the bloody Boer War all over again. What is this? The last bash at the wogs? I thought all that malarkey went out when I was a boy; I thought we’d just fought a war for a better world?’
Onions was shouting now. It was by far the longest political statement Troy had ever heard him make, wallowing in confusion and half-articulate sentiment though it was.
‘No wonder the niggers are picking us off like flies. We’ve no business there. Let the niggers have bloody Cyprus, let ’em have the fucking desert!’
Out of the corner of his eye Troy could see the occasional turn of the head. Almost involuntary on the part of the odd lunchtime drinker. Not wanting to look. The entire street knew who Onions was. They must all know of his loss.
‘What am I to tell our Valerie? That her husband was burned to a crisp with a bloody blow-lamp, had his teeth ripped out with pliers, just because we want one last go at the niggers before the Empire finally slips through our fingers? Is that it? Is that what I have to tell her?’
Silently the barman appeared at their table and set a large brandy next to Onions’ elbow. Neither he nor Troy had touched their pints. Troy swapped his plate of bread and wedge for Onions’ empty one. Stan downed the brandy in one, and started on his second plateful. He glanced up at Troy once or twice. There were tears in the corners of his eyes.
‘Are you not hungry?’ he said at last.
‘I had something on the way. Stopped off just south of here at Dunham Park.’
Onions responded to the tactical shift. Accepted the burden of small talk.
‘Know the place. Out Altrincham way. American base during the war, wasn’t it?’
‘From the look of it you’d think they left yesterday. Jerry cans all over the place, concrete bunkers, burnt-out jeeps. Mind you, a couple of centuries before that it was the delight of the landscape painters.’
‘Sounds like a better reason for going.’
The silence fell like fine dust through sunlight. Onions ate. Fragments of pub talk began to filter through to Troy in meaningless snatches. He felt suddenly vacant in the teeth of Onions’ unanswerable, so justifiable rage, and on the momentary tabula rasa of his mind the pieces of conversation scored an image so bizarre he turned around in his seat to see who was talking.
‘Busby’s Babes’, the man was saying. It was the only decipherable phrase, and Troy saw in the mind’s eye floating kaleidoscopes of pretty pre-war women dancing to formation camera-work and Irving Berlin tunes. Black-and-white glimpses of Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler. ‘Remember My Forgotten Man’. The many death had left undone. Appropriate to the point of absurdity. Then the man holding forth jabbed the table top with his middle finger, drew a line in the sheen of beer-spill and said, ‘Bobby Charlton’s the man. He’ll get us to the top this season,’ and the image popped like a bubble blown from a pipe, as the reality pricked through. Football. He should have known. They were talking about football.
He turned back to Stan. He had all but demolished the second plateful.
‘How is she?’ Troy asked.
Stan did not look up.
‘You’ll see soon enough.’
‘Taking it badly?’ It was a lame remark. Stan looked up. Tears dried.
‘Hysterical. You know Valerie. Any excuse.’
§82
They turned the corner from Great Clewes Street back into St Clement’s. Troy’s car stood out like a Sherman tank. The only car in the street. The donkey-stoned steps shone like false teeth—all except the Clovers’, where Jackie sat exactly where Troy and Onions had left her. The boy with the model-car obsession was sitting on the bumper of the Bentley, a Beano in one hand, a slice of bread and dripping in the other. His lips moving softly as he read, oblivious to all around him. At the end house a young woman in a wrap-around overall and a headscarf stood in the doorway taking the sun and smoking a roll-up. Wisps of auburn hair peeped out from under the scarf. It was a stunningly beautiful face. Troy stared a moment too long and she puckered up, blew him a kiss and winked at him. It was the sort of thing Tosca would do, he thought.
‘Where’s your Mam?’ Onions said to the girl.
‘She said to tell you she’s gone for a lie down, Grandad.’
Jackie paused, screwed up her face to look straight up at Onions.
‘Will she be tekkin’ me ter Lewises?’ she asked.
‘I shouldn’t think so.’
‘But she promised.’
‘When was this?’
‘Last week.’
‘That was before . . . before . . .’
The child waited. Troy had little expectation that Onions would get to the end of the sentence.
‘If Val’s asleep,’ he said, ‘I’ve time to kill. No point in waking her. I’ll take Jackie into Manchester, if you like.’
Jackie stood up, went through elaborate gestures of dusting herself off and smoothing down her skirt.
‘Can I sit up front?’
Before Troy could grant her wish a small voice behind him said, ‘Can I have me tanner now?’
§83
She let Troy buy her a pair of white ankle socks and an Alice band. They seemed to be all she wanted. The decision took most of the afternoon and necessitated a full, floor-by-floor tour of Manchester’s largest department store, its cornucopia. For more than fifteen years there’d been next to nothing to buy. The modesty of her choice was entirely in keeping with the modesty of the times.
On the way home she peered out of the window less intently than she had done on the way into the city. As they crossed the Irwell Bridge she asked Troy who he was.
Onions served tea with bread and jam on the oilcloth-covered table in the back room. Valerie made no appearance. Onions took up a tray and brought it down an hour later untouched.
‘Bugger,’ he said under his breath.
Troy lied when asked if he would stay the night. Told Onions he had booked a room at the Midland. He could see little point in exhausting the pair of them with boredom if tomorrow he had to face Valerie, and do whatever it was that Onions felt himself ill-equipped to do.
§84
It ought to be raining, he thought. Pissing it down in knives and forks like it did that dismal November when they buried his father. Tearing across the sky in sheets as it had done at Debussy’s funeral—a snippet he only knew because his mother had remarked on the weather and the similarity. He had never known that she had known the man. All those years practising the piano at her behest, and such was the woman’s nature that she had never before bothered to tell him that she had known Debussy in her youth, that he had taught her the instrument when she was eight years old, that she had journeyed to France on a wet day in 1918 to see him buried in a godgiven storm, to the rival thunder of the German bombardment. A fact as buried as the
corpse until the funeral of her husband prompted the randomness of memory in her, exactly as it was now doing in Troy. Perhaps funerals were Chinese boxes, always another within.
Streaming, dazzling sunshine seemed irreverent to the dead. Detrimental to the living. It showed the black of mourning in all its shabbiness. Every streak and speck and fleck turned the garb of mourning into a motley.
He had sat up front in the old black Rolls-Royce. Valerie sat between her father and daughter, crying silently throughout behind the veil. She had risen at noon that day, acknowledged Troy with the single use of his christian name, accepted a peck on the cheek from her daughter and said nothing to Onions’ desultory attempt at chatter. She retreated to the bathroom with a cup of tea and emerged forty minutes later in her widow’s weeds. They sat a long half-hour on the upright chairs in the front room, in the smell of lavender furniture polish and the stale air of disuse. When the hearse arrived bearing the body of Flight Sergeant Clover, Onions whispered, ‘Are you ready?’ and she had nodded.
Troy stood at the graveside with the detachment of a camera—‘kodak-distant’, as Philip Larkin so succinctly had it. Neighbours paid their respects and brought Valerie to the pitch of muttering. Onions stood holding Jackie’s hand, and as the last of the mourners left, Valerie put out a hand to summon Troy. He gave her his arm to lean on. Jackie rode up front on the return journey, where she had wanted to be all along. Troy took her place.
There would be no funeral baked meats. No guests. No wake. Onions made plain tea once more. As he rattled around in the scullery, Troy heard a dull thumping through the ceiling from the room above. He slipped quietly up the stairs and found Valerie sitting on her bedroom floor with the contents of the fireside cupboard scattered around her. She tugged at the perished rubber of a World War II gas mask, watching it come apart in her hands.