Old Flames (Frederick Troy 2)

by Lawton, John

  ‘You can tell a man what boozes by the company he chooses,’ he said.

  Troy knew the doggerel. His father used to recite it. God knows where he learnt it . . . ‘And the pig got up and slowly walked away:’

  Angus knocked back his scotch. Troy almost beat him to it. Their glasses returned empty to the table top at the same moment.

  ‘Quite,’ said Angus. ‘Same again?’

  Stones met.

  When Troy was eight or nine yet another seemingly interminable childhood illness had floored him, his head swam, his eyes refused to focus. He could not read. As ever he recuperated, bound in blankets, on long summer evenings on the south verandah. His father came home each day and read aloud to him from The Golden Bough. An old Aztec ritual had Troy chilled to the bone. He could never forget the sickening horror he had felt on first hearing the tale of the meeting of the stones—so phrased that the life that was crushed to pulp as the stones met did not even figure in the title. He was reminded once more of Nikolai’s lament for the apparatchiks—the little people he had called them, only to have Rod and Troy dismiss him with a sneer. But—the world between the stones was the world of little people—who could be crushed without care if they spoke a language that sounded like an accident with a Scrabble box, or were so unfortunate to have skins of dusky hue. The world between the stones was full of gooks and niggers.

  From Cyprus arrived a plain card in a plain envelope, saying simply, ‘Forgive me’. Troy never replied. The stones met. He felt again the sickness of horror. The stones met. He had supped with the devil.

  §108

  Christmas rose up at speed. The sisters descended upon him, complaining and hooting about the petrol rationing—the sense of deprivation was undeniably nostalgic, so British, so very British—and whipped the local tradesman up in a flurry of pheasant and venison and turkey and decked the house in holly. On Christmas Eve all the Troys gathered at Mimram, as they had done for thirty or more years. He stood on the porch with Rod, coatless and shivering as Rod, last to arrive, knocked the first flakes of snow from his hat and said softly, ‘I’ve lost the Foreign job. Gaitskell’s batted me sideways into Home. I suppose I’m paying the price of being right.’

  ‘No,’ said Troy. ‘I rather think it’s just the price of knowing.’

  Rod tilted his head gently towards the house and the burr and hum of the women revving into Christmas.

  ‘I could do without all this right now. But I suppose I have to get through it.’

  ‘We,’ said Troy. ‘We have to get through it.’

  Troy ducked questions on the whereabouts of Tosca. Pretended it was all jolly, skived off charades and lost twice a day to his uncle at chess. On Boxing Day a deceptive calm lay across the house and the white landscape. The elder children usurped the servants’ hall to watch the television without which they could, it seemed, no longer live. The younger gathered around the Christmas tree in the red room, assembling the vast train set Nikolai had given to Masha’s boys. In the drawing room Nikolai disappeared behind a newspaper many days old. Only when Troy, playing host, asked him if he wanted another glass of something did he realise the old man had nodded off. Hugh drank glass after glass of something scotch and rapidly got roaring drunk. The row that had been simmering for so long between him and his wife boiled over amidst the tinsel and the sherry. They stood either side of the fireplace shouting at each other, until Hugh raised an arm at Sasha and Rod broke a truce of many months and blocked Hugh’s arm with his own and told him he’d had too much to drink and should sit down.

  Hugh looked across Rod at his wife.

  ‘I’ll swing for you, you selfish bitch,’ he screamed in best B-feature cliché.

  ‘Hugh, you haven’t got the nerve. You’re all mouth and no trousers!’ Sasha yelled back.

  ‘Oh haven’t I?’ he replied, struggling against Rod’s restraining arms. ‘I’ll do for you just like I did for your fancy man!’

  Rod let go sharply and thrust Hugh backwards into an armchair. Sasha had a hand across her mouth and seemed to Troy to be screaming silently.

  ‘What?’ Rod said softly. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I said,’ Hugh hissed, ‘that I’ll do for her like I did for that snivelling ponce Johnny Fermanagh.’

  Rod looked at Troy. Desperation in his eyes.

  ‘I didn’t hear what he said,’ Troy said. ‘He’s drunk, and he’s rambling. I didn’t hear him. And nor did any of you.’

  He looked around the room, making sure they all acknowledged what he had said. Then he went upstairs to Tosca’s room. Lay on the bed and wept silently for Johnny Fermanagh. It seemed to him now that his life would be for ever tangled up in Bracks, that neither Johnny nor his sister would ever be out of his mind or out of his dreams. He had lost Tosca, he had lost Charlie and he had lost Johnny with too little realisation that the man meant anything to him. So he wept for himself. Never in his life had he felt this alone. He slept. He did not know how long. When he awoke he switched on the light on the dressing table. There, propped against the mirror, was the note Tosca had left. He had never moved it. It stood where she had placed it weeks before.

  On the vast white emptiness of foolscap her words read simply, ‘We cannot live like this.’

  ‘Who has not committed treason to something or someone more important than a country?’

  GRAHAM GREENE

  (from his introduction to Philby’s ‘My Silent War’ 1968)

  Historical Note

  This is a novel. Not fact—not even faction—but fiction. Here and there I’ve bent history a bit, usually because it did not suit the exigencies of the plot I wanted.

  First, in putting invented figures into an historical context, real people are displaced. Most obviously Commander Cockerell displaces the real Frogman Spy Commander Lionel Crabb. The plot of Crabb’s mission was (still is?) too drawn out for my purposes. The body was not found until 1957, and has never been positively identified as Crabb. I didn’t want to be bound by the facts of the matter, even though they were the starting point for the idea that became this book. Rod Troy, my fictional Shadow Foreign Secretary, displaces the real one, Alf Robens—sorry, Alf, but if anyone forty years on remembers you were ever Shadow Foreign Secretary I’d be amazed.

  Second, I’ve stolen time from Khrushchev’s meeting with the NEC (National Executive Committee) of the Labour Party. He ranted, and he stormed out, but nearer 11 p.m. than the 9.30 p.m. I give. I had other uses for the time. What George Brown, the only one of these historical players I ever met, said on that occasion is taken from his own account. What Khrushchev said has never been made public—the press were not present—but exists in fragments in the memoirs of the Labour bigwigs.

  Suez. The revelation I put into the mouth of Rod Troy, at the end of August/early September, on the Anglo-French conspiracy to invade, is—again for purposes of plot—deliberately out of synch, though hardly against the spirit of the times. The French, the British and the Israelis did not actually sign an agreement until 24 October. The British copy was given to Eden and has never been seen since. To say he burnt it is not provable, but not fanciful either. The text of the Israeli copy appeared in English in the memoirs of General Dayan (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1976), the original surfaced in the archive of David Ben-Gurion and was made public some ten years ago. The notion that the CIA got a look at the Israeli copy is fanciful, but I doubt impossible. That said, what the US knew about Suez before and during owed more to the U2 plane than to spies on the ground. It’s stated by several historians of Suez that the CIA made much use of the U2 over Egypt and Israel at this time, and also that the CIA monitoring station at Rome NY probably broke the codes used by the British, the French or the Israelis or any combination thereof, and quite possibly all three. If anything in my exercise of invention might be deemed fanciful, it’s the idea that what the CIA knew was dutifully passed on to Ike.

  As to Tom Driberg being asked to spy for the KGB, the published source for this is obviou
sly Chapman Pincher’s Their Trade is Treachery. In the introduction to his excellent life of Driberg, Francis Wheen is dismissive of Pincher’s allegations. Instinctively, I share his scepticism. However, about two years after Driberg’s death, and, if memory serves, two or three before Pincher’s book, rumours were flying fast and wild about Tom spying for one side or the other or both. I asked Peter Cook, so often, in his capacity as proprietor of Private Eye, Tom’s employer, if he thought Tom had been a spy.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, in a voice not unlike E. L. Wisty. ‘And a very bad one. He’d tell anyone who’d listen. The first time I met him he came up to me in a lavatory, stood at the next urinal, cock in hand, and said, “I’m a spy for the KGB y’know.” ’

  I cannot hold up this anecdote as proof or anything resembling proof—after all, the constant danger in asking Peter any question was that he would use the answer to take the piss—only as seductive, just about plausible, and dovetailing very neatly into the story I wanted to tell. The Tom Driberg to whom I ascribe a fictional encounter with my hero is not the vile beast of Pincher’s books, but the engaging couldn’t-give-a-piss artist of Peter Cook’s memory.

  JANUARY 1963

  ENGLAND

  §1

  When the snow lay round about. Deep. And crisp. And even. England stopped.

  First the roads, from the fledgling six-lane autobahns, known as ‘motorways’ – a word used as evocatively as ‘international’ or ‘continental’ – to the winding, high-hedged lanes of Hertfordshire, disappeared under drifting snow. Then, the telephone lines, heavy with the weight of ice, snapped. Then the electricity supply began to flicker – now you see it now you don’t. And lastly, huffing and puffing behind iron snow ploughs as old as the century and more, the railways ground to a halt at frozen points and blocked tunnels.

  It was the worst winter in living memory, and when and where did memory not live? It squatted where you did not expect it. And where you did. Not-so-old codgers would compare the winter of 1963, favourably or not, to that of 1947. Old codgers, ancient codgers, codgers with no calendar right even to be living at all, would trounce opinion with a masterly, ‘’T’ain’t nothin’ compared to 1895.’

  Rod Troy, Home Affairs spokesman in Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, a Labour MP since the landslide of 1945, had reason to be grateful to his father, the late Alexei Troy. When refitting the stately Hertfordshire pile he had bought in 1910, as a final refuge after five years a wandering exile from Imperial Russia, he had installed electricity and the telephone – the first in the village – and omitted to remove the gas lamps. Gas was a hard one to stop. It wouldn’t freeze and it had no wires to snap. So it was that, in the middle of a blanketed white January Rod found himself cut off in Mimram House, marooned in snow, stranded in a post-Christmas limboland, bereft of wife and children, hunched over a traditional English pastime, by the romantic glow of gaslight, facing a short, dark, irritating alien he ruefully acknowledged as his younger brother Frederick.

  ‘How can you?’ he yelled. ‘How can anyone cheat at Monopoly?’

  ‘That’s what it’s for,’ Troy replied. ‘If you can’t cheat, I can’t see the point in playing.’

  ‘Grow up, Freddie. For God’s sake grow up. That’s just the sort of attitude you had as a child.’

  ‘It’s a childish game, Rod.’

  ‘It’s about rules and trust and codes of conduct. All games are!’

  Rod should have known better. Such argument had never cut mustard with Troy when they were children and in middle age it was inviting the pragmatic scorn he seemed to store up in spades.

  ‘No it’s not, it’s about which bugger can be the first to stick a hotel on Park Lane.’

  Rod swept the board to the floor. ‘Sod you then!’ and walked out.

  Troy passed an hour in his study, staring at the unchanging landscape, the monotony of white. He put John Coltrane’s ‘Giant Steps’ on the gramophone, but was not at all sure that he was not kidding himself that he had a taste for the music, and he was damn sure it didn’t go with England in January. Did Delius write no Winterreise? Had Elgar left no Seasons?

  It occurred to him that he should go and look for Rod before Rod found him. He would only want to apologise and Troy could not bear his apologies. It seemed wise to head him off at the pass. They might, after all, have to spend days cooped up like this, and while the house was big enough to lose a small army within, they would inevitably end up together and if Monopoly brought them to grief, God help them when Troy started to cheat at pontoon.

  The cellar door stood open, a gust of icy air wafting up from below stairs.

  Troy called out his brother’s name and waited.

  ‘Down here in the wine cellar!’

  Troy moved cautiously down the stairs, the light dimly orange in the distance as Rod waved his torch beam around.

  ‘I think I’ve made a bit of a find.’

  Troy could not see him, only the dancing end of the torch. Then the beam shot inwards, and Rod’s face appeared, pumpkin-headed, in the light.

  ‘Hold this a mo’. I’ll get the gas lit.’

  A rasp of match, a burst of flame, and Rod reached upwards and lit the gas jet. In the flickering hiss of gaslight Troy found himself framed by vast dusty racks of wine, countless bottles in long rows stretching away under the house. Rod stood facing him, absurdly wrapped up against the cold in the eiderdown off his bed, belted around his chest and waist, looking like the rubber man in the tyre adverts. He appeared to be clutching a solitary bottle of wine.

  ‘What have you found?’ Troy asked.

  Rod wiped the label with his sleeve.

  ‘The paper’s a bit perished, but it says 1928 and I’d lay odds of ten to one it’s Veuve Clicquot.’

  ‘Does champagne keep that long?’

  ‘Haven’t the foggiest. But there’s only one way to find out.’

  He unhooked two glasses from the side of a wooden rack, where they had sat untouched since before the war and wiped the dust from them.

  The champagne burst into the glass in a healthy stream of bubbles. Troy swigged some of his and pronounced it ‘OK’. Rod sipped his gently and said, ‘OK? It’s bloody marvellous.’

  Then the pause, the reflective stare into the glass. The thought so visibly running through his mind and across his features that Troy grew impatient and wished he would speak.

  ‘Whenever I pull the cork on one of these . . .’

  Troy knew what was coming. He could see the curve of Rod’s illogic arcing between them like static.

  ‘Or whenever I watch you . . .’

  He sipped and stared into his glass a little more.

  ‘I think of the old man. Every time. Never fails. No matter what is on my mind or whatever shit you are giving me, as you are so wont to do – and age does not diminish it – it gives me pause. I think of our father.’

  ‘Sort of like unholy sacrament. An atheist communion?’

  ‘Don’t piss on it, Freddie. I’m serious.’

  ‘So am I. Has it ever occurred to you that’s why he left us this lot, so that we should think of him from time to time?’

  ‘I didn’t say from time to time, I said every time. And who else would he have left it to? And I wonder, what else did he leave us of himself? If this is blood of his blood, where is flesh of his flesh?’

  Troy was not sure he could follow this.

  ‘Come again?’

  ‘Who the hell was he? Was he the same man he was to you that he was to me?’

  ‘Doubt it,’ said Troy.

  ‘I mean . . . I’m his first born, you’re his last, the child of his dotage—’

  ‘Hardly dotage. He wasn’t that old.’

  ‘There, there’s my point. How old was he? Did you ever know? When was he born? Did he ever tell you? Or where?’

  ‘Must’ve done. Moscow, Tula, I don’t know. And if he didn’t, his dad lived with us for fifteen years. He must have mentioned it. God knows he rambled on enough.�
��

  ‘Quite. He rambled. His stories never went anywhere. But the old man was a master of precision. He told us everything – at least it seemed like everything – yet when I come to look back on it there are gaps you could drive a tram through.’

  Again the pause, long enough for Troy to refill both their glasses. Troy could see his brother’s point even if he could see neither the gap nor the tram. Personally he was sure such minor details as the date and place of his father’s birth were simply and temporarily lost in his memory; it was not that he didn’t know, it was not that he had not been told. But at the heart of the matter, the man was an enigma.

  ‘You’re right, of course,’ Rod resumed his musing. ‘He wasn’t the same man to both of us. I got sent away to school before you were so much as a toddler. You hung around the house almost till adolescence—’

  ‘I was at home because I was a sickly child, Rod, they weren’t doing me any favour.’

  ‘Nonetheless you were there. He talked endlessly to you. You were his favourite.’

  ‘Rod, this is bollocks. I was the youngest, that’s all.’

  ‘Youngest. Hand-reared. Privy to his wisdom.’

  ‘Recipient of all his gags and anecdotes, if that’s what you mean?