by John Lawton
Gus read the name out softly to himself.
“Larissa Dimitrovna Tosca. Well, there’s a mixed bag of origins for you. Dostoevsky and a dash of Puccini.”
“Russian … Italian … all America’s a hybrid of some sort.”
“Quite,” said Gus. “Born April 5, 1911. New York. You and older women again, eh Freddie?”
Troy said nothing.
Gus did his bit. Witnessed a civil wedding, pronounced Tosca, even with her haggard look and pancake makeup, 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 Hotel Sacher, and rushed through a British passport, asking no questions and stepping lightly over embassy staff who remarked that it was all a little irregular.
Gus did not give a damn about the irregular. Little or large.
“However, there is one thing,” he said sotto voce, towards the end of the second bottle of champagne. “The ambassador would like to meet you.”
“For God’s sake, why?”
“You’re the brother of a man who’ll be Foreign Secretary after the next election. Effectively the ambassador’s boss. Isn’t that reason enough?”
“What’s his name? Do I know him?”
“Sir Francis Camiss-Low. New to the job, but then so are we all.”
“Nope. Never met the bloke and now is not the time for a doublebarrelled Englishman.”
“He’s just a diplomat trying to be diplomatic.”
“So am I.”
“Fine, Freddie. Don’t tell me.”
Troy shrugged it off and mourned the days when they had all told each other everything.
What were old friends for?
§42
Tosca unfolded the marriage certificate out on the bedspread. Riffled the pages of her new British passport.
“As instant as a cup of Maxwell House,” she said.
“Almost,” Troy conceded, not knowing where this was headed.
“But is it real?”
“How real do you want it to be?”
“I want my real to be real. I don’t want fake real. I want real real.”
“We’re the real.”
“Are we, Troy?”
“I’m here. You’re here. The paperwork is all real, but that doesn’t matter. You’re real, I’m real.”
She walked across the room. Stared at herself in the full-length mirror. Folded her arms. Cocked her head to the right. She was looking at a stranger. Troy knew this.
He stood behind her. Short as he was, he was still taller than Tosca. He wrapped his arms around her, cupped her elbows with his hands.
“You’ve always been you,” she said. “I have had so … so many … identities. So many ‘me’s. Slough ‘em on and off like snakeskin.”
“And who do you see now?”
A deep breath. Exhaling a sigh.
“I guess I’m looking at Mrs. Frederick Troy. And like I said … is she real?”
Troy slid his hands back and squeezed her right hand. The Russians had taken pliers to her hands.
She winced. Her reflection screwing up in the mirror.
“Sorry. I keep forgetting.”
“S’OK. At last, something real. Pain.”
V
Troy
My body, now close to fifty years of age, has become an old tree that bears bitter peaches, a snail which has lost its shell, a bagworm separated from its bag; it drifts with the winds and clouds that know no destination.
—Basho, circa 1694
Fading is the worldling’s pleasure, All his boasted pomp and show; Solid joys and lasting treasure None but Zion’s children know.
—John Newton, 1779 to a tune by Haydn
§43
Someone was following Frederick Troy.
§44
Hampstead, London NW3: Saturday, August 3, 1957
Sir Rodyon Troy, Bart, MA, DSO, DFC, MP, Shadow Home Secretary, a man never entirely sure in which order his plethora of initials should follow, awoke one morning to find he was fifty.
He decided to ignore it, and told every member of his family to ignore it under penalty of him getting a bit grumpy.
§45
Hampstead, London NW3: Sunday, August 3, 1958
Sir Rodyon Troy, Bart, MA, DSO, DFC, MP, Shadow Home Secretary, a man never entirely sure in which order his plethora of initials should follow, awoke one morning to find he was no longer fifty.
“Oh fuck,” he said to no one, for the room was empty.
“Oh fuck.”
He remembered the opening of Orwell’s Coming Up for Air … “It was the day I got me new false teeth …” but then his mind drifted to The History of Mr. Polly, whose awareness of the rigidity of middle-age was summed up in the words, “Hole, rotten beastly hole.” This struck him as more appropriate—he was in H. G. Wells’s old house, in H. G.’s old bedroom, and in all likelihood in H. G.’s old bed … all bought as a job lot by his father in 1910.
He was not unprepared for this. For weeks now his wife had been saying things like … “We ought to get the family together” or “Do you fancy a bit of a do? You promised a bit of a do if we ignored your birthday last year.”
The shock of being “over fifty” was not one of intellectual revelation. It was visceral. The knowledge in tendon, bone, and gut that he was “over fifty.”
“Oh fuck,” he said to no one, his wife having risen some half an hour before.
He knew where she was. A smell of Twinings Blue Mountain medium-roast coffee was wafting up the stairs from the kitchen five floors below. He could see her in the mind’s eye. Blonde mop tucked up in a towel. Her blue silk dressing gown, so long it swept the floor. Perhaps it all augured well. Perhaps he’d get breakfast in bed for his fifty-first. Perhaps there’d be hanky-panky and high jinks to follow.
And his mind drifted back to the willowy, captivating blonde he’d met in the late spring of 1931, when he’d gone back to his old college—Trinity, Cambridge—for “a bit of a do,” and found himself drawn to this gorgeous twenty-one-year-old, just about to graduate from Newnham in Applied Biology.
“To what do you apply it?” he’d said, thinking himself the soul of wit.
And she had applied it to him. And he to her. Ever after.
§46
If he smoked he’d be blowing smoke rings at the ceiling. But he didn’t smoke. When his father’s physician had advised the old man to give up cigars—long before the war—the entire household had had to give up any form of smoking. The old man would not have it any other way. Rod was not in the habit of defying his father. He left that to his sisters—who surreptitiously did what they liked, let libido rule reason, and deceived rather than defied—and his little brother, Fred, who openly argued with the old man. But if you don’t smoke … what do you do after sex? What do you say? Twenty-seven years of monogamy had not left him at all certain of the protocol.
“Thank you,” whilst sincere, did not seem appropriate.
“Did the earth move for you?” sounded like he was fishing for a compliment, and was more than likely to elicit a reply from Cid along the lines of, “Not all of it, but parts of Africa and the Middle East might have rumbled.”
“You’re miles away again,” she said to him now.
“Was I?”
“Daydreaming. Family characteristic. The Troy male’s modus operandi. Your father, you … young Fred. Come back to planet Earth. Tell me what we should do with ourselves. The day has arrived with not a plan in place. We could have given dinner for thirty. We could have had a dirty weekend in Paris for two …”
“Well, I certainly wouldn’t want a dirty weekend in Paris for thirty!”
“Shut up. Your sisters would love that. Shut up and listen. We will do something. Not today perhaps, but something while the House is in recess. Once Parliament is sitting again, I’ll never get you away. So think on, my boy. Apply your mind to this and come up with a plan by teatime to
day. Or else.”
“Or else what?”
“Or else no more Applied Biology.”
§47
Frederick Troy was at home in Goodwin’s Court, London WC2 some three or four miles from his brother’s house in Hampstead. He too was in bed. He too was the grateful recipient of breakfast in bed, followed by hanky-panky and high jinks. He too stared at the ceiling, but less in need of something to say than utterly content with silence.
His mistress, Foxx, had just returned from topping up her mug of tea—that part of the Northern mind that desired to start the day with tea was impenetrable to Troy, but he had long since ceased to wonder at it—and she had tossed the morning mail to him. A single airmail letter floated onto the sheet. A pale blue multi-folded piece of origami, lighter than goose down, that defied being opened in any manner that prevented tearing, unfolded into something the size of a bath towel and was best read by rotating the single page … this way, that way … until something resembling meaning hove into view.
It was from his wife. Troy had married Tosca a little over two years ago, and a little less than two years ago they had parted. He had not seen her since. Foxx surely knew who’d sent him an airmail letter and question or comment could not be more than seconds away.
“It’s postmarked Chicago,” she said before he had taken in more than the date.
He twisted the outer face towards him.
“No return address, though,” he said.
“Then she doesn’t want you to know where she is. Anyone could have posted that for her.”
Troy read on. Foxx slurped tea for emphasis.
“What does she say?”
“No.”
“No?”
“No. She does not agree to a divorce.”
“Oh bum. Does she say why not?”
“More or less. The last year …”
“She’s been gone nearly two!”
“The last year has been difficult for her. It would be a decision made in haste and stress … and besides, what she’s not saying is that she knows damn well I can sooner or later divorce her in absentia on grounds of desertion.”
“Later?”
“Sooner.”
“All meaningless, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“So we stay as we are?”
“Yes.”
“And that suits you just fine, doesn’t it?”
§48
It felt like a summons. The following Sunday. To tea with his brother. A handwritten note, ending “or else.”
“Or else what?” he said, standing on the doorstep of the Hampstead house.
“Just a nudge to get your attention, Freddie,” his brother replied.
Foxx stepped between them, ever the peacemaker. Kissed Rod continental-style on both cheeks.
“I agree,” she said. “So much simpler than taking all your clothes off.”
And breezed past them both, and into the house.
In the library, facing front onto Church Row, Troy found most of his family assembled, balancing crockery and shedding crumbs.
His uncle, Nikolai Rodyonovich—quietly staring at nothing, head full of thinking and remembering.
His sister Sasha—knocking back the Canadian Club at ten to four of a Sunday afternoon.
Her twin, Masha—seemingly content with a cup of tea and a fig biscuit.
His brother-in-law Lawrence—a man who got by on four hours’ sleep a night, edited two national newspapers, and never looked exhausted.
His sister-in-law, Cid, and her children: Alex, the second set of twins, Eugènie and Nastasia, and her youngest, Lydia—all about twenty, having appeared in a rush of fecundity just before the war.
Of his other brother-in-law, Hugh, there was no sign, but he was a complete gobshite and Troy didn’t much care if he never saw him again. Perhaps Hugh’s representative on earth was his younger son, Arkady, a gangly monster of seventeen or so who was blessed in resembling neither parent in shape or nature, enough for Troy to wonder about paternity. Hugh and Sasha’s elder son, Maximilian, a man born to the pith helmet and alpenstock, always seemed to be up a mountain or crossing a desert with a team from this or that university in search of this or that lost/undiscovered/buried/sunken/stolen something or other. Troy tried to remember him at birthdays and Christmas and habitually failed, as he did with most of the nephews and nieces.
Masha and Lawrence had put off having a family, which implies more choice than there had been, until after the war. Their kids, two boys, hardly even adolescent as yet, would be at home with an aunt or a nanny or a dog or television set. Otherwise, Troy thought, the full dramatis personae had taken to the stage.
“Who’s died?”
“Freddie, please,” Cid reprimanded. “This is a joyous occasion.”
“Joyous?”
“Happy, you cynical bastard!” said his brother.
“Now,” Cid went on. “Thank you all for the birthday cards and presents you sent Rod last Sunday …”
Oh fuck, thought Troy.
“… but this Sunday Rod and I have a present for all of you.”
Foxx whispered in his ear, “You forgot his birthday?”
“S’OK. He’s fifty-one. It’s not a big deal. Not even a round number.”
“We want,” Cid was saying, “to mark Rod’s fiftieth …”
Foxx elbowed him sharply, muttered, “Idiot.”
“… with a holiday. Now, I appreciate the invitation is a year late, but would you all please accept an invitation from Rod and myself to accompany us in October on the last Grand Tour of Europe.”
Silence, followed by murmurs of curiosity, and a muttered “I don’t get it” from Foxx.
“Sorry if that sounds vague, I mean … we’d like to recreate the journeys of Rod’s parents across Europe in the years before the Great War, stopping off where they stopped off. Alex kept copious diaries and, apart from the odd hotel or restaurant that’s folded in the intervening years, I’m sure we can trace their steps. Obviously we can’t include anywhere that’s now behind the Iron Curtain. So, the route would be …”
Cid consulted a white card, nestling in her hand.
“… in the order we can travel now rather than the order in which Alex and Maria actually travelled … Paris, Siena, Florence, Venice, Vienna, and Amsterdam. We would like to take this at a leisurely pace, over a fortnight or more … so would you all please free up your calendars, rope in missing husbands and children, and be our guests.”
More silence. The first to break it was Sasha, rising to her feet to say, “Fucking hell, I need more booze.”
If looks could kill, Rod would have nuked her.
Then Nikolai spoke.
“Forgive me, my boy. I would love to, but I fear my old bones will not permit me.”
“That’s alright, Nikolai. I quite understand.”
Then Lawrence.
“I’m terribly sorry, I can’t get away in October. We launch the new colour supplement in November. There aren’t enough days in the month as it is.”
“Really?” said Rod, cold enough to crack tooth enamel.
“Er … er … I go up to Oxford in October, Uncle Rod,” said Arkady. “Rotten timing.”
“Well, Arkady,” Sasha said. “You’re not just letting Rod down, you’re letting me down. ‘Cos I want to go …”
“Thank you,” said Rod. “At last, a modicum of enthusiasm.”
“… But I’ll be fucked if I’ll go with your father. If that bastard’s on board you can count me out!”
Troy thought Rod might weep.
Instead “Jesus wept” and he went downstairs.
Cid, possessed of more sangfroid than any Troy, simply said, “More tea anyone?”
And the look in her eyes told them they were not off the hook just yet and that her legendary powers of endurance and persuasion had only just begun to kick in. This was a woman capable of organising Christmas dinner for forty, and of addressing the South Herts Labour Party W
omen’s Group without notes, and of drawing the tombola winners without fear or favour. A Grand Tour of Europe was kid’s stuff to Lucinda Troy.
§49
“Go after him.”
“Eh?”
“Go after him. Fifty? Fifty-one? It doesn’t fucking matter. Just tell him we accept gratefully,” said Foxx.
Troy found Rod at the kitchen table. The black cloud around him all but visible.
“I have the list.”
“What fucking list? Hell’s tits, you’d think I’d invited them to three nights in Wormwood Scrubs not the best hotels on the Continent.”
“Foxx and I will happily take the tour. I have leave due. And you’ve given me plenty of notice. Masha will leave the kids with Lawrence and accompany Sasha. With you, Cid, and your children that makes ten of us. Enough for every meal to be a party and probably about as many as you could manage, if you think about it.”
“So … no in-laws?”
“No. I’ll miss Lawrence. He can keep the conversation rolling better than anyone else I know, just the right measure of fact and gossip—but would you really want Hugh along? Did you really invite him? He calls Sasha a drunken bitch ten times a day, and I doubt they can get from Monday to Friday without her threatening to kill him.”
They both knew the levels of anger, if not violence, of which Hugh was capable. To Troy’s knowledge, he had not hit Sasha since the day she had hit back and broken his nose with the back of a hair brush. And he claimed to have beaten one of her lovers, no doubt intending the classic cuckold’s cliché “to within an inch of your life”—but the man had died. Troy had never wholly believed Hugh’s assertion—a boastful wanker at the best and worst of times—but had never been able to dismiss it either. It had been swept under the carpet. Family before all else. If Sasha had left Hugh, things might have been different, but she hadn’t and Troy did not know why she hadn’t. He could only surmise that she thought she could make him more miserable by staying, more miserable by having more affairs. Without a shadow of a doubt, she was having an affair right now—she’d never say who, but she’d make damn sure her husband knew about it. She had him on a hook, and she would twist and she would twist and she would twist.