by John Lawton
“Well,” said Rod. “He has it coming, hasn’t he?”
“Yes. I’d just prefer she hire a hit man rather than shooting him herself.”
Rod got up and opened a cupboard next to the fireplace.
“My mad sister isn’t the only one who needs a drink. Scotch OK?”
“Not for me.”
Rod sat back down, with the bottle, a tumbler, and a jug of water. Knocked back half a glass of over-diluted Scotch.
“Speaking of which. Do you think she’s mad?”
“They’ve both of them had that potential for years. But I think Masha might be pulling back from the edge. I see she’s on tea and biscuits upstairs.”
“A courtesy to the missus. Not getting plastered before six o’clock.”
“And if Sasha were going to tip over that edge I think she would probably have done it that Christmas when Hugh dropped his killer bombshell. Right now she seems determined to live long enough to get even.”
Rod rested his forehead on the deal table.
“I’m the one who’s mad. Why the fuck did I let Cid talk me into this holiday? Dragging those mad tarts around Europe. I need my head examined. I’m doing this why exactly?”
He lifted his head to look at Troy.
“Because she asked.”
“I’m doing it because I’m ‘over fifty.’ Ask me how I feel about being over fifty.”
“How does it feel?”
“Too old to be doing this.”
“It’ll be fine,” said Troy, more in hope than anticipation.
§50
Paris
To begin in Paris was to begin at the end. Paris had been his parents’ last jumping-off point. From here they could only land in England. England and stability and permanence after five years of traipsing—his father’s word, the old man loved collecting anglicisms … as a boy Troy could not be lost or bewildered, he was always “a dog at a fair”—traipsing around Europe in the last days of the ancien régime (how many ancien régimes could one continent have?) in the Edwardian haze. Along the way they had picked up a son (Vienna) and twin daughters (Paris).
Paris held more than enough to occupy the next generation. They shopped, they climbed the Eiffel Tower, they shopped, they drifted aimlessly around the Left Bank, they shopped, they paid lip service to the Louvre, and they shopped … while the previous generation made a pilgrimage. To Père Lachaise Cemetery … in search of Oscar Wilde.
All the way up the cobbled lane from the metro station, past seemingly countless tombs standing like abandoned sentry boxes, Rod complained about his feet.
“Suffer for your art,” Troy said.
“What art?”
“This.”
They had arrived at a vast monument in the Egyptian style, carved by Epstein, a god of some sort, floating or perhaps gliding … cock and balls flying free.
Rod looked baffled.
“Can you see any relevance to this?” he asked.
“Quite a lot, actually,” Troy replied. “He did write Salome.”
“Is that the best you can come up with?”
“And—”
“I thought Salome was Jewish not Egyptian. You know, Herods and things, not Pharaohs and things.”
“And … as I was saying … it may well reflect his rather odd way of spending his nights.”
“Good bloody grief.”
“OK. I give up. It has heaps of classical allusion, it has a knob, it has bollocks. What more would Oscar ask?”
“Don’t make me regret this any more than I already do, Freddie.”
“There’s nothing to regret.”
“I know you’ve got lots of friends who are … er …”
“Queer. The word you cannot utter is queer.”
“Alright … queer it is. No more euphemisms.”
“Queer is a euphemism.”
“If you say so. You have friends who are queer.”
“And some of my best friends are Jews.”
“Now you’re just taking the piss—stop it. All I meant was—”
“I know what you meant.”
“I meant I just don’t get it.”
“What’s to get?”
“The thing. The whole thing. The queer thing.”
“Does it matter?”
“Yes, it does. For one thing, there’s a Commons vote on Homosexual Law Reform not long after we get back.”
“Well then, you know how to vote, don’t you.”
“I do?”
“Vote for Oscar. It’s fifty years too late, but vote for every queer who’s ever been sent down for hanky-panky in a public lavatory.”
Slowly descending the hill, after several silent minutes, Rod said, “If I could only understand why it has to be in public lavatories.”
Troy said nothing.
“Disgusting places at the best of times.”
Troy said nothing.
“Y’know … I’ve got my doubts about my PPS, Iain Stuart-Bell. Before the war we’d have just thought him a bit effeminate … now I have to ask myself if he might be one of those.”
Troy had met Iain many times. He didn’t have doubts. He was sure.
“Why don’t you try asking him,” he said.
“Because,” Rod replied, “I’d rather not know.”
§51
Siena
The weather had favoured them so far. Sunny autumn days, warmer days than many an English summer, and they had drifted up and down cobbled streets, without faction or acrimony.
Rod had been pleasantly surprised to find his children still not averse to culture after several days of exposure. They had listened patiently while he explained the frescoes in the Sala dei Nove at the Palazzo Pubblico, the allegories of good and bad government, meat and drink to a politician—which he described as “refreshingly secular, not a Madonna and bambino in sight” without any of his children sniggering.
And they had wandered around the Duomo in awe of the Tuscan blue-starred ceiling, baffled by the marble floor panels, until Rod had told the story of the Sybil—how Tarquinius Superbus did one of the worst deals in the history of the second-hand book trade, letting the Sybil burn six of the nine before he finally stumped up the money.
“So she’s a pagan myth, right, Dad?” Nattie asked. “In a Christian church?”
He floundered a little at this.
“I suppose she is.”
Troy came to his rescue.
“She’s a myth, the books were real.”
“They were?”
“Mentioned by Tacitus in his Annals. How Augustus scoured the empire to reconstruct the text. Finally lost forever in the fifth century.”
But, at last, as they all knew she would, Sasha spoke up—just as they were leaving, stepping into the Piazza del Duomo as the afternoon sun faded and beat her in a contest to bring a chill to the air.
She pointed at the statues of Romulus and Remus that framed the space, as they did so many of Siena’s public piazze.
“OK, smarty-pants. Explain this. All these kids and all these bloody wolves. I’ve never seen so many babes sucking on wolf tit in my life. I ask you … one or two statues? … wouldn’t be in bad taste perhaps … but a suckling wolf on every street corner? I don’t know about you, but I am frescoed out and I am titted out!”
“Oh God,” Rod sighed. “She’s off again.”
“I’ve bumbled around enough for one day,” Sasha was saying. “You can have too much of a good thing. Certainly too much fresco and too much tit. I’m going to put me feet up. One of you pick a decent restaurant and let me know when dinner’s up.”
The gender divide divided. In less than a minute the three men, Rod, Alex, and Troy, found themselves alone.
“Was it something I said?” said Rod.
“It’s nothing,” said Troy. “Di niente. Let’s find a bar on the Campo and watch a blue sunset. There are things I need to tell you, and Alex is a journalist …”
“Yep,” said Alex simply.
/> “… So nosiness is second nature to him.”
At the top of the Campo’s fan-shaped slope Rod seemed to be searching for something, looking at tables, then turning around to check the view over the Torre del Mangia.
“What’s up?”
“The old man brought me here when I was thirteen. Blowed if I can remember where we sat.”
“I can.”
“You weren’t here.”
“No. But I came with him in ‘39. And we sat there, one rib of the fan and two bars over.”
Troy pointed to an empty table. Rod stood in front of it.
“Y’know, I think you’re right. OK, let’s get a waiter and a bottle of Brunello over, and hope we don’t get one of those blokes who insists you have to eat beef with it, because I’m going to drink it neat.”
So they did.
As Rod poured himself seconds, as Troy stared at the cobalt sky above the palazzo, the moment arrived.
“You’re not up to anything, are you? Either of you?”
“Not with you there, Freddie. Explain.”
“Alex, you’re not investigating anything … shall we say … dodgy in your cub reporter’s outfit?”
“No. I’m lucky if I get to cover a jumble sale in Primrose Hill.”
“Rod?”
“Such as?”
“Have you been assigned a bodyguard?”
“Now you’re just being silly. Bodyguard? No member of the opposition gets a bodyguard. If Macmillan called an election they’d assign a Special Branch bloke to Gaitskell, but only to Gaitskell. Who cares if the rest of the shadow cabinet gets shot before the votes are counted? Why are you asking daft questions?”
“Because we’re being followed.”
“What?”
“I spotted him in Paris. Wasn’t wholly certain, but as we sat on the stone bench at the Porta Romana yesterday, he passed by on the far side. An old trick. Get ahead of the person you’re following. When we passed the Ospedale Psichiatrico, on the way back into town, he was just inside the gate. He gave us about thirty paces and then resumed tailing.”
“I don’t fucking believe this!”
“Then try harder.”
“If we’re being followed, then where is this bloke now? The Campo’s deserted. We’re the only customers at this bar and I doubt there’s more than a dozen drinking at all the other bars put together.”
“I don’t know. I last saw him near the Duomo just before we went in. He won’t be far away. There’s a dozen alleys leading off in every direction. He could be watching us from any one of them, and we wouldn’t be able to see him.”
Alex intervened, “Dad, there’s nothing preposterous in what Freddie’s saying.”
“On the contrary, it’s cloak-and-dagger bollocks.”
“But,” Alex went on, “he won’t be following me. So which of you two is it?”
“I don’t know that either,” said Troy. “But I’ll find out.”
“How?” said Rod.
“I’ll take a walk after dinner. If he follows me, then it’s me. If he doesn’t, it’s you.”
Rod’s exasperation showed in the vigour with which he beckoned the waiter and ordered a second bottle, and the scarcely audible repetition of “I don’t fucking believe this.”
Alex said, “In 1939? Wasn’t there a war on?”
Troy admired the boy’s tact, switching back to the ever-present subject, his grandfather and namesake, Alex Troy.
“It hadn’t got far. Poland was a battlefield. France was still safe, and Italy still neutral. We were, I found out on this very spot, on our way to Rome to meet Mussolini. I think your grandfather saw himself as the fixer who might persuade him to stay out of the war. Probably futile, but we never got there.”
With another glass in his hand, Rod began to mellow.
“That was our dad. The fixer. The man for all seasons. The Sybil.”
“Eh? The Sybil?”
“He sat where I’m sitting now and prophesied. 1921. The first war had been over less than three years. A Europe desperate for peace, and he sat here and told me, a spotty thirteen-year-old, to think of it as a cricket match.”
“Eh?” said Alex again.
“Peace as a cricket match played in an English village over a long summer weekend. Sooner or later rain would stop play.”
“And you think I’m a cynic,” Troy said.
§52
Rod seemed to Troy to have put the problem, if indeed that was how he saw it, behind him at dinner and let himself relax. Troy had long thought his brother a happy man in so far as happiness was his default condition, that to which he reverted when the pressure was off. Happiness was not Troy’s condition, nor was it his nature.
They sat, all ten of them, at a vast round table in the Osteria Domenico Scarlatti on Banchi di Sopra, a room papered with sheet music, and with alcoves housing half a dozen different busts of the great man. Troy thought it would be little short of the magical touch if someone actually came in and played the harpsichord propped open in the corner, but no one did—and he resisted the promptings of his sister-in-law to play himself with “Can you imagine how heavy-handed I would sound after forty years playing the piano? My hands would feel like sledgehammers.”
Instead, as they chattered all around him, he unwound the thread of Scarlatti’s delicate, addictive B-Minor Sonata (K. 27) in the mind’s ear, as he had heard it played by Dame Myra Hess in 1940 or 1941, and as Cid saw his fingers form a chord upon the tablecloth, one hand closed over his and she squeezed.
They had worked their way through several bottles of very expensive wine over antipasti, primi, and secondi—the palimpsestic layers of the Italian menu—drinking in the direction of dolci, when Troy said:
“I think I must get some air. So if you’ll all excuse me, I’ll see you back at the hotel.”
No one seemed to mind—boozed into bonhomie.
He was standing in the street, buttoning his overcoat against the night, when he realised he was not alone.
“What do you want?”
And Sasha said, “Same as you. A bit of air.”
“I’m going for a walk. Quite a long one.”
“Then I’ll join you. One can have quite enough of family.”
“Has it ever occurred to you that you might be the family of which one can have quite enough?”
“I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that.”
Troy felt there was little left in his arsenal except “fuck off,” but as he looked at her—black jacket, the expensive hide of something dead and furry, black slacks and flat heels—it occurred to him that she was dressed to keep up with whatever pace he set and that to have her along might diminish the possibility of the tail thinking he’d been rumbled.
He leaned in close.
“I’m being followed. Don’t fuck it up.”
She whispered back, “Don’t fuck what up?”
“I mean to tackle him.”
“Bloody hell! I can’t wait. Lead me to it.”
“Just do as you’re told.”
Troy headed north and west, uphill, away from Il Campo, in the direction of the Basilica di San Domenico. Sasha slipped an arm through his. He did not discourage her—the touch of intimacy added to the air of innocence he wanted to create.
“Where is this chap?”
“Dunno for sure. Somewhere behind us. It would be almost impossible for him to be dodging ahead of us or walking a parallel street. The streets are too narrow and this part of the city’s like a maze.”
Halfway up Costa Sant’Antonio they took a sharp left into an alley less than six feet wide and emerged onto the Via Camporegio, with the basilica looming up ahead of them.
She whispered, “Not another bloody church?”
“Churched out, are we?”
“Yep. And I think you might have lost him.”
“No, I haven’t. Stick with me.”
And they began the long descent down the Camporegio steps into one of Siena’s urban valle
ys.
“Put a spurt on.”
All he’d meant was “walk a bit faster,” but Sasha began to hop from one giant step to the next, like a little girl playing hopscotch, left foot to right, right foot to left. She reached the bottom well ahead of Troy, and Troy for his part hoped they were both well ahead of their tail.
At the bottom of the steps stood an ancient, ornate, fortress-like building that housed the three fountains that had supplied Siena with water for a thousand years.
Troy pulled Sasha under the first arch. The light vanished completely. He put one hand across her lips.
“Now. Keep your voice down.”
“Where are we? I can’t see a damn thing.”
“We’re in the Fontebranda. Your eyes will get used to the darkness in a few seconds, but he’ll be as good as blind if he looks in.”
A minute passed. A figure appeared as a black outline in the curve of the arch. It seemed to Troy that the man was looking straight at him, utterly unable to see him.
Troy’s first punch doubled him over. The second knocked him cold.
He wasn’t a big man. Taller than Troy but skinny as a rake. Troy dragged him to the lip of the fountain, rested his head against the low wall.
Sasha seemed ecstatic. All but hopping from foot to foot again.
“Do we torture him now? I’m still good at Chinese burns, y’know.”
“I hit him too hard. I only meant to knock him down, not out. Scoop up a handful of water. Torture or no torture, I need to talk to him.”
Sasha splashed water onto the man’s face. His eyes opened, he shook his head gently and groaned.
“Right, you bastard,” she said. “Start talking!”
“Sasha, please.”
The man groaned again.
Troy squatted next to him.
“Why are you following me?”
“Wurr … wurr … wurrrr.”
Sasha took his wrist in both hands and delivered the Chinese burn with which she had tormented Troy when they were children. Troy let her. It might be productive.