Friends and Traitors

by John Lawton

  “I’m flattered, but …”

  “Oh fuck … but what?”

  “You sister phoned.”

  “Masha?”

  “Sasha. That sanatorium where she’s been drying out, up in Derbyshire … she’s leaving on Saturday. Wants you to pick her up and drive her home.”

  “What sanatorium?”

  “The one Rod packed her off to.”

  “Am I missing something here? When the fuck did this happen?”

  “The day after we got back from Amsterdam.”

  “And why, may I ask? I thought she’d been relatively sober after we left Siena.”

  “She was, but I think she was storing it all up.”

  “None the wiser.”

  “The morning after, at breakfast, she loaded up Hugh’s old army revolver and took potshots at him across the tea and toast. Missed every time, thank God. Hugh did not go running to the cops—well, he couldn’t really, could he?—God be thanked twice in one paragraph. He came to Rod. Rod called him the C-word and said he’d had it coming. Hugh was in shock, told Rod she kept yelling gibberish at him, something about ‘I’d rather fuck a swan.’ Made no sense to anybody. Rod told him to bugger off, but he collared Sasha, insisted she check in to this place in Derbyshire … not so much to sober up as straighten up. Although I think the two might be connected.”

  “I shall kick myself.”

  “Why, oh sweetest?”

  “I’m Deadeye Dick with a revolver. I could have taught her.”

  §104

  It was a dreary drive north. England in December. Phrases such as “It’s trying to snow” came to mind. A use of English that had always baffled Troy. In French it was snowing or it wasn’t. In Russian it was always snowing and worthy of comment only when it wasn’t.

  The Minister of Transport, a three-ring showman by the name of Ernest Marples, had promised a north-south autobahn to be called a “motorway.” Until it was finished, Derbyshire was many crawling hours away up the A5. Troy did not like driving at the best of times. Being at the beck and call of his errant sister might make it the worst of times.

  To his surprise Foxx had insisted on coming with him, and at seven in the morning, as he waited by the car at the back of the alley, in Bed-fordbury, he realised that she was packing a more-than-overnight bag.

  “Tell me,” he said.

  “Simple really. Winster Priory … which is where Sasha is, is about ten miles from Belper. I thought I’d have a few days at home.”

  “I thought this was your home, and Belper was … the day I met you … the ‘all this’ from which you wished me to ‘take you away’?”

  “Could we just get going, Troy? I’ll explain on the way.”

  They’d passed the North Circular before Foxx spoke again, and then only to comment on the drizzle.

  Troy put the radio on. Arthur Rubinstein playing Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto.

  She slept.

  Round about Tamworth she woke with a start.

  “Oh hell. I must have nodded off.”

  “Nodded off for two hours,” Troy said.

  “Damn. Must be all the Sir Jaspering, Troy. You’ve worn me out. What was I saying?”

  “A few days in a one-horse town in the north of England you now grace with the word ‘home.’”

  “Oh. Yes. Silly me. Well … it’s like this …”

  The pause stretched and stretched. To interrupt seemed to Troy like the snapping of a magic thread. Then she spat it out in one rapid, careful sentence.

  “I’ve realised you can’t just walk away from everything that makes you what you are.”

  This was scarcely one word different from what Burgess had said to him after two bottles of red wine, minutes before he fell face down in his lemon tart. Foxx was at least sober.

  “Do places make us what we are?”

  “Oh yes. Think of all those Forces kids you can meet, or the children of Empire, the sons and daughters of colonial district officers, bounced from place to place and nanny to nanny, then sundered from their mothers at some insanely early age and bunged into a prep school. They don’t have any sense of belonging, do they? It’s why the English upper classes are mad. It’s why they inflate the notion of country or empire because they cannot relate to any one place in either. All they have is their patriotism. And if patriotism isn’t localised it means nothing. It becomes abstract. It becomes Tory bombast. They have a big picture and no little picture.”

  The last sentence came as a relief to Troy. It sounded like Shirley Foxx. The rest … the rest at least assured him she’d been reading something else besides the romantic tosh.

  “So … you’re going, and I use this word cautiously, ‘home’ to reconnect with your roots?”

  “Not really. I think I never disconnected. And that’s the matter. I want two things … a second look, the certainty that I did the right thing when I left with you two years ago … and to put it all in the right place. The right piggy hole in my head, where it can sit safely and not trouble me. I’d much prefer to be supported by my childhood than haunted by it.”

  “And how long do you think this will take?”

  “Dunno. A week. Maybe two?”

  For about five miles he let silence rule, if not reign.

  Then she said, “Friends. I still have friends up there.”

  “Aha. Friends you never mention.”

  “Friends I treated badly. I said no goodbyes. I was angry with a place and angrier still with a time … the time being my entire life up to that point. I found a small town oppressive, I hated being singled out as bright … all those taunts of ‘smart arse’ and ‘oo er … ow’s swallowed a dictionary’ if I used a word with more than three syllables … all that made me so angry … and in the end you presented me with an opportunity to blast it all by leaving. I took a shotgun to my childhood. I needed a sniper’s rifle.”

  “So. You’re going back to slay the beast. What you mean to put in that piggy hole in your mind is the stuffed and mounted head, horns and all.”

  “God, what an appalling image!”

  “I’m right, though.”

  “Yes, you are, my very own smart-arse. I shall be kinder to the few friends I have. I shall treasure the memories that are to be treasured, and the rest I shall leave headless corpses upon the field of battle.”

  Troy roared with laughter. It had taken her an age to articulate all this. Two years with him and almost four hours up an English highway, and he could not but agree. He had watched his grandfather yearn silently, through his years of exile, for the old country. Heard his grandfather give voice to his grief at every far-from-silent opportunity. His father had it down pat, so did his uncle Nikolai … their stories, tinged with nostalgia, had never broached heartbreak. They each had found the right piggy hole for childhood, and on that basis had created a secure home, a physical and mental realm Troy had always thought of as Troy Nation … the piggy hole was in the domain of the head, according to Foxx, and the nation in the kingdom of the heart, according to his father. What was the alternative? To go mad? To fall face down in the lemon tart ever after?

  §105

  It was almost noon when Troy parked his Bentley in front of Foxx’s house, on a hill high above the town.

  Foxx hefted her one bag. Troy stood with his hands in his overcoat pockets, looking around at the mix of inter-war and post-war houses, with the odd stone cottage breaking the uniformity, unrepentant reminders of a Georgian past, of a pre-industrial peasantry that had raised pigs and hammered out nails in the days before the machines came. And over it all, the red brick chimney “up at t’mill”— except that the mill was not up, but down from where he stood. Nor was it dark or satanic, by all appearances.

  “What’re you looking at?”

  “Oh, just seeing if the curtains twitch.”

  “Don’t worry, they will. They may not twitch for me in my own right, but I am Stella Foxx’s sister and if the scandal has died down so soon, I’ll be fla
bbergasted.”

  “Ask not for whom the curtain twitches. It twitches for thee.”

  “Oh, yes. Very funny I’m sure.”

  Stella had left home well ahead of her twin sister. Run off with the man from the carpet emporium, to be set up in a love-nest in Brighton—and to be murdered. Not one scandal but two. Troy had solved the murder, and in keeping with Foxx’s new-found philosophy, had found the right hole in which to lodge it. Foxx was here and Foxx was Foxx. He gave little thought to the circumstances of their meeting.

  He’d never done this. Returned to an empty house he had once called home. Let cold, and that hollow sound that empty always made, ferret around in his feelings.

  Foxx had set down her bag and sighed.

  “Bugger, bugger, bugger.”

  The house was clean. Troy realised someone had to be coming in once in a while and, if nothing else, dusting. It had been remiss of him not to ask, callous not even to have wondered. How much had she packed the day they had, true to cliché, run away together? Bra, knickers, spare T-shirt, spare jeans? He doubted it had been more than that. If he had to run what would he have taken? Books? Well … he could have done without the complete Jane Austen. Although he knew a man who couldn’t.

  “Troy. Why am I doing this?”

  “The heart has its reasons.”

  “Isn’t that a book title or something?”

  “Duchess of Windsor. Dreadful woman. Never bothered to read it. I just like the title. She pinched it from Pascal. ‘Le cœur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point.’ Or something like that.”

  “Oh God. Am I being that irrational?”

  “No, no, you’re not. Do this. Take your time. Take as long as you need. Salvage what you will, then kill the beast.”

  She disappeared upstairs.

  He put the kettle on. Made tea. Found an ineffectual one-bar electric fire in the broom cupboard and plugged it in. In a year or two it might just take the chill off the kitchen.

  Foxx heard the kettle whistle.

  “If you’re making tea, you’ll need to nip out for milk. That’ll be a first.”

  “Eh?”

  “I’d bet that you’ve never been in a corner shop in the north of England, and I’d bet the woman behind the counter has never heard an accent like yours before.”

  “So much for one nation.”

  “Just buy the fucking milk! I am, as they say around here, ‘parched.’”

  §106

  He found her in her bedroom. Childhood spread out across a handknotted rag rug—one large doll, one small lacking its left arm, half a dozen Ladybird books, a dozen Collins Classics, a shrivelled bouquet of posies in a faded red ribbon, a bar of soap in the shape of Minnie Mouse … a couple of Anya Seton’s novels … Dragonwyck, The Hearth and Eagle … The Albatross Book of Living Verse, Warne’s Wayside and Woodland Trees—and adolescence … a scattering of Johnnie Ray 78s, a Vince Christy long-player: That Old Black Magic, Vol 2—and emerging adulthood … Orwell’s Animal Farm, Huxley’s Brave New World, The Catcher in the Rye … the Elgar Violin Concerto, recorded by Yehudi Menuhin circa 1932.

  “Not much, is it?”

  “But there’s more?”

  “Not a lot. Mostly clothes I wouldn’t be seen dead in any more. And God knows there’s nothing like a visit to either of your sisters to make me feel like Fanny Frump.”

  “Ignore them. Their taste is simply the Russian version of Milly-Molly-Mandy. Doesn’t require any idea of fashion or any sense of colour. You wear the same damn thing all the time. All you really need is an open cheque book and a good seamstress to look like my sisters.”

  “I wouldn’t want to look like your sisters. That’s my point.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Now? Right now? I just feel like weeping.”

  “Then in the words of your chosen pop idol, just go ahead and cry.”

  She smiled, a sad smile that barely suppressed a tear.

  She sat on the bed.

  “Just hold me, you stupid sod.”

  He did.

  “I’m not going to cry. Really, I’m not.”

  §107

  He’d taken off his overcoat and wrapped it around the two of them, thinking she might sleep and with sleep cease to weep, but it was he who dropped off.

  Rain on the skylight woke him.

  Foxx was staring at him. Her finger touched the end of his nose.

  “I can’t hear you think when you’re asleep. I find your silence quite relaxing. No buzz of ‘what is he thinking? what will he say next?’ Almost peaceful.”

  “Is that a complaint?”

  “No.”

  She paused. Looked up at the darkening sky.

  “I always loved rain on the roof. Erotic.”

  Troy glanced at his watch.

  “We have to go. It’s almost two. Sasha is expecting us at three.”

  “You go. I need big sis like I need an extra belly button. I’ll stay here. Press on. Get things done. Call me when you get to London.”

  “Really?”

  “I can handle this, Troy. Honestly.”

  “It’s a journey without maps.”

  “What is?”

  “Childhood. And I’m quoting someone yet again. Not sure who. Probably not Graham Greene. But it’s childhood revisited for you now. You have your map. It’s called hindsight. You just need to know how to read the signs and contours.”

  “What to keep and what to throw away.”

  “Exactly. You can start by throwing away all the records. I have the Elgar. I can probably live without Johnnie Ray and I could never stick Vince Christy.”

  “You’re a bastard, you know that, don’t you?”

  “Is that a complaint?”

  §108

  Winster Priory stood alone in its Jacobean redbrick grandeur at the end of a long cobbled street, chimneys twisted like barley sugar, roofs steep and red against the Derbyshire downpours, gates rusted open as though they had not closed in a century or more.

  Troy’s was the only car and as he pulled into the drive he felt he had landed on the set of a western … all he needed was rolling balls of tumbleweed and a glimpse of Kirk Douglas or Burt Lancaster. He looked back down the deserted street, straight as an arrow, sloping gently towards the valley, every cottage tight and huddled, belching coal smoke from every chimney, bound by the silence of a winter’s Saturday afternoon. Only the glut of television aerials told him it was the twentieth century, and that in every huddled house every huddled family was watching the racing or the football results.

  “You’re late!”

  Sasha was in her black Russian outfit and, quite possibly, her black Russian mood.

  “I thought coppers were supposed to be punctual.”

  “It’s five past three, you pedantic hag.”

  A woman, slightly more colourfully dressed, stepped out from the porch. Sasha stuck her tongue out at him and said:

  “You remember my little brother, PC Plod, don’t you?”

  This was a looker. A stunning blonde. Deep, magnetic blue eyes. The top lip from heaven. A perfect arch. A smile to rip the heart from any man. Troy would put her in her late thirties, perhaps coming up to forty. He was being introduced as though they’d met. He was faintly concerned that if Sasha was right he’d forgotten someone he should not lightly forget.

  “Of course, I remember Freddie,” the blonde said. “Although the last time we met I fear I didn’t. And now, the boot’s on the other foot. From the look in his eye Freddie doesn’t remember me.”

  Troy held out an ungloved hand in greeting.

  “Frederick Plod. And it’s Chief Superintendent not PC Plod.”

  She shook.

  Sasha said, “Bags, Freddie,” and installed herself in the back seat of the Bentley. Troy ignored her.

  “You’re going to have to remind me, you know.”

  “Oh, no reason you should remember. It was an age ago. In the Blitz.”

  “That expl
ains it. I couldn’t see you clearly in the blackout.”

  She giggled at this.

  “No, no excuse there. It was in La Popôte, you know, underneath the Ritz. You were with Guy Burgess.”

  Memory burst in him like a dam busted.

  “Venetia Maye-Brown?”

  “The same, although I’ve had a few names since then. It’s Stainesborough now. Has been for a while.”

  “And is there a Mr. Stainesborough?”

  “I don’t know how to take that question. Fishing already, Chief Superintendent? But no … there was a Lord Stainesborough but I’m pleased to say he went to the great distillery in the sky some time ago. I am a very merry widow. Or I was until I checked into this place.”

  The voice from the car.

  “Freddie, do get a move on! I’d like to be home before midnight.”

  Troy hefted both bags into the boot.

  As he drove he wondered why he had not recognised Venetia, Lady Stainesborough. A surfeit of expectation, perhaps? Once or twice … no dozens of times … over the intervening years Sasha had mentioned her, and based on their last brief encounter he had built up a mental picture of someone as degenerate as Sasha herself. She had, after all, been headed that way. But Venetia wasn’t. She’d aged remarkably well. Forty or so was wide of the mark. She was nearer fifty, but few would ever guess.