Second Violin

by John Lawton

  ‘A Nansen? You travelled around the Third fucking Reich on a fucking Nansen. Are you completely mad?’

  ‘That’s what Hugh Greene used to say. It’s what the bloke from SS said when he saw me off at Tempelhof. And I was careless, not mad, and I did get away with it.’

  ‘Rod . . . the Germans didn’t bang you up. That’s amazing . . . absolutely bloody amazing . . . now the British are going to do it!’

  ‘And I’m going to let them.’

  Their mother seemed to snap to life.

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He said,’ Alex said, ‘that he will not resist this internment.’

  ‘But he must.’

  The next thing Troy knew they were all talking at once, once more. Only Rod and Troy said nothing. Rod looked at him, sad in the eyes, biting on his bottom lip as though on the verge of explanation and apology that Troy dreaded hearing. He tuned out to the family, stared at the ceiling. Then one word in emphatic English cut through the Babel racket, his mother at the top of her voice, ‘Enough!’

  And she was gone, banging out – nought but verbal rubble in her wake.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ Alex said softly. Then more audibly, ‘Freddie, go to her. None of us can. Go to your mother.’

  Troy stood in the hallway waiting for any sign that his mother’s feet had touched earth once more.

  A matter of minutes later he heard the sound of a piano coming from the red room – his mother playing a note perfect but far too robust Cathédrale engloutie. The piece lent itself to that – the left hand from hell or deep water, Poseidon plays. It was her way, one of her ways, of administering morphine to the soul. Anger had often driven her to the piano during his childhood. She was an angry woman. His father was not an angry man, indeed Troy had scarcely heard him raise his voice, but the twins drove him to distraction (‘Is it my fault? Have I taught them to so ignore the court of public opinion that they think they can get away with anything?’) and he and Rod drove his mother to rage. One summer, Troy was almost certain, she had got through both books of Debussy preludes, one day, one prelude, at a time, as piano therapy for life with small children underfoot.

  She stopped, hands poised, twitching above the keyboard.

  ‘Can’t remember what comes next.’

  Neither could Troy.

  ‘Is it the ninth or the tenth?’

  ‘Tenth – I’m pretty certain of that.’

  The lid slammed down.

  ‘Then I’m stuffed.’

  She sat, fingertips on the lid as though still touching the keys. A silent chord played for no one.

  Suddenly she was up, facing him and into a tirade in French so rapid he could not keep up.

  ‘Lentement . . . lentement . . . and preferably in some other language.’

  She switched to Russian – ignored the hint – and spoke to him slowly in her French-tinged nineteenth-century Muscovite Russian, the sort of accent that got you put up against a wall and shot these days.

  ‘Why are they doing this to me?’

  ‘To you?’

  ‘To me. You do not remember the old country.’

  Of course Troy didn’t remember the old country – he’d never even been there.

  ‘You should know. I was born here, and unless you’ve shocking news for me, it was you gave birth to me.’

  ‘The old fortress,’ she went on, ignoring him. ‘Peter and Paul. Throughout my childhood people vanished into it. After we left, in 1912, my brother Pierre was arrested by the Tsar’s secret police. He too went into Peter and Paul. And in 1921, after the putsch that Bolsheviks insist was a revolution, my brother André was snatched by the Cheka or the OGPU or whatever set of initials they had for it in those days. He too went into Peter and Paul. I never saw either of them again.’

  Good God, thought Troy, the things this woman had not told him.

  ‘Now the English Cheka want to put my son in a camp. They do not tell us what camp. They merely say present yourself at such and such a railway station at such and such a time. And I know nothing. For all the English tell us it could be Peter and Paul . . . it could be Dachau.’

  Troy said, ‘The station Rod has to turn up at is St Pancras. That’s the line that goes into Manchester Central. I’d say they were shipping him to the Isle of Man.’

  ‘The Isle of Man?’

  ‘It’s all on its own in the Irish Sea between England and Ireland and Scotland.’

  ‘And what is this island like?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s British, but sort of independent. Its own parliament and that sort of thing.’

  ‘Independent?’

  ‘Sort of.’

  The sigh was massive, continental in its breadth and exasperation.

  ‘Oh God . . . not another small, faraway country of which we know nothing?’

  ‘Sort of . . . I really don’t know –but I should hardly think it’s Dachau.’

  § 98

  Just before lunch the next day, Troy felt the specific gravity of the house change. It was close to mystical, the sense that something in the house had changed. He looked into his father’s study. The old man was standing in the open window, holding his pince-nez in place with a forefinger and staring down at an open volume in the other hand. Yet again searching for the verse that caught his mood or the mood. No change at all.

  His mother passed him in the hallway, vanished into the red room before he could even turn to look at her, and he knew the source of the feeling. She was trailing her mood in a rough wake that only his father would not feel.

  He followed. She stood by the piano, dropped her handbag, pulled off her hat. The hat spun across the room to land neatly on a chair.

  ‘I have been into town.’

  ‘Liberty’s,’ he said, lying hopefully. ‘Harrods? Army and Navy?’

  ‘Downing Street. I have been to see that man Churchill.’

  Oh fuck, thought Troy.

  ‘And how was that man?’

  ‘I do not know. I had assumed that in view of the number of times I have sat at the dining table with that man that whatever differences might now exist between him and your father I would be received. They, that is the Cheka Anglais, would not let me in. I gave them my card and a flunky came out, a private or a personal or a parliamentary secretary – I could grasp neither his name nor his title – returned the card and told me the Prime Minister was not available. I was left standing on the steps with a London bobby, feeling like a knife-grinder being shown the tradesman’s entrance. Do you know what he said to me? This London bobby? He said “Don’t you know there’s a war on madam?” ’

  She lifted the piano lid – began, appropriately, at the beginning – got halfway through ‘Danseuses de Delphe’ and stopped.

  ‘You play so much better than I. Play for me Freddie.’

  Time was Troy would have agreed with her. The Troys had thrust music at all their children. The twins had sung like angels, Rod still wasn’t half bad on the violin, but in the eyes (ears) of his mother it was her son Frederick who shone. Now, he felt rusty, suddenly out of practice – too long living in a house without a piano. He picked up ‘Danseuses’ pretty much where his mother had left off.

  ‘I looked at the sheet music in that shop on the high street today. The one we could neither of us remember yesterday was “Puck”.’

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Play “Puck” . . . play anything.’

  § 99

  Rod had a small house on Holly Mount – about a quarter of a mile from his father’s house. From the top floor he could see across London all the way to Crystal Palace and beyond that to the North Downs. Troy found him pretty much where he expected to find him – sitting at the top of Holly Bush Steps, settling for the lesser view down what he called his petit Montmartre, to Heath Street, his two-year-old daughter, Nattie, sitting at his side displaying remarkable patience as Rod ad-libbed a story about fieldmice and hedgehogs. Troy sat down next to him. Rod paused the narrative.

  ‘Sh
e’s furious,’ Troy said simply.

  ‘She doesn’t get it,’ Rod said as simply.

  ‘I’m not sure I do either.’

  Rod sighed.

  ‘Perhaps you’d better tell me,’ Troy prompted.

  Still Rod said nothing, and for a minute or more all three of them stared down at the slate roofs of Hampstead.

  ‘It’ll make us English at last,’ Rod said.

  ‘At last?’

  ‘Yes. At last, finally . . . in the end . . . dammit Freddie, you surely don’t think we’re English yet?’

  ‘Of course we’re not. I don’t feel English.’

  ‘And you were the only one of us born here.’

  Troy nodded his head towards Nattie.

  ‘Different generation,’ Rod said. ‘That matters. I’m sure my son and daughter will grow up to be English. But I’m not and you’re not.’

  ‘You’re more the Englishman than I am.’

  ‘That, brer, is because I have not resisted it the way you have.’

  ‘And it’s why you’re not resisting now?’

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘So letting my flat-footed friends lock you up and bung you in a camp will somehow make you English?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘A camp in all likelihood devoid of the English, but full of Italians, Germans, Austrians . . .’

  ‘And Nazis . . . and Jews. Yes, Freddie, a thousand times yes.’

  ‘Then I still don’t get it.’

  ‘Daddy,’ said Nattie. ‘What happened to the mousie?’

  Rod whispered in her ear. She stood up and ran for the house – through the front door and clattering down the hallway.

  ‘What happened to the mousie?’ said Troy.

  ‘I told her he was living under the squeaky floorboard in the dining room.’

  ‘Do you know what kind of a camp you’ll be going to.’

  ‘No – but I’m sure you’ll be able to tell me. Besides, it can hardly be Dachau, can it?’

  ‘That’s what I told Mother. That’s what she doesn’t get. She equates any camp with Peter and Paul, which is pretty well Dachau in her vocabulary. People disappear into them and vanish without trace.’

  ‘I won’t, and we both know I won’t. And with a modicum of effort we can get that through to her. You can describe the camps to her surely?’

  ‘Some . . . I’ve never seen the inside of any of them. I know there’s an old mill in Lancashire somewhere. That sounds grim. Most likely it’ll be the Isle of Man . . . “come to sunny Douglas” . . . they’ve cordoned off whole streets of B&Bs with barbed wire.’

  ‘So . . . if the worst comes to the worst, I’ll be getting a cheap prewar holiday just like thousands of Manchester mill workers. I won’t be in Peter and Paul or anything like it.’

  Troy weighed up his next sentence – uttered it just the same.

  ‘She lost two brothers in Peter and Paul.’

  Rod leaned back – sprawled full length across the flagstones – big feet in odd socks dangling off the steps.

  ‘Good God. The things that bloody woman doesn’t tell you.’

  Troy walked back via Hampstead High Street, bought a second-hand piano at Parker & Trewin – an upright Bösendorfer made, they told him, in 1907, the year of his brother’s birth, in Vienna, the city of his brother’s birth. It seemed somehow appropriate whilst packing his brother off to an unknown fate on a remote island in the Irish Sea to install a wooden substitute at home. It symbolised the nature of the problem in walnut and ebony. He wrote a fat cheque and asked for the piano to be delivered to Goodwin’s Court.

  § 100

  They were prompt. 10 a.m. Sharp. Troy had wangled a morning off by convincing Stilton that a visit to St Pancras Railway station to ensure the departure of a detainee was work. He had omitted to mention that the detainee was his own brother and, if Steerforth had told Stilton, Stilton wasn’t giving so much as a hint. 10 a.m. Sharp. Two men from Parker & Trewin turned up with his chunk of old Vienna rattling like a badly improvised boogie.

  ‘Are you sure you want it in ’ere guv’ner. Room ain’t much bigger than the joanna.’

  That was the problem, the price he’d paid for beauty. Houses in Goodwin’s Court were tiny. They looked as though they had started their life as shops sometime in the eighteenth century – bow-fronted, narrow, beautiful. The first time he had seen it he’d been able to imagine the Tailor of Gloucester sitting cross-legged in the window. After East End digs the house had felt big enough when he’d moved in, and he’d moved in early 1937 after a blow to the head had left him senseless at the battle of Cable Street the year before and the impossibility of recuperation without privacy had come home to him. He had had all the privacy he could have asked for in any of his father’s homes. He’d none at school, and the former forever failed to compensate the latter. Living ‘on the manor’ had been considered a necessity to learning the shoe-leather, corn and blister craft of coppering as a beat bobby, and he’d given it more than a year before he succumbed to the lure of a place of his own. The price was living accommodation only marginally better than boarding school – although the food was much the better. Goodwin’s Court, cramped and cosy, was the first home he had chosen for himself. His mother referred to it scathingly as his ‘bachelor quarters’.

  ‘There’s nowhere else,’ he said simply. ‘It’s got to fit in here.’

  They tugged and strained and manipulated the beast in burr walnut until it sat spanning most of the right-hand wall of the living room.

  ‘We’s’ll tune up in a mo, guv’ner,’ the first man said, while the second leaned on the piano and muttered something about being ‘parched’, a phrase Troy had come to accept was only ever used by tradesmen. He took the hint, stuck the kettle on and looked at his watch. He’d have to be out of the house in ten minutes. He sat at the piano, lifted the lid and struck a minor chord. It was off.

  ‘Like I said, guv’ner, we’s’ll tune ’er up when we’ve had a cuppa. I’m just a shifter me, but Ted ’ere . . . he’ll ’ave the old girl singin’ for you in half an hour.’

  Troy ignored the bum notes and began to play.

  ‘’Ere . . . know this one . . . it’s . . . don’t tell me . . . it’s . . .’

  Troy stopped, took his jacket of the peg, fished around for his house keys and tossed them to the shifter.

  ‘It’s called ‘Tea for Two’. And you two’ll be making your own. The caddy’s on the draining board. It’ll be rationed any day now, so try and leave me some, will you?’

  Troy followed a cab all the way into the station, hoping to flash his warrant card and be able to just leave the car among the cabs between platforms 5 and 6, but the concourse was awash with people. He’d not seen a scene like this since the mass-evacuation of children last September in the final forty-eight hours before the declaration of war.

  He stopped the car and got out. Dozens if not hundreds of people milled around him. In and out of uniform. Soldiers, sailors . . . children. Half a dozen children numbered and labelled like luggage. All met by joyous parents. All but one. This one grabbed Troy by the hem of his jacket.

  ‘Have you seen me mum?’

  A little girl, aged ten or thereabouts, in a summer frock, a cheap plastic slide in her dirty blonde hair – a worn man’s tweed jacket for a topcoat, frayed at the collar and cuffs – a brown paper parcel tied up with string and bursting, a yellow, balding teddy bear under one arm.

  ‘Me mum said she’d be here.’

  Troy looked down at her. He was useless with kids and he knew it.

  ‘What are you doing here? Are you going to the country?’

  ‘Nah. Been there. We comin’ back now. Had enough of the bloomin’ country, I ’ave. You can stuff yer bloomin’ country.’

  ‘All of you?’ Troy asked. ‘All of you coming back to London?’

  ‘’Spose so. I don’t know none o’ them others. I was vaccywated wiv me cousin. Only ’e done a bunk in March. We was in Llandudno. We ’ated
Llandudno. We was wiv Mrs Sproat. Mrs Sproat ’ated us. ’Ated all cockneys. Me, I’m a Stepney girl, I am.’

  This was madness. A winter away from bombs that never fell, and now they returned in droves just as Hitler seemed to have London and the Southern Counties in his sights.

  ‘Stepney you say? I may be able to help you there.’

  The child reached up and took his hand, and as she did so he caught sight of his brother, mired among the mites, trying to stride over them like a giant in seven-league boots.

  ‘I thought you’d never make it!’

  It pleased Troy that some anxiety had etched itself into his brother’s expression.

  ‘Is Cid here?’

  ‘No, no. She’s not. It’s not the place for a farewell, is it? Not the place for the wife and kids.’

  ‘Really?’ said Troy, holding up the child’s arm, her hand still locked into his.

  ‘Who’s she?’ Rod said, as though it was only now he’d noticed that his brother was welded to a child.

  ‘No idea,’ Troy replied. ‘I’ll find out when you’re on the train.’

  A uniformed copper examined Troy’s warrant card at the barrier.

  ‘I’m to see him onto the train,’ Troy lied.

  ‘Must be someone special – a right villain if the Yard send a personal escort. Most of ’em we herd in two dozen to a bobby.’

  ‘Oh, he’s special alright,’ said Troy moving on.

  ‘That might not exactly be helpful, you know, Freddie,’ Rod said. ‘I don’t want them thinking I’m any sort of a fascist.’

  ‘I think this is where I mutter something about bed, made, lie in it.’

  ‘That doesn’t help either, you know.’

  Rod looked at him, sadly, Troy thought. They rarely understood one another.

  ‘When you get on that train, nothing will help. You have no idea with whom you’ll be banged up. For all you do know it’ll be every half-arsed Hitler impersonator in Britain. It’ll make Saturday night at the music hall look like high realism.’