Riptide

by John Lawton

  ‘Kitty, I’m kind of pubbed out.’

  ‘Yeah-but just for me, eh?’

  He felt he couldn’t win this one. His idea was to talk, to discuss, for want of a better word, the protocol of their relationship. Her idea was to prop up a bar and chat to him for half an hour.

  ‘I’ll be there.’

  He listened to the dial tone as she rang off. Lay back on the pillow. He wanted to sleep. He wanted Kitty. He wanted Kitty and everything she had on offer. Why the guilt? What bendable but unbreakable moral imperative had his childhood seared into his character?

  § 32

  Just over two hours later, Troy pushed open the door to the Saloon bar of the Salisbury. It was the nearest public house to his house, a minute’s walk away from the tiny Georgian terrace he had in Goodwin’s Court, on the opposite side of St Martin’s Lane. He was looking for Charlie-his oldest friend, they’d met on their first day at an English public school they had both loathed-and they’d stuck together ever since. About the time Troy had joined the Metropolitan Police Force, Charlie had come down from Cambridge with a third in Arabic and had joined the Irish Guards. For the first few years Charlie had shown up in uniform more often than not. Now he was a secret agent, of what precise variety he had never said and Troy had never asked, he wore civvies. Being a spook suited him. He looked like a ladykiller in or out of uniform-well over six foot, a mop of blond curls, dazzling blue eyes-and whilst it was a truism of war that a uniform attracted women like moths to a candle, Troy had never once seen Charlie disadvantaged by the lack of it. He could pull a woman as she handed him the white feather.

  Charlie was sitting in a booth on the Cecil Court side, flicking through the News Chronicle, a whisky and soda at his side. He looked up as Troy sat down, eyes bright, a broad smile across his lips. He lit up, a hundred tiny physical responses-all the visible muscles expressing. Charlie was the most affectionate person-man or woman-Troy had ever known. He was clearly, genuinely delighted to see Troy. Troy might well have reciprocated-few people meant as much to him as Charlie-but he did not have the vocabulary of such affection, physical or verbal. He had not the facility with honesty. As his brother Rod put it, he was ‘a colossal fibber’-it was second nature to him to guard the truth, the truth of his own emotions not excepted-and, if nothing else, it made for a dedicated copper.

  ‘Freddie? What’ll you have?’

  Troy hardly drank and asked for a ginger beer.

  ‘Bollocks. You want ginger beer you can buy your own. Have a drink, for God’s sake. Even if it’s only a half

  Troy asked for Guinness. Charlie buttonholed the bloke clearing the empties and ordered half a pint of the black stuff. Troy would leave it sitting on the table, the white head slowly deflating into the black, and with any luck Charlie would never notice.

  ‘How’s tricks?’

  ‘Not much fun,’ said Troy. ‘The only good body to show up in a while got nicked from me by old Walter Stilton.’

  ‘Father of the luscious Kitty, eh? She’s standing at the bar right now.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Next to the tall bloke in the awful suit. See, looks like it was cobbled together by Flanagan and Allen in a Crazy Gang sketch at the Palladium. They were there when I came in. The chap sounded American to me.’

  He’d know Kitty anywhere, from any angle. She slipped her arm through the man’s. Gave him a kiss on the ear. Troy wondered if she knew he was there. If Charlie had told her who he was meeting. But the Salisbury was twenty yards from Troy’s front door. Who else would Charlie be meeting? Kitty inched closer. The light between their bodies vanished as she melded her affection into him, fitting the curve of her waist around the man’s hip. Troy stared, willing the American to turn around. He did. It was the same man he’d seen Kitty’s father with last night. Time to change the subject.

  ‘You’ve been out of London. You must have. Or you’d have been nagging me to come out for a drink before this.’

  ‘Indeed I have, o’man. But I can’t say where or why for reasons of national security.’

  This was nonsense, or the prelude to a gag. Charlie was the most indiscreet man alive. He couldn’t keep a secret to save his life.

  ‘Come off it,’ Troy said simply.

  ‘Let’s just say a quick trip to the land of bagpipes and haggis, a quicker trip back to a large unnamed fortress not a million miles from here in which Richard III murdered his nephews, all because of a chap who’s name begins with H and ends with ESS, but who is known to us in the trade as Mr Briggs.’

  Troy tried not to laugh. If he did Charlie would get the giggles and collapse in a heap of helpless laughter. This was typical of the man. The unutterable blurted out in a flippant sentence. Matters of national security. Of course he should not have told Troy that Hess was in the Tower of London, but Troy could not think of the force on earth that could stop him. Short of a firing squad.

  ‘Chatty, was he?’

  ‘Doesn’t breathe between paragraphs. Talk? The bugger never shuts up. Alas, he doesn’t say anything that matters. I’ve just witnessed four days of the party line. I think he came here genuinely believing that Hamilton would introduce him to the King and a bunch of senior Tories, and then they’d all get together, dump Churchill and do a deal with Hitler. He even asked for a copy of Three Men In A Boat-if that’s his vision of England, then Mr B. is a chronic fantasist who seems to believe in some sort of ancient Tory heartland that’s only waiting for the moment to make peace.’

  ‘Well,’ said Troy. ‘He’s right about that. That’s why we locked them up.’

  ‘Quite-but I rather think his invitation to join forces against the Soviet horde might have found itself outweighed by the opening of the flat or the start of the hunting season. “Mad” does not begin to convey Rudolf Hess. Barking, barking, barking. No matter what question the blokes from the FO put to him, he found some trite bit of Nazi spiel that covered the issue neatly. I tell you, Freddie, it reminded me of nothing quite so much as getting stuck on the doorstep with a very persistent Jehovah’s Witness.’

  ‘You should introduce him to my father. They’d be well matched.’

  ‘We’d probably get a damn sight further with your old man putting the questions than we have with these types from the Foreign Office. However, I think hell will freeze over before the boss lets your father within a mile of Mr Briggs.’

  ‘Who is the boss?’

  ‘Reggie Ruthven-Greene. Do you know him?’

  Troy shook his head. Charlie flagged down the clearer again and ordered another whisky and soda, pointed at Troy’s untouched Guinness. Troy shook his head, lifted the glass to his lips and put it back without taking a sip.

  Charlie said, ‘This had better be my last. I have to meet Reggie about five minutes ago. Look, I won’t be far out of London once old Briggs is fixed up, and I can be back any time there’s a break. You’re single again, aren’t you…?’

  ‘Single?’ said Troy, as though the word meant nothing to him.

  ‘You know what I mean… spare… without a woman! Why don’t we get together one night next week? Do the town. Check out operations on the totty front.’

  He belted back his whisky in a single gulp and was on his feet before Troy could answer. But Troy never would answer. He’d just say ‘Of course’, and when Charlie phoned up divert him from the plan or plead the job’. Charlie always wanted to check out the totty front, but he always ended up ‘doing the town’ without Troy.

  The American and Charlie collided in the doorway. An ‘Excuse me’ deferred to an ‘After you, old chap’, they hesitated for ten seconds and then the American slipped out and Charlie waved his cheerio and followed. The coincidence of them leaving at the same time left Troy staring at Kitty Stilton’s back. She turned, stuck her hands in her coat pockets and sauntered across the floor towards him.

  ‘Fred,’ she said by way of greeting.

  ‘Sergeant Stilton,’ said Troy with all the neutral inflection he could muster.


  ‘Your mate coming back, is ‘e?’

  ‘No. Yours?’

  Kitty pulled back the chair Charlie had sat in.

  ‘Ain’t you gonna buy a girl a drink, then?’-Troy buttonholed the clearer. Asked for a gin and lime.

  ‘I’m not a bleedin’ waiter, y’know.’

  Kitty opened her coat, let him see the uniform beneath and thrust out her chest.

  ‘For the boys in blue?’ said Troy, and the man muttered a grudging ‘Awright’.

  Thirty seconds later he slammed a glass down in front of Kitty, spilling half its contents and stuck out his hand for the cash.

  Kitty sipped at her drink.

  ‘S’made with cordial,’ she said. ‘Don’t taste the same.’

  ‘I expect they can’t get fresh limes any more.’

  Troy tipped his Guinness into the aspidistra pot.

  ‘Could you do me a favour?’

  ‘Course.’

  ‘I bumped into your father last night. He’s still treating me like a pariah…’

  ‘A wot?’

  ‘An outcast. He talks to me with thinly disguised hatred. I wonder if you might put him straight. Tell him the truth.’

  ‘What truth would that be?’

  ‘That you dumped me, not I you. He seems to have got it into his head that I trifled with your affections.’

  Kitty sniggered through her gin and lime, and succumbed to a fit of giggling and choking.

  ‘And while we’re on the subject of loose ends, you still have a key to my house.’

  ‘Ain’t got it on me though, ‘ave I? Besides, you still got all my records.’

  ‘Come and get them. I’ve no wish to deprive you of them.’

  ‘Right now?’

  Troy paused-this had the makings of a Kitty trap.

  ‘Isn’t your friend coming back?’

  ‘Nah-he’s got to meet my dad. They got work to do. He’ll be gone all night.’

  No-she could not mean what he thought she meant. They were past that. She had dumped him. She’d made that perfectly clear.

  § 33

  Troy opened the cupboard under the gramophone and removed a stack of records-all the things Kitty liked and he didn’t. Dance bands with inanely exotic names-Orpheans, Melodians, Waldorfians-or inanely stupid-Syncopating Syd and his Tyrolean Accordianist Ensemble, Ali McDonald’s Ocarina Wizards. He’d tried and failed to get her to listen to Duke Ellington or to Art Tatum. Ellington had ‘got something’, but she’d never put him on the turntable of her own choosing, and Tatum was ‘just a racket’ and ‘ruined a good tune’.

  A record slipped from the top as he reached the table. Kitty caught it or it would surely have shattered on the floor.

  She held it in both hands and looked at the label, fingers brushing across the grooves, tracing out the words on the label.

  ‘It’s Riptide,’ she said. ‘Al Bowlly and Lew Stone.’

  She hesitated, staring down at the record in the dim light.

  ‘Lovely Al Bowlly,’ she said. ‘Poor, lovely Al.’

  Al Bowlly had been killed in an air raid in the wee small hours one Thursday morning the previous month. A land mine had floated down, taken out a large slice of Jermyn Street and Mr Bowlly with it. The women of London still mourned him. England’s greatest crooner. A womanizer extraordinaire. Troy wondered if Kitty knew this. If she did it probably didn’t matter to her. A romantic ideal, that unfleshly object-while the real man, the flesh beneath the ideal, had had half the women he’d ever met. Kitty was weeping, softly, silently for Al Bowlly. Troy said nothing.

  ‘Could we play it?’ she asked.

  Troy wound the gramophone. It was easier by far than finding anything to say to her. He was glad she’d caught it, though the rest he could willingly have seen smashed: Riptide had that certain something. He was particularly fond of that long, slow introduction before Bowlly came in. It had an inescapable intensity. After it Bowlly’s voice could only be a let-down. He had always sounded to Troy more like a man in his seventies than his forties. He had never understood the appellation ‘the English Crosby’-he sounded nothing like Bing Crosby. Troy much preferred the women singers-Elsie Carlisle or Greta Keller. Yet-the song was pleasing. Its structure delighted him. It was all verse. No chorus. The song did not repeat itself. Just when any other song would rehash all it had said so far, the band came in again and Bowlly sang no more. It was startling to realise the song was over. It had made its statement-made a song of its precisely captured emotion, but not a ‘song-and-dance’ of it.

  Kitty was shuffling around the room in a slow, sad dance for one. Caught in her own little riptide.

  She came to rest in front of him-still tearful-and, though the taller, managed to rest her head upon his shoulder.

  ‘When was it, Fred? When was ‘e killed?’

  ‘It was the seventeenth, I think. A month ago to the day, all but a few hours.’

  Her arms slipped around his neck. Troy braced himself immovably. I won’t dance. Don’t ask me. He half expected her feet to resume their half-hearted shuffle. They didn’t. She swayed gently, leant into him, and aimed her words somewhere into his chest.

  ‘So this is the anniversary of Al’s last night on earth?’

  ‘I suppose so. If you think a month is any kind of an anniversary.’

  It was three months to the day since she’d dropped him, but he wasn’t going to tell her that. He wasn’t counting.

  ‘I been lucky in this war. So far. I never lost anyone. None of me family. All me old boyfriends are still alive. Two of’em even made it back from Dunkirk. I knew people who died-the bombs and that-but they weren’t people I lost. I just knew ‘em, sort of. Al Bowlly dying was like losing someone. Really it was.’

  She was right. She had been lucky. They’d both been lucky. But Troy would not have been the one to say so. They could lose all, lose everyone before this war was over. To say so seemed rather like inviting it.

  ‘I don’t want to spend the night alone,’ Kitty said. ‘Not tonight of all nights.’

  Troy said nothing. He’d heard her say this before. It was line one of Kitty’s chat-up routine.

  Kitty took his right arm and slipped it around her waist. Troy did not move. She wriggled until he could escape no longer the obligation to enfold her shoulders with his left. She looked at him, eye to eye, as she stooped. Her cheeks were still wet. She kissed him lightly, and buried her head in his shoulder, singing softly to herself.

  ‘Riptide. Caught in a riptide, torn between two loves, the old and the new. Riptide. Lost in a riptide, where will it take me, what shall I do?’

  Troy said nothing. Telling Kitty what to do had always been a waste of time.

  § 34

  ‘St What?’ said Cal.

  ‘Alkmund. It’s Saxon. And it’s a whopping great church, one of the biggest in Shoreditch. They cleared out the crypt last November. Got rid of the dead to make room for the living.’

  Stilton had stopped the car. Cal got out into another urban desert. The church stood like a redwood in wilderness-little else did, for what Cal estimated to be a couple of blocks in any direction.

  ‘Is it safe?’ he asked.

  Stilton stared up at the spire.

  ‘Probably not. But where is, apart from down the Underground? Half a million tons of masonry held up by flying buttresses and prayer. Thing is, it feels safe-it’s well… reassuring.’

  ‘Give me sacred steel and God’s good concrete any day. We going in?’

  Outside the main porch they passed a group of people sitting on a tomb. Cal heard the plummy tones of upper-class English voices. He’d heard that the English all ‘mucked in’, as they put it, but this lot were not the sort who looked as though they’d spend the night in a crypt except as a gag at Halloween. They were overdressed, as though they’d slipped out in the interval from a West End theatre, and they appeared to be sipping wine and eating sandwiches. Stilton’s feet clattered on the stone steps ahead of him.r />
  ‘Leeches,’ he said, cryptically.

  ‘Leeches?’

  ‘Well-mebbe not. More like voyeurs. Ghouls. Toffs coming East from Mayfair to see how the other half live.’

  ‘Die, how the other half die,’ said Cal.

  ‘Aye-whatever. Can’t stand the sight of ‘em. They should all have summat better to do.’

  The crypt was on a scale Cal could not have anticipated-somehow he’d thought the word implied low and small. This was a cathedral beneath the streets, a cavern twenty feet high stretching into an infinity of half light, criss-crossed by arches, fragmented by alcoves. And full of people. Cal could not begin to guess. A thousand seemed arbitrary but suitably large. A sea of humanity pinpointed by flashes of light-a cigarette being lit, a portable stove fired up-punctuated by a thousand different noises and a dozen different smells. It hummed, literally and metaphorically. Only when Stilton shook him by the arm did he realise he’d stopped, and was just staring-not, he hoped, open-mouthed.

  ‘I know what you’re thinking.’

  ‘Do you, Walter, do you?’

  ‘How can people live like this?’

  ‘Well-how can they?’

  ‘Believe me, Calvin, this is a damn sight better than it was last autumn. Then there’d be two and a half thousand people crammed in here. That was before the government had the sense to open up the Underground at night. Mind, they only did that ‘cos folk from round here defied the authorities. Went in and wouldn’t leave. There was talk of’em even being turfed out by the coppers. You can imagine how well that went down. But it’s fine now. Us and the toffs. We understand one another a bit better. A few ghouls notwithstanding.’

  Stilton pointed upwards with his finger, back towards ground level.

  ‘What’s the smell?’ Cal asked. ‘It’s pretty… pervasive.’

  ‘Chemical lawies, lad. Imagine how pervasive the smell was before we had them. Now-let’s be getting on.’

  ‘Sure. What do I do?’

  ‘Wait here till I find Hudge.’