Second Violin

by Lawton, John

  ‘Well, George . . . with a gas mask, a stirrup pump, seven buckets of sand and about five hundred feet of sticky brown tape across the windows I’d say we’re close to impregnable. You go to the shelter if you like. I’m finishing this pile of bumf, then I’m nipping out for a spot of lunch, a bit of a stroll across the manor, and, if any Germans get past our wall of firebuckets and sticky brown tape, I’ll let you know.’

  § 65

  After lunch Troy stood a while in the Whitechapel Road opposite the Underground station. People-watching, which might be deemed second nature to a policeman, had become a pseudo-academic hobby of the Thirties, under the title ‘Mass Observation’. All over the country hundreds of volunteers, ‘observers’, who might otherwise have been out youth-hostelling or playing mouth organs, had compiled reports on the state of the nation, from the results of nothing more scientific than people-watching. People had, as Bonham had declared, ‘scattered like hens’. Now, it was as if Troy was watching the same film run backwards. Most people seemed to be coming from somewhere rather than going to somewhere – although Troy recognised that this was an entirely subjective point of view. The same people he saw coming up from the Underground – one of the sub-surface stations, hardly bombproof by any stretch – could be ‘scattering’ as surely as those that had fled. There was a zebra crossing a few yards east of the station, broad black and white bands painted on the tarmacadam, and a pair of belisha beacons – flashing globes of orange on striped poles that signalled safety to the pedestrian. When they had been introduced a few years earlier by Mr Hore-Belisha, the then Minister of Transport, after whom they were named – a man now stuck with the unenviable task of Minister for War, and the same man subject to the rantings of those who wanted Jews out of government – Troy had watched a drunk trying vainly to blow one out under the impression they were gaslit. The traffic was now stopped at the zebra stripes and the flashing beacons to let a stream of pedestrians pass. Last of all was an old woman pushing a perambulator – no baby, it was piled high with her possessions – splashing through the puddles left by last night’s thunderstorm. Coming or going? No matter. What mattered was the pair of well-dressed gentlemen poised at the crossing in the front seat of a sleek, grey, convertible, three-and-a-half litre, six-cylinder Armstrong-Siddeley – top down, chatting to each other in the accents of received pronunciation. Everything about them said ‘toff’, the car, the clothes, the inevitable if accidental hauteur. Indeed, Troy had met both at his father’s dinner table, although he knew damn well they would not recognise him out of that context in a thousand years – Harold Nicolson, MP for Leicester, and Victor Cazalet, MP for Chippenham, one National Labour, the other Conservative, thereby demonstrating how in English life class so readily superseded politics. They hadn’t noticed Troy, nor had they noticed the old woman still crossing at her snail’s pace. But she had noticed them. She left her pram and shuffled across to the driver’s side, to harangue Cazalet.

  ‘’Ere. You. You lot. Toffs!’

  Both heads turned.

  ‘This bleedin’ war. It’s all your fault. You fink the poor ever started a neffin’ war? What poor bloke ever started a neffin’ war. Wars is toff fings, they is. It’s all your neffin’ fault. It’s all the fault of the neffin’ rich! You fink we wanna go through all that again –’

  Cazalet cut her short, smiling politely all the time, slipped the car into gear and drove carefully around the pram.

  The old woman pushed it to the edge of the road, up onto the pavement, banging into Troy as she did so. An arthritic hand, all bulging knuckles, beckoned him closer.

  ‘I lorst me ’usband in Flanders, lorst my Johnnie I did. I lorst two o’ me bruvvers an’ all. And this bunch o’ tosspots fink I’m gonna send me sons now. Fuckem, fuckem all. We could’ve seen this ’Itler bloke off in thirty-three!’

  She did not wait for a reply. Troy had none ready. It was, he thought, a bit like hearing one of his father’s editorials boiled down to the rub with a few choice foul words thrown in for good measure. If only his father had the succinct freedom to print ‘fuckem’. If only she’d known to whom she had been speaking.

  Troy looked up at the clear afternoon sky. It was cloudless, it was still summer. It was hard to imagine the sky darkened by bombers, yet every pundit in the land was predicting, and had done so for years, that London would be pounded to dust. It was the received wisdom of the times. He looked up – trying to get through his head the simple notion of being ‘at war’. It didn’t work. It just didn’t work. Besides, he’d had high hopes of being out of Stepney before the balloon went up. He’d never expected to see this war through in Stepney.

  § 66

  17 September 1939

  The Day Russia Invaded Poland

  A one-word Latin telegramme arrived at Church Row:

  NUNC? CHURCHILL.

  What now? It would be the last word they would ever exchange directly.

  What now? Alex knew only too well what now, and in the evening summoned his entire family into his study. With the exception of his younger son, Frederick, the policeman, they all managed to be there. Rod, Rod’s wife Lucinda, known as Cid, his twin daughters Sasha and Masha, their respective husbands – the Hon. Hugh Darbishire and Lawrence Stafford – his wife of forty-one years, Maria Mikhailovna, and his youngest brother Nikolai Rodyonovich, Professor Troitsky – the only other member of his family to cross to England with him, and the last one to cling to the old family name.

  ‘I shall be retiring from public life – forthwith.’

  There was a prolonged silence, a sigh from his wife that he took to be one of relief, and a little coughing from the sons-in-law. It was Lawrence who spoke first.

  ‘Might we ask why?’

  ‘Why? Because one lives with the consequences of one’s own words and actions. Because I have made a fool of myself in public and will henceforth be a fool in private. If that were not enough . . . well . . . I am old . . . and we are at war.’

  ‘Actually . . . y’know it’s hardly even started yet . . . and there were these chaps in the club last night who reckoned it’ll all be over by Christmas,’ Hugh chipped in. And everyone in the room looked at him as though he were the fool.

  § 67

  18 September 1939

  It was an odd normality. As so many said, it didn’t feel like being at war at all. There was something fake and phoney about it. No lurid patriotism, no vicious xenophobia. No raining death of shrapnel and cordite. It was, for want of a better phrase in Troy’s mind, business as usual. What had changed, in odd ways, struck him as changed for the better. The city was darker, quieter, moonlit, almost enchanted. The nights suited him fine. To walk London after dark was to touch beauty, to immerse in . . . in what? He hadn’t found the word. He had merely found the vision. To sit in Piccadilly Circus, freed from the electric rain of advertising and look at London as none had looked at it since the 1880s – and even then they’d had gaslight. This embracing darkness, smothering night – surprised by a kiss – had not been seen in centuries.

  It was a fortnight after the outbreak of war. Two weeks of apprehension and unreality. It was the day after Russia’s invasion of Poland. The telephone on his desk rang.

  ‘Stanley Onions,’ said a northern voice at the other end.

  Troy shifted a little in his seat at the sound of Onions’ voice. A hint of sitting to attention. It had been ages since he’d heard that blunt Lancashire accent crackle down the wires from Scotland Yard. Onions outranked Troy in spades. A superintendent, and, at that, the superintendent in charge of the prestigious Murder Squad.

  ‘You’ll recall I said I’d be in touch?’

  Not that Troy could forget, but that had been the best part of three years ago.

  ‘I’ve been watching you. You’ve a few feathers in yer cap. A few scalps on yer belt.’

  ‘I’ve been lucky,’ Troy said with a modesty he did not much feel.

  ‘Luck’s got nowt to do wi’ it. I said, I said bac
k in thirty-six that when the time was right I’d want you for the Yard. Now’s the time. You’ll get a fortnight’s leave to mek the move, but I want you here at the end o’ the month.’

  ‘Just like that?’

  ‘Take it or leave it, lad, it’s not a negotiation.’

  ‘Then I take.’

  ‘Good. ’Cos there’s more. You’ll be stepping up a rank. From the thirtieth you’ll draw a sergeant’s pay. I don’t think for one moment you need it, but I’ve never yet met a man who’d turn down a pay rise.’

  Of course he wouldn’t. In fact his gratitude was inexpressible. Just as well. Onions rang off and left him no time to express it.

  When the phone rang a second time, Troy had already made up his mind to sound a little more grateful, a touch more enthusiastic about a job he would have chopped off a leg to get. But it wasn’t Onions, it was his father.

  ‘My boy, do you have any holidays owing?’

  ‘I’m twenty-four, Dad. I’ve left school. In the Police Force we call it leave. And as it happens, I’ve got a fortnight in hand. I’ll need a couple days of that to sort a few things out . . . so tell me what you have in mind.’

  ‘Let us go abroad while we still can. Let us go to the Continent before Hitler’s tanks roll over it. Let us go to France and Italy before the lights go out all over Europe again.’

  Troy was acutely aware of how that sentence ended – Sir Edward Grey, Foreign Secretary in 1914: ‘We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime’. It was, Troy thought, less the onset of war than awareness of his own age and mortality that motivated his father. It occurred to Troy that he did not even know how old his father was. But he was old. Possibly even over eighty.

  ‘Not perhaps the grand tour, but France and Italy. Perhaps Le Touquet, and Paris and then on to Rome and Amalfi.’

  ‘Not Le Touquet, Dad.’

  ‘As you wish, but why not? Time was we would go en famille at least once a year.’

  ‘That’s precisely why not.’

  Troy hoped his father would probe no further and he didn’t. Troy had no wish to offend the old man by letting him know, if he did not know already, how bored he had been as a small boy on a French beach looking back at England, his parents conversing in multiple languages with decrepit strangers, the well-heeled, well-clothed, musty refugees of a revolution that, whilst it had happened in his lifetime, might as well have happened a thousand years ago to a boy often. Troy had long since lost track of, ceased to pay heed to, M. le Comte de Thisanthat or Prince Whateveroffsky and their well-wrapped, lace-enfolded, big-bosomed wives, the latter of whom seemed far too willing to be enchanted by his pre-pubescent surliness.

  ‘Why not choose your own itinerary, my boy?’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Be my guest.’

  ‘Paris . . . of course, Paris. But I’d rather see Florence or Siena than Rome.’

  Alex was thinking. Troy counted past ten before his father spoke again.

  ‘Good, good,’ he said. ‘Paris it is, and Siena. September in Siena is still outdoor weather. Who would not sit in the campo gazing at the night sky with a Campari and soda in hand? But . . . would you mind a substitution for Florence?’

  ‘Try me,’ said Troy.

  ‘Monte.’

  ‘Monte?’

  ‘Monte Carlo.’

  Bloody hell.

  ‘I think you need a little vice if not in your soul then in your fingertips. I have not been to Monte in years and you never have. Stop being a policeman for two or three days and indulge in the sins.’

  ‘Do I get a choice of sin?’

  ‘Be my guest.’

  § 68

  Troy’s father had two modi operandi for breakfast when travelling. Silence behind a newspaper – the newspaper in any of four or five languages – and garrulousness with strangers he had only just met but to whose geopolitical wisdom and crackpot theories he would listen with unfeigned interest. Neither mode required him to talk to his son. Troy would either take breakfast in his room or sit in the dining room of the Georges V with a novel or a newspaper, ready to be distracted from it whenever his father decided to sum up what a night and a morning of incessant natter had gleaned for him. He’d read that morning’s Post with a professional eye – the Old Bailey report on the conviction of two soldiers for the savage murder and necrophiliac rape of one ‘Amaryllis’, prostitute of Hindhead, Surrey; a case his new boss, Stanley Onions, had chosen to handle personally. Scarcely in a lighter vein he had chosen Splendères et Misères des Courtesanes by Balzac as his novel. Not possessing his father’s facility with language – two was quite enough, and French made only two-and-a-half – he read a leaden Victorian translation. It seemed an appropriate book for Paris, and would last him well into Italy, if they ever got there.

  ‘They’re cocky,’ his father said by way of summary. ‘The French seem confident that the line will hold when the time comes, that the Germans will not roll over France as they did in 1871 or even a corner of it as they did in 1914. I keep hearing the same words, “impregnable”, “impenetrable”.’

  ‘Sounds like morning assembly . . . “im-something, in-something . . . God Only Wise . . .” have they not noticed the German troops rolling over Poland right now? God knows what the Poles had thought before-hand. Impregnable?’

  Alex shrugged.

  ‘It remains, however, an untried army,’ Troy added.

  ‘Untried?’

  ‘They fought no battle for Austria, none for Czechoslovakia. Are they fighting anything more than skirmishes in Poland?’

  ‘All that means is that no one has called their bluff.’

  ‘My point in a nutshell, Dad.’

  ‘No one has called it . . . to find out that they’re not bluffing.’

  This was one of the things that made talking to his father awkward. The bugger had a way of trouncing you in two sentences.

  ‘And you still want to go on to Monte Carlo and Italy?’

  § 69

  Their next breakfast together was on the sleeper train heading for Monaco.

  Alex had spent most of the previous evening in conversation with a party of Italians – in Italian. At breakfast he chose to eat with his son and switched to Russian, something he hardly ever did – he had embraced the English language with fervour – but when he did it meant he sought confidentiality.

  ‘I have some business to attend to when we get to Monte Carlo,’ he said, taking the top off his egg with a knife.

  ‘But you’re not going to tell me what?’

  Alex shrugged.

  ‘So it isn’t a holiday after all?’

  ‘Of course it is.’

  ‘What am I supposed to do while you get involved in another of your conspiracies?’

  ‘It is not a conspiracy. It is . . . an arranged meeting. And you will, as we agreed, have the opportunity to sin.’

  ‘You mean gambling?’

  Alex nodded

  ‘I thought I got to pick the sin?’

  ‘Then pick . . . chemin-de-fer, roulette . . . the choice is yours, just don’t expect three-card brag or Glewstone Donkey . . . it’s a far cry from the Snug in a London pub . . . land I can tell you now roulette is a mug’s game, a mug’s game of no perceptible skill.’

  ‘Dad, they none of them hold the appeal of a cold omelette.’

  ‘Indulge me, my boy. Indulge yourself. It will only be for one evening.’

  ‘At least tell me who you’re meeting.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  Alex got stuck into his second egg, Troy pushed away his cold omelette. A rustle of skirts at their table and a black-haired beauty of a woman brushed past them, her backside all but perched on the edge of their table as she passed the waiter coming the other way. Troy turned to follow her trail down the car to an end table. She sat facing him, neat as ninepence in her black suit and matching hat, looked straight at him, smiled and vanished behind the menu.

  ‘I told you you’d find another sin,’ his fa
ther said in English. ‘I admire your taste. She is a fine-looking woman.’

  ‘Dad . . . in the parlance of my generation, she’s an absolute stunner. That’s why I won’t stand a cat in hell’s chance.’

  He turned again, stealing a last look. A tall, grey-haired man in his fifties was now taking the seat opposite her, a proprietorial touch of his hand on her arm as he did so, and she wasn’t just smiling at him, she was beaming.

  Fat chance.

  § 70

  Troy was in a muddle with his bowtie.

  ‘It’s not essential, my boy.’

  ‘You’re wearing one.’

  His father declined the jibe and stood behind Troy much as he had done ten minutes before every formal occasion of Troy’s childhood, and in a couple of swift motions had tied the tie with what he referred to as his ‘bugger’s grip’.

  ‘And don’t go in there with any sense of awe. It’s all grandiose rather than grand. A mock-palace full of one-armed bandits much as you might find in a London pub – and at that managed by bank clerks and mechanics.’

  Troy said, ‘It looks intimidating. It looks awesome.’

  ‘Before the war – the last war I mean – that might have been true. They still used coins in those days – gold Louis d’Or. In 1909 I saw an English ship’s captain win a small fortune at roulette by putting down one of the shiny buttons off his jacket.’

  ‘And they paid up?’

  ‘Of course they paid. He staggered back to his ship with his pockets stuffed with gold. However, I have no such expectations of you. I’d be happy if you won the price of a good dinner for the two of us.’

  § 71

  Troy wandered. He could see why his dad had warned him of the danger of ‘awe’, it would be easy and it would be a misperception. The casino made Versailles and Les Trianons look understated – tempting as it might be, awe did not strike. This was the lurid fantasy of a king layered with the even more lurid fantasies of commerce. It might look like a royal palace, but it was also, Troy felt, tacky. Tacky and unreal. As unreal as a film set. As unreal as the sets of the silent epics of his childhood, like Ben-Hur and dozens of others that had never lodged in his memory. It came almost as a surprise to pass through the doors and not find the struts and props that supported the papier-maché façade. Inside it was overblown, grandiose to the hilt – too many columns, too much onyx, too much stained glass – and too many characters who looked like leftovers from Central Casting.