by Lawton, John
‘What?’
‘They wanted you in 1940. I stopped it.’
‘You stopped my call-up? You didn’t bloody tell me?’
‘Did you want to go in?’
‘That’s not the point.’
‘Yes it is! You never made any secret of your dislike of the forces. I kept you ’cos I needed you. Just like you kept the boy. If you’d not put your two penn’ orth in he’d have been called up months ago. I need you. I need the pair of you. But I haven’t got you, I’ve got Gutteridge and Thomson.’
‘You keep saying that!’
The kettle whistled on the hob. Onions got up. Troy sat in silence until he felt a tap on his arm, heard Onions say ‘Don’t knock it over’, heard the rattle of him stirring his three sugars. Troy let his cup stand. Onions made awful tea. Deepest brown, merely tinted by milk, fit to tan buckskin.
‘I keep saying that because it’s got my goat. I’m in a pickle. A teenage girl in Golders Green – how respectable can you get? -puts rat poison in the teapot and polishes off the whole family. Least that’s the way it looks.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Done a runner. Not there to ask is she? And a typical Troy case, two naval ratings quarrel over a prossie and the next thing one of them’s found face down in the Serpentine and the other bugger’s denying the lot. You get my point? You’d’ve cracked these nuts in a day or two. But as it happens I don’t have you.’
‘You’ve got Gutteridge and Thomson,’ Troy said, anticipating the echo.
‘More than that,’ Onions said. ‘Fact is I’ll be needing the boy too.’ Troy knew he had to appear calm. Onions hardly ever demanded respect for his rank in any other registration but calm. Outrageous questions could be asked, rebellious refusals offered, but not in anger.
‘Stan, if you do that we’ll lose Wayne.’
‘You already have.’
‘If you take Wildeve off the case I’ll have hell picking up the pieces.’
‘I’ve already got Wildeve. I’ve put him on to both cases an hour ago. I had to. He’ll work as number two to Tom Henrey. Tom’s up to his neck as it is.’
Henrey was a Detective Inspector. But for a slight difference in rank and a larger one in the power of imagination he was Troy’s peer on Onions’s staff. A decent, honest plodder. A man who caused Onions little trouble. There was an obvious question waiting.
‘What about me?’
‘We’ll see. You’re no damn use to me blind. And if you could see now I’d put you on new cases too. If you reckon the Stepney murder’s still hot when you get back, then we’ll see. Happen Tom will crack Golders Green or Hyde Park. On the other hand he might not. Don’t get me wrong, Freddie. Laying aside for the moment that you tried to pull the wool over my eyes and you got caught, you did as good a job as could be done – but it pays to know when to stop.’
‘It seems like yesterday you were telling me—’
‘I know what I told you. Don’t throw my words in my face! Like I said, we’ll see.’
It was a father’s phrasing. The meaningless tactical put-off. No by any other name. We’ll see. The opposite of Troy’s father’s habitual ‘If you like’.
‘We’ll see,’ said Troy ironically. ‘If I see. Stan, I didn’t do this to myself!’
‘That just makes it one more unsolved crime then, doesn’t it?’
‘You know damn well who did this!’
‘Don’t tell me it was Wayne. It wasn’t. He hasn’t been seen since Miller was killed. He wasn’t at the Savoy. According to Wildeve he hadn’t been there since the day you arrested Diana Brack. He’s not likely to materialise out of whatever hidey-hole the Yanks have got him in just for the pleasure of kicking shite out of you.’
Troy listened to the awkward pause. Would Onions ask him why no mention of the Savoy had been made in his reports of the interviews with Brack? Onions began to drum the side of his cup with the spoon. The repetitive noise told Troy the meeting was over. Stan had had his say and was not about to let Troy argue. He heard the springs in the sofa scream as Onions’s bulk released them. The tweed rustle as he fumbled with his coat.
‘I’d best be off. Do you have a doctor looking in on you?’
‘Yes. Kolankiewicz will take the bandages off in five or six days.’
‘Suit yourself. I’d as soon see a pork butcher as that mad bugger. I’ll leave the door off the latch, shall I?’
Onions clunked off the way he had come, leaving the odour of Wills’ Woodbines hanging in the air.
Into his darkness came.
The Whore.
Who called each evening between seven and eight. Chattered aimlessly and cooked a meal for two. Troy said all that was required of him – yes and hmm and nodding interjections falling short of the traditional well-I-never. She did not mention or allude to the problem of his sight. Only her presence there in her chosen role made silent reference to the fact of his helplessness. She left an hour before closing time, telling him that duty called, varying the line with the occasional crack about contributing to the war effort.
Into his darkness came.
The Almost-Doctor.
‘Troy?’
He awoke from a light snooze. The wireless mumbled softly in the background. A voice he did not recognise had spoken to him.
‘Troy. It’s me.’
He still had no idea who she was.
‘Anna Pakenham.’
‘Eh?’
‘Kolankiewicz sent me. He said it’s time your bandages came off.’
He tried to get up and felt her hand spread flat across his chest to stop him.
‘Don’t even think about it. Just stay put and let me get on with it.’
‘Where’s Kolankiewicz?’
‘Sawing bone. Literally. He was busy whipping off the top of a chap’s head the last time I saw him. He sends fraternal greetings and a thousand I told you sos.’
The slick sound of steel on steel as she cut into the bandages.
‘I haven’t done this since I was a medical student, so don’t move or you may lose an ear.’
‘I didn’t know you were a doctor.’
‘I’m not. I was in my next to last year in 1940. My chap was on Hurricanes. Thought it would be all over for us soon, so why didn’t we get married and chuck caution and every other damn thing to the winds. I believed him. As a result I spent the first six months of 1941 thinking I was a widow. The Germans can take for ever to tell you they’ve got someone in a POW camp. My concentration went completely to pot so I took a sabbatical for the duration. Now – I can’t go back till it is over. I work for the Polish beast. And Angus is banged up in Colditz.’
She moved around behind him as she spoke and pulled the mass of bandage free from his head. He had not seen Anna in ages. Curious to think that she would be the first person he saw.
‘I can’t see,’ said Troy. ‘I still can’t bloody see!’
She took him by the chin, talking straight at him. ‘Can you see me at all, Troy? Shapes, light, anything?’
‘Not a damn thing!’
‘You’re going to need patience, Troy. Lots of it.’
Into his darkness came.
The Lover.
He had been a passing-good pianist as a child, neglectful as a young man and nowadays played at best once a fortnight out of duty or boredom. On the afternoon of the seventh day of his blindness he forgot the aching shins, forgave the Victorian upright his mother had given him as a house-warming hint and decided to see how many of the Debussy Préludes he could play from memory. He was prompted less by pre-war memories of Debussy recitals - his mother had taken him to see Walter Gieseking in Hannover - than by recent performances of the blind pianist George Shearing in the London clubs. And in a spirit of ‘so can I’ he fumbled his way to the keyboard and began mangling Danseuses de Delphes. He picked up around the fifth prelude and by the tenth was playing a note-perfect Cathédrale Engloutie. He broke at seven thirty to let Ruby chatter, ate her meal grate
fully, feeling better than he had for days and granted her wish for something she knew, ‘You know, something you can hum’. He bashed away at ‘The Lambeth Walk’, ‘Any Old Iron’ to her shrieks of laughter, and touched by inspiration switched to Gershwin’s ‘Someone to Watch Over Me’. He seemed to have hit the spot. He heard distinct sniffles, and when he stopped she pronounced it ‘loverly’ and said she must dash. Pleased with his efforts Troy took up the tune again. He was still playing it when the door opened several minutes later. He thought it must be Ruby, finding some excuse to return, but as the evening breeze through the doorway brought the scent of Je Reviens to his nostrils he knew it was Brack.
Her fingers began at the top of his ear and ran lightly down his cheekbone. The tip of her little finger parted his lips and her tongue danced over his ear. He stopped, paralysed by the wave of lust that shot through his body, fingers frozen on the keyboard holding down the last chord. He swivelled on the piano stool, to bury his face in her clothes, to swim in the smell of her.
‘Hey, baby. Don’t stop. I’m kinda fond of Gershwin.’
He screamed out loud, shot upright off the stool and fell back against the wall. He hit his head hard and sank down to the floor. The great gust of Je Reviens came closer.
‘Wassamatter, baby? Did I startle you?’
A hand plucked at his. She had not the weight to pull him to his feet.
‘Easy now. Come to momma.’
He stood, shaking with fright. Tosca wrapped her arms around him. Kissed him gently on the lips, scenting him into a deeper confusion.
‘You’ve changed your scent,’ he said at last.
‘And there was I thinking you’d never notice. We just pulled one of our guys out of Paris. Abwehr getting too close. He brought me this as a treat. Reckons you can’t get the stuff over here for love or money these days.’
‘He’s right,’ Troy gasped. ‘Look. You must go now.’
‘Go? I only just got here. I’ve not seen you for over two weeks. I was beginning to think something had happened to you. You’re a very hard man to find. How come you never told me where you live? If I’d known we were this close . . .’
‘No. No,’ he was almost screaming. ‘You must go now! It’s not . . . it’s not . . . it’s not safe!’
‘Not safe? Not safe from whom? Oh. I get it. You mean Scotland Yard?’
Troy clutched at the straw.
‘Yes. That’s it. My Super. He drops in the evenings.’
‘You mean he’d give you a hard time for having me around? Couldn’t I be your cousin Katie from Kalamazoo?’
‘No. No please. You must leave before—’
He felt the flutter of air across his eyelashes. She was waving her hand close to his face.
‘Goddammit. You can’t see me, can you?’
Troy made no answer. Felt two hands grip his skull and yank his head down. Logically he must be looking into her eyes and she was most certainly looking into his.
‘I was right, something has happened to you. Oh my God!’
‘It’s temporary. Honestly. The bandages came off yesterday. My sight’s returning. It’ll just take a while that’s all.’
If he could be certain in which direction the door lay he would have ushered her towards it.
‘Please,’ he said, praying she would ask for no more reasons. Praying in particular that she would not ask how blindness had come upon him.
She kissed him again.
‘OK. OK . . . but you come see me the minute you can see.’ She kissed him again. He heard her sigh with a sense of finality and knew she believed the lie she had placed on his lips. He heard the door squeak open. She stopped.
‘Troy? You still love me, don’t you? I mean it’s just the eyes. There’s nothing else I should know about?’
‘Nothing,’ he lied. ‘Nothing at all.’
It seemed to him at that moment that his life had become bound up in a web of lies – a web entirely of his own weaving. He knew why the smell of Je Reviens on her had struck terror into him. He knew that he had panicked at the thought of her being there when Brack showed up, but there were depths to that yawning back into childhood – besides he had seen nothing of Brack since before the tram ride out to Stepney.
Within the hour the door squeaked its long squeak again. Another wafting stream of Je Reviens. His pulse raced. He held his breath for a seeming age. The latch on the Yale clicked to.
‘I had begun to assume the worst,’ Brack said at last.
66
After. She sliding off him – him damply detumescent. She kissed him softly on each eyelid, anointing, and lay back to sleep in the crook of his arm. He heard her breathing assume the rhythm of sleep, and in a matter of minutes drifted off to follow her.
It was light when he awoke. She was still there. The first time. He had wrestled a few seconds with double and triple vision before he realised that he could see again.
He found he could focus almost clearly for ten seconds or so by extreme concentration. He held the window, seeing it slide from fours to threes to single vision, then he let his eyes relax and the image dissolved. He tried pulling Brack into focus, close as she was, and slowly a lock of hair, swept over an ear, resolved itself for him. He touched the ear. She made a sleep murmur but did not move. He ran his fingertips down to the lobe and focused harder. What his fingers had felt was a plain gold sleeper ring, pushed through the hole in her ear. The silver-mounted pearl ear-ring was still in the breast pocket of his overcoat where he had placed it days ago. Whoever had dropped it in Wolinski’s flat it wasn’t Brack. He had almost hoped it was, it would have simplified things enormously – but simplicity wasn’t everything.
She cooked breakfast for two. Wrapped in his old silk dressinggown, fussing at the stove to the baritone burble of the wireless. Chatter would have cut through the awkwardness of it all but she did not chatter Рto chatter was unBrack. She placed a boiled egg, perched precariously in its chick-pattern eggcup, in front of him. He watched her fragmenting like silvers of glass in a kaleidoscope. He pulled her into focus and she leaned across to slice the top neatly off his egg. When she sat back he could see her clearly, could see that she was smiling Рthat wide, beautiful mouth with its even white teeth Рand pushing the errant lock of hair back behind one ear. The vulnerability of sleep excepted he had not seen her smile since the night they had met at the Tippett. For the first time he saw familiar features in her face. She bore a striking resemblance to the actress Judy Campbell, so often to be seen in the plays of Noël Coward, and Miss Campbell herself was Greta Garbo sketched by Modigliani.
‘What’re you staring at?’
‘Just staring. Just pleased to be able to do it.’
He watched her eat, left his egg untouched, touched as he was by what he saw as the grace of every movement she made. She was only spooning egg, but to Troy, watching in soft focus, she might have been making all the hand-passes of a Japanese ritual. Precise and positive and incomprehensible.
‘Eat your egg,’ she said.
And he bent to breakfast, wondering what it was that he could see in her and put no words to. A face to kill or die for – that had been his first reaction to her that day in Tite Street. But that was a world away. He could no longer see quite what he had meant by the notion.
‘Have you looked in a mirror today?’ she asked as he finished. ‘You have a week of stubble.’
Troy put a hand to his face. He had not attempted shaving and had all but forgotten what he must look like.
‘Tomorrow,’ he said. ‘I’m not up to that yet.’
She went up to the bathroom and returned with his strop, his cut-throat and his badger-hair shaving brush. She whipped up a foam at the sink and set a bowl of hot water in front of him. The towel was tucked around his throat before she stated the obvious.
‘I shall shave you.’
‘Have you done this before?’
‘Yes.’
She lathered his face. Troy closed his ey
es and searched for the last tinge of burnt cinnamon that still clung to her. Felt the silky rasp of the blade across his throat, gliding up his cheeks, gently shaping itself to his top lip. She said not a word. Troy became acutely conscious of her breathing, a deep slow rhythm softly reassuring him, resolutely seducing him. She wiped him dry. Her fingers rested a moment on his left cheek an inch below the eye, the ball of her thumb playing firmly over the same spot. The steel touched his face again, held still, poised, and then in a quick, hard action bit into his cheek. He opened his eyes, felt the trickle of blood start out across his face, saw her bend down to kiss the wound.
She stood back. Licked her lips, a smear of his blood still clung to the lower. She smiled, but he knew it had been deliberate.
67
Three days later, his eyes functioning normally again, the cut on his face a tiny ribbon of scabs, the red cloud a troublesome memory, Troy returned to work.
It was too early for Wildeve. His desk was neat and piled high in paperwork. Troy’s desk was neater still – empty but for his blotter and his calendar. He reached across the desk and picked up the calendar, pages unturned for weeks, the date stuck like a stopped clock at the day of his last interview with Brack. He tore off the thick wadge in a single gesture, and as the pages fluttered down into his waste-paper basket he heard the tap of a hand on the frame of the open door.
‘’Bout time. I was beginning to think I’d imagined you.’
Onions rested his weight against the door jamb. As much as Onions did, he smiled.
‘If ever I needed you it was today.’
‘Trouble?’ Troy asked hopefully, feeling a dark whisper begin to start up in his blood.
‘D’ye know the Black Swan, East India Dock Road?’
Troy shook his head.