A Little White Death

by John Lawton

  ‘I know!’ he said in a breathy tone of utter exasperation, head shaking from side to side, looking at the floor – and Troy knew damn well that he didn’t. ‘But . . . but that’s not the point is it?’

  Troy did not know what the point was. Charlie did not seem to be getting any closer to it.

  ‘Oh fuck it, Freddie. What the British did to him was awful. He had access to nothing that mattered a damn – and they came down on him like a ton of bricks and then . . . and then . . . we went mad. We had a national fit. I can’t think of any better way to put it.’

  Nor could Troy. At last they agreed on something. It had indeed been a national fit. The papers had had a field day of unsupportable allegation and innuendo. To take them seriously would have been to believe that the Civil and Secret Services were riddled with queers, every one of whom was being blackmailed or readily open to blackmail.

  ‘It shocked me. I am accustomed to thinking I cannot be shocked. First we crucify a man of no importance and then we cry wolf louder than ever. We explode in a fury of national breast-beating. And when the press, and I think I have to say “we”, I’ve been a hack these six years now, are called to account, it happens all over again. They won’t name their sources, so two poor sods go to jail for the freedom of the press. What freedom? The freedom to make it up as you go along? It pinpointed a moment for me. It pinpointed something about the country and about myself. Don’t expect me to say it shattered my belief. It didn’t. But it showed it up in all its ambiguities. We break Vassall, a butterfly upon a wheel. Meanwhile the big fish, people like me, are untouchable. I’m not the stuff of jailbirds; I’m the subject of an annual negotiation, the Beirut Tea Party. On the social calendar somewhere between Ascot and the Henley Regatta. The press went barmy. I’ll swear they made up half the stuff they printed about Vassall. And as a hack I’m disgusted with my profession. Then the government wreaks unholy vengeance on the press, and then my sympathies are back the other way. It was madness, Freddie. National madness. All I did was sit in my mother’s living room and read the papers, listen to it unravel on the Home Service and earwig a few tap-room conversations in the West End pubs, but it seemed to me that I was at the heart of it. Of course something snapped in Mr Charlie. Weird, isn’t it?’

  Troy had no idea where this was leading. It seemed almost unbelievable that it was simply the spy’s sentimentality over the lost certainties of his uncertain trade. It was, he too thought, a strange moment in the nation’s history. A battle over truth and freedom, when there was nothing but lies, but the personal way Charlie seemed to take this he could not grasp.

  Charlie rubbed his cheeks and eyes vigorously with both hands as though trying to jerk himself into a finer stage of wakeful coherence. ‘Tell me,’ he said. ‘What is the glue that holds a generation together?’

  ‘Dunno,’ said Troy.

  ‘Shared values?’ said Charlie.

  ‘Partly. Though I think you’ll find they cross generations, or a nation would constantly be at war with itself.’

  Charlie blinked at this as though Troy had just given him enough ammo for another day’s debate, then he waved it aside with his hand and picked up the thread.

  ‘One generation, then, just one.’

  ‘The shared experiences, the common experiences of any stretch of shared time.’

  ‘Good. For a moment there you sounded just like your father. Now, narrow it down to our generation. What binds us together? What’s the glue?’

  This required no thought.

  ‘The war.’

  ‘The war,’ Charlie echoed.

  ‘Yes,’ said Troy. ‘The war.’

  ‘Boom,’ said Charlie, so softly Troy could scarce make out the word. ‘Boom. Boom. Boom!’

  Charlie stretched out a hand across the table. His fingertips just touching Troy’s. His head on one side, resting on the table in a pool of spilt booze. The voice hoarse and low, croaking and slobbering out of him.

  ‘England will go boom. England is going to go boom. And when it does it will be unrecognisable. The England you and I knew will dissolve into dust. And when it does that’s what will go, the common values wrought out of shared experience. The war was the glue, and the glue no longer holds. We’re going to come unstuck. Boom!’

  Troy had to think about this. He knew exactly what Charlie meant, and whatever his motives, whatever his deceptions, Charlie, like brother Rod and countless hundreds of thousands others, had done his bit in the Second World War. Troy had not. He had spent it entirely as a copper. He had not fought, he had not volunteered, he had readily accepted being in a reserved occupation. Nonetheless, he understood Charlie’s point. It was the glue that bound them together. That was undeniable, and its effect was also undeniable. The war, as a phenomenon of memory and culture, persisted long beyond its historical end. The British still lived the war; in their hearts and minds they still fought it. It should not be odd that in the body of a traitor there still beat the heart of an old soldier, and Troy strived laterally to see it as Charlie saw it, to see what snapped, to see what boomed.

  ‘And you think this is tragic, do you? Like Lawrence said after the first war, ours is a tragic age, we just refuse to take it tragically?’

  Charlie reared up off the table, vodka dripping from his hair and cheek, a look of pure astonishment in the bloodshot eyes.

  ‘Tragic? Tragic? Bollocks! I’m mad as hell I won’t be there to see it! It’s everything I’ve worked for all my life. It’s the end of everything I’ve ever hated about the bloody place. What was it Winston said? It is not the end, arf warf grumff, it is not even the beginning of the end, or some rubbish like that . . . but it is perhaps the end of the beginning. That’s it, that’s what I saw last autumn, the end of the beginning! Boom, Freddie, boom! England will go boom, the end of the beginning. It’ll burst at the seams; they’ll be kicking the stuffing out of the old girl; there’ll be horsehair and calico all over the shopand where will I be? Where the fucking hell will I be? Freezing me bloody balls off in bloody Moscow, that’s where! I’d give anything to be in England. Anything. After all I’ve done to bring it about, don’t you think I’d kill to be in England when the lid finally comes off ? London is the place to be right now. London, Freddie, London. Not Omsk not Tomsk not Tosspot-on-Don!’

  He swept the bottle and the glasses to the floor with a mighty blow from his outstretched arm, then he followed them down and lay sprawled, motionless, on the cracked linoleum among the broken glass and vodka. The room gave them the full five seconds of attention they thought worthy of a good drunk and went back to having a good time, or as near to a good a time as the Soviet Union permitted.

  Troy turned. The spook was looking at the two of them, wide eyed and worried.

  ‘Don’t just sit there,’ said Troy. ‘Give me a hand with him.’

  § 15

  They laid him out on the bed, a dead weight, too heavy by far even for the two of them. Troy managed to get his shoes and trousers off, but they could not turn him, so he lay snoring and twitching, tangled up in his fur coat, with a grubby pair of worn underpants gaping at his loins. Troy pulled an eiderdown over him and left him.

  He assumed the woman would vanish as mysteriously as she appeared. They stood a moment in the corridor. She looked both ways like a diligent child practising her kerb drill. He said goodnight and thanked her for her help. She returned his words with a silent, wide-eyed stare. He turned the key in his own door and went in. She followed, put a hand out to his arm.

  ‘Are you going to tell?’ she asked again.

  ‘I don’t know. How do you feel about directing traffic in Novaya Zemlya?’

  He meant it as a joke. She did not smile. It wasn’t funny.

  ‘Why don’t you sit down? Take off your coat.’

  She did not move. He walked round her and closed the door behind them.

  ‘OK. Then start with the hat. Work upto the coat.’

  She pulled off her cap and sat down, still clutching the ca
p.

  ‘I’m Troy,’ he said, almost as though talking to a child.

  ‘I know. Commander Troy. Royal British Navy.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m not. I’m a policeman.’

  ‘Commander is a naval rank, is it not?’

  ‘Except at Scotland Yard, where it’s a police rank. I’m a detective. You are KGB?’

  ‘No. I’m in the militia,’ she said. ‘Not the KGB. I too am a police officer.’

  ‘Well, we have something in common after all. Shall we drink to our common cause?’

  He turned his back on her while he rooted around for the bottle of ouzo he had bought at Athens airport. It would make a change from vodka, and he’d bet she’d never tasted the stuff in her life. He heard the swish as her coat slid off and the double thumpas her shoes hit the floor. The moan of the springs as she settled back in the chair.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  He turned around. She was sitting curled upwith her toes under her backside, just like his wife used to do, one hand toying with her hair, her head on one side, the small heart-shaped face looking up at him, eyes as big as millwheels in the dimness of the room.

  ‘Valentina Vassilievna Asimova – but you can call me Vivi.’

  § 16

  In the morning Troy dressed and packed, and when he could wait no longer for Charlie, shook him awake. ‘What time is it?’ ‘Past noon. I have to leave in a couple of hours.’ ‘Where am I?’

  ‘Monte Carlo.’

  Charlie laughed till he coughed. He eased himself off the mattress. Propped himself up on one elbow. Looked around.

  ‘We should complain to the management. I asked for the Duke of Windsor’s room.’

  He laughed again, muttered, ‘Russia, fucking Russia, what did I ever do to deserve you?’ and staggered into the bathroom to cough fitfully for several minutes.

  When he had stopped Troy knocked gently on the door.

  ‘Charlie – we haven’t a lot of time.’

  ‘It’s not locked.’

  Troy pushed, in some trepidation. Charlie was seated on the loo, red-faced and straining. It was a habit born of schooldays, where none of the stalls in the boys’ bogs had locks and half of them no doors. Defecation was communal. Troy had hated it.

  ‘I’ve just discovered a real disadvantage to Russian nosh,’ said Charlie. ‘It constipates you. I cannot shit for love or money. Shit, shit, shit, I cannot.’

  ‘Why did you get me here?’ Troy asked

  ‘Loose ends. The Russkis seemed surprisingly understanding about it, but then they’d want me to cut off any potential problems, wouldn’t they?’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And it’s chiefly the old dear. My mother. In fact it’s entirely my mother. She has a pittance of a pension. It will not keep her in the manner to which and blahdey blah. I’ve got money in England. Not as much as I had, and nowhere near as much as you’d think. But the old fart won’t touch it. Thinks it’s tainted. I cannot convince her otherwise. I’ve about twelve grand tucked away in Mullins Kelleher. I’ll write you a cheque. You take the money, and see she’s all right. Tell her whatever fib you think’ll work.’

  ‘OK,’ said Troy.

  ‘Old dear’ was just Charlie’s figure of speech. Mrs Leigh-Hunt was nobody’s old dear. She had been a child bride, eighteen when Charlie was born – and she had been born to raise hell. On the few occasions Troy had seen her in recent years she had been living modestly in a village in Hampshire or Sussex or somewhere, and hating it as much as Charlie now hated Russia. He was a little surprised to learn that she was quite so principled about money.

  Twelve grand could turn her life around.

  ‘We never did have money, you know.’

  This was an Englishman speaking. A Communist, a traitor, and, finally, a defector, but an Englishman through and through. Only an Englishman brought upas well as Charlie would ever speak of his circumstances thus. No money meant not enough money. Not enough after the public school fees and the house in the country. In English terms this was tantamount to poverty, and that clearly was how Charlie regarded it. One rung above the workhouse. It was rubbish, but Troy had no heart for the argument. He passed Charlie his jacket, Charlie fumbled in the pockets for his chequebook, Troy lent him his fountain pen and he scribbled out a cheque for twelve thousand pounds, the wage of the British working man for the best part of twenty years. Troy had no way of calculating how far such a sum would go towards the wage of the Russian working man. A lifetime, he thought, or perhaps two.

  ‘I always envied you, you know. Not the money. The security. At least I think that’s the word I mean. After my old man buggered off we seemed to move every couple of years. I’d get home for the hols – it seemed like every couple of terms there’d be a new house and a new bloke to call “uncle”. I could never hang on to anything. My stuff was forever going in or out of packing cases. Lost me teddy bear before I was seven. I used to envy you, and what I envied was the security of the home. You and your mother and your loony sisters and your big brother – I’d love to have had a big brother – and the house. The sheer solidity of it all. The junk of solidity. All that . . . all that sort of Troyness rolling back in time. I felt more at home in your dad’s house than I did in any one of the places I cannot dignify with the word home.’

  This made some sense. Judy Leigh-Hunt had been cursed with good looks and a string of feckless men, usually purporting to be heroes of the First World War. On open days at school there was no knowing with which man she’d turn up, and Charlie withstood a lot of ribbing on the subject of his ‘uncles’ – and in the holidays he would find himself dragged from one watering hole to the next. The cheapskates took him to Scarborough, the spendthrifts to Biarritz. The out-and-out bounders would ditch him entirely, suggesting that perhaps Charlie would prefer to ‘spend the hols with a pal’ – which pal would inevitably be Troy. But in part it was nonsense.

  ‘Charlie, has it ever occurred to you that most of that junk of solidity was fake?’

  ‘Whaddya mean, fake?’

  ‘It didn’t roll back centuries. It didn’t even roll back to the start of this one. The old man left Russia with next to nothing. Most of the junk that you refer to he bought at one time or another – the solidity of time-treasured possessions, history as furniture, which I think is what you mean, was left behind. Most of it is probably locked away in the cellars and attics of the old house on Dolgo-Khamovnichesky Street.’

  ‘Ye gods, I’d hate to have to pronounce that when I’m pissed. However, what’s your point?’

  ‘That it was his creation. What you saw was the world as he made it. Not as he found it.’

  ‘A lesson for us all, eh?’

  A short sentence shot through with silent sighs.

  ‘If you like.’

  ‘I can make my own solidity, my own junk, my own world?’

  Troy said nothing.

  ‘Out of Russia? I can make my world out of Russia!’

  Charlie was shrilly incredulous. Troy said nothing. He had said quite enough for the half-dozen microphones buried in the plasterwork of the walls and ceiling already. He had been speaking of the past, of lost possibilities. There was no world to make now. It was, as Charlie insisted, a time of unmaking. All Charlie had made was his bed and he had to lie in it, and if that bed was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, so be it. He closed the loo door on a ranting Charlie and as he did so heard him sigh, ‘Ah, bliss,’ and, knowing what it presaged, stuffed his fingers in his ears.

  § 17

  Troy waited until they stood on the tarmac at the airport once more.

  ‘I’ve something to ask of you,’ he said.

  ‘Okey doh.’

  ‘Can they hear us?’

  ‘In this wind? This far from a building? Doubt it. If there’s a listening device that can cope at this distance in the open air, I don’t know of it. In a room, no problem. Train a mike on the vibrations in the window, acts like the ear drum and you can pick
up a conversation from a quarter of a mile or more. Out here, the most they could manage is a bugger with binoculars who can lipread. If you really want to tell me a secret, just button upyour collar.’

  Troy did so.

  ‘A favour, Charlie. Years ago a Pole working for your lot told me my father was a Soviet agent. I want to know the truth.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Charlie.

  ‘Can you find out?’

  ‘Do you really want to know?’

  ‘I’ve just said so.’

  ‘A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.’

  ‘I know, you told me. The day before yesterday.’

  ‘Winston meant Russia. But he might just as well have been describing your old man. I say again, do you really want to know?’

  Troy said nothing. Stared at him till he cracked.

  ‘It’ll take a while. I’ll need to get my knees under the table. I’d have to trade a few secrets. But I’ve plenty of those. The real problem would be how could I tell you? We’d need a code.’

  Troy felt momentarily helpless. This was not his world, not his vocabulary.

  ‘Mind,’ Charlie went on. ‘I’ll think of something. Bound to think of something.’

  § 18

  It was still winter when Troy returned home. England under snow. A flying, white visit to Charlie’s mother in Dorset. A small, white, utterly implausible lie about the money. A small mountain of work at the Yard. A small row with Rod.

  ‘Where’ve you been?’

  What was the point? The pain he would give Rod if he said he’d been to Russia. The boredom he would let himself in for if he admitted it and Rod banged on with a thousand questions.

  ‘I can’t tell you.’

  ‘More lies, Freddie?’

  ‘No. Silence.’

  ‘There’s such a thing as lies of silence, you know.’

  ‘If you like, but I still can’t tell you.’

  ‘Sod you then!’

  Rod could not hold a grudge. Partly because he knew that he might wait till kingdom come only to find Troy still silent before him. Partly because decency, that spurious Anglo-Saxon virtue, ran through him deeper than the word Brighton through the eponymous stick of rock. Within a week they were speaking once more. By the end of February affably so, and early one Friday evening, a couple of weeks before Easter, only days, it seemed, after the last evaporation of the most interminably lingering winter, Rod could be found almost horizontal on the sofa in Troy’s sitting room in Goodwin’s Court feeling very fridayish, a cupof tea balanced on his chest, rising and falling with his breathing like a small vessel at sea, red tie at half-mast, beetlecrusher shoes off, odd socks on, lamenting the lot of a member of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, lamenting in particular the small peculiarities of breeding and character that defined the leadership of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition.