A Little White Death

by John Lawton

  ‘They’re bastards. The pair of ’em. Bloody Brown. Bloody Wilson. Bastards.’

  Troy had known Brown for several years – a young light from the trades union movement, outspoken, emotional, and impossible when pissed. He had met Wilson just the once, at a dinner party Rod had thrown for the Labour nobs – a former Oxford don, a professional Yorkshireman, whom Troy had thought about as fascinating as congealing custard, unredeemed by wit or wickedness or the prospect of a good indiscretion when drunk; a ‘man of the people’ who chomped on a pipe in public for the sake of the image and in private puffed away at cigars, and who habitually wore a hideous fawn macintosh, spun out of some new synthetic fabric, in an effort to make himself appear more ‘ordinary’. He always succeeded in this – effortlessly. Troy had on occasion wondered which of the Labour Party wags – Rod? Or the equally waggish Tom Driberg? – had told him he needed to be more ‘ordinary’, and why Wilson had not recognised that he was being sent up.

  Of the two Troy preferred Brown, and this in no way took account of his politics within the internal, infernal machinations of the wretched party. Brown’s tactless unreliability at least smacked of honesty, not a word one would ever think of in the same sentence as the word Wilson. Wilson, it was, some old Socialist had dubbed ‘the desiccated calculating machine’. Rod was content with calling him ‘Mittiavelli’, a poor man’s Machiavelli. He had reduced himself and Troy to hysterics a while ago by asking, ‘What do you get if you cross Walter Mitty with Machiavelli?’ The answer – Harold Wilson. And he’d been Mittiavelli ever since. But if Rod was going to sit here and ruin Friday evening with a whinge about the pair of them, there was an obvious question lurking in the wings.

  ‘You made them a gift of the leadership. Why didn’t you stand?’

  ‘Why not?’ Rod said. ‘Perfectly good reason when it came down to it. Do you remember what Jack Kennedy said in his inaugural?’

  ‘Yep, he said watch out, commies, we’re a-gonna blast yer.’

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ Rod said softly. ‘Do you have to be quite so cynical? He said no such thing.’

  ‘Yes he did. Meet any challenge, fight any foe, zapany country, look out world. He’s a cold warrior, Rod. It was a speech of warmongering patriotic hokum.’

  ‘Freddie, I’ve met the man, you haven’t. He is not a—’

  ‘Yes I have.’

  ‘Have what?’

  ‘Met him.’

  ‘When?’

  Rod looked at Troy in utter disbelief.

  ‘Just before the war. When his dad was the ambassador. You were busy doing your stint as the Post’s man in Berlin. The old man invited the Kennedys out to Mimram. Jack was this tall skinny thing, he’d be about twenty or twenty-one I suppose. I was not much older. The old man stuck us together on the assumption common age might yield common interest. Fat chance.’

  ‘Oh? What did you talk about?’

  ‘We stood on the verandah. Nice sort of evening, sort of balmy, the kind of summer evenings we don’t get any more. He said, “Sho this is the English countryshide?” Not exactly a conversation piece – all you can say is “yes”. “Sho,” he said, “what doesh a man have to do to get laid in the English countryshide?”’

  ‘You’re making this up.’

  ‘No, honestly—’

  ‘You know, cynicism will be the death of you.’

  ‘It’s true, all of it. I fixed him upwith Ted Driffield’s daughter.’

  Rod’s voice rose to parliamentary peak, the polite bludgeoning of the House of Commons. How to shout down an opponent without getting slung out by the Speaker.

  ‘Cynicism and lies will be the death of you! The President of the United States does not come to rural Hertfordshire simply to get laid, and it’s got nothing to do with the point I was trying to make!’

  He ground to a halt. Lost for words.

  ‘What was I saying?’

  ‘Inaugrual speech,’ Troy prompted.

  ‘Right. What he said was something about let the word go forth, et cetera et cetera, the torch – that’s it – the torch has been passed to a new generation.’

  ‘So that’s why you wouldn’t stand? The torch has been passed to Harold Wilson? He’s the “new generation”? You’re mad.’

  ‘It was too late for me and I knew it. The party wasn’t looking for a man for the next couple of years, it was looking for a leader to take them into the seventies. By 1970 I’ll be sixty-two.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Too old. I knew it in my bones. Time to pass on the torch.’

  ‘Maybe – but younger men? Wilson and Brown!’

  ‘They’re ten years younger than me.’

  ‘So? Wilson’s a bore and George is a liability. For God’s sake, Rod, Harold Wilson was born middle-aged!’

  ‘As a matter of fact, they’re both younger than you.’

  Troy shrugged a silent ‘so what?’

  ‘Don’t you ever get the feeling that it’s time to pass on the torch, that your generation has had its chance?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You will. Take my word for it.’

  Rod lapsed into silence, giving Troy time to digest this. Troy silently spat it out. The phone rang. And rang. And rang.

  ‘You going to answer that?’ Rod said at last.

  Troy picked up the telephone and heard Anna’s voice for the first time in several weeks.

  ‘Troy. So glad I caught you. Look, are you free this evening?’

  ‘Depends,’ said Troy.

  ‘Don’t be so damn cagey. I was only trying to ask you out.’

  Anna was an ex-girlfriend – a word that caused Troy on occasion to wonder how pertinent it could be when applied to a married woman of forty-three or four. She was also Troy’s doctor, and one of the few women to penetrate the male domain of Harley Street. It was her habit to call from time to time with just such lines as she was using now.

  ‘There’s a quartet playing in Notting Hill tonight. Paddy Fitz is putting together a bit of a crowd. We thought you might like to join us.’

  Notting Hill was hardly a tantalising qualification to the offer. It was a rough, largely black area of London north and west of the park. For ten years now it had been the rising ghetto of Britain’s Caribbean immigrants, a run-down neighbourhood of large houses split into tiny flats and ruthlessly exploited by slum landlords. To call it ‘notorious’ would not have been overstating the case. But then, Anna thought like a doctor and Troy like a policeman.

  ‘Calypso isn’t really my cup of tea,’ he said.

  ‘’T’isn’t calypso. It’s jazz. Or I wouldn’t be asking. You think I don’t know you by now?’

  ‘Putting together a bit of a crowd’ brought out suspicion in Troy – a quality, if such it be, never far from the surface at the best of times – but the truth was, the invitation appealed. To go home to Mimram with Rod in this mood would clearly be to subject himself to a couple of days’ political whingeing. And whilst he could not rely on Anna’s opinion in music, Fitz was known for his discrimination. Fitz, put simply, had taste. He put a hand across the mouthpiece.

  ‘Can you drive yourself tonight?’

  ‘Don’t see why not. Your car, I assume?’

  Rod drove one of the new mini cars that had swept Britain, and most other countries, over the last couple of years. Fashionable as hell in British racing green – the same deepgreen as Stirling Moss’s Vanwall – but tiny. Rod was a stout six footer and fitted into Troy’s 1952 five-litre Bentley Continental much more comfortably than he did into his everyman’s Mini Minor. Owning the symbol of Britain’s new classlessness, he took every opportunity to borrow Troy’s symbol of the old wealth.

  ‘OK. But I must have it back Sunday night.’

  ‘Done,’ said Rod.

  ‘Anna. When and where?’

  ‘I’ll pick you up around eight.’

  § 19

  It was a beautiful evening. A warmish day, a darkening sky patterned with blown clouds and the hint of rain
poised in the air. Troy washed, changed his shirt, propped open the front door, sat awhile in the spring breeze that wafted in from the courtyard, and thought of Paddy Fitz. Patrick Fitzpatrick was the senior partner in Anna’s practice. He was a good-looking, if epicene, man of fifty or so, tall, affable, cultured to the extremes – eclectic or catholic – and outlandishly well read and well spoken. He would talk of anything and everything in what Troy could only think of as an upper-class English drawl. He was single. And he was also, far and away, the most rumoured-about man Troy knew.

  He had begun life as plain Patrick Alan Smith. This, Troy knew to be true. He had changed his name by deed poll to the Fordian symmetry of Patrick Alleyn Fitzpatrick, and had acquired his accent by a mysterious process of practice and attrition – intoning into the mirror while one shaved and cocking a keen ear to the strains those class confrères around one will buff all but the most immovable of accents. Professor Higgins had little on Fitz. He was a grammar school boy from Cheshire. No public school. No Oxbridge. School certificate and a medical degree at a redbrick university. But you would never know it to listen to him. If asked – confronted was hardly the word – he would deny nothing, would even reminisce, in tones of irony, about a childhood in the ‘arse-end of nowhere’ and joke about wearing clogs and learning the alphabet on a slate. But if not asked, the line between the man he was and the man he had made was seamless. Paddy Fitz was a wordspinner, an inventor, a weaver of dreams. And he spun words by the million, wove who knew what dreams, and invented nothing better, no one finer, than himself. Where his powers of invention stopped, the power of rumour took over. He was single . . . ergo he was queer . . . ergo a roué . . . ergo he swung both ways. He was more than well off from his practice – a patient list dotted with duchesses and ambassadors and cabinet ministers – ergo . . . he could not have come by his money honestly – when he so transparently had if one but looked at his bills – ergo . . . he had fiddles . . . things going on on the side . . . performed abortions . . . sold dope.

  All in all, Fitz adored rumours. Troy had long ago concluded that he spread most of them himself and took a wicked delight in seeing how long they took to come full circle. Nonetheless the power of such rumour caused problems. Problems, to say the least, of protocol. Fitz might cultivate a friendship with Troy. Troy did not and could not cultivate one with him. He was thinking just this, to the point of cold feet, when Anna tapped gently on the door.

  ‘Are you ready, you silly old sod?’

  Troy could not remember when they had last met. Christmas? New Year? They had ditched one another as lovers years before, in the mid-1950s, and apart from an initially rocky period had managed a passably loyal friendship ever since. Much like the one they had had during the war, the one they should never have surrendered to the futility of sex, when Anna had worked as Kolankiewicz’s assistant at the Metropolitan Police Laboratory in Hendon, and their talk had consisted of little else but death.

  ‘You are coming, aren’t you?’ The eyes wide, the rising tone of hope frustrated in her voice. ‘Troy?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I suppose I am.’

  She zipped them along Oxford Street, across the top of Hyde Park, in the direction of Notting Hill Gate, in her little Triumph Herald Vitesse. It was a sturdier, more stylish car than Rod’s Mini. Strong, square lines, rather than the blown soapbubble of the Mini. But sitting inside it was womb-like, dark beneath the soft top, the first drops of evening rain beginning to patter on the roof. The Triumph Herald would make a great summer car, Troy thought, if we ever had a summer again.

  Anna swung the car right at the Gate, left into Portobello Road and brought it to a halt in St Aubyn Street, outside a garishly painted house – the blues and reds of the Cool in the Shade Club, number 98 St Aubyn Street, or as it preferred to put it, 98.6. ‘Come in and cool your blood’ the sign seemed to imply, rather like the famous hippopotamus in mud, mud, glorious mud.

  Down a narrow staircase. Out into a wide basement, far far bigger than the outside proportions would ever have led him to guess. A small stage at one end, a scattering of tiny tables in the centre, and a U-shaped row of booths around the edges. It took a minute for his eyes to get accustomed to the light – or rather the lack of light. It was dimly lit and the dimness augmented by a hefty layer of smoke, a certain something in the air, and by deepblue walls, deepblue ceilings, scattered with myriad stars. To achieve the effect, the club’s proprietors had painted over everything – no line had ever given the paintbrush cause to pause – light fittings, doors, windows, the lot, were all the same rich, dark blue.

  Troy saw a hand waving at them from a centre booth. Paddy Fitz rose. Kissed Anna – the token tap on her cheek – shook hands with Troy and proffered the introductions.

  ‘Troy. You and Tommy know each other, don’t you?’

  A tall, fat, balding, smiley man plucked himself from Anna’s embrace.

  ‘Of course,’ said Tommy Athelnay. ‘Long time no see, o’ man.’

  This was their way. Troy was not his ‘old man’. Never had been. He and Lord Athelnay were at best nodding acquaintances. Old Tommy had had far more to do with Troy’s brother and sisters than he ever had with Troy himself.

  ‘And’, Fitz went on, ‘the twins, Tara and Caro Ffitch. Frederick Troy.’

  Tommy Athelnay resumed his seat. Whichever of the two blonde women less than half his age it was that had taken upwith him for the evening slipped her arm through his, smiled sweetly up at Troy and kissed the old man softly on the ear.

  He blushed. Troy could have sworn he blushed. The merest reddening of the ear and cheek, but a blush by any other name.

  The other one of these women-like-bookends said hello to Troy and made no response whatsoever as Fitz stretched both arms out along the back of the booth and let his fingers rest lightly on her shoulder. Troy and Anna squeezed in. He found himself facing Tommy Athelnay and one of the Ffitch girls. It was, he concluded instantly, a slumming night. A few Mayfair toffs deciding it would be radically chic to spend an evening in a black club just beyond the boundaries of their known civilisation.

  Fitz could be no more than fifty or fifty-one, he thought, but Tommy was in his sixties. He doubted these women were much more than girls, twenty or twenty-one, looking, with their dyed blonde hair, their deepred fingernails and their expensive little cocktail dresses, like sex in a packet. Just add water – well, to be precise, just add man over forty. The women were gorgeous. And whilst they clearly had the desired – or could it be undesired? Who in their right mind would want to be seen sexually aroused, sexually provoked in public? – effect on Tommy, Fitz was as ‘cool’ as the club they sat in. His arm shot up. A waiter ambled over, casual enough to be ‘cool’, and took Fitz’s order for more champagne.

  ‘You’re going to like this, Freddie,’ Fitz said, stuffing a cigarette into the end of a short black holder. ‘In fact you’re going to love it. I thought of you the minute I first heard these chaps play. Reminded me of you.’

  Troy had no idea what to say to this, indeed could not remember when Fitz had heard him play. So often he played to and for himself.

  They moved and spoke for Troy as though in a bubble. He was there and not there. Fitz flowed on with a languid, witty line of small talk and sat as though holding court, name-dropping, name-gathering and slandering half London in the process. Dozens, it seemed, came upand said hello, and each time Fitz introduced Troy to, invariably, total strangers with a ‘You know Troy, don’t you?’ – just as he’d done with Tommy Athelnay. At no point did he add to this. Troy was not an old friend of Anna’s, was not a policeman, was not Scotland’s Yard’s chief detective. He was anonymous but for the uninformative label that was his name. He was glad of this. The job was a show-stopper and he had no wish to stop the show. At the same time he could not help the feeling that it was all on the level of a private joke, that he knew and Fitz knew, but the endless stream of slumming toffs, cockney wide boys and loudly dressed blacks did not. A feeling
began to grow in him that he was somehow Fitz’s trophy.

  All the time a private conversation was taking place in the corner as Tommy reduced his escort to giggles with inaudible nothings, and the movement of her arm told Troy that beneath the table her hand was almost certainly caressing his cock. They were remarkably beautiful and physically identical, but they were not twins. He’d lived all his life with twins. His sisters moved as one, more often than not thought as one. This pair did not. The sameness of face was not matched by sameness of posture, of gesture, the small, almost uncontrollable, unconscious actions of the body. Even the look in their eyes was different. The one with Fitz radiated self-assurance to Troy; the one with Tommy did not. He could see why everyone else at this table was fooled by their twins line, but he was not.

  The band were brilliant, far better than Troy had even dared to hope. A tight, four-piece unit of bass, drums, trumpet and a tenor sax who occasionally played baritone too. He could hear hints of Roy Eldridge and Miles Davis in the trumpeter; he could hear the milder, earlier Coltrane in the sax player, and the rumbling, grumbling influence of Gerry Mulligan when he switched to baritone.

  At the end of the first set they took a break. Fitz beckoned and the sax player came over. A tall, thin black man – skin of black hue that looked almost blue. He pulled up a chair. Fitz called for another glass. The man introduced himself as Philly. Troy had made the immediate assumption, entering a club in Notting Hill, that a black band would be Caribbean, but Philly’s accent and name told him otherwise.