A Little White Death

by John Lawton

  ‘Are you all Americans?’ he asked.

  ‘Well . . . I am. And I ain’t from Philly. I’m from Weehawken, New Jersey. Lou there . . .’ Philly squirmed in his seat, pointing to the trumpeter. ‘He’s Harlem born and raised. Up on Lenox Avenue. Played with Ellington and Basie in his time. Errol on bass is from Barbados and Cliff on drums is English – citizen of Shepherd’s Bush.’

  ‘Quite a mixture,’ said Troy, failing miserably at the small talk. ‘You stir it well.’

  Philly accepted the compliment with a silent smile.

  ‘Gets kinda hard to keep it together sometimes.’

  ‘Musical differences?’ Troy asked.

  ‘Work permits,’ Philly said succinctly. ‘Way things are goin’, Cliff be drummin’ on his own.’

  Troy looked at Fitz. He was never certain where Fitz was concerned what his motives might be. It crossed his mind that Fitz might just have got him here in the hope he would drop a word in Rod’s ear. But then Fitz said, ‘Troy is the chap I was telling you about. Damn fine pianist.’

  Philly nodded. ‘You wanna sit in on the second set, man? Blow the dust off the ivories?’

  This was the last thing Troy had expected. It was embarrassing – it was flattering – to play with a man who played with Ellington. It was corrupting.

  ‘I . . . er . . . why not?’ he said, and Philly led the way back to the small stage and threw the dustcover off the upright piano.

  Troy riffled through a quick couple of scales. It was tuned.

  ‘Just tell us what you want, man.’

  ‘Rodgers and Hart. Do you know “My Funny Valentine”? The version by Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker?’

  ‘The ’53 or the ’57?’

  ‘The ’53.’

  ‘Ain’t no piano on the ’53, man.’

  ‘I know,’ said Troy. ‘It leaves me a bit of room.’

  ‘You wanna lead?’

  ‘No, I’ll follow. Just give me the nod when you’re ready.’

  The trumpet opened, passed the lead to Philly and from Philly to Troy, who managed not, he thought, to mess it up.

  It was one of the most haunting tunes in the repertoire of standards, Troy had long thought. It ranked with Kern and Harbach’s ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ and rare, less sentimental renditions of Arlen and Harburg’s ‘Over the Rainbow’. The audience clearly loved it, and as he rose to go back to the table he felt Philly’s hand pressing him back onto the piano stool.

  ‘Just one more, man. Just one more. You got any other tricks up your sleeve?’

  It did occur to him to suggest Gershwin’s ‘I Got Plenty O’ Nuttin’, from Porgy and Bess. Charlie seemed to have lodged the tune perpetually in his mind – but it wasn’t ‘cool’; in fact it was downright perky. Instead he turned to the band and said, ‘How about “My Man’s Gone Now”?’

  He had been tinkering for weeks with Grainger’s piano arrangement, his ‘fantasy’, deciphering the way the madman had spread Porgy and Bess across two pianos and four hands and crammed it into twenty minutes, wondering how much of it he in turn could cram into his own two hands. But it suited the mood, that air of melancholy, almost outweighed by the heat haze of languor that hung about the tune.

  They said nothing. Put their heads together. Then Philly turned to him and said, ‘OK. Lou will pick up from you.’

  This surprised and pleased Troy – a rare pleasure for a front-parlour pianist to alternate with a trumpet. He wove his cautious improvisation around the left hand and saw Lou stick in the mute. He gave it two minutes, gently nodded and Lou picked up the melody with a lost-in-the-distance whine, a steam-train-somewherein-the-next-state, canyon-over-the-mountain whine, that almost made his blood run cold. It was good, good enough to make the parlour pianist in him want to give up and listen for the rest of his life. The man blew like the Angel Gabriel. By the time he passed back to Troy seven minutes later, he had the room on its feet stomping and whistling and clapping.

  It pays to know when to quit. Troy rounded up the tune like a dutiful sheepdog, brought in the sax, and drew the song to a neat conclusion.

  Lou leant in to Troy beneath the applause.

  ‘Not bad. Not bad at all.’

  ‘I know,’ said Troy. ‘This is where you tell me not to give up my day job.’

  ‘Well. Mebbe go fifty-fifty on it. Say, what is your day job?’

  ‘If I told you, you wouldn’t believe me.’

  ‘Why? You ain’t the heat are you?’

  ‘Hot as hell,’ said Troy, and the band laughed like drains. He headed for the lavatory and let them take a bow without him.

  In the lavatory the aroma that had troubled him all evening finally showed its source. Two West Indians stood chatting and passing a reefer back and forth between them. Even the presence of a middle-aged white man gave them no cause to do anything much more than glance upas he came in. They huddled against the wall, unsmilingly serious about the business, sucking in their cheeks to squeeze the last hit out of a tiny stub, croaking in strangulated whispers as they attempted to hold in the smoke and talk at the same time. It was all too familiar.

  He sat in a cubicle biding his time and giving them five minutes to go away. If they were still there when he came out, he thought, he’d arrest them. Well, he’d probably arrest them. By the fifth minute ‘probably’ had dwindled to ‘might’, to an earnest wish that they would just bugger off. They did, and he emerged from the bog to that unmistakable heady, herby smell of pot and a firm resolution that he and Anna were leaving, whether she liked it or not.

  When he got back to their booth Fitz was on his feet helping Anna into her coat.

  ‘You don’t mind do you, Troy? I’m just . . . well sort of pooped.’

  § 20

  He leant well back in the seat. Closed his eyes and replayed Lou’s solo in the mind’s ear.

  ‘Well,’ Anna said.

  ‘Well what?’

  ‘What did you think of it?’

  ‘Band were good . . .’

  ‘I can hear a “but” bubbling to the surface.’

  ‘But . . . whatever the company of young women like those does for Fitz, it makes me feel old.’

  ‘You?! Old?! What the bloody hell do you think it does for me? You haven’t got tits heading for the equator faster than Blue Streak. You haven’t got dimples in your thighs the size of lunar craters. You don’t put on half a stone if you just look at cream cake.’

  ‘Sorry I spoke,’ said Troy.

  § 21

  It was a week before they spoke again. Anna called him at the Yard, on the eve of the long weekend.

  ‘You have got the weekend off, haven’t you? You see, Tommy Athelnay’s invited us all down to Uphill for the holiday. You know, one of those pre-war long weekends. Turn up for tea on Saturday, set off home same time Monday, back in London before bedtime.’

  ‘Us?’ Troy said simply. ‘All?’

  ‘Well you and me, and the Ffitch girls, and a couple of Fitz’s friends. Chap called Tony, someone he calls Marty, and a girl called Clover. I know her – she’s part of that odd harem Fitz has at the mews house. Funny little thing. Never met Tony or Marty, or at least I don’t think I have. Tommy doesn’t go a lot on surnames – but it’ll be about a dozen in all I should think.’

  Troy said nothing, so she prattled on to coax him.

  ‘I say Tommy’s asked us, but we’d stay with Fitz of course. He rents the south lodge off Tommy. Tommy’s lived in the north lodge ever since Uphill Park got bombed in the war.’

  ‘You think the prospect of prolonged exposure to Tommy would put me off, do you?’

  ‘I never know with you, Troy. The slightest thing can put you off. Tommy can be a bit of a bore, but you’re one of the most awkward buggers I know.’

  ‘And what about Fitz?’

  ‘What about Fitz? You’re not saying you’ve anything against Fitz?’

  Troy knew Anna. He could imagine her clearly now, spluttering with incredulity. He chose his words c
arefully.

  ‘He pricks me.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I think I mean he flirts with me. It’s a kind of flirtation. He flirts with the law.’

  ‘Can’t say as I’ve noticed.’

  ‘You wouldn’t.’

  ‘I mean, you’re not saying you think Fitz is a wrong ’un are you? He’s a rogue, but hardly a wrong ’un.’

  ‘No. I’m saying that he thinks he is. In his own mind he thinks he’s outside the law. The flirtation is in wanting also to be above the law.’

  ‘Now you have lost me.’

  ‘Why are most criminals caught?’

  ‘In my limited experience because they leave their fingerprints all over the shop. The average criminal seems not to be able to afford the price of a pair of gloves. Perhaps that’s what drives them to crime in the first place? And they don’t reckon with Kolankiewicz and his bag of forensic tricks. And then, they don’t much reckon with you I suppose. The relentless plod who never stops. You know “neither rain, nor snow, nor something something shall stop. . .”, and all that.’

  ‘I think you’ll find it’s the New York Post Office who never stop. No. Most criminals are caught because they want to be caught. Greater by far than the profit motive is the wish to be able to fling the defiant act in the face of authority.’

  ‘And you think that’s what Fitz is doing to you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But he’s not a criminal.’

  ‘No. He’s not.’

  ‘Then I still don’t get it.’

  ‘You think inviting me to sit in a cellar that reeks of pot-smoking, where men roll up reefers in the lavatory, isn’t flirtation, the flirtation I’ve just described?’

  ‘Did it reek of pot? I can’t say I noticed. I mean you expect the odd whiff. It wouldn’t be jazz and it wouldn’t be jazz in Notting Hill if there weren’t a dash of that sort of thing. I mean. Negroes do that sort of thing, don’t they? One sort of expects it of them, doesn’t one?’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘Yes – but you’re a policeman . . . oh bugger. This is rather where we came in, isn’t it?’

  ‘Quite. And I think by now you ought to be able to see that he associates with such people because it gives him sin by association, vicarious pleasure without the guilt, and then, to crown it all he wants me to see it. He wants me, relentless plod as you put it, to see how untouchable he is in the middle of all this vicarious pleasure, this second-hand guilt. The eyes of Nero and the hands of Pontius Pilate. That’s Paddy Fitz.’

  ‘He doesn’t mean any harm, you know.’ There was a bottomless sadness in her voice.

  ‘Convince me,’ said Troy.

  § 22

  Troy let Anna drive. She was thrilled to be behind the wheel of a seventeen-foot Bentley, and she was a better driver than Troy. Most people were.

  He did not go often to Sussex. For all its proximity to London, it was not a part of England he knew well. He thought, as Anna drove him south, that it undulated in that classic way of rolling English countryside. He’d seen it in all those pre-war films, he’d seen it from time to time from train windows on his way to Brighton. He had never been sure of the etymology of the word ‘Downs’. Clearly, they were ‘Ups’, two chains of hills that wended their way from somewhere in the middle of southern England – Troy had no idea where – eastward to the coast. The North Downs sort of fizzled out in Canterbury, and the South Downs leapt to their death near Beachy Head, and between the two lay a curved plain that took up much of East Sussex and Kent. To cross them was a delight, revelation after revelation, a peeling away of horizon from horizon.

  In its day, Uphill Park had been famous. It had been built by Inigo Jones for some ancestor of Tommy Athelnay’s, with later additions by various hands and, later still, gardens by Humphry Repton. It had peaked about 1860, gone slowly downhill, in every sense but the nominal and literal, throughout the previous century, and had been in very poor condition, though still inhabited, when a stray doodlebug chugged out sixty-odd miles short of its target and finally saw it off in the summer of 1944. Queen Elizabeth may never have ‘slept here’, but Queen Anne had, and so had Mr Gladstone, William IV, Gilbert White and Admiral Nelson – to say nothing of Lady Hamilton.

  All that remained were the walls, and the north and south lodges. But the lodges were on the grand scale and occupied one of the best vantage points in the county, a sharply rising, flat-topped hill that had long, long ago been an island in the tidal inrush of the channel until centuries of silt had embedded it firmly in the surrounding mainland, above which it now rose as sharply as a sandcastle. The lodges had been built as follies by the mid-Victorian umpteenth Viscount Athelnay. From the road, and from the surrounding countryside, they appeared to be the craggy ruins of mediaeval castles, utterly at odds with the big house in Jones’s English wet-weather-adapted Palladian style. From the park side, they were houses, far from ordinary houses, bent into colossal horseshoe shapes for the benefit of the illusion, but houses all the same. In between the two lodges lay the ruins of Uphill itself, the neglected Repton gardens, and enough grassy space – lawn it was not – to accommodate a couple of cricket pitches and several tennis courts should anyone desire them. What had been desired was a croquet pitch. All a croquet pitch required was a level surface, a lawnmower, a roller and the banging of a few hoops into the ground. As Anna pulled the Bentley up the hill and around the south lodge, Tommy Athelnay was lining up a shot, his great, overstuffed frame bent at the knees, the mallet swinging smoothly between his legs to whack the wooden ball effortlessly through the hoop.

  He was playing the Ffitch sisters, and partnered by a third young woman, whom he brought over to the car as Troy and Anna stretched their legs.

  ‘Jolly good,’ he said in his over-hearty tone. ‘Jolly good, you’re the first. Just in time. We can all have one more bash and then set up tea on the terrace. Now have you met Clover? You haven’t met Clover have you? Mind you, the sky’s pretty clear. Perhaps we could play another hour and go in for tea, get a nice log fire roaring and . . . er, have you met Clover? Or did I ask you that already? Anyway it’s a fine afternoon why don’t we . . . er . . .’

  Troy wished Anna would say something, do something other than smile, or Tommy might prattle for ever. The girl took the initiative.

  ‘Clover Browne,’ she said, and stuck out her right hand at Troy. ‘Browne with an “e”.’

  Troy shook. He didn’t know how Tommy did it and he was not at all sure he wanted to know, but this girl was younger and better looking even than the Ffitch girls. She was not their leggy five foot ten, but her hair was long and blonde, natural blonde, and her eyes a piercing shade of blue. It was a face to turn heads. The accent did not match. Her ‘with’ was a ‘wiv’. The Ffitch girls spoke the received pronunciation of a southern girls’ public school. They were Roedean or Cheltenham or Bedales. Clover was undisguised cockney – Parson’s Green Elementary or Shepherd’s Bush High – and no ‘e’ on the end of her Brown would ever disguise it. It was Brown as in ‘knees up’. If she’d added the ‘e’ herself, thought Troy, she’d wasted her time.

  ‘I’d love to play,’ said Anna. ‘Just what I need after two hours behind the wheel. I’m a bit rusty, though.’

  ‘No matter, no matter,’ said Tommy, hugging her with one huge arm, while the other dangled his mallet. ‘It’s like riding a bike. You can have the pleasure of falling off all over again. And you, Troy?’

  Troy was miles away. Staring at Clover Browne. Tommy had said his name again before he realised he had been staring, and realised the more that the child had not looked away, but had steadily returned his gaze, frowning all the while. Child. Yes, he thought, child. She could hardly be more than eighteen or nineteen.

  ‘No thanks, Tommy. Not for me. I’ll get the bags in.’

  ‘Fine, fine,’ said Tommy, and Troy surmised that little would ever displease or unsettle such an amiable buffoon.

  ‘’Ere, you ’ave
mine,’ Clover said and thrust her mallet at Anna. ‘I’ve ’ad enough for now.’

  Clover walked ahead of Troy up the steps of wide flagstones, their cracks dotted with flowering thyme and creeping mint, past the remains of Repton’s terraced garden, to the back door of the lodge, propped open with a weathered stone head at the centre of the horseshoe. She gave him a good view of her backside, so neat in its navy-blue slacks, the sort of slacks that slipped a loop under the foot and stretched themselves to the leg and the backside with every stride. She turned on the top step, watching him, lumbered with all the bags he wished Anna had not brought and his own solitary overnight case. She looked neat standing there. He could think of no other word to describe her – neat in her stretch slacks, neat in the sleeveless white cotton blouse, buttoned high at the throat, leaving her arms bare and tanned. Neat with no wind to ruffle her hair, now nestling lightly over one eye to give her a modern version of the peekaboo. Neat in her stylish way – stylish, he thought, like Veronica Lake. The archetypal short, blonde beauty of the 1940s. But she was staring at him far more intently than he at her.

  ‘Why are you staring at me?’ he asked.

  ‘I was just thinking – bet you was a looker when you was young.’

  Thanks, thought Troy. And the girl turned on her heel and vanished into the house.

  ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ said a voice behind him.

  Troy looked over his shoulder. Paddy Fitz stood in a bed of miniature roses, in grubby corduroy trousers and a smudged RAF blue shirt, shorn of its collar, pulling off a pair of gardening gloves.

  ‘You were thinking, “I bet she’s under age.”’

  ‘Not quite,’ said Troy. ‘But almost certainly under voting age.’