A Little White Death

by John Lawton

  ‘How tactfully you put it, Freddie. But try to think a bit less like a policeman. She’s seventeen. I may have a certain reputation, but not with minors. If she were under age, believe me, she would not be here.’

  Fitz threw his gloves on the ground, reached out and took two of Anna’s bags from Troy.

  ‘Let’s have a drink, shall we? I’ve been pulling up fucking weeds all afternoon.’

  Troy followed Fitz into the house – dark and cool, wooden panelling, heavy furniture and the smell of beeswax polish. Repton’s ‘red book’ stood in the hall, propped open on a lectern. Uphill Park, for all Fitz’s efforts, might never look that way again. On into a thoroughly modern kitchen, all stainless steel and yards of that new stuff that had so completely displaced oilcloth and had a name like ‘Formica’ – and gadgets, gadgets galore, that sliced and chopped and mixed. Troy cooked when the mood took him. He wasn’t bad at it, but he’d never win prizes for it. He was simply not the slave to the laziness of living alone, or the dependence on women, that most men of his age were. But this was the kitchen of a man who took his cooking seriously, and equipped it with a vast batterie de cuisine – an arsenal. A full set of imported French enamelled iron cooking pots hung from hooks embedded in the beams. A murderous-looking row of Sabatier knives clung to a magnetic strip on the wall as though merely waiting the appearance of the knife thrower and the girl in the tasselled swimsuit. And the dusty harvest of last year’s crops dangled from the rafters, great swathes of tarragon and rosemary, and strings of onions, shallots and garlic. The centrepiece was a vast deal table, which bore every conceivable stain and scar of its years of use: the black spots of fag ends carelessly stubbed out, the red rings of wine glasses, the faded brown of coffee cups, the washed-out greens of pounded herbs and the serratic scars of endless slicings and choppings across this maid of all work.

  The air was rich and warm with the smell of yeast. Troy had to hand it to Fitz. He didn’t know another man in the whole of England who would pass a lazy Saturday afternoon baking his own bread.

  ‘Dump your stuff anywhere,’ said Fitz, and Troy did.

  Fitz opened a cupboard and reached down a couple of glasses.

  ‘You know, I’m really very glad you decided to come. Anna needs the break. And I’m not all sure she’d have come without you.’

  Troy was not all sure what he meant by this. He’d half formed the opinion that he was her escort in a very broad sense of the meaning – convenience, in that he played man to her woman on the social stage; protection, in that while he did this none of Fitz’s male friends were likely to regard her as a bit of spare and leap on her. If there was another meaning, he’d rather hear it from Anna than Fitz.

  Troy said nothing, and yawned.

  ‘Tiring drive?’ Fitz asked.

  ‘Didn’t drive. Let Anna do it all,’ Troy replied through another yawn. ‘I just haven’t been sleeping too well lately.’

  He could almost hear the click in Fitz’s brain as the professional mode cut in.

  ‘Prolonged, is it? Or intermittent bouts of insomnia?’

  ‘Fitz, could you try to think less like a doctor?’

  ‘Touché, old boy, touché. Now, shall we get to the best bit of gardening as a hobby, where one stands amid the roses and the hollyhocks and sips the gutsiest vodka martini known to man?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Troy eagerly. ‘Stirred not shaken.’

  ‘Quite. Bugger the Bond films. Stirred it is. The only way.’

  He mixed up two lethal martinis, and the two of them stood halfway down the giant steps of the terraced garden, with the hoots and shrieks of a croquet battle ringing in the distance, looking at his budding roses, and a host of unspecified green shoots rising spear-like from the earth.

  ‘Tell me,’ Fitz began. ‘Do you know how many varieties of flowering garlic there are?’

  There were many who doubtless thought this the opening gambit of a colossal bore. Troy was not one of them.

  § 23

  He took a nap before dinner and woke to the distant sound of a television. He found Clover in one of the smaller rooms, seated on the floor, arms around her knees, watching a programme he knew to be called Juke Box Jury. A ‘review’ of the week’s pop record releases. Hits received a ding from a bell, misses were klaxoned into oblivion. He rather thought it was the klaxon that woke him.

  He stood behind her, watching. What struck him most was firstly how out of touch he was with the new wave, and secondly that most of the ‘judges’ on this ‘jury’ were over thirty. He wondered if they knew or appreciated it any more than he did himself.

  When it finished, Clover stood and said, ‘It’s hottin’ up. Things are really hottin’ up.’

  And then she disappeared upstairs once more.

  In an hour or so Fitz’s dinner guests began to arrive. He introduced Troy to a seventy-year-old woman in a paint-spattered shirt whose surname appeared to be a sequence of Hungarian polysyllables.

  ‘You know Magda,’ he said, as he always said, regardless of whether one did or not. ‘Surely you’ve seen her work in the Tate – Red and Blue No. 4?’

  Troy could not have put a name to her, but he knew her work. She painted nudes pretty much in the manner of Lucian Freud. But she painted men – fat men, hairy men, bald men, men with scrawny slack muscles and bloodshot eyes, men with limp dicks and grey hairs on their balls. Red and Blue No. 4 was, for want of no other word occurring to him, grotesque. Too real for comfort.

  Fitz introduced him to a young man. Not a face he knew, but a name he did: David Cocket, not much over thirty, a barrister of some renown and a hot tip to take silk before he was much older.

  And the last face he did know. Martin Pritch-Kemp, professor of English at London University, probably about Troy’s age, a man who pitched his work squarely at the whybrow market – academic tomes made accessible, made into bestsellers by an inherent grasp of the commercial possibilities of the lay market. Helped, of course, by his having been the star turn a couple of years ago at the Trial of Lady Chatterley, which was how the case of Regina v. Penguin Books – over the matter of the pornography or not, obscenity or not, of the D.H. Lawrence novel – had come to be known. He had inescapably become known as, if not the face, then certainly the voice of liberated England. Pritch-Kemp was one of those men who thought to drag England screaming and kicking, although whining and cowering was far more accurate, into the twentieth century before it actually turned into the twenty-first.

  The women, that is the younger women, dressed for dinner. The men did not – Fitz’s concession to an occasion of his own making was a clean shirt, and the painter woman stuck with her artist’s motley as though it were a uniform. It had been a while since Troy had seen quite so many little black dresses. Tara and Caro Ffitch did not dress identically. Tara’s dress was strapless, and probably required whalebone engineering to keep it up. Caro had opted for shoulder straps, one of which she seemed to have to hoik back into place every five minutes. And Clover appeared transformed. Had Troy not known she was seventeen he would have revised his guesses to twenty-two or three. She had achieved a startling, diagonal asymmetry with an off-one-shoulder dress, and her hair piled high above the opposite ear. His one, if silent, complaint was that she favoured too much black eyeliner.

  Anna was wearing a frock he’d seen her in a dozen times.

  ‘Well,’ she said, smiling nervously, shoulders back, tits out, teasing a lock of hair into place.

  ‘Well what?’

  ‘Pig,’ she said.

  Fitz served an exquisite rack of lamb. All through the meal there was a place set and a seat unoccupied next to him. He complained lightly over the carving that ‘one can never rely on Tony to be on time’ and after two or three glasses of wine, was asking first one sister and then the other, ‘Well, where is the bugger? You told Tony seven thirty for eight, didn’t you?’

  Fitz had split up couples. Even the pretend couples. Troy had found himself seated between the painte
r woman, whom he quickly decided was barking mad – she said next to nothing, hummed to herself through most of the meal and interjected only when she was absolutely sure of a cast-iron non sequitur – and Tara Ffitch. Tara he took to. She sat opposite her sister, and although the resemblance was striking, he still could not understand why anyone fell for their ‘twins’ line. They were so different in character. Tara was wittily cynical, cutting acidly into conversation and expert at the poker face. Once or twice in the evening she caused Tommy Athelnay to double or triple take at the things she said. Only when Caro corpsed and gave in to a fit of giggles did he get the gag. Caro reacted much more than she initiated. She was an unrepentant giggler. The twin thing, he concluded, was their game.

  Clover played a game of her own. No longer the surly brat who had left him on the doorstep. Now she was charming, now she was coy, now she cracked a joke with the men, reduced Caro to more giggles – and a moment later was looking at Troy with an intensity that bored into his skull.

  She was the first to cut and run.

  ‘Well, I gotta go. You old farts will bore the knickers off me and Lennon’s calling. See you all at breakfast.’

  Troy did not think this was funny. Tommy Athelnay thought it the funniest thing he had ever heard and laughed till he choked. Fitz simply said, ‘Can’t you two teach her any manners?’

  ‘No,’ said Tara. ‘Your department, I believe. I do make-up. I don’t do manners.’

  ‘Who’s Lennon?’ asked Troy in all innocence.

  ‘Who’s Lennon? Who’s Lennon?’ said Cocket. ‘Troy, where have you been? You sound like one of those old buggers I get stuck with in court. Last year I had a judge pull me up because I’d mentioned Marilyn Monroe. “Who is Marilyn Monroe?” “An actress, m’lud” – and I knew in my bones he’d not known the name of any actress since Ellen Terry or Mrs Patrick Campbell! Really, Troy, you must get out more.’

  ‘I keep telling him that,’ said Anna. ‘John Lennon’s one of the Beatles, Troy. You must be the only person who hasn’t heard.’

  Tommy Athelnay moved to the piano, began singing dirty lyrics – the sort most associated with rugby players and all-male communal baths – to melodies more appropriate to the metre of Tennyson or Lear. It was an old trick. Edward Lear had provoked Tennyson to rage at London soirées ninety years ago by taking the ‘tune’ of Tennyson and setting to it his own ‘nonsense’ lyrics. Tennyson had failed to see it as homage, much as Tommy’s audience failed to appreciate ‘Four and Twenty Virgins’ rearranged as ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’. It sounded like heresy.

  ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake – somebody stop him!’ Fitz was yelling.

  Tommy rose up from the piano stool, pissed and wobbly on his feet. ‘Never let it be said that Tommy Athelnay exploited a captive audience. I yield, sir. I yield.’

  ‘Troy, be a love and take over before remorse wears thin. He’ll be at it again in five minutes if you don’t.’

  Troy slipped onto the piano stool, slipped into a lazy version of ‘The Lady is a Tramp’, slowly jerking the melody around, pulling it away at the tangents. Quite the opposite of Tommy’s style.

  The stool was long enough for two. He looked out of the corner of his eye to see Tara Ffitch seat herself next to him.

  ‘Is this your coded judgement on us, Troy?’

  ‘No. Nothing of the sort. Just listen to the lyrics.’

  ‘You’re not singing them.’

  ‘Not my forte. Just run them through the mind’s ear for a moment and you’ll see what I mean.’

  Tara watched his hands for a few seconds.

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Do you get too hungry for dinner at eight?’

  ‘I’ve usually demolished the bread rolls before the waiter gets to the table.’

  ‘Are you late for the theatre?’

  ‘Punctual to a fault, that’s me.’

  ‘And do you bother with people you hate?’

  ‘Not any more. Not since the day I left school. The first freedom is the freedom not to bother with those you hate.’

  ‘That’, said Troy, ‘is why the lady is not a tramp.’

  ‘No, Troy – is atramp.’

  ‘The irony is there in letters six foot high, and still you miss it.’

  ‘Then play something less subtle.’

  He blended the Rodgers and Hart tune into Cole Porter’s ‘Love for Sale’.

  Clearly Tara knew the words to that too. She got up and left.

  Troy pootled through the tune, thinking all the while of what to play next. ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ won the silent, inner debate – the languid, devious arrangement Thelonious Monk had laid down some ten or so years before. It brought home to him, as it usually did, why he liked the piano as an instrument and, the obverse side, why he felt less than good at it. The piano was, he had read somewhere, three instruments in one – melodic, harmonic, percussive. A good pianist could exploit all three. Art Tatum, and no one matched Tatum in Troy’s estimate, could exploit them all at the same time; ‘A Foggy Day in London Town’ spun under his fingers like a Catherine wheel. But then Tatum had six hands, which was what Troy had thought the first time he had heard him. Monk had only two, but where they would wander next was anybody’s guess.

  He watched the dinner party fragment into lesser parties. Fitz and Anna adored bridge and coaxed Pritch-Kemp and the painter woman into playing. He heard the clump of Clover’s feet overhead, and the bass of her Dansette through the beams and boards as a pop record rumbled on. Tommy and Cocket stayed at the table drinking and flirting with Caro. Tara slumped in front of the fire with a magazine. Troy could not be certain whether this was petulance or not.

  He played ‘Night and Day’ – slowly, far more slowly than Tatum would ever have played it; strictly for his own amusement, if that were the word for the memories it evoked, for a tune he could not separate from the dark nights of the war, a slow foxtrot in the face of death; strictly for himself – he doubted that anyone else was listening.

  He helped himself to another glass of claret, slumped in an armchair, made the most of the flickering fire. Tara glanced up at him once, said, ‘Bridge is such a bloody bore,’ and turned over a page in her magazine. From the far room he could hear the cries that seemed to be turning bridge into happy families, heard Tommy Athelnay laughing like a jackass. He closed his eyes.

  When he opened them he was not sure whether he had nodded off or not, but a tall man stood before the fire sloughing off a drizzle-spattered raincoat, and Tara had vanished.

  Troy could scarcely believe his eyes, but he knew Anton Tereshkov at once. He had not seen him since 1956 – had met him only once, at an interminably dull reception given for Khrushchev at the Soviet Embassy, where he had been, as he put it, ‘Comrade Khrushchev’s man here’ – but he was unmistakable. He looked, Troy now thought, rather like that new actor that was wowing women in the cinema aisles, the Scottish bloke, Connery, who played Ian Fleming’s upper-crust, public school spy James Bond – and at that played him with an Edinburgh accent, full of deliciously wet and sibilant sounds. Connery was a former body-builder. Tereshkov could only have been in his mid-to late twenties seven years ago, but at thirty-three or so he had filled out in that same muscular way – all the weight not only above the waist, but high on the chest and shoulders, so that the rest of the body seemed to taper. And the eyebrows – Troy had been fascinated by Sean Connery’s eyebrows, which seemed to trail away to infinity either side of his head and still not to vanish at all, very like Tereshkov’s, one of which was now raised at Troy in quizzical greeting.

  Before either of them could speak Tara returned clutching a bottle of brandy and a glass, and Fitz interrupted his bridge to pay a fleeting visit.

  ‘Tony, you’ll be late for your own funeral!’

  So this was the Tony who’d upset the host so much by his absence?

  ‘Still, no harm done, there’s plenty left. Cold of course, you’ll just have to help yourself.’

  Fitz went back
to his game. Tara kissed Tereshkov on the ear, poured him a brandy and whispered to him. Then she too left, kicking off her shoes and running for the stairs. Tereshkov took the empty chair.

  ‘It’s been a long time, Commander.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Troy. ‘You’ve been at the embassy all this time?’

  ‘No,’ said Tereshkov. ‘I’ve been home twice. This is my third tour of duty. I am getting rather fond of London.’

  Troy found it easy to believe. He’d seen Moscow. Anywhere was better than Moscow.

  Tereshkov swirled his brandy around, seeming to think, looking at Troy from under those remarkable eyebrows, and read his mind to the letter.

  ‘I do hope you enjoyed Moscow. Comrade Khrushchev regrets deeply that he was not able to see you.’

  The evening, so mixed in its pleasures until now, took a clear turn for the worse. Of course, the Russians knew, knew everything . . . but . . .

  ‘I find it hard to believe he cares at all,’ Troy said. ‘Tell me, do you think the British know I was there?’

  ‘No. I doubt they know a thing.’

  ‘But you,’ said Troy cautiously. ‘You know everything?’

  ‘Me? Oh yes. Everything.’

  Tereshkov leant back from their confidential huddle, stretched and smiled, his eyes fixed on Troy’s.

  ‘Everything. And wasn’t Vivi simply marvellous?’

  Troy said nothing.

  He sloped off to Fitz’s study, found a book he’d always meant to read and retreated to the safety of the bedroom. Whatever game Fitz was playing, it wasn’t bridge and it most certainly wasn’t cricket.

  § 24

  He sat up in bed reading Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom by the dim light of the bedside lamp, reading of El Aurens leading the Yahoo life. Trust Fitz to have a numbered first edition. Every couple of pages he flipped back to the opening line, wondering how much effort, how many revisions had gone into an opener that once read could never be forgotten – ‘Some of the evil of my tale may have been inherent in our circumstances.’