A Little White Death

by John Lawton

  § 38

  The first he knew of it was Catesby reading to him. But for this, it often struck him later, he would not have known for days – weeks, even. How little of it would have broken through the bubble?

  ‘What do you suppose this means? Here, in the Henry Esmond column on the back page.’

  The old man was holding a copy of the Sunday Post folded over a couple of times to make it manageable.

  ‘“What larks I hear at Uphill Park. As the black Zim roars out of one entrance, the black Humber growls in another.” Now what on earth is that about?’

  Troy knew. ‘Henry Esmond’ was the Post’s William Hickey. Gossip, unattributable gossip, and anyone with a story he wouldn’t dare put his name to was free to use it. This was undoubtedly the work of Troy’s nephew Alex, staying just the right side of the libel laws by not naming the individuals frequenting Uphill. Only the makes of car. But, cabinet ministers drove Humbers, and few, if any, outside the Soviet Embassy staff drove Zims . . . just the odd British defector in Moscow.

  It was an old technique. It might just work. Flush out your bird by daring the other newspapers to run with what they have. Let the competition beat for you. Then run with the whole damn shooting match and claim prior publication as your defence.

  Sure enough, the following day Catesby appeared with the London Argus, still trying to make two and two make four.

  ‘Blowed if I understand it. Like a damned crossword puzzle. “Dr Patrick Fitzpatrick’s weekend parties at Uphill Park have of late been graced by guests of some distinction. Indeed it is reported that East has met West, and that Dr Fitzpatrick’s flatmates, the former fashion models Tara and Caroline Ffitch, are among the most obliging of hostesses to be found along the prime meridian. Oh lucky man who passes a weekend at country matters in this delightful Sussex retreat, long home to Viscount Athelnay.” D’ye think it’s in code?’

  Troy did not as a rule read gossipcolumns and for a moment he wondered why Catesby did, then he realised that he read everything in the paper – cover to cover. It was his way of getting by. This was crude. ‘Country matters’ was the crudest of Shakespearian puns – too crude to need explanation, he thought. And if it did, he would not offer it.

  Three days later the tabloids all ran with photographs of the Ffitch girls. None of them mentioned Tereshkov or Woodbridge. Oh, lucky Woodbridge. At the weekend, the Sunday Times ran a profile of ‘Harley Street socialite – Patrick Fitzpatrick’. The Observer interviewed him on the subject of his garlic beds. He must, Troy thought, have been drunk or desperate. Or perhaps this was Fitz’s way of containing the damage – give them a photo-opportunity and an interview on something absolutely harmless? But nothing Fitz could say now was harmless. They’d got him in their sights, and he was a fool not to see it.

  Then, after ten days of unsubtle innuendo, Alex took his finger from the dyke and let the flood burst.

  Catesby read it to Troy. He felt like a bad actor making far too much use of the man in the prompt box.

  ‘“Passing Dreyfus Mews the other day who should I find popping out from number 21 but that man-about-the-corridors-of-power Tim W**dbr*dge MP, Minister of State at the F*r*ign Office. Stopping to tie my shoelace I saw his red Mini Minor leave the mews at the northern end, and deciding that public safety necessitated I retie the other lace, I found myself still there when a dark blue Morgan rolled in the south end and that man-about-the-KGB Anton Tereshkov rang on the bell to be greeted with hugs and kisses by the delightful Ffitch sisters, the house guests of that man-about-everywhere Patrick Fitzpatrick. I sincerely hope the ladies do not catch cold, for it seemed to me that they were somewhat scantily clad for the time of year.”’

  Catesby did not, for the first time, ask what it meant. It was all too obvious.

  ‘There’ll be questions,’ he said. ‘At least there’d better be.’

  ‘Could I see?’ said Troy.

  Alex had swapped the symbolic vehicles for the real ones. Woodbridge did drive an outrageously red Mini, and Tereshkov had parked his expensive, un-Soviet, British-built Morgan next to Troy’s Bentley at Uphill. All the same, the precision of the encounter – in one end of the mews and out the other – seemed just that, symbolic, as it had in the first snippet, and it left Troy wondering about the extent of the real evidence. He wondered at the blanking out of five vowels. It did not keepthe Post the right side of libel and he doubted that they expected it to do so. It was a red rag to a bull. It showed exactly the direction they expected to take issue – it would not be Fitz or the sisters, and if it were Tereshkov it would be the first time in history that an agent of a foreign power had issued a writ for libel.

  ‘D’ye suppose he’ll sue?’ Catesby asked.

  ‘He’ll have no choice. They want him to.’

  ‘They want him to sue!’

  ‘They’ve got proof. Cast-iron proof, I should think. They clearly have much more than they’re saying. They’ve blanked his name to make him think they’re being coy for safety’s sake. In reality they want him to stepoutside the Commons and enter a realm where he has no immunity. If he sues he’s a fool. The most he can hope for is that it doesn’t get raised in the Commons. And I don’t think he stands a cat in hell’s chance of not being asked about it. Then the best he can do is say he does not have the time or the inclination to answer every piece of scurrilous gossip and whichever honourable member has raised it ought to have better uses for his time and so on.’

  ‘I see. What do you think he’ll do?’

  ‘I think he’ll deny it. And if he does, protocol demands he sue – last refuge of honour after all – and then the Post will produce God knows what, photographs, letters, and they’ve got him.’

  ‘It wasn’t like this when I was young.’

  ‘Yes it was,’ said Troy. ‘You just didn’t know it.’

  It took less than a day. That evening, Jack Dorking, Woodbridge’s opposite number on the Labour benches, rose to ask if he would deny an affair with the mistress of a Soviet agent. It was more subtly put – one of those ‘Is the House aware?’ openers, when all of Britain was aware – and addressed not to Woodbridge but to the Home Secretary, Nicholas Travis, in his capacity as the man who should investigate should the gossip prove unfounded and a slur upon ‘a member of this House’. It defied logic, but it worked. Woodbridge got together with half a dozen cronies and denied it to the House the following day.

  Just before lunch on the day after that, Troy and Catesby met as usual. Catesby shuffled into the conservatory, the morning papers under his arm and read out the ‘Woodbridge Statement Mark III ’.

  ‘“I wish to deny any rumour or allegation of any impropriety between myself and Miss Tara Ffitch or her sister Caroline. I have met the misses Ffitch, they are house guests of Dr Fitzpatrick of Harley Street. Dr Fitzpatrick maintains a weekend cottage on the estate of Lord Athelnay. Lord Athelnay and I are old friends – we have known one another since the war – indeed there are many in this House who would claim such friendship with Lord Athelnay. I have been a frequent recipient of his hospitality at Uphill, and I have met the misses Ffitch both at Lord Athelnay’s lodge and at the cottage of Dr Fitzpatrick. I can only recall two meetings with Mr Tereshkov. The first at a reception given by the Soviet Embassy for the visit of Mr Khrushchev in 1956, and the second at a reception given by the Prime Minister some eighteen months ago for the Russian cosmonaut Major Gagarin. I have accordingly instructed my solicitor to begin proceedings against the Sunday Post for libel.’

  ‘Well?’ said Catesby.

  ‘He’s damned,’ said Troy. ‘Damned for a tart.’

  § 39

  The last person he wanted to see usually turned out to be whoever came to see him – a moveable feast. The real last person he wanted to see finally arrived. Anna, less than a week after Woodbridge’s statement.

  Troy stood. He had the memory of her power over him, her life sentence. To sit seemed to give away too much. He let her kiss him and ask after his hea
lth like a friend and pronounce on his health like a physician.

  ‘You’re looking better. That’s a very good sign. Bit of colour in your cheeks.’

  This to Troy sounded as medically precise as reading the weather in seaweed and bunions. He had no idea whether he was better or not – a regime that froze him with fresh air and stabbed him with hypodermics left him little sense of his own wellbeing. He stood in the conservatory window. Half looking at her, half not.

  ‘And you,’ he said, not caring what she said as long as she did not talk about him. ‘What about you?’

  She slipped one hand into the other, twisted the rings on her fingers like changing the combination on a safe.

  ‘I hardly know where to begin. There’s been so much happened. Tommy Athelnay died, you know.’

  ‘No. I didn’t know.’

  Catesby read obituaries, he was sure, but never out loud, never to him. Some things there were that never crossed the generations.

  ‘Heart. Died last Thursday. Poor old Tommy. I think this whole damn thing finally did for him. And then there’s Fitz, of course. They’re hounding him, you know.’

  ‘The press, well . . . he’s asked for that. He should never have agreed to talk to them in the first place.’

  ‘No. Not the press. The police.’

  ‘Which police. The Yard?’

  ‘Chap called Blood. A chief inspector. In the Vice Squad.’

  ‘I know Blood. He’s in Special Branch, not Vice.’

  ‘He told meVice.’

  ‘You?’

  ‘He’s been talking to most of Fitz’s friends. Harassing them would be a better word. He came to see me in Harley Street. He asked me about Fitz and Tony. I said I was not at liberty to discuss the relationship between my partner and one of his patients. I was well aware that appealing to the conventions of confidentiality was wasted on him, so I said something that perhaps I shouldn’t. I said, “On the other hand Tim Woodbridge is a patient of mine and so’s Commander Troy – perhaps you’d care to discuss their medical histories instead.” Did the trick though – shut ’im up. He’d nothing more to say after that. I didn’t hear from him again. He pestered a lot of Fitz’s patients, and I’m not at all sure how he worked out that they were Fitz’s patients. But he left mine alone and he left me alone. I’m sorry, I used your name to scare him off.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter.’

  ‘But he won’t be scared off. He’s wrecking Fitz’s practice just trying to get something on him. He’d talked to old Tommy. Tommy might be alive now if he hadn’t.’

  She came up behind Troy. One hand upon his shoulder. Trying to break the illusion of indifference he tried so fiercely to maintain.

  ‘Look, I’ve never asked this before, and I wouldn’t be asking now if it weren’t such a bloody mess. Fitz has done nothing wrong. You told me so yourself. Couldn’t you get that through to this Blood chap? He’s looking for a scapegoat. Couldn’t you tell him not to?’

  ‘I don’t run the Branch. It’s wholly separate.’

  ‘He’s Vice. Really he told me he was Vice.’

  ‘I don’t run that either.’

  ‘I thought Vice was C section?’

  ‘It is, but Onions took it away from me not long before he retired. It’s had its own deputy commander for quite a while.’

  ‘But you could have a word, all the same.’

  ‘No I couldn’t.’

  ‘Troy, they’re persecuting Fitz!’

  ‘If he’s done nothing wrong, he’s nothing to fear.’

  ‘How many times have you told me the opposite? That the law is an ass, that justice isn’t blind, it’s blind drunk?’

  ‘There is nothing I can do.’

  ‘I mean it’s not as if—’

  ‘I know what you mean and I cannot do it. I’m on sick leave. I am stripped of all responsibility. Those bastards at the Yard are cockahoop, because they think I’ll never make it back. I’m on sick leave, I’m out of it. I’m not at the Yard, I’m here, waiting for death. I’m here where you put me. I have no more power! It’s all used up! I’m on the sick list where you put me!’

  ‘Couldn’t you just—’

  Troy took her face between his hands, his fingers spread to the temple, the palms flat across her cheeks.

  ‘Do you know what you’ve done to me? Do you know?’

  He squeezed. She did not move. He knew he was hurting her and he held her in his grip, and as the tears rippled silently down her cheeks, he said again, ‘Do you know what you’ve done to me? Do you know?’

  She was looking straight into his eyes, hers dark and glistening, his black and cold. She did not move, did not flinch, did not try to escape.

  Her tears were hot beneath his hands, and still he held and still she cried. He let her go, wondering if he had not crushed the spirit out of her, and might she not fall at his feet, but she rubbed one eye with her knuckles, picked up her handbag and left without looking back.

  § 40

  At five that afternoon Catesby summoned him to the wireless and the BBC news. Woodbridge had written to the Prime Minister, owned up to everything he had not long since denied, apologised and resigned.

  In the morning the Herald led with Tereshkov’s return home – ‘Where is Tereshkov?’ asked the headline, and then answered itself with the Soviet Embassy’s statement that they would not say where he was, except that he was no longer in England – whisked away under notion of the diplomatic bag.

  ‘D’ye suppose they really put them in bags?’ asked Catesby.

  ‘Nothing would surprise me, bags, boxes or posted home airmail,’ Troy replied.

  He’d no idea what the Russians had done with him, welcomed him back as a hero who’d embarrassed the British or as a candidate for the salt mines who’d embarrassed them – all he was certain of was that he’d seen the last of Tereshkov.

  For days afterwards – or was it weeks, surely it was weeks? – the same half-dozen photographs of the Ffitch girls were to be found in a hundred newspapers, hawked like dirty postcards, again and again and again: Caro caught leaving her hairdresser’s; a little black dress flash photo of the two of them accompanied by Hooray Henries reprinted from an old Tatler; a blurry grey snapshot of Tara topless on a Greek island (‘topless’ was a new world neologism – inseparable in Troy’s mind from the idea of dismemberment). He could not make out whether they were regarded as national heroines or national villains. All he was certain of was the adjective: national, national whatever they were, the women now – indisputably – public property.

  § 41

  Without the precision of the phrase the national obsession, at least the national press obsession, became one of ‘who fucks who’. Such precision as there was was habitually blurred by being disguised as moral enquiry. And where it was not so disguised it became a round robin . . . the bishop fucked the duchess; the duchess blew the cabinet minister; the cabinet minister licked the tart; the tart shagged the spy; the spy swung both ways and in his turn rogered the bishop, while the dog in his wisdom slept with his backside to the wall – and only the poor duke got none. If this did not spur the nation to outrage, the moral enquiry did. Scarcely a Sunday passed without one of the newspapers running with an enquiry into the morals of ‘our young people’ – sex and kicks, the degeneracy of popular music, the excesses of teenage fashion – the sin of short skirts, tight trousers and winkle-pickers . . . and so on ad infinitum.

  On occasion Catesby would read such a piece to Troy, more for its comic value than its pretence of sociological analysis. Catesby was rueful, disbelieving. Geoff was the one to rise to outrage – he seemed endlessly fuelled by it. One such piece, entitled ‘Do you know where your daughter is tonight?’, appeared the day Geoff was due to be discharged. They had all gathered in the conservatory to see him off, the invalids in their dressing-gowns, Geoff, predictably, in the uniform of post-war man, the blue, shiny-buttoned blazer with military crest. Catesby read the piece out as they waited for Geoff ’s wi
fe to turn up. He smiled, his eyes twinkled, and when he was through said simply, ‘Piffle.’

  Alfie leant over and looked at the photo the paper offered of a young lady of the night – some actress paid to pose as a teenage whore.

  ‘I quite fancy her meself,’ he said.

  Geoff steamed.

  ‘Kids,’ he was saying. ‘Kids. What does she think she looks like? Painted hussy.’

  More than most aspects of the world they watched from their confinement, the deeds and mores of teenagers provoked Geoff to a rage Troy could only see as proprietorial. It was his world, at least it had been until they’d stuck him in The Glebe, and it would be again once he got out and got to grips with the world he did not know and turned it back to the one he did. Blinkers would be useful. So would a bit of bluster.

  ‘I should think she looks like what she wants to look like,’ said Alfie.

  ‘She should know better. Where was she brought up?’

  Troy thought Alfie might laugh in his face. He hoped he wouldn’t. Geoff would go from red to purple – it could not be good for him.

  ‘Wotsit matter where she was brought up?’

  ‘If you’re brought up in a good home, by decent people—’

  ‘Bollocks,’ said Alfie, as he was wont.

  ‘There’s no talking to you, there’s no talking to you. “Bollocks”, that’s your answer to everything.’

  ‘If she was brought up in a good home – by which, Geoff, you mean a posh one – she’d be learnin’ to do wot the bleedin’ ’ell she likes. ’Cos that’s what the toffs do. You think Woodbridge gave a toss, you think this Fitzpatrick bloke gives a monkey’s bum what you think of ’im? You think all them lucky sods in all them orgies at Uphill give a toss?’

  Geoff stopped at the puce phase of coloration unto rage, and tried for a calm sentence. ‘That’s got nothing to do with it.’

  ‘It’s got everything to do with it. Wot’s sauce for the goose—’