A Little White Death

by John Lawton

  ‘Alfie, there’s no comparison. You cannot compare the actions of a cabinet minister and a feckless teenager!’

  ‘Wot about a feckless cabinet minister then?’

  Geoff sighed with exasperation. He had spent his life being led by the Woodbridges, voting for the Woodbridges. He had marched behind the Woodbridges of England into battle and ballot.

  Catesby filled the silence. ‘Alfie has a point you know. One does look to the Woodbridges of this world to set an example. Woodbridge has let us all down as badly as any tearaway – worse if you think what his responsibilities were.’

  Out in the driveway Mrs Geoff honked on the horn and cut short the argument.

  Geoff shook a manly hand with them all. Told Troy that if ever he wanted a new Riley he knew where to come. Then he picked up his bag and stepped away from his brush with death, and his brief encounter with the social melting pot – back to his own ‘walk of life’, as Nurse might have put it.

  ‘Would you adamaneve it,’ Alfie said. ‘A born bleedin’ NCO. He’ll be a fool till the day he dies. Do you know he was on the brink of tellin’ me he fought in two world wars for the likes of that young tart?’

  This was exaggeration. Geoff was far too young for this, no more than fifty, but it was a cliché of the times.

  Catesby, however, had fought in two world wars.

  ‘How so?’ he said.

  Troy dropped out of the debate. He had never really joined in, listened with half an ear. They argued across him as though he wasn’t there. Indeed he wasn’t. Man down glass well, blown in a bubble. Invisible.

  ‘When I was in the army,’ Catesby was saying, his most frequent opening gambit, ‘it was understood, as so many things were, that one could not do certain things. Rank had its responsibilities. It still does. Noblesse oblige and—’

  ‘Knob what?’ said Alfie.

  ‘Noblesse oblige.’

  ‘What like French? Like foreign?’

  ‘Do let me finish, Alfie, then you might understand what I’m saying. It was expected of us. It was our duty. We could not do what our men could not do. Even more, we could not do what they did do. Avenues of behaviour open to the common man were not open to officers.’

  ‘S’at wot you fink I am, the common man?’

  ‘I did not say that.’

  ‘S’wot you fink, though, innit?’

  ‘Alfie, the social standing of you or I is hardly germane to the argument.’

  ‘Yes it bleedin’ well is!’

  And Troy could hear Alfie momentarily suspend his wide-boy act long enough to strike home, and he had not asked what the old man meant by germane.

  ‘All you’re saying is Woodbridge was a toff, and it’s up to the toffs to set an example to the ’oi polloi. Well, what I say is, speakin’ for yer actual ’oi polloi, is who the bleedin’ ’ell needs it?’

  ‘The nation needs it,’ Catesby said calmly, seriously, with a creeping hint of exasperation in his voice to tell Alfie that it was not a trifling matter, it was on a par with love of country and loyalty to the crown. ‘It is up to some of us to set an example to the rest. And when I was a soldier it was understood that the example one set ran the length of one’s chain of command. An officer cannot ask of the man what he cannot give, cannot do, himself.’

  ‘Wot’s not sauce for the goose, eh?’

  ‘If you like,’ said Catesby, much as Troy might have done himself.

  ‘I don’t like,’ said Alfie. ‘Bollocks to it.’

  ‘Well – if this is the level the argument has sunk to—’

  ‘And levels ain’t got nuffink to do wiv it neither. Wot I say is this. We don’t need your bleedin’ example. That went out years ago. Tell it to Mrs Noah. From hereon in it’s every man for himself. If Woodbridge wants a bit of fanny, best of British luck to ’im. It’s got nothing to do with chains of command, it’s got nothing to do with the likes of you setting a good example to the likes of me. And you know why? ’Cos if I had to wait on the likes of you for the likes of me to get a bit of fanny, I’d be waiting till doomsday, and me right ’and’d be worn to the bone. The world ain’t what it was when you was young, general. Fings ’ave changed, fings ain’t never gonna be the way they was again, not ever—’

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ Catesby said softly, invoking a West End musical hit of recent years. ‘Fings ain’t wot they used to be?’

  Troy would not have thought the man had the wit in him.

  ‘Too bloody right they ain’t,’ Alfie replied. ‘And a bloody good thing too!’

  Troy thought Woodbridge an unworthy subject of a national division. But clearly he was. He exercised the national conscience, put on, scratched and tore off the national hair shirt upon a daily basis.

  ‘What do you suppose he takes me for?’ said Catesby, when Alfie had gone.

  Troy said nothing. To say anything at all might be to compound an insult. Better by far to let the old man answer his own question.

  ‘A fogy, d’ye think?’

  ‘I should think to a man of Alfie’s age we’re both fogies.’

  ‘How old would you say he was?’

  ‘Twenty-five.’

  ‘Too young for the war?’ Catesby asked pointlessly.

  ‘War baby. Born before it. Brought up in the worst of it. An evacuee, I shouldn’t wonder.’

  ‘And we’re fogies?’

  Catesby seemed to kick this one around a while, then said, ‘He’s wrong, y’know. I’m out of touch, but then, I’m sixty-five, and not as out of touch as some. He’s a right to dismiss us. A right to his rebellion. I made mine in my day.’

  And he led off along a line of thought Troy had not expected.

  ‘When I was sixteen the First War started. I lied about my age. Volunteered for the Public Schools Battalion, the Sixteenth Middlesex, Kitchener’s New Army, when the posters went up. Kitchener needed me – but not half as much as I needed him. Got me out of everything. Home, school, the prospect of university in a year’s time. It looked . . . it looked like blessed relief. And I wasn’t completely green, I wasn’t one of the ones who though it would all be over by Christmas. And I hope I wasn’t one of those who prayed it wouldn’t end before I saw action. I saw action. One day of it. July 1st, 1916.’

  Troy knew the date. Every schoolboy of his generation did. He was less than a year old then. He’d learnt it in school and before school. The Somme.

  ‘I was Second Lieutenant Catesby. Seventeen pretending to be twenty. Took a couple of rounds from a German machine gun in my thigh two minutes after I went over the top. No time to be a hero. Shattered the bone in three places. Couple of our blokes got me back into the trench. One of them said, “It’s a blighty wound, sir. You’ll be going home.” Then he stuck his head up too far and got it shot to pieces. I spent over a year recovering. Learning how to walk again. Transferred to the regular Army. I couldn’t face the thought of the old regiment. None of them – at least none I knew – had survived. By the time I got back to the front it was 1917. The Americans joined us and the next year we began pushing the Boche back. Did me time. Picked up me gongs. Counted up the dead friends and saw most of my illusions vanish. But it served its purpose, my personal, my selfish purpose. Got me away from all that bound me. Created new ties that I thought would bind me for ever.

  ‘I was out by the summer of 1919. Married in 1923. First child in ’24. Very odd time. Very awkward time. Perhaps you remember it? You must have been a nipper yourself. Perhaps you remember blokes like me. I couldn’t settle to anything. Couldn’t settle to anything sedentary. I was a fool. Took my inheritance, what there was of it, went into chicken farming and went broke. Time was you talked to any chap with an accent like mine and a threadbare suit doing the rounds, looking for work, and he’d tried chicken farming. But I’d another string to my bow. I’d been on the reserve list since 1919. So, in 1931, at the age of thirty-three, I applied to rejoin the army. I’d’ve signed on as a private just to be able to earn a wage. I was lucky. My old regi
ment took me back at my old rank – captain. Old pals’ act? Who knows? Perhaps someone saw the day coming when we’d need an army again. Perhaps they didn’t? Things moved so slowly. The thirties raced by. Every year seemed to throw up a new crisis – the Rhineland, Austria, Munich, Czechoslovakia. But Britain seemed to crawl along – wallowed in its own misery, filled up with refugees, and failed to listen to what they were saying. I was only a major when the Second War broke out in 1939. I was a brigadier when it finished. I’d seen Dunkirk, El Alamein, Salerno, D-Day and Germany. I picked up another lot of gongs, and this time I came through without a mark on me. At least no physical mark.

  ‘In the winter of ’43 I spent a few weeks training in Egypt – on a base not far from Alexandria – and I saw for myself the work of the Army Bureau of Current Affairs. Now, I knew our blokes had guts. This might have been the first time I knew they had brains. I’d seen them fight and perhaps I finally learnt what they were fighting for. It wasn’t enough to invoke simple patriotism. The British working man was fighting for a better Britain. And this time he wasn’t going to be conned the way my generation had been with piffle about homes fit for heroes. The Bureau held a mock election. Every other party but Labour was annihilated. I knew then what would happen in ’45 – or whenever the war ended. I’d always been a Liberal myself. But I voted Labour that day, and I have voted Labour in every election since. And I’ve done so because I believe in the right of the individual to have his share in the nation’s wealth. The wealth he has created. And to share in it without going through what I went through. What they went through. We shouldn’t have to prove our courage in battle, we prove it every day. Every day we get up and go to work and try to put food in our children’s mouths and a roof over their heads. That’s heroism enough. Chicken farming was heroism enough. Half my generation died on the battlefields of Flanders, and the rest seemed to go under in the crises of the twenties and thirties. That was heroism enough. I suppose young Alfie would find that hard to grasp.’

  There was silence while Catesby found a way to round off his tale, fought his way back along the ribbon of his narrative.

  ‘I was promoted again in ’48. Major-general. Retired with that rank in ’57. People call me general. Only natural after fifteen years I should answer to it. I am “general”. Hugely symbolic to Alfie, I shouldn’t wonder. I’ll answer to general. I’ll be blowed if I’ll answer to fogey.’

  He got up. Put down his newspaper on the chair. He seemed to Troy to be succumbing to memory, to the emotionalism of the sentimental man, much as he had been at the moment they had met. He had set his memory in motion like clockwork and for all Troy knew was reliving things he would rather not relive.

  ‘Excuse me a moment, won’t you.’

  He shuffled off. Troy had taken to the old man. But he’d never in a thousand years understand such emotions.

  § 42

  He found he could not bear television. The inmates, he could think of them no other way, clustered round a ten-inch television watching Britain unravel with every passing news bulletin, crowded the common room, where the one-eyed beast sat, on Saturdays to watch late-night satire in the form of That Was The Week That Was – which Troy had watched in unblinking silence. The man with the silly haircut and the Uriah Heepvoice seemed to be the funniest man alive. As far as Troy was concerned he might just as well have been talking Martian.

  It was the nature of the complaint. The nature of consumption to consume, to waste mind as well as muscle. And in part it was the nature of the man, as child is father to the man, as the boy Troy had succumbed to one damned illness after another in the teens and twenties of the century, each had taken him this way. Each had lost him to the world. Each world had had to be slowly rediscovered.

  He stuck with newspapers, began reading for himself, followed Alex’s trail through what was now firmly dubbed the ‘Tereshkov Affair’ – Woodbridge had been lucky again, it could so easily have been the ‘Woodbridge Affair’ – and stuck with the wireless, tuning into the Home Service and the Third, and making occasional forays to the Light Programme. And on occasion the bubble would burst and he could see clearly, only to form again its milky sheen. So often he felt apathetic. More often just pathetic. Anger focused him wonderfully, but then it always had. Anger pulled him back from the brink. He could have gone so quietly into goodnight had it not been for the high tide of his own anger, and few things roused more anger than his visitors. Few visitors roused more anger than Rod. Rod turned up just in time to let Troy graspat the lifeline. Another day, one more morning down the well, one more afternoon in the bubble and he might have been lost for ever.

  Complacent in victory, pulling at the ragged sleeve of government, Rod crowed.

  ‘So Woodbridge lied,’ Troy said. ‘Big deal.’

  ‘One does not lie to the House of Commons, Freddie. It is a matter of principle. I cannot tell you how strongly that principle is regarded in the House.’

  ‘Don’t be so bloody preposterous. Woodbridge lied to the Commons in ’57 when he cleared Charlie. Most of the voting public might have believed him. But the House didn’t. Did you?’

  ‘That’s . . . that’s different.’

  ‘How so? Because no one called him a liar? Because he lied by common – or do I mean Commons – consent? Or is it all OK as long as he didn’t get caught?’

  ‘It’s different. Believe me it’s different.’

  ‘What is this? “Trust me, I’m a politician”? Rod, you gave Charlie a job on American Week knowing damn well he was a spy.’

  ‘He had been cleared by a government minister.’

  ‘That’s your excuse? Your “get out of jail free card”? A government minister says something you know to be untrue, and that sanctions you to endorse the untruth publicly? Woodbridge lied, blatantly, and no one gave a damn because it suited them not to give a damn. I do not see how a profession that lies for a living can be so concerned about one more lie.’

  ‘It is perhaps a lie too far.’

  ‘And they should have better things to do than debate the sex lives of their own people! Who fucks who is none of their damn business.’

  ‘It’s not the sex. Well not just the sex. There’s the security issue.’

  ‘Look me in the eye and tell me you really believe Tim Woodbridge whispered state secrets to the Ffitch girls, one of whom was probably gagging on his cock, the other probably sitting on his face. Into what organ did he whisper? Then tell me the Ffitches rogered Anton Tereshkov, and in between blowing him, fucking him, and I know not what, found the time to mutter the same secret somethings to him!’

  ‘My God, Freddie, you can be crude when you want to.’

  ‘Rod. Look me in the eye and tell me you really believe there was a security risk!’

  Troy leant in and fixed him, an eye wide. Rod squared off, big brother to little brother. Bickering adolescents once more. And he could not say it. The posture was ridiculous. Troy began to corpse. He could feel himself cracking up with an uncontrollable fit of giggling.

  At last Rod spoke, and Troy knew from the tone that he’d won.

  ‘Tell me,’ he began, tacking away from the storm. ‘Have you heard the latest one about Harold Wilson that’s doing the rounds?’

  Troy shook his head. There was a playful, wicked flicker around Rod’s lips.

  ‘How can you tell when he’s lying?’

  ‘Dunno,’ said Troy.

  ‘His lips move.’

  Rod grinned. Troy cracked. Rod laughed till he cried.

  § 43

  His visitors now came if not in droves then in serial caravan as though The Glebe stood like some Arabian oasis between the wadis. Troy could scarcely believe the effort and the frequency with which denizens of the metropolis sought him out. He decided that he was probably the basis of a good day out. Motor down to Suffolk, spot of lunch on the way, look in on poor old Freddie.

  Two days after Rod he could scarce believe the visitor at all. A mirage at the oasis. Cate
sby leant into the conservatory and yelled with his customary bonhomie, ‘Another one for you, old chap,’ and Troy turned from his copy of the Herald to see Woodbridge standing awkardly in the old window between the house and the conservatory, clutching a couple of books and a pineapple. It was one of the miracles of the modern age, mass communication – television, the rise of easy-to-read tabloid newspapers full of pictures, all but devoid of text – and yet, it seemed, Catesby and the nurse who had ushered Woodbridge in still failed to recognise the man.

  He waited till they’d gone, then said, ‘I hope you don’t mind my dropping in?’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Troy. ‘Bored out of my brain. But let’s ditch the pretence. One doesn’t just drop in to this neck of the woods, one seeks it out.’

  Woodbridge turned around a wicker armchair to face Troy, and sat in it. Set the pineapple to sit between them on the low table, uneasily, like an unexploded, oversized hand grenade.

  ‘It’s bloody murder. You know I would never have imagined it could be so bad. A lifetime in politics and I thought I was ready for the worst. I suppose some naive node in my brain actually thought the gentlemen of the press needed sleep occasionally. Couldn’t be more wrong. They’ve camped on my doorstep, and I do mean literally – thermos flasks, sleeping bags, like the queue for the first day of Harrods’ sale – camped there day and night for weeks now. Only the police will move them, and since I stepped down I might as well be a fugitive Nazi as far as the local coppers are concerned.

  This morning seemed to double their numbers, but then every new twist in the tale does. I suppose you’ve seen the papers?’

  Troy held up the Herald. ‘FITZPATRICK ARRESTED AND CHARGED. IMMORAL EARNINGS AND PROCUREMENT’ screamed a banner headline.

  ‘God knows what they expect me to say. But they were out in force when it emerged that Fitz had finally been charged. I really needed a break from it all. I felt I’d go mad if I had to say “no comment” one more time. I drove like a lunatic across London, and found myself on the North Circular road, looked in the rear-view mirror and I couldn’t believe it. I’d lost them. There I was heading towards Whipps Cross and not a Fleet Street hack in sight. I hadn’t a clue what I was doing. I was elated I’d lost them. I’d actually shaken the buggers off. No idea where I was going, then I saw a signpost saying A12, and I thought “A12? Doesn’t that lead out towards Suffolk?” And then I thought of you. I do hope you don’t mind. If you think about it, it’s the last place the bastards’ll ever look for me.’