A Little White Death

by John Lawton

  ‘I was wondering,’ he said, ‘whether you and old Catesby might not have more in common than you think. I mean, I wasn’t in the forces.’

  ‘Then you was lucky. I ’ated it. National Service – bullshit, that’s what it was, Fred. Bullshit. Screamin’ an’ shoutin’ at yer from the minute you dropped off the back of the lorry till the minute you climbed back on two years later. And a total waste of bleedin’ time. Do you know what they had us doing in summer? We was in Nissen ’uts. Hoops of corrugated iron, about as friendly as yer average igloo. Heated by a cast-iron tortoise stove. Used to burn coke. In summer they was out. Never lit ’em from May till October. So in summer I had to blacklead the stove. Inside and out. I ask you. Inside! Blackleading the bits no bugger ever saw. Then, I used to whitewash the coke. Can you think of anything more futile than wastin’ a bloke’s time whitewashing a pile o’ coke? When I could be earnin’ a good wage back in civvy street, they ’ad me whitewashin’ coke! Can you think of a bigger example of bullshit? ’Cos I can’t. Then it dawned on me what the British Empire was. It was a bunch of poor sods like me, scattered to the four corners of the world to whitewash coke. The red bits on the map aren’t red, they’re pink – and all because of buggers with buckets o’ bleedin’ whitewash whitewashin’ everythin’ in sight. I whitewashed the flight lieutenant’s jeeponce. Got three weeks in the glass’ouse for that. But I learnt me lesson. I learnt that it was every man for ’imself and I’ve stuck to it ever since. Now, I know what you’re thinkin, that I’m gonna say it was blokes like Catesby told me to whitewash coke. It wasn’t. It was corporals and sergeants, species somewhere between a whelk and a winkle on the food chain; but it was blokes like the general they answered to, and to this day I ’alf suspect there’s officers who’ll say they didn’t know what was going on. But it did go on. And it was bullshit. And there’s no excuses. I lost earnin’ time, an’ I lost drinkin’ time, an’ I lost totty time. So from ’ereon in it’s every man for ’imself.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Troy.

  ‘Quite,’ said Alfie exactly as Troy had said it. The perfect piss-take.

  ‘You kill me sometimes, Fred. You really do.’

  ‘I was saying – you may be right.’

  ‘I know bloody well I am.’

  ‘But we won’t shove it down old Catesby’s throat, will we?’

  Alfie’s feet shuffled on the lino. His shoulders shrugged. It hardly needed a deal of thought.

  ‘Nah,’ he said. ‘What’d be the point? He’s a decent old cove is old Bludnok.’

  A little, just a little, he began to understand Alfie and to wonder about the Ffitch girls and Clover Browne. Charlie was right. The lid was coming off. He would listen for the ‘boom’.

  § 44

  Each day he took three doses of medicine. Each morning he took an intramuscular injection straight in the backside. The prevalent side-effect was skin ulcers. Sooner or later the nurses ran out of unpunctured bumskin and would have to shoot the drug into an old wound. You could spot the longer-serving patients. They tended to stand for an hour or two each morning. Troy was lucky. He healed fast. His skin closed and repaired itself with the mechanical ease of a zipfastener, and he began to realise that whatever the ebb of his spirits, his body was mending. He was thin and he was weak, but compared to, say, a man of Catesby’s age, he had good recuperative powers. Four months after Rod dropped him off at the door, they told him he could leave. ‘You’ll feel tired,’ they said. ‘And you must rest and not work, but you can leave.’

  § 45

  His sister Sasha had telephoned. ‘We’ll come and get you,’ she’d said. We. Somehow Troy had expected Rod. Rod driving Troy’s Bentley. He was late.

  Troy sat in the open windows of the conservatory, case packed, coat on, like a soldier awaiting demob, watching the empty drive, the dancing butterflies of August, half-hearing the meaningless mutterings of General Catesby behind him, the low murmur of the Home Service on the wireless. Then the slow crescendo of a very familiar noise, that mixture of roar, putter and purr, preceded first sight of his carriage home. Not a brother, not a Bentley. It was a motorbike. A motorbike with sidecar. A motorbike without snowplough. A motorbike with sidecar and without snowplough driven by an extremely fat man in a leather helmet and an old Second World War London County Council Heavy Rescue Squad navy-blue leather-elbowed battledress, unbuttoned to the summer breeze, its belt tail flapping and its pockets billowing.

  The Fat Man scrunched to a halt in the gravel, pushed up his goggles and said, as he always did, ‘Wotcher cock.’

  ‘Do you expect me to ride in that?’ said Troy.‘I’ll catch my death of cold.’

  ‘Nah. You’ll be fine. That good-lookin’ young woman as is your quack told me you needed fresh air, lots of it.’

  ‘Fresh air! It’ll be like riding in a hurricane!’

  ‘Trust me, old cock. I got the ’orse blanket to wrap you in—’

  ‘I’m not wearing anything previously worn by a horse!’

  ‘Just a figure o’ speech. Keep yer ’air on. ’Orse blanket.’

  The Fat Man reached into the sidecar and held up a grubby old blanket.

  ‘Thermos flask.’

  The Fat Man pointed to a flask mounted on the nose of the sidecar’s fuselage, with a little leather strap, where the snowplough used to be.

  ‘’Ipflask. With a nice dropof Armagnac, as I knows yer partial to it.’

  The Fat Man pointed to a half-bottle of brandy mounted after the same fashion.

  It was like the obligatory armourer’s scene in a James Bond film. Where the exploding talcum powder? Where the 9 millimetre Walther automatic? And the fifty quid in old sovereigns?

  ‘And at the back ’ere. Yer Fortnum’s ’amper. Plus all the Sunday papers. We s’ll ’ave a nice little picnic, and be ’ome to the family before dinner. They’ll all be there. They can’t wait to see yer. The pig’s been pining.’

  Troy was not at all certain that pigs pined. But he believed the rest of the Fat Man’s tale. They would most certainly be waiting. He could do without that. Without they.

  They cut a path across the northern corner of Essex, via back lanes and villages. Every so often the Fat Man would bring the bike to a halt on some picturesque village green, pink-painted cottages, black mansard barns, windmills for the tilting, some corner on the English quilt, and say, ‘Do you a fancy a bite to eat?’ and Troy would say, ‘No.’

  Two hours and more later they were within fifteen miles of home, the hamper still unopened. They pulled onto the green in Datchworth and Troy heard him say, ‘Sod yer, I’m not wasting it.’

  The Fat Man got off, unstrapped the hamper and began to lay out the picnic.

  ‘We’re only twenty-five minutes from home,’ Troy protested.

  ‘I don’t care if we’re two furlongs from the back door. A picnic I brought and a picnic we shall ’ave. You be as miserable as you like, I’m going to tuck in.’

  Troy said nothing, accepted defeat, and climbed out of the sidecar.

  ‘There you are,’ said the Fat Man. ‘Baguliar caviar.’

  ‘Beluga.’

  ‘Same to you.’

  ‘No – I mean it’s pronounced Beluga.’

  ‘Beluga, begorrah – I don’t care – so long as it’s the best.’

  ‘It is,’ said Troy. ‘And it’s kind of you, but I really can’t stand caviar. Sorry. It’s like a cross between tapioca and fishpaste to me.’

  ‘No apology necessary, old cock. It’s yer brother you should thank. He slipped me a pony, said I was to go down Fortnum’s and fill a namper o’ the best. Besides I’m very partial to a spot o’ caviar. Go down a treat that will. Or did you think I was a fish an’ chips man?’

  ‘No,’ said Troy. ‘I thought you were a ham-sandwich man. If I’ve seen you eat one of a Saturday morning, I’ve seen you eat a hundred.’

  ‘True enough. But after bein’ a nam guzzler, I’m most definitely a caviar guzzler. But on top of yer Baguliar, we got quai
ls’ eggs, smoked salmon, and a jar of that dill sauce, a quarter moon of ripe camembert, half a duck, a jar of pears in port . . .’

  Troy felt sick just listening to him.

  ‘Smoked salmon,’ he said, clutching at something that sounded safe.

  ‘Pâté de fois gras, a tin o’ snails in jelly, truffles . . . a bottle of Mouton Rothschild ’53 . . .’

  ‘Any bread?’

  ‘Yes, cock – one o’ them there French sticks.’

  ‘Just a little bread and salmon then.’

  ‘Comin’ up.’

  Troy nibbled. The Fat Man started on the caviar with a dessert spoon and in two gulps it was gone. Then he tore into the duck like Henry VIII just coming off an enforced diet. He ate the quails’ eggs, shells and all, and managed to find room for half a loaf and a quarter pound of fois gras. The camembert seemed not to appeal, or perhaps he was saving it for later. Troy felt like an invalid.

  A young woman of thirty or so came into view, wheeling a large black pram, and took the bench next to them. Troy looked at her face, wonderful blue-grey eyes. The Fat Man looked at the infant set down from the pram to crawl its infant crawl upon the grass. It was a small child, Troy thought, six or seven months at most.

  ‘Oochie coochie coo,’ said the Fat Man to the child, and began to prattle meaninglessly, and Troy wondered whether the man was any better with children than he was himself. They were aliens. Creatures from some other universe. He looked again at the woman, beaming with evident pride and pleasure in her offspring, and the thought occurred to him that this was everything he had missed in life, everything he had avoided, rejected – wife, child, family – locked away in the attic of the mind. But he did have a wife, somewhere – a brown-eyed, short-arsed American – somewhere. She smiled at him. He knew he wasn’t smiling. Wrapped up in the horse blanket like a forgotten parcel. And he knew her smile said ‘poor sod’ and he hated her for it.

  Time to go.

  ‘What’s ’is name?’ the Fat Man was saying to the blue-eyed blonde.

  ‘Samantha,’ she replied.

  ‘Wot? Like the Kenny Ball song?’

  The Fat Man hummed a few bars of some inane hit of couple of years ago. The thankfully short-lived ‘Trad’ Jazz boom. It was the sort of music that drove Troy demented and brought him to the brink of smashing wireless sets.

  The woman’s expression showed she had taken umbrage at this suggestion of topicality in the naming of children. And it dawned on Troy that the Fat Man had probably expected a boy, and had addressed the child thinking it was a boy. He could not see the Fat Man as a ladies’ fat man. He had utterly failed to charm this local beauty. Nor could he see himself as a ladies’ man. The last thing he wanted was women. And the house would be full of them.

  ‘Can we go?’ he said. ‘I’m suddenly very tired.’

  The Fat Man chugged slowly up the third of a mile from the gate to the house, letting Troy take it all in. It had scarcely been spring when he had seen it last and now it was the dry end of summer, August winding down into September – a month that in the British Isles could be summer or autumn depending on the fickleness of the weather. Troy did not know the place. As often happened, it rose up before him as though he had seen it only in some distant dream.

  They stood on the steps, waiting to meet him. His twin sisters Sasha and Masha, his sister-in-law Lucinda, Rod, their son Alex, their daughters – the second set of twins – Eugénie and Nastasia, his brother-in-law Lawrence, his Uncle Nikolai and so ad infinitum. Troy stumbled from the sidecar, shed the horse blanket, and nobody moved. For a moment he felt like Haig inspecting the troops. Then they fell upon him – wolves upon the fold. An enveloping curtain of women, a solid wall of clashing scents, a buffeting bolster of soft arms and smothering breasts. He would gladly have murdered the lot of them. It was like being eight years old again, the youngest again, and the last thing he could say was what he had said when he was eight – a brutally simple ‘Get off !’

  By the time he had extricated himself he became aware that Rod and the Fat Man had bunked off. The women bundled him onto the porch steps and he heard Masha saying, ‘Half a mo’. We’ve got a surprise for you.’ They were not words he much wished to hear.

  Then they turned him around like the victim of blind man’s buff and the surprise surprised him.

  There, standing between Rod and the Fat Man, was his prize Old Spot sow, Cissie. Cissie, wearing a lead, and upon the lead her runner-up’s rosette from last year’s Hertfordshire show.

  ‘Schnuck,’ said the pig – in Troy’s experience pigs said little else.

  ‘’Ere,’ said the Fat Man. ‘Look who’s come to see yer.’

  He was delighted to see the pig again. Clearly the pig did not know him. But then one of the things Troy had always liked about pigs was their wilful contempt for humanity. They were like tortoises, and he’d kept plenty of those when he was a boy. They moved through your world, took what you had to offer, but didn’t want a great deal to do with you. Their evolution oddly followed mankind’s: they were closer companions than even the trusty dog; they had emerged from the forests when we had; they ate what we ate – anything and everything – but as far as they were concerned we were all yahoos, and ours was the yahoo life.

  § 46

  Wondering how he would get through dinner, he found the voice of self-censorship muttering at him.

  ‘Miserable bastard,’ it said.

  So he dutifully took his place at the head of the table. Why not? he thought. It was his house and probably his money blown on a banquet for which he had little physical appetite.

  He found he had Rod’s wife Lucinda on one side and his sister Masha on the other. He did not mind, but that Nikolai, the one person he would have relished as company, was at the opposite end, beyond the reach of any normal conversation. But what was normal conversation? He seemed now to Troy to be ancient, well into his eighties, to be frailer by far than he was himself even in the pit of his infirmity. He was getting deaf and his retreat from deafness was to and talk less and so have to listen less. He passed whole meals now eating little and merely nodding in answer to questions put to him. It was a small miracle he had come out at all – most of the time he was holed up in his flat at the back of the Albert Hall working, Troy had long assumed, on his magnum opus of applied physics, the book he had always put off writing to write some other book – on the molecular structure of custard, the magnetic properties of raindrops, the aerodynamic possibilities of porcine aviation.

  The Fat Man carved. A flourish of steel upon the blade and he sliced a rare roast beef so thin one could not but admire the artistry. He had always told Troy that he earned his living as gentleman’s gentleman – an anachronism to be anybody’s Jeeves in this day and age, and he had never so much as hinted for whom he performed such services. Besides he was old, far too old, to be anything but retired. It was, Troy thought, the one advantage to baldness: you never went grey and people spent for ever guessing how old you were. As he served up, Troy realised he had just seen the first clear evidence of the man’s trade. He really did do it like a pro. Better by far than the cack-handed hacking of Rod.

  Softened by booze, the family dissolved into a dozen conversations. Troy said little and listened and the drunker they became the more he heard a dozen topics resolve into the component parts of one, and then fuse to the single subject. All tongues led to Woodbridge and Tereshkov. There was only one topic beneath all the others.

  ‘There’s an absolute hoot doing the rounds at Westminster,’ he heard Rod say. ‘Apparently someone told Macmillan that six high court judges had been caught at an orgy. Mac thought about this for a minute and then said, “Two high court judges I could believe, possibly three, but six!!!” – as though the numbers lent any credibility to the story.’

  And then he topped his own anecdote, waited for the laughter to die and fired his best shot.

  ‘Jack Kennedy phoned me up from the White House in June. Said if ever the Ffi
tch twins were in the USA would I give them his address. “Fire away,” I said, “I’ve got a pencil and paper right here.” He laughed fit to bust and hung up!’

  By the last course one voice held forth – Rod’s eldest, Alex, all too frequently known to the family and to Fleet Street as ‘young Alex’ to distinguish him from his grandfather, a man dead these twenty years.

  ‘The bugger of it is we were watching him like hawks,’ he was saying to all and sundry, ‘and he completely gave us the slip. We chased him as far as Tottenham and then we lost him. By the time I realised where he’d headed he could have been anywhere in the whole of eastern England. Made me wonder – has he got a woman out there too? God he was fast. Stirling Moss doesn’t have a thing on Woodbridge.’

  Life is a series of circles, thought Troy, circles that touch but never quite connect, that seem to pass invisibly and impossibly through one another like the prestidigitation of some Chinese conjurer.

  Sasha got to her feet, whacked the table with an empty bottle and called for a toast.

  ‘We are gathered here this summer eve to welcome our little brother back from the jaws of death.’

  Troy distinctly heard the other twin, his sister Masha, seated next to him, mutter, ‘Oh bloody hell.’

  ‘I am sure I speak for us all – and if I don’t, sod you – when I say that I thought the grim reaper had finally got you. You are, Freddie, a man with seemingly scant regard for life and death, but most especially your own. More knocks and scrapes and scars than one could ever hope to count. But you’ve cheated death yet again. So, the toast is “Fate – bollocks to ’im!”’

  Just for the moment Troy wondered if his family would balk at the proposal, but then to a man, and moreover to a woman, they lifted their glasses to him and in unison echoed Sasha’s toast.