A Little White Death

by John Lawton

  ‘Fate – bollocks to ’im!’

  Troy looked at Nikolai, toasting the cheating of death when it stood impatiently at his own shoulder. Then Masha whispered softly, ‘I love my sister dearly, but there are times I wonder if she isn’t completely mad.’

  It confirmed what he had been thinking for a couple of years, that the indivisibility of the twins had ceased, that they had gone their separate ways and were no longer, as he had been wont to put it, one dreadful woman with two bodies. Masha was still married – happily, Troy assumed, for all her infidelities – to Lawrence, editor of the Sunday Post. While Sasha and the late Hugh had begun their family before the war within a year of their marriage – her daughters were now in their twenties, married themselves, scattered and absent – Masha had married during the war and almost of necessity had begun her family only when it was over. Even now her boys were only in their early teens. Sasha had a freedom denied her sister, and it would be in character for her to go wild with it. Masha was rooted, he could think of no better word, but then as the twins changed their alignment so they changed in alignment with him, formed a new constellation, and he knew that he now had more in common with Sasha than he did with Masha. He was not rooted, nowhere near as rooted as he thought and the last thing he wanted was Sasha adopting him.

  Suddenly a figure was at his side. His nephew Alex.

  ‘Sorry, must dash. Just thought I’d say welcome back, old thing.’

  He clenched a fist, tapped Troy gently on the upper arm – a hammily chappish gesture – and left.

  Troy found himself exchanging looks with the young man’s mother, Lucinda. ‘There are times’, she said, ‘when I think he’s got a banger up his arse.’

  It was unlike her to be quite so Troyish in her speech, but her dissatisfaction with her son was so evident.

  ‘He won’t sit still for anything. I told him this was special and that if he was going to do his usual cut and run, then he shouldn’t come in the first place.’

  Looking down the length of the table at the extended, the vast tribe of Troy, drunken, garrulous, foul of mouth and mind, Troy could not much see that one more or less mattered.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said to his sister-in-law.

  ‘Yes it does,’ she said. ‘It’s the Tereshkov affair. It’s made a Fleet Street hero of him. It’s made him a bighead. One way or another I think the whole sorry business will make fools of us all before the year’s out.’

  And she looked at her husband as she said it.

  § 47

  Bliss. He had slept. Not the night through, but he had slept. Had not seen dawn. It was almost eight o’clock. He felt he could safely nod off and sleep until ten. If he could sleep properly again, he might just get through this mortal mess.

  At eight thirty a boom-boom-boom like rolling thunder woke him. It was not overhead. It was closer. It was inside his head. He yanked back the curtain. A large Bedford tipper truck was backed up to the kitchen garden, dumping a mountain of bricks. Rod was yelling and directing the driver. Troy would get up, get dressed, and then he’d kill him.

  ‘You’re up with the lark,’ Rod said by way of greeting. ‘You must be feeling better.’

  ‘What are you doing?’ Troy asked.

  Rod was bizarrely dressed in undersized overalls that hovered about his shins, flashing half a yard of socks – as ever, they did not match – and he was wearing a tatty straw hat. If memory served, Troy thought, it had belonged to one of his sisters some time between the wars. He was mixing mortar, bending over a pile of sand and cement and stirring it with the end of his shovel. Whatever the purpose there seemed to be as much delight in making pretty patterns in powder grey and dull yellow as there was in achieving the mixture.

  ‘Building a brick wall,’ Rod said.

  ‘Do we need a brick wall?’

  ‘Yes. We most definitely need a brick wall.’

  ‘Well then, do we need it now?’

  ‘Yes. Been saving it for years, saving it for just such a moment as this.’

  ‘Since when?’

  ‘It was the summer of. . . oh bugger, when was it the summer of? ’29? ’30? Hang on ’30, yes definitely ’30. I’d be twenty-three. Winston was out of office. Start of that long phase that kept him in the political wilderness until Chamberlain asked him back to the Admiralty. Now when was that?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. Get on with it.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter when it ended. You were talking about the start.’

  ‘Was I? So I was. Anyway. That summer Winston asks the old man and our mother down to Chartwell for the weekend. And the old dear won’t go. Winston irritates her. Clementine bores her. So the old man asks me to go instead. Wonder where you were? It was just the sort of jaunt he’d ordinarily ask you on.’

  ‘If it was 1930 I’d be fourteen. Hardly likely to gee up the dinner-table chat with the Greatest Living Englishman. He’d never have asked me.’

  Troy knew exactly where he’d been. It was the summer he turned fifteen. Biarritz. With Charlie, his mother and one of the better ‘uncles’. After surrendering his own virginity to Troy’s sisters the previous summer, Charlie was determined to get Troy laid. Troy was determined that he should not, and when Charlie succeeded in pulling the chambermaid – ‘pour mon ami, le petit Russe’, as he had told her – Troy had left him to it. Hours later he returned from a ‘bracing’ walk to find Charlie still in bed. ‘Mireille was marvellous Freddie, bloody marvellous. You don’t know what you’re missing.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Rod. ‘He wasn’t the GLE in those days, but I suppose you’re right. Anyway. Winston is whiling away the time thinking up books. He has it in mind to do a “State of Europe” book, and he’s asking the old man to give him the gen on Russia. The old man succeeds in talking him out of it. “Don’t even try,” he says. “It’s a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”’

  Troy raised an eyebrow at this. It would be typical of Alexei Troy to have pinched one of Churchill’s better lines and claimed it for his own. Equally it would be typical of Churchill to have picked up a throwaway line of Alex Troy’s and made poetry of it. It also reminded him that he had recently glimpsed the enigma (or was it the mystery?) and he wasn’t about to tell Rod this.

  ‘Winston accepts this, and as I recall they fell to arguing about Germany. “How long do you give Hitler?” Winston asks. “About two years, perhaps two and a half,” the old man replies, meaning about thirty months until the Nazis come to power. Should have had a tenner on it. He was absolutely right. “How long before the war starts?” Winston asks. And the old man spins him some line about there being no need for war but on the other hand it could come any time, and they start to argue and they go on arguing, and they went on arguing for the next ten years. Which, come to think of it, is why, when I got interned in 1940, the old man would not ask any favours from Winston. Even to get me out of jail.’

  ‘Rod,’ Troy said softly, ‘is this leading anywhere?’

  ‘Quite. I digress. On the Sunday morning, before they started rowing, I took a stroll. I came across old Winston down by the kitchen garden. He had a couple of tons of red bricks, a load of cement, a pair of overalls, a straw hat and a trowel. He said he was going to build a wall the length of his vegetable beds – massive, absolutely bloody massive – said it would balance his life nicely, and if he was out of office for any length of time would relax him purposefully. He invited me to roll up me sleeves and I laid two rows with him. I suppose I have been storing up the memory of that for these thirty-odd years. I have even, as you have doubtless observed, been saving the overalls and the straw hat. And now I find I have need of purposeful relaxation, I’ve ordered a ton of bricks and I too am going to build a wall for the kitchen garden. It will do for me what it did for Winston, pass the time and stop me from going mad with impatience. And I bet I’m as good at it as he was – after all, his rows wobbled more than a bit. He was well suited to the Admiralty, being, as
he was, well acquainted with wavy lines.’

  ‘Impatient for what?’ said Troy.

  ‘We are a year away from an election. At the most. But it could happen any time. In the meantime, we are in for a period of what I shall call pre-electoral madness. I shall show patience and discipline. Better by far to lay bricks than drop them, say I.’

  § 48

  But for Rod and Sasha they all went home. In the course of the day Sasha looked in on Troy more times than he could count, and he realised that she did indeed mean to adopt him. To nurse him, insofar as she knew anything about nursing beyond plumping pillows and saying, ‘Do you fancy a little drinkie?’ She appeared in his father’s study amid the dust and junk with her mid-morning coffee. And again at lunchtime. He walked around the garden to escape her, felt tired and retreated to his bedroom, and she called on him again. And just before seven in the evening she swanned in for ‘a natter’.

  She was, he thought, on her third gin of the evening.

  ‘Do you think there were people like us fifty years ago?’ she said, à propos of nothing.

  Troy had no idea what she was talking about.

  ‘Or even twenty or ten. Except of course for us – I mean. Were there people like us?’

  Troy said nothing.

  ‘Didn’t you grow up– didn’t we both – feeling, well, different, sort of ?’

  ‘Sort of ? How sort of ?’

  ‘Remember that bit in Jude the thingumajig?’

  ‘Obscure.’

  ‘Quite. Jude the Obscure. He’s married, well, come to think of it he hasn’t married, this silly tart who says something like, “We weren’t meant to be, we were born before our time, too sensitive for the age we live in.” Bit of a moan really. Silly tart. Never liked her, but you turn it around and it just about makes sense. We were ahead of our time. We did not, and I could not – dunno about you – behave as others did or as others expected of me. But we were not too sensitive. Far from it.’

  What was the damn woman blathering on about?

  ‘Tell me, how many women have you had?’

  ‘Dunno,’ Troy lied. He knew exactly. There had not been many.

  ‘Do you know there are some women who’ve only ever slept with their husbands? Most women in fact have only ever known one man.’

  She was pissed, definitely pissed.

  ‘I’m fifty-three years old. In my prime I had most of the men I knew. Fucked all your friends.’

  Troy knew this. Charlie had simply been the first.

  ‘I cuckolded Hugh at the reception. Had one of his ushers in your bedroom.’

  Troy didn’t want to hear this. And he’d still no idea where she was heading. Then she threw down the newspaper she’d been clutching. More sleazy headlines from the Summer of the Sleazy. Troy gave it the merest glance. ‘Britain’s Raunchiest Bishop. The Duchess speaks out!’ It was the composite headline. Next Sunday they’d simply transpose the nouns. Somewhere in the bowels of Fleet Street a subeditor on night shift flicked through a thesaurus for synonyms of ‘raunchy’.

  ‘We lived rather fast, I think. I don’t think we let our morals be decided for us.’

  ‘Rod did,’ said Troy, and it sounded like a miserable bleat even to him.

  ‘Oh yes, Rod did. But I didn’t and you didn’t and Masha didn’t. But don’t you think the world is catching up with us?’

  ‘Are you saying you’re the new moral standard?’

  ‘No. I’m not.’

  ‘Then what are you saying?’

  ‘Not sure.’

  ‘The cakes of custom cracking open?’

  ‘Dunno. Why does custom come in cakes? Why not tins or packets?’

  This was a classic twins remark, either one of them could have uttered it. Troy wished she’d just go away. He was not at all sure how long he could refrain from saying it.

  ‘I think I’m saying that things are breaking up. And the more the world becomes more like the one in which I have lived all my life, the less I like it.’

  The woman could drive him mad.

  ‘Because it inverts, it becomes the new moral imperative. Decided from outside, by popular acclaim. If you see what I mean?’

  ‘People expect loose morals?’

  ‘Sort of. And it won’t work. It’s a false freedom. It’s prurience, and prurience does not do what it wants, it does what outrages. One eye always over the shoulder looking back at the moral code, seeking permission in defiance. It won’t work because it only works in dissent. If it becomes, as it were, “permissive”, if we are now entering upon a permissive society—’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A permissive society.’

  ‘What’s that? What the hell is a “permissive society”?’

  ‘I rather think I just made it up. But it does describe pretty well the society we are becoming, but if we are “permissive” – can you hear the inverted commas, Freddie? – then are we not forced to ask “whose permission?” I never needed anyone’s permission. I did what I did because it was what I wanted to do. Not because it outraged the bourgeoisie. Fuck ’em, I say.’

  It was the most complicated statement he had ever heard the wretched woman make. She who lacked all self-awareness, a born anarchist, who did first and thought about doing, if at all, much much later, had come up with something that passed for analysis. A statement of her ‘position’. ‘She didn’t need ’em.’ And Troy did not need Sasha.

  ‘Sasha. Could you just fuck off ?’

  She stood up, little legs ramrod straight, the lips a letterbox line. Picked up her drink and her newspaper and stared at him.

  ‘You know, Freddie. When you were young you were very pretty. A complete shit but a very pretty boy. One forgave you everything. Now you’re an emaciated wreck, you’re going to have to be a lot more careful about playing the complete shit!’

  She slammed the door on the way out. He knew now. He’d have to go to London or they’d all drive him totally mad.

  § 49

  Salvation was at hand. Two days later he woke late after another bad night and heard the sound of someone playing his piano. Badly. A deepand truly awful voice drifted up from below.

  ‘You look sweet, talk abaht a treat, you look dapper from yer napper to yer feet . . .’

  Troy swung his feet to the floor and reached for his dressinggown.

  ‘Dressed in style, wiv yer brand new tile, yer farver’s old green tie on, buuuuuuut ah wunt give yer tuppence for yer old watch chain, old iron, old iron!’

  Descending the stairs, something told him this was not an unannounced visit from Lennon and McCartney.

  ‘Any old iron, any old iron, any any any old iron . . .’

  The Fat Man sat at the piano, a brace of dead pheasants on the piano lid. He was in black jacket and stripes, a bowler hat the size of one of the lesser planets plonked down next to the pheasants. His gentleman’s gentleman outfit. Troy had never seen him in it before.

  ‘I was in this neck o’ the woods,’ he said. ‘The guv’nor fancied a fresh bird, what with the glorious twelfth just passed. So I got on me bike and bagged a couple o’ yours. You wasn’t up. So I was just passing the time at the old joanna. They don’t write ’em like that any more do they?’

  No, thank God.

  ‘You’re going up to town?’

  ‘All the way to the ’Dilly, old cock.’

  ‘Any chance of a lift?’

  ‘’Allo, ’allo,’ said the Fat Man. ‘’Ere we go again.’

  § 50

  Once he had settled into Goodwin’s Court it seemed a good idea to call Anna. So he did. She drove over at once, clutching her doctor’s bag, wearing a flowery cotton dress, poppy-like flowers on a black background, flat shoes without stockings. It was still summer. Her arms were bare and tanned. She had lost weight. Probably the same half stone he had gained. She looked the better for it – he remembered vividly the slim young woman he had met in the 1940s. But there was a mask across her face, a flat unemotionality in her vo
ice, that he had put there.

  ‘I really should have come and seen you as soon as you were discharged.’

  He said nothing. She seemed hesitant, confused.

  ‘Of course . . . that would have meant me coming out to Mimram . . .’

  Of course, he had not asked her to Mimram.

  ‘But here we are,’ he said and so evaded whatever it was she might have meant, as such phrases are intended to.

  Anna took his pulse, his blood pressure, listened intently at his chest and insisted he got down the bathroom scales so she could weigh him. He had indeed gained half a stone, nine pounds exactly.

  ‘You’ve been very lucky,’ she said. ‘You’re mending well. You’re still giving yourself the jabs?’

  Intramuscular injections, self-administered to the backside with the aid of a mirror. To say nothing of a large handful of pills each day.

  ‘Yes. I was wondering how long?’

  ‘Oh, weeks yet.’

  ‘If I’m recovering well, how soon can I—’

  ‘Work? Oh God, Troy. Don’t press me on this please. Months, honestly months.’

  She stuffed the stethoscope back in her bag, smoothed down the front of her skirt, and looked grimly at him. She had not smiled once.

  ‘Now, is there anything else?’

  ‘I’m still not sleeping. I feel as though I’ve heard every dawn chorus for ages.’

  ‘Well, I can easily do something about that.’

  She sat down, took a prescription pad from her bag, scribbled quickly and then tore up the topsheet.

  ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Oh, nothing. Damn near killed you with the wrong dose, that’s all. I’ve been so distracted lately.’

  ‘Distracted?’

  ‘You know. Angus.’

  ‘You’ve heard from Angus?’

  ‘Don’t be daft, Troy. Of course I haven’t heard from Angus. I doubt whether I or you will ever hear from Angus again. It’s been nine months. He’s never vanished for that long before. And Fitz. You know.’