A Little White Death

by John Lawton

  ‘What’s your point, Troy?’

  ‘Are we now painting out the Britain we knew, twenty years after that in its turn ended? Ended, in a bloody war, much the same, and we have lived with its vestiges far too long, but . . . are we now to be walled up alive in Pegboard, suffused in a sea of Magicoat, bound and gagged in strips of Fablon? . . . The last whitewash turned out to be philistinism on the grand scale.’

  ‘If the only way to defeat the new philistinism is to defend all that is without discrimination, then philistinism wins – cannot lose, in fact.’

  It was a shrewd answer, shrewder by far than his analysis.

  ‘Might we not come to regret the “boom”? Might we not come to regret the 1960s?’

  ‘Why not just roll with ’em’ Troy? It’s the only way we’ll find out. You’ve kicked against the pricks as long as I’ve known you. You’ve staged a personal vendetta against the Britain that raised us. One more roll and we might well have seen the last of her.’

  ‘Come away with me.’

  He had changed tack so suddenly she was visibly startled.

  ‘What? I mean where?’

  ‘I don’t know. Pick a country. Let’s just get away for a while.’

  ‘Troy, I can’t.’

  ‘Let your builders get on with it for a couple of weeks.’

  ‘No. It isn’t that. That would be fine. It’s . . . it’s just that I’ve already arranged to go away while the work’s done. I’m leaving tomorrow as a matter of fact.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘France. I’m spending ten days in the Cevennes.’

  ‘Woodbridge,’ Troy said simply.

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘He was wearing blue jeans the last time I saw him. You’re starting your fashion revolution in the most unlikely places.’

  ‘Well,’ said Foxx. ‘Well, he did ask first. Troy, I’m so sorry. I’d love to go somewhere, but I’d be letting him down. Why didn’t you ask me a fortnight ago? I’d’ve jumped at the chance. We could have gone somewhere warm. The Cevennes in November won’t exactly be April in Paris, will it?’

  She hugged him. Kissed him once. Her way with apology.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he lied. ‘Really it doesn’t.’

  § 127

  Troy phoned Anna. He waited almost a whole day after Foxx turned him down and then he called Anna. He could not remember when he had last called her.

  ‘I’ve been trying to reach you for two days,’ she said.

  He thought she sounded tearful, an immense sadness in her voice.

  ‘I’ve been out a lot,’ he said lamely. ‘Just walking around.’

  ‘Could you come over right away?’

  ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Angus is dead. They’ve found his body. It appears he jumped in the river and drowned himself about a month back. Now the body’s washed up on the Essex coast by Jacob’s Reach. The police came to see me two days ago.’

  Tumbling through his mind, the kaleidoscopic explosion of paper as he had torn Angus’s manuscript free from his chest, the manuscript he had faithfully promised Angus he would deliver safely to Anna, the last words he had spoken, ‘I knew it would get me in the end.’ Had he jumped before or after Troy had been pushed? Then the indelible words Charlie had uttered to him – Jacob’s Reach, the muddy promontory on the Essex coast where the body of Norman Cobb had finally broken surface. Anna’s voice cut into his reverie.

  ‘Oh God, Troy. I can’t take any more. Just get over here pronto, will you?’

  He listened to the buzz of the dialling tone, put down the phone and, wondering how long he’d be gone, packed a toothbrush and a clean shirt. Then he collected the Bentley, parked in Bedfordbury almost exactly where it had stood the night Percy Blood had riddled it with bullets, and drove to Unbearable Bassington Street.

  ‘They asked me to identify him,’ she said. ‘I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to see my husband dead. I didn’t want the memory of him looking like a half-decayed corpse. I spend my working life with the dead and dying. I wanted to remember Angus alive. I wanted him vital, I wanted him to be the man I married. I called you. You could have gone instead. But I had to go. And I couldn’t swear that it was him. He was unrecognisable. The water, the fish, God knows. The eyes were gone. Troy! He had no eyes! A one-legged man with Angus’s wallet in his coat pocket. And I wished they hadn’t made me look. So I asked for the leg. And there it was, that old tin leg with all the repairs he’d had made to it over twenty years. And on the back of the calf a maker’s stamp. I’ll remember it till the day I die: ‘A. Futscher, Colditz, fecit. MCMXLII .’ So it was him, I said. Him or some other one-legged RAF ace with a tin leg made by the same little man in the same little German town. God, Troy, where were you when I needed you?’

  Angus was buried the following day. Troy had spent the night in Anna’s guest room, heard her cry till dawn and watched her emerge in black, decline his offer of breakfast, hiding her grief beneath a layer or more of make-up.

  A damp November day, ten thousand leaves waiting to be swept up, soggy underfoot, clinging to the soles of the shoes. No one came. Angus had few friends, no siblings, and his parents were long dead. Troy stood with Anna on his arm while a priest, two gravediggers and an old lady who seemed to be a professional mourner watched Angus’s vast coffin lowered into the grave. He found thoughts so idle, so pointless he could never utter them – had they buried his tin leg in the coffin with him?

  They walked back to his car as the thud of earth hitting the coffin lid boomed out. He did not know how Anna felt, but he could not bear to hear this sound.

  They stopped under a leafless chestnut tree. She slipped her arm from his.

  ‘Well?’ he said.

  ‘Well?’ she said. ‘Well? You bastard, you complete and utter fucking bastard.’

  Her arms flailed and the blows of small clenched fists caught him on the chest, the cheeks, the ears. She laid into Troy just as Peggy Blood and Valerie Clover had done.

  Troy held her fast, her arms with his, stilled the rain of blows and her head sank onto his chest and her tears rolled forth in flood.

  ‘Oh Troy, just hold me, will you?’

  Minutes passed. He could not have guessed how many. The furious pounding of her heart slowed, the tectonic heaving of her breast calmed. At last she spoke again, her voiced muffled by the tear-wet wool of his winter overcoat. ‘Oh Troy, just fuck off, will you?’

  § 128

  Troy resorted to cleaning up. The house was a mess. He’d done nothing to it since the end of August. He started with his own wardrobe. There hung the suit he had been wearing the night Fitz and Clover had died. He hadn’t worn it since. Superstition? Fortuity. It was a good suit; too good be written off as he’d had to do with the remains of the one he had been wearing the night – as things turned out – that wandering Angus had died.

  He decided to send it to the cleaner’s, and turned out the pockets. The left-hand pocket yielded a folded piece of notepaper. It was the letter from Tosca that Fitz had given him. ‘Come up and see me some time.’ He had completely forgotten that he had it.

  He called Rod’s secretary. She booked all Rod’s foreign travel and had always offered to do the same for him if he ever again took to travelling. Half an hour later she phoned him back and told him he was booked on the next afternoon’s Pan Am to Idlewild.

  ‘. . . And Rod had me book a car to take you to the airport.’

  ‘I’m quite happy with the coach,’ said Troy.

  ‘He insisted. His treat.’

  At lunchtime the following day, he was packed and stuck in that expectant phase of the journey when all is ready, but the clock tells you ‘too soon’. He was sitting in his house, in his topcoat, doing no more than listen to the clock tick.

  Someone knocked at the door. His sister Sasha. Bright, busy and nosy.

  ‘I wondered if you were free for lunch?’

  ‘I’m not.’

  She noticed the suitca
se, upright by the hatstand, bound up with a stout leather strap, plastered with long-defunct hotel labels from the days when his father had globetrotted with it half a century ago.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘New York.’

  ‘New York?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Perhaps a wee drinkie, then, before you leave, a little something to steady your nerves?’

  It seemed to Troy that he might have to open the door and push her out. She wanted something. Probably, simply the doubtful pleasure of his company, and she wasn’t going to get it. Another knock at the door spared him this. It was Tara Ffitch – defying the November weather in a simple, startling red Chanel two-piece. Her hair was still brown – perhaps she had renounced the sins of the blonde? – and she was clutching a smudgy, inky newspaper galley.

  ‘I’ve not called at a bad time?’

  ‘None better,’ said Troy seeing relief from his sister in her presence. ‘Do come in.’

  He made the introductions. Sasha beamed, seemed genuinely pleased to be meeting a ‘celebrity’.

  ‘I brought you the last instalment,’ said Tara. ‘This will run in the Post next Sunday. I don’t suppose you followed the story, did you?’

  ‘I’m afraid I didn’t. I suppose I should have. The moral tale for our times?’

  He had not meant to say this. It slipped out. He liked the woman. He had no wish to offend her.

  ‘If you like,’ she said, using one of his favourite phrases. ‘You know what morality is? It’s the great sideshow, beats bloody hell out of wireless and the telly, and before wireless and the telly were invented it was all they had. It’s wonderfully simple. You set up your morality, your moral code that the dull, the lazy and the unimaginative will have no difficulty with, and then when the rest of us, you and I, the few, break it – since it is not in our nature to do otherwise – the many – that is the unimaginative, the lazy and the dull – have hours of endless fun tut-tutting and condemning, the vicarious fun of who fucks who and who does worse. And if we did not fuck and if we did not fuck up, then what would they have to talk about? You see, they need us far more than we need them. In fact, we don’t need them at all. So, I’ll give them what they want. Or, since in this day and age everything has its price, to be precise I’ll sell them what they want.’

  ‘Precisely,’ said Sasha. ‘Fuck ’em.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Tara. ‘Fuck ’em.’

  It was a dreadful moment. Generations met, years rolled away. Troy knew from the twinkling hagshine in her black eyes that his sister had found her dark soulmate, realised that he had been the unwitting midwife to a friendship cast in hell. That each had lost their twin – whether real or pretend – Masha lost to continuing marriage and motherhood, Caro to the joys and struggles of illegitimacy and miscegenation – and had simply realigned, struck new liaisons, the elective affinity, the coven, the twindom wreathed in sulphur.

  ‘My dear,’ said Sasha, ‘we appear to be manless. May I buy you lunch?’

  ‘That’s just what I came to ask Troy. But he’s not coming out to play, is he?’

  Troy watched them down the alley, Fox and Cat arm in arm, almost to the kink in the way that led under the buildings on St Martin’s Lane. Then Tara was running back to him. Her arms around his neck, a smacking kiss.

  ‘Thanks for not giving me away.’

  ‘What?’ he said.

  ‘You know. You always knew.’

  ‘Knew what?’

  ‘Caro never testified in court. I couldn’t put her through that. Don’t you think I deserve an Oscar for my performance?’

  Another smackeroo, and she ran to catch up with Sasha. It was, he had to admit, little short of brilliant, and it had almost worked. She’d seen that Blood meant to charge Fitz come what may, felt first hand his mania to subvert justice and suborn witnesses and, knowing if it were not her it would be someone, she had set him up. Good girl, bad girl – and she had played both parts. She’d pushed Mirkeyn almost to the limit with her ‘hysterical’ performance; she’d risked contempt and perjury and got away with both. She’d clouded his judgement and but for his ultimately sharing Blood’s mania to convict, she could so easily have destroyed the case against Fitz. Troy sincerely hoped that she had just had the last word on the case of Paddy Fitz. There was no more he wanted to hear.

  He went back for his suitcase. It felt oddly light. He’d no idea how much to pack. No idea how long he’d be there. Five minutes later he followed the women, down Goodwin’s Court, under the arch, out into St Martin’s Lane to wait for the hire car. A deepblue, wire-wheeled Morgan shot past him and braked just down the lane, between the Court and the Coliseum. A woman opened the silly toy door and climbed out. It was just like Tereshkov’s car. For a moment he looked in double-take. They weren’t so common as to be unremarkable. The woman straightened her black winter coat and came up the street towards him, smiling and waving. He did not recognise her. She was in her fifties, he thought. A looker for her age, but all the same he did not know her. An open car in November meant hats and gloves and headscarves. She could see much more of him than he could of her. Only when she stopped less than five feet away and spoke his name did he know her. It was Judy Leigh-Hunt, mother of the errant Charlie. And she wasn’t fifty, she was sixty-five or more – a looker all the same.

  ‘I thought I’d missed you.’

  ‘You almost have. I’m on my way to Heathrow.’

  ‘Then I’ll be quick. I’ve had a letter from Charlie. He’s written three or four times since February. Usually childish whinges about life in Russia, but by the last letter I finally twigged. When he was a little boy he loved all those Boy’s Own and Magnet thingies, and he’d write me coded letters from school, pretending he was Richard Hannay or Bulldog Thingie or somebody like that, until he got too big to want to bother. I realised he was using it again. I won’t bore you with the details, but there was a message for you buried in his last complaint about borscht and fried tripe.’

  She opened her handbag and fished out a piece of paper.

  ‘Haven’t a clue what it means, but when I got through the nursery code this is what he says: “Tell Freddie his old man was kosher, the real McCoy, the dog’s’” . . . herrum . . . oh dear . . . “the dog’s bollocks. No need to worry.” Now does that mean anything?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Troy, wondering if it mattered any more. ‘Yes, it’s quite clear.’

  Over her shoulder he could see the man in the driving seat of the blue Morgan twisting his neck to look at Judy. One of the blueblazered RAF types. He leant on the horn.

  ‘Who’s your friend?’

  ‘Oh, Barry, you mean.’

  She coloured almost imperceptibly. Her right hand flapped once, sweeping away something invisible to the eye.

  ‘Well. Bloody hell I thought, when that Woodbridge thing blew up– all these blokes and all those young women – sauce for the goose, I thought. Young Barry – I say young, he’s your age if he’s a day, darling – well, he’d been hanging around for weeks, and I thought, bugger the family, bugger the neighbours, bugger the village. You’re only old once. Well, must dash. Toodle-oo.’

  She took a few steps then turned back to him. Sizing him up.

  ‘Freddie. You shouldn’t, you know.’

  ‘Shouldn’t what?’

  ‘Worry about Charlie. He’s not worth it. Men like Charlie, men like Woodbridge, Fitzpatrick – they’re none of them worth a damn.’

  The Morgan vanished into the snarl of traffic waiting to enter Trafalgar Square. Behind him a horn pipped. He turned and saw a Rolls-Royce at the kerb, a peak-capped driver waving at him. Trust Rod to overdo it. To Heathrow in a Roller? Why not?

  He got in the back. The driver looked at him and said, ‘’Eaffrow, guv’nor?’ And whipped off his cap. It was Alfie. Alfie from The Glebe Sanatorium.

  ‘Yes,’ said Troy, feeling he should explain, somewhat nonplussed to see the man again. ‘Yes. I’m on my way to New York.’
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  ‘New York, Fred?’ Then he cackled like Tommy Trinder. ‘You lucky people!’

  Epilogue

  NOVEMBER 1963

  NEW YORK

  It was a fortress of a building, dwarfed now by the larger, vulgar developments of the post-war years, but still dominant on its site halfway up Central Park West. It was easy to imagine it as it once was, standing alone on the edge of a virtually treeless Central Park, a mock-gothic castle in a sea of mud so far from the heart of fashionable Manhattan, at a time when rich New Yorkers lived no further north than Union Square, that they said you might just as well live in the Dakotas as live at One West Seventy-Second Street.

  It was remarkably like his father’s old town house in Moscow, the same pale brick, black with dirt, the same extravagant use of copper, weathered to a startling powder-green, the same tiny turrets and dormers, islands in the sky. But this was the town house writ large, the town house on a monumental scale, ten or eleven storeys, the building running the length of a city block all the way to Seventy-Third.

  Troy walked along from the corner – a row of black Neptunes peered at him from the ironwork – and stopped by a blue-uniformed, peak-capped porter, who had just stepped from his sentry box. The man pointed the way to the office. For a moment the fortress became a cathedral as he passed under a high vaulted ceiling, then up a flight of steps and into a small room to face another man in uniform, perched in front of the massed spaghetti of an ancient telephone exchange. Whatever this place was it could not be cheap. Either Tosca had landed on her feet or . . . but there was no end to the sentence, no speculation worth the thought.