by John Lawton
‘Number 66, please,’ he said.
‘Mrs Troy?’
‘Yes.’
The man dialled. Troy could hear the phone ring and ring.
‘Nobody home.’
It was pointless asking to be let in. The look on the doorman’s face told him that this was not the sort of place that let you in on a bluff or a whim.
‘I’m her husband,’ he said, knowing how lame the line sounded.
The man nodded. ‘Sure, sure,’ said the look.
‘She could be gone a day or two, you know. Tends to do that.’
Troy checked into a hotel and killed two days walking the streets of the city. A wet, misty late November. It seemed to him that with the closing year he had reached the year’s antithesis. Twelve months ago or thereabouts he had been in Moscow, the city without. Now New York, the city with.
His sense of the place, based on a single visit in 1928, was that they’d got round to finishing it. In 1928 it had struck him as being a construction site on an unimaginable scale. The Chrysler Building at Lexington and Forty-Second almost built, 40 Wall Street, almost as high and almost as built – and the Empire State Building, webbed with scaffolding, half-built, like the younger brother growing so fast it was all too evident he would soon outgrow his siblings. Troy searched for a metaphor. If Beirut had been London in the war, all black market and fiddles; if Moscow had been London in the bleak years, all want and worry . . . what, then, was New York? At dusk on the second day he found himself at Radio City, on Sixth Avenue, the cross-street led directly into the Rockefeller Center, rising topless from the concrete to vanish in the rain and mist, lit in lurid lilac by the floodlights. It looked hellish, supernatural, futuristic. A backdrop for The Shape of Things to Come. That was it. New York was London in the future. He was not at all sure it was a future he wanted.
He headed back to the Upper West Side, a maverick route up Ninth Avenue until it became Columbus, past the bulldozed tenements of the Jets and the Sharks, a voice inside Troy singing, ‘I like to be in Ameeerrriiika!’
At West Seventy-Second the same man said simply, ‘You can go up. She’s expecting you.’
He was admitted through the second gate, into the courtyard. The walls rose up around him like a keep. More than ever it resembled a castle. And right in front of him was a fountain. Little fishes spouted water, arched their backs and spread their fins around the base of huge conch shells from which rose the same yellowy-white lilies that graced the iron gates of his father’s house, spouting still more water. He began to wonder. All those years she had spent in Moscow. Had she made the same visit he had? A quick look at the closed gates of the Ministry of Agriculture, Subdivision of Planning & Production, Wheat & Barley, then on to the guided tour of the Tolstoy house. Is that what attracted her to this Victorian monstrosity? Its very Russianness, its seeming un-Americanness?
Yet another porter, a young woman in blue, wearing a pillbox hat, took him up in the lift, a marvel in mahogany, a plush confessional for the unrepentant, with its Neptunes now in brass, a brass so shiny it must be polished every day.
The door of apartment 66 stood ajar. Darkness within. He pushed gently. A very fat tabby cat, a good eighteen pounds of furry beast, lay on its back on the carpet, barring the threshold, legs in the air, head raised slightly so it could see who was coming in. He took a stepforward, expecting the cat to bolt. It didn’t.
‘He won’t let you in ’less you tickle his belly,’ said a voice from the darkness.
The floor beneath his feet began to float; the walls took wing. He’d heard that voice in a thousand dreams. Damn romance – of late he’d heard it in a dozen nightmares.
‘Where are you? I can’t see you.’
‘In the dark. One of us always seems to be.’
He scrunched his eyes. Willed his irises to widen to the light. A short figure assumed shape at the edge of vision. The cat rolled onto his feet and took flight. A barefoot Tosca padded slowly towards him.
‘What kept ya?’
She pecked him on the cheek, pushed the door to and walked on into the sitting room without waiting for his answer.
He looked around. Books from floor to ceiling, books in piles on the floor, books three layers deepadding six inches to the height of the coffee table. The Tosca he had known had read Huck Finn over and over again. In the mid-fifties, when they’d married, he had tried to broaden her taste. He’d no idea he had succeeded on quite such a scale. It was more a Troy household than a Tosca one. Troy Nation new-built in the New World. But then, as Fitz had said, she was Mrs Troy.
She was dressed of old. A blouse and slacks. He could not recall that he had ever seen her in a dress. He looked at her. She bloomed. She was older than he, fifty-two, but she had kept her figure. The starched white blouse, a cotton sculpture over big breasts, the black slacks clinging to the curve of her backside. Her neck had not gone, but that it would was inevitable with women. The neck went before the tits. The eyes shone, nut-brown, fleckless and cat healthy. She was looking back at him, smiling, so obviously glad to see him. He wondered what she saw when she looked at him.
And he knew at once that everything had changed.
Troy woke. A post-coital wakefulness, the kind that used to drive her nuts. She could sleep like death, and if he woke her she would complain. But she was awake first. He realised almost at once that she could see him in the half-darkness, the reflected light of the building opposite cutting through the curtains of the bedroom.
She threw off the sheets and disappeared down the corridor. A few minutes later she returned, a plate of warm pizza in her hand. Still naked. Tanned, trim. Tits up, arse firm. She took some form of regular exercise, he concluded. Cared for herself in a way he’d never found possible or practical. The job had blown him apart, time and Kolankiewicz had sewn him back together. Until now.
‘Figured you’d be hungry. You used to eat like a horse after. Ah, the joys of a Toast’R’Oven.’
He’d not eaten pizza in years. It had never caught on in England. Probably never would. His first taste of it from the PX during the war had struck him as exotically un-English. Now it seemed too rich, too greasy; it merely filled a space in his belly.
She ate more than he. A rolling tear of oil coursed from the corner of her mouth, down her neck and across her left breast. He dammed it just short of the nipple with the tip of a finger and traced its route back to her lips.
‘Why did you want me back?’ he asked.
‘Well . . . the sex was always good . . .’
She was grinning as she said it. But she also meant it, he knew. As though his inhibitions were smothered by her lack.
He was astounded. The idea that there could be such a thing as ‘good’ sex. All sex was bad sex. It drew you and it bound you and it spent you. It took all your unspecified desire and then it tossed you aside with your desire still unsatisfied. But that was less than half her answer.
‘I love you. Took an age for me to accept it, but I do. Or to be precise, it took a world for me to accept it.’
Troy said nothing. She had not ducked her own words, had looked at him through every syllable.
‘Could you live here? I mean. Being practical. Could you live here?’
‘I don’t know,’ he lied, knowing damn well he couldn’t. He did like to be in Ameeerrriiika; he just didn’t want to live there. ‘Could you live in England?’
‘No. It’s an uptight—’
He knew the lyrics to this one and cut her off.
‘—Tight-assed little nation.’
‘You’ve noticed?’
‘It’s changing. Everybody tells me its changing.’
‘Believe that when I see it.’
The pause, the deep intake of breath, told him more was coming – that what followed would not be so flippant. ‘I had to do this my own way. You understand? I had . . . I had a world to make.’
This was her considered word on an absence of seven years. This was what his father had t
old him. This was what he had told Charlie. A world of difference, the one between the world as you find it and the world as you make it.
‘I mean. Who am I? Took me a while to know.’
This was the question she had posed over and over again when she had fled Russia in ’56. It was a reasonable question after a life of deceit and disguise. A war spent with the US Army, a cold war spent with the KGB and the years since 1956 spent, if not hiding from, then avoiding, both. It seemed to Troy that she had fled one way almost as Charlie had fled the other. My friend the spy, my wife the spy. The pity of it was he hated spooks.
Now, he was startled by the combination of personalities she was displaying to him. The wise-cracking Lower East Side she-huckster who had seduced him effortlessly in 1944, now overlain by the Manhattan sophisticate – two styles of competence and confidence. And the broken-winged bird he had married in 1956 – endlessly pushing him out to arm’s length – was nowhere to be seen. It was he whose wings flapped hopelessly, he who had looked in the mirror and failed to recognise his own body.
‘Who am I?’ he said back to her, and departed from the script. He had never asked her that before. It was not a question he would ever have put to anyone.
Out in the corridor the cat struck up a wail. Only when Tosca got out of bed and opened the door to him did the beast shut up. All Troy saw was a flash of tabby fur as he shot into the room. A couple of minutes later he appeared on Troy’s pillow, silent, looking into Troy’s black eyes with his own merely slits of emerald green. He could not help the feeling that he’d seen this look before.
That night he dreamt of Clover again. Wet-footed, softly to his bed. The dead hand upon him. He felt no pain.
He woke to the brightness of day and a fit of coughing. He’d not hacked so badly in quite a while. He grabbed a handkerchief and spat blood into it. He’d never done that before. Maybe it was a mistake to have flushed all his pills down the bog, the TB tablets along with the uppers and downers.
He looked sideways. Tosca was on the floor. On the other side of the room, by the window. The cat next to her, eyes flashing. They were both staring at him.
‘Y’OK?’
‘I’ll be fine. What are you doing?’
She turned back to the window. Put a knuckle and a diamond ring to the glass.
‘You remember that window in the Blue Room at Mimram, where your sister scratched the date of her engagement and their initials in the glass. I kinda thought I’d do the same. Mark the date we got it back together in glass. Otherwise we’ll neither of us remember it. It was way after midnight, so it’ll be today’s date.’
She was right. He would not remember. He could remember nothing save that which tumbled headlong through his dreams.
Nothing. Nothing lasted. Everything changed. Everything passed. The brightest tent, its shining yards hung in tatters from the rail for moth and mouse to feed upon.
Why should not middle-aged men be mad?
She
who never knew a word of
Dante, who half-remembered
Oscar Wilde, and once,
long ago,
had heard
Dylan Thomas on the wireless . . .
who cares what the old books said?
who cares why middle-aged men should be
mad . . .
She had made her world, as she rightly, proudly put it. There was no place for him in it, though she did not know it – and there was no place in it that he wanted. He had lived so long without – without wife, without family, without feeling – without the value scheme, the moral scheme that life builds on reciprocal emotion. These were things he did not know and did not wish to know and would never know.
He had learnt a lesson too late in life – that other people’s emotions do not matter.
Her ‘I love you’ was meaningless to him.
She might just as well have said, ‘Your flies are undone.’
Once acknowledged, instantly forgotten.
Other people’s emotions are out there somewhere beyond, beyond the bubble. The glass bubble. He had come to think of the glass bubble as the condition of tuberculosis, the White Death – but it was the human condition, the Living Death.
A fire engine roared up Central Park West, full siren song. He found himself gazing at her spine, bent over her etching. Naked but for knickers. She pulled back from the windowpane.
‘There,’ she said. ‘That should do it.’
He saw his initials entwined in hers, and the date diamond deep. ‘November 22nd 1963.’
She was right. No one would ever remember that.
Historical Note
There is an obvious source for some of what precedes. The Profumo Affair of 1963 gave me some of the plot and a few of the details of the second quarter of this book. Equally, there are other, perhaps less obvious sources – the case of Detective Sergeant Challenor of 1962, the defection of Kim Philby, also in 1963, and the resignation of Lord Lambton some ten years later. I was also influenced by, among others, Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger,V.C. Fishwick’s Pigs: Their Breeding and Management (rev. edn, 1956), the poetry of Brian Patten and the Diaries of Alan Clark.
This is not a roman à clef. It does not helpto presume that Woodbridge is Profumo or to presume that Charlie is Philby. Equally, Fitz is not Ward and Tara, Caro and Clover are neither Mandy nor Christine. The ‘real’ people are the minor characters – Driberg, Rebecca West – or background figures who do not appear – Wilson, Kennedy et al. I made the rest up. Only two ‘speeches’ made by anyone in 1963 are used in this book, the first uttered by Stephen Ward at his trial is given, slightly amended, to Marty Pritch-Kempon p. 231, and the second, uttered, perhaps apocryphally, by Rebecca West is on p. 188.
I’ve bent history as little as possible, but for reasons of plot I sent Troy and Driberg to the Establishment Club after the real Establishment had folded, and I’m well aware that a 1952 Bentley Continental was a two-door car, and that I gave it four.
If a novel can have a single starting point, it was this. Several years ago I interviewed a reporter who had covered the Stephen Ward case in 1963, and had known Ward well. ‘Any idea that he was bumped off is fantasy,’ I was told. ‘He killed himself.’ And I started to think of a plot whose premise was ‘supposing he didn’t?’ Once I’d gone down that road, since I’d no doubts that Ward did kill himself, the resemblances to what really happened in 1963 became those of mood, as in ‘national mood’, and tone rather than of incident and character. I stuck with the axis of the plot being a sex scandal because no other plot would be authentically as axiomatic of the times. As Rebecca West put it: ‘The state of mind of England in 1963 was itself a historic event . . .’
§ 1
Berlin April 17th 1941
It was an irrational moment. A surrender of logic to the perilous joy of common nonsense. When the train stopped between stations on the S-Bahn, Stahl felt exposed, fearful for his life in a way that made no sense. High on the creaking metal latticework, the train tortured the tracks and juddered to a halt. Then the lights went out and Stahl knew that there was an air raid on. Yet again the RAF had got through to a city that the Führer had told them would never see a British plane or hear the crash of a British bomb. Berlin the impregnable, some of whose citizens now trembled and wept in the darkness, packed into a swaying train, high above the streets.
It was irrational. He was no more at risk here than on the ground. It just seemed that way – as though to be stuck on the elevated tracks like a bird on the wire made him into . . . a sitting duck. He recalled a phrase of his father’s from the last war, one every old Austrian soldier used occasionally – every old British soldier too, he was certain – ‘If it’s got your name on it . . .’ which meant that death was inevitable, and urged a grinning stoicism on those about to die.
The raid distracted him. He had been pretending to read a newspaper. He always did when he waited for the word. Tonight he had been oddly confident that there would be word. S
o confident, he became worried that he would miss her. More than once he had carried the pretence into practice, and had been caught engrossed in some nonsense in the Völkischer Beobachter and all but oblivious when she had brushed past him and muttered a single sentence.
The train moved off, the lights still out, sparks visible on the tracks below – hardly enough to make them the moving target his fellow-Berliners thought they were. At Warschauer Straße station passengers shoved and kicked till the doors banged open, a human tide surging for ground level and the shelters. The moment had passed, he was happier now in the open air and, as ever, curious about the men who dropped death on the city night after night. He stepped onto the platform, gazing into the clear, night sky hoping for a glimpse of a Blenheim or a Halifax. This was a reprisal raid. Last night – and into the small of hours of the morning – as the wireless had crowed all day, the Luftwaffe had blasted central London.
She brushed his shoulder. So quick, so quiet he could have missed her. A dark woman in a belted, brown macintosh, almost as tall as he. He could scarcely describe her face – he didn’t think he’d ever seen her eyes.
‘You are in the gravest danger. Go now. Go tonight.’
He heard his heart thump in his chest. He had expected this for so long that to hear the words uttered at last was like a body blow. The wind knocked from his lungs, his pulse doubled, a weakness in the knees that was so hackneyed a response he could scarcely believe it was happening to him.
‘Go now,’ she had said. ‘Go tonight.’
‘Leave Berlin,’ it meant, ‘leave Germany.’ And with that phrase, twelve wretched years of his life were stitched and wrapped and over.