Riptide

by Lawton, John

  He hadn’t. It was Cormack. Somehow Troy had got it into his head that he’d seen the last of Cormack.

  ‘Do you have the time? I need to talk.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Troy.

  He glanced around the sitting room looking for evidence of Kitty’s presence and while Cormack had his back turned to close the door, he quietly booted her crash-helmet under the sofa and hoped she’d stay in bed.

  Cormack slumped on the sofa. Troy could see the helmet framed between his ankles as menacing as a land-mine. He looked unhappy. He looked troubled.

  ‘I’m being sent home,’ he said. ‘I’m the man who knew too much.’

  ‘Is that really a hardship?’

  ‘I guess not. It’s not as though I were being deported. But . . . I had unfinished business here.’

  ‘Stahl?’

  ‘No – Stahl is finished business. Stahl is dead.’

  Troy was shocked. He’d examined the man’s wound himself. It wasn’t serious.

  ‘Stahl killed himself. Jumped from a hospital window. I reckon your people have had the most hellish time covering up. But if you haven’t heard, then I guess they succeeded. Before he died he told me everything.’

  Cormack ground to a halt, a tearful sadness in his eyes, his head shaking gently from side to side as though denying what he knew.

  ‘Which part of it was too much?’ Troy prompted.

  ‘All of it, I guess. Tell me . . . would you feel compromised if I told you? I have to tell somebody. I’d feel better telling you than Kitty. I don’t think she’d understand somehow.’

  ‘Fire away,’ said Troy, and he did.

  Afterwards, Cormack seemed sadder than ever, as though a burden shared was a burden doubled. Little of it surprised Troy. Of course the Germans were going to invade. His dad had been telling him that for years. The bit about the slave state was new to him – but if you thought about it, it was merely an extension, the putting into practice, of everything they’d ever preached about the ‘inferior peoples’, the logical explosion of what they’d begun in Poland. The Jews and the Slavs were always going to catch it sooner or later. It was not surprising. It was shocking.

  ‘It leaves a bad taste in the mouth,’ Cormack said at last. ‘It leaves me wondering, guessing. Suppose it wasn’t Russia? I mean, supposing it was my country that was going to be attacked? Supposing Churchill and Roosevelt knew of an imminent attack on the States? Would they not tell us? Would they find it expedient to let it happen?’

  Troy tried reassurance, the flat plains of uninspired logic. ‘I don’t think there’s a German bomber made that can reach America.’

  ‘You know what I mean. It’s the principle. I find it hard to have faith in a benign conspiracy.’

  ‘When will you be off?’

  ‘Two or three days, maybe four at the most. They’re sending me back on the clipper from Lisbon. In the meantime I’m hardly a prisoner. They’ve set no restrictions on my movements . . . and that kind of brings me to the other reason I called on you. I’ve been trying to find Kitty. I know the police let her go. And I phoned her sister Vera, but Vera doesn’t know where she is or else she won’t tell me. Never did figure out how to read Vera. I wondered – Kitty has a room in Covent Garden, near the police station, she said. But I never went there. I never knew the address. I wondered if you knew.’

  ‘’Fraid not. I never went there either. I think it’s Kitty’s little secret. But if I see her I’ll tell her.’

  ‘Could you tell her it’s urgent? I know everything is in a country that’s at war, but I mean it. It’s about as urgent as things can get.’

  ‘A matter of life and death, eh?’ said Troy.

  ‘Well . . . life, for sure.’

  Troy watched him go down the yard towards St Martin’s Lane. Then he listened. He’d not heard a sound from Kitty while Cormack had told his tale, but he could hear her now.

  Upstairs Kitty was in the bog, throwing up again. When she’d stopped, washed-out and drooling, Troy said, ‘Whose baby is it?’

  ‘What do you think, clever dick? Cal’s a good soldier. Uncle Sam gives him a gross of frenchies to see he don’t catch the clap, and he uses them. Wellie on, glasses off. Always in that order. And every single one stamped “Made in the USA”. You, you can never be arsed, can you?’

  § 96

  It was going to be a red day. His red woolly dressing gown with the black piping. The last, late crimson wallflowers nestling in the cracks between the paving stones just beyond his window. A ruby red broom by the flint wall at the back of the terrace. Delicate, beautiful crimson bergamot like burst pincushions in the herb bed. A streak of pink in the sky, and a startling magenta legal pad to replace the blue one he had used up in the effort to finish his Russian leader.

  Alex was searching for a red poem in an anthology of First War poets – Owen, Graves, Sassoon – weren’t half the poems of 1914–18 called Flanders Poppies? – when he noticed his younger son leaning in the doorway of his study.

  ‘Still on Russia?’

  ‘Need you ask?’

  ‘Wells still helping?’

  ‘Bert and I no longer see eye to eye on the matter. I shall write my piece, and Bert will surely write his.’

  ‘I thought I might give you a hand.’

  ‘Freddie – if your contribution is to be as helpful as your last, I may do better without it.’

  Troy pulled out a chair and sat opposite his father.

  ‘I have news of the invasion.’

  Alex scarcely looked at him, flicked through the index of first lines, still looking for a red poem.

  ‘Unless you have a date for it I doubt it will help. The world and his wife know it will come. When is what matters.’

  ‘June 22nd. About dawn.’

  He had his father’s attention now. Alex let the book fall closed and reached for a pencil.

  About an hour later Alex had scribbled furiously over half a dozen of the magenta sheets. Troy said, ‘Are we ready for this?’

  ‘No,’ said his father. ‘We are not ready. Stalin has had most of the cream of the Red Army shot. We were better equipped in 1935than we are now. But it will be the Germans’ greatest folly nonetheless . . .’

  Realising he had unleashed a lecture where he had wanted merely an answer, Troy ducked out when the telephone rang. His father picked up the receiver and waved to him.

  ‘Alex?’

  Beaverbrook. Again.

  ‘I thought I’d plan ahead a little this time. Winston wants to see the editors.’

  This was wishful. Most of the newspapers would send deputies and flunkies to any briefing.

  ‘I was wondering – let me add your name to the list.’

  ‘When?’ said Alex.

  ‘Tomorrow at ten. In the bunker.’

  ‘The bunker?’

  ‘Cabinet War Rooms under Storey’s Gate – you know, round the back by Horse Guard’s Parade. Now – can I add your name to the list?’

  ‘What is it the Prime Minister has to say to us?’

  ‘You won’t know that unless you turn up. What do you say?’

  ‘I’ll be there. But Max – a favour. Just put “representative of Troy papers”. Don’t put my name.’

  ‘Of course – it’s Winston’s show – he’d hate to be upstaged.’

  Beaverbrook laughed at his own joke and hung up.

  Alex leafed through the pages of notes he had taken as his son talked. June 22nd. He reached for his diary, wondering what day of the week that was. A Sunday – or, as Hitler most certainly saw it, very late Saturday night. Hitler pulled all his strokes on Saturdays. He had butchered Roehm and the SA on a Saturday, he had reintroduced conscription on a Saturday, he had retaken the Rhineland on a Saturday. Perhaps he thought to catch Russia napping or ‘gone fishin’?

  § 97

  In the morning Alex shaved and dressed in a black suit with waistcoat. It must be his age. At seventy-nine, even in summer a trip out seemed to require more l
ayers than it had a year ago. He rang for Polly the housemaid. She came, still wearing her firewatcher’s outfit from the night before.

  ‘I ’ope this is nothing urgent. A night on the roof is about as knackering as a night on the tiles.’

  ‘No matter, child. It is my wife I seek. Would you find her and ask her to have the Crossley brought round to the front. I am going into town. And do not say “blimey”, “stroll on” or any other of your cockneyisms. I am not housebound.’

  ‘Can’t do that. Your wife drove down to Hertfordshire two hours ago. In the Crossley.’

  Alex thought about it.

  ‘The Morris, then.’

  ‘You gave the Morris to young Fred in 1939.’

  ‘The Lagonda?’

  ‘Up on blocks in the garage in Hertfordshire.’

  ‘The Rolls?’

  ‘Well – the Rolls is actually here. It’s in the mews, but no-one’s driven it since last autumn.’

  ‘Fine,’ said Alex. ‘Tell the chauffeur to have it out front in fifteen minutes.’

  ‘No, boss. Not fine. The chauffeur joined up just after Dunkirk. And I doubt the Rolls’ll start. Battery’s gonna be flat as pancake Tuesday.’

  ‘Battery?’

  ‘Battery – as in electricity, you know?’

  ‘Nonsense. I may not be able to drive a motor-car, but I know for a fact that they run on a petroleum derivative. My brother runs his Armstrong-Siddeley on kerosene. They’re not electrical.’

  Polly led him outside, round to the mews, pushed back the garage doors to show him. Rats had eaten the tyres. There was no point in even demonstrating the silent frustration of a flat battery.

  ‘I could get you a cab.’

  The two of them walked back to the end of Church Row and stood ten minutes without a single black taxi passing. Alex looked at his pocket watch.

  ‘Urgent, is it?’ Polly asked.

  ‘A meeting with the Prime Minister.’

  ‘Why didn’t you say so? Come on, we’ll get the tube.’

  She slung her tin hat over one arm, extended the other to the old man and lugged him across the road in the direction of the Northern line.

  ‘We?’ said Alex.

  ‘You think you can make it on your own, do you?’

  He capitulated quietly. He had not been on the tube in donkey’s years. It might even be an adventure.

  It was a little after ten when they arrived at Storey’s Gate. A naval lieutenant with a list of names did not ask Alex for his. He simply turned to a colleague and said, ‘It’s Alex Troy!’

  Alex insisted on Polly accompanying him inside, described her as his ‘amanuensis’ – a word he doubted meant much to any of these young sailors who waited on Churchill, foot as well as hand. In the press room, the reaction was the same. A rising whisper that ran round the room and turned every head as they took their seats – ‘Good God, it’s Alex Troy.’

  He recognised hardly any of these men. Most of them had risen in Fleet Street as he had retreated to his study and his garden. But he knew their papers. The Times, which had wilfully ignored the reports coming from their own man in Berlin throughout the early thirties, the Observer, which had applauded Hitler’s invasion of the demilitarised Rhineland in 1936,the Daily Mail, which had been stupidly pro-Nazi, and Beaverbrook’s own Daily Express, which had repeatedly furthered the shaky cause of peace by urging ‘no intervention’ as Hitler tore up treaties, broke rules and extended his territorial imperative. Since 1930 Alex had opposed, criticised and, as he saw it, used his papers to alert the world to the menace of both Hitler and Stalin. When, in 1939, he had reacted to the Nazi-Soviet pact with a leader urging Britain not to judge Russia on this act, every single one of these newspapers had sent him to Coventry – a metaphor, but also a city that might not now be in ruins had such people not so espoused the little corporal at a time when he was still vulnerable.

  Now, they were staring. Alex Troy had not been seen in public for two years. He stared back. Only the gruff harrumph made by Churchill as he entered the room swung their attention to the front. Alex had hoped that Winston would wear one of his siren suits. He had a passion for dressing up. Peaked caps, pea jackets, Royal Navy battledresses, now romper suits for the grown up – a touch of silliness that Alex found an endearing characteristic. Churchill was not in mufti of any kind – black jacket, stripy trousers, waistcoatwith-watchchain, spotty bow tie. Alex waited. If he mentions Russia, if he tells these assembled hacks the truth, all well and good – if he does not . . . .

  Churchill looked straight at him. Not a trace of double-take. All the same, Alex knew he had not expected him. This was Beaverbrook’s game with the two of them.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ Churchill began. ‘Crete . . .’

  § 98

  The wound in his side was giving gyp. God alone knew why. Who would have thought a potato peeler could inflict such damage? He lay on the chaise longue and ached.

  Once on the mind, Russia was hard to shake off. It was not something Troy could take or leave – it was, after all, an ancestral homeland he had never seen, and given his father’s role in international affairs, one he never was likely to see. He suspended feeling about the country in much the same way many intellectuals willingly suspended their disbelief. Many a fellow-traveller had fellow-travelled to the old country in the years between the wars, and come back singing the praises of good order, collectivisation and the latest Five Year Plan. Wells had come close to falling for this himself. But to Troy – to any Troy sibling – over-exposure to their father’s abiding interest carried with it the danger of the arousal of a sense of longing – of what Troy could only render as ‘rodina’, a word for which he had found no precise English equivalent. He sated his longing by winding up the gramophone. He had recently acquired, on no fewer than six twelve-inch 78 r.p.m. records, Shostakovich’s ‘A Soviet Artist’s Practical Creative Reply to Just Criticism’, otherwise known as his Fifth Symphony. After ten minutes Troy could only conclude that the challenge of pleasing the Party had brought out the best in Shostakovich. It blew him away. This was an achievement that outstripped any of the man’s other symphonies. This put into the abstraction of harmony what Troy had felt when Cormack had described the Nazi plan for the enslavement of the Slavs, what he was certain he had passed on to his father when he in turn had told him – heartbreak. It was music to tear youtopieces.

  During the Largo he heard a key turn in the lock on his front door, saw Kitty steal in. Instead of putting the key in her coat pocket and sinking her hands in after it – her habitual gesture – she laid it on the small table next to him, in the pale arc of light thrown by his reading lamp. She wasn’t wearing a coat, she was in a pretty summer dress. White, with pink flowers and green leaves, and a halter top. This wasn’t the old Kitty – but then, the return of his latch key had told him that at once.

  ‘Calvin’s asked me to marry him,’ she said.

  Troy could not see her face. The voice fell on him from darkness. She sat on the armchair and one side of her face came into view. She displayed no given or visible emotion. Her face was as plain as her statement.

  ‘And?’ said Troy.

  ‘I said yes.’

  ‘How do his people feel about this?’

  ‘They’ll let him do anything that means he gets on that plane to Lisbon. The marriage is being rushed through.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Tomorrow. Finsbury Town Hall. Mum’s lodger Miss Greenlees arranged it all. Special licence. Then I’m Mrs Cormack. Then I’m off to America. I’ll be a sort of GI bride.’

  ‘How do you feel about that?’

  Kitty shrugged, but it didn’t work. Everything about her told him she felt anything but casual.

  ‘I feel . . . I feel like I’m caught in a riptide. You know, like the song says . . . caught between two loves . . . the old and the new.’

  ‘But you don’t love him. You told me so.’

  ‘I know . . . but . . .’

  ‘And if
you loved me you never told me.’

  ‘I know . . . but . . . .’

  ‘But what, Kitty?’

  ‘But . . . it gets me out of London, doesn’t it? Just like joining the force got me out of Stepney. You can’t imagine what it’s like to be me, can you? You grew up with a mansion out in the sticks, a town house in Hampstead. The only time you’ve ever lacked room to swing a cat is at that posh school you used to moan about. You never had to share anything. You never competed with your brothers and sisters for a damn thing. And you’re a youngest. Spoilt rotten they are. I’m the eldest, Troy. My childhood stopped when I was ten. I been sharing a room with Rose and Reen since I was three ’cos me mum and dad always needed lodgers to keep up the rent. You ever wonder why I never asked you round to my place? You know what I got in Covent Garden? One room, that’s all. A bed at one end, a gas ring at the other and a tin bath trundled out in front of the gas fire on bath night. It’s a hole. But it’s a damn sight better than sharing a bedroom in my mum’s house in Stepney.’

  ‘A house in mourning,’ Troy said, tacking away.

  ‘Wot?’

  ‘You’re leaving your mother in the lurch. She’s lost two children and her husband. Has it occurred to you she might just need you?’

  ‘Need me? Mum don’t need me. If I stay it’ll be like being a kid again. It’ll be like being the eldest kid in a family of seven. I was minding Kev and Trev by the time I was five, I brought up Vera and Tel. My mum don’t need me. My mum’s got Vera now. You think Vera’s ever gonna give up her place in front of the Aga? That’s better than sitting at God’s right hand that is. You think Vera’s ever gonna get herself a man? She’s there for life, is Vera.’

  ‘I say again, your mother needs you.’

  Kitty was crying now. Silent tears upon her cheeks. She moved off the chair, on to her knees, next to the chaise longue where Troy lay stretched out like an invalid, her hands touching Troy, one on his chest, the other wrapped in his hair above his ear. She looked up at him.