A Lily of the Field

by John Lawton

  “You were a copper?” Troy asked, slightly incredulous. “Tell me more.”

  “Love to, but it’ll cost you a lift home to Hampstead.”

  In the Bullnose Morris, crawling up Haverstock Hill, Troy heard how she had quit London for Berkshire during the war and enrolled as a WPC. It sounded like the time of her life, except that she seemed to have times of her life in a distinct plural.

  As she stepped out of the car in Fitzjohn’s Avenue, Laura said, “I forgot to tell you. Your sister-in-law called. I have a commission. I suppose I have you to thank for that?”

  Troy said, “And I forgot to ask you—what does André’s painting mean, I mean, does it mean anything?”

  “Mean anything?” said Laura. “Well, a painting isn’t a sentence, there’s no agreed syntax, but now I’ve said that the best I can come up with is that Venus Meets Magritte was André talking to himself.”

  Venus Meets Magritte—it sounded like the title of a third-rate horror movie from before the war. Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney, the phantom of the Northern Line.

  §101

  Troy called Anna with the same question he had put to Laura Narayan, and she said, “oh, God, I wish I could. I’ve worshipped that man’s fingertips since I was about twelve . . . but . . .”

  “But?”

  “But Angus. I’ve banged on to you about what a pain he can be. Pissed, remote, angry, still fighting a war in his head when the real one’s been over for almost three years . . . I can’t just up and say I’ll be out for an evening. Now it may be he won’t be home tomorrow night. He’ll tell me he’s nipping out for five minutes, bump into some RAF crony, go on a pub crawl, and by closing time he’ll be organizing the pub regulars into squadrons and re-acting fighter skirmishes . . . with him zooming around yelling ‘takka takka takka,’ and telling blokes who spent the war in the docks lifting barges and toting bales that they’ve pranged or pancaked or some such rot. On the other hand, it might be like tonight. Friday night—he’s come straight home from the office and he’s sitting on the sofa doing The Times crossword over a scotch and water, calling me ‘old girl,’ and asking me about any clues that seem to revolve around novels, as he’s never actually read one. You see, Troy . . . I have to be here.”

  “I see,” he said, and he did.

  “Is there no one else you could take?”

  “What? Do you think I have a little black book labelled ‘totty’?”

  “Of course not. Some men do, but not you. You’re useless at socio-sexual preamble.”

  “Eh?”

  “Chitchat, Troy. You’ve never been able to do it.”

  At that moment a booming voice yelled, “Piglet? Who wrote the fucking Waverley novels?” and Troy took that as his cue.

  Troy needed to ask Fish Wally another question about Skolnik.

  He telephoned him at his home in Marshall Street.

  “I need to talk to you,” he said. “Not over the phone. Although now I’ve said that I don’t know why not.”

  “Troy, I understand. You may ask me any question you like, but if it’s about a recently deceased Pole, I won’t answer you over the phone anyway, so . . .”

  “So?”

  “We could meet tomorrow night.”

  “Ah . . . that’s the one night I’m busy. I don’t seem to have a social life at the moment, but tomorrow I’m at the Viktor Rosen recital at the Wigmore.”

  “Ah . . . lucky you . . . a more pleasing performer than Gieseking, and possessed of more political savvy.”

  Troy was very partial to the playing of Walter Gieseking, but Gieseking had not left Germany when anyone who was anyone in art and science did. No one had called him a Nazi, but his failure to criticize them or to abandon them told. He now played to half-empty houses and on occasion got the slow hand clap. Rosen’s war was impeccable—a prisoner of both the Nazis and the British. He played to packed halls and the tickets changed hands at twice the price.

  “It so happens I’ve a spare ticket.”

  “Then I shall not wait to be asked. Shall we say seven o’clock?”

  §102

  Wally dressed for the evening. Black tie. A black suit with satin lapels and the obligatory ribbon down the seam of the trousers. The suit had been made for someone bigger and fatter than him, but Wally wore it as he wore his white gloves, without self-consciousness. Before the war everyone would have dressed for a concert at the Wigmore Hall. Even now about half the audience had. Troy was not one of them. It had not even occurred to him.

  “My cousin Casimir,” Wally said. “Killed by a V1 whilst out walking the dog in ’44. I was his only relative and hence his heir. He left me the rooming house in Marshall Street, the contents of his bank account, which were not insubstantial, and this suit. Since when, although the logic of the phrase eludes me, I have, as you say, been ‘sitting pretty.’ The rooming house is a gold mine, I could let every room twice over. And the pleasure I got from putting the Cockney nose out of joint when I let to West Indians last week is pure schadenfreude. If you had met me in the early years of the war you would have thought I was a penniless bum. Now, if clothes rationing ever stops, I have every intention of getting a tailor of my own.”

  Wally was fastidious. Troy would have to get used to that.

  Rosen had given him two seats in the third row of the stalls—Wally dusted his before he sat down—slightly left of centre with a good view of the keyboard—Troy liked to see a pianist’s hands while he played. They were first-rate seats.

  The violinist and the cellist took the stage to a round of applause.

  Troy glanced at his programme:

  Rhian Davies was in her early twenties, tall, dark, and Welsh. She had come to prominence as a child prodigy ’round about 1939. Troy recalled that she had played all the Bach suites for solo violin over an entire week as part of the National Gallery’s lunchtime “we can take it” concerts during the Blitz. He’d managed to catch precisely one day of this.

  Méret Voytek had appeared out of nowhere in the summer of 1946. She had taken London by storm, also by performing an entire Bach work, the solo suites for cello, in this very hall. Troy had caught none of it. He wished he had. The newspapers had praised her to the skies afterwards, “The Left-handed Wonder” “The Viennese Wunderkind.” He’d settled for buying the records. He wasn’t at all sure whether he’d met her until she took the stage. He’d met a lot of Viktor’s pupils and entourage but Viktor was never one for effecting introductions—he’d find himself turning up for a lesson in Cheyne Walk just as someone else was leaving and then shaking hands with someone who’s name he hadn’t quite grasped and who he was damn certain he’d never meet again. But when Méret Voytek took the stage he knew her at once. It had been just before Christmas 1946. And she had indeed been simply a handshake and one of Viktor’s mumbles as she left and Troy arrived in the dimness of Viktor’s hallway.

  She was slight, even slighter stood next to Rhian Davies, nearer thirty than twenty—striking rather than pretty or beautiful, with dyed blonde hair that served to make her dark eyebrows seem faintly sinister by making the dark eyes inescapably haunting. Despite the odd-sounding name, she was from Vienna, that much he did know, and the profiles in the newspapers said she was a survivor of Auschwitz, but Viktor had never mentioned this—but then Troy could not recall that, one brief meeting excepted, he had ever mentioned Méret Voytek.

  Rosen took the stage, the volume of the applause soared. A single bow to his audience, then straight to the piano, a nod to his musicians—Rhian standing far right, Méret seated in the curve of the Bechstein—and for the next forty minutes he held a couple of hundred people in rapture.

  Troy had seen plenty of cellists over the years—face-pullers, grimacers, eye-closers, dreamers who swayed, rockers who shifted their weight constantly between one foot and the other, one buttock and the other. Méret Voytek was perhaps the calmest he’d ever seen. The emotion was in the music, not in her face—it was a little like watching someone play
behind a glass wall.

  When they returned from the interval the piano was gone, pushed to the back of the stage.

  Troy consulted his programme again:

  Troy turned to Wally.

  “I don’t get it.”

  “What’s to get? Have you never heard the Schubert Octet before? It’s one of the oddest lineups in nineteenth century music. Two violins, viola, cello, double bass . . . coupled to woodwind—clarinet, bassoon, horn—there’s no piano. Huge for chamber music, about right for a jazz band.”

  “No piano? But all these people have paid to hear Viktor.”

  “No, Troy. I think they will still hear Viktor. They will hear him through the work of his protégés, for that is surely Herr Rosen’s intention. To give us a work in which he has schooled them all. He is in effect the conductor, but one conspicuously offstage. Roll with it. It is bliss. And as you are an Octet virgin, double bliss. You will not go home disappointed.”

  Wally was right. It was an introduction to something Troy wished he’d known about years ago. He’d always found string quartets a bit harsh—crudely put, they could be “scrapey.” The woodwind softened the whole effect—the French horn, the dreamiest of brass, burnished, it and the addition of a double bass gave it a bottom end quartets could only dream of, but probably didn’t.

  Rosen joined his players for bows and when the cry of “encore” went up it required neither ego nor modesty to know they were calling for him, not the seven young women and one young man who had played the Octet. The piano was pushed centre stage once more.

  Rosen sat down, pushed up his jacket sleeves, and turned to the audience.

  “I had had it in mind to devote an entire evening to Schubert, but I find Massenet at the tips of my fingers like static electricity. So I play Massenet, an elegy composed I know not when.”

  He placed both hands on the keyboard, then removed them, turning to the audience once more, much in the frustrating manner of Victor Borge. “I forgot to say, Massenet elegy in F minor, in an arrangement by the American pianist Art Tatum.”

  Someone in the audience laughed. Rosen shot him a look, saying, “You think I’m joking? Stick with me, kid.”

  Then the whole audience laughed and Rosen let rip with Tatum’s arpeggio-laden Massenet.

  It was the version Troy had played for him a couple of years ago, only to be greeted with withering disdain. Perhaps it was how badly Troy had played it that been the problem. Clearly, Rosen had sought out the original. Troy could not imagine any pianist holding out against Tatum for long. The sheer skill of the man was all but overwhelming. Perhaps three minutes of Tatum was quite enough for anyone new to him, and three minutes twenty-eight seconds was all they got.

  Afterwards Troy would have slipped away quietly but Wally wanted to meet Rosen, and as Troy could oblige, he did.

  Wally bagged Rosen readily by recalling to him a recital of Chopin he had given in Warsaw in 1929 to a thunderously patriotic reception, and the two of them vanished into a Mitteleuropean world—Wally seeming as fluent in German as he was in English—that left Troy shaking hands, saying thank you to the other musicians—polite English reserve from the woodwind, not quite knowing how to take a compliment; a bone-crunching grip from Rhian Davies; a limp, unengaged one from Méret Voytek and dark dungeons of eyes that would not meet his.

  Walking home to Marshall Street Wally said, “What was the question?”

  “You said you hadn’t ever mentioned Skolnik to Charlie Walsh. Did anyone in the Branch ever mention him to you?”

  “No.”

  “Did you deal with the spooks only through Charlie or did you meet them personally?”

  “I met them.”

  “And you said nothing to them, either?”

  “No, and for the same reason I gave you. Troy, where is this leading?”

  “I think I need to talk to someone in MI5, someone in the right department. Can you find me someone?”

  “Of course . . . but you are well-enough connected, surely . . . ?”

  “I’d rather it wasn’t someone I know. I don’t want to be seen to call in any favours and I don’t want it common knowledge in Scotland Yard that I’m doing this. I want it kept well away from the Yard. Just find me a spook . . . I hesitate to say this . . . a spook I can trust.”

  “Consider it done,” said Wally.

  §103

  When he got home a whore was waiting. Waiting for Troy. Sitting on his doorstep.

  “You’d better come inside,” he said.

  “Sorry.”

  Scarcely audible for the handkerchief pressed to her split lip.

  Troy turned the key in the lock and pushed the door open.

  “You know where the bathroom is.”

  He watched her dash to the staircase, took off his jacket and waited till she came down. It seemed an age—listening to the running water gurgling through the pipework.

  She’d cleaned up the blood, staunched the bleeding, but the lip and the flesh around one eye were swelling badly and her dress was torn and stained. Whichever punter she’d misjudged was going to cost her a couple of nights’ work at least. She sat down opposite him, red-faced and tearful.

  “Did you know him?”

  “Nah. New to me. Just strolling down the lane he was.”

  “Can you describe him?”

  “What’s the point? Doesn’t happen often but when it does . . . well, it’s like an occy wostit init?”

  “Occupational hazard.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And an occupational hazard in my job is wanting to catch him.”

  “Occy . . . thing hazard in your job, as I recall, is gettin’ beat up. Some fare gave me a fat lip and a black eye, Fred. So wot? I can live with it and I can live without you comin’ on copper to me. Maybe you live with gettin’ beat up, too, but that time in ’44 you took the kickin’ of a lifetime and damn near got yourself killed.”

  It was a defensive move, designed to shut him up. Ruby probably hadn’t saved his life but he would not deny that he’d taken the kicking of a lifetime or that she had found him, rescued him, and nursed him. Only when he had recovered enough to walk downstairs again did he realize that she’d plied her trade out of his front room in the meantime.

  “There’s the spare room if you want.”

  She stood up, smoothed down her dress, tucked the torn bit under the shoulder strap of her bra.

  “Nah, I’ll go home. I didn’t want to walk the streets lookin’ like I was, but nah . . . not as if he’ll be waiting, is it? That’s the thing about the violent ones, they never come back.”

  §104

  It was Tuesday of the following week. About ten thirty in the morning. Troy was at his desk, the door to Jack’s office wide open, the window onto the Embankment and the Thames letting in cooler air and the hum of traffic. There was a gentle tapping at the door. Troy glanced up, wanting to get on with his report without disturbance and, seeing Jack’s legs, glanced down again.

  A polite, fake cough followed.

  Troy looked up. The legs were Jack’s, the lean six-foot figure and laconic posture as he leaned one shoulder against the door frame were Jack’s—the suit wasn’t. Whoever this bloke was he was the dandy Jack couldn’t quite be arsed to be—he spent his money, quite possibly all his money, on clothes. He looked like a million dollars while Jack rated a mere ten grand, and Troy, in his own eyes, a five-bob postal order. And while Jack was handsome in a Denham or Ealing film star sort of way—Michael Wilding sprang to mind, perhaps Robert Donat—this bloke was pure Hollywood English and looked more like Cary Grant.

  He beamed his showbiz smile at an unresponsive Troy and said, “Jordan Younghusband.”

  “You’re kidding?” Troy said.

  “’Fraid not. A father who served with Allenby in Palestine—and it was a remote cousin of my grandfather who invaded Afghanistan.”

  “Well, we’ve all done that,” Troy said. “And you are . . . ?”

  “From anoth
er place,” Jordan said in a stage whisper.

  “Wally?”

  “Wally.”

  Troy recalled clearly what he had told Wally, to keep this away from the Yard, and here he was, a six-foot spook from MI5 leaning in his office door and shooting the breeze.

  “Don’t worry,” Jordan said in the same whisper. “I am quite literally just passing. I’ve booked us into the Ivy. Be there at one.”

  Three things were possible. Jordan Younghusband was loaded, Jordan Younghusband had an expense account with his masters that defied the spirit of the age, or Jordan Younghusband had Angus as his accountant.

  Jack came in seconds after Jordan left.

  “Who was that?”

  “Fish Wally’s spook. The flash bugger thinks lunch at the Ivy is a suitable place to talk secrets.”

  “Hmm,” said Jack. “Ask him for the name of his tailor, would you?”

  §105

  Troy was first to arrive. He’d not been to the Ivy in a while. His father had favoured the Ivy, in much the same way he favoured the Garrick, the London club that was very actorish, a bit bookish, when he could have joined clubs full of other newspapermen. He had liked the Ivy for its theatrical flair, something Troy found he could take or leave. To find himself seated at the next table to Margaret Lockwood, James Mason, or Douglas Fairbanks Jr. did not thrill him, although he thought it might have thrilled his father if only the old man had known who they were. His father’s idea of a film star was Douglas Fairbanks Sr.

  Troy liked the Ivy because he liked Art Deco—on his one trip to the United States, long before the war, he had watched, spellbound, the work on a new skyscraper, an Art Deco masterpiece to be called the Chrysler Building