A Lily of the Field

by John Lawton

  Troy had never seen the coast of North Devon before, a saw blade of bays, and promontories, and rock formations that left him wishing he knew the first thing about geology. Pottering about Lyme Bay as a boy he had returned home with a shoe box full of fossils, determined to identify them all and learn enough geology to place each in its eon. He never had.

  They had passed Baggy Point and were not far short of their first day’s destination at Croyde, when a large, flat-topped rock just within the tide caught his imagination.

  “Do you remember that Peter Wimsey novel that came out just before the war? Can’t remember the title but Harriet’s walking and discovers a body on a rock—a rock very like that. Surely it’s the same rock?”

  “Busman’s Honeymoon? Or was it Have His Carcase? And he turns out to be some sort of haemophiliac Russian prince, doesn’t he?”

  “That’s the one. And of course she sends for Wimsey.”

  “Well,” said Anna, slipping an arm affectionately through his, “I don’t have to send for a detective. You’re already here.”

  It was the most demonstrative gesture she’d made in a while. She had kissed him but once, as he lay prone and passive in a hospital bed in 1944, and in the same breath had called him a fool. But Troy’s mind was already wandering from her touch—the one thing leading to the other, the flat-topped tidal rock to a Dorothy L. Sayers plot, to the Russian body, to the bleeding prince of the house of Romanov, to a missing Russian prince of the house of Astrov whose likely name his mother had unhelpfully jumbled with yet another novel. Oblonskaya, Oblonsky. He wished she’d got it right. Then the next thing he knew, Anna had kissed him again, the lightest of pecks upon the cheek, and strolled on ahead, saying as she did so, “Of course, it’s not the same rock; she made it up. That’s what novels are for.”

  Her blouse was white and the tails flapped loose and occasionally the whole blouse caught the wind and billowed out full sail. Her culottes were of a shade that might be described as army surplus, except that Troy could not imagine that the army had ever manufactured or issued culottes for there to be any surplus three years after the war. Craving colour, he wondered what colour the knickers in all those envelopes might be. He knew they’d be white, but he could imagine red. A poppy in a cornfield by Van Gogh or Monet. He could imagine that.

  “Troy, you’re dawdling. And you’re daydreaming. Do get a move on!”

  §115

  They took rooms at the Goat and Periwinkle in Croyde, not far north of Barnstaple.

  Much to Troy’s surprise, and most certainly to the surprise of all the locals, Anna changed for dinner. A black dress that was sleeveless, backless, and almost arseless.

  “Don’t you have any of those gloves that go past your elbow?”

  “Now you’re just being silly. It’s steak and kidney pud with mash, in a country pub.”

  “Quite. I wondered if you’d noticed.”

  With the arrival of dessert—stewed pears with condensed milk—small talk turned big.

  “I could do with your advice,” she said.

  Troy doubted this but said, “Of course. What about?”

  “My job. The National Health Service. I joined it because I believe in it. I believe in it as firmly as Rod.”

  “But?”

  “But I’ve done two months and I find I’m exhausted. I’m twenty-eight and I feel fifty.”

  “You’ll get used to it.”

  “Or perhaps I won’t. Perhaps it isn’t me? Perhaps it’s the system?”

  “Are you writing it off already?”

  “No. We have to have a national health system. I just find myself wondering if we have to have this one, wondering if we got the mix right.”

  “Rod doesn’t think we have. He told me he thinks there were too many compromises to get the consultants and the old fuddy-duddies among the general practitioners on board. He thinks it was an all-or-nothing call. The coexistence of private practice within the NHS is bonkers, according to Rod.”

  “He’s right. We simply don’t have enough troops at whatever the medical equivalent of the coal face is.”

  “How about ‘skin level’?”

  “Sounds about right. At skin level the demand is overwhelming. Perhaps I had a sheltered upbringing. My experience of rickets comes out of a text book . . . but I can scarcely believe the state of the health of the nation . . . that so many people can be quite so ill with so many ailments that ought to be readily preventable. I find myself trying to remember what it was like before the war but I can’t remember because I didn’t know. We gels knew fuck all—’scuse my French. So much of it comes down to simple matters of nutrition, and if there’s one thing rationing did, it was to give everyone a much better, balanced diet. You might hate the national loaf but it’s full of what those idiots in advertising call ‘goodness.’”

  “Then perhaps you’d better write to Mr. Strachey at the Ministry of Food and tell him we should hang on to rationing.”

  “We should . . . it sounds bonkers, but we should. The question is whether I can hang on to the NHS.”

  “Are you thinking you might not?”

  “I’m thinking I’m a coward. I’m thinking right now that I’m glad it’s you across the table, not your brother. I’d hate to have to tell Rod they didn’t get it right. I couldn’t tell Rod they didn’t get it right. I’m a coward.”

  “I just told you: he already knows.”

  “If I leave . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “Don’t judge me. Don’t . . . try not to think the worse of me. I believed in it, I really did.”

  “But?”

  “But Paddy Fitz has offered me a job in Harley Street.”

  “Well, that should be fun. I gather he leads a life not unlike Errol Flynn’s.”

  “It gets exaggerated.”

  “He asks for it.”

  “Okay. He asks for it. All the same, it’s a tempting offer. It would leave me time to study nutrition. As long as the government leaves an ‘outside’ to the NHS, I may be able to achieve more on the outside.”

  “If you do, I shall not utter a word of criticism.”

  “Thank you.”

  “But there’s a quid pro quo.”

  “Oh, you . . . bastard!”

  “Take me on as a patient.”

  “Why, haven’t you got a GP?”

  “I have one of the old fuddy-duddies, when what I really need is a doctor as discreet as Kolankiewicz for the times when I don’t have Kolankiewicz.”

  She was nervous, she’d been that all evening, but now she seemed to Troy to be close to anger.

  “Now why would that be? Planning on getting shot again, are you?”

  In the corridor, her room to the right, his to the left, she dawdled, the nervousness of the evening wrapped like a veil around her. Dawdling led nowhere. He no more understood the next move than she did.

  He asked about the book she was clutching.

  A matter-of-fact question eliciting a matter-of-fact reply.

  “Eustace and Hilda,” she said.

  He looked at the spine. L. P. Hartley. He’d heard of the author but not the book.

  He jingled his keys and said, “good night.”

  Anna pecked him on the cheek, still beneath her invisible veil, and said, “Try not to get shot Troy.”

  §116

  They spent the following night at the Pig & Strumpet in Instow, about halfway between Barnstaple and Bideford, just across the bay from Appledore.

  At breakfast, each had a poached egg—the landlady had rustled up a third, which Anna had sliced fairly between them, the knife hovering over the yolk until she was sure it really was fair—two slices of toast—mercifully free from rationing—and a pitifully thin newspaper—newsprint still being rationed—Anna had the Manchester Guardian, Troy The Times, although the headlines were identical:

  “Atomic Scientist Arrested as Spy”

  “Have you ever heard of this Szabo bloke?” Anna asked.

/>   “No. And I’m glad to be out of London when something like this breaks. Or I’d have Rod bending my ear, telling me it’s a national disaster, how the Americans will never trust us again . . . and so on.”

  “But they won’t, will they? This chap worked on the bombs that were dropped on Japan, then he seems to have been made deputy head of whatever it is they do out at Harwell, and all the time he was working for the Russians and has given them all the know-how to make their own bomb. Doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in us.”

  Troy had abandoned the headlines for the inner pages.

  “He wasn’t English; he was Czech or something.”

  “Hungarian, and it says here we took him on in 1941 and gave him citizenship a couple of years later.”

  Troy did not wish to have this conversation with Anna any more than he wished to have it with Rod. Angus would have been a better choice, or even Onions—“Spooks? Fuckem.” But then the waitress appeared at his side, saying, “Inspector Troy? Telephone call for you. Scotland Yard.”

  Anna looked at him, daggers drawn.

  “I can’t not give the Yard my itinerary, can I? It’s probably nothing. And certainly nothing to do with this twaddle.”

  It was Jack.

  “I’m sorry to have to do this to you, Freddie, but there’s been a death. I think you should come back.”

  “Can’t you handle it?”

  “I can, of course I can. But I think you’ll want to. Freddie, it’s Viktor Rosen. He was found shot through the heart in his flat about forty minutes ago.”

  §117

  The local police told Troy that the quickest way to get him back to London was for them to drive him south to Exeter, where he could board an express to Paddington.

  Anna wanted to come with him but Troy kept saying no until she gave in.

  “Finish your holiday,” he said.

  “It’ll be no fun.”

  “It’ll be less fun. You were planning to do the walks alone anyway—and I’ve done half with you. It’s only a couple of days. Finish your holiday. Pick up the car and I’ll see you back in London on Wednesday night.”

  She had been tearful. Not for the first time he wondered what it was she wasn’t saying. But on the train, in a deeply sprung and ancient ex-GWR first-class compartment, hauled by a somewhat newer ex–Southern Railway Bulleid Pacific locomotive at one hundred miles per hour, he gave in to the diddley-da, diddley-dum, sat back, and slept. Only when he woke to find the train rattling across Salisbury Plain did a vision of Anna at the wheel of his mother’s car, foot on the floor at one hundred and ten miles per hour, come to him.

  §118

  “We’ve touched nothing,” Jack said. “We waited for you.”

  It was almost four o’clock when Troy arrived at the apartment on Chelsea Embankment. Jack had sent a car to meet him off the train at Paddington. A silent, almost rank-intimidated WPC had driven him across West London, through Hyde Park, and down to the river.

  Touching nothing was a gesture of respect. Troy could not be certain whether it was respect for the dead (Rosen), or for the living (Troy). He could understand it, but it had also cost four hours. Kolankiewicz, too, had waited.

  Standing in the hallway, just this side of the “magic” trompe l’oeil door, Kolankiewicz said, “You sure you want to do this?”

  “Yes. I can be the formal identification, and then you can take the body away.”

  Head shots were messy. Almost the first thing he’d had to get used to with gun killings was the sight of the inside of the human skull, of blood and bone, which were imaginable, and brains, which were not, plastered across the walls and furniture. Heart shots were wet. Few suicides pointed a gun at their heart. Few suicides would know its precise position.

  Troy stared. Viktor had dressed for death. One of the immaculate suits he’d had tailored in America during the war. A neat knot in the dark blue tie, silver cuff links in his shirt; even the shoes were shined. He lay slumped in a high-backed wing chair, head down, torso upright as though the impact of the bullet had bounced him off the back of the chair and simultaneously knocked the gun from his hand. It lay on the carpet about eighteen inches from his right foot. A wartime Beretta. Every British Tommy who’d served in Italy had brought one home as a souvenir, or so it seemed. Every street corner spiv would sell you one, or so it seemed.

  “Why the heart?”

  Kolankiewicz said, “I have learnt over the years that it is the romantic’s way. Most of us desperate to die, most of us desperate pragmatists, blow our brains out. Romantics desperate to die still have their nature and their aesthetic to contend with. They aim for the heart.”

  Troy knelt and looked up into Viktor’s face, pale and bloodless, eyes closed. To look for expression was meaningless—Troy thought those who pronounced the dead “peaceful” as idiotic as those who chipped “asleep” on tombstones—he did it all the same.

  “Time of death?”

  “Around midnight.”

  Troy turned to Jack. “Anyone hear anything?”

  “People above are holidaying in Cornwall. Chap below is very deaf.”

  Troy stood up and looked around. Familiar objects rendered alien by the fact of death. The Bechstein piano, the score of Mozart’s twenty-third piano concerto still open on the stand; a cello stood in the curve; the signed photographs of Toscanini and Furtwängler; the Picasso sketch of Casals, the walls lined with books in three or four different languages, the lithographs of eighteenth-century Vienna; the Matisse portrait he knew simply as “blue woman,” the Van Gogh of some waving cornfield near Arles.

  Jack touched him on the arm. “Freddie, there’s something else you should see.”

  Jack steered him gently to a door in the rear wall. Troy had never been beyond this point. It had always seemed a frontier of some sort. It led to a long corridor, with what Troy took to be bedrooms and bathrooms off—and he’d no idea how many of those there were.

  “All this is new to me,” he said. “Viktor’s public rooms were very public, and his private very private. ”

  “I think,” said Jack, opening the first door on the left, “that this has to be Viktor’s bedroom.”

  Troy stood in the doorway, unbelieving.

  “No, surely there are other rooms . . . ?”

  “There are. In fact, there are four other bedrooms. All smelling a bit airless, all obviously guest rooms. This was Viktor’s room.”

  Troy stepped in. A rectangular room about ten feet long and seven across. A narrow window looking out onto a brick wall. Torn and fading yellow wallpaper from some era late in the last century. In an apartment like this it was a box room or a maid’s room. An alarm clock showing the right time ticked softly on an upturned orange box, next to it a candle stub in a tin candlestick and a box of Bryant & May matches. The orange box stood by a camp bed, neatly made up in Spartan fashion. Coarse cotton sheets, coarser woollen blankets of the kind every army-surplus store in every town in the land had been selling off for the last couple of years. On the lower shelf formed by the box divider stood a cream-coloured enamel mug and a pair of tortoiseshell reading glasses. On the bare, carpetless boards a hardbacked German book lay splayed—Doktor Faustus, by Thomas Mann.

  There was nothing else.

  “I’d no idea,” Troy said. “No idea at all.”

  “Does it make any sense? I mean, there’s enough money hanging on the walls in the next room to offset the national debt. He spent more on his suit than he did on this room . . . and he lives like this?”

  “Oh, yes, it makes sense. Of a kind. Doesn’t mean I know why he chose this. It’s a bit like a cell, isn’t it? Viktor was one of the first to be rounded up by the Nazis—a spell in Oranienburg in 1933. And then we added insult to injury by interning him on the Isle of Man for nearly six months in 1940. And it really was an insult to a man like Viktor. And, of course, it’s where he and Rod met.”

  Uttering the name brought home the thought of his brother. He’d have to be the
one to tell him.

  “Freddie, I have to ask . . . was Viktor the kind of man to take his own life.”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea,” Troy said. “But I’ll ask Rod.”

  §119

  When they emerged from the foreign country at the back of the apartment, Kolankiewicz had taken the body and his men were dusting for fingerprints. For the first time, Troy noticed the bottle of Hine Armagnac on the small, pedestal table next to the chair in which Viktor had died, and the empty glass that stood with it.

  He declined to ride back to the Yard, and walked along the river in the direction of Westminster. It might give him time to gather his thoughts before he faced Rod. The House was not sitting. Troy would call at his office; there was a fifty-fifty chance he’d be there, and if he wasn’t, he’d take the Underground up to Hampstead. Above all, he did not want to call him on the phone. He could imagine no worse way for Rod to find out Viktor was dead. He had to tell him himself. He had to tell him face to face.

  “I thought you were in Cornwall with the gorgeous Anna.”

  Rod was in shirtsleeves, back to window, scribbling something at his desk, a cooling September breeze wafting across the terrace from the Thames.

  Troy waited till he looked up again, stacked his papers, and shoved them to one side. Rod was about to indulge in one of his big man’s sprawls of relaxation, a cat stretch, chest out, back arched, fingers locked behind his head.

  Troy said, “Viktor died last night.”

  The fingers never met behind the head; Rod almost slumped back to the desk, but righted himself with a jerk to stand up straight. A quick turn to the window, then a turn back to Troy, his eyes already brimming with tears.

  “How?”

  “It looks as though he shot himself.”

  Rod turned away again, rummaged in his trouser pocket for his hanky, and honked loudly into it.