by John Lawton
§156
By the middle of the following week, Troy was back at his desk, and Jack at his. He could see Jack through the door wrestling with the pages of the Daily Express. Then he was in front of Troy, slinging the folded paper down on the desk.
“Have you seen this, Freddie?”
Troy looked, feigning half-heartedness.
“Russian Spy Flees Across Channel:
Scotland Yard Seek Mystery Man”
There was a photograph of Voytek. And next to it a police artist’s sketch of a man described as, “having escorted the spy as far as Dover on the Black Arrow. Police are urgently seeking this man. Anyone who recognizes him or has any information that might lead to his apprehension is urged to call Whitehall 1212.”
“Hmm,” seemed to Troy to be the sort of noncommittal thing he should say at this point.
“I mean,” said Jack, “How is anyone supposed to recognize this bloke from that? His own mother wouldn’t know him.”
Indeed, she did not—Lady Troy never mentioned the messy sketch to him. Privately, Troy thought it looked about as much like him as if it had been drawn by André Skolnik.
§157
Jack was muttering something about elevenses—and on a slack day his sense of eleven o’clock seemed to jump forward in time—when the telephone cut him off midsentence and he put a call through to Troy from his sister-in-law, Cid, at Mimram.
“Freddie, you’ve seen today’s Express? Rod’s gone into a tailspin. Canceled all his engagements, called parliament, and told them he’s ill. I’ve never seen him like this before—not when Viktor died, not when your father died. He is grief stricken.”
“I’ll take the day off—there’s bugger all on my desk. I’ll shuffle it off onto Jack and be at Mimram by lunchtime.”
It was high time he retrieved his mother’s Lagonda. He went round to Bassington Street, stuck a note through Anna’s letter-box, opened up the car with the spare keys and set off north. He’d not been to Mimram since the day he had scrounged loaves and fishes to feed Voytek—and that had been in his tatty, slow Bullnose Morris.
He let the Lagonda rip. For once to drive suited his mood and to drive at 100 mph suited his mood even better.
§158
Rod was in their father’s study—Troy’s study since the old man died in 1943, but hardly worth the quibble. He was in bum mode, unshaven and only half dressed, and Cid said he had abandoned breakfast the minute he picked up the Daily Express.
He sought release in anger.
“Did you set a fucking lunatic on to me?”
“What?”
“Some arse calling himself Angus—said he was a mate of yours. Rang me up this morning wanting to discuss God knows what . . . the meaning of life . . . cabbages and fucking kings . . . wanting to come over for a bit of a chat . . . wanting to bring his pal Ernest . . . who the fuck is Ernest? . . . Is this man completely mad?”
“I think he probably is,” said Troy. “Send him away with a flea in his ear. He’ll be back, most likely at a better time. And if he does, you might find him interesting. He has a war record only slightly less spectacular than yours.”
“Spits or Hurricanes?”
“Can’t remember. I tend to turn off to ‘good war’ stories when old soldiers get going.”
Rod blinked at this.
“Have I bored you that often with my war?”
“No. And by the way, Ernest is his tin leg.”
“Oh,” Rod mused, anger fizzling away. “He’s that Angus, is he? The bugger who pinned the DFC to his tin leg in front of the king. My God, we all laughed at that one.”
Anger fizzled, Rod seemed to have nothing left in him.
Troy watched as tears formed in the corners of his eyes, until he turned away, feigned looking out of the window, and said, “Oh, bugger.”
Cid bought Rod another respite. Came in, hugged Troy, and told them both that lunch would be another twenty minutes. Then Troy said, “Rod, we’re both standing here because of Viktor. Why don’t we sit down with Viktor.”
They sat in the battered armchairs, either side of the fireplace. It was set but not lit. Troy put a match to it and for a quarter of an hour they sat in silence. Only when a piece of cherrywood split and spat a spark onto the rug did Rod revive. Stamped the flame out with his slipper and in so doing seemed to kick himself into life.
“The home secretary phoned me this morning. Told me this was a barrowload of shit the government could do without. Talked about the scandal of it all. How we’d never live it down with the Americans. Asked me how well I knew Viktor. Had I ever met Miss Voytek? I told him to fuck off. Right now, I don’t give a toss about the government. I want to know how this happened, how this came to be, how this happened to Viktor. I want to know why. I want reasons. I want something redeeming in all this. I want Viktor back.”
They staggered through lunch. Troy thought Cid would pull a muscle straining to keep the small talk going.
After lunch Troy persuaded Rod to wrap up well and got him outside for a walk around the garden: an inspection of the state of the veg patch at the onset of winter.
In the middle of the afternoon, Rod fell asleep in his armchair. Troy stoked the fire, read the paper, and waited. When Rod awoke, he was still on the same note.
“I want something redeeming in this. I want Viktor back. I want back the Viktor I knew.”
Troy had abandoned the newspaper on the floor between them.
Rod picked it up, spread the front page out.
“And shit like this destroys the Viktor I had more surely than the bullet that killed him.”
He screwed up the paper, thrust it into the fire and began to weep once more.
“It’s not as if I can just turn a blind eye to it—put it behind me. Viktor’s will turned up. Silly bugger hadn’t changed it since he got here in nineteen thirty-seven. All he did was write a separate letter naming me and Arthur as his executors. Anything he had—and it’s not inconsiderable—was left to cousins and nephews and so forth. All of whom were alive in nineteen thirty-seven, all of whom went to the gas chamber by nineteen forty-three. Arthur and I now find ourselves seeking probate for an estate with no heirs. When we obtain it . . . the exchequer gets the lot.”
“You know,” Troy said, “that’s not entirely without irony.”
“Isn’t it just? Positively drips with it. And it makes me want to spit.”
For a while Rod said nothing, staring into the fire.
Then he said, “Why?” with all the grief of the morning rippling through his voice once more.
“Why?”
Troy knew the answers to all his questions, and more. But he could not tell Rod what he wanted to hear.
§159
It was gone midnight when Troy got home. An unstamped letter was on the doormat as he let himself in.
“Fred,” in a kid-scrawl, in pencil.
And suddenly the telephone was ringing. He picked up the receiver, heard Jordan say “Troy?” and knew he had been ringing all evening. That Jordan had probably chased him at the Yard most of the day, got something akin to the brush-off from Jack, and had rung and rung and rung at Goodwin’s Court.
“Where the hell have you been? I’ve been ringing you all bloody day.”
“With my brother. He and Viktor Rosen were old friends, from the war. He’s taken all this very hard.”
It gave Jordan pause for thought, but thinking of Rod did not deflect him from the question burning on his lips.
“Troy, how long have you known about Rosen and Voytek?”
Troy said nothing.
“Dammit, Troy! I can still remember what Fish Wally said to me six months ago when he asked me to get in touch with you. He said you’d asked for someone you could trust. And you flung it in my face that night we were in the club room in Curzon Street. But you trusting me wasn’t the issue, was it? That was a total red herring. Because the issue was really could I trust you?”
Troy had stopped li
stening and was turning the letter over in his hands. It was no handwriting he recognized.
Dear Fred,
I thought I should write rather than just disappear, as you been good to me. You never asked why I was a prozzie, and once I got over you being a rozzer I realized you never would. My bloke never come back from France in 1940. We was going to get married. And after that I went to work in a munitions factory in East Ham until that blew up and took twenty-seven of my mates with it and then I thought I’d be better off dodging Jerry bombs up West than I would be dodging ours in East Ham. So I took that corner by your house. And then the Yanks came. And that set me up nice for the duration. And you never said nothink, and like I said I was grateful on account I gotta earn a living somehow. Anyways, I’m movin on. One of my regular fares, Dennis, has asked me to marry him and go to live in Leamington Spa with him. He’s been a regular since the end of the war. Couple of times a month he’s come down from Leamington. Now, I don’t love him, wish I did, and I’m not sure where Leamington is, but I’m getting too old to be on the game much longer—price will start to fall won’t it and I’ll be sucking cocks for tuppence ha’penny—and after what happened in ’44 I was a bit upset but this time I realized that if I stick around either you’re going to get me killed or get yourself killed, and if it’s that last then I don’t want to be around to see it happen. The war was bad enough, but I ain’t seen nothink like the other night and I never want to again as long as I live. And it’s like I’ve got this secret, this really deep, dark secret I can’t never tell no one. And I’ll find it easier to keep that secret if I’m not around you. If I can still have kids after two abortions I will, and if I can’t well Dennis won’t let me work so I can just be a bleedin’ housewife, useless and beautiful, you know like what they used to tell us in Sunday school, like one of them lilies in a field what Jesus used to talk about.
You been good to me. Take care of yourself. Lotsa love,
your ole pal
Ruby
Postscript
Wormwood Scrubs Prison,
London,
Dec. 22, 1948
Arthur Kornfeld
Clothmakers’ Fields
London
Dear Arthur,
I am so sorry. Can you ever find it in your heart to forgive me?
Please believe me when I say that I acted for the best and I still believe that good will come of my actions.
Your Friend,
Karel Szabo
convict no. 1119757
Wormwood Scrubs Prison,
London,
Jan. 3, 1949
Méret Voytek
Moscow
USSR
Dearest Méret,
I hope this finds you. ‘Méret Voytek, Moscow’ is a curt address, but I have no other and I cannot believe your name is unknown to the Russian post office. Nor will I believe the British will censor me by refusing to send this.
Trust me. One day we shall be free. And blood is thicker than water.
Trust me.
Your Loving Cousin
Karel Szabo
convict no. 1119757
Notes, Anachronisms, Explanations . . . and stuff
Shostakovich: I first heard it suggested that Shostakovich had encoded a musical signature into his work on the BBC Third Programme a few years ago. I checked this on a website run by Norman Lebrecht, and Norman himself subsequently confirmed to me that Shostakovich did indeed do this. Alas, I didn’t know in what piece or pieces he did this—I ascribed it to the 5th Symphony because it was written at the right time and because it suited my plot. Of course, it was the 10th and that wasn’t written until 1953. Tant pis.
Penn Station: was pulled down long before I ever set foot in New York. The description I give is closely based on that of Nathan Silver in his wonderful book, Lost New York (Houghton Mifflin 1967).
Chagall: The work I describe wasn’t created until 1949, when Chagall painted it as a backdrop for the New York revival of Stravinsky’s The Fire Bird.
Morris Minor: didn’t make it’s debut until the autumn of 1948. I pinched about four months.
Black Arrow: Well, I made that up. I had to. The Golden Arrow used to leave at 11 o’clock in the morning. Where’s the mystery in that? If there’s one hour in the twenty-four that lacks all mystery it’s got to be 11 in the morning. Who trysts with anyone at 11 in the sodding morning? Even Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard left it till teatime. I am frequently not even awake at 11 in the morning . . . (shome mishtake, shurely? shut up. ed.)
Indian Music Circle: That’s made up but only partly. The Asian Music Circle was founded in 1953—the year Ravi Shankar first performed in the West—by the Hampstead painter Patricia Angadi and her Indian husband Ayana. Twelve years later they introduced Shankar to George Harrison, and subsequently the rest of the Beatles. I have half a dozen of Patricia’s portraits and sketches—pride of place goes to a sketch of Lennon made while he recorded Norwegian Wood.
Club II: It had more than one home in its lifetime. In 1948 it was in its first at 44 Great Windmill St—alas it didn’t open until December, so I pinched a few more weeks. That said, the club was based around the music of John Dankworth (quartet) and Ronnie Scott (boptet—yes, boptet) and the tunes I mention were most certainly played there. In 1949 both bands recorded for the LP (it may not even have been that . . . 78s?) ‘Bop at Club II,’ and while the record purports to be from the Club, it was recorded in King George Hall, which was in Great Russell St and vanished under the wrecking ball years ago. It does, however, feature what must be the earliest English recording of a tune by Monk—52nd St Theme—even though it took thirty-seven years to get released. In 1950 the club moved to Carnaby Sreet, long before the street of tailors became the street of Mods—and that’s why anyone who reads A Little White Death (set in 1963) will find Troy remembering visits to the club in that location. After a police raid in April 1953—the floor littered with ditched drugs, according the memoirs of Superintendent Fabian—Club II closed its doors for the last time. Ronnie and Sir John went on to bigger, probably better things.
Trinity: There are differing, perhaps conflicting accounts of where Robert Oppenheimer was at the time of the explosion. His brother Frank recalled the two of them lying down outside the shelter at South 10,000. Oppenheimer himself said at one point that he remained in the shelter until the blast had passed. Others recall him holding onto a post as the shock wave hit. I put him where I needed him for the purposes of fiction, and used Frank’s version. The line from the Bhagavad Gita, Oppenheimer recalled in an interview many years later. He did not utter it at the time. Again, it served my fiction that he should, and I contrived a way. ‘We’re all sons of bitches now’ was said by Kenneth Bainbridge, the Test Director.
There is colour film, and at least one colour photograph, of the explosion—that said any colour I ascribe to it is based on what someone, at some point, recalled seeing, not what I see in grainy footage some sixty years old.
To anyone who wants to know more about Los Alamos and the invention of the atom bomb, I would recommend The Making of the Atom Bomb by Richard Rhodes (1986). To anyone looking into the politics, the dropping, and the aftermath of the bomb I would suggest Murray Sayle’s essay Did the Bomb End the War? (New Yorker 31st July 1995).
Paris: The description of Rue de la Huchette is taken from A Narrow Street (1942) by the American novelist/screenwriter/journalist Elliot Paul. I think the book is also known as The Last Time I Saw Paris, but has no connection with the Elizabeth Taylor film of the same name. Most of chapter 68 is closely based on a dispatch written by the photographer Lee Miller for Vogue in 1944, to accompany her photographs of Paris at the liberation.
Auschwitz Ladies’ Orchestra: I can’t remember when I first heard of this, but it was years ago. I thought up the plot of this book based around a cellist and a physicist, and then I started researching. Almost at once I found that two survivors of the orchestra had written memoirs—Playing for Time by
Fania Fenelon (published in Paris as Sursi pour L’orchestre in 1976) and Inherit the Truth by Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, published in 1996. They are very contrasting works. Fania Fenelon was a singer and pianist. Mrs Wallfisch is a cellist (my cellist is entirely fictional and is in no way modelled on Mrs. Wallfisch) and is also the mother of cellist Raphael Wallfisch; I listened to his recording of the Kreutzer Sonata endlessly while I wrote this novel. I am grateful to Cosima Dannoritzer for translating several interviews with Mrs. Wallfisch from the German.
The most influential memoirs were If This Is A Man (published in Italy as Si Questo è un Uomo in 1958) by Primo Levi; Auschwitz and After (published in Paris between 1965 and 1970 in three volumes—Aucun de nous ne Reviendra, Une Connaissance Inutile, Mesure de nos Jours—but not translated into English until 1995) by Charlotte Delbo; and the Diaries and Letters of Etty Hillesum (published in Holland as Het verstoorde leven, Dagboek van Etty Hillesum, 1981, and Het Denkende Hart van de Barak, 1982). They were, respectively, an Italian Jew, a French Catholic and a Dutch Jew. Primo Levi was still in Auschwitz when the Russians arrived. Charlotte Delbo was freed at Ravensbrück. Etty Hillesum survived slightly more than two months in Auschwitz and was murdered there on November 30th 1943.
Primo Levi’s work is world-famous, and was the obvious place to begin, but there is the element of chance in looking into any subject and in second-hand bookshops I stumbled across the work of Etty Hillesum (Oxfam Bookshop, Matlock, Derbyshire) and of Charlotte Delbo (Housing Works, Crosby St., New York).
I am aware of only one point at which I have ‘altered’ the history of Auschwitz—the arrivals ramp, which enabled trains to run straight into Birkenau, was not completed until about six weeks after my character arrives there. The camp commandant is fictional—as is Von Schönbeck—to ‘toggle’ between the two commandants the camp had in 1944 was too complicated so I invented one fictional figure to replace them both.