Old Flames (Frederick Troy 2)

by Lawton, John

  ‘It’s because I spent childhood listening to the old man and his old man blather on about the old country that I can’t go. It’s not a real place any more. It’s a myth now. I’d rather keep it that way. It could never measure up. There’s things back there I’d rather not know.’

  ‘Such as?’ Rod shot back, and Troy realised for the first time that he had embarked upon a conversation that could have no other result than Rod cornering him. He should have seen where it was leading.

  He drew a deep breath and told Rod what he had put off telling him on a dozen other occasions.

  ‘You remember when I was in Berlin in ’48?’

  ‘Could I ever forget?’

  Troy ignored this.

  ‘While I was there I met a KGB agent. A Pole I’d been investigating in London. He knew more about me than I did about him. He told me that the old man had been a Soviet agent all along.’

  Rod slowly got up and crossed to the desk and the phone. He dialled and waited a few seconds for his wife to answer.

  ‘Cid, I’m going to be late,’ he said. ‘Absolutely unavoidable. I’ll come home with Freddie just as soon as I can. He’s driving us down.’

  He paused while his wife said something Troy could not make out. Then he hung up and resumed his seat in the window.

  ‘Right, you bugger. Let’s hear it.’

  ‘You just did,’ said Troy.

  ‘That’s it? That’s the lot?’

  ‘I thought it was quite enough, myself.’

  ‘Some KGB spook collars you in Berlin and tells you your father was a spy. And you believe him?’

  ‘I didn’t say that. I thought about it. In fact, I still think about it. Most of the time I don’t know what to believe. Sometimes I find it easy to believe it isn’t true. I’ve never yet come to the point of believing it lock, stock and barrel.’

  Rod leaned forward to Troy, demanding his attention, playing the big brother and confirming all the reasons Troy had ever had for not telling him what he had just told him.

  ‘Freddie, it’s preposterous. It makes no sense. No sense at all. The old man opposed Stalinism all through the thirties—even when it was fashionable to be a fellow-traveller he eschewed it. I often worked with him on the editorials for the Herald, and one or two for the Sunday Post. He would have to have been a conman extraordinaire not to have meant what he wrote.’

  ‘Rod, there’s plenty of people think the old man was a conman, and you have to admit he was certainly extraordinary.’

  They had almost reached the bottom of the bottle. Rod pulled another from the cupboard without so much as a glance at the label, and proceeded to oil the wheels once more.

  ‘You amaze me sometimes, little brother, you really do. How can you have knowledge like this and sit on it, not use it? For Christ’s sake, if it had been me the bugger told I’d’ve come screaming round to your house like my arse was on fire!’

  ‘I know,’ Troy said simply.

  ‘How could you not tell me?!?’

  ‘Because I knew you’d react as you are doing.’

  ‘Freddie—it’s too important . . .’

  ‘No it’s not. You don’t believe a word of it, so it can hardly be that important.’

  ‘Yes it bloody well is . . . It’s . . . it’s undermining.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s undermining! I don’t want to be forced to consider that my father’s life might have been a sham. It doesn’t shatter one’s faith in the old man. It chips away at it in a shoddy, petty, corrosive way. He built a life here for himself. And he built one for you and me and the girls. I don’t want to be made to doubt that, and if I doubt him I doubt the life. It’s important to think he was committed to it.’

  ‘To England?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You know what I think of that.’

  Rod rose up in rage. Glass in one hand, bottle in the other. He stormed a few paces around the room in his stockinged feet, leaving Troy wondering why Cid never managed to get him to wear matching socks, and returned to his seat, seething with anger and not a drop of wine spilt.

  ‘You stupid, stupid sod. Let’s not go through that again. We’re English. That’s what he made us. For you to go on raging against the English because you hated their damn schools and you can’t grasp the first rule of their damn silly national game is just plain childish. For God’s sake, Freddie, grow up!’

  Of course Rod was right. Troy could not tell silly mid-off from deep leg. It ought to mean nothing, but at times was simply and neatly symbolic of his regard for the English as being other—‘them’ as he was wont to think of them. But on another level he too knew why Rod raged so madly against the idea. England—or rather that part of the English to whom it mattered at all—was still reeling from the defection of Burgess and Maclean the best part of five years ago. The scandal rippled through English society with a resonance and a force out of all proportion to the incident. Only last year some chap named Philby—Kim Philby, Troy recalled, son of the old Arabian explorer St John Philby—had been the subject of a Commons answer by Macmillan to the effect that he was not the third man in the case of Burgess and Maclean; and Philby had followed that with the unprecedented step of calling a press conference, so necessary was it to reinforce the general sense of his innocence in an atmosphere where the notion of a third man had reached the level of an Establishment paranoia. Establishment, there was a word at the heart of the mystery, buried so deep in the unwritten English code it was impossible to define and much of the time impossible to discern. But then the whole affair touched on unwritten codes—unspoken but understood meanings—the grasp of which, the consciousness of which, in Troy’s eyes, was what separated the likes of the Troys from the English proper. Not to be shocked by Burgess and Maclean was to miss a fundamental meaning in post-war English life. As Rod had so succinctly put it, it was like not knowing the rules of cricket. The two errant diplomats had broken the rules, which stated, in the unwritten code of the English, that spies were much more likely to be one of the cloth cap and brown boot brigade—who had, after all, something to gain from the triumph of Communism—than to be ‘one of us’. That the cloth cap and brown boot brigade had nothing and no one to spy on was neither here nor there. That Burgess and Maclean had each been ‘one of us’—although Burgess had managed the neat trick of being flagrantly one of them at the same time as being ‘one of us’—was at the heart of the offence. Contempt. It was what offended Rod now, the thought that their father had made him, and tried to make Troy, ‘one of us’, only to be in utter, secret contempt of the very notion. That was what hurt. That Alexei Troy might just have nurtured the same secret contempt, making fools of them all.

  Troy had known Guy Burgess. They had a common friend in Charlie, a common friend in Tom Driberg. Troy had propped up bars in Soho with Guy a dozen times. He was a charming, sometimes outrageous drunk, who blathered about politics and Communism half the time but around whom there lingered not a whiff of ideology. But, then, that was what had so obviously lent conviction to the façade that he was ‘one of us’. The English ideology could be summed up in some wag’s definition of the C of E—‘the creed of the English is that there is no God but that it is wise to pray to him occasionally’. Troy knew that he, Chief Inspector Troy, was not ‘one of us’; he knew that it suited Rod to believe that he, Rodyon Troy Bt. MP, was, but felt that in his heart of hearts Rod knew he too was on the outside.

  Troy taunted him, unnecessarily.

  ‘Why is it causing you such offence?’

  ‘Offence? Bugger offence. It’s pain. Pain, pain, pain! I am hurt by the idea that the old man could be called a spy. It’s insulting. More insulting than I can find words to express!’

  ‘Aha?’ said Troy. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve noticed, but you’ve called me a spy at least twice since I walked through the door less than an hour ago.’

  ‘I have?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Rod was momentarily contemplative. Inst
antly calmer. They both knew what the next logical remark must be.

  ‘It’s true in its way, though. Isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. I suppose it is. But that’s not why I was there. Whatever they expected of me, I was there for the crack. I knew we’d learn nothing we didn’t know already. If Eden hadn’t told Five and Six to lay off, I’m sure they’d never have clutched at such a straw. As it happens, I was a spy who didn’t spy a thing. My hands are clean!’

  ‘They didn’t,’ Rod almost whispered.

  ‘Didn’t what?’

  ‘Didn’t lay off. They went right ahead and spied on the Russians. They sent a frogman out to inspect the hull of that battleship Khrushchev came in on. The Russian captain made a formal complaint to the FO before he sailed. It was a lot bigger and dirtier than they told you.’

  Suddenly Troy was angry. His turn.

  ‘Eden’s denied it, of course. But you know in your bones it’s true.’

  Troy was angrier.

  ‘Wouldn’t surprise me if you and all the plods in Special Branch were just the decoys.’

  Angrier still. He bit on the bullet, and refused to give in to the rage he felt.

  ‘When?’ he asked. ‘When did this happen?’

  ‘The word is that the complaint came in on Tuesday morning. The denial was immediate, but my sources say Eden’s been in a paddy ever since because the spooks have admitted it.’

  That Rod had ‘sources’ was hardly a surprise. It made perfect sense for Her Majesty’s Civil Service to see to it that Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition knew what the Civil Servants wanted them to know. It was one way of ensuring their loyalty and it was easy enough. The Commons was a vast club, an elective Garrick, the voting man’s Athenaeum. And the mandarins were nothing if not natural clubmen, nodding and winking at their blind horses. After all, Opposition might well be Government in a year or two.

  Again Troy could hear Khrushchev saying ‘Do it!’ on the Monday evening. The remark made marginally more sense now than it had at the time. But he had created a situation in which it was now impossible to tell Rod that he had indeed heard something of worth in his spying on the Russian leader—impossible, without branding himself a liar as well as a spy in Rod’s eyes. He realised once more why he so hated spooks and spookery: it clung to fingers, it left a bad taste in the mouth, a nasty smell in the air. All in all he had only himself to blame. He should have known better.

  They all but rolled out of Troy’s Bendey in Hampstead. Lucinda Troy took one look at her husband and brother-in-law and demanded the keys to the car. One day, she told them, as she eased herself into the driving seat, there’d be laws against middle-aged men driving pissed to the gills.

  §17

  Rod had been a toddler of three, the girls babes-in-arms, only weeks old, and Troy himself unthought of, when their father had paid a pittance for the vast Georgian pile that was Mimram House. He had saved the bedrooms from falling into the ground floor and the house itself from crumbling into the eponymous river Mimram. He had turned it into a hybrid of a Russian dacha and an English family home. It had remained that after his death, home to his mother, home from home to the sisters and Rod’s constituency base, until their mother’s death in 1952. Troy had been, as he himself saw it, at best a visitor. To everyone’s surprise, not least Troy’s, Maria Mikhailovna had left the house to Troy, stating simply in her will that it was only right as he was her last unmarried child with no family home of his own. This to Troy confirmed what she thought of his terraced house in Goodwin’s Court, which she had always contemptuously referred to as his ‘bachelor residence’, as though it would serve only until he too married. There was little prospect of that, and even his sisters, those indefatigable romantics, had long given up the game of matchmaking. He had hesitated, had almost passed the house back to Rod. He had come to think of himself as a Londoner. He had been there since the thirties. He had witnessed the privations of the war there, and the worse privations of the peace. But in the end he had accepted that there was a certain appeal to claiming the family seat. It would never be wholly his—Rod needed it most weekends, and nothing short of a moat could keep out a determined sister—and hence the responsibility need not be the millstone about his neck that at first glance it might seem. He could indulge a dream. He had long wanted to keep a pig and grow vegetables. And to his own surprise he had done things his younger self would never have dreamt of. He took weekends and holidays as weekends and holidays. Before cases out of London, he would let Onions bribe him with the promise of days off. After cases out of London, he would let Onions reward him with days off. He spent summer evenings in the country, motoring down just for the night, and rising at first light to be back at the Yard. He had come to look upon Mimram House as a pleasurable retreat, although retreat from what he could not say.

  §18

  He awoke on the Saturday morning to the promise of breakfast in bed, followed by a stroll down to the pig pens. He was sitting up in bed with a cup of coffee and the morning paper when Rod opened his bedroom door. Troy could tell from his expression that he had just a tinge of guilt, the nagging self-doubt that perhaps he had overdone it and made an ass of himself. Unlike Troy, Rod could never hold a grudge. He had nothing to feel guilty about, but guilt he could hold aplenty. He looked immaculate, freshly scrubbed and shaved, three-piece suit and a shine to his shoes, ready to meet his electorate and suffer their complaints.

  ‘You haven’t told the girls what you told me yesterday, have you?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ said Troy. ‘Why should I? Can’t wear it, can’t fuck it. They wouldn’t know what to do with it.’

  ‘A deeply cynical attitude, if I may say so.’

  Rod left. Nothing on earth would have induced Troy to tell his sisters. Their dismissive indifference would have been far harder to bear than Rod’s absurd guilt. He went back to his newspaper, to the news of the departure of B & K, and a near-verbatim account of Khrushchev’s last words to the Foreign Secretary. Some Fleet Street hack must have been closer than he thought. Except that they weren’t Khrushchev’s last words, they were Troy’s, the lies of convenience by which he had stripped Khrushchev of his hostility and vulgarity. He was, he realised, a part of history. His lies were now lies of record. Oh, the accursed vice of lying. Troy threw back the covers and yawned his way to the bathroom.

  Under the oaks at the bottom of the kitchen garden he found a large, fat man seated on the makeshift bench of planks and oil drums, sipping tea from a thermos flask. When Troy had first met him he had seemed merely big. He was bald too, but his baldness had not altered—there was nowhere for it to go—but his growing girth had forced Troy to reappraise him from big to fat. He still wore, as so many of the British did, the shabby remains of his wartime uniform. All over Britain on Saturday and Sunday mornings shades of blue and khaki could be seen on the backs of digging men on allotments or peeping out from the bonnets of old bangers in back yards. It had become, by dint of durability, the mufti of the working man. There seemed to be not a dustman in England without his khaki blouse. The Fat Man had put leather cuffs and elbows onto the dark blue serge of his old LCC Heavy Rescue battledress, though Troy doubted very much whether he could still fasten it, but these details apart he looked scarcely different from the night when Troy had first encountered him in the gloom of the black out, tending his large white sow in the heart of Chelsea. These days you could search Chelsea from river to square, the length of the King’s Road from the Royal Court to World’s End, and find not a trace of a pig.

  ‘Mornin’ cock,’ he said as Troy wandered over.

  Troy had never known him to use names, his own or anyone else’s, a habit which had made him, on occasion, hard to keep track of. He had always told Troy, with a tap of the finger to the side of the nose, that he worked for an amateur detective, ‘a gentleman, like’. Troy took this with a pinch of salt. The Fat Man would disappear from time to time and occasionally Troy would wonder what became of him, but he always showed up a
t the punctuation points in the calendar of a pig’s life, and Troy had long since given up asking him questions. He would, after all, only resort to ‘ask no questions, you’ll be told no lies’, or some such phrase, which irritated Troy intensely, so reminiscent were they of childhood.

  Troy leaned over the side of the sty. The large Gloucester Old Spot sow was scarcely visible in the shade of the tree, well camouflaged by the natural black and white of her markings and the odd splash of mud. She grunted a greeting. Troy could just make her out, sitting on her haunches, rolling her head at the sky in anticipation of the coming sunshine.

  ‘I’s’ll ’ave ’er put to the boar next month,’ the Fat Man said. ‘We should get a good litter this year. She’s in the pink of condition.’

  Troy sat next to him on the planks and declined the offer of sickly sweet, milky tea.

  Troy had sought him out to get his advice on building the pens and breeding pigs. One hot summer day in 1953 he had roared up the drive on his motorcycle combination, still in his blue jacket, wearing goggles and a leather helmet. In the sidecar sat a patient, self-possessed pig, a large specimen of the Middle White. It, too, wore a leather flying helmet.

  Troy had stood in the porch with Sasha watching the bike approach. It ground to a halt in a spurt of gravel. The Fat Man pushed up the goggles and beamed at Troy.

  ‘Wotcher, cock,’ he said as though they had last met only yesterday.

  Sasha drifted over to the bike, walked slowly round it, delicately, barefoot on the gravel, feigning appraisal. At last she said, ‘Who’s your friend?’

  ‘Randolph,’ the Fat Man said.

  ‘Randolph?’

  ‘Randolph. On account of his father was called Winston.’

  Sasha corpsed. A fit of girlish giggles. The Fat Man did not, clearly, see the naming of pigs as a source of mirth. He looked stonily at her doubled up with laughter. The pig, for its part, continued to roll a pebble round in its mouth, it eyes narrowed to slits, staring straight ahead, oblivious to her hysterics, listening to the sound the pebble made on its teeth. For all Troy knew, what sounded like utter monotony to him might well have been music to the pig.