Old Flames (Frederick Troy 2)

by Lawton, John

  ‘Will you look at this junk,’ she said. ‘He’d never let me throw a damn thing away.’

  She threw the gas mask at the wall.

  ‘Fuck ’im,’ she said.

  There were no tears now.

  ‘Fuck ’im.’

  Troy sat on the floor. A small folding-bellows camera, missing the eyepiece, lay on top of a photo album, where it had fallen from the cupboard. He took it off, set it gently down, and turned a page. There was Jackie in her mother’s arms in 1946 in front of the house in Shepherd’s Bush. Six weeks old. Then the same set-up, the same place and pose, except that a proud father, in uniform, now held his daughter.

  ‘But you’d surely want to keep some things?’ he said.

  ‘Right now I could torch the lot. Starting with the bloody house.’

  She slammed the album shut.

  ‘I don’t want to see it. He dragged me away from that to live in this hole. Did you know he asked for this posting? When he got back from Korea he took us away from everything I had, everything I knew. I was seven when Dad went to the Yard. I hardly remembered Lancashire. I was a west London girl down to my toes. I never wanted to move. Fuck ’im.’

  ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘He wanted to get me as far away from you as he could.’

  ‘I didn’t know he knew about me.’

  ‘He didn’t. He just knew there was somebody. My “fancy man”, as he called him.’

  Troy had no idea what he should or could say to this.

  ‘Don’t flatter yourself, Troy,’ she said. ‘You weren’t the only one. And if you didn’t know that then I’m surprised you call yourself a detective.’

  It was almost a joke. A quick, grim smile flashed across her lips. Then the tears started to well in her eyes. She bowed her head and he could just hear her say, ‘Jesus Christ, Troy. What am I going to do now?’

  She stretched out her arms, draped them around his neck and sobbed into his shoulder.

  ‘Fuck ’im,’ she said between gasps. ‘Fuck ’im. I hope he rots in hell.’

  She sobbed an age away. Troy saw the light shift into late afternoon through the back window, looking out onto the privies and across the alley to the houses at the back. She had not moved in awhile. All he could feel was the slow, rhythmical rise and fall of her chest against him. He put out a hand to her hair. It seemed the right thing to do. It seemed that he had to do something. She stirred. Her face came up to his. Close in the dimness. She was only thirty-seven. Still very good-looking. Almost as blonde as her daughter, her father’s piercing blue eyes set in a broad, pale face. She kissed him on the cheek. Pulled back. Looked at him expressionless. Kissed him on the lips and began to prise them apart with her tongue.

  She could feel the lack of response in him. Lips like tentflaps.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Troy.’

  ‘I’m married,’ he said simply.

  ‘Hah? Married?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, and it felt more like a lie than all the lies he’d told lately.

  ‘I was married. What bloody difference did it make then? Troy, I don’t want you to tell me I’m the love of your life. I’m not so green as I’m cabbage looking, but I know what’s going to happen. Dad will ride to the rescue like a knight in shining armour. We’ll lose the house. And good riddance. It’s a RAF house, Married Quarters, NCOs for the use of—but Dad’ll take me back to bloody Acton. I don’t want Acton, Troy. I don’t want to be a little girl in my father’s house again. Fuck Acton, fuck my Dad. I just need a break, a chance, a chance to stand on me own two feet. Me and Jackie. Just put a roof over my head till I can do that. Acton’ll kill me. He’ll get me back and he’ll never let me go. I’ll be at 22 Veryneat Villas for the rest of my life. An eternity at Tablecloth Terrace. Do this for me, Troy. You don’t have to say you love me. Just help me. I couldn’t stand Acton. Help me, Troy.’

  Troy said nothing.

  §85

  Onions had lit a poor excuse for a fire in the iron range of the back room. He sat in front of it smoking a Woodbine.

  ‘I was beginning to wonder,’ he said.

  ‘She’ll live.’

  ‘In what state, though? There’ve been times when she was younger she’d work herself into such a tizzy I thought she’d go mad.’

  ‘She’s a grown-up now, Stan. She’ll pull through quicker than you think. And I wouldn’t expect her to wear her widow’s weeds for long.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘She won’t mourn for Ken any longer than she has to. In fact, I rather think somewhat less than protocol would demand. She’s quite determined to get shot of the house, and Salford, and get back to London. She won’t be erecting any shrine to Ken in this street or in her heart.’

  ‘She’ll be all right for money, though?’

  ‘Of course. Ken was a regular. There’ll be a full RAF pension. And he’ll count as killed in action. Maybe a bit more money, and a medal. I called my brother last night. He’s still the darling of the Marshals, for those two years he served as Air Minister under Attlee. He says Valerie will want for nothing. He’ll see to that. There’ll be money to put Jackie through school if you want it, and money to relocate back to London.’

  ‘Relocate?’ Onions said, querying the neologism.

  ‘If I were you I’d dust off her old room in Acton and have the two of them back till she finds her feet.’

  ‘Is that what she’s asking for?’

  Troy shrugged, letting the gesture say whatever Stan wanted it to.

  ‘I’ll have to stay here a while.’

  ‘Of course. What do you want me to do?’

  ‘You’ll have to take charge at the Yard. I can’t do without you any longer. The boy was right.’ The boy was Wildeve. Thirty-six and he’d never be anything else to Onions. ‘He came to me and insisted I lay you off. But you’re more or less OK now, aren’t you?’

  It seemed to have slipped his mind that there were other, better reasons for Jack’s request.

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘I’ll put in for a week’s compassionate leave. But I’ll not do it till Monday. That’ll buy you a few days to get a medical, get your life in order. You’ll have to do some of my work, just for a bit. And you’ll run the squad in your own right from now on—Tom won’t be back. I heard on Friday. Doctors have given him a month. Friday was my day for bad news. Just get yourself back to the Yard and take over. You’ll be confirmed as a superintendent as soon as Tom’s papers are through. I’ll handle things up here.’

  Onions slipped into silence. An infinite sadness. The beginning of a tear once more starting to form in the corner of each eye. He puffed one last time on his Woodbine and threw the nud end into the range. Rarely had Troy seen such a sense of defeat so manifest in Stan. For twenty years Stan had stood like a rock in his life. Rocks did not bleed stones did not weep.

  All in all Troy could not believe his luck.

  §86

  Jackie was sitting on the doorstep again. At some point she must have slipped upstairs to see her mother. She had the disintegrating gas mask on her face, and had taken the precaution of wearing her Alice band on the outside. Its garish plastic colours and glass gems contrasted comically with the greys and browns of rubber and canvas. It seemed to Troy to sum up something about the country rather well, the fruitless way his generation had passed their legacy on to the next. She turned and looked through the cracked plexiglass at Troy. The car-boy was standing on the pavement.

  ‘Go on. I’ll give you sixpence fer it.’

  Jackie turned back to him.

  ‘Awright,’ she said through the mask, sounding like an asthmatic frog.

  Her hand came up and delicately removed the Alice band, and then tore off the mask.

  ‘Tanner it is,’ she concluded.

  She put the small silver coin in the pocket of her dress, tucking it in below her handkerchief.

  Troy was staring. She felt this. Looked up and said, ‘I got a bob for me Dad’s old camera.’
>
  Troy said goodbye and walked round to the driver’s side of his car. The boy circled the car, wings out, undercarriage running hard, the faint burblings of a propeller coming from inside the mask. He had got his history mightily wrong.

  Troy wound down the window to let out the heat of the day. The boy touched down next to him.

  ‘Why did you waste your money on that thing?’ Troy asked him.

  ‘Whatdeyer mean waste? It’s good this is!’

  ‘Good for what?’

  ‘In case Jerries come again.’

  ‘Don’t be daft,’ said Troy. ‘That was years ago.’

  ‘Could still ’appen,’ the boy protested. ‘Me Dad says it’ll be Gyppos next.’

  ‘Maybe. But they’re not Germans, are they?’

  ‘Me Dad says they’re all foreigners.’

  The irrefutable logic of xenophobia, in one so young. The infallible oracle that was ‘me Dad’. Troy put the key in the ignition and decided to end the conversation. The boy felt otherwise.

  ‘Me Dad says Gyppos killed Jackie’s dad.’

  Troy looked at the house. The door was closed. She had gone.

  ‘That’s not true,’ he said softly to the boy. ‘It was Cypriots. Not Egyptians. The Egyptians haven’t killed anyone.’

  ‘Me Dad says they chopped him up inch at a time, just like Japs did in the war!’ said the boy with evident relish.

  Troy smiled falsely and turned the key.

  §87

  It was a glorious drive. Over the Pennines with the western sun behind him. Through Whalley Bridge and down into the old spa town of Buxton. He stopped in the last of day at Monsal Head. He had never driven the route before and had long wanted to see the railway viaduct that had so offended Ruskin. The most beautiful valley in England, desecrated with a huge bridge and a high embankment simply that ‘every fool in Buxton can be at Bakewell in half an hour, and every fool in Bakewell at Buxton’.

  Troy stared at the bridge. High and narrow over the Wye. As elegant as a row of flamingos’ legs. Ruskin was wrong. A hundred years on it looked as though God had put in an extra half-day’s overtime on the first Sunday to see that this sat well with Mother Nature.

  He had no wish to drive or to arrive in darkness. It seemed too compromising. He checked into the Peacock Inn at Rowsley. Dined late, breakfasted early, and by seven-thirty the next morning was approaching Commander Cockerell’s hometown from the north, along the crooked miles of the A6, snagged between the Derwent and the old Midland Railway line that snaked and burrowed its alpine way from Derby to Manchester.

  He stopped by the cotton mill and asked for the Wirksworth Road. A man exercising a dog pointed up the hill with his walking stick. Across the river, off the Ashbourne road. North, poetically, by north-west.

  He parked in front of number 44 and took the pink suitcase he had had since Brighton from the boot. There was no doorbell. He banged loudly with the horizontal knocker on the letter box.

  She was not dressed. She stood in the doorway, in a terry-cloth dressing gown, her hair pinned into a bun high on her head.

  She peered round Troy. Looked at the Bentley.

  ‘Are you going to leave that there? It’s wider than the house.’

  ‘Why, do you think the neighbours will talk?’

  ‘They’d better!’ said Foxx.

  §88

  Troy watched as she dressed, hands flitting between a large mug of instant coffee and items of clothing. For a brief moment she stood naked, as she pulled on her knickers, then disappeared beneath American fly-button faded blue jeans, that he knew from his nephews were all the rage and hard as hell to get hold of, and a white T-shirt. As she flexed her arms in the air to ease the shirt down over her breasts, one hand hovered at the back of her head and pulled out the pin that held her hair. She shook it loose, sending it cascading halfway down her back. She opened the back door to a row of steep concrete steps leading down to a perilously perched garden, stood in the doorway’s morning light and brushed out her hair.

  ‘I suppose,’ she said lackadaisically, ‘that you’re used to women with dressing rooms and dressing tables. Very working class to dress in the kitchen. But the reason everything takes place in the kitchen is that more often than not it’s the only heated room in the house. Besides, I live alone.’

  She looked down the garden, down to the valley, giving her a hair a last dozen strokes. Troy said nothing. Of course she was right, but then he’d relished every moment of it. When he was small his sisters, women devoid of self-consciousness and self-knowledge, had dressed and made up in front of him. It was curious, nostalgic even, hardly sexual but hardly devoid of sexuality.

  ‘What’s the suitcase for?’

  It seemed as though she had only just noticed it, but he had walked in carrying it and she was not looking at it now—she had chosen her own moment.

  ‘We’re taking a trip.

  ‘To the moon on gossamer wings?’

  She closed the door on the view, lodged her hairbrush next to the stopped clock on the mantelpiece.

  ‘No. To Paris. Possibly Monte Carlo.’

  She sat on the arm of a battered Utility chair that stood in the corner between the door and the fireplace, and pulled on a pair of baseball boots, back bent, fingers moving almost quicker than the eye could see as she laced them up to the ankle. She stood up with a little bounce, up onto her toes like a boxer moving around the ring in the seconds before the gloves touched.

  ‘I’m not dressed right for Monte Carlo,’

  ‘What do you think is in the suitcase?’

  ‘At a guess I’d say half a dozen of Stella’s frocks. But they’re not really me. Look, we don’t have to leave right now, do we?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not right now.’

  ‘Then let’s go out for a while. A walk. You are up to a walk, aren’t you?’

  She stepped lightly across the room to reach him. She stood eye to eye, shoulder to shoulder with him, put out her hands and pulled down his head. A gesture as gentle as Kolankiewicz’s was bullying, but to the same purpose. She ran her fingers along the scar.

  ‘It’s healing well. If you’re sure you’re up to it, I’ll show you around. There’s a few things to be said before we pluck up sticks and disappear.’

  All down the steep hill that led back into the town they walked thirty yards behind a group of chattering young women.

  ‘Eight o’clock start at the mill,’ Foxx said. ‘I should be with them at this time on any other day.’

  ‘Are you on compassionate leave?’

  ‘What? Don’t be daft. It’s a cotton mill not the Royal Navy. I asked for every day’s holiday due to me when that copper came up from Scotland Yard and told me Stella was dead. They gave me a fortnight like I’d asked them to chop off a leg. I’ve had more than a week now. And I still don’t want to go back.’

  She steered Troy off the road only a few feet before the Derwent Bridge and headed out along a riverside lane, high above the rushing white water.

  ‘How long did you say you’d worked there?’

  ‘I started there when I was eighteen. Later than most. I could have gone at fifteen or sixteen, I suppose. Wobbling around on heels, and me bra padded out, pretending I was Jane Russell, trying to look like a grown-up. I didn’t. My mother always thought we were cut out for something better. Long after our Dad was dead she was still trying to better us. I did the same secretarial course as Stella. Typing and shorthand might be “better”, but it didn’t pay as well—and to tell the truth I was heartily fed up with being anybody’s secretary. My boss was no better than Cockerell—worse, he thought he could stick his hand up your skirt and not set you up in a love nest. I went onto the mill floor. It was the obvious, the easy thing to do. Half the town works there, after all. And the half that doesn’t is down the pit or on the railways. It took me less than a day to learn the job and within a week I could do it in my sleep. Or at least do it while I daydreamed. At the time I thought a job which
used none of your mind was marginally better than one which used about a tenth—I thought of it as a kind of freedom. And it was good money compared to typing, brought in enough to run the house for me and Mam. Then Stella started sending money. I could have sent it back—I knew it was Cockerell’s money—but I didn’t. And I could have quit the mill, but I didn’t. Mam thought Stella was doing another secretarial job in London. I suppose I was part of the cover. If I’d stopped working she’d have asked where the money was coming from. That we lived a damn sight better than we could on a mill girl’s wages seemed to escape her notice. She wasn’t all there towards the end anyway. But Mam died at Christmas. And I grew to hate the mill long ago. There comes a point when daydreams turn sour if you don’t do something about them.’

  The pace she had set up was almost winding Troy. They climbed steeply up the side of the valley away from the river, and onto a rough, ancient track that ran southward along the ridge of the Pennines.

  ‘D’you know what makes a place like that tick?’

  She pointed back at the mill chimney, the largest object on the skyline.

  ‘Paypackets? Promotion? No—it’s a running undercurrent of sexual innuendo. The men don’t say “hello” on a Monday morning, they say, “Didst gerrowt?”

  ‘What?’

  ‘Didst gerrowt? Did you get any? Meaning sex.’

  ‘I see,’ he said, unable to visualise the exchange in his mind.

  ‘But then, nobody lays a hand on you.’

  ‘All mouth and no trousers?’ he queried.

  ‘Yes. And you don’t know how grateful a girl can be for that sometimes. I’m immune to the smutty remark. But then I was immune to the charms of Arnold Cockerell. If Stella had been too she might be alive now.’

  Foxx hopped nimbly over a wooden gate. Troy followed gingerly, and found himself facing a colossal stone wall in the middle of nowhere—or, to be precise, since a herd of Scottish longhorns mooed lazily at them as they approached, in the middle of a field of grazing cattle.

  Troy stared up at the wall. It was the best part of twenty-five feet high, solidly built of local granite, and pitted with small holes, out of a few of which sprouted ambitious sycamore saplings. It was a rifle range, clearly dated 1860 by an iron plate just below the parapet. A relic of the last time Troy’s two nations had fought each other in earnest, in the Crimea. The futile, bloody stalemate of the 1850s. Several ancestors and kinsmen had died at Sevastopol. This wall halfway up the Pennines was the result, as the British Army sought to improve itself, realising at last that a good shire militia was worth a dozen charges by the Light Brigade. It was odd to think that old history should penetrate as far as it did. The date and the obvious purpose of the structure instantly brought to mind his grandfather’s anecdotes of the brothers and cousins the old man had lost in battle. Whatever symbolic value the wall had for Foxx, she could hardly guess at its significance to Troy.