Friends and Traitors

by John Lawton

  “Do I play with strange women?”

  “I’m not strange. I’m Venetia.”

  He’d not expected this. He had not expected to hear from her. He had thought that all he wanted of a Foxxless Friday night was beans on toast; he had a can of Heinz’s finest—a few glasses of claret; he had an Haut-Brion ‘45; perfect with baked beans in tomato sauce—and a novel. He had the new one everyone seemed to be talking about, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, written at the kitchen sink by some bloke in Nottingham. And now he had doubt as well.

  “What did you have in mind, Venetia?”

  “Buy me dinner.”

  “Buy you dinner?”

  “Yes. You won’t regret it. I know everything.”

  “Why the sea is boiling hot, and whether pigs have wings?”

  “And much much more besides.”

  §114

  Troy called Venetia back fifteen minutes later.

  “I’ve booked us into La Rave. I’ll pick you up in about twenty minutes.”

  “Never heard of it. Where is it?”

  “Quite near you, in the King’s Road.”

  “OK.”

  §115

  “King’s Road?” she said. “We’re practically at World’s End.”

  Troy pulled over, parked his Bentley opposite La Rave.

  “Perhaps that’s why I was able to get a table at no notice on a Friday night. But it got a cracking review in the Spectator a while back.”

  “What does La Rave mean? I was always useless at French.”

  “It doesn’t mean anything. They just Frenchified an English word.”

  “So it’s rave? As in ‘we’ll go no more a-raving’?”

  “I think you’ll find Byron wrote ‘roving’ not raving.”

  “He probably meant raving.”

  “I’m quite certain he did. And I imagine the touch of French makes La Rave sound a bit more like Le Caprice, to which they no doubt aspire.”

  “Aim high, I suppose.”

  Once they were seated, Troy looked at the menu. Venetia looked for the wine list. There wasn’t one.

  “It’s a dry restaurant,” Troy said.

  “A dry restaurant!” Venetia said a little too loudly. Then she leaned closer to him, her eyes darting to either side, and mouthed, “What bloody good is that?”

  “I chose it because it was dry. I thought you’d prefer not to watch me drink if you can’t drink yourself.”

  “What a load of bollocks, Freddie.”

  “If you like, they will send out for wine.”

  “I do like.”

  Troy beckoned to the waiter who had shown them to their table.

  “What would you have, Venetia?”

  “Hmm … How about a claret?”

  “OK. There won’t be a lot of choice, but—”

  “As long as it’s not plonk. Anything Cru Bourgeois or better. After all, you’re not going to pinch the pennies on me, are you?”

  The waiter told them he’d be back in five minutes.

  Troy said, “I thought you were dry?”

  “No, Freddie. What I said was ‘clean.’”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “Dry means you don’t touch alcohol, clean means you are in control, not it. I am clean in that I can and do say no to booze. Order a second bottle and you’ll have to finish it yourself. Your sister is aiming for dry, because she knows she cannot manage clean. It takes too much will power. There’s actually less involved in stopping completely than in keeping control. But, keeping control of anything was never Sasha’s strong point. She was a lesson to me. By the time I met Bruce in ‘42, I was ready to clean up. To say the least, I’d led a raucous war. I’d even admit to being notorious. I’d have settled down happily with Bruce, but of course the minute we were married he was posted abroad to crawl up the spine of Italy, and I scarcely saw him until the winter of ‘46, and in ‘47 … well, I told you … Bentley, tree … tree, Bentley …”

  “Yes,” said Troy. “I think notorious might well be the word.”

  She smiled, unembarrassed by her “raucous” past life.

  “I was promiscuous, but not casually promiscuous.”

  “Again, what’s the difference?”

  “I can remember all their names.”

  Troy thought back to that night in La Popôte, and Burgess opining that several men might get lucky in the ladies’ loo if Venetia felt so inclined.

  “And, I don’t need to take my socks off to count them either.”

  “You mean fewer than twenty?”

  “No. Perhaps the sock idea was poorly chosen. Seventy-two to be precise. Seventy-two between the Blitz and VE night.”

  Troy said nothing.

  “You’re shocked, aren’t you? But you were such an innocent in those days.”

  “I think I was such an innocent until I was nearly thirty, actually.”

  “And now?”

  “I suppose I’ve learnt a thing or two about women. Enough not to run a mile in the opposite direction.”

  “Oh, Freddie. You underestimate yourself. Notorious might well be the word for you too.”

  “Now I am shocked.”

  “Shocked, notorious, but in control?”

  “I am very much in control. And I would not say I was promiscuous.”

  “And I would not say it of myself. But … I’m a widow. The ties do not bind.”

  “And I am married.”

  “So I’ve heard. No one seems to know much about her.”

  “There’s not much to tell. The marriage lasted weeks at most. It’s now … a technicality.”

  “And Sasha tells me you have a live-in.”

  “I do, and again, I don’t count that as promiscuity.”

  “You’re in control?”

  “I think so.”

  “Hmm … don’t you think it’s time to lose control?”

  “You mean order that second bottle and finish it myself?”

  “No, that’s not quite what I had in mind.”

  The arrival of the soup course broke the thread of the conversation. Troy thought it little short of a miracle.

  §116

  She pecked him on the cheek, a gesture probably at odds with her nature and her history.

  And once she had found her key she looked at him, a teasing glint in her eye, and said:

  “So we’ll go no more a-raving so late into the night. Though the heart be something something. Oh fuck, I forget.”

  “Though the heart be still as loving, and the moon be still as bright.”

  “Yes, that’s it. Thank you, Freddie.”

  He watched her up the steps. Some remnant of gentlemanly code telling him that he had not seen a lady safely home until the door had closed behind her.

  The key turned in the lock. She turned to him. Almost gone but not gone.

  “I know everything,” she said.

  And then she was gone.

  It was the second time she’d said that. He still didn’t know what she meant by it.

  §117

  Another postcard arrived from darkest Derbyshire. In an envelope. Not to conceal the sepia image—”The Annual Belper Toad Racing Festival” circa 1910, men in clogs and white tabards, each clutching what seemed to be a large, disgruntled toad—so much as for the content:

  This is really hard. How do you move on without the sense that you are throwing your life away? Why does every little thing seem to matter? Has anyone ever moved on, moved away without a permanent ache of regret? Why isn’t nostalgia a sin? Why isn’t it illegal? Why isn’t there a motto for psychological good health dunned into every child before they’re ten: “Don’t Look Back!”

  I begin to wish I’d known your parents. How did they ditch a country? All I’m trying to ditch is a one-horse mill town up north, possibly even a one-donkey mill town. Dunno, ‘cos I haven’t seen a horse or a donkey yet, just the fucking mill chimney. God—if only I could dynamite it.

  I’ve thought about talk
ing to your Uncle Nikolai, but I think the only country he acknowledges is between his ears, and all his “things” are ideas, the ultimate portable property.

  I’ve thought of talking to Kolankiewicz, but who was it said “Poland is not so much a country as a state of mind”?

  SFXX

  That was a Crispism. Quentin Crisp’s faintly damning critique of a friend. Troy must have told Foxx this at some point, probably on one of those days when talking to the Yard’s senior pathologist proved too exasperating.

  Troy was not at all sure how to help her with this. Telling her to burn her bridges was easy. His own childhood had left him with few loyalties, even though both morality and intellect told him loyalty should be valued as a virtue. He had no handle on nostalgia. He had never felt remotely English, yet not only did he know no other country, he still owned the house he was born in, and his brother owned the house he had spent much of his childhood in. Could one have nostalgia for what is, as well as what was? And logic told him nostalgia was possible even for what never was.

  And the telephone rang.

  “Are you doing anything this evening?”

  Lady Stainesborough. The usual slip-sliding inflections of irony or sarcasm utterly absent from her voice.

  “Just drinking alone.”

  “Been there. Done that. A tableau of misery. Why don’t you come over here and drink in company? I might even join you in a glass or two if you bring a decent bottle.”

  Troy’s wine cellar was less a cellar than the space under the sink, between two red brick columns, Chateau Stopcock with vintage old-growth lead pipe, in amongst the cartons of Vim, the bottles of Dettol, and the packets of yellow dusters he bought on the doorstep from the bloke who came around with the knife-sharpening contraption, and home to half a dozen spiders, but it abounded in decency. He’d even been known to keep a thoroughly decent first-growth claret in his desk drawer in case of an unforeseen claret emergency.

  A Latour ‘34. That should do the trick.

  And then he paused.

  What, if anything, was “the trick”?

  §118

  He remembered the moment of surprise when he realised that Foxx had hired a cleaner for her hillside semi in Derbyshire—so that, he had assumed, she might never return to layers of dust or piles of mouse shit no matter how infrequent her visits.

  Venetia seemed oblivious. Not to give a damn. The huge lobby of her Eaton Place house—he fought shy of calling it a mansion … London had grander houses by far—was strung with cobwebs, coated with dust. Something crunched underfoot, the dead leaves of last autumn, blown in from the street and never swept up, scattered across the threshold along with dozens of unopened letters.

  Venetia was in working mufti. A pair of loose blue jeans, tennis shoes worn to holes, and a baggy, collarless man’s shirt spattered with paint and what looked like woodchip. The mass of blonde hair piled up with kirby grips and rubber bands.

  “Sorry. Lost track of the time. I had meant to be dressed to kill by the time you showed up, something sleeveless or something backless, not still in me work clobber.”

  “Work?”

  “Don’t sound so bloody surprised, Freddie. It’s work that pleases me, occupies me, and on occasion pays. Gerry left me oodles of dosh, but if he hadn’t I’d scrub the floors in Selfridges if it kept the wolf from the door.”

  “Whereas my sisters would simply buy off Mr. Wolf with sexual favours.”

  “You said that, I didn’t. Now, follow me.”

  She led off into what Troy took to be the drawing room in the house’s original configuration, windows facing slightly west and north. Now it seemed to be some kind of studio, the clumpy, big-footed furniture of the last century piled up in one corner, the Persian carpets rolled back—all to make way for easels and work benches.

  Two easels were empty. A third had a portrait set in its wooden grip, half-finished, the face unidentifiable, the setting blurring into abstraction.

  “Don’t look at that,” she said, throwing a sheet over it. “I learnt my lesson.”

  “Which is?”

  “Can’t paint to order. Can’t do anything to order, in fact. Should never have accepted the commission.”

  “You won’t finish it? Even later?”

  “Only if my arse is struck by lightning. Now—”

  She upended a two-pound jam jar of paintbrushes and picked out the corkscrew.

  “Make yourself useful.”

  She blew the dust off two china mugs. Beneath the dribbles of congealed oil paint, they were still recognisable as coronation mugs. She handed him the Edward VII, and held on to the George V.

  “Are you pulling a face, you little bugger? You are, aren’t you? You won’t taste the paint. Honestly!”

  She held out King George. Troy did not pour.

  “I wasn’t pulling a face at the mugs. I was shocked that you don’t think the wine might need ten minutes to breathe.”

  “Oh … you utter fucking snob. OK. Ten minutes it is. I’ll show you work in progress, and if that doesn’t kill ten minutes, I’ll show you the house. You can marvel at all the crap five generations of Stainesboroughs have squirrelled away.”

  Behind the easels was a woodworking bench, perhaps the only neat thing he’d seen in the house thus far … every chisel in its drilled socket, every knife in its predetermined slit.

  The sculpture, if such it be, was about eighteen inches across, and looked to be a carefully arranged pile of leaves carved in some dark, biscuit-brown hardwood. There might be a hundred of them, all joined together with thin strips of blackened leather to make … what?

  Venetia lifted the leaves and suddenly its form was obvious—a cloak. And beneath this cloak of leaves, foetally curled, a small, naked priapic man in the primitivist style. His father had collected a few sculptures rather like this, they had become fashionable once Picasso had adopted them around the turn of the century—their features visible in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. To this day “Minnie” stood in the hearth in his study out at Mimram, a Pygmy astride an even pygmier elephant, its tusks long since snapped off. This man had the same huge eyes and wide mouth as Minnie, a fundamentally black figure carved in a pale wood, almost ginger.

  “Well?” she said.

  “Well,” he replied. “It’s got to be, hasn’t it? He’s Caliban. Hiding under the cloak before Trinculo sneaks in.”

  “I’m impressed.”

  “And Trinculo?”

  “Oh, I didn’t feel like carving a Trinculo. Just another jester, just another bloody Englishman abroad, after all. No, it was Caliban who interested me.”

  “When did you take it up?”

  “Sculpture, about nine months ago. Painting … about the time Gerry’s drinking started to get fatal. I set up an easel in the attic. I knew Gerry would never bother to climb so many stairs. One by one the staff quit on us. He wouldn’t hire more, and if he’d tried I rather think no one would have worked for us. I found myself alone in a huge house … with a madman … if you’ll agree that drinking oneself to death is a form of madness. Had to do something. Gerry had been mumbling incoherently since 1953 and stopped speaking altogether in ‘55. In ‘56, he died. The next day I rolled back the drawing room carpets—no doubt a violation of every social code the Stainesboroughs ever stood for. I’ve worked in this room ever since. I cannot say I am happy, just happier.”

  “Is there more?”

  “More what?”

  “Are there more sculptures?”

  “Oh yes. I tend to work on two or three at once.”

  She led him behind a screen. A Chippendale credenza, scuffed and dusty, had been turned into a plinth for three more sculptures.

  “Take a guess.”

  She placed her hands upon a wooden devil, clutching some kind of spear.

  “Lucifer?”

  “Poseidon.”

  She pointed at the next. A sightless head with a tangled mass of snaking hair.

  “Medusa?”
r />   “Yep. I shall have to steel myself to finish the gorgon gaze and give her eyes. And this …?”

  The last was more baffling than the first. Two bodies intertwined—more than intertwined, melded. A beast with two backs. Shape rather than feature, everything tending to a curve—the hint of a pendant breast, the suggestion of a sweeping feather. Then it came to him. Siena, Sasha’s awed response in the Bargello.

  “Leda and the Swan?”

  “Of course.”

  “You’re drawn to Greek myths?”

  “To myths … and to Shakespeare. Bring your bottle down to the kitchen and I’ll tell you. I have soup on the hob.”

  The kitchen was as it would have been had either of the two gentlemen on the coronation mugs dropped in during their respective reigns. A blackleaded range, now rusting—copper pans large enough to boil spuds for a couple of dozen diners. The only hint of modernity was a New World gas cooker, incongruous, untimely in its glaring white enamel and Ideal Home eye-level grill. He began to wonder if the conspicuous neglect was not some form of vengeance. The tale of the drunken, dead husband notwithstanding, he could not help but think of Miss Havisham in Satis House. A cruel world conspicuously rejected in a twenty-year display of cobwebs and mouse shit.

  Over dinner, claret and onion soup, seated at the twenty-foot-long, scrubbed deal table in what had been the servants’ hall, Venetia answered his unasked questions.

  “In my family education was for boys. We ‘gels’ weren’t allowed or expected to get an education. We got a nanny, then a governess, and then we were presented at court. I was a debutante of 1928. Same night as your sisters. I felt about it all much as they did. They smoked reefer in the lavatory and were stuck in front of Queen Mary smashed silly. To this day Sasha still does her impression of the old Queen when she’s pissed.

  “After … afterwards … it was marry well and breed, wasn’t it?”

  “My sisters had choices. My father would not have stopped either of them going to university. They showed no interest. My mother intervened and suggested finishing school in Switzerland—the voice of desperation, I think. I can still hear Sasha’s cackle of laughter. My mother never spoke of it again. She just hoped silently that Sasha would marry well—although the English definition of ‘well’ just means ‘wealthy,’ while my mother might have meant ‘happily.’”