by John Lawton
“Then she did not marry well.”
“Indeed, she didn’t.”
“I had two books as a child. No one thought to buy me more. The Complete Shakespeare. Four volumes nicely printed and bound in leather. Meant, I rather think, as an ornament than ever to be read. And a huge, fat collection of Greek Myths, flaking gold leaf on the cover, cracked boards and loose pages. They were my education. Yes, to answer your question, I am drawn to them, and they are what I draw on. You won’t find me sculpting a London bus or Sir Winston. I know them all, I could recite almost any legend, any Shakespeare plot … although I never thought his plots much mattered … and for much of my life, and I am forty-eight, they’re all I have known … my archive, my library, my vocabulary … but, and to the point, when we were kids you thought I was a noddlehead, didn’t you?”
“Yep.”
“And you’re not?”
“No, I’m not.”
“Masha, and I think she thinks about you more than her sister, told me there was … let me get this right … ‘a thing of darkness in young Fred.’”
Troy said nothing.
“And I am drawn to darkness also.”
“Don’t be.”
“Hence … Caliban.”
“I’m not Caliban. We’re none of us Caliban.”
“I was hoping you’d tell me what he is. I’m not a noddlehead, but I can’t pretend the play makes a lot of sense to me. I deal in images not ideas.”
“It’s a very common theme of those times. Nature versus Art, capital N, capital A. Science was beginning to tell us that we might not be the centre of the universe and hence not the apple of God’s eye, and the discovery of America, meeting warriors in loincloths who still fought with bows and arrows, who’d not even invented the wheel, set us thinking about what was man in his natural state … as Locke put it, ‘once upon a time all the world was America.’ Montaigne was fascinated by the New World. His most famous essay is about cannibals. Cannibal is Caliban. Caliban is Nature, Prospero Art.”
Venetia made lines in the pine top with the tines of her fork, swirls of chaos, crossing and interlocking.
“Don’t worry. I’m still with you. You haven’t lost me yet. If anything, you’ve confirmed what I half-thought. If I have this right, and you said we’re none of us Caliban, it’s because we are all of us both Art and Nature?”
“I think that’s what the seventeenth century had to tell us.”
“And what do we do? Do we balance the two?”
Troy shook his head.
“Can’t be done.”
“Does Shakespeare try?”
“I don’t know. The play has an ending that baffles me. There’s so much at work besides the nature of the savage … there’s power and tyranny, and vengeance and forgiveness. I’d have to read it again, or hope someone stages it on Shaftesbury Avenue in the near future. I’ve not seen it performed since I was about fifteen.”
“Gielgud?”
“Yes. And Richardson as Caliban.”
“Then it was at the Old Vic in 1930. I went too. Several times, in fact. And to most productions over the last thirty years. You seem to have missed Gielgud’s latest Prospero in Drury Lane only this year. Now, why do you say balancing Art and Nature can’t be done?”
“It’d be more accurate to say it doesn’t get done. Art will always smother Nature. If it doesn’t, you get a sort of social rebel who is cultured and debased at the same time, and will always be judged not for his Art but for his Nature.”
An image sprang to mind, seemingly from nowhere.
“The sort of man,” Troy said, “who can listen to a Schubert concert at the Wigmore, and duck out before the encore to get a hand job in the nearest public lavatory.”
She was grinning now, that beautiful top lip pouting with delight.
“I think you’ve just described our absent friend.”
“Eh?”
“Guy Burgess.”
“Guy Burgess? A well-balanced man?”
Her grin burst to laughter. Laughter so infectious it brought tears to Troy’s eyes.
As they calmed down, he said, “Those might just be the stupidest words I’ve ever uttered.”
“All the same,” she said, “Guy was hardly ashamed and certainly never repentant about his Nature. You might say he was in touch with his ‘thing of darkness.’”
Troy wondered where the conversation was headed. Back to his own “thing of darkness”?
But she changed the subject.
“Sasha tells me you breed pigs?”
§119
He walked home. Across St. James’s Park, into Lower Regent Street. Along Orange Street, where he had first spent a night with Tosca.
1944.
A garret under the eaves.
Melting pizza and stolen chocolate.
He wondered about the “thing.” He knew exactly where Venetia’s line was leading, and he hoped she never got there.
1944.
His other lover, Diana Brack. A friend of his sisters, so almost certainly a friend of Venetia’s.
1944.
He had shot Diana dead.
“The Tart-in-the-Tub Case,” as an insensitive press had so cruelly put it.
The case that made him famous.
He hoped Venetia never got there.
That was “the trick,” after all, to see she never got there.
§120
Another envelope. Another Derbyshire postcard. Four frames: a spartan, stone slate-roofed chapel; a loaf in the shape of wheat-sheaf; a bloke clutching a giant stripy marrow; two boys in Sunday best, matching grey jackets and shorts, hair plastered with Brylcreem, each posing with an untrimmed leek taller than themselves. And the caption:
EBENEZER METHODIST CHAPEL HARVEST FESTIVAL, 1933
What chance you could lend me £100? The bathroom here is out of the ark and the kitchen is little better than a calabash and an open fire. I can’t expect Rosie to live here with a new baby, not in conditions like this. I thought it was all pretty grotty when I was growing up, and Mrs. 1958 expects a lot more than my mum did. Next door still ponches clothes in a dolly tub and puts them through a wooden mangle! All her husband’s shirts have to have rubber buttons. Next door, t’other side, they keep coal in the fucking bath! So … so … I’ve decided to refit, new bathroom suite, new cooker, and get rid of that horrid Belfast sink. God … I hate to think of it … but mum used to bathe us girls in that, it’s so big. Anyway, a hundred ought to cover it. I will pay you back. Honestly.
It’ll slow me down a bit. If I can get a plumber sharpish I could be home in a week. Or maybe two.
SFXX
He posted Foxx a cheque for two hundred pounds. How readily the unravelling plot skeined into his hands. How easily his conscience salved.
§121
“If you’re free tonight, I can promise you something a bit better than onion soup and me in jeans.”
Eddie was hovering on the other side of the desk. A sheaf of papers in his hand. Troy put his hand over the mouthpiece.
“What?”
“Work is what.”
“What work?”
“Paperwork. Read and sign.”
“Has anyone been murdered?”
“Not today. Not yet, at any rate.”
“Then forge my signature and don’t come back ‘til there’s a body.”
Eddie paused, tried to give Troy the eye. He was not good at it and found he could not resist blinking.
“What?” Troy said again.
“Do you intend doing any work today?”
“When there’s a corpse, you’ll find me both eager and efficient.”
“Meanwhile, you slope off when it suits you and leave me with all the bum fodder.”
Troy dearly wished he could point to stripes on his arm or pips on his shoulders—any silent way to pull rank.
“Do I complain when you nip out to place a bet?”
Eddie blew a raspberry and left.
�
�Venetia … you still there?”
“Of course. About seven. And remember, I know everything.”
Troy still had no idea what she meant by this. She hadn’t let the phrase pass her lips last night, and he had thought it might be some whimsy she had adopted and then dropped.
§122
Was her promise empty? Venetia was still in jeans and her paint-spattered shirt.
Her glass was not empty.
She held it out to him. Brimful of vintage claret.
“Here is that which will give you language.”
Troy sniffed and sipped and swirled and thought.
“Go to be a Tempest quotation, hasn’t it?”
“Yes. But where?”
“Not a clue.”
“Act Two, Scene Two. Clown to Caliban.”
“And I’m Caliban?”
“Perhaps. However. Your wooden counterpart is finished.”
She led off to her studio. Caliban lay curled up in his cloak of leaves, eyes wide, staring into nothingness the way his cat out at Mimram often did. Unperturbed, but sleepless all the same.
“I’m not sure I see a difference,” Troy said.
“I’ve added more leaves. He seemed a bit exposed to the weather. And I trimmed his nose. See?”
She bent down and pointed.
The nose was a fraction smaller, but then he had to conclude that sculptors dealt in fractions and in slivers.
“He was a bit too brutal,” Venetia added.
“Can Caliban be too brutal?”
“Oh yes. Too wild? Not sure. After all, he isn’t an animal. He’s human feral.”
“I thought you said you weren’t an intellectual.”
“Not quite, Freddie. I said I wasn’t a noddlehead. That might imply that I might also not be an egghead … but for me two penn’orth, Caliban is a marvellous creation … the personification of rage against injustice … a living lust for vengeance.”
“And Shakespeare wastes him.”
“Indeed, he does, throws him away on stock-in-trade drunk scenes with a couple of boring clowns. Playing to the pit. So … we do see him the same, don’t we?”
She didn’t wait for an answer.
“Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll slip out of duck, muck, and mufti and emerge as a swan. Look around. You will see wondrous changes.”
She ran upstairs. Soon Troy heard the sound of old pipes groaning and knocking—enough to set the house shaking.
He wandered back to the hall. She was right. Not a dead leaf or a cobweb to be seen.
He drifted up the wide crescent staircase, wondering which bedroom was hers. Everything had been vacuumed and polished. Not a trace of Satis House.
On the first floor a door was ajar. The room faced south. Logically this might be the master bedroom, one she might have chosen for herself. But she had been a widow for some time, he could not remember how long, and had the pick of any room in the house. This wasn’t hers. It was piled with cardboard boxes.
He sat on one box with his glass, flipped the lid on another. Books. Lots of books. Gibbon’s Decline and Fall in several volumes. He flipped another. Books. Lots of books. The works of Dorothy L. Sayers in the wartime economy editions. Plain covers, paper light as tissue. He picked one up—The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club. His dad had bought him that when he was about thirteen. He’d sat up most of a long night to finish it. His dad had also bought him Gibbon’s Decline and Fall. He’d never finished that. He’d never met anyone who had. It just looked impressive on a bookshelf.
He opened the Sayers and read a page, then two, then three.
At page ten Venetia appeared in the doorway.
“Downstairs!”
“What?”
“Now! You’re ruining my entrance.”
He dashed past her, brushing through a cloud of scent, and ran to the foot of the staircase.
She stood at the top, just visible beyond the curve, and slinked into view.
He would not have missed this for the world. Her hair piled high on her head, her body sheathed in a scarlet dress that all but swept the floor. On the first half-landing she spun, and he could see that the dress, low-cut in the front, was even lower cut in the back.
She glided towards him, her motion invisible as a Russian folk dancer’s.
“You like?”
“Oh yes.”
“Been shopping.”
“And cleaning.”
“Not personally, you understand. I hired a team of ladies who do.”
“I might die happily in a cloud of Betterwear wax polish and Miss Dior.”
She laughed out loud.
Kissed him passionately.
As she drew back, blue eyes looking down at him, she said, “Y’know, Freddie, most men wouldn’t know Miss Dior from Mrs. Beeton.”
“Perhaps I am not most men.”
“Indeed, you’re not. Guard your thing of darkness well, Freddie.”
A fingernail stroked the tip of his nose.
“Now, let’s eat.”
§123
The long deal table looked freshly scrubbed. The iron range newly blackleaded. But Venetia was cooking on the gas stove.
“You should knock back the red stuff, Freddie. We’re having fish. Bouillabaisse. So we’ll be switching to white. A tangy Vermentino from Sardinia.”
“Well … I’ll bet you won’t find a recipe for bouillabaisse in Mrs. Beeton.”
“What? You think she was so narrowly English? Au contraire. She has a recipe, although she feels obliged to subtitle it ‘a kind of fish stew’ just in case her readers didn’t get it. And take it from me, it was very fashionable in the day. Thackeray even wrote a hymn to bouillabaisse. Not that I could quote you a word of it.”
“Thackeray? I thought you only read Shakespeare.”
“Well … I was underboasting, wasn’t I? He calls it a hotchpotch … a noble dish. There, I have quoted it.”
She took his glass to the sink and returned with King George and King Edward, freshly stripped of their paint dribbles.
“Take your pick. It’ll taste the same out of either.”
“Oh, I think I’ll stick with Edward and try not to think of the size of his belly.”
“A good choice. A noble choice.”
She poured white wine into each mug.
He sat quietly as she served “fish stew” on saffron rice.
Parsley, thyme, and hints of cayenne wafted upwards.
She sat as quiet as he. Her George V mug in her left hand.
She took her first sip.
He followed. Neither reaching for fork or spoon.
Then:
“It’ll keep,” she said. “Even better the day after.”
§124
Even in high heels she raced him to the top of the stairs. On the first landing he thought she’d dive into one room or another, but she carried on upwards, up the next flight and the one after that until they were under the eaves.
The door to what might once have been a tweeny’s bedroom stood open.
“You sleep up here?”
“I had to get away from Gerry’s snoring. And after that, I never wanted to move back down. It’s warm. It’s a room that wraps itself around you.”
There was just enough room to walk down one side of a full-sized double bed.
She turned. Arms outstretched in crucifix, her back to him.
“It’s just one button, Freddie.”
He flipped it loose without a fumble. She lowered her arms and the scarlet dress slid to the floor.
Naked but for her shoes.
She took him by the tie, slid the knot down his chest.
“C’mon copper, come an’ get me.”
§125
Afterwards, on the floor, wedged between the wall and the bed, she slept in the crook of his arm, her hair spread across his chest.
Then he realised she was awake again. Her left hand stroking his cock back to life.
And when it rose, she slipped into h
is lap and deftly took him inside.
Her lips at his ear.
“The game you and Guy played that night in Vienna?”
“How do you know about that?”
She rose up and slid down on him.
“If you want your secrets kept, never tell Sasha.”
Yes. He had told Sasha and even as he had done so knew it was a mistake.
“Let’s play it now.”
“Do you really think this is the right time?”
She rose up and slid down on him.
“Oh yes. Go on. Ask me. Remember, I know everything.”
The only words that could have made him go along with this.
“Go on.”
“Alright, number one?”
She rose up and slid down on him.
“Burgess.”
“Number two?”
“Maclean.”
She rose up and slid down on him.
“Number three.”
“Philby.”
She rose up and slid down on him.
“Number four.”
“Blunt.”
“Venetia … this really—”
She rose up and slid down on him.
Troy said nothing.
She rose up and slid down on him again.
“Go on! Five!”
“Five?”
“Your pal and mine, Charlie Leigh-Hunt.”
She rose up and slid down on him.
“Now ask me about six.”
“There was no six. Venetia, we never got to the sixth man.”
“But I know everything.”
“Fine. Number six?”
She rose up and slid down on him.
Her lips touched his left ear once more as she whispered:
“Bill Blaine.”
Troy slipped his hands under her arms and lifted her gently off. Her bottom slapped softly against his thighs.
“I told you,” she said simply.
“How? How do you know this?”
