by John Lawton
“Freddie? What’s my name?”
“What?”
“Just tell me.”
“Venetia Stainesborough.”
“No. That’s my title. My name is Venetia Frances Adelaide Parker-Blaine. Bill was Gerry’s little brother. It’s his book you were reading not half an hour ago.”
“Parker-Blaine?”
“Gerry never used his surname. Inherited the title aged three. He was always Lord Stainesborough or Gerry Stainesborough. Bill … Bill had a rough time at school, and after his first year at Cambridge dropped the Parker. He’d had quite enough of hyphens and silly nicknames.”
Troy heard, clear as a bell, a drunken Burgess replying to his last question in the Café Landtmann—”who was number six?”—and Burgess muttering, “Nosey Parker” as he fell into his lemon tart. He had assumed Burgess was telling him to mind his own business. He hadn’t heard the capital N. He’d no idea that Burgess had actually answered his question—until now. And he did not doubt that Venetia was telling him the truth. She knew everything.
“Nosey Parker?”
“Yep.”
“You’ve known all along?”
“Yes. I was Bill’s confidant. Everyone has to tell someone, and after Gerry died, I think I was the most important person in his life. He told me all about it—getting recruited at Cambridge, all about his handler … even the secrets he passed on. I knew and did not tell. Mea culpa. I chose a man over a country.
“I won’t be telling anyone else. All I have is a room full of Bill’s books. The ones you were sitting on. Arrived yesterday. Probate was granted a few days ago. I am next of kin, if not all kin. He left me about two thousand in cash, a flat near Marble Arch, and a zillion books. There are no diaries, no letters. I doubt he ever wrote anything down, so there’s nothing for anyone to find.”
“But you choose to tell me?”
“I think Bill owed you that. He nearly got you killed. What he told me was a secret we shared. Now you and I share it, and there it stays. I don’t have much patriotism in me, and nor do you, I think, but let’s not destroy Bill’s reputation. He’s dead and that’s an end of it.”
§126
He dressed and sparked the hob.
By the time Venetia appeared—not dressed, wrapped in a sheet—the bouillabaisse was hot enough to serve.
“Jolly good,” she said. “I’m famished.”
She reached for a spoon, flashed him a smile of irresistible warmth and beauty.
He resisted.
Faked a smile back across the table.
And they ate.
§127
When conscience makes cowards of us all, what does the thinking coward—the man previously untroubled by that hysterical and unreliable organ—do?
He runs away.
“No, I can’t make Friday. I have to be at Mimram. I haven’t been there since I got back from Vienna. There’s stuff piling up.”
“Stuff?”
“Family stuff. I’m the son and heir, after all. Rod got the title, I got the house.”
“Freddie, you wouldn’t be avoiding me, would you?”
“No,” he lied.
“I don’t expect flowers and chocolates, but it’s a pig of a man who doesn’t call a girl the morning after … and don’t you dare say ‘after what?’”
He hadn’t called her. She was right. He was being a pig, but telling him so would not stop him.
“I’ll be back Sunday evening,” he said.
“Back here? At Eaton Place?”
(Pause)
“Freddie?”
“Yes … at Eaton Place.”
There was nothing piling up at Mimram except dead leaves.
He was a pig.
He got there an hour before dusk.
The first thing he saw was a pig.
A large Gloucester Old Spot, playing football on the edge of the orchard. The Fat Man was booting an old, softly deflating casey. The pig was in goal.
“He’s a marvel. Look at him,” the Fat Man said. “Never lets one through. I tell yer, old cock, if Manchester City knew about Bertrand here, they’d dump that Bert Trautmann in the wink of a pig’s eye.”
Trautmann was the most famous goalkeeper in the country, a former Luftwaffe paratrooper, he had famously played on in the cup final a couple of years back despite suffering a broken neck. He was also the only goalkeeper Troy had ever heard of.
“Bertrand? I thought you named all your pigs after Churchills?”
“There’s only so many Randolphs and Winstons you can have at one time. And as I have both still up an’ gobblin’ the new boys will be named after philosophers. Next boar I get will be called Ludwig. Or maybe Aristotle.”
He kicked the ball wildly in the rough direction of the goal. The pig snouted it back with startling accuracy. The Fat Man let the ball bounce off his shins and said, “Wot brings you ‘ere, then?”
“I live here. Surely you haven’t forgotten?”
“Have you forgotten it’s yer bruv’s weekend to meet the voters?”
Troy had forgotten. Every second Saturday, except in August, Rod held constituency surgery in the village—excising social ills, prescribing political placebos.
“Oh fuck. I really wanted to be alone.”
“Righty-ho. We shall pack our piggy bags and leave you to it.”
“No. Not you. You stay. It’s just … Rod.”
“You in trouble, cock?”
“Yes, but not the sort you might be imagining. Right now the last thing I want is the company of my family’s self-appointed moral philosopher.”
“Then don’t tell ‘im. Whoever she is, don’t tell ‘im.”
The Fat Man could do that to Troy. Catch him off guard every time. He secretly prided himself on his silence, his contrived lacunae, his well-preserved privacy … and every so often the Fat Man made him feel utterly transparent. A man whose world seemed to revolve around pigs and vegetables and beer, who probably read a book by the light of a blue moon, could read Troy as though he were a novel. In this case, though the title was undoubtedly Venetia, he hoped the author was not Miss Heyer.
“I can’t tell you, so don’t ask.”
“Wasn’t going to. So there.”
§128
Troy heard Rod come in shortly after midnight and managed to avoid him at breakfast with a pretence of sleeping in. Pretence, as he had not slept a wink all night.
He breakfasted at ten. Peered through the French windows of his study, regretting that it was too late in the year to breakfast outside unless you liked porridge with added drizzle.
Rod would not be back till well after lunch, which he would take in the village pub with his party agent and some of the party faithful.
Troy reckoned he had five hours of uninterrupted thinking ahead of him. But only one thought to think.
“What have I done?”
He was, in summary, a married man seeking a divorce, co-habiting (at least he thought that was the neologism … his mother’s generation would have called it living in sin), and until two nights ago doing so faithfully—a palæogism if ever there was one, and not an adverb that had ever troubled him until now. Casual sex did not bother him because the adjective never occurred to him. Sex bothered him, per se, simply because it was sex, and he had from his first encounters with the opposite held that there was no such thing as “just sex.” Venetia was not “just sex.” She was an open invitation to fuck up every aspect of his life, every shred of stability he had achieved in the two and a bit years since Tosca had walked out on him, and now … now … mid-coitus … she had slid neatly, wetly, nipples dragging along his chest … from her erotic heaven into the mundanity of his work. It was bliss. It was a trap. She knew everything, she had said. How right she was.
On the north wall of the study was a seven-foot-tall armoire. Troy vividly remembered the day it had arrived in 1922 or 1923—hauled up from the station on the carrier’s cart by a gigantic Clydesdale, quite the largest living creature the boy Troy h
ad ever seen. Mostly it was still full of his father’s junk. Almost fifteen years after the old man’s death Troy had still not sorted through it. He had, in fact, added to it. A dozen or more shoe boxes, crammed with scraps of paper he had turned out of his London house and stored here. He’d even attempted method. Each box bore a year that might or might not accurately reflect the nature of its contents.
He took out 1940.
Postcards from his best friend, Charlie, serving in France with a guards regiment.
Eight-page letters in Russian from his father, all in the vein of Montaigne, instructing Troy—twenty-five years old, but still a boy to his father—in “how to live.”
And a creased pen-and-ink sketch, once screwed up and lobbed mercilessly into the wastepaper basket, only to be retrieved, smoothed out, and stored the following day.
An obscene cartoon of Troy and Venetia fucking by the statue of Eros at Piccadilly Circus, captioned “Morituri te salutant.”
At the bottom was the artist’s note and signature.
If I were you, I’d fuck Venetia Maye-Brown under floodlights in the middle of a hundred-bomber raid.
Yrs Ever,
Guy.
They hadn’t bothered with the floodlights, but in every other respect it seemed like a prophecy merely delayed in its fulfilment. Burgess, a man Troy thought of as distinctly lacking in self-knowledge, knew him better than he knew himself.
He retreated to the armchair by the fireplace.
“Mind if I join you?”
Troy looked over Rod’s head at the grandfather clock standing on the other side of the room, exactly where it had stood for the last forty-seven years. Six o’clock. He had worried away a day. Low autumn light draining into the crepuscular plug’ole and he’d not even noticed.
Rod did not wait for an answer. Plonked himself on the far end of the sofa—his thumb curled around the neck of a bottle of whisky, two glasses held precariously against it by one finger each of one huge hand, and a soda siphon in the other.
The words “not for me” formed on Troy’s lips without utterance. Rod would not take no for an answer—he never did—and the sheer bollock-numbing boredom of listening to Rod and “the day I’ve had” would be a welcome, inane distraction.
“It’s a bugger,” Rod said after his first gulp of Strathpiddle.
“Yep,” said Troy with no idea what Rod was talking about and no inclination to ask. Sooner or later Rod would tell him.
“It’s a good thing no one goes into politics for the glamour.”
Ah—it was going to be a familiar complaint. Rod whinge No. 12 sub-section B: “The Hon. Member feeling unappreciated.”
“I dunno,” Troy said. “You get to hobnob.”
“Lloyd George knew my father,” said Rod, lyrically.
“Father knew Lloyd George,” Troy replied—the only two lines in a Great War marching song, properly sung to the tune of “Onward Christian Soldiers.”
“And with what nobs do I get to hob? George Brown? Doesn’t have the same ring to it as Lloyd George, does it?”
“No, but you know Uncle Harold.”
Their nickname for the Prime Minister.
“Quite.”
(Pause)
“He had me round to Number 10 not that long ago.”
“On what matter?”
(Pause)
“You.”
Troy shifted from the laconic near-horizontal to a semblance of the vertical attentive.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Freddie, I haven’t seen hide nor hair of you since Vienna.”
“And?”
“And he was checking you out … sort of. No real suspicion. Just the usual Mac caution mixed with the usual Mac subtlety to create the usual Mac ambivalence. He didn’t want you adopting Burgess as a cause. One thing he wasn’t ambivalent about, however, was that he wasn’t sending anyone out to Vienna to accommodate Burgess. Told me he didn’t want him back at any price.”
Troy doubted Rod could know about Blaine. He might have heard a whisper, but all sides had tried to keep it under wraps.
“Rod, try to remember. What exactly did Macmillan say?”
“I’m not addled and I’m not yet pissed. I can remember quite clearly. His exact words were, ‘There’ll be no de-brief, no attempt to bring him in from the cold.’”
“When was this?”
“My first day back. You were still in Vienna with your strange friend. Obviously.”
“You’re sure?”
“Absolutely. Unforgettable. It was the same day my PPS, Iain, quit on me because he’d been nabbed with a guardsman in the park. Macmillan brought it up in the same conversation. Switched from asking me about you and Burgess to asking me about Iain. Coincidence? Non sequitur? Just one of those things.”
“Just one of those queer things?”
“If you like,” Rod said, much as Troy might have done himself.
“The queer thing you didn’t get at Oscar Wilde’s tomb?”
“The queer thing I still don’t get.”
And Troy pondered the queer thing and everything Rod had told him. Just one of those things? It did not seem like coincidence to him.
§129
They got through an evening meal and Sunday breakfast in a condition akin to armed neutrality—a buzz-phrase of the times—Troy suspicious of what Rod might not be telling him, and Rod just suspicious.
A neutral condition might have been more fun if Rod had had hobbies they could talk about. Troy thought he had none. His work was his life. Then Troy remembered stamp collecting. His brother’s Great Britain and Empire collection in its worn red album. Victoria penny reds, a lone, precious penny black, all the way to King George and Queen Mary, those exemplary middle-class monarchs. Then. He couldn’t remember the last time he saw him open it, and vivid images of his teenage brother sprang to mind, in a regular Rod activity—trying to pick a folded stamp hinge off the end of his tongue and cursing Man and God and Glue. The Fat Man joined them for lunch, well-armed with pig monologues. Troy watched Rod glaze over as Randolph anecdote followed Winston anecdote, all ending with “Ya gotta larf, ain’t ya,” even though no one did.
By five o’clock Troy was no nearer a conclusion than he had been on Friday.
He’d promised Onions.
He’d let this one go.
He couldn’t.
He’d promised Foxx nothing.
Let her go?
He couldn’t.
He’d promised Venetia nothing.
Let her go?
He couldn’t.
The phone rang. Saved by the bell.
He heard Rod yell, “I’ll get it. Probably for me.”
It wasn’t.
Rod was yelling, “Pick up the extension! It’s Jack.”
“Freddie. I think you should come back tonight if at all possible.”
“Murder?”
“Could be. Looks like an accident to me, but it could be.”
“If it’s that ambiguous, you handle it. I have other—”
“You’ll want to take this one yourself. It appears the deceased is an old friend of your family—Venetia Stainesborough.”
Troy said nothing.
“Freddie?”
Troy said nothing.
“Freddie?”
“You’re at Eaton Place?”
“Yes.”
“Get Kolankiewicz. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
He could not let her go.
It had occurred to him that she might let him go, but never in this way.
§130
A crash on the Great North Road cost Troy half an hour and more. By the time he reached Eaton Place it was past seven—a dark autumn evening, rain not falling but hanging in a slick miasma. One lone, bedraggled bobby on the door. The man straightened up and saluted as he saw Troy approach.
Troy did not return the salute.
“Mr. Wildeve’s inside, sir.”
He thrust the door open.
At the foot of the staircase a body … the body … her body … lay covered by a bedsheet.
Kolankiewicz sat on a hall chair by one of the ornamental half-moon tables—his vacuum flask out, sipping at black Russian tea.
Troy turned on the threshold.
“Go home to the wife and kids, Jim,” he said to the bobby. “I think we’ve all the coppers we need here.”
Kolankiewicz looked up, said nothing.
“Where’s Jack?” Troy asked.
“Kitchen. Waiting for you.”
Troy knelt and lifted a corner of the sheet.
She was as beautiful dead as she had been alive. She was wearing the same scarlet dress she had worn when last he had seen her. The one that had cascaded down her back like a waterfall. Expecting him. She had been expecting him. He must have held up the sheet far too long. He felt a hand take it from him. Heard a voice call his name.
“Freddie. Freddie. Let go now.”
He looked up.
Jack.
“Let’s all go back to the kitchen.”
Troy did not move.
“Freddie. Nothing more can happen. Leave her now.”
In the kitchen, Kolankiewicz handed him his plastic cup. Troy muttered thank you and tasted strong, sweet tea.
“Let’s all sit down, shall we?”
Jack sat on one side of the table, Troy and Kolankiewicz opposite him. He was being far too gentle. Troy could guess why.
“You’ve fingerprinted the house?”
“Yep.”
“Any prints besides hers or mine?”
“Three sets of prints from small hands, which I take to be the cleaning ladies. It was one of them found her. Let herself in just before five today. Said she’d forgotten her bag. Had enough sense to dial 999, but it soon evaporated. She was near-hysterical when I got here. I sent her home in a squad car. We’ll get prints and a statement in the morning. Otherwise the house is uncommonly spotless.”
“They scrubbed the place from top to bottom. Tuesday, I think. Possibly Wednesday.”
“And when were you last here?”
“Wednesday.”
“All night?”
“Yes. My prints will be in Venetia’s bedroom, the loo, possibly in here too.”
