Black Out (Frederick Troy 1)

by Lawton, John

  She paused, looked him up and down once more, fixing him where he stood, lamely silent with his hands in his pockets like a recalcitrant schoolboy.

  ‘You gonna take your coat off or what?’

  For reasons he refused even to guess at, simply unbuttoning his sodden black overcoat in front of her reminded Troy of undressing before his mother aged ten or eleven, past the stage where he needed her help or supervision but too young to convince her of his need for privacy. He pressed his palm against a large cast-iron radiator and draped the coat over its feeble heat to dry. When he turned she’d found the bourbon and was drowning two lots of icecubes in a generous four fingers of sour mash. She pushed a glass across the table to him. Without coat or shoes she seemed even smaller. Troy felt his slight five foot eight to be lumbering and ox-like. He picked up the glass of whiskey for the sake of something to do with his hands. She took a large gulp of whiskey and sighed with the pleasure of it – eyes and lips still smiling at him.

  ‘First of the day. Always the best.’

  For a minute or more they faced each other across the table. She seemed animated, even when stood stock-still and quiet. Troy felt grotesquely that he must be blushing or trembling. Only the width of the table separated them, but he felt it would take an earthquake, or – much more likely – a bomb, to move him. Only a single sixty-watt bulb lit the room, half-muted by its shade and several years of dust, yet Troy felt as though a searchlight had picked him out. Her gaze seemed warm, open, honest and searing. She belted back the rest of her drink and clunked the glass down. Troy sipped slowly at his. In a swift movement she peeled off her non-regulation blouse and it floated down on top of her battledress. Her bra was non-regulation black silk, and as her skirt pooled around her ankles Troy could see that the pants matched in an expensive, black-market, strictly non-issue set. Even the stockings were real not painted.

  ‘Wassamatterbaby? Cat gotcha tongue? Would you like me to put the light out? Is that it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes what?’

  ‘Yes I’d like you to put the light out.’

  In the darkness, groping towards the bed, he heard the sudden swish as she tore back the covers.

  ‘There’s just one thing – what’s your name?’

  ‘Troy.’

  ‘I know that, dummy – what’s your Christian name?’

  ‘Frederick.’

  ‘OK. So I’ll call you Troy. You can call me Lara.’

  Troy heard the rapid double snap of elastic and the springs creaked as she lay back on the bed.

  ‘Lara?’ he said.

  ‘Yeah. Like short for Larissa.’

  ‘Sounds Russian.’

  ‘Yeah. But only on my mother’s side.’

  He pulled off a shoe. He was wet to the skin. Suddenly, freed from her gaze, buried in his elemental darkness, it seemed a relief to be getting out of his clothes.

  33

  Nearer the dawn a bomb moved Troy. A dull repeated whumpf somewhere off to the south woke him and drew him to the window. He groped for his shirt at the foot of the bed, slipped it on and peeled back a corner of one of the blackouts – he could see part of Nelson’s column and the square as it swept over towards Charing Cross. Somewhere beyond Lambeth an orange-red glow flickered on the skyline.

  ‘Hey. You OK?’

  Her voice startled him.

  ‘Yes, I’m fine. There’s a raid on. I was just looking.’

  ‘Is it close?’

  ‘No. New Cross or Lewisham, I should think. Somewhere out that way.’

  ‘Thank God for that. I hate going down the subway in the middle of the night. It stinks. You know that? It really stinks.’

  ‘Half of London sleeps down there permanently.’

  The dull whumpf again – then the burst of flame from the same direction. A single heavy blockbuster followed by smaller incendiaries. He turned back to look at her. The light from the open blind cut a cheese wedge into the room. She was looking at him, again.

  ‘Why d’you put your shirt on?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he lied.

  ‘Come over here.’

  Troy moved slowly towards her, stepping into the point of the wedge of light.

  ‘Take it off. No buts. Take it off!’

  He sat on the bed and tossed the shirt behind him.

  ‘Ain’t gonna bite. Least nowhere I haven’t already.’

  She traced his ribcage on the left side, bringing her fingers up to the shoulder and down his left arm.

  ‘Baby – you’re a mess of scars.’

  ‘Occupational hazard,’ he said simply.

  ‘What are you? A flyer? Soldier?’

  ‘I don’t follow . . . ’

  ‘Sergeant you said. Sergeant of what?’

  ‘I’m a police officer.’

  ‘Whaaaat?’ She sat bolt upright, almost screaming.

  ‘I showed you my card.’

  ‘So? Ace of Clubs. Jack of Diamonds – I didn’t look.’

  She flopped back on to the pillows, her fists pounding her temples in a mockery of amazement.

  ‘My God. My God. I screwed a cop.’

  ‘There’s a first time for everything,’ said Troy.

  ‘So there is.’

  She sat upright and kissed him on the lips. ‘OK. So now tell me about the scars.’ Her fingers stroked a weal on his ribs, an inch or two below the nipple.

  ‘That’s a knife wound.’

  ‘Flick knife?’

  ‘No . . . actually it was a potato peeler.’

  He could see her grinning.

  ‘I got between a wife-beating drunken Irishman and his beaten drunken wife. She stabbed me with a potato peeler.’

  She bit her lower lip, restraining the laugh and silently moved her fingers over to his arm.

  ‘Bullet from a Webley point thirty-eight. I went to arrest a member of Her Majesty’s Household Cavalry, who tried to deter me with his service revolver.’

  ‘But you got him?’

  ‘I got him.’

  ‘You’re not such a chickenshit after all.’

  ‘Whatever made you think I was?’

  ‘Oh – you should have seen yourself a couple of hours ago!’

  ‘Point taken.’

  Her hand slid across his left thigh to the knee. ‘And this little piggy?’

  ‘Nothing to do with the job. My brother pushed me off a bicycle when I was eleven.’

  ‘What’s all the new stuff?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘All these scabby little nicks on your hands.’

  Troy held his hands, backs up, in front of him. He could see nothing. Rubbing one with the other he could feel the cuts and weals the blast of brick and concrete had left there. He remembered how he got them – it brought him back to his subject, slightly amazed that for an hour or two at least he had allowed it to slip from his mind.

  ‘That was a bomb blast on the Underground. Actually, I was following a friend of yours when it happened.’

  ‘A friend of mine?’

  ‘The Major. The one who sat on your desk. You lit his cigarette for him.’

  Troy felt her squirm deep into the bed, avoiding his words, pulling the blankets higher.

  ‘So . . . you’re not off duty. Tell me, do you always fuck on the company time?’

  ‘I just thought you might know who he was.’

  ‘Sure I know him. But you gotta wait till morning. I tell you now, you might arrest me before I get my beauty sleep.’

  Troy walked around the foot of the bed and slipped in the other side. For a minute or two they lay like spoons in a cutlery drawer, then she wriggled and jammed her backside up against him, and with a half-audible mutter of ‘lousy copper’ she sighed her way into sleep. Before he too dropped off Troy felt almost certain she was faintly snoring.

  34

  The whistle of a full kettle rattling on the iron hob woke Troy with a wrench. He looked down the room. Tosca sat on a stool in front of the ironing board,
reading a battered copy of Huckleberry Finn. She was dressed even to the tie, but for the skirt that lay draped across the board awaiting the long rev-up of a primitive electric iron.

  ‘Welcome to the world, sunbeam,’ said Tosca.

  She splashed a pint of water into the coffee-pot. ‘Today we have real coffee.’

  ‘Good Lord.’

  ‘From the PX like everything else. Stick with me kid an’ I could show you a good time.’

  ‘Overpaid, oversexed and over here,’ said Troy.

  ‘Come again?’

  ‘Gives new lie to an old cliché,’ he muttered.

  ‘Oversexed, eh?’

  She picked up her book and looked at him over the top, a caricature of the seductive secretary – Katharine Hepburn or Barbara Stanwyck.

  ‘I always read ten pages of Huck. Every day. Kinda like my Bible. Reminds me of home.’

  ‘You’re from Missouri?’

  ‘Don’t be stupid, I’m from New York.’

  She slapped the book down and brought two cups and the coffee-pot to the bedside. Curiously elegant in olive green and high heels. Curiously naked without her skirt.

  ‘I’m from Manhattan. Or did you think I talked like this for the fun of it?’

  Troy eased himself up in the bed, once more ludicrously conscious of his nakedness; the whiteness of his skin in the morning light.

  ‘I seen men’s nipples before, you know.’

  He let go of the sheet and made an effort to be less shy.

  ‘Now – about Jimmy.’

  ‘Who? Aagh!’ The coffee cup burnt his fingers and he thrust it quickly back at the table.

  ‘Jimmy. Jimmy Wayne. The guy you were so indelicate as to grill me about at an intimate moment.’

  ‘The Major. Yes. Tell me. What’s his regiment . . . I mean unit?’

  ‘OSS.’

  Troy stared, not understanding.

  ‘Office of Strategic Services. Dirty tricks. Nasty things overseas. You know. That sort of thing.’

  ‘And here?’

  ‘Here nothing. They’re just based here.’

  ‘Does he work for Zelig?’

  ‘Sort of. But sort of not. Like they’re . . . equals.’

  ‘And who does Zelig work for?’

  ‘Directly? For David Bruce, the OSS station head here, and before you ask the whole shebang is run by Donovan. Known as Wild Bill. Don’t ask me why.’

  ‘And he works for . . . ?’

  ‘For Ike, of course. Dammit we all work for Ike one way or another. Why, what’s Jimmy done?’

  She swilled back coffee so hot Troy still found it scalding and returned to her skirt. Three or four deft strokes of the iron and she had the pleats in line and was stepping into the skirt before Troy had worked out what to tell her. She turned her back to him and pointed.

  ‘There’s a hook and eye thing at the back I never can reach . . . can you . . . ?’

  Troy leaned towards her, fingers fumbling.

  ‘I think it’s all that makes a girl marry. Just to have someone around to do up the fasteners at the back. Still not gonna answer me, eh? Boy you expect a lot.’

  Tosca slipped on her battledress, peered into the wardrobe mirror, running a slither of bright red lipstick across her pout. She blew him a kiss and headed for the door.

  ‘Let yourself out, copper. Slam it good and hard. And when you finally decide to tell me Jimmy’s been monkeying with food coupons, let me know. Maybe I could help. Same time tonight?’

  Before he could answer she was gone. Troy heard her feet dance down the stairs, and felt the house shake as she banged the street door. He reached for the coffee, sipping cautiously at it, wondering what he was going to tell her and why Huck Finn should remind anyone of New York and feeling that familiar, troubling mixture of guilt and happiness wrap itself upon him.

  35

  As a child Troy was much troubled by his sisters. He had no way of grasping the twists, the utter volte-faces of character that could inflict such vicissitudes upon him and upon the family as a whole. Only when his brother gave him an edition of Saki for his thirteenth birthday did he realise that Sasha and Masha were each both Aunt and Clovis within a single, shared character. They could be, beyond all prediction, first authoritarian, displaying a governessy lack of humour, and then mischievous, undermining all they might stand for as Aunt with a Clovis-like taste for trouble and an acid wit.

  Now they turned up on his doorstep in the first calm of early evening. Solicitous of his welfare. They’d called the Yard only to be told he was off sick. Now Masha fussed about his kitchen, opened the doors of all the cupboards and made herself insufferable. Sasha tidied his bedroom, picking his clothes off the floor and lingering nosily over his shirt, clucking sternly over the lipstick on the collar, and warning him off women who wore cheap perfume. Then the twist – just what he was not expecting.

  ‘We’re going out.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Out, my boy. Out, out, out! There’s a new concert on at the Adelphi. The new work from this Tippett chap and you shall accompany us.’

  The ‘shall’ was a defining archaism. It allowed of no possible disagreement. Every so often the social bug seized one sister or the other out in Hertfordshire where they had lived in self-imposed exile with Troy’s mother since their husbands volunteered – Hugh for the navy, where he now captained a minesweeper, and Lawrence for the army, for whom he did some mysterious staff job at the War Office – and they would breeze manless into London feeling deprived and out of it, insistent on knowing what was what, and where anyone who was anyone was to be found. Not that Troy knew, so they would whisk him off to one of their traditional haunts, to the Four Hundred in Piccadilly, the Millroy in Berkeley Square or the Bon Viveur in Shepherd Market, to wave at minor royalty and to be hugged and smothered by the expansive bodies and personalities of European exiles. Troy hated every minute of it. Became easily bored with the Count of this or Prince that. Hated any restaurant or club they chose, almost on principle, and found nothing cheering in the latest craze to hit the sisters -contemporary music. He would often take calls at the Yard from them in the Wigmore Hall or the National Gallery, for which they expected him to drop everything, murder included, for the pleasure of lunchtime with Myra Hess. He usually declined and knew he could risk their displeasure by hanging up, as they had the combined memory span of the average dog. He had never heard of a composer called Tippett but he knew it meant a tuneless evening of scraping catgut.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ve something else on.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Sasha. ‘Miss Lipstick I presume?’

  He had silently promised to see Tosca at nine. He realised this only as he tried to think of a lie to tell them. He had recalled only his silence not the assent which it had become for him. He had no idea what Tosca expected, but knew now that left to his own devices he would turn up at Orange Street at nine. He could not use the truth, however fresh from the mould of thought, as an excuse. The last thing he wanted was his sisters’ involvement in any further aspect of his life.

  They arrived at the Adelphi with ten minutes to spare, and he found they had taken a box from which to see and be seen by all their friends. He hated their eccentricity, for much the same reasons he relished Nikolai’s and even Kolankiewicz’s. It was so very unEnglish. They swung their moods with a Russian whimsicality, overbearing or overfriendly, and dressed in a manner that was a joke. They looked like little Anna Kareninas, identical to a T in their blacks and velvets, in their high-laced boots and their winter muffs. He would not play piggy in the middle and sat on Masha’s left.

  In the little time they had left she endeavoured to explain to him what the music was about.

  ‘A Child of Our Time is about this Polish-Jewish refugee fleeing the Nazis.’

  The notion that music was or could be ‘about’ something was not an idea Troy readily accepted, but he listened patiently to the music and much to his surprise he found he rather liked it. Then the c
hoir came in with a chorus of Negro spiritual – singing ‘Steal away’.

  He leaned close to Masha. ‘I thought it was about the Jews,’ he said.

  ‘It is. This is sort of about slavery and freedom. The Negroes sort of stand for the Jews in this bit.’

  ‘Stand for?’

  ‘They are the Jews, then. The composer sees them as symbolic of one race enslaving another. Taking away their status as human beings.’

  ‘That’s what I call a strained analogy,’ said Troy.

  He looked around from the near-global vantage point they had given him by taking a centre box in the dress circle.

  Across to the extreme right a woman had leaned forward resting her hands on the balcony rail and her chin on her hands. Troy leaned across his sisters and took Sasha’s opera glasses from her lap. He focused on the woman across the pit. Her eyes were closed, she was smiling serenely as though enraptured by the power of the music, the undeniably dramatic swell of voices – ‘Steal away, now, Steal away’ – and it was Diana Brack. And just behind her was a man, smoking a cigarette, halfway into the shadow of the box.

  The house lights rose with the applause at the end of Tippett’s piece. Troy picked up the opera glasses again. Brack sat back and the lights revealed the face of Major Wayne, chatting to her and doing up the buttons on his mackintosh. Troy dropped the glasses and ran. He estimated three doors from the end of the row to correspond to the box they sat in, and as he rounded the curve in the corridor he could see that the door was open. He took the steps three at a time and reached the ground floor just as the stalls released a flood of people into the foyer. He elbowed his way through the crowd and rushed out into the unlit street. He looked up the Strand and down it. He could see no sign of the American. A needle in a haystack would be understatement. He stood on the steps, reluctant to give up the pursuit as a bad job. The audience flowed out to either side of him, swamping the street in the sound of chatter. A hand pinched at his upper arm, Masha tugged him gently in the direction of the foyer,