A Little White Death

by John Lawton

  Troy and Anna swapped guns like jugglers trading Indian clubs in mid-air, but the third clay had flown wild and low. By the time Troy had it in his sights it was below the treetops and the barrel of his shotgun was nearing the horizontal. He took his finger from the trigger and lowered the gun, heard the distant crack as the clay hit the trees.

  Woodbridge was behind him, standing where he could follow the clay from Troy’s point of view.

  ‘You know,’ he said, and Troy turned to him, ‘you could’ve hit that.’

  ‘It was too low,’ said Troy.

  ‘No, honestly you could have hit it. You’re really very good.’

  ‘Too low,’ said Troy. ‘Well into the woods. Could be people there for all we know. Aim too low and you never know who you might hit.’

  He put a hand to his eyes, stared off into the woods for a moment. Nothing moved.

  ‘I owe you a hundred.’

  ‘Cheque’ll do,’ Woodbridge said in a ‘don’t mention it old chap’ tone of voice and before Troy could say anything Tommy Athelnay chipped in with, ‘I don’t know about you lot, but I’m starving. Why don’t we all toddle off and see what Fitz has rustled up?’

  Woodbridge broke his Purdey, stuck it in the crook of one arm and held out the other to Anna.

  ‘Mrs Pakenham?’ he said, investing two words with several buckets of practised charm, and she took his arm and they strolled off towards the south lodge. After a dozen paces she turned to stick her tongue out at Troy.

  ‘You know,’ Tommy said, as he and Troy pulled the covers across the traps, ‘he’s not at all bad when you get to know him.’

  ‘When,’ said Troy emphasising his disbelief with an inflection lost on Tommy.

  ‘Terribly sad man. Terribly sad. Never got over his wife’s death.’

  This was common knowledge. Sarah Woodbridge had died in a car crash along with their six-year-old daughter four years before. Woodbridge had been driving – the family’s annual holiday in Italy. A twisting road south of Naples, a reckless lorry driver and the car had plunged off the road and down the hillside. Somehow Woodbridge had walked away from it. Much of the time it seemed as though he wished he hadn’t. His grief had been public. The heart of the nation – an organ in which Troy found it hard to believe – had gone out to him. He had been the rising star of the Conservative Party, a man with, as the curriculum vitae demanded, a ‘good war’ behind him – he had roared across Europe to Lüneberg Heath in command of a tank battalion and picked up more medals, even, than Rod Troy – a safe Commons seat since the election of 1950; a wife heralded as an asset, the brightest, prettiest young wife of the man-in-the-making. Woodbridge was a future prime minister many said, certainly a future foreign secretary. He had been number two at the Foreign Office. But he had resigned at once. And no blandishments of Macmillan would make him reconsider. Last summer Macmillan had sacked half his cabinet in an effort to revive the standing of a flagging government and, if rumour were to be believed, had offered Woodbridge the post of Foreign Secretary. Woodbridge had declined, and at this juncture it might have seemed that it was all over for him – one can be a rising star for only so long before there comes a point at which one has either risen or one has not. And the role of bright young thing is best played by the young and, if at all possible in politics, the bright. It was all but impossible nearing fifty – and Woodbridge, Troy knew, was much the same age he was himself.

  Then at Christmas he had suddenly relented. He had taken his old job back, Minister of State at the Foreign Office, number two to Lord Home – a man Troy thought not long for this politic world once Mac had sharpened his next case of knives – and since Alec Home sat in the Lords, Woodbridge was to all intents and purposes the Foreign Secretary for the Commons. It was a shrewd move. It gained him all the press attention, all the House attention he needed to renew his chances, but kept him out of the firing line. Anyone calling for heads to roll was unlikely to name him as the man who must go. The safe job was ‘Number Two’ – and it was in this capacity that he had turned up on Charlie in Beirut. Troy wondered in what capacity had he turned up on Tommy Athelnay and Paddy Fitz?

  Right now this ‘terribly sad man’ was reducing Anna to hysterics. Troy and Tommy Athelnay walked to the lodge some thirty yards behind Woodbrige and Anna. Troy could not hear a word of what he was saying to her, all he could hear were her giggles. And then the gesture. The affectionate arm slipped from his to wrap itself around his waist, as his came around her shoulder. Last night Troy had humped her sore and not seen such affection from her. Only the rawness of her own need.

  § 26

  He could not deny that Woodbridge was a charmer. He and Charlie were two of a kind – were it not for Charlie’s decline into booze they’d even look alike – but by the end of the evening Troy had concluded that Woodbridge and Charlie deserved each other. Even a good-natured rogue could be a little wearing. He was glad when Woodbridge slipped an arm around the helplessly squiffy Tommy and ushered him home in an ostentatious chorus of ‘goodnight ladies’. Glad to be able to call an end to the round of bonhomie and fall into bed. Preferably alone. There had been tense moments, moments when he could have sworn Woodbridge bit his tongue and did not say what he had it in mind to say – perhaps even moments when he might have unsaid what he had said. No matter, not a single one of the man’s asinine sentences had stuck in Troy’s memory. All in all, he concluded, it must have put a bit of a damper on the evening to find himself at Fitz’s table with someone quite so closely associated with the Opposition as Troy. He watched the waving torch as the two of them picked their way across Uphill Park at midnight, and said goodnight to whoever remained. There was no sign of the women – Anna had gone up an hour before and he’d no idea what had become of the others. There was only Fitz, still at the dining table, a little the worse for drink, humming softly to himself. Troy left him to it.

  He had drunk too much. A scraping dryness at the back of his throat kept him awake an hour or more. He slipped on his shirt and trousers – to bump into Anna in his dressing-gown seemed too much the invitation – and set off for the kitchen. Again he passed the Ffitch girls’ bedroom door in the west wing. It was closed. But the same sighs and whispers of sexual intercourse crept through every crack in the panelling. It froze him mid-stride, foot hardly daring to press down upon a potentially groaning floorboard. He hesitated too long. The door opened, he had the merest glimpse of a man’s plunging buttocks and the uplifted legs of a woman, her ankles crossed behind his back, and Caro Ffitch emerged, bare-arsed, a sheet clutched to her front, and dashed across the landing to the bathroom. She put a finger to her lips – a silent hush – but Troy wasn’t saying anything. Was she hushing his thoughts?

  Then she whispered, ‘Can’t watch tonight. Tim thinks that’s a bit too kinky,’ pecked him on the cheek and vanished into the loo.

  It embarrassed him to think that she thought he was queuing at her bedroom door. Embarrassed him to think that she’d noticed him the night before. He’d rather hoped she hadn’t. He should never have stood so much as a split second with Paddy Fitz watching their antics. It was too kinky for him too.

  He found Fitz where he had left him, in the dining room, centre-table amid the debris, the thin man’s Henry VIII , finishing the last of the wine – two and seven-eighths sheets to the wind.

  ‘Going to get pissed. Care to join me?’

  Wrong tense, Fitz.

  He wandered the length of the table and gathered the bottles in a half-moon around him, sampling and mixing almost regardless of grape or vintage. It seemed to Troy that it was a sorry drunkenness he was aiming at – a sorry-for-himself piss-up.

  ‘Woodbridge isn’t playing the game,’ he said miserably, seemingly à propos of nothing, as though he and Troy were picking up the threads of a ragged conversation.

  ‘What’, said Troy seizing the moment, ‘is the game?’

  ‘Peekaboo.’

  ‘Peekaboo?’

  ‘I peek and
nobody says boo. Tell me, Freddie, are you familiar with the work of the Victorian pornographer known to posterity as “Walter”?’

  Troy doubted he was familiar with the work of any pornographer. Was D. H. Lawrence a pornographer? Was Henry Miller?

  ‘No.’

  ‘Among other things – well to be honest among many things, the man wrote at inordinate length – he once asked of his readers, “Who among you, offered the chance to watch two people fuck, would not look?” The answer, as I’m sure you grasped, was implicit in the question. Who indeed would not look at a fucking couple given half a chance?’

  Troy said nothing.

  ‘It is . . . my pleasure, my pleasure above all others to watch people fuck. Twos or threes. I have no puritan principle about the sanctity of the couple. I have other pleasures, of course. Booze, my garden, music, booze and more booze. On occasion I too will fuck . . . but to watch . . . to watch is my particular delight.’

  Fitz lingered over the ‘ck’ of fuck, the ‘ic’ of particular and slurred down to silence at the end of his sentence. Troy thought he might have ground to a drunken halt. Wistfully lost in contemplation of his perversion.

  ‘And?’ he prompted.

  ‘Perfectly simple. House rules. We all watch. If we want to.’

  Troy began to realise he’d had a lucky escape. Thank God Anna had begun by asking for separate rooms. Thank God for her indecision, her lack of foresight, her impulsive actions. If Fitz had thought they had . . . God knows?

  ‘But . . . Woodbridge isn’t playing the game. Bastard.’

  ‘Has he ever?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  Troy trod carefully through the next sentence.

  ‘Perhaps . . . perhaps it’s me?’

  ‘Oh good Lord. Are we back to you being a copper already?’

  ‘Looks like it. Look at it his way. Would you want the brother of an Opposition MP hanging about? Would you want a Scotland Yard detective watching you fuck? Would you want him knowing you fucked women half your age – and in pairs?’

  This scarcely required thought, yet Fitz seemed to think about it.

  ‘It’s not illegal, is it?’

  Good God, was the man really so naive?

  ‘I mean . . . as you say . . . looking at it from his point of view . . . I think I’d be more bothered by a reporter than a copper.’

  ‘If I were Woodbridge, I’d be bit more careful. If I were you, I’d be a bit more careful.’

  Suddenly Fitz managed if not a sober moment – that was impossible – then a clear one. He leant in and spoke sharply to Troy.

  ‘Am I to take this as a warning, Commander?’

  ‘I wouldn’t put it that way.’

  ‘Am I to take it that your interest is professional?’

  ‘Knock it off, Fitz. You know damn well what I meant.’

  Yet, clearly, the man didn’t.

  ‘It’s not illegal,’ he said again. ‘I’m doing nothin’ illegal.’

  ‘In your house, under your roof, as your guests, one of Her Majesty’s foreign ministers shares mistresses with Khrushchev’s embassy representative. A KGB colonel for crying out loud! Can you imagine how that would look?’

  A dreadful question formed itself in Troy’s mind.

  ‘They do know about each other? Don’t they?’

  ‘Of course. They’ve been here together half a dozen times. Never in the same bed, but then they’re both conservatives – if you see what I mean.’

  ‘Did they know I’d be here?’

  ‘Mmm . . . Tony did. Seemed quite pleased at the prospect of seeing you again. Tim didn’t, but that’s his fault. Never tells anyone when he’s coming. Sort of turns upon Tommy – and he is, after all, Tommy’s guest not mine – at the last minute. He must take us as he finds us. I rather think he thinks you think he went home when old Tommy did. But then, a good pussy always gets the better part of his discretion. A touch or a taste and the man’s senses all but desert him. He’ll probably slope off before dawn and assume you never knew. Silly sod.’

  Fitz picked up three or four wine bottles and plonked them down like a studious chess player until he found one half empty – or, as he most certainly saw it, half full. A plain white label reading, ‘Le Chambertin 1952’. He paused to drink more and when he had drunk returned to the ragged ends of conversation and picked up a different thread.

  ‘You know, what you said about being bothered by reporters—’

  ‘I didn’t say that. You did.’

  ‘Did I? Anyway, there has been one.’

  ‘One what?’

  ‘Reporter.’

  ‘From which paper?’

  ‘Post.’

  ‘Did you get me here to tell me that?’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘Do you know his name?’

  It seemed as though Fitz might never speak. He downed another glass and sat staring at the empty vessel in his hand.

  At last he said, no more than a surly, self-pitying mutter, the single word ‘Troy’.

  And Troy was quietly furious with him.

  ‘So I’m not here because I’m a copper?’

  ‘Whoever said you were?’

  ‘I’m here because I’m a Troy.’

  ‘Right now, o’ man, I find myself wondering why we’re either of us here. But as I recall Anna wanted your company and I’m rather partial to your way with the piano.’

  He swayed drunkenly and braced himself, elbows on the table.

  ‘Alex. Alex Troy. Cousin perhaps?’

  It crossed Troy’s mind not to answer and let him stew.

  ‘Nephew. My brother Rod’s son.’

  ‘Whatever . . .’ Fitz’s arm swept the table dismissively and sent two wine bottles spinning to the floor, ‘. . . whatever . . . he’s been . . . sniffing. Asking questions in London . . . and in the village. Y’see, Woodbridge’s constitunency – ye gods, that’s a stinker to pronounce when you’re pissed – anyway the damn thing is in the next county, in Kent, less than twenty miles away. It would have been no problem for this nephew of yours to have followed him here. Common knowledge he’s a friend of Tommy’s, and he’s a patient of Anna’s, which ain’t common knowledge, but I suppose he has to work a few things out for himself.’

  ‘And he knows about Woodbridge and the Ffitch girls?’

  ‘Dunno.’

  ‘Does he know about Tereshkov?’

  Fitz seemed suddenly reluctant to part with the information.

  ‘Does he?’

  Still Fitz said nothing.

  ‘And I suppose you’d like me to have a bit of a chat with Alex? Convince him we’re all chaps in a chaps’ world and that some things might be better left unsaid – or, should I say, unwritten?’

  Fitz got to his feet, the pathetic beginnings of a drunken rage visible in his reddening cheeks, but he’d drunk too much to pull it off. Where there should have been temper there was only tantrum, where he should have roared he could only squeak.

  ‘Look, Troy. I don’t need your help. I don’t need your protection. I did not get you here on false pretences. Any friend of Anna . . . oh bugger . . . oh bugger . . . got to piss—’

  He staggered off in the wrong direction, to the door of the sitting room.

  ‘Don’t need your protection. Ace in the fucking hole. D’ye hear me? Ace in the fffff . . . fffff . . . fffff . . .’

  Troy followed and watched Fitz get as far as the large Knole sofa and pass out. He nudged him and called his name, but the man was already snoring. He went back through the dining room to the kitchen, in search of the cold drink that had got him up in the first place.

  Clover Browne stood in the open fridge door, swigging from a coke bottle.

  ‘Help yourself,’ she said and handed him the bottle.

  She was bizarrely dressed for two in the morning – fur coat and wellington boots. Either she had not bothered to take off her make-up for the night or she’d just put it back on.

  ‘Love the dressing-gown,
’ said Troy.

  ‘It’s not a dressing-gown. I’m off out.’

  ‘Out?’

  ‘Just a walk over the park. Wanna come?’

  Troy looked through the open doorway, past the table, into the sitting room. All he could see were Fitz’s feet sticking out.

  ‘I wouldn’t worry about Fitz if I were you. Worst that’ll happen is he’ll wet ’imself. You gonna come or what?’

  ‘Why not?’ said Troy, and the part of his mind that thought came up with a dozen reasons why not, and the part of his mind that worked his legs and his groin did not hear them.

  Crossing the open space of the croquet lawn a bird shrieked. Clover grabbed his arm with both hands.

  ‘Wossat?’ she said.

  ‘A little owl,’ said Troy. ‘Several little owls in fact. They’ll be out hunting this time of night.’

  ‘How little’s little? Like a sparrer?’

  ‘No. More like a pigeon. A fat pigeon.’

  ‘That’s what I hate about the bleedin’ countryside. All those things in the night that you can never see, and all those creepy crawlies that you can. I been comin’ ’ere since last summer and I still can’t get used to it.’

  ‘City girl are you?’

  ‘Leave it out,’ she said.

  They entered the ruins of Uphill House. Inigo Jones favoured high ceilings at the best of times, and with most of the upper floors missing, the view up two floors to the sky was like stepping into a cathedral. The chimney stacks towered over them – stars motionless in heaven, a cloudless, clear night sky.

  She led Troy to the far side of the ruin, treading across the broken shards of what Troy was sure had once been Jones’s highpitched roof. They came within sight of the north lodge. Lights glowed upstairs and down. Someone on the first floor facing was fond of fresh air and had left a window wide open to the night.

  Clover whipped off her coat. She was naked but for knickers.

  ‘Hang that up for me.’

  A large rusty nail protruded from the wall. He looped the coat over it and turned back to her. She braced herself with one hand on his shoulder and kicked off her wellies. The knickers followed. A thumb in the elastic to ease them off her hips, then she stepped neatly out of them.