A Little White Death

by John Lawton

  ‘Behave yourself. Do what yer Uncle Freddie says. D’ye hear me?’

  On the doorstep, with the door half closed, barely masking their conversation, Onions said, ‘I’m sorry, Freddie. She’ll be better with you, really she will. It’s her mother, and it’s me – we seem to provoke her. You won’t, I know that. But if you catch her with this filth again, then as far as I’m concerned you can charge her. I’m sorry, really I am. I’ll phone every day. I will.’

  And with that he was gone.

  The door swung creakily on its hinge and Troy stood in the open doorway, half in, half out. Listening to Stan’s boots resounding down the courtyard, looking at Jackie.

  ‘He can’t make me cry,’ she said. ‘I won’t. I won’t. I don’t care what he does, I won’t cry.’

  Troy believed her. This woman-child was carved in granite.

  He resorted to the English truce – a nice cup of tea. There was, as the English told him far too often, nothing like a nice cup of tea.

  Jackie Clover kicked off the sensible shoes, took the band from her hair and shook it back to the peekaboo look he had first seen at Uphill. When Troy sat down by the fireplace, she took the hint and sat opposite him, legs dangling over the edge of the chair.

  ‘Wossis? Time for a bit of a chat, Uncle Freddie?’

  ‘Yes. House rules. We’d better have them clear from the start, Jackie.’

  ‘The name’s Clover!’

  ‘And my name’s not Uncle.’

  ‘What do I call you?’

  ‘Troy.’

  She smiled. ‘Fair enough.’

  ‘Now – you don’t really want to be here.’

  ‘Too right.’

  ‘And I don’t want you here.’

  ‘Shall I go now?’

  ‘Hear me out. For Christ’s sake, hear me out.’

  ‘OK. Shall I be mother?’

  She picked up the teapot and began to pour. If the worst she had to offer was to take the piss at every turn, then it might not be so bad after all.

  ‘We’re stuck with each other, Clover.’

  ‘Are we?’

  ‘You know that as well as I. You know the mess we’re in. Or else you’d have ratted on me to your grandfather.’

  ‘Couldn’t see the point. He thinks Uphill was some sort of brothel. No point in telling him it wasn’t. No point in telling him you were there too. Only make things worse for both of us. Like you said, we’re in it together.’

  Troy did not care for her sense of conspiracy, but she was right.

  ‘Quite. He’s not alone in that view. Most of the nation thinks it was a brothel.’

  ‘Not true, though. Is it?’

  ‘No, it’s not. But it’s because the nation, or to be precise, our much respected free press, thinks it was, that you’re here. I’ve no intention of acting as your jailer. You can come and go as you please. But take my advice. The press do not know who you are. They’re looking for you. They’d love to put a name to you, but they don’t know. And you should keep your head down until the trial’s over and the dust has settled. A few days indoors won’t kill you. There’s a gramophone—’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Record player to you. And there are plenty of books. Just lie low. You might even like it.’

  ‘Why? There’s a bob or two to be made. Caro and Tara have been offered hundreds to write their stories for the Sunday papers.’

  ‘And they’ve neither of them taken it. If they had we’d have seen something of what they had to say by now. Neither of the girls want to see him stitched up. If the press find you, you’ll make a few hundred, but they’ll use you to beat down Fitz and so will the prosecution. Clover, I’ve been to Fitz’s trial. Do Fitz a favour, do yourself a favour, stay in until it’s all over. What did Fitz ever do to you?’

  ‘Fitz,’ she said, rolling his name around. ‘Fitz? He rescued me from miserable bloody Acton, miserable drunken Mum. Took me to the clubs with ’im, taught me ’ow to cook, ’ow to mix ’im a Martini, ’ow to drive, ’ow to play bleedin’ croquet. Fitz? He taught me ’ow to have fun after ten dreary years at Tablecloth Terrace watchin’ me mealtime manners with an old man who ’asn’t noticed the ark ’as landed yet and a sozzled baggage who thinks the world ended some time in the 1950s when she last got laid. I was just a kid when we met. What did Fitz do to me? He taught me ’ow to grow up. That’s what he did to me.’

  It was an impressive little speech. He was not sure he entirely believed her, but it leavened her ostensible selfishness. Though he questioned silently how grown up she could be or would want to be at sixteen – or was it seventeen? His father had taught him, younger by far, at twelve or thirteen, as he had put it all those years ago, ‘how to be’. It was a beginning. That’s all one can ever ask. And in the years that followed he became, with each passing day, more aware of the omissions in his education into being.

  ‘I’m glad to know you appreciate him. If they find you you’ll make plenty of fairweather friends on the newspapers, but you’ll lose Fitz and you’ll make one enemy you cannot afford to make.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Your grandfather. And whatever you think of him, he was telling you the truth. He may not be able to teach you how to mix a Martini but he has been father and mother to you since your father died. Believe me. I know your mother.’

  ‘So do I. She hates you. Absolutely hates you.’

  ‘Then why has she sent you here?’

  ‘Simple – we all do what the old man says, don’t we? Isn’t that why you’re having me here?’

  It was too true to answer. Troy dearly wished she were in any other house but his, but he could not argue with Stan.

  ‘And don’t let me catch you smoking pot.’

  ‘You won’t. He took me stash. Funny to think of my grandad walking round London with half an ounce of shit in his pocket. Hope he doesn’t get nicked. But it’d be bloody funny if he did.’

  She giggled. Put down her teacup and rocked with laughter. It wasn’t funny. She reminded him of nothing quite so much as his selfish sisters in demented mood. Really, it wasn’t funny.

  § 56

  In the morning he found he had overslept. Deliciously fogged by sleep. And when the fog cleared he found that Clover hogged the bathroom. A wafting air of talc and scented soap. The sound of her singing. A song from her Beatles record. The one about there being a place to go when she’s down, inside her own head. He tried patience, but soon ran out. All the same he could not bring himself to hammer on the door, stopher singing – tuneful singing, ‘playayayace’, ‘miyiyiyind’ – and tell her to get a move on. He skipped shaving, pissed in the sink, made a mental note to buy a second toothbrush to keepin the kitchen cabinet, and set off for the Old Bailey. He arrived in time to see Tara stepdown and the court adjourn for lunch. He had missed Cocket cross-examining her.

  He took lunch with Dame Rebecca. The same walk to Carter Lane. The same caff. He bought two portions of pie and mash, while she read quickly from one of those large yellow pads made for the legal profession in America.

  ‘You can talk while I write. You don’t mind, do you? I must get this in.’

  She took out a sheet of white foolscap and began turning her yellow jottings into publishable prose.

  ‘Dame Rebecca . . . ’ he began, meaning to ask her to elaborate on what she had said two days ago about the Ffitch sisters, only this time to see how it fitted Clover, now that he was stuck with Clover.

  ‘Call me Cissie,’ the old woman said. ‘Your father always did. It is so nice to be reminded of him again. Your nephew looks just like him, of course, but then he doesn’t seem to have time for anybody.’

  Troy hesitated. He could not call her, or any woman, ‘Cissie’. It was his pig’s name. The dilemma so confused him he completely forgot what it was he wanted to ask her.

  ‘Did I miss much?’ he asked at last.

  ‘This morning? No. Young Cocket could not budge Miss Ffitch. Odd, when you come to think about it.
When have you ever seen a young woman quite so willing to brand herself with the scarlet letter?’

  § 57

  He arrived home to find the dining table set for two, the heat and smell of cooking drifting out from the kitchen.

  He found Clover at the gas stove, hair up, wearing a man’s shirt and grey cotton trousers. A large pan of oily water coming to the boil, a small pan of deep-red sauce, a bundle of pasta wrapped in floury paper.

  ‘Spaghetti,’ she said to him, rubbing at her nose with the back of her hand.

  He looked at the cookery book she had splayed on the kitchen table. The Kitchen in the Corner by Katharine Whitehorn. He turned to the title page. There, in Paddy Fitz’s best doctor scrawl, was ‘Clover – new girls begin here. All my love, Fitz XXX.’

  ‘Wot you lookin’ at?’

  ‘Oh . . . nothing.’

  ‘Nothin’ my arse. When I said spaghetti you thought I meant out of a tin, din’t yer?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose I did.’

  ‘I told you, Troy. Fitz taught me everything. I know a lot more than how to cook in a bedsit. The pasta’s fresh from Brewer Street, so’s the parmesan, an’ it’s yer reggiano, not the common stuff and it doesn’t come in a plastic shaker. And the sauce is bacon and tomato. Only I add a bit of red wine, which she don’t mention in the book because she’s trying to keep the cost down.’

  Clover’s bit of red, from the look of the bottle, had been a whole glass of ’55 Fronsac. This was cuisine au coin with a bottomless wallet.

  ‘Found it under the sink,’ she said.

  ‘That’s fine,’ said Troy. ‘It’s there to be drunk. Where did you find the clothes?’

  ‘Wardrobe in the spare room. Not the one you put me in. The other. You don’t mind, do you?’

  No, he didn’t mind. It was curiously nostalgic to see her in his old trousers, one of his cast-off collarless shirts from the days before mass-production decided to save five minutes in the working day of the average man by sewing the collars in. Tosca had dressed this way, had worn these same clothes. That was why they were still in the wardrobe. Exactly where she had left them and where he had forgotten them. Clover was only an inch or so taller than Troy. They fitted her far better than they had ever fitted Tosca.

  ‘Keep them,’ he said. ‘They were my wife’s. She nicked them off me. You might as well have them.’

  ‘You’re married?!’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘We’re separated. I haven’t seen her since 1960.’

  Clover did not know how to react to this. It was not, he knew, the awkwardness of the fact of separation, it was discovering that there were things her mother had not told her.

  ‘Wot’s ’er name?’

  ‘Tosca.’

  ‘Tosca?’

  ‘That’s her surname. She’s called Larissa, but hardly ever uses it.’

  Troy decided to kill this subject or they’d be into ‘When did you meet?’, ‘Why did you split up?’ He reached into the cupboard and set out two wine glasses. Poured.

  ‘How long?’ he asked.

  ‘As long as it takes to cook the pasta. No more than ten minutes. If you clear out the way, that is.’

  He retreated to the sitting room, still clutching the cookery book, and decided to read quietly for the while. It purported to be a survival handbook for life in a bedsitter. He’d never lived in one, never had to. He was surprised to find the author moving readily between food and sex. She was establishing the sexual semaphore that is food and drink. Tosca had once told him that the American for sex was ‘coffee’.

  ‘I don’t get it,’ he had said. ‘Doesn’t everyone get very confused at breakfast?’

  ‘No, at breakfast coffee means coffee. At night, say eleven going on midnight, if you say to a woman, or a woman says to you, “Youwannacuppacawffee?” then it means sex.’

  ‘What does “Youwannacuppatea?” mean?’

  ‘That means orgy. Two men and a woman, two women and a man, three women, two men and a German Shepherd. All the peas in the goddam pod. Whatever. Why do you think most of us don’t drink tea?’

  ‘Memories of Boston?’

  ‘Nah. The whole issue’s too darn risky! You nod to a cup of Earl Grey and the next thing you’re in bed with half of Yankee Stadium!’

  If only, he thought, there had been such a book as this in 1935 when he was twenty. How differently life might have flowed. His life did not flow. It flooded and it froze, but flow it did not.

  A mouthful of what smelt delicious had scarcely touched his lips before Clover asked, ‘What do you think? Is it all right?’

  ‘Don’t ask.’

  ‘Bad as that?’

  ‘No – I mean, “Don’t ask” appears to be one of the rules.’

  He picked up the cookery book from where it lay splayed next to his plate.

  ‘It’s one of her rules for social success. Here we are. “Elementary Rules’, subsection entitled ‘Cooking for Men’. Never ask if it’s OK and never apologise.’

  ‘Is she right?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘OK. So Fitz didn’t teach me everything.’

  ‘I’m sure he tried.’

  ‘But . . . it is OK, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s super. You really can cook.’

  Head down, she was smiling. He wasn’t at all sure that she wasn’t also blushing a little at the over-solicited compliment.

  Afterwards she sat at the table and perused her book while he made coffee. Damn it, let caffeine and Mandrax fight it out in his bloodstream.

  And when he set the cup in front of her she spooned in sugar and stirred. He could see the operation of thought as the spoon switched from clockwise to anticlockwise, and he knew, more or less, what was coming.

  ‘I wonder if I should be there.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why? To help him of course!’

  ‘In what way do you think you could help him?’

  ‘I could give evidence.’

  ‘Indeed you could. After all, the prosecution were only too keen to be able to call you. However they can’t find you and without you they’ve had to drop a charge. You’re helping by not being there. If you were there I doubt there’s a thing you could do for Fitz.’

  ‘I could speak for the defence.’

  ‘There’d still be a cross-examination.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Well, let’s begin with the obvious. Did you have sexual intercourse before you were sixteen?’

  ‘Of course I did. Didn’t you? I mean it’s not illegal, is it?’

  ‘Yes it is. Did Fitz sleep with you?’

  ‘Yeah, but that’s different.’

  ‘How so? You were over sixteen?’

  ‘No . . . I wasn’t. But it was different. Me and him. Different.’

  Troy thought better of asking what she meant. He did not wish to hear the mitigation of the ‘special’ – she surely meant special when she said different? He preferred not know. Sixteen was a line, a legal line, an arbitrary line, below which the law stated that there was no basis of personal responsibility. It was arbitrary whilst trying to be accurate – there were plenty of women knowing and responsible below it and plenty above it who would never be either – but it was a wilfully stupid man who ignored that line.

  ‘Did Fitz ever introduce you to men with whom you subsequently had sexual intercourse.’

  ‘What? You mean deliberately?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. Fitz doesn’t even need to know you slept with them. The question is did he effect the introduction?’

  ‘Nah. Fitz didn’t find boyfriends for me. I don’t need anyone to find boyfriends for me. You may not have noticed, Troy, but I’m a looker. Men queue up to ’ave me!’

  She stopped, let the change in Troy’s expression sink in.

  ‘Wossamatter? Have I said something wrong?’

  ‘Not wrong. Awful. Damning. Imagine that it is not me talking to you across the dinner ta
ble, but Henry Furbelow, Queen’s Counsel and in this instance the prosecuting counsel at the Old Bailey. Imagine the effect of your last remark upon him. Upon a jury of middle-aged men and women. If I were Furbelow, I would have a ready follow-up. Are you now or have you ever been a prostitute?’

  ‘Nah. Leave it out!’

  ‘They don’t leave it out. Men like Furbelow leave nothing out. Have you ever accepted a gift in money or goods from a man with whom you have just had sexual intercourse?’

  ‘Yeah. Lots of women do that. If a bloke wants to bung you a few bob for a frock or some make-up it’s no different from if he brings you flowers.’

  Troy shook his head.

  ‘As things stand Fitz isn’t facing a procurement charge. If you get up in court with all your good intentions, they’ll revive that charge and add another count of immoral earnings. And if you ever tell anyone you slept with him before you were sixteen they’ll lock him up and throw away the key.’

  ‘Tell me what you think, Troy. Is Fitz going to get off ?’

  ‘If the case against him unrolls as I have seen it do to date, then it’s a shambles, but the judge is old school and cuts the defence no slack. And I’ve watched the jury. There are no free thinkers there. They may just convict him despite all they’ve heard. Stay out of it, Clover.’

  He gathered up the plates and stacked them in the kitchen. When he returned she was still sitting there.

  ‘What you mean is, don’t meddle. Leave well alone. That’s what my grandad says.’

  She was angry. He had treated her as a child. What had appeared to be a promising evening without hostilities had just taken a turn for the worst. He pleaded tiredness, told no lies, and went early to bed.

  § 58

  Clover caught him out again. By the time he was up in the morning she was already in the bathroom. He’d bought a spare toothbrush, so he pissed in the sink once more and dashed off to the Old Bailey.

  Caro stepped into the witness box, and Troy saw every head in the room turn to the head next to it in silent, wide-eyed amazement. She was dressed exactly like her sister. Down to the last detail, from the hair pinned above her ears, via the chic black two-piece down to the flat-heeled shoes. And there the awe at identity ended for Troy. Tara had looked boldly around the court, her surrender of a couple of inches in height had been the tall woman’s attempt to be unintimidating to short men like Furbelow and Cocket – a calculated move. Caro was simply trying to make herself invisible. Invisible and inseparable, Troy knew. Troy knew most people in the room could not tell one sister from the other. A doubt only relieved when she stated, almost whispered, her full name to the usher.