A Little White Death

by John Lawton

‘I know, but I can’t think where else to start.’

  ‘You could try asking me why I lied in court.’

  ‘Well . . . it did make me wonder.’

  ‘That copper from the Yard. Blood. He interviewed most of Fitz’s friends. He had me and Caro in there at least a dozen times. After the second time he split us up. Very clever. He’d get nothing out of her with me there, and he’d get nothing out of me but the truth. I never gave Fitz so much as a farthing. I think Caro has better manners. She bought a pair of oven gloves and occasionally came home with a packet of coffee beans; but I’m a pig. I was happy to live off Fitz and most of the time Fitz was happy to let me. All this stuff about Pritch-Kemp giving us money which we then passed to Fitz is just that – stuff and nonsense, as my mother would have said. I gave the Yard Pritch-Kemp. They were idiots. I wouldn’t name him, but it was obvious who I meant. They thought I’d handed them a loaded gun, but I’d given them a time bomb. They were idiots to think Pritch was the kind of man who’d hide from it. They thought he’d bury his head in the sand like Tim. I knew damn well he’d stand up for the defence. But I seemed to be the only person who did.

  ‘I think it must have been the last time but two, or thereabouts, that we’d been to the Yard. I met up with Caro on the Embankment. She was in floods of tears. Blood had played his trump card. He’d found out about the baby.’

  ‘What baby?’

  ‘Caro’s daughter. She’s two now. Vivienne Elizabeth. Caro’s had a nanny for her for the last year. We lead the life of working women in reverse – Caro sees the child midweek, the nanny has her weekends. Fitz never needed to have a baby and wet nappies around the place, and life goes on as . . . as normal. Shocking word isn’t it, “normal”? Our dear father doesn’t even know. But Blood found out. Told Caro if she didn’t co-operate he’d have the child put in care. She was quite resolute. Got guts, my little sister. She told Blood to go to hell. I’m more of a realist. I knew he could do just what he threatened. The next time he got us in I changed my story. Caro never would, but I couldn’t let her do that to herself. I nagged her and I nagged her until eventually she signed a statement. I suppose it was naive of me to think she’d stick to it in court, once she had to face poor old Fitz across a courtroom. I’ve been wondering ever since what it must have looked like. I knew what she’d done, but by the time she could tell me she was all over the place. I thought she’d go mad. I still don’t know what Blood said to her before she signed. She won’t tell me. But if he wants to exact his vengeance, he’s got to find her first.’

  ‘So have I,’ Troy said simply.

  Tara said nothing. Troy decided to tack off and come back to the point at a better moment.

  ‘When did you and Fitz meet?’

  She swigged gin. Seemed to muse on the question.

  ‘Can you remember?’ he prompted.

  ‘Oh yes, I can remember all right. I met him late in the summer of 1959. A Saturday. One of those Indian summer days when they stick tables outside the London cafés and try to pretend it’s Rome or Paris or anywhere but London. It was in Endell Street, near Covent Garden. I was with Caro. Fitz was sipping his cappuccino at another table. Saturday is a mufti day for men like Fitz. Wore his linen suit and this preposterous hat – a Stetson I think you’d call it. Anyway, it was his affectation at that time. Did the trick. Made people notice him. As he was leaving he came over and said, “I’m having a party at my house tonight. It would be so nice if you could come.” Then he picked up the menu, jotted down the mews address and a phone number and went. We’d neither of us spoken. Then we debated whether or not we’d go to a party given by a man we’d never met before and it sort of resolved itself down into I-will-if-you-will-sowill-I. So we did. Two days later we moved in. We were there four years. He only moved us out when the police came. Said it would be better for all of us. Said it was strictly pro tem. He was much quicker with Clover. Stuck her in a bedsit as soon as young Alex started his campaign in the Post. He wasn’t taking any chances with her.’

  ‘How did they meet? Fitz and Clover, I mean.’

  ‘Same way. Almost to the letter. Another summer. Last year’s. Another café. Old Compton Street this time. Except she was working as a waitress. He even used the same line. Told her we were having a party. Which we were not. But we were by the time she arrived. Fitz drummed up a drunken quorum between four in the afternoon and eight in the evening. He was a bit more hesitant about moving her in than he was with us. I think she dropped a few hints. She’d seen how we lived. She knew Caro and I only needed the one room between us, so I think in the end he just gave in to her.’

  ‘What did he see in her? She wasn’t your age. She was scarcely more than a child.’

  ‘She was fifteen, Troy. We both know that. I can see no need to hide it now they’re both dead.’

  She paused, thought through something and picked up her thread very decisively.

  ‘He made people. Or rather remade them. It was a sort of hobby of his, remaking people.’

  Hobby? More like a colossal vanity, Troy thought. He had never understood it – the Pygmalion syndrome. His father had a touch of it, but surely a man was entitled to some share in the making of his own sons? And if Alex Troy made Frederick Troy with an excess of zeal, it was in part due to the vicissitudes of Troy’s health, in that he was around, always around, and in part due to the age his father had reached – sixtyish and bored by his own success. His father’s old rival Lord Beaverbrook had indulged this vanity in spades, remaking mistresses and protégés. Rod’s brief rebellion against his father had been to go and work for Beaverbrook’s Daily Express for a year. Lord B had seen not only the potential in Rod, but the potential rage to which he could provoke Old Troy. It did no one any good. Rod had the makings of a good journalist, but he did not have the makings of a good Tory – simply rearranging the letters was not enough – and there the relationship foundered. It showed in Rod to this day. If he read a book he liked he would go back to the shop buy three or four copies and give them to friends or family – it was remaking reduced to its most basic components of knowledge and influence. Take it or leave it. It worked or it didn’t. Troy still had somewhere a copy of Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis, received one day nine or ten years ago when Rod had rushed in, dishing out copies saying it was funniest thing he had read since Evelyn Waugh stopped being funny. It wasn’t. Troy’s bookmark stuck where he had placed it after twentyodd yawnsome pages. Somewhere in his house now was Clover’s cookery book – ‘New girls begin here’ – the testament of Fitz’s Pygmalion game with the child.

  ‘There were others?’ he said.

  ‘Two at least that I know of. Frances. No surname that I ever heard. I’ve no idea what became of her. Simply vanished about a year before I met Fitz. But I’ve seen the photographs. The before and after shots, as it were. The before have her looking more waifish than Clover ever did. The afters have her looking like a duchess. The end result of the Fitz method. And then there was Tanya Hennessey. I knew Tanya. She didn’t vanish. She lived the dream so well she fulfilled it and in its fulfilment there wasn’t a deal of room for Fitz. She married one of Tommy’s nephews in the spring of 1960. In fact, she married the heir. So I suppose, now that Tommy’s gone to the great nightclub in the sky, she’s Lady Athelnay. Everything Fitz could have wanted for her. And he isn’t here to see it, and if he was I doubt she’d give him houseroom. If you ask me he did a better job on Clover. Didn’t run against the grain. Found her an unsophisticated little tart and left her a sophisticated little tart. No elocution lessons, no class pretension, simply told her what she needed to know. Much the better way. You see, once he’d remade himself he thought it was easy to remake others. He was soft for me and Caro, but we didn’t much need what he had to offer. We learnt from Fitz, without doubt, but we were not recast in his image. Tanya did need him, Clover did. They were his Elizas; they were his Gigis.’

  Troy was not entirely sure he believed her disavowal. It was probably what France
s, wherever she was, and Tanya, Lady Athelnay, said – if they spoke of Fitz at all. He knew there was truth in Rebecca West’s damning assessment – Fitz had packaged the Ffitches.

  ‘Tell me, Troy, did Clover show off her cooking?’

  ‘Yes. Was that the obvious thing?’

  ‘Oh yes, her pièce de résistance. Did not wait to be asked. Fitz lesson No. 1. I do hope you enjoyed it. I can’t cook for toffee.’

  Troy looked at his watch, remembered the pile of empty bean tins spilling out of the wastebin. ‘I can,’ he said.

  She showed him the larder. It was bare enough for the age of rationing. The sight of few and sorry vegetables put him in mind of the austerity of war and the long, stark years that followed. A meal out of this would be a small miracle. Three eggs, two potatoes, a rare red pepper wrinkling with age, an onion green with mould at the outer skin . . . but in his war he had produced little miracles on a regular basis, helped by the fact that his mother had used her huge Hertfordshire garden to produce vegetables and eggs aplenty. It called for a Spanish omelette. He had seemed to make them quite a lot during the war.

  Tara’s contribution was to light three candles on the kitchen table, candles undignified by candelabra, stuck into enamel Wee Willie Winkie candleholders. Troy thought for a moment how romantic and how absurd this was, and then remembered that there was no electricity and that she was coping with necessity, not setting a mood.

  They ate in near silence. For the moment she seemed to have nothing to say. The most he got out of her was a ‘not bad’. Then à propos of nothing she said, ‘What was Clover’s real name? Did she ever tell you?’

  ‘I thought it was Clover,’ he said, telling truth as lies.

  ‘Nobody’s christened Clover. At least nobody born to a couple of cockneys at the end of the war. Surely she was a Pauline or a Susan?’

  ‘Never said.’

  ‘I bet Fitz knew.’

  Tara stacked the plates in the sink and left them, reached for the gin bottle again, poured two huge measures and flavoured them lightly with a splash of tonic.

  ‘Shall we sit outside?’ she said. ‘I think there’s about fifteen minutes of a rather spectacular sunset left.’

  She stuck two kitchen chairs in the yard, and they sat looking westward either side of the door. The last slice of sun was glowing burnt orange and sinking beneath the horizon.

  ‘It is beautiful, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘Makes me think I don’t get out of London often enough.’

  ‘I do,’ said Troy. ‘I have to get out of the fray. I have to get out of the fray, because I have to be in it. You could stay out of it. You don’t have to go back.’

  He was not looking at her as he spoke, he was looking at the sun, but he was sure her non-word amounted to ‘hrrummph’, and turned to find her looking hard at him.

  ‘You took a shine to me at Uphill? Am I right?’

  ‘A shine?’

  ‘Coyness doesn’t suit you, Troy.’

  ‘OK. A shine it is.’

  ‘Glad we can agree. But . . . Troy . . . do not mistake me. Do not think me one of the good girls. I’m not. Forget the whore with the heart of gold. T’ain’t me. I am in what I am in for what is in it for me.’

  ‘Aha?’

  ‘Now – I know a little bit about you. Fitz seemed to think you were the best thing at a piano since Russ Conway, and Anna used to talk about this eccentric copper who bred pigs and won prizes for his leeks. I rather think she loved your rural idyll, and you were a bastard not to let her see more of it than you did. You can tell me it’s bliss to be out of the fray – you can tell me till the cows come home and God knows there’s enough of the four-footed fuckers around here. But . . . big big but . . . I am a child of the fray. Going back? Of course I’m going back. Did you think I meant to stay here for ever? I can’t fulfil your rural idyll for you, Troy. I’m going back. More than that, I’m taking the money. I’ve already sold Fitz. I want my thirty pieces of silver. My father cut me off in 1955. I’ve torn away ever since, since I was seventeen. There’ve always been other “daddies”. Although right now there’s really a shortage of daddies, at least of daddies I’d ever want. So I’m taking the money. I’d never have done it if Fitz had lived – but he didn’t, so nothing I can say will hurt him.’

  ‘You’ll be notorious.’

  ‘I’m already notorious.’

  ‘How much are they offering?’

  ‘Thousands. Believe me, thousands. I’ll give Fleet Street what they want, every last damn scrap of it. And if it isn’t enough I’ll make it up. But I’ll nail Chief Inspector Blood. And I don’t care if he sues. I’ll tell Britain what the bastard did and I’ll take the consequences.’

  ‘When?’ said Troy.

  ‘Any day now. As soon as I can screw up the courage.’

  ‘Can you give me more time?’

  ‘You? I don’t understand.’

  ‘I can nail Blood. But Blood’s a dim bugger. It’s possible he set out to convict Fitz at any price. There’s a kind of policeman in every force whose idea of good coppering is to convict at any price. And they don’t think they’re dishonest. They think they’re making up for all the loopholes in the law. He might have thought this up on his own. But I’d be very surprised. And I cannot nail him and whoever pulls his strings in a couple of days.’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘A fortnight. Give me a fortnight.’

  Tara sipped gin and thought. Tapped against the leg of his chair with the toe of her plimsoll.

  ‘OK. A fortnight it is. But you must be the one to talk to Alex. I don’t want to do it. In fact, I don’t want to see the little shit until you’re through.’

  ‘Is he a little shit?’

  Tara thought about this too.

  ‘I don’t have your family loyalties. Perhaps it’s fairer to say he’s ambitious and he knows he’s pulled off a real coup this time, and that has consequences upon his character. He’s just not like you or your brother.’

  ‘You’ve met my brother?’

  ‘Tommy took me to lunch at the Lords a few times. Your brother was there once. I think it was just about passable for a socialist to be seen dining with a cross-bencher. Your brother’s a sweet man. Your nephew isn’t. It’s about as simple as that.’

  ‘I don’t think Rod remembers meeting you.’

  ‘He wouldn’t, would he? I wore National Health specs, put my hair up and tried to look like a secretary. Tommy did that a lot, you know. Primmed and primped me and took me out to meet the respectable and the boring. I think it gave him enormous pleasure. “This is Miss Jones, doing a little research for me.” It was his idea of sailing close to the wind, but as most of the people he introduced me to would have been none the wiser if he’d told them my real name and left me looking, as he used to put it, “like a scarlet beauty”, I don’t think there was really any risk at all. That was just silly old Tommy. Fitz, now Fitz did take risks. But then Tommy was an insider, wasn’t he? He could flirt harmlessly because he belonged. Fitz was an outsider. He wanted to belong and to destroy in equal measure. So he took real risks. He used to fuck in St James’s Park, in the bushes – who hasn’t after all? – but as close as he could get to people passing by, as close as he could get to public sex without it being public. Flirting with the outrageous, wanting to outrage, which of course he never quite did. The man who wanted to belong always in some sort of bizarre equilibrium with the man who wanted to destroy. Poor Fitz, he finally did outrage the public, and what a price he paid.

  ‘Tommy untarting me was his rather tame version of the same flirtation. He introduced me to your brother as Miss Brown, I think. Rod asked if I was any relation to George Brown. Tommy stepped on my foot to stop me laughing out loud and then your brother tried to talk Tommy into supporting a Labour vote in the Lords. Rod was sweetness itself, but I doubt I figured much in his thoughts. Some men never look twice at another woman. They still exist, much to my surprise, and he’s one of them. But there you and your b
rother differ – don’t you, Troy?’

  Troy said nothing. The sun winked out.

  ‘Am I shocking you, Troy?’

  ‘No,’ he said. And she wasn’t.

  ‘But all this, all this sort of thing isn’t you is it? Isn’t your thing.’

  ‘No. It’s not me.’ He found he could not utter the phrase ‘my thing’ without mentally adding inverted commas. ‘Not “my thing”.’

  ‘Are you staying the night?’

  ‘Dunno. What time is it?’

  ‘Dunno. But it’s dark. Do you really want to drive back in the pitch dark?’

  § 83

  In the morning he found there was nothing in the cupboard but bread, butter, a splash of milk and half a packet of maggoty old flour – and there was no water in the tap. Hot or cold. Then he saw the shiny new galvanised steel bucket below the kitchen sink and realised that drawning water from a well probably went with cooking on bottled gas and pissing in an earth closet.

  He went into the yard and prised up the wooden lid of the well. He’d done nothing like this since before the war. A gardener’s cottage on his father’s estate. An old boy who refused all the new-fangled gadgetry that his father would have installed in 1930 – water in taps, a bog that flushed, electricity. The old boy had lived all his life thirty-odd miles from London and never been there. In his retirement he had raised the lushest garden Troy had ever seen, so rich, so colour-crammed, Fitz would have been chlorophyll green with envy – head-high delphiniums in palest blue, tiny tulips in darkest black, and the mottled, browning greens of foul, fug-making homegrown tobacco, strung out in late summer to dry – and he knew the proper names of none of his blooms, no more than he knew the real names of half the creatures of the garden. One word had lodged in Troy’s mind for ever: the old boy had called snails ‘hodmandods’, a word peculiar to the dialects of eastern England. ‘Hodmandod,’ thought Troy, as he saw one of the creatures slide up the inner wall of the well.

  Perhaps Tara was right. Perhaps he laboured under an habitual fancy of being a rustic. Even as he thought the mundane thought he heard the crash of conkers in their spiky shells hitting the ground, looked up to see crows conspiratorially perched on the barn ridge, and a fighter formation of Canada geese, gently flapping southward, watched a black-stained, mildewed sycamore leaf float slowly down, and smelt the unmistakable cheesy, rotten smell of Phallus impudicus – the stinkhorn toadstool. Autumn in all her fruitfulness, and yet again a new season spelt out to him how much of the year had gone, how much of it he had passed in the dream.