The Coldest War

by Ian Tregillis

  He shrugged off the threat. “I’ve been thrown out of better places. Got tossed from Sunday service once.”

  Marsh gulped at his beer, changed the subject. “It’s my daughter’s birthday.” John’s older sister would turn twenty-three a little bit before midnight.

  “That’s something good. Why don’t you go home, then, and spend it with her?”

  “The worms ate her long ago. She died in the war.”

  “Oh.” The barman shook his head. “Sorry to hear it, mate.”

  Marsh ignored that. “Maybe it was rats. Could’ve been rats that ate her up. We never buried her proper. No body. Too much rubble. Just a casket. An empty casket.” He pulled on his pint. Foam from his lips spattered the bar as he said, “It was so small.”

  Quietly, the barman said, “Blitz?”

  Marsh grunted.

  The barman sighed in sympathy. “Bloody Jerries.”

  He drifted away, down the bar to deal with a few of the other regulars here at this early hour of the afternoon.

  Bubbles streamed up through the amber depths of Marsh’s glass, like tongues of smoke billowing up into a still evening sky. Williton had been reduced to a sea of smoking debris by the time he and Liv arrived. Worst of all, he remembered the smell: the sharp scent of cordite lay over the ruined village like a fog, mingling with the baby smells from Agnes’s blanket.

  From somewhere far away, he heard Liv saying, “What if she’s cold?” And from somewhere even farther away, he heard, “Leave ’im alone. He’s grieving.”

  Marsh shook his head, shook off the memory. Now the telly shouted the BBC news at quarter past. Cracking his knuckles against his jaw, Marsh turned on his stool to get a glimpse of the screen.

  A kerosene lamp had been identified as the cause of the recent fire in the Forest of Dean. The rumors of abandoned villages in Tanganyika had proved false, but now similar reports were coming out of British-held India near the Nepalese border. The Eighth Cruiser Squadron was soon to join the HMS Ocean in the Persian Gulf. Radio receivers at Jodrell Bank in the U.K. and Parkes, in Australia, reported the space station had fallen silent. Urgent transmissions from the cosmonauts returning from their orbit of the moon suggested they had received no communications from the station since emerging from the moon’s shadow a day ago. Moscow denied any problems.

  Closer to home, news of the day concerned a sweeping new trade agreement between the United Kingdom and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. His Grace, the Duke of Aelred, was credited with brilliantly shepherding the initiative through a period of increased tensions between the two nations. Up flashed an old clip of Aubrey Beauclerk shaking hands with a member of the Soviet diplomatic mission. The duke was thought to be a likely successor to the Foreign Secretary, if the BBC could be believed.

  Then the image changed to a clip of the duke’s brother.

  “Turn it off,” said Marsh.

  The younger Beauclerk, long a political outsider and burdened with what was delicately referred to as a “murky” past, had in recent years become one of the duke’s closest advisers. Lord William Beauclerk had played a major role in hammering out the new agreement; the commentary predicted a bright future for the duke’s brother, complete with twee metaphors about sunlight after the storm.

  William fucking Beauclerk. It wasn’t fair.

  “I said, turn it off!” Marsh hurled his pint glass at the television. He missed. It shattered against the wooden cabinet, splashing the screen and those closest with the dregs of his beer. The room erupted with shouts of anger and alarm.

  “Oy!” the barman yelled. “That tears it!”

  Somebody tried to grab Marsh’s arm; his knuckles connected with what felt like a jaw when he threw a punch. But dizziness and rage made it a wild, uncoordinated swing, little more than a glancing blow. The hand on his forearm tightened its grip.

  Marsh jumped from his stool, reflexively thinking to use it as a weapon to break the hold on him. But when he wheeled to face the man holding his arm, a punch landed solidly on his cheekbone, just beneath the eye. The sting of torn skin; the thrower wore a wedding ring.

  Somebody else grabbed Marsh in a wristlock and slammed his head to the bar hard enough to rattle glasses. Marsh struggled, but halfheartedly. The barman stood in the corner, telephone receiver to his ear, glaring at him.

  He knew that look, and it took the fight out of him. He’d lose his job if he got tossed in the clink again.

  Marsh wrested free of the man holding him. Every eye in the room watched him warily. The pub was silent as he plucked the towel from the bar, gathered his hat from the hooks behind the door, and stepped outside. The murmur of conversation—mostly “tsk, tsk” and “shameful drunk”—resumed as he slammed the door.

  The pub shared a doorstep with a shoe repair service. Marsh sat there, trying to staunch the flow of blood with the towel, waiting for the police. It stung; the towel had whiskey on it. The sunlight left him feeling cold. A white-haired lady hurried down the street with a grocer’s sack. Marsh scowled at her; she crossed the street.

  Blood still trickled from the gash along his cheekbone when a black Ford Corsair rolled to a stop in front of the pub. The police radio squawked something incomprehensible; the driver responded into a handset while his partner emerged from the car. Marsh suppressed a sigh of relief.

  The copper looked at Marsh, then nodded toward the pub. “They throw you out?”

  “I threw myself out.”

  “Throw anything else while you were at it?”

  “Yeah. A pint glass. A punch or two.”

  “Caught one, too, I see,” said Constable Lorimer. He brushed off a spot next to Marsh before sitting down. “Why do you keep doing this?”

  Marsh said nothing. His sense of loss, his rage at the world for what his life had become—these were private indignities. Only one person in the world could even begin to understand how he felt, but she had stopped caring about his ills a long time ago.

  The constable said, “Dad used to talk about you, back in the war. Said you were ‘right clever for a Sassenach tosser.’” He pronounced the last part in the style of his father’s Scottish brogue. Marsh had fought alongside James Lorimer and had been present when he died. His children had grown up in London raised by a Welsh mother, and so inherited different accents than their father’s.

  “But you don’t seem all that clever to me.”

  Marsh glared at the young Lorimer. Cotton threads from the towel tugged at the spots of blood crusted on his face when he turned his head. The towel smelled of blood and booze. As did Marsh. “Sorry to disappoint.”

  The copper shook his head. “Look, Mr. Marsh. My point is that this can’t continue, and you’re smart enough to know that. Any more of this, and I’ll have to write you up good and proper, toss you in jail at Her Majesty’s pleasure. You knew my dad, and I’ve let you slide on account of it. I keep it up, they’ll have my arse in a sling,” he concluded, with a slight nod toward the car and his partner.

  He stood. Marsh followed, gritting his teeth against the ache in his knee as he climbed to his feet. It took Marsh an extra moment to steady himself.

  “I ought to haul you down to the station house.”

  “But you won’t.”

  The young Lorimer waved an admonishing finger an inch from Marsh’s nose. “I will, if there’s a next time, Mr. Marsh. You’ve exhausted my surplus of charity.”

  Marsh inspected the towel. It was ruined.

  “And have somebody take a look at that cut, eh?”

  “I’ll take care of it once I’m home,” said Marsh.

  “Need a ride?”

  Marsh shook his head. “Better not. Liv wouldn’t like seeing me escorted by the coppers.”

  “Straight home,” said the constable, climbing back in the car.

  Marsh acknowledged this with a little salute. He set off at a slow walk. After the coppers disappeared up the street, he balled up the towel and threw it at the boards covering the s
hattered window of a derelict storefront. It hit the door with a weak thump, unraveled, and fluttered to the ground.

  Home was fifteen or sixteen streets away. Marsh took his time. He remembered running this same route in the other direction, during the blackout, before dawn on the morning his daughter was born.

  Doing that today would get a man mugged. Or worse. Smart folks didn’t walk these streets after dark. Back then, the neighborhood hadn’t been marred with graffiti and broken windows. The smell of rubbish didn’t permeate the streets on hot days. It would have been a good place to raise a daughter. But the economic burden of rebuilding great swaths of London had meant that other parts of the city had been victims of benign neglect.

  Cheap rents had attracted an endless progression of immigrants and refugees. But few of their shops and restaurants had persisted for long. Marsh had never set foot in any of them. Couldn’t afford it.

  Marsh wished it were late at night, perhaps even raining, rather than a bright springtime afternoon. Hooligans drew their courage from the shadows and ill weather. He knew; he’d been one of them, long, long ago.

  He cracked his knuckles again. His rage and self-hatred needed an outlet. An excuse to boil over. An attempted mugging. No copper would fault a man for defending himself.…

  But he made it home without incident, after filing the idea away for further thought. The yowling from upstairs, like an endless screech of fingernails on slate, greeted him before he opened the front door.

  Liv didn’t say anything about his bloodied face when he entered. The look on her face shamed him more than any words could. Even his cock-ups were beneath her contempt now. She took it for granted he was a washed-up failure of a man.

  So did he.

  When did it happen? Could he remember the moment when the last glimmer of love went out of Liv’s eyes? When the world snuffed that final fading ember of affection like a candle, to replace its feeble glow with cold shadows and foul vapors?

  No. There was no such single moment. History provided no comfort in what-if, no solace in if-only. The twists and turns were too complex to chart. The corruption of his family life, the perversion of his dream, grew from the long slow grind of years. Gretel killed their daughter, but the failed attempt to begin anew had killed their marriage.

  Marsh trudged to the garden shed, the drink in his veins too dilute to provide comforting numbness against the yowling from his broken son.

  11 May 1963

  Soviet Embassy, London, England

  What the world had lost in fine vintages when the Soviet Empire collectivized the French wineries, it had more than regained in the form of Caspian Sea caviars. Will, whose lips hadn’t touched a drop of wine in decades, found this a perfectly acceptable trade. And the Gruyère de Comté was excellent. He mentioned this to Gwendolyn.

  “You see, dear? The wineries were a dreadful mistake, but they acknowledge it. They haven’t done the same with the dairies.”

  She nibbled on a toast point topped with salty black roe. While dabbing at her lips, and with her mouth hidden behind a serviette, she said, “William, you daft, daft darling. Cheese doesn’t grow in the ground. I’ll wager it merits little interest from Lysenko and those academic stillbirths he calls colleagues.”

  Her choice of words caught Will, as it so often did, unawares. He tossed back the last of his tonic water to suppress the laughter that escaped him. Too late; his outburst turned heads and collected attention.

  Ambassador Fedotov weaved through the room to join them. Behind him, past a swirl of diaphanous curtains, Aubrey and one of his politburo counterparts chatted on the balcony overlooking the horseshoe drive. Next to the cold fireplace, the Foreign Secretary and his wife (what is that woman’s name again? Gwendolyn will know) listened to the Party General Secretary of the Republic of Belgium as he outlined his plan to introduce mandatory Russian language instruction in schools across the Republic. Under an immense cut-crystal chandelier (Will called it decadent; Gwendolyn called it shamefully czarist), two members of the House of Lords debated the merits of cricket with a member of the ambassador’s staff. HRH the Prince of Wales discussed an oil painting (mostly blacks and reds, depicting a group of noble farmers in a noble moment of noble uprising) with the embassy’s gray-lipped cultural attaché, Cherkashin.

  The string quartet returned from their break. They struck up another piece by one of the modern Soviet composers, all of whom were indistinguishable to Will. He thought it more suited to marching than dancing.

  The ambassador took Gwendolyn’s hand. “Your Grace. Thank you again for honoring our function.” He wasn’t a tall fellow, standing a full head shorter than Will and shorter even than Gwendolyn. His voice carried the peculiar warble of Russian softened by years spent in the West, like a block of granite weathered smooth by years of English rain.

  “A pleasure, Ambassador,” she said. “But I must correct you. While I do have honor, my grace is nonexistent. My husband has proved a suitable provider in other regards, but he has been a crushing disappointment in this area.”

  Fedotov looked confused.

  “The blame lies at my brother’s feet,” chimed Will. “Selfish fellow, hoarding titles for himself and his wife.” He indicated Viola, also on the balcony, where she stood chatting amicably with the ambassador’s wife. “She, of course, is ‘Her Grace, the Duchess of Aelred.’”

  “But I am merely Lady Gwendolyn Beauclerk.”

  “Formerly the Lady Gwendolyn, of course,” said Will.

  Fedotov looked back and forth between them, like a spectator at a tennis match. Which, in a way, he was.

  Taking encouragement from the deepening furrow between the ambassador’s eyebrows, Will put on the air of revealing a close confidence. “As I’m sure you can imagine, our marriage was quite the scandal. The daughter of an earl marrying an untitled commoner like myself?”

  Which was partially true. Not for the sake of titles, of course; Gwendolyn herself was not a peer. Marrying into the Beauclerks had been the eventual aim of many families since Will and Aubrey had been children. But Will’s personal history, rather than the order of his birth, had tarnished the brand.

  The ambassador frowned.

  Gwendolyn shook her head lightly. “It wouldn’t have been quite so scandalous had you allowed the announcements to use your title.” She turned to Fedotov. “‘Lord William Edward Guthrie Beauclerk,’ naturally. But he wouldn’t have it. So the announcements looked quite lopsided: ‘William Edward Guthrie Beauclerk and the Lady Gwendolyn Wellesley.’”

  “But you did compromise in the end, dear.” Will’s turn to take Fedotov into confidence. “She finally agreed to drop that ghastly ‘the’ after our nuptials.”

  “Compromise? I had no choice in the matter, love.” Again, an aside to Fedotov: “My husband is merely a lord. And that only by courtesy. Which is why today I am merely Lady Gwendolyn. It’s all quite straightforward, you see,” she concluded.

  A moment passed. The creases of concentration on Fedotov’s forehead melted away, and he smiled. He shook a finger at them. “You are having me on. Both of you.”

  Will shook his head. “We wouldn’t dream of it.”

  Fedotov laughed. “We don’t suffer from such complexities in the Soviet Union,” he said. “Anybody is free to marry anybody, without consideration of titles and status. That, my friends, is just one of the reasons why we thrive. Everybody is equal.”

  Again dabbing at the corners of her mouth, Gwendolyn said, “And yet you live in a mansion.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “My wife complimented your lovely home,” Will covered.

  Cherkashin, the cultural attaché, noticed the conversation. He pushed aside the lock of hair that had flopped across his forehead and hastily joined them. Gwendolyn stiffened. Cherkashin lacked the ambassador’s gift for chitchat. And his smile never quite touched his eyes. It was a Potemkin smile.

  More introductions and niceties all around. Cherkashin whispered into t
he ambassador’s ear. Gwendolyn caught Will’s eye; he didn’t understand the source of her unease, but he tried to quell it with a wink. It didn’t appear to mollify her.

  Fedotov nodded. He replied to Cherkashin also in Russian, then turned his attention back to Will and Gwendolyn. “I’m reminded that I had hoped to take advantage of your attendance, Lord William—”

  Fishhooks of panic jabbed Will in the neck. Please not in front of Gwendolyn, he thought.

  “—to iron out a tiny business detail. If I could prevail upon your patience, Lady Gwendolyn?”

  Gwendolyn smiled, saying, “By all means.” She said it in the same tone of voice she took when enduring Viola.

  Will said, “It won’t be a moment, dear.”

  He watched Gwendolyn in the long gilt-frame mirror along the dining room wall. Graceful as always, she turned to speak with Cherkashin as though their conversation hadn’t missed a beat. But he abandoned her to follow Will. She recovered, but not before irritation darkened her face.

  Will followed Fedotov downstairs, into the depths of the embassy, where the Soviet Union’s diplomatic affairs were conducted in private. He’d never been outside the entryway and the reception hall; only members of the Soviet diplomatic corps were allowed in these corridors. It was a flattering display of amity, but also a bit worrying.

  They passed a sturdy walnut door reinforced with steel bands. Quite different from the other doorways they’d passed. Will paused, curious in spite of himself. The guard seated beside the door glared at him.

  “This way,” said Cherkashin. With one hand he pushed Will away from the door, while with the other he pointed up the corridor.

  Fedotov’s office was situated at the rear of the house, with a view of Green Park just across Piccadilly; the lights of Buckingham Palace twinkled in the far distance. The office wasn’t so decadent as the furnishings upstairs, which were intended for entertaining important visitors, but still not entirely modest. Walnut, leather, brass, even a wet bar. It wasn’t all that different from Aubrey’s study at the Bestwood estate. Will stifled a little laugh. What difference was there, truly, between peers and a high party officials?