A Lily of the Field

by John Lawton

  “I’ve spent half the day toying with the idea that someone might have killed Viktor. No suicide I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen plenty, ever wiped the scene free of fingerprints. You don’t reach the point of not giving a damn and then do something like that. It smacks of murder. Kolankiewicz thinks it was murder. But no murderer would scrupulously have wiped down the piano keys. Every single bloody one. And it had me baffled. But Kolankiewicz says the spare bedroom, not the one Viktor slept in, but one of the others, was also wiped down, and that doesn’t fit, either. And then I put the pieces together. The piano, the bedroom, the faint scent in the air . . . someone who played the piano . . . someone he still gave a damn about at the moment of his death. Rod, Viktor had a mistress . . . and you could have told me yesterday.”

  Rod took the blast standing but as soon as Troy stopped he sat down, looking sad and tired. He pushed a list of names across the desk to Troy.

  “He had twelve pupils—apart from you, of course—I’ve called them all. They’re shocked, to put it mildly. And it would be good if you could leave this until tomorrow . . . but the one you want is Méret Voytek.”

  “How long have you known?”

  “Since it began. That must be about eighteen months now.”

  “Would you ever have told me?”

  “Probably not. I didn’t think it mattered, and I can’t see that it matters now. But since you asked, I won’t lie to you. I don’t know why you need to know, but you’ll tell me you need to know everything. When you came to see me yesterday I thought about telling you, but I thought better of it, I thought about Viktor’s reputation.”

  “He can hardly suffer for his reputation now.”

  “I think he can. An affair with a woman less than half his age? And what about Miss Voytek?”

  Troy sat down. Rod’s reasonableness would erode stone.

  “Rod, it doesn’t need to be public, but I do have to talk to her. For all we know she may well have been the last person to see Viktor alive.”

  “I think she was. She told me she was there until late Sunday night.”

  “Then you were an ass not to tell me about her. If I talk to her and there is nothing crucial to the case I can’t see any reason why her relationship with Viktor should be known. Now, where can I find her?”

  “She lives in Clover Mews.”

  “Doesn’t ring any bells.”

  “It’s a cul-de-sac off Dilke Street.”

  “What? At the back of Viktor’s apartment?”

  “Yes. I concluded he wanted her close.”

  “Close but unseen?”

  “Freddie, don’t try to make a moral fog out of this. He was an old man—he was sixty-six. He never married. I think Méret was all he ever had in life. The money meant nothing to him . . . and what is music if you have no one to share it with?”

  “I rather thought he shared it with the world.”

  “Which is, word for word, what I said to him when he told me about Méret.”

  “Did he tell you everything?”

  “Pretty well. I think everyone has someone from whom there are no secrets. You’re the great exception to that. You’re here, on your professional high horse, as you have every right to be, but personally, you have more secrets and lies in you than anyone I know and I’ve known you since the day you were born. Now, tell me you can wait until the morning and I’ll phone Méret and agree a time. And if you can release the body, I’ll arrange the funeral.”

  Troy said yes to both.

  Later, back in his office, Rod called and said, “Méret Voytek is expecting you at ten a.m. tomorrow. I’m expecting you at ten a.m. on Friday, Golders Green crematorium. Be there.”

  §125

  When Troy had bought his first, and only, house in Goodwin’s Court, in 1937, he had been drawn to Mews houses. He liked the off-the-beaten-track feel of mews, the sense of hidden corners in the city . . . streets that led nowhere . . . streets down which no one strolled . . . houses that didn’t look like houses. Before the war many mews still housed chauffeurs, but not as many as housed merely cars. Now, hardly anyone had a chauffeur—they had, like his father’s, like Laura Narayan’s father’s, gone off to the armed forces, got demobbed, voted Labour, and chosen not to return to the tugged forelock and the low wage. Goodwin’s Court pleased on most counts. It was a little-used alley—although since 1942, Ruby the prostitute had worked the St. Martin’s Lane end as her “beat”—and the house he lived in looked less like a house than a Georgian shop.

  But Clover Mews had it all. It was a cul-de-sac, tucked away only yards from the Thames Embankment, and the flats over the garages had a look of the warehouse to them, chains and derrick arms intact on one, makeshift balconies on all, precariously perched flowerpots full of geraniums and trailing nasturtiums. It had the Bohemian touch he lacked the courage to create for himself. It looked to be years since anyone had got out a pot of paint and a brush. Everything was faded, everything was peeling back to bare wood. But then he thought, that was England—a faded country sadly in need of a metaphoric, symbolic coat of paint. That was Attlee, that was Bevan, that was Rod—a man with a giant paintbrush, sadly short of a giant pot of paint.

  Above number seven, the French window onto the tiny balcony was ajar and the sound of someone playing scales on a cello drifted down to the street.

  Troy rang the bell. It made no sound. He stepped back and called out hello to the upstairs window.

  A blonde head appeared on the balcony and said, “I cannot abide bells. Door is open.”

  She met him at the top of the stairs, barefoot, a voluminous blue dress worn like a tent, billowing around her, the dungeon eyes that had avoided his backstage at the Wigmore now looking straight at him.

  “Thursdays. Seven till eight. Am I right?”

  “I’m sorry, I . . .”

  “You came to Viktor for lessons, Thursdays seven till eight. You have not been since last Christmas. We met once as I was leaving.”

  Whatever the scent he had noticed in Viktor’s flat was, he was smelling it now and realized he had smelled it long before Kolankiewicz had pointed it out. It was there, tucked away in his unconscious until she resurrected it.

  “And sometimes,” he said, “you were there in the rooms at the back, while I played, and you did not come out. You were hiding.”

  “Yes. Quite so. Come in, Mr. Troy. Today is not a day to hide.”

  She disappeared into her bedroom, saying she would be but a moment.

  Troy stood alone in the large sitting-room-cum-study. It was as Mitteleurope as Viktor’s, but in a completely different style. It was almost shtetl—not that Troy had ever heard that Voytek was Jewish—broad, bare, blackened boards; bare brick walls; an upright, cylindrical, wood-burning stove; a tatty, possibly Persian rug; a bursting Edwardian armchair so large she could have used it as a bed; and a litter of books and music scores, strewn everywhere, stacked on every surface, piled in every corner. Gathering dust. It would have driven Viktor mad.

  And on it’s metal stand, just in front of the door to the balcony, her cello.

  In the midst of structured chaos and benign neglect, the cello almost shone, a midbrown shade—he’d no idea of what wood cellos were made—to which the centuries had imparted a glowing sheen, a patina of use. He daren’t touch. He’d never played a stringed instrument. They looked so fragile. And ƒ-holes—where was Freud when you needed him?—always struck him as sexy.

  She emerged, the only changes seemed to be a grip in her hair to stop it falling over her eyes and a pair of espadrilles on her feet. She reached down to the loose Italian tiles that formed a fire drop in front of the stove and picked up a roll-up machine to make a cigarette.

  “You want?”

  Troy shook his head. Waited while quick fingers rolled a cigarette as thin as a knitting needle—the fine, white tube in her fingertips, the darting tongue along the gummed line. Oddly, he could see the same grace and care in rolling a quick smoke as in her fingers stopping
the strings on the neck of her cello. It was as though the woman didn’t have a clumsy bone in her body.

  The flick of a match with her thumbnail, Bogart-style; a single, deep drag, then, “Ask, Inspector. Ask whatever.”

  “You told my brother that you saw Viktor on the night he died?”

  “Yes. That is so. I dropped in late. I had been to flicks. Viktor never cared for flicks. I go alone. I call by on my way home.”

  “About what time?”

  “After ten. Maybe half past ten. I catch tram from West End to Chelsea Bridge and walk.”

  “How was he?”

  “Well, he not talk like a man about to kill himself. He dressed, as you say, to the nines, but Viktor often did that. He was not a man for mufti. He was drinking Armagnac, his favourite. He offer to open wine for me but I say no, it will keep me awake. So we talk.”

  “About what?”

  “About when we first met. Then I get ready to go home, and he say, ‘Play for me, play for me, Méret.’ So I play, and then I go.”

  “Did you go into the back of the apartment?”

  “Not this time. We did not always make love, Inspector, and there was no reason to hide.”

  “But you have, the both of you, hidden the relationship.”

  “Inspector, I am twenty-four years old, Viktor was sixty-six. A gap of forty-two years. Why would we invoke the judgement of society upon us? Besides, there are things you not know. Viktor was my tutor back in Vienna before the war. He was friend of my father’s, friend of many of my father’s friends—I was ten years old when I first went to him for lessons. It would be very foolish to give anyone the right idea about me and Viktor, even foolisher to give them the wrong one. Not that I think there are many left alive in Vienna who knew us . . . but . . .”

  “So, when you say you talked about the time you first met, you were talking about Vienna, not your arrival here?”

  “Yes. Vienna. Vienna in 1934.”

  “Did that make Viktor sad?”

  “No, Mr. Troy. It made me sad.”

  “Did you see the gun?”

  “No. I had no idea Viktor owned a gun. I think he probably bought it only a few days ago, but that is just my feeling.”

  “Did you know how Viktor slept?”

  “You mean his room? Of course I knew. I think perhaps he slept that way ever since he was released by the Germans. I never saw his private quarters in Vienna, but it would not surprise me to learn that he had a room there just like the one he had here.”

  “If he had, what would it tell you?”

  She’d reached the end of her cigarette. She took the grip from her hair, splinted the fag end with it and drew two or three more puffs. Troy realized that that was why the grip had been there all along.

  “Tell me? You mean, does this hold the key to Viktor’s suicide? Is it to be explained by his time in Oranienburg or on the Isle of Man? That this is why Viktor killed himself ? A little too easy perhaps? The first thing I did when I moved in here was to cut the wires on the doorbell. I cannot stand the sound of bells. Everything in the camps was governed by the sound of bells. Every aspect of life was summoned by bells. Bells to work, bells to eat, bells to shit. I don’t care if I never hear a bell again. But I wouldn’t kill myself if I did. Mr. Troy, I don’t know why Viktor killed himself. Viktor had no reason to kill himself.”

  “What was it you played?”

  She stood up, opened the lid on the unlit stove, and flicked the last fraction of her cigarette into it. The grip went back into her hair, tucking it out of her eyes once more, and she crossed the room to her cello, sat in the window, and played.

  Troy knew the piece at once, it was a Fauré elegy. Originally written as a duet for cello and piano. Three mournful minutes, in which he learnt what it was he liked about the cello. It was an instrument that fell asleep in your arms. The piano was an instrument you assaulted—biff, bash, bosh—and then it kicked you back. Rockers and swayers notwithstanding, there were really only two kinds of cellist—nodders and not nodders. Voytek did not nod—the tilt of her head in contrast with the frenetic, voltaic activity of her fingers on the neck of the cello, the head lolling almost motionless against the instrument, not nodding, not bobbing. He’d never claim the piano was an extension of himself, it would be as sensible as laying claim to a weaving loom—the cello was Voytek, Voytek was the cello, nurse, baby, lover. Strings bowed and plucked for her immersive bliss and his delight.

  When she had finished, she said, “Viktor and I played it together many times. He made an arrangement just for piano and another just for cello last year. I didn’t see it as a separation, but now I have the power of hindsight. His last wish was that I should play the piano version, rather than the cello. I don’t know why, perhaps he wanted to hear the sound of his Bechstein under fingers other than his own, to die with that sound still in his ears—but then I didn’t know it was going to be his last wish.”

  “An elegy,” Troy said. “A song for the dead.”

  “When you listen to Mozart’s requiem, or Fauré’s own for that matter, do you always think of the dead? Did you weep at Viktor’s playing of Massenet’s elegy as his encore? Read what you will into Viktor’s choice. I read nothing.”

  At the door, her hand on the latch, Troy hesitating at the top of the stairs, he said, “Could I ask you . . . the scent you’re wearing?”

  “I not wearing scent today.”

  “Then, perhaps yesterday . . . and before that many times in Viktor’s apartment?”

  “Oh, I see. Soir de Paris, Mr. Troy. And I thought I had been sparing with it. I have only the one bottle. I found it in my parents’ flat. After the war.”

  It seemed to Troy that she had uttered the last three words as a whole, separate sentence, and that it had the same import and inflection, the same stand-alone, conceptual quality the English gave to “before the war.” It was a time, it was a place, it was an idea . . .

  §126

  Troy had only been to the crematorium once—for the funeral of Sigmund Freud in 1939.

  He knew he’d blend in—the world of classical music would turn out en masse for Viktor Rosen. All Troy had to do was be anonymous. The place was packed; half of central Europe, half the orchestras in Britain were represented here. Rod and Cid were up front. It would be typical of Rod to want to make a speech. Sir Thomas Beecham was up front—they’d have to shove a cue ball in his mouth for him not to make a speech. And Voytek was up front. Troy had no idea whether she’d say anything or not—whether she would speak for her generation of young musicians nurtured by Viktor or whether she would, however inadvertently, cast herself as the widow.

  It was a purely secular affair. Troy would not have known from anything said that day that Viktor was Jewish, and was pretty certain that he had left instructions to that effect. He wondered if Rod and Beecham had done a deal: Beecham, in a rich, almost caricature English voice that rose at the end of every sentence—a little too high-pitched, a little too ripe—paid tribute to Viktor the musician. Rod paid tribute to Viktor the man: the way they had met, which Troy had heard a hundred times, although oddly enough never from Viktor’s point of view . . . how difficult it was to know Viktor . . . his combination of “tolerance and irascibility” . . . “one who did not suffer fools gladly” (which was English for “rude”) . . . his “unpredictability” . . . and what was more unpredictable than the manner of his dying?

  Lastly, Méret Voytek stepped up to speak, a scrap of paper in her hand. All neat in a ballerina “new look”—the page-boy, tightly nipped jacket, the long flared skirt. Effortlessly frail. She glanced down at the paper only once, and then recited from memory, word perfect if somewhat accented:

  Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep!

  He hath awakened from the dream of life.

  ’Tis we who, lost in stormy visions, keep

  With phantoms an unprofitable strife,

  And in mad trance strike with our spirit’s knife


  Invulnerable nothings. We decay

  Like corpses in a charnel; fear and grief

  Convulse us and consume us day by day,

  And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay.

  He has outsoared the shadow of our night.

  Envy and calumny and hate and pain,

  And that unrest which men miscall delight,

  Can touch him not and torture not again.

  From the contagion of the world’s slow stain

  He is secure; and now can never mourn

  A heart grown cold, a head grown grey in vain

  Nor, when the spirit’s self has ceased to burn,

  With sparkless ashes load an unlamented urn.

  He wondered how she had come across “Adonais.” It would be typical of Rod to have steered her toward some classic in the English canon—their father would have relished the moment, leafing through his books of poetry to give her what she wanted—untypical of Rod to have chosen it. It wasn’t his view of life, of anyone’s life, let alone Viktor Rosen’s. Besides, the urn, whatever became of it, wherever it lodged, would hardly be unlamented.

  Throughout, Troy had stood next to Billy Jacks. On the other side of Billy stood Arthur Kornfeld. He heard Billy whisper, none too softly, “S’truth. What the bleedin’ ’ell was that?”

  And Arthur had replied, “Billy, I will say to you what Viktor would say were he living at this moment. Mein Gott, do you Cockneys know nothing? It was Shelley. Shelley writing on the death of Keats in eighteen and . . . whatever.”

  “Yeah, well, I ain’t none the wiser.”

  Troy had always wanted to meet Beecham. Now, as they all dispersed, was not the moment. It was a musician’s moment. He edged his way through the crowd. Beecham was kissing Voytek, one cheek then the other as Troy slipped past unnoticed, or so he thought.