A Lily of the Field

by John Lawton

  “Mr. Troy?”

  Troy looked back. Beecham was cheek to cheek with some other “gel.” Voytek was looking at him.

  “You are driving back into town?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  She stepped closer, held out her hand. Thinking she meant to shake his, Troy reciprocated—instead she clutched it the way a child clutches its mother’s, more holding hands than shaking. Her gloved hand wrapping itself in his gloveless.

  “Please, take me home.”

  He apologized for the state of his car: the shot springs, the worn upholstery.

  She said, “When I was girl in Vienna, all cars were like this.”

  But the bait of small talk had been batted back. She said nothing all the way down through Hampstead and Marylebone, across Knightsbridge and Belgravia.

  He turned into Dilke Street. She’d closed her eyes miles back, and only opened them as the car stopped.

  “Do you have time? Then park car. Come inside.”

  Inside, the little black hat with its little black veil was tossed carelessly across the room and the little black jacket followed. She sat on the overstuffed armchair, appeared to notice for the first time that she was wearing black gloves, tore them off, and threw them at the wall. Troy sat down opposite her, perched on the edge of his seat, wondering where all this was leading.

  She was staring down at her hands, turning them slowly, knuckles up, palms up, as though they were not her own and had been grafted on by some mad Frankenstein—and as the tears burst in her eyes she buried her face in her hands and wept loudly and without restraint.

  Troy did not move. There seemed to be nothing she wanted from him but his presence. Buried in her hands she had little need of his. When the volume of her grief diminished, Troy got up quietly, found the kitchen, found her tea ration and a kettle, and made tea. The kettle boiled so slowly on the pathetic jets of gas that idleness poked him into curiosity and he wandered out of the kitchen to open whatever door came next.

  It was her bedroom. A rough palliasse upon the floor, an orange box next to the bed, a candle in a tin holder, and a battered enamel cup on the shelf beneath. Splayed upon the bare boards of the floor, a large, cream-coloured French paperback with torn, feathery edges—Editions Gallimard: Memoires par Hector Berlioz. Only the choice of book was different.

  When he carried the tea tray back to the sitting room, the black shoes had been kicked off, the legs were tucked up beneath her and her head was resting on one outstretched arm, and she was silent.

  Troy put the cup where she could reach it, and when he spoke she made no response. He knelt and looked in her face—her eyes were closed and she was asleep. As he stood, he noticed for the first time, on the outstretched left arm, just beyond the spread of her bleached hair, bold and blue upon the pale skin, a five figure tattoo ending 757 . . .

  He took out a calling card, identical to the one he had given Jordan Younghusband: Scotland Yard on one side, his address in Goodwin’s Court on the reverse, and lodged it in the saucer. She’d find it later, next to a cold cup of tea. He made as little noise as possible leaving. He wasn’t sure why she had asked him in, she had no need of him—what she needed, he told himself, was sleep.

  ‘Odd,’ he thought, descending the stairs, ‘Most odd, but there wasn’t a single mirror in the whole apartment. She must put her make-up on by a sort of braille.’

  §127

  Jack spent more time rubbing shoulders in Scotland Yard than Troy did or could. Jack had not offended quite so many people, Special Branch still spoke to him, and at the rank of sergeant he could take tea in the canteen without reducing the other tables to silence or whispers. Troy had no idea how long this would last but as long as it did, Jack would surely drop in, as he had now, with tidbits of Yard gossip, whether Troy wanted to hear it or not.

  “I just had a cuppa with two blokes from the Branch. They spent the morning at Leconfield House.”

  Troy had been scribbling notes, had not even bothered to look up as Jack swanned in and plonked himself down. He stopped.

  “Okay. I won’t pretend you don’t have my attention.”

  “Szabo.”

  “The spy?”

  “Is there another? Of course, the spy. Anyway, these blokes heard that Five have put Jim Skardon on the case—”

  Troy had never met Skardon—he doubted Jack had either—but he was known as the Secret Service’s best interrogator.

  “—and he’s got Szabo owning up nicely. But when Skardon referred to him as a ‘spy’ he protested. Told Skardon he was a British citizen and hence a traitor not a spy. Of course, the Branch think this is hilarious. Then Szabo tops it all. Skardon asks about the information Szabo passed to the Russians and he replies, ‘I cannot tell you. You don’t have clearance at that level.’ Imagine. The sheer bloody cheek of it.”

  Troy went back to his notes.

  “You know Jack—loyalty is a distorting mirror. Depends entirely on the angle you’re at. Szabo may well be quite serious. His loyalty to Russia somehow coexisting with his loyalty, nay gratitude, to Britain. Proud to be British even as he sells us up the Swannee. Nothing would surprise me. Did you know Napoleon applied for asylum here after Waterloo?”

  “You’re kidding?”

  §128

  Out of nothing more than idleness of interest, Troy relayed Jack’s gossip to Rod. Rod rattled off the standard line that Troy had predicted about the “embarrassment to the government,” “the Americans will never trust us again,” and “looking like complete clowns on the world stage.”

  And then he said, “You know, I narrowly missed meeting Szabo in nineteen forty.”

  “How was that?” said Troy.

  “When I got to the Isle of Man, they’d just shipped out a lot of internees . . . Australia, Canada . . . Szabo was one of the ones sent to Canada. One of the lucky ones. The boat bound for Australia got torpedoed. He shared a room with Arthur Kornfeld. I think they kept in touch for ages after—then Arthur quit physics. I think they drifted a little after that. Surprising really. Those sort of bonds last forever.”

  There was a pause. Troy could not have said how long. Rod, hands in pockets, head down, kicking idly at a ball of paper he’d thrown down some time before.

  Then he said, “Of course, I shared a room with Viktor.”

  There were tears welling in the corners of his eyes. And Troy realized he did not grasp the depth of his brother’s grief, and that behind Rod’s assertion that he knew of no reason why Viktor had killed himself was a crippling desire to know—to have a motive, any motive, rather than none at all.

  He said, “Rod, you’ve done the public bit—it was a terrific speech at the funeral—perhaps it’s time to do the private bit. Get all your old pals together. Have a wake for Viktor.”

  §129

  Troy would have preferred it otherwise but it was inevitable. Rod invited him to the wake.

  He arrived late, deliberately to let them be the group they were without Rod’s absurd social inclusiveness fracturing the boundaries for them, to find, yet again, inevitably, it was an all-bloke do. Cid had retreated, somewhere, and there was a spare place at the table for him between Joe Hummel and Arthur Kornfeld.

  He had not arrived late enough. Rod was on his feet, coaxing them all into paying tribute to Viktor. Troy would have raised a glass, toasted the name of Viktor Rosen, and then left them all to reminisce as they saw fit and as the memories seeped to the surface. Not Rod. Rod was the sort of arse who’d call an informal meal to crippling formal order with a teaspoon against the side of a glass making a sound like goat bells in the distance.

  Nothing, it seemed, would induce Joe Hummel to speak. Joe was quite capable of it on a topic of philosophy or politics, but not once had Troy heard him utter a statement on an emotional matter. Oskar Siebert, ever the one-man awkward squad, contented himself and his listeners with a raised glass and ‘a mensh’; Billy Jacks was terse but pointed with, “the bugger gimme a hard time, but I needed a
kick in the pants and I needed an education—Viktor was part of that, part of me learning to look outward and not up me own jacksey”; and it was up to Lou Spinetti to say something that amounted to a paragraph.

  “It was about two years ago. I’d fallen out with the boss at Quaglino’s and he’d said summink like “scarcity o’ sugar these days, who can be bothered with a bleedin’ pastry cook?” . . . I must have told Viktor because next thing I know he’s booked a table at the restaurant and brought along a dozen of his mates. You’ll remember this Rod, as you was one of ’em. Waiter asks for starters, or as we posh put it primi piatti, and Viktor says, “Signor Spinetti’s pudding for all”—and what’s more he says it in Italian, “Dolci di Signor Spinetti per tutti” . . . so there’s a bit of an argy-bargy but he gets his way. Waiter comes back for the main course—“Dolci di Signor Spinetti per tutti.” And when it comes to dessert, “Dolci di Signor Spinetti per tutti.” After that they didn’t dare take puddings off the menu, nor me off the job, an’ Rod . . . your waistline ain’t been the same since.”

  Rod’s eyes roamed the table and came to rest on Troy—but Troy was prepared for this.

  “Viktor Rosen was a complex man, but I know that at the heart of him there was a bedrock of simplicity, of simple tastes and simple needs. Viktor knew how low a man could sink, and he never let the riches he acquired, the luxury in which he could live, become a mask to hide that depth and that simplicity.”

  Troy knew this might baffle them. It would undoubtedly set everyone but Rod thinking, but he’d said as much as he could. Viktor’s room was a private matter. It died with him. Of course he had hidden it—he’d hidden the tin cup and the palliasse from everyone but himself and Méret Voytek—but that was as it should be.

  He sat down to murmurs of puzzled assent. Arthur Kornfeld topped up his glass and whispered, “Me next.”

  “I think my abiding memory, though not my fondest, is a recent one. This spring I accompanied Viktor to the Studio One cinema in Oxford Street to see the Walt Disney film Fantasia. After ten minutes of this technicolor rubbish, I whispered ‘why are we here?’ and he said, ‘because it’s shit, but it is shit about which everyone will ask me for an opinion, so I have to be able to say it’s shit, and to do that we have to sit through shit.’ We suffered Tchaikovsky and The Rite of Spring as we might witness a massacre, we giggled guiltily over Mickey Mouse as The Sorcerer’s Apprentice and at the mishmash of Schubert and Mussorgsky, and we left to sotto voce muttering from Viktor, ‘Scheiss, scheiss, scheiss.’ I have always been the devil’s advocate, and pleaded the cause of the film one last time as we rode the tram back to Chelsea. ‘Think that it might introduce children to classical music.’ And he replied, ‘It will lead them to think it is easy. Nothing worthwhile in life is easy.’ That was Viktor Rosen.”

  Rod insisted on telling them what they all knew—the tale of their rounding up by the British in 1940 . . . how most of them had met in the railway carriage whisking them to an unknown destination, how this had proved too much for some, how a man had leapt to his death under a railway train on Derby station . . . how, in the wake of this and other tragedies, they had become the ad hoc family . . . the Stinking Jews, a title bestowed upon them by a fascist that none, not even the very English Rod, the very Italian Spinetti, the lapsed Lutheran Kornfeld, and the cynical, atheistic Viennese Siebert had ever thought to shrug off. It occurred to Troy that it was a suicide that had these men gathered here, and a suicide that had brought them together in the first place. It was a disturbing symmetry. But he was pleased with the tale. It bore repetition. It was worth the telling. If there was one thing the war had given them it was this bond, something Troy could only imagine.

  “And I think what I relished most about Viktor were the inherent contrasts in him, because they amounted to a combination of the high seriousness that one would expect in anyone who’d achieved what he had, and an ability to take the mickey out of himself. I once heard him lament that a pianist I shall not name had rushed through the wonderful first movement of Mozart’s twelfth piano sonata—a piece Viktor always played with a languorous, almost lazy relish. ‘Is he late for something?’ he said to me. ‘You would think the man had a train to catch.’ The following night, with a bit too much to drink inside him, he decided to see how quickly he could play the last movement of the eleventh sonata, the “Alla Turca”—a piece every schoolboy knows so well it’s all but corny—and he wrapped it up in well under three minutes. It became his party piece when pissed. I believe my little brother once timed him at one minute fifty-five—and when fed up with audiences who demanded encore after encore, that was what he’d give them, two minutes of rushing to catch a train—he’d even look at his watch while he did it! And he looked for all the world less like the greatest pianist of his time than an outsize Chico Marx.”

  Arriving late left Troy sober, while almost everyone else was half-pissed by the time the pudding was served. Lemon meringue pie was a shocking dish to serve to half a dozen palates starved into hypersensitivity by eight long years of deprivation.

  “Where did you get the lemons?”

  Rod said, “Chap on the Foreign Affairs Committee went on a junket to Portugal. Portugal, though I’m sure you lot haven’t a clue, is our oldest ally ever, since the Treaty of Windsor in fourteen something or other . . . and being our oldest ally they showered him with gifts, including a crate of lemons.”

  “But . . . but . . . the eggs?”

  “My mother, ever the practical one, has kept chickens as long as I can remember.”

  “The sugar?”

  “I saved my rations, you dozy buggers!”

  It was more than a little like being at a children’s party, like being at one of those controlled but indulgent sugar feasts that Laura Narayan’s parents had invited him to so long ago. Looking at Arthur Kornfeld, Troy thought the man might die of ecstasy. He didn’t, but when he turned to converse with Troy it was death that was on his mind.

  “Am I right, you are the investigating officer in the matter of Viktor’s death?”

  Troy just nodded.

  “And, of course, it was suicide? Forgive me asking but I would not have said Viktor was the type. Indeed, is there a type?”

  Troy replied, “In his roundabout way, Rod has just told us that we didn’t really know Viktor. You may find echoes of that in what Lou and I both said. You’re asking me, ‘Is there a type to commit suicide?’ I don’t know. It may be that we are all capable of it. I deal in murder—all I can tell you is there is a type to murder and we are not all capable of it. We are not all capable of killing, per se.”

  “Well,” said Kornfeld. “If, as you say, there is a type to kill, I can say without doubt that Viktor wasn’t that type.”

  Troy had known Viktor Rosen as well as Kornfeld had. He could not say one way or the other whether Viktor could kill, it was scarcely a question that mattered. But he had one that did.

  He said to Kornfeld, “Rod tells me you knew Karel Szabo?”

  “Yes. I knew Karel. I knew him before he was interned by the British, I knew him as he was interned by the British, and I knew him when he returned to England to work for the British. In fact, he told me the moment he became British. And now I wonder if I knew him at all.”

  Without naming any sources, Troy gave him the gist of the Skardon story, of Szabo splitting hairs over “spy” and “treason.”

  “Ah . . . that I can understand. It is a willingness to own up to the greater of the two sins, is it not? But I can take an educated guess at why he sinned at all. I think Karel really does have loyalty to Britain, and I suspect he feels the sin of his treason acutely—but he has a greater loyalty elsewhere and that is not to the Soviet Union. No, Karel would say his loyalty was to mankind. I’m reading between the lines, the lines of more conversations than I can count, but he would say that for one power to possess the atom bomb was fatal to the species. It was fairly common around nineteen thirty-nine or nineteen forty to listen to a phys
icist elaborate on the science of nuclear fission, only to end with either a caveat on its use as a weapon or a touching hope that something so terrible would be the ultimate weapon and, as such, put an end to war. No one would dare use it. Otto Frisch, Leo Szilard, more colleagues than I could count . . . they all uttered or published statements like that. And I gather such arguments went on in Germany as well as in the U.S.A. and here. Karel . . . and remember I saw nothing of him between nineteen forty and nineteen forty-six, and by then we knew exactly what an atom bomb could do to a city . . . Karel came to the conclusion that any imbalance of power would sooner or later lead to the use of the damn thing. If two powers have the secret . . . then there would be, and I invent a phrase for him here, a balance of power.”

  “Or a balance of terror?”

  “Quite, as you Troys are wont to say. But Karel was one of those physicists the Americans sent out to Japan after the surrender in forty-five. He saw the terror. He saw the bomb tested in New Mexico, and then he saw what an identical bomb had done to Nagasaki. And it left him scarred.

  “He felt he knew America, though I doubt that he did—what had he seen? The inside of a couple of universities, a city in Tennessee so secret it wasn’t even on the map, and the desert around Los Alamos—and he said to me only a year or so ago that a world in which the United States took on the role of world policeman was an inherently unsafe world. It is America he has betrayed far more than he has betrayed Britain. Now, tell me, Inspector Troy . . . will you people hang him for this?”

  Rod summoned them to the drawing room for coffee, to more cries of, “where did you get it?” Rather than listen to any tale of an MP just back from a junket to Brazil, Troy wandered downstairs in search of his sister-in-law. He found her in the study, her three youngest children ranged on floor, cushions, and a chaise longue, posing while Laura Narayan painted them.

  “How goes it?”