A Lily of the Field

by John Lawton

  But Gibbs wound up with, “So, I cleared the flat, I cleared the studio.”

  “May I come in?”

  Gibbs’s natural suspicion of a policeman seemed to be retreating in the hope that Troy might be the solution to his problem.

  In the darkness of the corridor, dimly lit by an overhead bulb in a dirty shade, the enormity of the task struck Troy. He was looking for a needle in a haystack. God knows how many of Skolnik’s appalling portraits were lodged here.

  Troy looked at the twenty or so facing outwards and said, “Perhaps if I described the one I was looking for?”

  “They all look the same to me.”

  “This one was on the easel at the time Mr. Skolnik was killed. It was different. It was . . . very green . . . and a bit red.”

  “Do you mean his Venus travesty?”

  “I do,” said Troy.

  “In here,” said Gibbs, leading off into his parlour, where the offending work was propped in front of the fireplace.

  Lately, and for that matter throughout his time as a detective, Troy had become accustomed to being the alien presence in private interiors. It had become almost a game he and Jack played—guess the room from the person, or the person from the room. When the game failed it could do so spectacularly, as in the case of both Viktor and Voytek. But he had guessed Mr. Gibbs aright. The sheer shabbiness of 101 Charlotte Street and its inhabitants was thoroughly offset by the sense of order Mr. Gibbs had created. Every wall was lined with bookshelves. Every shelf bore a letter of the alphabet and a subheading. Thousands of works of nonfiction, most with tiny paper slips sticking out as clear indication that they had been read as well as ordered. Far from escaping from the workplace, Mr. Gibbs was in his element.

  “I suppose I couldn’t quite believe it. I brought it in to have a good look. Then I got intrigued by the Russian inscription. I taught myself Russian during the war . . . all those long nights in the shelters . . . and it’s been sitting here until I get around to finding out what it is André was quoting.”

  “I can save you the trouble,” said Troy. “It’s from Pushkin. Boris Godunov.”

  “A bit before my time,” said Gibbs.

  Spoken like a man for whom Russia did not exist until the revolution, thought Troy.

  “Does it remind you of anyone?” he asked. “Anyone André knew? Anyone who might have modelled for him?”

  “Well, we all did that. It was part of the price of knowing André. Somewhere out there there’s one of me waiting to be painted over.”

  Gibbs tilted his head a little, as though countering the angle of Venus’s head.

  “No,” he said.

  The original was golden-haired, the eyes soft and scarcely focussed. This goddess had blonde hair, darker eyebrows, and the eyes were black and hard.

  “Do you mind if I take it with me?”

  “I was hoping you’d take more than one,” said Gibbs. “I was hoping to sell André’s clothes. Fat chance. In the end, I got threepence off the rag-and-bone man. But he wouldn’t take the paintings. Said he’d call back if he ever needed a new roof for his shed.”

  Having no shed, nor any need of a shed, Troy politely declined the offer.

  On the doorstep, Gibbs said, “Did you ever find out who shot him?”

  “No,” said Troy, and damned himself with a back-tracking, far-too-careless, “But I will.”

  Afterwards, walking down towards Oxford Street clutching his cumbersome load, wishing he’d driven over to Skolnik’s, he weighed up his remark, remembered what Onions had told him and what he had told Onions, and realized that he would find out and that the commitment was to himself rather than to anyone else.

  §143

  Troy had little that was new in his sitting room. In that respect his room was like Laura Narayan’s or Méret Voytek’s or even like that of Mr. Gibbs—it was all hand-me-down, and past its best, but less from its being a matter of make do and mend than of some sense of the tatty chic of heirlooms. The only thing he’d bought was the Bösendorfer upright piano—he had bought it impulsively and without regret one day in the summer of 1940—and that was far from new. Made in 1907, it was older than he was. He had two small Constables above the mantelpiece—dummy runs for works much larger, depicting near-identical views of Dedham Vale—that his father had picked up for next to nothing in an auction nearly forty years ago. If he moved them both and stuck in a hook somewhat higher up the wall there was just enough room to hang the Venus travesty.

  Stepping back, he took in the posture of the goddess, the sexiness of ƒ-holes, and for the first time he could see what it was Skolnik had meant to add on the last day of his life. In her left hand, Venus was surely meant to be holding a cellist’s bow? She was the cellist. A left-handed cellist. And she herself was the cello, its neck invisible between her breasts, the bridge below her groin hidden in blonde tresses. And . . . what tune was she playing?

  He called the left-handed cellist and invited her to an impromptu dinner. If she said yes, he’d go on the scrounge.

  “I’m not a bad cook. I know how to spin out the ration and I’ll be at my mother’s this afternoon. She grows all her own vegetables.”

  “I don’t need convincing, Troy. Just don’t serve cabbage or turnips. Even if your mother has grown them and blessed them.”

  §144

  A flying visit to his mother out at Mimram in Hertfordshire yielded off-the-ration goodies—not so much loaves and fishes as spuds and fishes—spuds and fishes, and straggly spinach, and a fulsome head of celery and leeks with a foot or more of white, blanched flesh on them, and parsley. His mother’s cook’s father, Bert, was one of a near-extinct species of rural silents. He could sit in the pub and spin out a pint of ale wordlessly over a whole evening. Troy could not recall a single word the man had uttered to him when he was a boy, and since he had attained manhood he had been graced with little more than “Gurr,” “Wosser,” and “Gertcher.” Troy had no idea what any of this meant. What was worth knowing was that Bert had a way with a fishing rod and a hat full of flies that brought in a prodigious haul. It had fascinated Troy as a boy to watch Bert tie his own fly feathers. Too old for the first war, too old even for the Home Guard in the second, Bert had watched London burn from a distance, untouched, fascinated but silent. In whatever decade he was now in, the old man still fished in the river and the lakes dotted around Mimram. Today he had been out with live bait and returned with a large pike, a sleek glossy-green marauder of still waters, which Lady Troy had willingly given to her son. Her son had willingly accepted. Not his favourite fish, or anyone’s favourite fish—a poacher’s meal if anything—but it was a gift pike and one did not look a gift pike in the gills.

  He declined the offer of turnips. He knew a recipe for stuffed pike. At some point during the war someone had stuffed a pamphlet of miserly Minstry of Food recipes through his letter box. It had taught him how to make puddings without eggs should the need arise—it never had—and how to stuff fish with celery, leek, and parsley, and pike would stuff as well as anything.

  He met his brother on the kitchen doorstep—in blue, bum-saggy ex-RAF trousers and a moth-eaten Fairisle pullover, mud, and wellies.

  “Gardening?” said Troy. “You hate gardening.”

  “King Edwards need lifting. Somebody has to do it. Do you know how hard it is to get gardeners these days?”

  In the vocabulary of the English upper and upper-middle classes, window cleaner could easily be substituted for gardener in a sentence such as Rod had just uttered. The workers no longer knew their place—the war had done for the social order . . . and Rod was just asking for it, all but begging sarcasm.

  “Now you mention it, I did hear that the Duke of Devonshire was down to his last dozen,” said Troy. “In a well-ordered society he’d still have forty or fifty, but of course we’re all equal now and a gentleman digs his own spuds. Welcome to the new Socialist Britain.”

  “Fuck off,” said Rod.

  “When Adam delv
ed and Eve span, who was then a gentleman?”

  “Chaucer?”

  “John Ball.”

  “Hmm . . . you only come here on the scrounge these days, don’t you?”

  “I have a guest for dinner. The only way to get a decent meal together these days is to scrounge.”

  “These days. Such a telling phrase. Is it any more precise than now?”

  “I couldn’t care less. You created these days, Minister, not me.”

  Rod swiftly changed the subject in an effort to wrong-foot Troy.

  “Dinner guest? A woman?”

  “Yes.”

  “Anyone I know?”

  Troy thought better of the truth and said, “No.”

  It wasn’t that Rod would draw the wrong conclusion, it was simply that any conclusion would be wrong. Where Viktor was concerned, Troy did not trust Rod’s emotions—but Rod walked off muttering “high time you got yourself fixed up,” and Troy knew he was far from the scent. It was the sort of elders’ and betters’ remark—misplaced, patronizing—he usually replied to with a youthful, “fuck off,” but Rod had beaten him to that one.

  He said nothing.

  §145

  Voytek arrived with the last of the day. Nights beginning to draw in. Just as the old boy who lit the gas lamps came around with his hooked pole. There were four lamps in Goodwin’s Court: three on brackets—one on the corner where the alley bent, under which Ruby the whore stood to advertise her trade; one outside Troy’s house; one at the back of Giovanni’s restaurant; and one on a post that shone through the arch from Bedfordbury. At best they threw soft hoops of light down to the ground; in mist or fog they glowed like angels glimpsed at a distance—less faithful light than self-adoring aura.

  As she knocked on Troy’s door, the pole yanked on the chain that sparked the gas and a halo of light slowly rippled out over the short, dark figure of Voytek.

  The lamp lighter doffed his cap to the lady, said “Evenin’ guv’ner,” to Troy, and ambled off towards the arch. Voytek watched him go, stared silently as he reached up with his pole and lit the lamp on the other side. Troy found himself mentally totting up two encounters in one day with living anachronisms—Old Bert and the lamp lighter with his prewar deference. Or was it his postwar piss-take?

  “Such light,” Voytek said.

  Troy remembered Ruby’s remarks about the postwar lights, wondered if Voytek felt the same but felt disinclined to ask.

  “Paris in nineteen forty-five. I had lived so long in darkness. Paris was lit up. I felt . . . I felt . . .”

  “Washed clean in light?” he ventured, in Ruby’s words.

  “No. The opposite. Seared. Scorched. Scarred. I burnt in such light. As though every secret should be searched out and illuminated for all the world to see.”

  “Do you have many secrets?”

  She said nothing. Stood in front of Skolnik’s atrocious portrait and stared at it.

  Troy ducked into the kitchen, returned with an open bottle of Brunello di Montalcino that he’d been saving since his last trip to Italy in 1939. “The good stuff” as his dad would have said.

  She turned her back on the painting without comment, without apparently recognizing herself, thanked him for the wine, and said, “I felt I belonged in darkness.”

  “With your secrets?”

  “We all have those, Troy. You can make too much of a word. A secret may not be world shattering, it may just be a private, a very private piece of self.”

  He heard the unspoken touché, and decided empathy might be better than enquiry.

  “I have plenty of pieces like that. A jigsaw box full. Things that are probably harmless that I’d never tell anyone, all the same.”

  “Exactly,” she said. “Harmless but secret.”

  She could probably go on lying all night. So could he. The difference was he knew they were both lying.

  He slowed his pace. He never thought he gobbled his food, and to gobble pike with all its small bones was nigh on impossible, but she ate so slowly he was in danger of finishing his plate while hers was three-quarters full.

  She noticed. Said, eyes on her food, not on him, “I learned not to bolt my food. That had its risk. What you had not yet eaten could be stolen. And while there was nothing to be savoured in grey bread and watery soup, the more slowly I ate the more filling it seemed. I suppose it’s the power of illusion. But it seemed a worthwhile trick to play on myself. And now I find I cannot stop.”

  “I remember when the first bananas arrived after the war. Children had no idea how to ‘open’ a banana, and I saw one of my nieces swallow one so fast she threw up most of it seconds later like a dog that’s emptied its bowl in a single gulp.”

  “But we all empty our bowls. At whatever speed. And we all break the polite rules of the table and wipe our plates with bread.”

  “Well . . . you’ll never see my mother do that, but yes, most of us do. I think we’ve become a generation that will always eat what is put before us. Speaking of which, there is more.”

  “Thank you, but sufficient is sufficient.”

  “I have an orange for dessert. We could split it.”

  When he returned with the orange, Voytek had moved to the hearth rug and curled up with her legs underneath her. Troy peeled it with his thumbnails, digging into the pocky skin and tearing. He held out a half-moon of segments to her. Instead, she picked the peel up off the rug, scratched the skin to produce a burst of mist, pressed it to her face, and inhaled.

  “All smells are precious. All good smells. Not death or decay or shit. The good ones. The ones you can lose.”

  “I don’t wish to put you off your orange, but when I was at school, there was such a thing as a good fart.”

  “Spoken like a dog, Troy.”

  She was sitting close to the gas fire, much the way Onions did—but where Onions seemed no longer to care whether it was lit or not, she was almost toasting her hands against the bars, palms up at right angles to her wrists, rotating slowly, like paddles, as she stared at them, just as she had after Viktor’s funeral. Troy expanded his makeshift theory of “never enough of enough” from an attempt at understanding Onions to include anyone who’d ever been so cold they thought they’d never be warm again. It was possible she’d come close to dying of cold. It was possible she’d tell him this sooner or later.

  He fetched a second bottle of Brunello ’37 from under the sink, with every intention of getting her drunk and loquacious, and had the corkscrew in his hand when she said, “Viktor told me you not practice enough.”

  “He was right.”

  For a moment the corkscrew stole his attention. Odd—after all, he’d used it for years, and not for the first time tonight. It was as ornate as the Fabergé gun that had killed André Skolnik. It was as ornate as the Fabergé cigar clipper. But for the incongruency of it ever being part of the same set, Troy thought it would match the kit his father had left on his desk. He was pretty certain his father had given it to him. He just couldn’t remember when. He had snapped out of the reverie, pulled the cork, flipped it neatly into the bin, and was about to pour for both when she said, “Play for me now, Troy. Play me one of your jazz songs.”

  Troy stuck the bottle and the corkscrew on top of the Bösendorfer and lifted the lid.

  “Anything in particular?”

  “No. I do not know jazz. It hardly touched my youth. After the Nazis came it was forbidden to listen to it. They called it degenerate.”

  Troy did degenerate. Did it in spades. It gave him a broad brief. He had always been partial to the music of Hoagy Carmichael. Just before the war there had been a forgettable Hollywood film starring the delightfully erratic John Barrymore, for which Hoagy had written one of his best songs, “The Nearness of You,” and someone—Troy could never remember who—had turned in one of his best lyrics: “It’s not the pale moon . . . dooby doo doo . . .” If it hadn’t reached Europe that was hardly surprising, but during the war Glenn Miller had recorded it and, year
s after his death, was there anywhere the sound of Glenn Miller did not now reach?

  It occurred to him that he could play this as she and Viktor had played Debussy—he could add notes, flatten them, sharpen them . . . but would she notice? In all likelihood she would not know the song, and if she did, in all likelihood she would take anything he might do to the song as “jazzing.” He played it straight, or as straight as his jazz fingers would allow.

  As he finished she appeared next to him on the piano stool, nudged him none too gently with her hip to make room for her.

  “A Bösendorfer? I played one as a child. I would go home from lessons with Viktor on his concert Bechstein and practice on an 1859 Bösendorfer upright.”

  “This is a little newer. 1907.”

  “Viktor also said your forte was Debussy.”

  “Imbibed the Préludes with mother’s milk. And she learned them from the man himself.”

  “Really?”

  “He taught her in Russia for a while. Long before the revolution. Just before it, they both found themselves in Paris. He was writing the Préludes then.”

  “Russia? Ah . . . that could explain why some of them are so miserable. I always thought it was raining in Debussy’s world but perhaps it was snowing instead.”

  Troy took this as his cue. Played the most miserable sodding prelude he could think of, La cathédrale engloutie—a stark, languid bog of belllike semibreves—dans une brume doucement sonore—guaranteed to make you reach for the booze to englout your sorrows in brume, in bog . . . and he tweaked it with sharps and flats, overarpeggiated, gave it a meaningless code, and still she did not notice.

  He handed her a glass of Brunello. They did not move. She sipped at her wine, moved her left hand silently across the keyboard playing invisible chords.

  Suddenly she was looking at Troy, her dark eyes only inches from his dark eyes.

  “Did Viktor teach you En blanc et noir?”