by John Lawton
§ 2
It must have been two or three days later. He was waiting on the consultant’s round, waiting on his petty god and the news of his own imminent escape. His mother sat once more at his bedside, his sister, as ever, out in the corridor preferring a tacky novel to their mother’s grapplings with poetry, although Masha’s influence must have prevailed to some extent. When the old woman had flourished a volume of Hardy’s verse, Troy’s spirits had floated on visions of Wessex life and rumpy-pumpy in haystacks, only to crash to earth when she began to read ‘The Voice’ from Hardy’s poetry of the last years before the Great War. Her accent was atrocious.
‘“Woman much missed how you coll to me, Sayink zat you are not as you were. . .”’
And he realised she was about to embark on a cycle of dead woman songs – Hardy’s own Frauentotenlieder.
‘“. . . Zuss I; faltering fowadd, leafes around me follink, Wint oosink sin srough ze zorn from nowidd, And ze woman collink.” ’
Jesus Christ. Dead women collink? What had possessed her to pick that? Innocence? Not grasping what the man was banging on about. It’s about death, dammit! Hardy’s murky obsession with dead women. Far, far too close to Troy’s own.
Saved by the bell once more. The consultant breezed in like a man late for a dead cert at the bookie’s, glanced at his chart and said, ‘You can go, Sergeant Troy. Healing up nicely, wouldn’t you say?’ And did not wait for an answer.
‘I shall let you dress,’ said Lady Troy. ‘Masha and I will be outside.’
From the other side of the bed Troy heard the impatient sigh of the Big Man folding his News Chronicle. ‘Struth, old cock, I thought she’d never stop. I don’t know who this Hardy bloke is . . . but wot a miserable git! D’ye reckon everyone he knew popped their clogs?’
‘Who cares? Help me out of here before I pop mine.’
Troy swung his legs to the floor, felt the first rush of dizziness and paused, staring down to where white knees peeped from under his nightshirt, pale as jellyfish.
‘Awright, cock?’
The Big Man loomed over him, big and round and blue in his Heavy Rescue uniform, blocking half the light from the window, like a tethered anti-aircraft balloon floating in his flight path. Troy felt the rush of an old, familiar feeling breaking in his mind. He wondered out loud: ‘You know, this has been bloody awful. I was the kind of child who got everything going, mumps, measles, scarlet fever . . .’
‘Wot kid didn’t, matey?’ said the Big Man without sympathy. ‘Bet you didn’t get rickets, though, nor pneumatic fever – not toff’s diseases, are they?’
Every so often the Big Man would do this to him, remind him, whether he liked it or not, of their respective places in the layers of the big onion that was English society. Troy spent a split second wondering what pneumatic fever might be, then gave up. ‘Can I finish?’
‘Be my guest.’
‘I was a sickly child – but nothing prepared me for this, I mean for the last six months. For all this . . . recuperation . . . all this fucking hospitalisation . . .’
‘Mind yer French, young Fred, there might be ladies about.’
‘. . . and if I thought . . . I mean if I thought I’d have to go through this again . . . ever . . . I mean . . . spend this much time in hospital . . .’
He had no ending to the sentence, but the Big Man did: ‘If you want to avoid all this malarkey in the future, then you best do what that Klankiwitch bloke and Bob Churchill are telling you.’
‘You know about that?’
‘O’ course. Mr Churchill and me, we go back a long way. Till when you was a nipper, I should think. He’s done a fair bit of the old owsyerfather for the guv’ner, has Mr Churchill.’
Troy had given up trying to find out who the ‘guv’ner’ was. He was clearly the Big Man’s employer, and once in a while the Big Man would refer to himself as a ‘gentleman’s gentleman’, but declined to solve the mystery. Troy had known him intermittently since the end of last winter, when he had come across him tending a pig on an allotment carved for wartime necessities out of the former elegance of Tedworth Gardens in Chelsea. The last time Troy had discharged himself from hospital, in June, it had been the Big Man who had bundled him up like a baby and rushed him to hospital and, when it came down to it, saved his life. Troy had never been really grateful to him. It had all got in the way of an indulgent self-pity that had left him wanting to die.
‘So you think I’m going to get myself killed as well, do you?’
‘You can bet your best baggy underpants on it, old cock.’
The Big Man held underpants in one hand, trousers in the other. As Troy snatched them from him he remembered a phrase of Dorothy Parker’s that came close to the approximation of gratitude: ‘You might as well live.’
‘Might as well live? Wossat mean, cock?’
‘Nothing,’ said Troy. ‘It doesn’t matter. You’ve won this one.’
§ 3
The Big Man wrapped him in a blanket – a parcel awaiting collection once again – and put him into the back seat of Troy’s father’s 1937 V12 Lagonda. The last time Troy had seen the car it had been up on blocks. Now it purred softly at the pavement, like a big cat lazing away a savannah afternoon. ‘Where did you get the tyres?’ he asked.
The Big Man tapped the side of his nose. One of those infuriating ask-no-questions-be-told-no-lies gestures he seemed to delight in using.
‘The petrol?’ Troy persisted.
‘Your family pooled their coupons to give you a smooth ride home. An invalid carriage fit for a king.’
‘How about an invalid carriage fit for an invalid?’ said Troy remembering how he had got the car up to 110 m.p.h. on the Great North Road one day in 1938.
‘Trust me,’ said the Big Man.
Troy found himself in the back, next to Masha, his mother the best part of six feet away next to the Big Man, who sat behind the steering-wheel.
Masha smiled almost sweetly at him. It was one of her great cons to be unpredictable and unreadable. Troy thought there might be a Just So story somewhere in which a deadly creature habitually smiles at its prey. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Let’s hear it.’
‘Let’s hear what?’
‘Whatever it is that you’re bursting to tell me. Whatever snatch of gossip is eating your soul at the moment.’
‘I don’t gossip.’
‘Fine. Have it your way. Bitch a little instead. You can bitch for Britain, after all.’
Masha mused, lips gently parted, one hand idly conducting some invisible orchestra. ‘Well . . . Mummy’s raised the most enormous crop of leeks for the winter.’
‘Is that the best you can do?’
‘And with no keepers and no shoot the pheasants have bred like rabbits, so we have a positive plague. Cocks duelling at it all over the place. And, of course, more pheasants means more food for foxes so we have an army of little red—’
‘Masha, for Christ’s sake.’
‘OK. OK.’ (Pause) ‘Speaking of cocks . . .’
‘Yeeees?’
‘My co-natal sibling would appear to be the object of a penetrating physiological enquiry.’
The woman was talking bollocks. Then he realised: code. A code to exclude their mother, who might have nodded off or might be listening. Co-natal sibling? Her twin, Sasha. Penetrating physiological enquiry? Fucking. Sasha had a new lover.
‘Really,’ Troy said at last. ‘Who’s she shagging now?’
‘Freddie!’
But his mother had not turned. Her ears had not pricked up at the prick. Troy concluded she had nodded off, ramrod straight, more upright asleep than she would ever manage waking. And the Big Man was in a happy world of his own, foot on the floor – flouting wartime wisdom – tearing along at over ninety, a tuneless tune humming on his lips. The outrage on Masha’s part Troy knew to be bluffery – the fond illusion the twins cherished that, whilst flinging caution to the winds themselves, they could somehow protect him from the very people the
y were. There were times their catalogue of conquests bored him, times, as now, with little else to echo in the idling mind, when it was better than nothing.
‘Anyone I know?’ he asked.
‘Nice young chap. RAF, actually. Based at Duxford. Shot up in a Hurricane. Not too bad, but too bad to fly, so he’s one of those chaps with lots of rings on his cuffs who pushes little models around a map with a sort of snooker rest.’
Troy revised his metaphor slightly – they had flung caution to the hurricanes, well, at least to a former Hurricane pilot. ‘You know,’ he said tentatively, ‘there’s something awfully familiar about that description. Didn’t you have a thing with a chap out at Duxford last September?’
‘Sort of.’
‘How sort of?’
‘Sort of yes.’
‘Sort of yes with a chap who got shot up in a Hurricane and now pushes little models around a map with a sort of snooker rest?’
‘If you put it like that, yes.’
‘How else could I put it? What you’re saying is that you passed this Wotsisname—’
‘Giles Carver-Little, actually.’
‘Whatever. This English toff with too many names gets passed from one sister to the other like a brown-paper parcel.’
‘A brown-paper parcel? No. Not at all. More like some delicacy from Fortnum’s in a little white box all done up with a pinky silk ribbon and a gold-edged card saying, “ To my darling sister, all my love Masha”.’
Good God, it was rich. He had often wondered if there was anything of which these two were not capable.
‘I mean, if you found out about something jolly good wouldn’t you tip off a mate about it?’
‘Don’t make it sound like a tip for the Derby. What you’re telling me is that the two of you are willing to share lovers.’
‘Not literally, not any more. We haven’t done threesomes for a while. But yes. I mean. Bloody hell, why not?’
‘Don’t you think it’s all a bit melodramatic? Everyone having everyone else?’
‘Not in the least. I simply let my sister in on a good thing. As for having everyone else . . . isn’t that just that Darwin chap – evolution,
survival of the fittest and all that?’
‘Herbert Spencer,’ said Troy.
Masha mused.
‘No. Can’t say I’ve had him. Don’t think I’ve ever had a Herbert, in fact. But you can’t really expect me to remember the lot now, can you? Friend of yours, is he?’
‘I meant,’ Troy persisted, with wasted logic, ‘that the survival of the fittest was said by Spencer not Darwin, and I cannot for one moment see how you can pass off what you get up to as the ascent of the species.’
‘Selective wotsit? Natural thingies?’ Masha ventured.
‘Shared shagging,’ Troy said.
‘Quite,’ said his sister. ‘I mean. Wouldn’t you?’
Troy said nothing. Yet again the woman had gone beyond the bounds of what he knew.
They rode awhile in silence. Troy had no wish to feed whatever bizarrely amoral trend of thought might be lurking deeper in the pit that was his sister’s psyche. They had crossed into Hertfordshire ten minutes ago. Home, after all, was not far away. It just seemed that way and had for a while – but as the car passed through the gateposts of Mimram (the gates having gone to make Spitfires in 1940), rounded the curving, crisply brown winter beeches at the head of the drive and the house sprang into view, Troy lost mental sight and sound of his sister. His childhood home. The rotting pile his father had bought in 1910 and had never quite finished restoring. An English country seat crossed with a Russian dacha. It was like a Mexican blanket, thought Troy, ragged at one corner where the artist had left loose threads and thus allowed his soul’s escape from his art. His father had escaped into death, and Troy’s own words to the Big Man came back to him in all their crassness – if he could get him alone he’d tell him so. ‘You might as well live’ seemed so inadequate in the face of all that Mimram now dragged out of him.
He turned to Masha, said, ‘Home.’ And thought that perhaps his inflexion had not been as intended for she said, ‘Where did you think we were going?’
§ 4
Christmas came to drive him mad. Christmas at the family home seemed tailor-made to drive him mad. It was their second without his father – Troy was certain his mother counted ‘dead Christmases’ – one of many without brother Rod, a pilot on Tempest fighters, stationed in France, or the brothers-in-law Hugh and Lawrence, both doing their bit for King and Country. It was, Troy thought, a return to the infantile: too many women to remind him that he was the baby of the family at twenty-nine and would for ever be so. Yet it was lavish in a way few English families could extend to in the winter of 1944, for his mother raised not only leeks but potatoes in her greenhouse, fresh as June for Christmas Day, turkeys in a pen on the south lawn and Brussels sprouts on a vast raised bed in her vegetable garden. She had propped up her failing limbs and dug for victory since the first blast of war in 1939. Nonetheless he had had all the gin and charades he could take by Boxing Day, so his mother suggested to him that it might be a good idea if he invited some of his ‘chums’ round for a day or two. He leapt at the chance, rang Jack Wildeve and rang Kolankiewicz.
Kolankiewicz said, ‘And your lessons, my boy?’
‘My lessons?’
‘You are bored already. Give Bob Churchill a call and get down to business.’
To his surprise Churchill readily agreed, said that he had not been to Mimram since he had personally delivered a hand-made shotgun to Troy’s father in 1928.
Churchill was last to arrive, rolling up the drive at the wheel of a ’34 Buick, a huge two-seater, complete with dickey seat propped open and covered in tarpaulin. He was in tweed, all set for a pre-war country weekend. The Big Man slid out from the passenger seat, still in his LCC Heavy Rescue outfit, and muttered ‘Wotcher.’ He unroped the snow-spattered tarp from the dickey and unloaded a pile of darkly polished, dovetail-jointed, brass-plated, mahogany carrying cases. He set them on the drive, a neat and presumably lethal pile at their feet.
‘Don’t expect me to hump the lot on me tod,’ he said.
‘You came prepared, then?’ Troy stated the obvious.
‘Oh yes,’ said Churchill. ‘We’ll tackle the lot. Smith and Wesson, Colt, Winchester, Mauser, Walther, Schmeisser – get you familiar with them all.’
The Big Man picked up two cases and stomped off into the house. Churchill fished his dinner togs from the dickey seat, crumpled on their hanger. Handed them to Troy. A black tent of a jacket and capacious trousers.
‘You came over-prepared, then?’
‘I did?’
‘We haven’t dressed for dinner since before the war. But don’t let me put you off. My mother will be delighted.’
‘Y’know, the last time I was here your father was in . . . what shall I call it? One of his moods. Not only would he not dress for dinner he wouldn’t dress at all. Spent two days in his dressing-gown . . . wouldn’t shave, often as not wouldn’t speak.’
‘He could be like that. I’ve seen dinner pass with him sitting like Banquo’s ghost at the end of the table.’
‘And at other times—’
‘You wished you knew how to make him shut up?’
‘Exactly,’ said Churchill.
‘I can promise you a more customary evening,’ said Troy. ‘We are none of us enough like the old man to put you through that again.’
He spoke too soon.
§ 5
Troy’s mother had gone to bed after the main course, leaving Troy, Kolankiewicz, Wildeve and one sister to finish the meal alone. She had been charmed by Churchill’s dressing for dinner, something Jack and Troy chose not to do and something Kolankiewicz never would, but perhaps the presence of two such trenchermen as Kolankiewicz and Churchill had proved too much for the old lady. Troy had seen few men with the appetite of Bob Churchill. But he, at least, was virtually teetotal. Kolankiewicz could drink a p
ub dry. The Big Man had declined to join them on the grounds that ‘an evenin’ of toff chat would like as not bore the britches off me and, worse, lead to me missing me favourite programme on the wireless’. A pity: Troy had wanted to see the look on his face when he realised there was a Sasha as well as a Masha. As identical twins went, they were identical. Troy had never had any trouble telling them apart, but he’d known his own brother get them mixed up; he’d known both of them to exploit the fact for all it was worth, and, as yet, time and chance had not wrought enough differences in their characters that one could drive a playing card between them. They were, as Troy was wont to think and utter, one dreadful woman with two bodies. He decided to reward the Big Man for his churlishness by letting him find out the hard way. Masha had gone home on Boxing Day: let him ‘discover’ sister Sasha for himself. All the same the Big Man had been right about toff chat. Even Wildeve was stifling yawns as Kolankiewicz unburdened himself of one of the many theses he seemed to store up in a mental sack. Troy thought that conversations a bit like this, though surely less intense, must be taking place all over the country – ‘when the war is over’ had all but displaced ‘before the war’ as an opening gambit.
‘It won’t be the same,’ Churchill was saying. ‘It can’t be the same.’
‘You’re speaking professionally?’ Troy asked.
‘Indeed I am. But it’s your profession as much as mine.’
‘What are you expecting? A sudden surge in the possession of guns?’
‘Goes almost without saying. Call it the debris of war. Any war. The flotsam and jetsam. Whatever shade of government we have, whatever system we set up for the demobilisation of a million men-at-arms, we’ll never get back so much as a fraction of the handguns we’ve issued.’
‘Souvenirs,’ Wildeve offered. ‘All my uncles kept an old Webley in the desk drawer throughout the twenties. We boys thought it was great fun. Never saw one fired, though.’
