by John Lawton
At last she pulled forth the final item. A Second World War issue Webley revolver. The unison communal intake of breath was like a pantomime breeze rattling the leaves.
‘With this gun my husband single-handedly held off the entire German army at Dunkirk. To listen to him tell his war stories, as one so often had to, was to realise what British pluck and British bullshit were all about. That dear Hughdie was stationed in Camberley at the time of Dunkirk never caused the slightest hiccup in the telling of the tale.’
Sasha approached the grave as though intending to lob this last item into hell with Hugh. Instead she took aim at the coffin, and blew a hole in the lid. And as though not content with this, she then leapt down into the grave, legs spread for balance, took the gun in both hands and began to empty it into the late Hugh. By the third shot the vicar and most of the mourners had fled. Troy found himself at the graveside with only Masha to turn to.
‘Rot in hell! Bastard, bastard, bastard!’
And with the sixth shot, the final cry of ‘bastard’, the gun was empty and so, it seemed, was Sasha. All passion spent.
There was silence. The birds had scattered. The cemetery seemed suddenly empty. Troy looked around. Rod had retreated to a safe distance, the two gravediggers peered round the yew tree, wide-eyed and gob-smacked.
‘Don’t just stand there. Give me a hand out, you two.’
Troy and Masha each extended an arm and pulled Sasha out. She tossed the gun over her shoulder, one last thump down in the grave, and beckoned to the gravediggers. ‘Come on, you dozy buggers. I’m not going to bury the bastard myself, am I?’
Then she turned to Troy. ‘Shall we go home now?’ And smiled.
She slipped an arm through her sister’s and wandered up the path more as though coming from a picnic than from an act of madness. Troy followed, reached into his pocket as he passed the gravediggers and bunged them each ten quid. ‘Two things,’ he whispered. ‘Not a word to anyone, and that gun stays where it is.’
‘Done,’ said the diggers, with all the deference of greed, and Troy followed on, to find the Fat Man perched on the wall, exactly as he had said, reading his copy of the Pig and Pigeon Gazette, oblivious to all that had happened. That which might wake the dead, of which there were plenty at hand, had not penetrated his self-absorption.
‘Is the do now?’ he said.
§ 13
It was about an hour and a half later. Sasha was mingling among the grazing mourners as though nothing at all had happened. Rod was pouring wine on troubled waters, and Troy was looking sceptically at what he held to be a bunch of lunatics, and wondering if, perhaps, he had not been found under a gooseberry bush, when Rod’s daughter Nattie came to tell him there was a policeman at the door.
‘One of mine?’
‘No – old Trubshawe from the village.’
‘And he’s asking for me?’
‘He’s asking for the guv’ner, whoever that might be.’
‘Fine. Show him into my study. Then find Sasha, get her upstairs and keep her there.’
Troy gathered up Rod and brother-in-law Lawrence. ‘I want the two of you there. But say nothing unless I give you the nod. This is copper stuff and I suggest you let me handle it.’
Neither argued. When Constable Trubshawe was shown into Troy’s study, the three of them had arranged themselves like actors blocking out the set in a third-rate West End drawing-room drama, the fireplace, the desk, the french windows. Troy thought they all looked like suspects in Cluedo. All they needed was the lead piping or the dagger. Trubshawe clutched his helmet, that monstrous, absurd symbol of his authority, in one hand and shook Troy’s hand with the other. Troy had known Frank Trubshawe most of his life. He’d come to the village as a constable – indeed, he was still a constable – when Troy was in his teens. All the same it was not a time to use his Christian name.
‘Good of you to call so soon, Mr Trubshawe. You know Rod, of course, and my brother-in-law, Lawrence Stafford.’
‘Mr Rod, Mr Stafford,’ Trubshawe said, with the hint of deference he could never quite lose after twenty-seven years as a village bobby. He sat on the edge of a chair, the helmet at his feet, his notebook out and flipped open.
‘I gather there was a funeral this mornin’, a member of your family, I’m told, sir.’
‘We buried my sister’s husband. Viscount Darbishire,’ said Troy.
‘I have had reports of the discharge of a firearm.’
‘Really? From whom?’
‘The vicar, sir. Canon Chasuble. Very distressed, he was.’
‘Anyone else?’
‘Oddly enough, no, sir. The gravediggers say they heard nothing, and I’ve not yet had occasion to talk to any of the mourners.’
‘They’re all here.’
‘I’m sure they are, sir.’
The remark seemed almost dismissive, a conclusion foregone.
‘However the Reverend Mr Chasuble can hardly be dismissed lightly, so if you’d care to tell me what happened . . .’
Trubshawe’s appearance was misleading, fat, fiftyish, red-faced, bald, but nobody’s fool.
‘My sister did fire a gun, yes. She was hysterical with grief. But I cannot see that any law was broken.’
‘Discharge of a firearm in a public place, sir. You know the Act as well as I do. Indeed, I should think you could quote me the relevant sub-paragraph.’
‘A public place?’
‘The cemetery.’
‘The cemetery is not public, it’s private – it is the fiefdom of the Lord of the Manor and merely loaned to the Church.’
Trubshawe mused on this, but seemed undeterred. ‘And who might the Lord of the Manor be, if you don’t mind my askin?’
‘Well,’ said Troy, ‘It was my father . . . so I suppose it is now one of us – Rod, as the eldest son, or me, as the owner of Mimram. It’s not a conversation we’ve ever had.’
‘Indeed, sir. And I am informed at least one shot was aimed at the coffin.’
Troy said nothing.
‘Which might be termed “mutilation of a cadaver”, which, as I’m sure you know, sir, is illegal under the 1716 Act and again under the revisions of 1868.’
‘We’ll never know,’ said Troy.
‘How do you reckon that, sir?’
‘Well, the body is now under several feet of earth. We cannot simply dig it up and look. That would require an exhumation order from either a judge or a coroner, and I do find myself wondering if, without any further corroborating evidence, we should pursue the matter to that extent.’
‘Further corroborating evidence?’
‘Quite,’ said Troy. ‘Unless you care to talk to my entire family, who are, almost needless to say, in mourning . . . you know, grief, shock . . . all that sort of thing.’
Trubshawe flipped his notebook shut without a word written. Looked from Troy to Rod and from Rod to Lawerence. Nobody spoke. A nod from Troy, and Lawrence, with his insatiable hack’s curiosity, would be in like lightning, but Troy didn’t nod.
‘I’ll thank you for your time, gentlemen,’ Trubshawe said at last. ‘And I’ll be off.’
Troy walked with Trubshawe to the front door. He put his helmet back on, tucked the strap into a cleft between his many chins, clutched the handlebars of his bike, and said, ‘How much did you slip the gravediggers, sir, if you don’t mind my askin’?’
‘Tenner each,’ said Troy.
‘Hmmm,’ said Trubshawe musing again. ‘That seems to be about the going rate. Certainly did the trick.’
‘Doesn’t pay to be stingy at a time like this.’
‘Indeed, sir. Might I also ask where the gun is now?’
‘In the grave with my late brother-in-law.’
‘Then we’ll say no more about it. Dare I say, sir, you’ve got away with it?’
Troy said nothing.
‘But sometimes, sir, don’t you wonder just how much you can get away with, and that one day maybe you won’t? It’s one thing, a bunch of toff
s getting the best of an old-timer like me who’s never made it past constable, but you play in a bigger league, don’t you, sir?’
Trubshawe wasn’t smiling exactly, but, equally, he seemed to be speaking without resentment, as though the point so made was of purely philosophical interest.
‘Did you never fancy life at the Yard, Mr Trubshawe?’
‘No, sir. I like a world where black is black and white is white. The – what would ye call ’em? – the ambergooities of your world wouldn’t sit toowellwithme.’
With that he scooted up his bike, flung one leg over the saddle and rattled off down the drive.
Troy found he rather envied Trubshawe. He’d been a copper almost as long, and well remembered the days before the ambergooities of the job had made themselves obvious to him . . . when the world had been black and white or he could at least pretend that it was.
§ 14
It was only a few days later. Troy had spent the afternoon sitting in the yard at the front of his London house, pretending to read the daily papers, occasionally watching print dance like clumsy hippopotafairies across the page.
The papers seemed to have next to nothing to say for themselves. He had read all he could stand of the exploits of Lord Steele and his headline-hogging wife Sylvia – she of the gold-plated Daimler, a woman who seemed to have no other purpose in life than to spend her husband’s fortune. Ted Steele was, as he reminded the press on every occasion, a self-made man. Conspicuous consumption was his wife’s prerogative. Earned, not inherited. And when he’d said his piece he stood next to his wife, as the photographers flashed away, and let her prattle on. He struck Troy as a faintly comic figure, rich, vulgar and foolish, looking, at fifty-something just a bit too old for the thirty-year old woman on his arm.
Troy supposed that they might be a symbol of the age. That was the sort of phrase his brother used, and whilst Troy hadn’t the first idea what they symbolised, he felt pretty certain Rod would. He could imagine the conversation now. ‘What, brer, is the symbolic value of a peer of the realm and his tarty wife dressing to the nines and visiting a coal pit in Derbyshire or opening a town bypass in evening dress and a tiara and pronouncing, as they are wont, on matters of which they know bugger all?’ And Rod would look serious, rev up his argument and embark on his thesis of the self-made man. Perhaps that was all it was – the self-made man was post-war man, or at least what post-war man aspired to, a chancer who saw his chance and took it. We would all be rich if we could. Meanwhile Rod, the man of 1945, of socialism, idealism and the Welfare State, would try to convince the British of such matters as ‘the common good’ and fought a losing battle. The British subscribed to the Welfare State whilst sincerely hoping to be rich, and saw no contradiction. Even Ted Steele was a member of the Labour Party. Indeed, for a couple of years he’d been a Labour MP. Troy wondered if he’d actually voted Labour before his elevation. To be a paid-up Labour Party member, whilst privately voting Conservative, now that really would be symbolic of the age. That needed no explaining.
And when the newspapers slipped from his lap he had watched summer bloom in the southern sky. Even the most blurred vision could not have missed the great swirling billows of cloud blowing offstage eastward to make way for the June blue heaven.
Come evening, he had propped open the front door, stuck Thelonious Monk on the gramophone and treated those Londoners who used Goodwin’s Court as a cut-through to the joys of ‘Smoke Gets In Your Eyes’ and ‘Hackensack’.
At dusk a figure appeared in his doorway: Anna in one of her many summer dresses – this one red with the black silhouettes of flowers. ‘Why are you sitting here?’
‘Would you believe “It’s where I live” as an answer?’
‘I might. If it weren’t for the fact that you have a perfectly decent house out in the sticks. There’s no need to sit here being miz.’
‘I am not sitting. I am, as you will observe, lying. And I’m not miserable. I am. . .’
Content was not the word. He was not content. Happy was not the word. He was not happy. He was Monkish, but he saw no point in telling her that, and let the sentence hang.
‘Must be this awful music, then. I don’t know what you see in it. It’s all so sodding . . . well . . . miserable. Plonk plink plonk. I’m sure you’d be much happier in the country – especially now the weather’s improved a bit – where you wouldn’t be on your own, where you wouldn’t be fending for yourself, where there are maids and a cook, and the Fat Bloke looking after your pig.’
‘Is he?’ Troy asked.
‘Yes. I gather you rather blew him out when he offered to look after you here.’
Had he? Troy had a half-way decent recollection of this and he rather thought the conversation had gone ‘You need anything, cock?’, ‘No.’
‘I know for a fact he’s looking after your pig. I had that chap he works for on the phone asking if I’d seen him lately. What’s the point in having a gentleman’s gentleman who buggers off half the time, was pretty much the gist.’
‘I didn’t know you knew him.’
‘Patient,’ Anna said simply, and Troy knew there was no point in even asking her for a name. She’d invoked her confidentiality clause much as one would slap down the Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card when playing Monopoly.
‘Let’s go to Mimram,’ she said.
‘I’ve only just got back. It was chaos, sheer bloody chaos.’
‘You mean the funeral?’
Troy had told her nothing of what happened. ‘Sasha . . . well, Sasha was Sasha.’
‘I think I’ll leave that as cryptic as it is. Whatever she’s done this time I’d rather not know. However, the house will surely be empty now. Let’s go to Mimram.’
It was not pleading, but it was little short of pleading. He had no way of knowing whether this was what she thought best for him or merely what she wanted for herself. But the obvious monosyllabic question was at hand: ‘Us?’
‘The two of us.’
‘My brother will be there.’
‘Rod never gets there much before midnight on Friday. He spends most of Saturday with constituents. I think we’d see him for Sunday lunch and that would be that. If we get there on Thursday—’
‘That’s tomorrow.’
‘We could have a sort of long weekend.’
‘Indeed we could. It would be like—’
‘Old times?’
‘Sort of,’ she said. ‘Sort of.’
Troy let Anna drive. He did not like driving at the best of times. At the worst – and this was surely one of the worst – he was death on wheels. They rolled down the drive of Mimram House late on the afternoon of the following day. He had nodded off and slept from the fringe of the city almost to his own gates (replaced in 1955, and doubtless made from melted-down Spitfires) and woken to Anna chattering something about how much she looked forward to the light nights of summer. The raucous heaven’s choir that was birdsong, the dusky leathern flap of gliding bat, the midnight goosepimpling whoop of owl, the six a.m. barking yawn of dog fox, the basso profundo snuffle of pig at breakfast. Fine, thought Troy, if that’s what she really wants . . .
The house was empty. Clean, well-stocked but empty.
Anna knocked up spag bol for two, Troy rooted around in the cellar for a bottle of Chaˆteau Quelque Chose and they sat at the kitchen table with less than little to say to one another.
‘I was always happy here,’ she said at last, cradling a glass of claret in one hand and swirling it gently around.
‘Happy?’ he said.
‘You say that as though you don’t know the meaning of the word.’
‘I’m sorry. That wasn’t what I meant. I suppose I was saying that I didn’t realise how happy you’d been.’
‘But I was.’
‘All the same. No regrets?’
‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘No regrets. I mean. After all. You’re married now. Aren’t you?’
It was typical of Anna to see the status of his relations
hips rather than their substance. She’d known him and Foxx as an item ever since they had itemised. She’d dined with them at home, eaten out with them, been to the theatre with them and, a matter of days ago, had been reluctant witness to the item’s demise. All of this, any of this, might have bothered her. None of it did. Instead it was the wife, the absent wife, the relic of a marriage that had lasted weeks that bothered her.
‘I’ve never felt less married. I don’t even know where she is.’
Troy had never been able to explain Tosca to Anna. They’d never met and it was conceivable that he’d never mentioned her name until that day in 1956 when he had had no choice. Even then he’d botched it. How to explain, without sounding like an utter clot, that he had involved himself with an American WAC sergeant in the last year of the war, that he had doubtfully presumed her dead only to have her reappear for the ‘other side’ five years later to bail him out of a jam in Berlin, and that he had returned the favour in ’56 – and that a vital part of that reciprocation had been a sham marriage and a real British passport. How to explain that, alive or dead, she rattled around in his dreams to that day? Better not even to try. Better to retaliate in kind.
‘You were married when we met.’
‘You know very well what kind of a marriage mine is. On or off, depending on whether Angus wanders or hangs about for a while.’
‘You could try taking away his tin leg.’
‘And have him crawl away from me? Good God, no. I’d far rather he walked.’
‘Is he on walkabout now?’
She sipped and nodded. ‘Day after you got blown up. I woke up to a call from the Charing Cross telling me you were in a coma, and a note from Angus sellotaped to his spare leg saying, “The pipes are calling.” ’
