by John Lawton
‘You just tell me who, and I’ll go round with an Austin 7 startin’ ’andle and sort ’em out.’
‘You’re kidding?’
The Fat Man spat crumbs over Troy. ‘Course I’m kidding. It’s that Stanley, isn’t it? And it’s that young woman o’ yours, and it’s that other young woman o’ yours – your doctor? And I reckon it’s your brother too.’
‘That’s about the gist of it. Not my brother, oddly enough, but everybody else you just named wants me to call it a day.’
‘Resign, you mean?’
‘Retire.’
‘But . . . you’re just a boy.’
It was well meant – although Troy found it hard to take that way – and he supposed that to the Fat Man, whose age was impossible to guess, bald for years and fat almost as long, he was not much more than a boy.
‘It’s OK. I’m not going to do it. If I give in now I’ll spend the rest of my life wondering about what might have been . . . I’ll become a fat, sodden whinger, full of regret and self-pity like . . .’
Like who? For fuck’s sake, like who?
The pig gave up waiting for more turnips and rolled on her back squirming at an itch she could not scratch. Troy knew just how she felt.
‘. . . Like . . . like Dyadya Vanya.’
‘Daddy who?’
‘Not daddy – Dyadya. It means “uncle”. It’s Russian for “uncle”.’
‘I didn’t know you’d got an uncle Vanya. I’ve met your uncle Nikolai, but I don’t remember a Vanya.’
‘No. I haven’t got an uncle Vanya.’
‘Then why tell me you have?’
‘He’s a character in a play by Chekhov.’
‘Who’s Chekhov?’
‘Doesn’t matter. All I meant was that I’d become like Vanya – a miserable, suicidal sod incapable of blowing out his own brains or anyone else’s for that matter.’
‘You want to blow somebody’s brains out?’
‘No, of course not. That’s not what I meant.’
‘It seems to me, young Fred, that about three-quarters of what you’re saying isn’t what you mean. But this much I will say. You do what you think’s best, cock. Maybe there’ll come a time to throw in the towel. Who knows? t it’s for you to say. And, if you want my
But wopenn’orth, when that time comes you’ll know. Believe me, old son, you’ll know. In the meantime you get back into the thick of it and kick bum!’
‘Bum?’
‘Arse.’
‘Ah, you mean . . . as they say in America, “kick ass”?’
‘Oh, no, cock. Never hurt an animal.’
§ 18
‘Really, Troy?’
‘Yes, really.’
‘But we don’t have to. I don’t have to. I can call Fitz and get a locum. I could take off the next fortnight, the next month if I have to. We could stay here. Dammit, Troy, I’m happy here.’
He hoped she would not cry. It would not be out of character, but it would be impossible to contrive. Anna could not and did not cry on cue.
‘You can stay. It’s only me. I have to go back. Not to be in London now . . . not to be in London now is to risk being edged off the map.’
‘Troy, it could be weeks before you can work again. And that’s not some old flame talking, that’s your doctor.’
‘I can’t be out of the loop. Not now. A copper just got blown to smithereens on the streets of London –’
‘I know! It was nearly you or has the fact escaped you?’
‘– so I have to be there. Don’t you get it?’
‘No, Troy. I don’t get any of it. In fact, I think it’s madness.’
All the same she drove him back. Parked the Bentley in Bedfordbury, handed him the keys, would not cross his threshold, declined his offer of a cup of tea and left with an immeasurable sadness in her eyes.
§ 19
Troy phoned Scotland Yard.
‘Jack?’
‘Ah . . . Freddie, you read my mind. Did you know I was about to pick up the phone and call you?’
‘You were?’
‘You surely didn’t think I was going to leave you out of things . . . just because. . .?’
‘No,’ Troy lied, ‘of course not. What’s happened? Something’s happened. I can hear it in your voice.’
‘Bernie Champion.’
Bernie had been Alf Marx’s right-hand man for years. The investigation that had sent Alf down had found nothing provable against Bernie. Bernie was at large: the heir apparent come into his own.
‘Dead?’
‘No, just missing. His wife walked into Leman Street nick this morning and said he hadn’t been home for three nights.’
‘Then he’s probably dead.’
‘I think they had more tact than to tell her that, but from now on I’ll be looking at every body that turns up to see if it’s Bernie.’
‘Jack?’
‘Yeeeees?’
‘Bodies. Bodies turning up. Don’t leave me out of that either.’
‘As if . . .’ Wildeve lied.
§ 20
The days of his recuperation – and it always seemed to him far longer than it was – took on an immediate routine, such was the nature of recuperation. Yet each day Troy awoke not with the sense of a pattern established or a life well ordered, but with the distinct, the unnerving sensation that each day was the first, the first of what he did not ask – but it was a greenness and an absence of familiarity and accomplishment that disturbed him not a little.
Blows to the head notwithstanding, Troy prided himself on having a good memory. It was part of the job. And this woman standing on his London doorstep had introduced herself with ‘I’m Kate Cormack. I bet you don’t remember me,’ – and he didn’t.
About his age, maybe a bit younger, say, thirty-eight or thirty-nine, red hair, expensively cut, a Dior suit in charcoal black, an American accent quite unlike his wife’s – none of the brashness of New York, more a touch of the South, perhaps Carolina or Virginia – and an impossible sadness in the eyes that, once noticed, distracted him from the beauty of a good-looking middle-aged woman. She looked much as Anna had done the last time he’d seen her. Sad without anger. The sadness of defeat.
‘When you knew me I was Kitty Stilton,’ she said.
Good God, so she was. And she wasn’t thirty-eight, she was nearer fifty.
Troy swung back the door. Kitty/Kate stepped over the threshold. Dropped a large flat package on the hallstand. Stood with her back to him, letting her eyes readjust to the half-light of the room. She looked around, the sadness in her eyes welling as restraint of tears in the corners. The hydraulic surge of times remembered. Then she looked at Troy. He was damn certain they were remembering the same times, thinking the same things at that moment, lumbering themselves with the same burden of imagery.
‘It’s been a long time,’ Kitty/Kate said.
Troy said nothing.
‘Almost eighteen years,’ she added, then, ‘Are you ever going to say anything or shall I just bugger off now?’
‘Seventeen years, ten months, three weeks and I sort of lose count of the days,’ Troy heard himself say.
She wrapped herself round him, tears falling wet and warm on to his face. ‘And there was I thinking you hadn’t an ounce of sentimentality in you.’
Slowly, he set the walking-stick against the wall and put first one arm, then the other round her shoulders.
‘My mum died,’ she murmured, into his shoulder.
‘I heard,’ he said, wondering how he could have missed the significance of George Bonham’s phone call, failed to anticipate that the death of Edna Stilton might well bring her daughter home, and marvelling that at some point his unconscious had tracked back to the precise date they had last stood together in this room: June 1941. Sentimentality had less to do with it than the scrambled eggs that were his brains today.
‘How old was she?’
Kitty prised her head up, pulled out a handkerchief and dabbed a
t her cheeks. ‘Sixty-nine. Not old enough.’
‘Of course,’ said Troy.
‘Of course what?’
‘Your mother and George Bonham were at school together. They’d be about the same age, wouldn’t they?’
‘Yes. They were. I haven’t thought of George in years. Old Bigfoot. Kept us all in line. All us kids.’ She screwed her handkerchief into a ball, looking down at it, then up at Troy then down again.
‘I expect he’ll be at the funeral?’
‘I expect so. Be unlike our Vera to forget him. My little sister, in charge again. But that sort of brings me to the point, doesn’t it?’
Troy sat down, hoping Kitty would follow and take some of the tension out of this impromptu reunion. Lowered himself gently into an armchair, felt his head rattle like peas in a tin. Kitty tucked her skirt deftly, sat on the edge of the sofa, mannequin-poised, and crossed her legs. ‘It’s the day after tomorrow,’ she went on, ‘and I really don’t want to go alone.’
‘Alone? Your whole family will be there, your husband—’
‘No,’ said Kitty. ‘Cal won’t be coming. Quite simple reasons, really, but the upshot is I wonder if you’d escort me.’
She glanced knowingly at the stick, still propped against the wall where Troy had left it.
‘I mean, you are on the mend, aren’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. Good. I know about your accident. Vera sent me all the press clippings. You were lucky. But you will, won’t you? You will do this for me?’
He could hardly say no.
‘I can’t stay. They want me in Stepney. Shall we say two o’clock? I’ll get us a cab at Claridge’s and pick you up.’
‘You’re staying at Claridge’s?’
‘I couldn’t stay at Stepney. It would be too . . . well, you know.’
‘I was just thinking . . .’ said Troy.
‘I know. Claridge’s – where Cal stayed during the war. It was where . . . well, you know. It was where Cal Junior was conceived.’
‘Ah.’
‘You didn’t really think it was yours?’
‘I never knew.’
‘And you never asked. No, Troy, young Cal is seventeen, the dead spit of his namesake and getting ready for West Point. I’ve two other children. Walter—’
‘After your father.’
‘I had to do it. He hates the name and he’s insisted on being Walt since he was six. But I couldn’t let my dad’s name die. And there’s Allison. And she’s named after no one.’
Kitty/Kate was smiling for the first time. She took an obvious pleasure in speaking of her children that seemed less than obvious when she spoke of her husband. That infinite sadness in the eyes of women like Kate and Anna was, he realised, probably put there by men like him. Men like him and men like United States Senator Calvin M. Cormack.
‘Really, I have to go now. The parcel’s for you. A couple of things you’ll find in every American home.’
She kissed him, did not wait for him to open the door, and left. Troy watched as she passed out of sight at the kink in the alley. He picked up the package. Given the shape it could be only one thing. A long-playing record. He tore off the wrapper. Two long-playing records.
Concert by the Sea, Erroll Garner.
Time Out, the Dave Brubeck Quartet.
He’d heard records by both pianists. The last time he’d heard Brubeck he rather thought it had been an octet. These were treats. The Kitty he used to know would have dismissed music like this as ‘strictly for wankers’.
He stuck the Garner on his gramophone. It was time to buy a new one. Everyone he knew was banging on about ‘stereo’. Old friends invited him round to listen to their ‘stereo’, invariably a recording of a steam train passing to demonstrate how the Doppler effect could be achieved with two speakers. It did nothing for music and nothing for Troy. Life, he protested, was mono. He had been perfectly happy with shellac at 78 r.p.m.
Garner played witty games with his audience. He buggered about so much with the opening of each song that they were kept guessing. So much so that a cheer went up when they finally spotted what he was playing. ‘I’ll Remember April’ – one of Troy’s favourite songs – opened with a slam-dunking left hand: Troy could almost swear Garner was doing nothing more musical than bringing down a clenched fist on the keyboard. But . . . it was intriguing. He played it over and over again for the rest of the day, and then opened the lid on his piano to see if he could do it. He could. Not all that well, but he could. And for a day and a half he was blissfully happy, blissfully unaware of his injuries, and blissfully unaware that his career was over.
§ 21
He had always known he was a klutz, long before his wife had taught him the word. As a child if it could be dropped or broken he would drop or break it, and ball games struck him as a mystery. Golf in particular had baffled him until he realised that there was no ball in golf, and that the arm gestures were part of an arcane ritual of divine appeasement, probably dating back to the building of Stonehenge.
Equally problematic were shoelaces and ties. Of late, say the last twenty-five years, he had coped fairly well, with his father’s oft-repeated dictum never far from his mind: ‘What does it matter, my boy?’
Today he had managed shoes but how to tie his black funeral tie was escaping him. Odd: he’d managed it without a second thought for Hugh’s funeral, but today he couldn’t do it for love or money. Right over left, left over right, the little rabbit goes down the little hole . . . were all right in their way, but then his father’s efforts to teach came back to him: his father being right-handed and Troy left, it had been like trying to learn the woman’s role in a tango and dance backwards, at the end of which footloose farce his father would say, ‘What does it matter, my boy? Do not wear the tie, go barefoot if it pleases you,’ et cetera.
He finally achieved something so bulky that his tie looked less like a tie than a small turban lodged at his throat. He glanced in the mirror. Good God, he looked like the Duke of Windsor, a man in the fierce grip of a fashion frenzy so absurd as to be anything but unobtrusive. He was not wearing a tie, he was making a statement. If only he knew what it was trying to say to him.
‘Come on, Troy. I’ve a cab out in the lane with the meter running.’ Kitty stuck her head in through the open door. ‘I thought you’d be ready by now.’
‘Can’t do the sodding tie.’
‘You can and probably will be late for your own funeral, Troy, but let’s not keep my mum waiting, eh?’
Kitty whipped it off him and, in a flurry of hand movements, retied it and pulled the knot up to his collar. A small, sensible knot, with nothing to say for itself. ‘If you had sons you’d know how to tie a tie backwards. Taught both of mine, after all.’
‘Where were you when my dad needed you to dance backwards?’
‘Are you feeling all right?’
‘You should never dance a tango with an Eskimo.’
‘I couldn’t agree more, but why tell me now?’
‘Never mind. It’s just the sort of meaningless connection that the mind makes when it has nothing better to do.’
Troy found himself face to face with Kitty, looking slightly up at her as she spoke. She paused briefly, a sad sort of smile passing briefly between them, then she kissed him once, drew back, kissed him again and said, ‘Let’s go.’
They crossed the City in silence. Passing the Bank of England Troy said, ‘I didn’t ask you where.’
‘St George’s-in-the-East. Next to my dad. You weren’t at that one, were you?’
‘No, I wasn’t. If you recall, I got stabbed a couple of days after Walter was killed. I was sort of . . . laid up.’
‘Ah,’ she said, and looked out of the window away from him as though not remembering.
Then she said, ‘It was awful in so many ways. Dead Dad – as if that wasn’t bad enough, but the church was in ruins. Got hit in one of the last raids of the Blitz only a few weeks before Dad was kille
d. It would have been the May, May 1941. They just swept aside the rubble and carried on. I can still remember the crunch of dust and mortar under my shoes.’
Troy hadn’t been to St George’s since before the war. It was a Hawksmoor, but a Hawksmoor driven to the hilt. So many towers and turrets, urns and domes. It seemed to Troy that the architect had seen this first not in his sketches but in a dream, some opium-induced fantasy of Xanadu proportions. Buildings were the stuff of dreams, after all. Worse, the stuff of nightmares. It surprised him how often he dreamt of buildings and rooms and walls.
Inside the walls, the parishioners of St George-in-the-East had erected a tin hut. It looked for all the world like a chunk of a wartime RAF base plucked up by Dorothy’s tornado from a field in Kent and plonked down in London, into a frame by Nicholas Hawksmoor. It was utilitarian in the extreme. Tin and asbestos walls, stacker canvas chairs and a plug-in Hammond organ. Inside, all that was visible of the glory that had been was the dazzling mosaic gold of the Christ Crucified on the end wall onto which the hut had been built. A funeral service in a glorified Nissen hut? It seemed to Troy to be another symbol of the age in which they lived.
Troy had decided it would be no bad thing if this funeral failed to resemble the last one he had been to. Not that he expected any of the Stiltons to behave like Sasha. It would be just as well if it were different in every respect. He looked at the sky over the East End. It was ominously, pleasingly dark. They might be in for a summer cloudburst. That would be different – it would change the tone nicely.
Compared to the funeral of the late Hugh, this was on the grand scale. The Stiltons had turned out in force. Troy would have been happiest at the back, beyond the obvious questions surely being asked of ‘Who’s he?’ but Kitty rightly would have none of it. She was the eldest child, she had to sit at the front with her three sisters, her one surviving brother and all their many spouses. But that didn’t stop her whispering and pointing out every single member of her family to him.
