Blue Rondo

by John Lawton

  Rod swigged, handed his glass back to Troy, said, ‘Fill ’er up, waiter,’ and flopped into an armchair, wrestling with his tie. When it came loose he leaped up again, tore off both tie and jacket, stamped on both and flopped back down with his hand out for the wine glass. ‘And I’m grateful, believe me, I’m grateful. It’s just that’s it’s all so . . . fucking deadly.’

  Troy sat down opposite. It was too good a claret to swig. He rolled it around on his tongue, hoping Rod would slow down and get rat-arsed at a more civilised pace.

  ‘You know – it was Ike. He fucked it for us. Macmillan got a joint telly broadcast. All I got was a lawn littered with fucking golf balls. Ike made him look like . . . Like what, for God’s sake?’

  ‘A statesman.’

  ‘That’s it. A statesman. What every sodding PM wants to be – more than a politician, a statesman. And Ike handed it to Mac on a plate.’

  ‘Perhaps next time you should get the President to come over and root for you.’

  ‘Next time. 1964? Good God, Freddie, that’s like a science-fiction number. 1964 isn’t five years away, it’s an age away. We’ll all be bloody robots by then – tin hearts, tin brains, tin cocks. 1964 – Jesus Christ! Do you know, I can still remember the first year I was conscious of having a tag to it. I was five. I’d drifted through life, the longest part of life, it seems, with the outside world scarcely touching me. Knew it was there, out there on the horizon somewhere, things like the King dying – the old man took me to watch the parade . . . Can’t remember a sodding thing about it, wish I could, the Kaiser was there, the Tsar, all those Balkan monarchs who got kyboshed – but, no, the first year I can remember as a year is 1914. I remember asking him, “Dad, what year is it?” and the answer, “1914, my boy. The second of January.” ’

  ‘Hardly a year to forget.’

  ‘Quite. But I’m telling you now that all that pre-1917 stuff seems to me a damn sight closer than the prospect of 1964. What a preposterous bloody date.’

  Rod reminded him of Kate Cormack. He was sure she’d said something very like this, some sad song of the creeping tread of time.

  ‘You’d think the world would end before we got to a figure as crazy as that. Yet that’s our next crack at getting into power. Unbelievable, un-fucking-believable. We’ll still have Mac bumbling his way through his repertoire like George Robey on tour, a trunkful of daft hats and comic trousers – and the Americans’ll have Cormack or Nixon. Men in their forties. A whole new generation. We’ll look like fucking dinosaurs.’

  ‘Well, it might be Nixon, if Ike comes out for him.’

  ‘Ike hates Nixon. If Nixon were on fire Ike wouldn’t piss on him.’

  ‘But it won’t be Cormack.’

  ‘Aah, I see. You have inside information?’

  Troy said nothing.

  They’d got halfway down the third bottle, Rod very much the worse for wear, maudlin and dishevelled, well on the road to guilt, when he said, ‘Shpoon.’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘What do you intend to do? You’re surely not going to leave things as they . . . are?’

  ‘It all depends if you win or lose.’

  Rod waved a hand across the space between them as though cutting ribbons – slicing through the ambiguity. ‘We’ve already lost. The country has gone to hell in a handcart. We are . . . bolloxed. Banjaxed, buggered and bolloxed.’

  ‘You will agree – a spook, and at that a spook of dubious sexual mores, in opposition is one thing. In the Cabinet quite another.’

  ‘Sho, you’ll shay nothing?’

  ‘Rod, let us agree – we both of us underestimated Ted Steele. We looked at the rubbish in the papers and we took him at face value. OK – he asked for that. He cried out to be “Lord Spoon” and we stuck it to him. He worked as hard at the image of the self-made man who knows how to spend money as he did at making the money in the first place. We all fell for the illusion he spun round the dreadfully vulgar wife and her twice-time vulgar car. But . . . there was more to him than that. He’d been through more than we either of us knew. More than we cared to imagine. And it didn’t even dawn on me until the night I had him sitting in here, the evening of Ike’s reunion, refusing to answer my questions. It had never occurred to me that this might by no means be the worst interrogation Spoon had suffered. Stupid of me. There he was, chatting to Mala Caan, and we both knew what her experience of the war was, we both know how she earned her VC. Spoon was far, far tougher than I’d ever guessed. Yet . . . the Ryans terrified him. He told me so when we went upstairs. He’d no idea they killed the boys they brought him just for sport. But he knew they’d kill him if they didn’t get what they wanted. He was more scared of them than he ever had been of the Gestapo. He told me what they were up to, and then he made it perfectly clear he’d go to jail before he’d testify against them. He said he’d faced SS thugs armed with pliers and a blow-lamp and felt less scared. But it wasn’t just words. It wasn’t just what he was telling me. He rolled up his shirt and showed me the scar tissue down his spine where the Gestapo had taken a blow-lamp to him. Burns the size of half-crowns. Made his back look like the twelve spot in dominoes. And he took off his shoes and showed me the toes they’d broken with pliers. He spared me the dropping of his trousers to show me where they’d crushed one of his balls. I took his word for that. He said the only key to surviving was to convince them you knew nothing. He did. They stopped pulling him to pieces, and stuck him on a train to Belsen, from which he escaped. And when he’d finished telling me all this, he said, “What else can you do to me, Mr Troy? What can you do that is worse than the Gestapo, that is worse than Patrick and Lorcan Ryan?”’

  Rod uttered a sotto voce ‘Jesus Christ.’

  ‘Now, in its way the same may be true of old Bobby Collington – they scared him shitless is the cliché – and what the deal was with Maurice, we’ll never know. Maurice would be a hard man to intimidate, but we all have our breaking point. I saw Spoon’s that night – I’ve never seen emotional collapse and self-control in such equal measures before.

  ‘The upshot of all this is that the decision isn’t mine, it’s yours. Spoon has been a spy for someone all his life. It’s his modus operandi. He doesn’t know any other. In that sense he’s no different from tens of thousands of others who lived through the war. What they did then has achieved the level of an addiction. They do what they do because they can do no other. I suspect the Americans don’t think much of him as a spy, but it’s enough of what used to be to satisfy the craving he has. You’re a bit like that yourself. Part of you is still Wing Commander Troy. No bad thing at all. But it’s perverse in Spoon. It’s an addiction. To spy is what makes him what he is. It’s become his identity. Money, fame, success – God knows he has all three aplenty – all those are insignificant compared to the sheer frisson of the secret life that spying confers upon him. I’d even venture, despite all the assurances I’ve had as to the reality of his homosexuality – he is no mere dabbler, after all – that the appeal for him lies in the fact that such sex must always be secret sex. He enjoys the clandestine world of the bugger and enjoys just as much the lies of a marriage lived in public. The presentation of a false front to the world. He’s a foreigner who passes for English, the queer who passes for married, the member of Her Majesty’s House of Lords who serves a foreign republic. A spy down to his socks. You and I used to joke that he was probably the only Labour MP who voted Tory. The joke’s on us. Nothing about the man was real.

  ‘There are still only half a dozen people who know he’s a spy – you, Gaitskell and me, and three members of my team at the Yard who read the letter I showed you. The letter isn’t in any Scotland Yard file, it’s in my desk drawer just over there. Your secret can stay a secret. I have no case against Spoon that I would ever wish to bring. But it remains – he’s a prime candidate for blackmail. Do you really think this mad scheme will work? Do you think Spoon is consistent enough or simple enough to be an unwitting conduit? Do you reall
y want him anywhere near power? For that matter do you want him anywhere near your party? The ball, as the Americans say, is in your court.’

  Rod said nothing. A rare enough event in itself.

  § 122

  Troy woke to a nudging hand. The Fat Man was towering over him with a cup of black coffee held out to him. ‘I made for both of you,’ he said.

  Troy looked across the room. Rod was slumped in the armchair by the last-glowing embers of the night’s fire, mouth open, drooling and schnucking.

  ‘It’s the business. The ground-up stuff. None o’ that instant muck you’re too polite to say you don’t like.’

  Troy followed the Fat Man out to the verandah, and down in the direction of the pigpens. He looked at his watch – he had been too drunk to remember to wind it and it had stopped in the night. He looked up at the sky. It was ripe with the bulbous clouds of autumn. Not a hint of the sun.

  ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Half past eight.’

  ‘Is anyone else up?’

  ‘I think your sister-in-law’s been up a while. I saw her pegging out some washing.’

  ‘How did she seem?’

  ‘She was singing “The Red Flag”. Y’ know “cowards flinch and traitors sneer” and blah-de-blah, but every other word was that f-word you lot seem so fond of. I don’t think she meant any of it, ’cept the f-words, that is. I think it might be that irony thing you keep trying to explain to me and I don’t ever seem to get the ‘ang of.’

  ‘I’m sure it was,’ said Troy.

  ‘You stayin’ long, cock?’

  ‘No. My suspension’s over, but Onions has insisted on me taking a few days’ compassionate. All the same, I have to get back today. Unfinished business, you know . . . that sort of thing.’

  ‘Fine,’ said the Fat Man. ‘Don’t tell me. See if I care. I’ve better things to do ’ere. Did I tell you the pig’s learnt how to balance a parsnip on the end of ’er snout?’

  ‘Thin end or thick end?’

  ‘Thin end, o’course. This is a class act, this pig is.’

  They arrived at the tree under which Cissie the pig habitually sat. The Fat Man delved into a capacious trouser pocket and pulled out a ten-inch parsnip, much in the same way that a beat bobby extracted his truncheon. He tossed it into the air, the pig watched it cartwheel through space, leapt forward and stuck out her snout to catch the parsnip and hold it balanced by the thick end.

  ‘Ah, well,’ said the Fat Man, ‘Nobody’s perfect.’

  ‘Now, where have I heard that line before?’ said Troy.

  § 123

  Once it had begun to rain, it did not stop. October became a sodden vengeance for the summer heat, rain pelting down on London rooftops, rattling the sashes and filling the gutters. It had been raining like this the first night he set eyes on Foxx. Jeans and T-shirt. Soaked to the skin, banging on his door – just as she was now.

  Troy took her by the chin as she stepped over the threshold. A black eye, a split lip, and a broken tooth.

  The tears were silent tears – no sobs, no throwing herself on his shoulder. A simple ‘If you feel like telling me what a fool I’ve been, now would be a good moment.’

  ‘Christy?’

  ‘Just when you think you’ve got to know a man . . .’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Oh . . . on his way to Heathrow, he’s booked out on the late Pan Am to New York.’

  ‘Do you want a doctor?’

  ‘No. And certainly not the Polish Beast. I’ll see my dentist tomorrow.’

  ‘It looks bad.’

  ‘Flesh wounds, Troy.’

  ‘Does it?’

  ‘Ha-bloody-ha.’

  Troy kissed the split lip. ‘Go and clean up.’

  When he heard the bath filling Troy called Swift Eddie at the Yard. ‘Eddie, get on to the airport police. Tell them to arrest Vince Christy, an American booked for New York on the Pan Am late. Possible alias Cristofero da Vinci. Tell them to bung him in the cells overnight. No kid gloves. No favours. We’ll sort out a warrant first thing in the morning.’

  ‘And the charge, sir?’

  ‘Oh . . . let’s start with Grievous Bodily Harm, shall we?’

  § 124

  In the middle of the night Troy got up for water and heard snoring from the sitting room. A large ginger man was stretched out on the sofa. In the middle of the floor was a tin leg. Taped to the tin leg was a note.

  To my good fortune you forgot to lock the door last night. Hence you find me here.

  Don’t dash off in the morning, there’s a couple of things we need to chat about.

  The wife – obviously – but also what you said the last time about ‘You cannot change yourself, you can only change.’ That was what you said, wasn’t it? Or was it the booze talking to me?

  Whatever – been giving it a lot of thought, especially in the light of the way you’ve just grabbed the headlines.

  We cannot change ourselves. You’re right, of course. But we change on a daily basis, do we not? For what is character, if not the sum of our actions? We are what we do, and what we do changes on the quotidian.

  Suppose for a moment that there were no limits to a man’s actions. Suppose you could get away with anything. A man without limits would become a monster. A Frankenstein unbound, remaking himself out of his own being. Not from the flesh but from the spirit. It does prompt the question, doesn’t it? What are your limits, Troy?

  Ho hum bum. Just a thought, really. I’ll sleep on it.

  Come to think of it, it all sounds a bit Faustian more than Frankensteinian, doesn’t it? Be a good point at which to quote you a bit of Goethe but, truth to tell, I can’t remember a single sodding word the bloke ever wrote.

  Ah, well, tant pis.

  Yrs

  Angus

  James

  Montrose

  Tobermory

  Pakenham

  Redhead of this Parish,

  War hero

  Chartered Accountant

  &

  Failed Parliamentary Candidate.

  PS My hollow leg appears to be genuinely hollow for the time being – where did you hide the Talisker?

  Troy read it, was about to bin it, but instinctively turned it over to see what was on the other side.

  . . . and there followed what appeared to be Angus’s political manifesto, headed:

  Jam Today, Jam Tomorrow, Jam Forever.

  Troy binned it unread and went back to bed, back to the pale, pleasing curves of a bloody, broken Foxx. The living woman pressed flesh upon his flesh; all the dead ones pinballed full tilt through his mind.

  Historical Note

  The most important thing I’ve changed is no real change, it’s something that just happens – time gets compressed. The plot of this novel takes from May to October 1959. In particular the weeks of August and September get telescoped. Ike’s visit began on 27 August and lasted ten days. The Wartime Reunion is real enough but was given by Ike rather than for him, at the US Embassy. The next day when Ike had left Macmillan announced the General Election. Parliament was dissolved ten days later and the election held on 8 October – the first I can remember in any detail, and in which I delivered countless leaflets on behalf of a now defunct party that got hijacked by the talking suits in the 1990s, who, at the time of writing, have just led us into a third war in six years. (I had thought nothing would ever top the Macmillan government for lies, sleaze and backstabbing . . .) Where was I? Ah . . . What I describe as taking place after Ike’s departure would take a matter of days not weeks. I’m not conscious of having changed anything else. It was a very dry summer, Russ Conway did make number one in the pop charts . . . and, from less than ridiculous to the certain sublime, Time Out did become the fastest selling Jazz record in history.

  The most useful books I found in the course of research were Eric Rumsey’s The Dockland Gangs (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1960), Rossi and Lambert’s Scotland Yard: Shoot to Kill? (Eyre & Spottiswoode, 19
59) and Race and Marks’s Teach an Old Pig New Tricks (Werner Laurie, 1947).

  Acknowledgements

  I wrote most of this novel in the high, wet hills of Derbyshire and rewrote it on the New York Subway mostly back and forth between Manhattan and Brooklyn. If coffee and cake called, then bits of it got rewritten in the back room of Ceci Cela at Spring and Lafayette in Little Italy. Hence I think it fitting that I should acknowledge the witting assistance of . . . Zette Emmons and Sarah Teale (roof over my head), Gordon Chaplin (desk space), John Fagan and Linda Shockley (unflagging encouragement), Frank Lawton (whizzes and bangs), Clare Alexander, Ion Trewin and Anna Hervé (tweaks and turns) . . . and the unwitting assistance of the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority and the blokes who run Ceci Cela . . . Herve, Laurent et Dominic – and waitresses with the patience of saints.

  §

  Under moonlight

  a madman dances.

  §1

  12 March 1938

  Hampstead, London

  Yellow.

  It was going to be a yellow day.

  The nameless bird trilling in the tree outside his window told him that. He had learnt too little of the taxonomy of English flora and fauna to be at all certain what the bird was. A Golden Grebe? A Mustard Bustard? He took its song as both criticism and compliment – ‘cheek, cheek, cheek’.

  Fine, he thought, if there’s one thing I have in spades it’s cheek. Do I need a bird to tell me that?

  He watched its head bobbing, heard again the rapid chirp – now more ‘tseek’ than ‘cheek’, and was wondering if he had a yellow tie somewhere for this yellow day and whether it might sit remotely well with his suit, when Polly the housemaid came in.

  ‘My dear, tell me . . . what is this bird in the tree here?’

  ‘Boss . . . there’s bigger fish to fry than some tom tit—’