Riptide (aka Bluffing Mr. Churchill) (48 page)

‘Bob has an idea,’ Kolankiewicz began.

‘Well, more of a suggestion, really, and it was your idea, really, Ladislaw . . .’

Ladislaw? No one called the Polish Beast by his Christian name.

‘Stop there, both of you. I’m too tired and too pissed off to listen to you play Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Could one of you just spit it out?’

Kolankiewicz deferred. Churchill took the chair Troy’s mother had been in, and Kolankiewicz perched on the edge of the bed.

‘It’s like this, Frederick. After you were shot, Ladislaw and I met up . . . When was it now?’

‘Doesn’t matter when,’ said Troy.

‘I suppose not. Anyway, he told me you couldn’t hit a barn door at twenty paces and the only reason Diana Brack hadn’t killed you instead . . .’ Churchill paused,
reddened even, as the inevitability of what he had to say next struck him.

‘Instead of me killing her,’ Troy prompted.

‘Quite. As you say. The only reason was . . . well . . . pure luck. Wasn’t it?’

Churchill looked at Kolankiewicz. Kolankiewicz looked at Troy. Troy met them head on. ‘Yes. A lucky shot,’ he agreed.

Lucky? The bullet that had killed Diana Brack ricocheted through his dreams and would do so for the rest of his life.

‘So . . . what’s your point, gentlemen?’

‘Well . . .’ Churchill fudged.

Kolankiewicz had had enough of fudge.

‘Well is as well does. Next fucker who comes at you with gun is going to kill you, you stupid bugger.’

Churchill manoeuvred around the F-word by pulling out a large linen handkerchief and honking loudly, as though a good hooter blast could erase the sound of air turning blue.

‘Fuck it, Troy, you know as well as I do if the Brack bitch had got off a second shot you’d be six feet under pushing up buttercups!’

‘Daisies,’ Troy said softly.

‘Eh?’

‘It’s “pushing up daisies” not “pushing up buttercups”, you Polish pig – and, yes, you’re quite right. She damn near killed me. I’ve had six
months to work that out. Now tell me something I don’t know.’

Churchill got between them. ‘When will you be discharged?’

‘For Christmas,’ Troy replied. ‘They’ve assured me of that.’

‘And how fit will you be?’

Troy threw back the bedclothes, hoisted his nightshirt and pointed to the four-inch scar on his abdomen.

‘I see,’ Churchill said. ‘You’ll take a while to heal. So, we’ll take it gently at first, shall we?’

‘Take what gently?’

Kolankiewicz answered, the steam spent, and a near-avuncular tone in his voice: ‘My boy, Bob is offering to teach you to shoot. It’s a good idea. It could save your life.’

‘I get weapons training at the Yard.’

‘Perfunctory stuff, take my word for it,’ said Churchill. ‘Enough so coppers don’t dislocate their shoulders with recoil, enough so they can fire the odd bullet in
roughly the right direction. A few weeks with me and you’ll be shooting like Wyatt Earp.’

It was a good idea. Troy knew it. But he had a built-in aversion to guns. He’d only had one with him that night because Larissa Tosca had nagged him not to go unarmed. He had lived through
that night. Tosca had not – although the absence of a body had always left him with more than enough room for doubt. On the nights when Brack did not rattle round in his head, Tosca did. On a
really bad night they met. Yes – he’d master that aversion: learning how to shoot would be good. It might even occupy his mind, an organ desperately in need of occupation, any
occupation, that might evict the dead women squatting there.

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 BigMan foldinghis
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.’

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 they 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.