A Little White Death (11 page)

‘Charlie, has it ever occurred to you that most of that junk of solidity was fake?’

‘Whaddya mean, fake?’

‘It didn’t roll back centuries. It didn’t even roll back to the start of this one. The old man left Russia with next to nothing. Most of the junk that you refer to he bought at
one time or another – the solidity of time-treasured possessions, history as furniture, which I think is what you mean, was left behind. Most of it is probably locked away in the cellars and
attics of the old house on Dolgo-Khamovnichesky Street.’

‘Ye gods, I’d hate to have to pronounce that when I’m pissed. However, what’s your point?’

‘That it was his creation. What you saw was the world as he made it. Not as he found it.’

‘A lesson for us all, eh?’

A short sentence shot through with silent sighs.

‘If you like.’

‘I can make my own solidity, my own junk, my own world?’

Troy said nothing.

‘Out of Russia? I can make my world out of Russia!’

Charlie was shrilly incredulous. Troy said nothing. He had said quite enough for the half-dozen microphones buried in the plasterwork of the walls and ceiling already. He had been speaking of
the past, of lost possibilities. There was no world to make now. It was, as Charlie insisted, a time of unmaking. All Charlie had made was his bed and he had to lie in it, and if that bed was the
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, so be it. He closed the loo door on a ranting Charlie and as he did so heard him sigh, ‘Ah, bliss,’ and, knowing what it presaged, stuffed his
fingers in his ears.

Troy waited until they stood on the tarmac at the airport once more.

‘I’ve something to ask of you,’ he said.

‘Okey doh.’

‘Can they hear us?’

‘In this wind? This far from a building? Doubt it. If there’s a listening device that can cope at this distance in the open air, I don’t know of it. In a room, no problem.
Train a mike on the vibrations in the window, acts like the ear drum and you can pick up a conversation from a quarter of a mile or more. Out here, the most they could manage is a bugger with
binoculars who can lipread. If you really want to tell me a secret, just button upyour collar.’

Troy did so.

‘A favour, Charlie. Years ago a Pole working for your lot told me my father was a Soviet agent. I want to know the truth.’

‘Hmm,’ said Charlie.

‘Can you find out?’

‘Do you really want to know?’

‘I’ve just said so.’

‘A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.’

‘I know, you told me. The day before yesterday.’

‘Winston meant Russia. But he might just as well have been describing your old man. I say again, do you really want to know?’

Troy said nothing. Stared at him till he cracked.

‘It’ll take a while. I’ll need to get my knees under the table. I’d have to trade a few secrets. But I’ve plenty of those. The real problem would be how could I
tell you? We’d need a code.’

Troy felt momentarily helpless. This was not his world, not his vocabulary.

‘Mind,’ Charlie went on. ‘I’ll think of something. Bound to think of something.’

It was still winter when Troy returned home. England under snow. A flying, white visit to Charlie’s mother in Dorset. A small, white, utterly implausible lie about the
money. A small mountain of work at the Yard. A small row with Rod.

‘Where’ve you been?’

What was the point? The pain he would give Rod if he said he’d been to Russia. The boredom he would let himself in for if he admitted it and Rod banged on with a thousand questions.

‘I can’t tell you.’

‘More lies, Freddie?’

‘No. Silence.’

‘There’s such a thing as lies of silence, you know.’

‘If you like, but I still can’t tell you.’

‘Sod you then!’

Rod could not hold a grudge. Partly because he knew that he might wait till kingdom come only to find Troy still silent before him. Partly because decency, that spurious Anglo-Saxon virtue, ran
through him deeper than the word Brighton through the eponymous stick of rock. Within a week they were speaking once more. By the end of February affably so, and early one Friday evening, a couple
of weeks before Easter, only days, it seemed, after the last evaporation of the most interminably lingering winter, Rod could be found almost horizontal on the sofa in Troy’s sitting room in
Goodwin’s Court feeling very fridayish, a cupof tea balanced on his chest, rising and falling with his breathing like a small vessel at sea, red tie at half-mast, beetlecrusher shoes off, odd
socks on, lamenting the lot of a member of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, lamenting in particular the small peculiarities of breeding and character that defined the leadership of Her
Majesty’s Loyal Opposition.

‘They’re bastards. The pair of ’em. Bloody Brown. Bloody Wilson. Bastards.’

Troy had known Brown for several years – a young light from the trades union movement, outspoken, emotional, and impossible when pissed. He had met Wilson just the once, at a dinner party
Rod had thrown for the Labour nobs – a former Oxford don, a professional Yorkshireman, whom Troy had thought about as fascinating as congealing custard, unredeemed by wit or wickedness or the
prospect of a good indiscretion when drunk; a ‘man of the people’ who chomped on a pipe in public for the sake of the image and in private puffed away at cigars, and who habitually wore
a hideous fawn macintosh, spun out of some new synthetic fabric, in an effort to make himself appear more ‘ordinary’. He always succeeded in this – effortlessly. Troy had on
occasion wondered which of the Labour Party wags – Rod? Or the equally waggish Tom Driberg? – had told him he needed to be more ‘ordinary’, and why Wilson had not recognised
that he was being sent up.

Of the two Troy preferred Brown, and this in no way took account of his politics within the internal, infernal machinations of the wretched party. Brown’s tactless unreliability at least
smacked of honesty, not a word one would ever think of in the same sentence as the word Wilson. Wilson, it was, some old Socialist had dubbed ‘the desiccated calculating machine’. Rod
was content with calling him ‘Mittiavelli’, a poor man’s Machiavelli. He had reduced himself and Troy to hysterics a while ago by asking, ‘What do you get if you cross
Walter Mitty with Machiavelli?’ The answer – Harold Wilson. And he’d been Mittiavelli ever since. But if Rod was going to sit here and ruin Friday evening with a whinge about the
pair of them, there was an obvious question lurking in the wings.

‘You made them a gift of the leadership. Why didn’t you stand?’

‘Why not?’ Rod said. ‘Perfectly good reason when it came down to it. Do you remember what Jack Kennedy said in his inaugural?’

‘Yep, he said watch out, commies, we’re a-gonna blast yer.’

‘Jesus Christ,’ Rod said softly. ‘Do you have to be quite so cynical? He said no such thing.’

‘Yes he did. Meet any challenge, fight any foe, zapany country, look out world. He’s a cold warrior, Rod. It was a speech of warmongering patriotic hokum.’

‘Freddie, I’ve met the man, you haven’t. He is not a—’

‘Yes I have.’

‘Have what?’

‘Met him.’

‘When?’

Rod looked at Troy in utter disbelief.

‘Just before the war. When his dad was the ambassador. You were busy doing your stint as the
Post
’s man in Berlin. The old man invited the Kennedys out to Mimram. Jack was
this tall skinny thing, he’d be about twenty or twenty-one I suppose. I was not much older. The old man stuck us together on the assumption common age might yield common interest. Fat
chance.’

‘Oh? What did you talk about?’

‘We stood on the verandah. Nice sort of evening, sort of balmy, the kind of summer evenings we don’t get any more. He said, “Sho this is the English countryshide?” Not
exactly a conversation piece – all you can say is “yes”. “Sho,” he said, “what doesh a man have to do to get laid in the English countryshide?”’

‘You’re making this up.’

‘No, honestly—’

‘You know, cynicism will be the death of you.’

‘It’s true, all of it. I fixed him upwith Ted Driffield’s daughter.’

Rod’s voice rose to parliamentary peak, the polite bludgeoning of the House of Commons. How to shout down an opponent without getting slung out by the Speaker.

‘Cynicism and
lies
will be the death of you! The President of the United States does not come to rural Hertfordshire simply to get laid, and it’s got nothing to do with the
point I was trying to make!’

He ground to a halt. Lost for words.

‘What was I saying?’

‘Inaugrual speech,’ Troy prompted.

‘Right. What he said was something about let the word go forth, et cetera et cetera, the torch – that’s it – the torch has been passed to a new generation.’

‘So that’s why you wouldn’t stand? The torch has been passed to Harold Wilson? He’s the “new generation”? You’re mad.’

‘It was too late for me and I knew it. The party wasn’t looking for a man for the next couple of years, it was looking for a leader to take them into the seventies. By 1970
I’ll be sixty-two.’

‘So?’

‘Too old. I knew it in my bones. Time to pass on the torch.’

‘Maybe – but younger men? Wilson and Brown!’

‘They’re ten years younger than me.’

‘So? Wilson’s a bore and George is a liability. For God’s sake, Rod, Harold Wilson was born middle-aged!’

‘As a matter of fact, they’re both younger than you.’

Troy shrugged a silent ‘so what?’

‘Don’t you ever get the feeling that it’s time to pass on the torch, that your generation has had its chance?’

‘No.’

‘You will. Take my word for it.’

Rod lapsed into silence, giving Troy time to digest this. Troy silently spat it out. The phone rang. And rang. And rang.

‘You going to answer that?’ Rod said at last.

Troy picked up the telephone and heard Anna’s voice for the first time in several weeks.

‘Troy. So glad I caught you. Look, are you free this evening?’

‘Depends,’ said Troy.

‘Don’t be so damn cagey. I was only trying to ask you out.’

Anna was an ex-girlfriend – a word that caused Troy on occasion to wonder how pertinent it could be when applied to a married woman of forty-three or four. She was also Troy’s
doctor, and one of the few women to penetrate the male domain of Harley Street. It was her habit to call from time to time with just such lines as she was using now.

‘There’s a quartet playing in Notting Hill tonight. Paddy Fitz is putting together a bit of a crowd. We thought you might like to join us.’

Notting Hill was hardly a tantalising qualification to the offer. It was a rough, largely black area of London north and west of the park. For ten years now it had been the rising ghetto of
Britain’s Caribbean immigrants, a run-down neighbourhood of large houses split into tiny flats and ruthlessly exploited by slum landlords. To call it ‘notorious’ would not have
been overstating the case. But then, Anna thought like a doctor and Troy like a policeman.

‘Calypso isn’t really my cup of tea,’ he said.

‘’T’isn’t calypso. It’s jazz. Or I wouldn’t be asking. You think I don’t know you by now?’

‘Putting together a bit of a crowd’ brought out suspicion in Troy – a quality, if such it be, never far from the surface at the best of times – but the truth was, the
invitation appealed. To go home to Mimram with Rod in this mood would clearly be to subject himself to a couple of days’ political whingeing. And whilst he could not rely on Anna’s
opinion in music, Fitz was known for his discrimination. Fitz, put simply, had taste. He put a hand across the mouthpiece.

‘Can you drive yourself tonight?’

‘Don’t see why not. Your car, I assume?’

Rod drove one of the new mini cars that had swept Britain, and most other countries, over the last couple of years. Fashionable as hell in British racing green – the same deepgreen as
Stirling Moss’s Vanwall – but tiny. Rod was a stout six footer and fitted into Troy’s 1952 five-litre Bentley Continental much more comfortably than he did into his
everyman’s Mini Minor. Owning the symbol of Britain’s new classlessness, he took every opportunity to borrow Troy’s symbol of the old wealth.

‘OK. But I must have it back Sunday night.’

‘Done,’ said Rod.

‘Anna. When and where?’

‘I’ll pick you up around eight.’

It was a beautiful evening. A warmish day, a darkening sky patterned with blown clouds and the hint of rain poised in the air. Troy washed, changed his shirt, propped open the
front door, sat awhile in the spring breeze that wafted in from the courtyard, and thought of Paddy Fitz. Patrick Fitzpatrick was the senior partner in Anna’s practice. He was a good-looking,
if epicene, man of fifty or so, tall, affable, cultured to the extremes – eclectic or catholic – and outlandishly well read and well spoken. He would talk of anything and everything in
what Troy could only think of as an upper-class English drawl. He was single. And he was also, far and away, the most rumoured-about man Troy knew.

He had begun life as plain Patrick Alan Smith. This, Troy knew to be true. He had changed his name by deed poll to the Fordian symmetry of Patrick Alleyn Fitzpatrick, and had acquired his accent
by a mysterious process of practice and attrition – intoning into the mirror while one shaved and cocking a keen ear to the strains those class confrères around one will buff all but
the most immovable of accents. Professor Higgins had little on Fitz. He was a grammar school boy from Cheshire. No public school. No Oxbridge. School certificate and a medical degree at a redbrick
university. But you would never know it to listen to him. If asked – confronted was hardly the word – he would deny nothing, would even reminisce, in tones of irony, about a childhood
in the ‘arse-end of nowhere’ and joke about wearing clogs and learning the alphabet on a slate. But if not asked, the line between the man he was and the man he had made was seamless.
Paddy Fitz was a wordspinner, an inventor, a weaver of dreams. And he spun words by the million, wove who knew what dreams, and invented nothing better, no one finer, than himself. Where his powers
of invention stopped, the power of rumour took over. He was single . . . ergo he was queer . . . ergo a roué . . . ergo he swung both ways. He was more than well off from his practice
– a patient list dotted with duchesses and ambassadors and cabinet ministers – ergo . . . he could not have come by his money honestly – when he so transparently had if one but
looked at his bills – ergo . . . he had fiddles . . . things going on on the side . . . performed abortions . . . sold dope.