A Little White Death (25 page)

By the last course one voice held forth – Rod’s eldest, Alex, all too frequently known to the family and to Fleet Street as ‘young Alex’ to distinguish him from his
grandfather, a man dead these twenty years.

‘The bugger of it is we were watching him like hawks,’ he was saying to all and sundry, ‘and he completely gave us the slip. We chased him as far as Tottenham and then we lost
him. By the time I realised where he’d headed he could have been anywhere in the whole of eastern England. Made me wonder – has he got a woman out there too? God he was fast. Stirling
Moss doesn’t have a thing on Woodbridge.’

Life is a series of circles, thought Troy, circles that touch but never quite connect, that seem to pass invisibly and impossibly through one another like the prestidigitation of some Chinese
conjurer.

Sasha got to her feet, whacked the table with an empty bottle and called for a toast.

‘We are gathered here this summer eve to welcome our little brother back from the jaws of death.’

Troy distinctly heard the other twin, his sister Masha, seated next to him, mutter, ‘Oh bloody hell.’

‘I am sure I speak for us all – and if I don’t, sod you – when I say that I thought the grim reaper had finally got you. You are, Freddie, a man with seemingly scant
regard for life and death, but most especially your own. More knocks and scrapes and scars than one could ever hope to count. But you’ve cheated death yet again. So, the toast is “Fate
– bollocks to ’im!”’

Just for the moment Troy wondered if his family would balk at the proposal, but then to a man, and moreover to a woman, they lifted their glasses to him and in unison echoed Sasha’s
toast.

‘Fate – bollocks to ’im!’

Troy looked at Nikolai, toasting the cheating of death when it stood impatiently at his own shoulder. Then Masha whispered softly, ‘I love my sister dearly, but there are times I wonder if
she isn’t completely mad.’

It confirmed what he had been thinking for a couple of years, that the indivisibility of the twins had ceased, that they had gone their separate ways and were no longer, as he had been wont to
put it, one dreadful woman with two bodies. Masha was still married – happily, Troy assumed, for all her infidelities – to Lawrence, editor of the
Sunday Post
. While Sasha and
the late Hugh had begun their family before the war within a year of their marriage – her daughters were now in their twenties, married themselves, scattered and absent – Masha had
married during the war and almost of necessity had begun her family only when it was over. Even now her boys were only in their early teens. Sasha had a freedom denied her sister, and it would be
in character for her to go wild with it. Masha was rooted, he could think of no better word, but then as the twins changed their alignment so they changed in alignment with him, formed a new
constellation, and he knew that he now had more in common with Sasha than he did with Masha. He was not rooted, nowhere near as rooted as he thought and the last thing he wanted was Sasha adopting
him.

Suddenly a figure was at his side. His nephew Alex.

‘Sorry, must dash. Just thought I’d say welcome back, old thing.’

He clenched a fist, tapped Troy gently on the upper arm – a hammily chappish gesture – and left.

Troy found himself exchanging looks with the young man’s mother, Lucinda. ‘There are times’, she said, ‘when I think he’s got a banger up his arse.’

It was unlike her to be quite so Troyish in her speech, but her dissatisfaction with her son was so evident.

‘He won’t sit still for anything. I told him this was special and that if he was going to do his usual cut and run, then he shouldn’t come in the first place.’

Looking down the length of the table at the extended, the vast tribe of Troy, drunken, garrulous, foul of mouth and mind, Troy could not much see that one more or less mattered.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said to his sister-in-law.

‘Yes it does,’ she said. ‘It’s the Tereshkov affair. It’s made a Fleet Street hero of him. It’s made him a bighead. One way or another I think the whole sorry
business will make fools of us all before the year’s out.’

And she looked at her husband as she said it.

Bliss. He had slept. Not the night through, but he had slept. Had not seen dawn. It was almost eight o’clock. He felt he could safely nod off and sleep until ten. If he
could sleep properly again, he might just get through this mortal mess.

At eight thirty a boom-boom-boom like rolling thunder woke him. It was not overhead. It was closer. It was inside his head. He yanked back the curtain. A large Bedford tipper truck was backed up
to the kitchen garden, dumping a mountain of bricks. Rod was yelling and directing the driver. Troy would get up, get dressed, and then he’d kill him.

‘You’re up with the lark,’ Rod said by way of greeting. ‘You must be feeling better.’

‘What are you doing?’ Troy asked.

Rod was bizarrely dressed in undersized overalls that hovered about his shins, flashing half a yard of socks – as ever, they did not match – and he was wearing a tatty straw hat. If
memory served, Troy thought, it had belonged to one of his sisters some time between the wars. He was mixing mortar, bending over a pile of sand and cement and stirring it with the end of his
shovel. Whatever the purpose there seemed to be as much delight in making pretty patterns in powder grey and dull yellow as there was in achieving the mixture.

‘Building a brick wall,’ Rod said.

‘Do we need a brick wall?’

‘Yes. We most definitely need a brick wall.’

‘Well then, do we need it now?’

‘Yes. Been saving it for years, saving it for just such a moment as this.’

‘Since when?’

‘It was the summer of. . . oh bugger, when was it the summer of? ’29? ’30? Hang on ’30, yes definitely ’30. I’d be twenty-three. Winston was out of office.
Start of that long phase that kept him in the political wilderness until Chamberlain asked him back to the Admiralty. Now when was that?’

‘Doesn’t matter. Get on with it.’

‘Eh?’

‘Doesn’t matter when it ended. You were talking about the start.’

‘Was I? So I was. Anyway. That summer Winston asks the old man and our mother down to Chartwell for the weekend. And the old dear won’t go. Winston irritates her. Clementine bores
her. So the old man asks me to go instead. Wonder where you were? It was just the sort of jaunt he’d ordinarily ask you on.’

‘If it was 1930 I’d be fourteen. Hardly likely to gee up the dinner-table chat with the Greatest Living Englishman. He’d never have asked me.’

Troy knew exactly where he’d been. It was the summer he turned fifteen. Biarritz. With Charlie, his mother and one of the better ‘uncles’. After surrendering his own virginity
to Troy’s sisters the previous summer, Charlie was determined to get Troy laid. Troy was determined that he should not, and when Charlie succeeded in pulling the chambermaid –
‘pour mon ami, le petit Russe’, as he had told her – Troy had left him to it. Hours later he returned from a ‘bracing’ walk to find Charlie still in bed.
‘Mireille was marvellous Freddie, bloody marvellous. You don’t know what you’re missing.’

‘Quite,’ said Rod. ‘He wasn’t the GLE in those days, but I suppose you’re right. Anyway. Winston is whiling away the time thinking up books. He has it in mind to do
a “State of Europe” book, and he’s asking the old man to give him the gen on Russia. The old man succeeds in talking him out of it. “Don’t even try,” he says.
“It’s a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”’

Troy raised an eyebrow at this. It would be typical of Alexei Troy to have pinched one of Churchill’s better lines and claimed it for his own. Equally it would be typical of Churchill to
have picked up a throwaway line of Alex Troy’s and made poetry of it. It also reminded him that he had recently glimpsed the enigma (or was it the mystery?) and he wasn’t about to tell
Rod this.

‘Winston accepts this, and as I recall they fell to arguing about Germany. “How long do you give Hitler?” Winston asks. “About two years, perhaps two and a half,”
the old man replies, meaning about thirty months until the Nazis come to power. Should have had a tenner on it. He was absolutely right. “How long before the war starts?” Winston asks.
And the old man spins him some line about there being no need for war but on the other hand it could come any time, and they start to argue and they go on arguing, and they went on arguing for the
next ten years. Which, come to think of it, is why, when I got interned in 1940, the old man would not ask any favours from Winston. Even to get me out of jail.’

‘Rod,’ Troy said softly, ‘is this leading anywhere?’

‘Quite. I digress. On the Sunday morning, before they started rowing, I took a stroll. I came across old Winston down by the kitchen garden. He had a couple of tons of red bricks, a load
of cement, a pair of overalls, a straw hat and a trowel. He said he was going to build a wall the length of his vegetable beds – massive, absolutely bloody massive – said it would
balance his life nicely, and if he was out of office for any length of time would relax him purposefully. He invited me to roll up me sleeves and I laid two rows with him. I suppose I have been
storing up the memory of that for these thirty-odd years. I have even, as you have doubtless observed, been saving the overalls and the straw hat. And now I find I have need of purposeful
relaxation, I’ve ordered a ton of bricks and I too am going to build a wall for the kitchen garden. It will do for me what it did for Winston, pass the time and stop me from going mad with
impatience. And I bet I’m as good at it as he was – after all, his rows wobbled more than a bit. He was well suited to the Admiralty, being, as he was, well acquainted with wavy
lines.’

‘Impatient for what?’ said Troy.

‘We are a year away from an election. At the most. But it could happen any time. In the meantime, we are in for a period of what I shall call pre-electoral madness. I shall show patience
and discipline. Better by far to lay bricks than drop them, say I.’

But for Rod and Sasha they all went home. In the course of the day Sasha looked in on Troy more times than he could count, and he realised that she did indeed mean to adopt
him. To nurse him, insofar as she knew anything about nursing beyond plumping pillows and saying, ‘Do you fancy a little drinkie?’ She appeared in his father’s study amid the dust
and junk with her mid-morning coffee. And again at lunchtime. He walked around the garden to escape her, felt tired and retreated to his bedroom, and she called on him again. And just before seven
in the evening she swanned in for ‘a natter’.

She was, he thought, on her third gin of the evening.

‘Do you think there were people like us fifty years ago?’ she said, à propos of nothing.

Troy had no idea what she was talking about.

‘Or even twenty or ten. Except of course for us – I mean. Were there people like us?’

Troy said nothing.

‘Didn’t you grow up– didn’t we both – feeling, well, different, sort of ?’

‘Sort of ? How sort of ?’

‘Remember that bit in
Jude
the thingumajig?’

‘
Obscure
.’

‘Quite.
Jude the Obscure
. He’s married, well, come to think of it he hasn’t married, this silly tart who says something like, “We weren’t meant to be, we
were born before our time, too sensitive for the age we live in.” Bit of a moan really. Silly tart. Never liked her, but you turn it around and it just about makes sense. We were ahead of our
time. We did not, and I could not – dunno about you – behave as others did or as others expected of me. But we were not too sensitive. Far from it.’

What was the damn woman blathering on about?

‘Tell me, how many women have you had?’

‘Dunno,’ Troy lied. He knew exactly. There had not been many.

‘Do you know there are some women who’ve only ever slept with their husbands? Most women in fact have only ever known one man.’

She was pissed, definitely pissed.

‘I’m fifty-three years old. In my prime I had most of the men I knew. Fucked all your friends.’

Troy knew this. Charlie had simply been the first.

‘I cuckolded Hugh at the reception. Had one of his ushers in your bedroom.’

Troy didn’t want to hear this. And he’d still no idea where she was heading. Then she threw down the newspaper she’d been clutching. More sleazy headlines from the Summer of
the Sleazy. Troy gave it the merest glance. ‘Britain’s Raunchiest Bishop. The Duchess speaks out!’ It was the composite headline. Next Sunday they’d simply transpose the
nouns. Somewhere in the bowels of Fleet Street a subeditor on night shift flicked through a thesaurus for synonyms of ‘raunchy’.

‘We lived rather fast, I think. I don’t think we let our morals be decided for us.’

‘Rod did,’ said Troy, and it sounded like a miserable bleat even to him.

‘Oh yes, Rod did. But I didn’t and you didn’t and Masha didn’t. But don’t you think the world is catching up with us?’

‘Are you saying you’re the new moral standard?’

‘No. I’m not.’

‘Then what are you saying?’

‘Not sure.’

‘The cakes of custom cracking open?’

‘Dunno. Why does custom come in cakes? Why not tins or packets?’

This was a classic twins remark, either one of them could have uttered it. Troy wished she’d just go away. He was not at all sure how long he could refrain from saying it.

‘I think I’m saying that things are breaking up. And the more the world becomes more like the one in which I have lived all my life, the less I like it.’

The woman could drive him mad.

‘Because it inverts, it becomes the new moral imperative. Decided from outside, by popular acclaim. If you see what I mean?’

‘People expect loose morals?’

‘Sort of. And it won’t work. It’s a false freedom. It’s prurience, and prurience does not do what it wants, it does what outrages. One eye always over the shoulder
looking back at the moral code, seeking permission in defiance. It won’t work because it only works in dissent. If it becomes, as it were, “permissive”, if we are now entering
upon a permissive society—’