A Little White Death (33 page)

‘Eh?’

It was perfectly logical remark on Clover’s part. ‘Eh?’ indeed. He should have known better than to try to summarise a Shakespeare plot in a single sentence.

Pyramus and Thisbe, he thought, that was easier. One of them got eaten by a lion . . . or was it a bear? Oh sod it. She’d probably never read Ovid anyway.

‘I can think of only one example of a suicide pact by lovers, and it isn’t fiction, it’s history,’ he said.

‘And?’

‘Mayerling. About twenty years before the First War. The heir to the Austrian throne, whose name escapes me, and his lover, whose name also escapes me, killed themselves at his hunting
lodge.’

‘Why?’

‘Can’t remember.’

‘But people do do it, don’t they. They do. It’s true!’

‘Idiots do,’ said Troy.

‘Can’t you see the love in it? Can’t you imagine a love so powerful you’d die for it?’

‘No,’ he said truthfully, ‘I can’t.’

Troy cut a devious route back home. Along Oxford Street, down Great Chapel Street into Soho. Then the double-back into St Anne’s Court. Clover dawdled, idly looking around. The habitual
affectation of the bored teenager – at least habitual for as long as there had been teenagers. Troy could not remember that he ever was one. He wondered if she’d even notice his
aberrant navigation. He stopped before a glass panel, next to a newsagent’s, and feigned reading the posted advertisements. And found he could not feign. He paid so little attention to
London’s square mile of vice, perched as it was upon his own doorstep, that the advances in subtlety since the law had hustled the whores off the street, begat an inventiveness little short
of startling.

‘Well padded sofa – pretty in pink.’ And then a local telephone number.

He could not for a moment think what this meant. Then he felt Clover’s chin descend to his shoulder, her eyes next to his as she leant on him and stabbed at the ad with her finger.

‘White woman, good looker, big tits,’ she said as though she had read his mind to the letter.

‘Really?’ escaped him. He would have preferred to have said nothing.

Her finger shot out to ‘Double fronted mahogany wardrobe – suit bachelor.’

‘Black woman – even bigger tits. Anything else you don’t understand?’

In for a penny, he pointed to ‘Tired old 3 piece suite? Let Maggie the Upholsterer whip it into shape.’

‘Jesus, Troy. Where have you been all your life?’

She walked off and left him. He caught her up at the corner of Wardour Street. She was smiling gently and seemed almost to be laughing to herself. At Meard Street he turned in and she
followed.

Meard Street was bolder. Prostitutes risked arrest, stood in their doorways, leant out of windows. Troy had few doubts that most of these women were slipping backhanders to his colleagues on a
weekly basis. It was what he hated about vice and Vice – everybody bent to it.

A roguish whore smiled at him. He quickened his pace, only to feel Clover’s hand restrain him.

‘What do you take me for, Troy? You think I haven’t seen all this before? I been coming up West since I was thirteen. I seen all this and so what? So bleedin’ what? Is this
your morality tale? Are you trying to tell me this is where I’ll end up? Poor little Jackie Clover on the stony path to hell, earning her living on her back? Troy – it’s not my
problem. It’s yours. You’re the one with this vision of hell, not me. And you’re about as wrong as you could be. It’s been a wasted lesson. I’ve learnt only one thing
I didn’t know.’

OK, he thought, play the game.

‘And what’s that?’ he said, dutifully playing.

‘’Ow to use a peashooter.’

She pointed down Meard Street towards the narrow end where it bottlenecked into Dean Street to emerge almost opposite Gennaro’s restaurant. Good bloody grief, he’d never even
noticed. A young whore was leaning out of a first-floor window blowing dried peas at passing men. She had discrimination – only those whose footsteps lingered – and she had aim –
Troy watched her ping one right off the back of a bloke’s neck. He slapped a hand to his neck and looked around, as though expecting to see an aggressive insect of some sort. His eyes caught
the whore’s. She waved, fingers in a rolling fan, like an elementary five-finger exercise at the keyboard. The man reddened and walked on.

‘See?’ said Clover.

She left Troy standing again, turned into Dean Street. Troy followed before the Maid Marian of Whores drew a bead on him. He could not grasp Clover. Equally he could see no reason why he should
be able to grasp her, but grasp her he could not. The naive romantic, entranced by his Mayerling tale; the hardened cynic unintimidated by the bare facts of metropolitan prostitution. Perhaps
he’d asked for this? Served him right. But then . . . when he’d been thirteen he was still making models of balsawood aeroplanes.

It was raining before they reached home. Cold enough for the gas fire. He lit it and lay back in the chair. It was the time of day he flagged badly. Past that time. He’d
pushed it by a couple of hours. Not been out this late in an age. Closed his eyes.

Clover kicked off her shoes and whacked them carelessly into a corner. He felt her hand on the topof his head, fingers playing with a strand of hair.

‘Are you coming up?’

The proprietorial nature – good fucking grief, the middle-aged nature – of the remark. It went with slippers and cardigans, rollers and the permanent wave, and milky drinks before
bedtime. It reached into his blood, colder than a Moscow night.

‘Up?’ he whispered, incredulous.

‘You know . . .’

‘I can’t.’

He was not at all sure why he had chosen the word ‘can’t’ in preference to ‘won’t’ or ‘couldn’t’. The prospect of sex with Clover rooted him
to the spot. He who knew no guilt, rigid in a recliner while a woman of sixteen or seventeen propositioned him in the vocabulary of a tired housewife.

‘All right then. We’ll do it here.’

‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t.’

She was quickly undoing the buttons of her blouse, fingers dancing down the line from neck to belly button. Then it was off, and she stood in her bra and slacks. The slacks zipped at the hip.
The beguiling twist of the torso, the thrust of the hipsideways as she pulled the zip.

‘Why not?’ she said bending to push her slacks off her feet. ‘What’s a fuck between friends?’

What’s a fuck between friends? Was this the philosophy of the incoming age? What’s a fuck? Only the most complex action he knew. Lives bent around the act; new lives came into being because of it. And she made it sound
like a handshake.

‘And we are friends. Aren’t we?’

Leaning over him. One hand on each of his knees, bracing herself.

‘I can’t.’

Then he did.

He awoke on the hearth rug. Gas fire hissing soporifically. Clover looking at him in the pink light of the flame.

‘You din’t take your pill.’

‘Forgot.’

‘Forgot?’

‘Maybe I’ll sleep without it tonight. Make a change.’

‘Can I have it if you don’t want it?’

‘Not a matter of “it”. There’s plenty. If you can’t sleep, take one.’

She dashed to the bathroom, returned with a glass of water and a jar of his pills. She sat cross-legged, naked, on the rug, and tipped a couple of dozen into her hand.

‘One’s enough,’ he said.

‘You got hundreds.’

‘Not hundreds.
A
hundred. Fifty in that jar, fifty in the other.’

‘She wrote you a ’script for a hundred!’

She palmed two, tipped the rest back, capped the jar and handed one to him. He swallowed it with a gulpof water. Watched her do the same. Watched her grin at him.

‘What’s the joke?’

‘You don’t know about Mandies do you?’

‘Mandies?’

‘Mandrax. The pill you just took.’

‘It’s a pill. A sleeping pill. That’s all.’

‘Yeah, well . . . but if you don’t go to sleep.’

‘The point, the whole point, is to sleep.’

‘Just you wait, Fred. Put it off, stifle the yawns, prop up your eyelids and stay awake for another half-hour.’

‘I find they tend to work in about half that time.’

‘Trust me.’

She went upstairs when he complained of the cold, pulled the eiderdown off his bed. Wrapped them in it. A cocoon for two. The bounded frontier. Him helpless. A ridiculous desire to grin. Then it
hit him. A wave of erotic arousal that forced the grin. Into laughter. Almost a giggle.

‘Told yer,’ she said.

Then he saw the same stupid grin reflected on her face, felt the same wave from her, and felt it wrap around them deeper than the eiderdown, warmer and wetter than the night.

It was like playing wigwam. The containing game of childhood. Refugees, orphans of storm – bigger storms by far than the celestial tantrum which danced outside the window now. It
buttressed what she felt – or what he thought she felt, had to feel, didn’t she? – abandoned by her father’s death, neglected by her mother’s life. Buttressed what he
felt, certainly – the conventional coital conceit that the rest of the world had ceased – buttressed by the madness of idleness that was TB and its cure.

Clover emerged from the bathroom as Troy was buttoning up his overcoat – the childhood ritual of keeping well wrapped up when poorly. It went with string vests and Vick
rubs. By contrast she wore only the towel, clutched to her front.

‘Troy. Lend us a few quid, will you?’

‘What for?’

‘There’s things I need. Grandad bundled me up so fast I scarcely had time to pack.’

‘What sort of things?’

‘God, you’re suspicious. Thing things. Woman things.’

Troy said nothing.

‘All right, you asked for it. Knickers. I’m right out of clean knickers. And Tampax. I’ve got no Tampax at all.’

Troy unbuttoned his coat and jacket, reached for his wallet and took out a five-pound note.

‘Make it a tenner,’ Clover said.

‘A tenner!’

He should have put his wallet away instead of standing with it folded open. She pulled another fiver from it and ignored his protest. Then she flipped the wallet shut and shoved it back inside
his pocket. She had to let go of the towel. It fell to the floor. She locked her arms around his neck – the familiar wrestling hold of a woman wanting something – a five-pound note in
each hand. He could hear them crackle past his ears. She pressed her chest onto his, and he felt her nipples pushing through the fabric of his shirt.

She kissed him. One ear. Then the lips.

‘Ta. You’re a sweetie, really you are.’

And he knew he’d never see his ten quid again.

At the Bailey Troy wondered whether Cocket would put Fitz on the stand. If he were Cocket he would not – there was too much in the life of Paddy Fitz which Furbelow could exploit to
advantage. But if not Fitz, who?

Cocket rose. ‘I call Professor Martin Pritch-Kemp.’

The court buzzed softly. Mirkeyn asked counsel to see him in chambers, and when they returned the call went out for Pritch-Kemp. Troy could guess what had been said. Mirkeyn reiterated that he
had not allowed the Professor to be named, because he had been told quite clearly that the prosecution would not call him. Cocket would have replied that he had never said he would not call
Pritch-Kemp, had no obligation to disclose such information and what the prosecution chose to do or not do was not his domain. Cocket would also have said that the court could not prevent
Pritch-Kemp from giving evidence if he volunteered. And he surely had volunteered? God knows what Furbelow had said. Nothing, would have been the wisest course. If the prosecution had gambled on
Pritch-Kempwanting to avoid scandal, then they did not know the man. Or perhaps it had never occurred to them that the Professor could be Pritch-Kemp?

‘Are you the man known to Tara and Caroline Ffitch as the Professor?’

‘Yes.’

‘What was your relationship with Tara and Caroline Ffitch?’

‘We were lovers.’

‘All three of you?’

‘Yes,’ said Pritch-Kemp. ‘Can’t have one without the other.’

Mirkeyn stared out at the court, simply daring anyone to snigger at the unconscious rendition of a line from a popular song.

‘Where did the three of you have sex?’

‘At their home.’

‘Dreyfus Mews?’

‘Yes. At my home, in Little Venice. At various hotels. We visited Paris and Amsterdam. At Dr Fitzpatrick’s cottage at Uphill . . .’

Pritch-Kemptrailed off and Cocket let him. It would not help for Pritch-Kemp to add to the list. They’d probably fucked in half the London parks and the backs of taxis, and Pritch-Kemp was
just the sort of bloke to tell you so.

‘Were you charged by any of these establishments?’

‘Of course. Hotels are not free.’

‘But you paid no money at Dreyfus Mews or Uphill?’

‘Paid for what?’

‘For the use of a bed . . . or for services rendered.’

‘The answer’s no to both questions. Fitz didn’t rent me a bed, and I’ve never paid the Ffitch girls for sex.’

‘But did you ever give them money?’

‘Yes. I gave them presents and I gave them money so they could buy their own presents.’

‘Why?’

‘Why not? I’m a wealthy man. I was born rich; I’ve a good job and my books are bestsellers. Why should I not share my good fortune with my friends and lovers?’

‘And this . . . these gifts were not associated with sex?’

‘Not directly. But there was a time when, more often than not, if the three of us met we had sex. Hence if I decided to treat them it would, more often than not, be on an occasion when we
had also had sex. But that is no more than coincidence.’

‘Did Dr Fitzpatrick know you had sex with the Misses Ffitch in his home?’

‘Of course.’

Don’t say he watched you do it, thought Troy, just don’t say it.

‘And do you know if either of the Misses Ffitch passed on the money you gave them to Dr Fitzpatrick?’

‘I do. He used to complain, jokingly, that they were eating him out of house and home, that they contributed nothing to his household.’