Second Violin (41 page)

‘Then perhaps we should stop whispering and go somewhere where we can talk.’

‘I’ll be at home this evening.’

‘I can’t come to Cambridge.’

‘Don’t worry. I may not be a cockney sparrow any longer, but I’m still a London girl. I have a top-floor flat overlooking the park. 112 Stanhope Place, just past Marble Arch.
Shall we say eight o’clock?’

‘Shouldn’t you be here? Shouldn’t you be sitting
shiv’ah
at your father’s house. I thought
shiv’ah
lasted quite a while?’

‘
Shiv’ah?
What did you do? Look up “Jew” in an encyclopedia?’

‘Yes.’

Troy thought she might laugh again, instead she said, ‘Do you think I give a damn? I want to be out of here before they start praying again. Be there at eight. I’ll provide the bacon
and eggs, you bring the champagne.’

The lift was like a gilded cage. Two fat ladies could not have stood side by side. It whisked Troy to the top floor, jerked to a halt and disgorged him, Taittinger in hand,
opposite the open door of Zette Borg’s ‘penthouse’ flat. He pushed gently at the door, a waft of scent across the room, a hint of steam and talcum from the bathroom, a wireless
softly airing a Benny Goodman Concert – Helen Forrest crooning ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ a little too jauntily.

The sitting room faced south-west, and from this height Troy had a clear view above the treetops across Hyde Park. It was light, it would be light for a couple of hours. It was, he thought, a
flat chosen for sunsets. Perhaps sunset was what Zette had in mind.

An arm snaked around his waist. The waft of scent grew stronger with the lips pressed to the back of his neck, the chin resting on his shoulder. He knew the fragrance – his sisters had
used it for years now –
Indiscret
by Lucien Lelong. It summed up their joint character, or at least would do so until the advent of a scent called
Who Gives A Damn
?

‘I know what you’re thinking.’

‘You do?’

‘You’re thinking Lindfors has set me up in a love-nest.’

Which was exactly what Troy was thinking.

‘I’m not his only one, you know. He likes clever women. He’s had affairs with most of his female staff.’

‘Do you mind?’

‘Nope. Sauce for the goose. Just so long as I’m
numero uno,
as long as I don’t find some other woman’s knickers in the laundry basket . . . I couldn’t give a
damn.’

Her head left his shoulder, she turned her back and said, ‘Zip me up, Troy.’

She was wearing a Schiaparelli trouser-dress, the sort of thing Marlene Dietrich always seemed to be wearing when there was a photographer around. The trousers billowed from waist to ankle, the
top clung to her like a second, simple black skin. The end of the zip was all but in the cleft of her buttocks – a line of white flesh peeping through black silk, from neck to arse – no
knickers, no bra.

‘Don’t be shy, Troy.’

He yanked it up, was about to take a pace backward when one hand came over her shoulder and pointed at her spine.

‘Oh no, you don’t get off that lightly. Kiss.’

He kissed.

‘You know,’ he said into the scent and the flesh of her backbone. ‘I rather thought you told me not to make plans.’

‘Who’s planning anything? I’ve nothing planned beyond midnight. Now – you did remember the champagne?’

‘Next to your gramophone, well chilled.’

‘How do you manage to chill champagne at this time of year?’

‘You plan ahead. You lower a bucket of water into the coalhole outside your house and dunk the champagne in it for as long as you can. Then you wrap it in last night’s newspaper,
jump in a cab and get here as fast as you can.’

‘Supposing the coalman calls?’

She had pinched his shirt. Troy wandered around in trousers, sockless. Zette stood at the stove scrambling eggs and crisping bacon. All he’d had to do was pop the cork on
the champagne while it was still cold.

It was a sparse flat, close to bare. Unengaging shades of cream. Chunky leather furniture. Immaculate lines and surfaces. Bland watercolours that looked as though they’d been acquired as a
job lot after Huntley & Palmer had used them on biscuit tins. Everything in it cost, but also everything in it told you no one lived there. It was like being in a hotel. Troy pulled open a
drawer in the sideboard half-expecting a Gideon bible – it was empty – opened a cupboard next to the fireplace – that was empty too. How long did you have to spend somewhere
before you wanted to put your mark on it, to introduce some personal object, some well-read book, some framed photograph of some loved one? It struck Troy that this was the opposite of all those
Jewish homes he and Walter Stilton had invaded this summer – they were crammed with memories, stuffed with the signifying junk of life – this flat was stripped of them. How long did you
have to spend somewhere . . . how long would you spend dressing up, all that Lelong and Schiaparelli, knowing you would all but rip it off in minutes?

They had tumbled into bed so quickly he wondered that she had bothered to ask him to zip her up.

Afterwards she had made no comment on his amateurishness. It was understood. He was better at it than the last time they’d met. He’d give Kitty Stilton credit for that, were it not
that he was pushing Kitty Stilton as far from consciousness as possible.

‘Now, Troy!’

Zette rushed in, shirttails flapping, a gust of bacon and brown sauce trailing behind her. Slapped their after-lights-out dorm feast on the table by the picture window on the park. It would soon
be dark, the sun was a reddling blush on the horizon. And with darkness came the blackout.

‘Not that I’m saying bolt your grub or anything, Troy, but I can’t abide the blackout. I usually put out all the lights instead. Often as not I just sit here. Before the war,
of course, one watched London light up, now it never does, as though a giant had leaned over London in ’39, huffed just once and out they all went.’

After bacon and eggs, after most of a bottle of Taittinger, she said, ‘Just so you don’t think I’m utterly heartless . . . tell me how my father died.’

The question took Troy by surprise. But what didn’t? That their wake for Izzy Borg had been to fuck each other senseless had taken him by surprise.

He told her as briefly and as clinically as he had told Onions.

‘And,’ she said at last, ‘you have no doubts?’

‘No.’

She said nothing while they drained the bottle, then, with a suddeness that was startling, she stood up, peeled the shirt over her head, threw it at Troy, stood naked before him and said,
‘Get dressed. Time we went out.’

‘What – a club or something?’

Troy did not do clubs – he’d somehow missed out that phase of his education.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Or something.’

She disappeared into her bedroom and reappeared in a macintosh and soft shoes.

They crossed the road into the park, she slipped an arm through his. A couple of hundred yards and she steered him across the grass, towards trees, but they stopped just short of them.

It was a dark night, but not so dark he could not discern the vague shapes of bodies on the grass around him. Not so dark that he could not see that Zette was face to face with him. And no depth
of dark could mask the sounds of coitus coming at him from every direction. If there was one couple coupling, there were a dozen or more.

‘I discovered this in the spring. People come here every day just to do it. Even before dusk.’

‘They do?’

‘It’s almost a tradition. Indeed, a new London cry is to be heard nightly the cry of ye olde rubber johnnie seller. We might even see one. Condoms on sticks like candy floss, and the
cry of “Five bob new, half a crown used”.’

‘Used! You’re kidding?’

‘Nope. A good rinse and a light dusting with chalk and a rubber johnny ought to last a month. All depends how hard you go at it. But . . . we don’t need him, because we have . .
.’

There was just enough light to see the french letter in its tiny paper envelope, like a thank you card from an elf, that she held up to him.

‘Er . . .’

‘Yeees?’

‘We don’t need him, but we don’t need the park either, we have . . . your flat. These people probably have nowhere else to go.’

‘No Troy, they do it here because they can. They do it here because they want to do it here. It’s the “aphrodisia of war”. It’s pure Freud. It’s pure sex. We
need to do it here, Troy.’

‘No we don’t.’

‘Oh, but we do. We do. We most certainly do.’

She let the macintosh slip. She’d a simple cotton frock on. She hoisted the frock to her waist, bunched the skirt in one hand – knickerless still – and thrust the condom at him
with the other.

‘Let’s do it.’

‘I . . . I . . . I . . . er.’

And a voice from the dark said, ‘Fer Gawd’s sake, fuck ’er, mate. If you don’t, I bleedin’ well will. Maybe then she’ll shut ’er great clangin’
gob!’

Later, heaped with embarrassment, glistening with sweat, trousers round his knees, groin locked to hers, pale moon of arse in the air, wondering what he’d do if a policeman stopped by,
Troy found everything an inhibition.

‘Come, Troy. Come.
Viens
!
Viens
!
Viens
!’

Like it or not he did as he was told, and at the wettest moment of the great wet rush, she whispered in his ear, ‘Catch this bastard for me, Troy. Catch him. Promise me you’ll catch
him!’

For no reason he could think of Troy was suddenly reminded of Dora Wax reading tea leaves for him. Something about a dark woman entering his life. A dark woman, a wicked woman.

Under moonlight,
infectious moonlight,
a madman dances,
chanting numbers,
two, three, five, seven, eleven.
Smeared in excrement,
naked as nativity,
smeared in his own blood,
throat bared to heaven,
Lord Carsington dances.

As Izzy, henceforth known as Zette, and Troy repeated their night-time feast on scrambled eggs, crispy bacon and Taittinger, Rod Troy and his new-found friends mulled over the
pleasure of their cuisine in their dormitory three hundred miles away.

Hummel said, ‘Have you considered that this might indeed be heaven? We have beds with sheets, we have indoor plumbing, sufficient entertainment and diversion, we have three square meals a
day . . .’

‘Squa
rish
,’ said Billy ‘The grub ain’t that great and there’s hardly ever seconds of anything. There’s no booze. And you can get fed up with kippers
every day.’

Hummel conceded, ‘Squarish then. If heaven lies in the security of the basic necessities of life . . .’

‘Food that falls from the trees?’ said Rod.

‘Kippers don’t fall from trees.’

Hummel ignored Billy and picked up from Rod, ‘Exactly then Heaven’s Gate might not be heaven, but as you more aptly suggest Eden?’

‘Wot are you on about?’

‘He means, Billy, that one could get used to this.’

‘Do you ’Ummer?’

‘Indeed I do. I begin to wonder if I might not spend the rest of my life here in fruitful idleness.’

‘You don’t ’arf talk some bollocks.’

Rod and Hummel said nothing. Billy could always be relied on to fill a silence, and clearly, he was thinking.

‘Where do kippers come from?’ he said at last.

And from the farthest bunk Herr Rosen said,
‘Mein Gott,
do you cockneys know nothing?’

A couple of days later, Troy found a postcard on the doormat as he and Kitty let themselves in early in the evening.

He glanced at it. A view of the backs and the river at Cambridge.

‘Wossat?’

Kitty’s head on his shoulder, peering at the card.

‘Nothing,’ he lied, folding the card. ‘My old pal, Charlie. Works with your father out at Burnham.’

‘You live in a world of old pals, you lot, don’t yer?’

Rod found himself looking forward to the idea of Heaven’s Gate Make-shift University. It would pass the time, much as playing second violin in the string quartet would
pass the time, and it might kick his brain into gear the way things did when he was at Cambridge. He was not at all surprised to find that Rosen and Hummel joined him – after Hummel’s
offer to speak on the matter of God, it was to be expected. What surprised him was to find himself seated between Jacks and Lt Jenkins.

Jacks said, ‘It’s gotta be better than twiddlin’ yer thumbs, ain’t it?’

Rod said, ‘Are you under orders, Mr Jenkins?’

‘’Fraid so, old man. Besides, you can’t keep it a secret, and I’d’ve come anyway.’

‘Mr Trench will not be joining us?’

‘Nope. He’ll get whatever potted version I choose to give him. He’s expecting subversion and dissidence. Anything less and he’ll probably dismiss me before I get to the
end of my first sentence.’

Drax’s first sentence was incredibly long. As was his second and his third. He coughed into a hanky every so often, otherwise he launched into a convoluted account of ‘Our
Times.’

It was disappointing. Drax, the most interesting conversationalist Rod had met in his imprisonment, was all too predictable as a lecturer. Rod felt he could have written all this himself. It was
too familiar. It was the rubber-stamp, left-wing interpretation of the inter-war years, a potted account of the rise of Nazism, and potshots at every other wing of politics for not resisting it. It
sent Rod into daydreams. Jacks nodded off. Jenkins and Hummel looked alert enough, but Jacks was definitely asleep, his snore punctuating the boredom as regularly as Drax’s cough. Rosen
looked engaged, engaged and angry.

‘In conclusion . . . the development of National Socialism in Germany in all its horror is not an aberration from the human values extolled by the capitalist system but a direct
consequence of them. I would even say their apotheosis, and propaganda is now being used to convince the British of their fundamental difference from the Third Reich, whereas in fact the difference
is at best one of superstructures . . . not of fundamentals. When we hear of “the Enemy Within” – ourselves, gentlemen, ourselves! – and are urged to vigilance, it is only
intelligent to recognise that the enemy has been “within” for one hundred and fifty years, and if war is now being fought in terms of nationalities, it conceals rather than cancels the
war between capital and labour.’