Blue Rondo Page 11

  ‘No. But you’ll need to ask him yourself. Indeed, I can’t think why you haven’t. I’ve just remembered the last time you and I met. It wasn’t at the Stiltons’, it was at Rod’s demob party. You flew with his squadron in ’44. You know what the RAF means to Rod. Call him at the Commons. I can’t believe he won’t take the call.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. Really. And you’ll have to do it because I’m not going to do it for you.’

  ‘We’ve not met since the last reunion in 1954.’

  ‘Trust me, Maurice. He’ll take the call. Besides, whilst I doubt you’re a paid-up member of the Party, I’ll bet that your millions have made the odd contribution to Party funds.’

  ‘There has been a few quid. When I thought I could help out.’

  ‘Very coy, Maurice. Can we go now?’

  They turned back into Watney Street, emerging at the junction where the market met Cable Street, where the London, Tilbury and Southend Railway crossed high on its way to Essex, and the East London branch of the Metropolitan Line crossed deep on its way under the Thames down Brunel’s tunnel to Rotherhithe. They stood outside the Eel and Mash shop. Maurice waved for the car, all but besieged by kids at the top of the street, and as Troy got in he said, ‘Maurice – why?’

  ‘Why? Because it’s my street. It’s my neck o’ the woods. As they say Stateside it’s my “briarpatch”. It’s what made me. Even the effort of getting away from it made me. It’s time to give something back. We all have to give something back.’

  Maurice sat back in the seat. It seemed to Troy that he was smiling contentedly. He gazed back at the grubby faces of rowdy kids pressed to the windows without concern.

  ‘Give something back?’ said Troy. ‘And make something while you’re at it?’

  Maurice wasn’t smiling now: he was grinning.

  ‘Goes without saying, Freddie. That’s the way of the world.’

  § 24

  Troy felt they’d been lucky. Kitty was ready to leave, but hardly champing at the bit. She was chatting happily to another old face from Troy’s East End days – a broken-nosed, pugilistic face, but a handsome one – the boxing promoter Danny Ryan. As Maurice came in he threw a mock punch at Danny’s shoulder, saying, ‘Just taken Freddie back to the old street, Dan.’

  Ryan smiled without any more to it than good manners. ‘Whatever you say, Mo. Blow it up, paint it sky-blue pink. All the same to me.’

  Maurice moved on. Kitty looked from Troy to Ryan and back again. ‘So, you two know each other?’

  ‘I knew Danny when I was a beat copper.’

  Ryan said nothing.

  Kitty said, ‘Danny and I go back a long way. We were kids together.’

  Ryan cleared his throat and spoke: ‘I think we were a bit more to each other than that, Kit.’

  She touched his arm gently. ‘Of course we were.’ And turned to Troy whilst still touching Ryan.

  ‘But that was before you and I were . . . you know . . .’

  ‘Of course,’ said Troy.

  In the cab heading back West, Troy said, ‘Been your day for old flames, hasn’t it?’

  ‘I don’t know about that. There was only you and Danny. And Danny wasn’t there as an old boyfriend. He was there because he’d been very good to my mum since my dad died. Not that my mum would ever have asked, but if it were left to Danny she’d never have wanted for anything.’

  She caught Troy smiling. ‘What’s so funny, Troy?’

  ‘The use of the conditional “were”. It’s very American. Twenty years ago you’d’ve said “woz”.’

  ‘Leave it aht, young Fred,’ said Kitty in pure glottal-stopped Cockney, and her hand took his and gave it a squeeze.

  § 25

  ‘Do you have anything to drink? I mean hard booze. I don’t think I could face another glass of wine, let alone another cup of tea.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Troy. ‘Not much choice, but say what you’d like and we’ll see.’

  ‘Vodka.’

  ‘No problem.’

  ‘Not much choice’ was a lie posing as modesty. Between the squat brick columns that supported the kitchen sink Troy kept his ‘cellar’. Every trip home to Mimram would garner another half-dozen bottles of wine from the genuine cellar that his father had left equally to Troy and brother Rod in 1943, and which, sixteen years on, they seemed scarcely to have dented. For the benefit, mostly, of guests he also kept vodka – Polish as well as Russian to keep Kolankiewicz happy – and whisky, a couple of single malts, which had pretty much the same happiness quotient for Wildeve. And pale ale for those rare occasions when the Fat Man knocked on his door. He picked up the Russian. It wasn’t as strong as the Polish. Something lurking in the memories of his youth left him scared – oh-so-slightly – of a Kitty pissed.

  ‘I’ll be staying a while. I don’t know how long.’

  ‘I understand, things to sort out.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Not a damn thing to sort out. Probate won’t take long. Mum’s will was perfectly straightforward. I’m the executor, me and her sister Dolly. There are small bequests to no more than a dozen people, a bigger one to Tel – always worried about Tel, Tel being the youngest – and the house goes to Vera.’

  ‘Pretty unequal, then?’

  ‘Unequal but fair. Vera’s run that house since my dad died. She’s never lived anywhere else. Mum would never have put her in the position of having to sell up and move just so she could divvy a share of it to Rose and Reenie. They’re doing all right. Or, rather, their husbands are. Tom’s got his civil-service pension. They’ll be “comfy” – a very Tom word, “comfy”. And, you’ll have gathered, Maurice has made a fortune since the war.’

  ‘Impossible not to. If you flick through the pages of the Sunday newspapers, there’s often as not a bit of gossip about Sylvia Steele’s latest abomination for charity in the home pages, something in the financial pages about Maurice, usually a company takeover or a building going up, and another bit about Danny Ryan in the sports. If you’d invited Lady Steele to the funeral you’d have scored a hat-trick. And you? What’s your legacy?’

  ‘I asked for nothing. Vera wants me to take Mum’s old sewing-machine. A girl’s best friend, as she insists. But that’s a sentimental thing. I might even do it. But I asked for nothing. What would I want with a few quid from the estate? Cal is richer than he ever was, almost as rich as Maurice, which is surprising when you come to think of it. No one in that family has done any work – real work, I mean, not politics – since before the Civil War.’

  Troy steered her back to the subject. ‘But all the same, you’re staying.’

  Kitty drained her glass and stuck it out for more. ‘There’s something I haven’t told you.’

  Troy was quite sure there were thousands of things she hadn’t told him.

  ‘Cal’s running for president. The primaries start in about six months. He’s already fundraising. Running in a race that’s hardly started yet, and won’t be over till next November. Once I get back, I get back to . . . not chaos exactly, but I know my feet won’t touch the ground till about January 1961.’

  Her own words seemed to give her pause for thought and pause for booze. She was getting steadily pissed, but it was a day to get pissed. He was beginning to accommodate the idea of a Kitty pissed. He almost felt he could join her at the bottom of the bottle.

  ‘Good God, when you say it it sounds like something out of science fiction, doesn’t it? Who ever thought we’d live to see a date like 1961? Imagine writing that on a cheque. You’d look twice at your own handwriting. So . . .I’m just putting a little distance between me and the big race. It’ll be the last chance I get for more than a year if he wins the nomination. If he wins the White House, make that eight years. Tell me, Troy, when you took up with me all those years ago did you ever imagine in your wildest dream that I’d be America’s First Lady?’

  Of course he hadn’t. Neither had she. She’d been a chatty, cheeky police sergeant, making he
r own small piece of history as the first woman ever to run a London nick. He was a rather raw detective sergeant, outranked by Kitty in every sense but the literal. It had all changed with her sudden marriage to Cormack. She had been Britain’s first GI bride, some three years and more before the term had been minted.

  ‘Have you told the family?’

  ‘No. They wouldn’t understand. America’s just Hollywood and GI Joes to them. They probably think the presidency’s hereditary. Right now they take the mickey out of my accent. They think that’s really funny. As though I could or should have gone on being the Cockney sparrow. Once I’d explained about Cal’s ambitions they’d be inordinately pleased and boasting to the neighbours about how well Kitty’s done in America, without the first grasp of what America is. Honestly, Troy, I could do without that. I think I need time to think.’

  ‘Do you know what America is?’

  ‘As ever, straight to the heart of the matter in a single sentence. You are your father’s son. And the answer is, I’m not sure what America is, but I know I spend a damn sight more time thinking about that than my husband does.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And more booze if you want my thesis.’

  Troy topped up her glass, decided to join her and topped up his own. The Kitty Stilton he had known would never have uttered a word like ‘thesis’.

  ‘America is . . .’ Then she stopped. Swigged vodka and held out her glass again. Troy would never keep up with her at this pace. ‘America is I Love Lucy, Leave It To Beaver, the World Series and . . . and . . . nothing – that’s what America is. A culture – a popular culture masquerading as a nation state. So there.’

  Pissed or sober this woman was definitely not Kitty Stilton. This wasn’t like a chat with Kitty: this was like an argument with his dad, who had unlegged many a donkey on many a subject. In turn this realisation only made his bafflement, the inevitable questions, the more pathetic.

  ‘I’ve seen I Love Lucy, but what’s Leave It To Beaver and what’s the World Series?’

  ‘Kids’ programme. Every kid in America watches it, I should think. World Series is baseball – all the major national sides and maybe even one or two from Canada.’

  ‘Sort of like the FA Cup?’

  ‘Bigger, more obsessive – you even get women reciting ballgame statistics to you. Fanatic followers. High drama. On a scale you’d never get here. But . . . I Love Lucy, Leave It To Beaver and the World Series are the three things that bind America together and they’re all on television. That’s the level at which America exists – television. I couldn’t argue that it exists as a single nation on any other level – and, of course, America doesn’t know this. War’s different, of course. I got to America six months before they entered the war. It . . . rallied them . . . It fostered the illusion that they might be one nation, but they’re not. Fostered the illusion that they’re the world’s great melting-pot, but they’re not. Did you know Cal was part German? Fluent in it since childhood. As I’ve heard him tell people more times than I’d ever care to count, “German is handed down with the family Bible.” My boys speak passable German. My husband is both typical and atypical. Typically any American who can trace his family to the old country – any old country – does so and never ceases to remind you that they are Irish, Moravian, Lithuanian . . . whatever. But . . . Cal is a hybrid, and that’s rarer than you might imagine. The tribes, there is no better word for them, the white tribes, practise endogamy by and large . . .’

  Troy had to think what endogamy was but the context helped. He wondered when in the hurly-burly of raising children she had found the time to educate herself, but she had.

  ‘. . . and hence we have the strange phenomenon of the ethnic vote. The separate nations that really make up America when the illusions are blown away. Tell me, Troy, can you imagine your brother worrying about the Jewish vote or the Irish vote? Can you imagine the Jews or the Irish voting as a block with one mind? Can you imagine any English politician even thinking in those terms? That’s what Cal will spend the next year doing – wooing, conning, cajoling. Kissing babies, wearing a yarmulka, sporting a shamrock, lying through his teeth. God knows, if the Negroes could vote he’d be wooing them too. And I’ll be there with him. At his side, the loyal wife, mother of his sons. And Troy, my glass is empty.’

  Troy had lost count of the number of refills he had given Kitty by the time she persuaded him to lift the lid on the piano. They’d boozed away an evening into a night. She had a remarkable capacity to stay lucid while pissed, but he felt pretty certain she was approaching her limit.

  ‘Did you ever see The Best Years of Our Lives? You know, Myrna Loy and Fredric March.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That scene where Hoagy Carmichael plays “Lazy River”, so soft and slow, his hands hardly moving. Made it look effortless.’

  ‘Hoagy Carmichael made everything look effortless. “Lazy River”, “Lazy Bones” – he wrote them both.’

  ‘Play it for me. Soft and slow.’

  Troy played the song, as close as he could remember to the version Carmichael had played in the film. Kitty drooped, wilted like a flower, and laid her head on his shoulder.

  ‘Do you think there is a lazy river – somewhere – anywhere?’

  ‘Depends,’ Troy said. ‘On what you want from it. I have pretty much what I want out at Mimram – pig in its pen, vegetables green and growing in the kitchen garden, all the Art Tatum records money can buy. There’s even a river Mimram at the bottom of the garden. If I fished I’d hang out a sign that said “Gone fishin’“ whenever I felt like it.’

  ‘But you’re still a copper.’

  ‘Call it balance. I’ve never thought of quitting – though I’m pretty certain Stan has come close to firing me more than a few times – and lately everyone else seems to want me to quit but . . . there’s that ole rockin’ chair waiting just to get me . . . but there’s something in the job I need. Never known what.’

  ‘Well . . . you never needed the money, did you?’

  ‘And, these days, neither do you, Mrs President.’

  ‘I don’t want to be First Lady, Troy. I want my lazy river. If I ever find it I’ll become lazy bones . . . sleep in the noonday sun . . . never make another dime . . . and hang out that sign for real – “gone fishin’“.’

  Troy changed songs. He could scarcely sing a note, but Louis Armstrong had a highly imitable voice. Troy threw in a few scat noises as deep as he could go and bababoomed his way through it. Kitty wept. When she had stopped, blown a good honk into her hanky, she said, ‘You know, I can’t stand the thought of another day as a political accessory. That’s all a politician’s wife is, about as important as a bloody handbag or a matching set of shoes and gloves. I make him look better than he is on his own – I make him . . . electable. God knows, there’s never been a bachelor in the White House. But I really don’t want that any more. Any of it. I don’t give a toss. I just don’t want it. I don’t want to have to do it or be it.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I want you to take me to bed.’

  Kitty Stilton just took; Kate Cormack asked.

  § 26

  Kitty had none of the self-consciousness of the middle-aged woman, but then, she’d had none of the self-consciousness of the young woman twenty years ago. Modesty was always, by definition, false modesty, of which she had none. No ‘Don’t look at my stretchmarks’ or ‘Don’t look at my spare tyre.’ She had neither: she’d looked after herself. At almost forty-nine she was tall, lean and firm with a better tan than she’d ever have had to show if she’d spent her life in England. At almost forty-four Troy was skinny and pale, a book of scars on which she passed no comment. This was a gentler Kitty. The need was obvious, the haste absent. It was a slower, more gentle lovemaking than he’d ever known with her. And she was setting the pace. He would not have initiated the sexual rage of their younger days, but he would not have objected either. A little rage might have convinced him of
his own capacity. He liked slow and easy. He’d rather liked rage too.

  Afterwards. Kitty sprawled and musing. Stringing her sentences together slow and breathy. ‘You remember the film?’

  ‘Which film?’

  ‘The Best Years of Our Lives. The one you were . . .’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘The scene where Fredric March finally gets back to his apartment in whatever one-horse town it is . . .’

  ‘Of course, they never do tell you exactly where. There’s that marvellous shot from the bomb-aimer’s window as the plane comes in low over Kansas or Iowa or wherever, lasts for ages, and you see the midwest, flat and almost endless, rolling away beneath the plane. I think it’s meant to give you a sense of it being Anytown, USA.’

  ‘Have you finished? Because I hadn’t. Myrna Loy is in the kitchen. March comes in the front door and shushes the kids, but Myrna Loy . . . I guess she kind of hears the silence. But she doesn’t turn around straight away. There’s a tangible moment of anticipation. You almost hear her breathing. Then . . . well, then . . . you know. That’s not unlike Cal’s return home. I mean, I didn’t think he was dead or anything. In fact, I knew damn well he wasn’t. But it was scary. In 1943 he’d got himself transferred out of Intelligence to a front-line regiment. He could have spent the whole damn war at a desk in Washington, but he wouldn’t do it. Said it would make him sick to see other guys fighting the war while he polished a chair with his trousers. Said he’d had enough of spooks and spookery, scuttlebutt and lies. So he did the honest and stupid thing –he put his life on the line.’

  ‘So did Rod. Had a desk job working with Ike at Overlord HQ. Once the D-Day plans were fixed he asked to fly again.’

  ‘Did they let him?’

  ‘Yes. Led squadrons of Tempests over France. Made Wing Commander.’

  ‘Cal was a full colonel by 1945. That February the Americans – I should say we, the Americans – landed on Iwo Jima. That was the only time I really thought he might have bought it. About a thousand dead GIs for every square mile. He was there, as much in the thick of it as a full colonel could be. But in the end it was promotion saved him. By the end of the war he was a one-star general.’