A Little White Death Read online

  His father had given him a copy for his eleventh birthday. A precious gift, a private edition. He had got scarcely further than the first page – a prose so difficult, a mind so extraordinary, beyond the grasp of a child – and had protested to his father, ‘Not another book about the war, Dad?’ ‘No,’ said his father, ‘it is so much else besides.’ The English had gone on reliving the war, much as they now did with the one after. He had never forgotten the line, and he had long pondered, through the numbing ritual of chapel at his school, the idea of an ‘indifferent heaven’, but he had never finished the book. He was forty-seven, forty-eight in August; perhaps he was ready for it now. He had lived half a lifetime under that same ‘indifferent heaven’.

  The door opened softly and Anna crept in. She pushed the door to with her backside and leant on it. He heard the click of the latch, the sharp intake of breath and counted the seconds until she spoke.

  ‘I don’t suppose you fancy a fuck, do you, Troy?’

  He didn’t. He wanted to read. He looked at her across the top of his book. She had her back pressed to the door, as though fearing someone might come in. Or that he might leave. One palm spread across the wood panel, one fist bunched in the candlewick fabric of her dressing-gown, pulling it closed over her bosom. They hadn’t made love in years. Even then it had been a mistake.

  ‘OK,’ he said.

  She let the dressing-gown fall behind her. Her nightie was hideous. A synthetic fabric in a floral pattern meant to put you off flowers, a horticultural contraceptive meant to put you off sex.

  ‘It’s practical,’ Anna said. ‘Warm. Besides you haven’t seen me out of it yet.’

  She reached for the hem and paused with it bunched at her thighs like a spent hula-hoop.

  ‘Are you going to put the light out?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘On your own head be it.’

  Her face disappeared into the nightie, accompanied by a vicious crackle of static.

  ‘See! Big bum! Fat legs! Don’t say I didn’t warn you!’

  Of course she had changed. In all the ways she was saying she had. But he could not understand the fuss she was making. She dived beneath the sheets as though picked out by the glare of limelight not the forty watts of Troy’s reading lamp. All he could see was the top of her head.

  ‘Put it out!’ said a voice muffled by the sheets.

  He lay T.E. Lawrence face down on the bedside table and switched the lamp off. A quick yank of the curtain and they had traded electricity for moonlight. Anna surfaced. She had a beautiful face. Small and dark, with big black eyes not unlike his own. An un-English face. Looking up at him from her rabbit hole.

  ‘It’s been an age.’

  ‘Where’s Angus?’ he asked.

  ‘Are you trying to piss on it, Troy?’

  Angus was Anna’s husband. A colossal, red-headed drunk, former hero of the Battle of Britain, one-legged escapee from Colditz. Daring, decorated, drunk – he’d been in a tailspin for years.

  ‘No. I just—’

  ‘He can’t get it up any more. The bastard’s wasted the best years of my life. I’m forty-three. No kids, a marriage that comes and goes like the sun in Wimbledon week, a husband who’s pissed every night – Oh God, Troy. I don’t don’t don’t want to talk about Angus!’

  She pulled the sheets over her head and vanished. From beneath them he heard her say, ‘Gone walkabout again. Weeks ago.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘If you’re so concerned about the sod, go down the Streeb and Spigot and look for him in the sawdust—’

  ‘Sorry, sorry, sorry.’

  Her head popped up again.

  ‘Oh fuck, Troy. Just touch me, will you?’

  He ran his fingers through her hair and brought them to rest on one ear.

  ‘Nooooot theeeeeere yooooou fooool!’

  He had no idea four syllables could be stretched to such length.

  A cold coming they had of it. He couldn’t come. He was glad there wasn’t a clock in the room, because it felt like hours of pounding meat and if it were he’d rather not know. He thought Anna might have come. He rather hoped she had. He hated to think that she was finding it the butchery that he was.

  ‘I say, Troy. You couldn’t . . . well . . . you couldn’t just sort of well . . . come. Could you? It’s just that I’m getting a bit . . . well . . . you know . . .’

  Anna squirmed under him. Feeling cramp in one leg, she slipped it over his shoulder and stretched out the muscles in her thigh and calf. Just as Valentina Vassilievna Asimova had done. The last time he had fucked. Valentina Vassilievna Asimova. A freezing night in Moscow. Call me Vivi. A violet-eyed imp with maroon nipples, curled beneath him. Legs in the air. Hands roaming blindly across his face. And thinking of Valentina Vassilievna Asimova, he slipped Anna’s other leg across his shoulder.

  ‘Ooh,’ she said.

  And thinking of Valentina Vassilievna Asimova, he came.

  Later, much later, Anna spoke. Her hand resting on his stomach, below the rise of his ribcage. Her fingers tracing circles in the sparse column of hair that stretched from balls to belly button.

  ‘You’re getting awfully thin, you know.’

  ‘Nonsense.’

  ‘How much do you weigh?’

  ‘’Bout nine and a half stone. Average for a bloke my size, I should think.’

  ‘Have you weighed yourself lately?’

  ‘Don’t have to. Been the same weight since I was twenty or so.’

  ‘I doubt it.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Troy. You’re more like eight and a half stone or maybe even less. Look.’

  She pulled at the skin of his belly.

  ‘There’s nothing here. No adipose tissue. It’s tight as a drum.’

  ‘Quite. As it should be.’

  ‘Troy. We’re at the age when we put weight on, not lose it. Feel!’

  She took his hand, tucked it into the roll of her spare tyre. It was like prodding marshmallow. After all her complaints about dimples, big bum and fat thighs, it didn’t seem necessary. After a night of flesh-slapping intimacy, it didn’t seem necessary.

  ‘That’s fat. It’s normal at my age. Your age. I wish to God it weren’t. Troy, you’re a bag of bones.’

  ‘Can we go to sleep now?’

  ‘Are you sleeping OK?’

  Fitz had asked much the same question. He did not much care to answer. He had one arm around her. He slipped it down her back to her waist. Pulled her in closer, and with the other hand made show of pulling the sheets and blankets higher and tighter. The infinitesimally small nest of intimacy. The bounded frontier of conjugality, far short of the ridge where the west commences, never gazed at the moon never lost their senses. The illusive voice that cried, ‘Do, by all means, fence me in.’

  He could not kid himself she’d fallen for it – but she had fallen asleep. He prised himself free of her, slipped on his dressing-gown and went in search of food. The main staircase led down to the hall. Further along, the back stairs led directly to the kitchen, in the west wing. The corridor was dark, only a shaft of light from one of the bedroom doors gave him anything to aim for. As he got nearer, the door swung on its hinges and the shaft became a flood. He stopped, scarcely believing what he saw. Tereshkov stood with his back to him. Not for him the coyness of lights out. Every light in the room burned as he fucked Tara Ffitch from behind. She knelt on the bed; he stood with his back straight and his knees bent, thrusting at her – and standing on the bed, legs astride her sister, head up, back arched, eyes closed, Caro shoved her cunt in his face and played her lips across his. This was believable.

  What was not was the casual, the relaxed figure of Fitz, in an armchair, by a reading lamp, a cigar and a hefty glass of brandy on the go, watching – just watching. Head nodding gently, knees crossed, all but tapping his foot to the human rhythm as though the groans and moans of coitus – for real or for fake – were more a concert on the Third Programme than a Home Servicing. />
  Suddenly he turned and was speaking to Troy. Mouthing words silently that Troy could not make out. Logically he should be saying ‘sod off ’, but he wasn’t. He was beckoning. Troy entered, bent down to Fitz to hear what he was saying.

  ‘Pull upa chair, old boy. Make yourself comfortable. Tara’s in fine voice tonight.’

  Troy fled.

  § 25

  The non sequitur seemed to be an essential part of Fitz’s modus operandi. They had circumnavigated Uphill Park straight after breakfast, down into Rye, wound their way through Peasmarsh, a drink at a country pub, and back up the steep flank of Uphill. It was a fair walk and Troy found himself acutely conscious as they came up the hill of the number of times Fitz had had to slacken off his pace or simply stop and wait for him. It was worth it. I may be out of shape, Troy thought, but it’s worth it. To see England roll away to nothing beneath them and the English Channel glisten in the light of noon.

  Breakfast had been just the two of them. Fitz not only baked his own bread, he had found time last autumn to make his own bitter orange marmalade. Anna slept; there was no sign of Tereshkov or the Ffitch twins; Cocket, Pritch-Kemp and the mad painter woman had gone and the thump thump of the Dansette told Troy where Clover was and what she was doing. He and Fitz had rehashed his garden, his garlic obsession, his miniature roses, and Troy had told him of the delights of keeping pigs. Each man in his own private world striving for the vocabulary that might make it less private. The more Troy saw of Fitz the more versatile the man seemed to be and the more he liked him. He was banging on about his Old English roses, ‘so much nicer than the modern varieties, don’t you think, the looseness, the spread of them, rather than that artificial, almost plastic density of the modern thingies?’ Then, suddenly, as they crested the hill and as he was wont, Fitz tacked off.

  ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘you know Tommy’s trouble? No money.’

  ‘How does he live?’

  ‘He puts in a lot of time in the Lords, which gets him his daily allowance, and there’s a couple of firms have him as a director just for the sake of having a title on the headed notepaper. But the reality is he’s usually broke. I pay him rent of course. But it’s bugger all. The place was little more than a ruin when he let me have it. I spend a damn sight more maintaining it than he can ever ask in rent.’

  ‘How long has it been?’

  ‘Eleven years. Near enough. I took the lease in the July of ’52. I suppose you think it’s a pretty rum set-up?’

  Troy didn’t know what he thought. He had found Fitz better company than he thought he might – far from flirting, he seemed oblivious to Troy’s peculiar way of making his living, and he doubted very much whether he had bothered to tell anyone else. And Troy had skimmed across the surface of an encounter with Tereshkov without fall, though not without surprise. And in the last hour Fitz had had enough tact not mention their own brief encounter in the small hours of the morning. All in all it was turning out to be a pleasant break – Anna notwithstanding. He did not want to be made to comment on the ‘rumness’ of it all. So he said nothing.

  They had reached the croquet pitch. It no longer was a croquet pitch. Troy had a good view of Tommy Athelnay’s upturned backside, shod in heavy corduroy, as he serviced the contraptions that launched clay pigeons.

  ‘Bugger,’ said Fitz. ‘He’s got mad keen on this the last few weeks. He found all the clobber for it in a shed no one had looked in since before the war.’

  ‘Not your sport?’ Troy asked.

  ‘I’ve no idea what my sport is. But it’s the guns that I object to, the guns and the racket. I can’t abide guns. I’d even diagnose myself and say I’m phobic about them.’

  ‘How did you get through the war? I thought you were an ex-serviceman.’

  ‘Oh, I did my bit. Didn’t we all? North Africa, then France, with the Royal Army Medical Corps. But I never picked up a gun. They said it was obligatory for an officer to bear a side arm and know how to use it. If only to shoot our own side when they mutiny. “So court-martial me,” I said. Of course, they didn’t. You know what they did? They carved me one out of wood. I went right through the war carrying a wooden gun. The Army was like all authority. One colossal bluff. Taught me a valuable lesson. The best way to deal with the crassness of authority is simply to stand firm.’

  Troy wondered how long he would have to go on listening to other people’s ‘war’. Everyone seemed to have it in them, though he was grateful to Fitz for the brevity and novelty of his narrative.

  They came close. Anna was looking at an old shotgun as though to identify the object correctly were a parlour game – and Troy had had the feeling for the best part of two days that this whole venture was a form of parlour game. Tommy was loading clays, and a man in a white shirt, billowing in the breeze, impervious to the weather, stood in profile, pushing shells into a rather expensive-looking Purdey over-and-under.

  It was a famous profile. The filmstar looks, the tall, elegant shape of Her Majesty’s Minister of State at the Foreign Office, Conservative MP for Somewhere-or-Other, Tim Woodbridge.

  Tommy saw them.

  ‘You don’t fancy a go do you, Freddie? I’ve a spare gun. Woodbridge brought his own.’

  Troy looked at Fitz.

  ‘Go ahead,’ Fitz said. ‘I’ll go back to the lodge and get on with lunch. Come up in about half an hour.’

  He left them to it.

  Anna made the introductions, adding, ‘You have something in common. You’re both patients of mine.’

  Troy would not have been surprised to find that that was all they had in common. If there had been a mental list of ‘people I least expected/wanted to meet here/there/in any circumstances’, Wood-bridge would have been high on it.

  He smiled a good, white-teeth smile and shook Troy’s hand. ‘I’ve crossed swords with your brother a few times in the House,’ he said, aiming at non-partisan affability.

  Such vanity, thought Troy. Rod always wiped the floor with the arrogant bugger.

  Anna had never shot clays before. She missed four in a row. Troy put down his gun and proceeded to teach her.

  ‘No,’ said Troy. ‘Lean into it. There’s almost no recoil, so don’t anticipate it. Put your weight on your leading foot.’

  Anna shifted her balance, steadied the gun and called. A clay soared up from the left. She followed it, fired and missed.

  ‘What did I do wrong?’

  ‘Don’t follow. Pick your window, wait for the clay to enter it.’

  ‘What? Let it come to me?’

  ‘Sort of. If you pick your window, you’ll find you don’t swing the barrel wildly. In fact you’ll find you only need to put the gun to your shoulder to aim.’

  The obvious example was at hand.

  ‘Just watch Woodbridge for a minute.’

  Woodbridge never missed. Every time he yelled ‘pull’ two clays took to the air and he blew both to smithereens without even seeming to aim. He’d be chatting amiably to Tommy, weight on his left hip, gun at waist level, and would still be talking as he casually shifted to the right foot, put the gun to his shoulder and fired both barrels seamlessly. It was like watching Fred Astaire in one of his old films, whacking away at golf balls in the middle of a dance routine, a rhythm so perfect he never missed, an aim so true he must have been the envy of half the golfers on earth.

  Troy talked Anna through it. It struck him as pitifully simple. He had been the world’s worst shot, and had paid for it with the loss of half a kidney to an assassin’s bullet twenty years ago. Only a lucky shot had saved his life. Recovering – long, still summer days of immobility and pain, the distant hum of traffic, the puttering sound the V1 flying bombs and deadly, ear-splitting explosion of the V2 – he had determined that he would never again rely on luck where guns were concerned, and a few lessons had long since taught him how to hit the bull’s-eye. As a copper he still disliked guns, and rarely felt the professional need of one, but he took a refresher course every year just the sa
me.

  Woodbridge was beginning to irritate him. After a couple of dozen more clays Anna had got the hang of it, and was hitting two in three. Woodbridge had not missed once. Woodbridge had pissed him off no end. Somehow Anna seemed to know this.

  ‘He’s rather flash, isn’t he?’

  ‘Just a bit,’ said Troy. ‘But he’s using a far better gun than you.’

  ‘Why do I have the feeling you’re being kind to me? Why do I have the feeling the quality of his gun matters less than his skill or my lack of it?’

  ‘Well fuck ’im,’ muttered Troy, and picked up his gun.

  Anna stepped back. Woodbridge was still blathering with Tommy.

  ‘Load three,’ said Troy.

  A silence followed.

  ‘Eh?’ said Tommy.

  ‘Three,’ said Troy.

  He had Woodbridge’s attention now.

  ‘There’s only two barrels, Troy.’ Anna whispered the obvious.

  ‘Just stand over there and load up. When I throw you my gun, you throw me yours.’

  Tommy synchronised the two traps and nodded to Troy.

  ‘Pull!’

  He took out the first two effortlessly, threw the gun to Anna, caught hers, shouldered it and caught the third clay far and low and heading for the treetops. He knew from the way it spun that he had only nicked the rim with the shot, but it broke, it shattered and it counted.

  ‘Bugger me!’ said Tommy Athelnay.

  ‘Good Lord!’ said Anna.

  ‘Well done,’ said Woodbridge. ‘Fine shooting, but I’ll wager twenty quid you can’t do it again.’

  Troy looked at him. He’d half expected him to try to top whatever he had done with a meretricious display of his own. He was smiling – smiling, but quite serious.

  ‘Twenty quid?’ said Troy a little peevishly.

  ‘If you hit all three.’

  ‘No,’ said Troy.

  ‘No?’ said Woodbridge.

  ‘A hundred,’ said Troy.

  ‘Bugger me,’ said Tommy Athelnay again.

  Woodbridge looked to Tommy, who shrugged a ‘don’t ask me’, then he looked at Troy, grinned broadly and said, ‘You’re on.’