Old Flames (19 page)

‘You bastard!’

Troy blinked at her, not much interested in what it was he might now be supposed to have done. She threw her hat at him.

‘What have you been saying to Nikolai?’

‘Me?’

‘The pair of you! You unconscionable bastards! I had him on the phone Friday and yesterday in one of his tizzes. What have you and Rod been saying to him?’

Troy gathered his dressing gown around him. This was no way to spend his first Sunday morning off in six weeks. He picked up the
Sunday Post,
threw it towards her. She caught it with a
little gasp, but didn’t look at it.

‘Here,’ he said. ‘You read it. I can’t be bothered. And when you have, you go and talk to him about the fate of the little people. Of necessity and choice, of shoes and
ships and sealing wax, of apparatchiks and kings, and why the sea is boiling hot and whether pigs have wings. See if you can’t irritate him far more than I can.’

He left her clutching the paper and went back to the kitchen to make more coffee. On the kitchen table was a note from the Fat Man. Thick pencil on lined paper.

‘Pig in Pudding Club. Your ole pal, …’ Then a long scrawl which Troy took to be his signature. All he could make of it was that it was indeed very long.

Damn. He’d missed him. He must have come and gone before Troy was even up. ‘Pig in Pudding Club.’ Troy tried to work out the date. The gestation period of a pig is 117 days.
That made it … September the … well, near enough the end of September. He’d have to remember that. It would be a shame to be in Aberdeen or Aberanywhere at that moment.

On his way back out he heard the telephone ring in his father’s study. Then he heard Masha’s voice answer. She was cooing unctuously. She could only be talking to her husband. Then
the penny dropped. A husband. Not hers.

‘Of course, darling. Of course. Well, I think Masha wants to take a walk through the woods this afternoon. I thought perhaps we’d make up some sandwiches and … what? No, he
won’t come. He’ll stay at home with his blasted pig. I’ll call you about five, shall I? Bye, Hughdey darling.’

Troy waited till she had finished and then crossed the room to
the verandah. He did not care that she must know he had heard; he did not care what lies she told.

Masha reappeared next to him as he sat down and reclaimed her hat.

‘Don’t ask,’ she said.

‘I wasn’t.’

‘And don’t judge.’

Which he certainly wasn’t.

He heard Masha banging around in the house for another ten minutes or so, then he heard the scrunch of gravel as her car disappeared down the drive. He was just starting to wonder about the
problem she had left him with if Hugh phoned back asking for Sasha, when the phone rang. If it were Hugh, he’d no idea what to tell the poor cuckolded sod.

It was Rod.

‘Well, did you see it?’

‘I could hardly miss it. It weighs as much as a side of bacon. Whatever happened to paper rationing?’

‘No, not Khrushchev. Bugger Khrushchev. Page seven, bottom left. Got ’em! All I want now is the name!’

Troy rang off and turned to page seven. Any subject but Khrushchev would do, but all the same he had no idea what Rod was on about. Then he saw it. A small piece buried between a bit of
Khrushchev and an advert for Horlicks.

‘Sources close to Downing Street have revealed that Her Majesty’s Government will make a Commons statement early next week on the matter of the Frogman Spy, following several
questions tabled over recent weeks by Sir Rod Troy (Lab.—Herts. South), the Shadow Foreign Secretary. It is believed that the Prime Minister will admit the error, and offer an unreserved and
full apology to the Soviet leader and to the captain of the
Ordzhonikidze.
It is understood that while the purpose of sending out a naval frogman was to test new experimental underwater
equipment, the exercise was open to the wrong interpretation and is to be regretted.’

Fine, thought Troy and turned to Uncle Todger’s gardening strip at the back of the paper.

‘Aye up,’ said a bubble coming from the lips of a caricature northern bloke on his allotment behind the mill, waistcoat, muffler, cloth cap on head, string around the knees of his
tatty trousers. ‘Did you know that now is the right time to make a second sowing of Cos lettuce so you can have lettuce right through the autumn? I thought not.’

This was more like it. In the absence of tit and titillation, Uncle Todger was infinitely preferable to Khrushchev or the Frogman Spy. Rod could keep the spooks and spookery. This was the real
world of rhizomes and tubers, of scab and blackleg, of pricking out and earthing up, and putting horsemuck on rosebushes. Not that Troy was entirely sure what a rhizome was. All the same, he took
Uncle Todger at his word, and as soon as he had bathed and dressed went down to the kitchen garden, took up the rake and hoe and made a fresh sowing of lettuce.

It was late afternoon before the telephone rang again. He was mentally striving for the last frame of Uncle Todger’s strip—of every strip, on every Sunday—the scene of pastoral
reconciliation in which he sits upon a barrel and puffs gently on his pipe, while Nature blooms abundant all around him, fed and watered by his own hand … all that’s made to a green
thought in a green shade. It was almost five, a sunny, moderately warm June afternoon, the height of the English summer, peaceful Sunday, blessed Sunday … bloody Sunday. He was not succeeding;
the tooth and claw crouched waiting beneath the green and pleasant, and he was beginning to think that perhaps he and Uncle Todger were not cut from the same cloth. Where was Uncle Todger in the
fury and the breaking thunder when it came to rage against the heavens? What price this Nuncle on the blasted heath? And—he was half expecting Masha to show up any minute and reinforce her
sister’s alibi. He picked up the phone, wanting it not to be Hugh in his cuckold’s horns, and heard Jack’s voice.

‘I’m in the office.’

‘On a Sunday?’

‘Just clearing up a bit. Look, there’s an airmail letter turned up for you. It’s done the rounds a bit. It’s dated last Tuesday. It was addressed to “Sergeant
Troy”, except that the “y”s been smudged. It’s ended up in your tray. Probably late yesterday. Shall I open it?’

‘Yes.’

‘It says “Hotel de l’Europe, Amsterdam. Till Thursday next week. Lois Teale.” You don’t know anyone called Lois Teale, do you?’

‘No,’ Troy lied. ‘I don’t.’

Amsterdam is a city of concentric circles, of concentric canals. Prinsengracht, Keizersgracht, Herengracht and, as near to the middle as dammit, the Singel.

Troy had last been in Amsterdam as a child late in the 1920s. One of his mother’s musical grand tours. A little night music in Vienna, on to Hannover to hear Walter Gieseking—in the
days before his dubious, disgraceful association with the Nazis—play the entire Debussy
Preludes,
with
Estampes
thrown in for an encore, and ending in the Concertgebouw in
Amsterdam and the full blast of Mahler’s Second. He had no recollection of the Mahler, it had merged with a dozen other performances over the years, but to this day he had only to close his
eyes and imagine the sound of the third
Etampe,
‘Jardins sous la pluie’, to see Gieseking’s huge frame and bald head bent over the keyboard, his giant’s hands somehow
producing the most delicate music he had heard in his young life. And when he saw Gieseking he saw not Hannover, but Amsterdam.

The war and occupation seemed to have left Amsterdam physically unscathed. A seventeenth-century mercantile city left intact by the blitzkrieg that destroyed Antwerp and Rotterdam, Coventry and
Plymouth. It had none of the ambitious design of Hausmann’s Paris, a city reshaped to the military column—he could not imagine the Dutch marching in columns. Nor was it the mess with
occasional concession to scheme that London was—a city in which no grand scheme had ever run more than a few streets without merging once more into the chaos that was natural to it.

Tall, narrow houses, no two alike it would seem, squeezed each other for room on the canal banks—odd shapes, uneven heights, gables sharp as steeples, some tilting at precarious
angles—the city seemed to Troy to loom over him, to wrap itself around him, to contain him and thrust him at its heart. Accordingly, he found himself on the innermost circle, the
bull’s-eye, as it were, at a sharp curve in the Singel at about five in the afternoon, on the day following the cryptic airmail letter. He presumed a degree of secrecy and so did not
telephone ahead. He presumed also that Lois Teale would be expecting him. He looked up at the outside of the Hotel de L’Europe, seven storeys of red brick, edged in white and topped by a
Hollywood-scale sign, rising to a host of dormer points, St Pancras in miniature, hesitant, wondering what he might find. June light danced on the water of the Singel. It had been a blazing,
blistering summer’s day, one of those days when the canals turned to glass and lit the city from below, creating a mixture of spotlight and shadow, a dappled city, revealing as much as it
hid.

He could leave now. He could turn right around, get on one of those creaking old trams and go back to the Central Station, the way he had come. He could pretend that he had never received the
airmail letter. He could learn the lesson of youth, admit he had grown up a bit, and not get involved again.

A flower-seller was pitching his wares from a wooden cart, only a few feet away. An eye-catching display of summer’s reds and yellows and blues, against the flaking Balmoral green of the
old wagon. There had been one much like it on almost every corner. The flower-seller eyed Troy expectantly.

‘Why not buy her some flowers?’ the flower-seller asked in English. Two assumptions in a single expression, so put as to make Troy instantly self-conscious. Was he really so
transparent? Did the look on his face say ‘woman’? Worse, did it say it in English? He had no idea what to buy. To buy tulips seemed nothing less than corny.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Roses. A dozen white roses.’

As English a choice as he could make, a dozen York roses. Since, he was, it seemed, so recognisably English.

He crossed the iron bridge to the other bank, a few feet nearer the heart, walked into the lobby of the hotel and asked for Miss Teale. Did he mean Mrs Teale? There was a Mrs Teale in 601. Yes,
he was sure he did. An American lady? They would have to ring up. No visitor could be admitted unannounced. Mrs Teale had been quite insistent on the point.

He tapped lightly on the door of 601. It opened at once, an inch or two of light showing, a face in shadow thrust to the crack, a brown eye peeking at him.

‘That you, baby?’

‘Yes.’

‘I—er—I need a minute. And we’re right out of the hard stuff. Could you go round the block to a liquor store and get me a quart of Jack Daniels?’

The door shut on him before he could argue a syllable.

Back across the iron bridge, he asked directions of the flower-seller and two side streets away found a liquor store which had very expensive, imported bottles of Wild Turkey. It would have to
do.

He gave her a full quarter of an hour and tapped on her door again. Her voice answered faintly from inside.

‘It’s open. You can come in.’

She stood between two double beds, facing him, back to the window, curtains half drawn to whittle down the daylight to a single shaft aimed at him, framed in the doorway, lit as by a natural
spotlight. The room resolved into vision for him, and he saw that daylight was not the only thing aimed at him. The thing in her hand was a small automatic, a .25 Beretta or some such, the classic
woman’s gun, tailor-made for the handbag.

She was dressed in a neat Chanel deep-blue two-piece, oh-so-high heels, a nervous, flickering grin on her face, that failed to make the evolution to a smile, her blonde hair bobbed, her
fathomless, fleckless brown eyes staring at him.

‘Long time no see,’ she said, lowering the gun.

‘Yes. It’s been a while.’

‘You can close the door now.’

He kicked it to with his foot. She put the safety on and dropped the gun on the bed behind her.

‘Had to be sure. You see that, don’t you?’

Troy was not at all sure what he saw. He felt encumbered, bourbon in one hand, flowers in the other, and neither seeming much to matter any more. He put them gently down on a chair and moved
slowly round her in an arc towards the heavy brocade curtain. She turned as he moved. He grabbed the curtain with one hand, her arm with the other and pulled. The shaft of light became a flood and
he drew her to him, cupped her face with one hand and rubbed his thumb across her cheek. He knew now why she had stalled him, why the curtains had been drawn. The cheek was thick with make-up. She
squirmed and yelled but before she had pulled free he had seen the bruises, purple ringed in yellow. He caught the hand that came at him spread to slap. Two of the fingernails had been half torn
off, the pulpy flesh beneath bright pink and swollen.

‘What the hell is going on?’

She lurched across the room and picked up the first thing to hand. A dozen white roses hurtled at him, followed by the bourbon. He caught the flowers in his right hand and the bourbon neatly in
his left.

She flung herself at him, hands flailing. She caught him a couple of stingers round the ear. A clenched fist to the diaphragm almost winded him. He found himself encumbered once more, the
flowers and the bourbon had simply changed hands. He drew her to him, smothered her anger in a clumsy half-embrace, like hugging someone in too many overcoats and outsize mittens.

She kicked his shins, but he simply tightened his grip until she stopped moving altogether. It seemed to him that minutes passed, before she moved again. He had no idea how long. He could hear
the sounds of traffic in the street, the occasional hoot of a barge on the canal, and when they were silent all he could hear was the thumping of her heart.

‘Troy, Troy, Troy, Troy, Troy,’ she said into his chest.

‘Tosca,’ he said, looking down at the top of her head. ‘Or do I call you Mrs Teale?’

She wriggled, tilted her head up at him. One clear brown eye peeping out, a teardrop poised in the corner. Her voice rough and throaty, as New York as lox and cream cheese.