Old Flames (22 page)

She flapped a dismissive hand at him.

‘Oh, don’t mind me. It’s just—well—it’s just that that’s what it looks like to me. Y’know, Hollywood England, green shires on a back
lot.’

So, she had not read the book after all, she was merely remembering the Hitchcock film—Olivier, darkly romantic, and George Sanders playing yet another supercad.

‘I wouldn’t mind,’ he said. ‘But Joan Fontaine so mangled those opening lines.’

‘She tried, baby. We all do. Now, do I get to meet Mrs Danvers?’

‘If you’re going to take the mick—’

She leant her head on his shoulder and elbowed him until he put an arm around her. He slipped his foot slowly off the clutch and let the car crawl gently up the drive in first, steering as
little as it needed with the fingertips of one hand upon the wheel. For a moment or two it was plausible, the seductive lie that this was the opening page of a lasting romance. Every bone in his
body wanted it to be true, and every cell in his brain told him it wasn’t.

‘Of course you can meet Mrs Danvers,’ he said. ‘But you mustn’t let her play with the matches.’

Mimram to him was a series of shapes and spaces, colours and sequences arranged in transparent time—a glass onion. The house of childhood, still visible through adulthood, nestled at its
core, laid out in the order in which he had discovered it.

Tosca pulled a face at the stuffed black bear standing in the hallway.

‘Jeez, but he looks moth-eaten. I mean, does he have to stand there, like the first thing you see when you come in the door?’

True, he was ugly as sin, had lost one eye, one ear and seemed daily to lose more and more of his stuffing, but to Troy he was Boris the Bear. He had stood on the same spot since 1919, and Troy
saw no reason why he might not be found on the same spot in 1969. One of Troy’s earliest memories was of Boris wearing a tin hat and waving a Union Jack on the first Armistice Day. He had
worn a red poppy every November ever since; someone, not always Troy, remembered to pin one on him. He was part of the structured maintenance of childhood, as, indeed, was so much of the
paraphernalia of the living house. In the main drawing room, the blue room, a battered Congolese carving of a Pygmy mounted upon an ebony elephant, the human figure far, far larger than the animal,
had stood in the fireplace longer than he could remember. Sasha had nicknamed it Minnie, as a child. Once Troy had moved Minnie from the left-hand side of the fire to the right, only to see Sasha,
on her next visit, move the figure back, without comment, or, Troy thought, consciousness. He would have difficulty explaining things like this to Tosca. The sheer solidity that the old man had
placed around them, the spun, set spidersilk of airy nothings—his genius, as Nikolai had put it, for wrenching choice out of necessity. Tosca had lived her life out of a suitcase—three
countries, a dozen passports and countless cities. Her cry of ‘Who am I?’ was not one he had ever asked of himself. He had doubts by the score; he knew Rod did too, and if they ever
rose to any level resembling self-knowledge it was possible the sisters would too. He knew who he was; he was a Troy. And the best protection he could give her was to make her one too. If she would
but accept.

‘Pick a room,’ he said to her, as he dumped their bags on the first-floor landing.

‘Whaddya mean, “Pick a room”?’

‘You did say you would like your own room.’

‘I know—you gotta give me some time. I mean I—’

‘No, no I wasn’t arguing with you. I’m saying pick any room that isn’t occupied. Make it your own.’

‘Any room?’

‘Any that isn’t occupied.’

‘Well, how many are there?’

‘I’ve never counted, but I should think between fifteen and twenty.’

‘How do I know which are occupied?’

‘Slippers at the foot of the bed, dressing gowns on the back of the door, and the ones that aren’t will probably smell a bit mothbally.’

She wandered from room to room, every step and word echoing around the empty house. She took a liking to Masha and Lawrence’s room, bathed in the rosy western light of late afternoon,
tinting the off-white walls Masha favoured with a wash of pink, and for a moment he wondered whether he might not have to persuade his sister to swap, but on the south side of the house she plumped
firmly for a small dark room with faded wallpaper and a view of the river and the willows.

‘It’s kinda my size. You know what I mean? Well, you ever lived in a Moscow apartment, you would.’

‘Yes. I know. It was my room when I was a boy.’

‘You grew up in this? This was where you read
Winnie the Pooh,
sat up nights with Kennedy’s
Shorter Latin Primer,
and jerked off to dreams of Carole Lombard?’

‘Sort of. But I had a preference for Barbara Stanwyck.’

‘And now?’

‘I took my father’s room at the end of the war. It’s next door. Look, why don’t you bathe and change. It’s been a hellish journey. I’ll rustle up some tea,
and then we can look over the rest of the place.’

He had not contrived the situation, but once it had arisen he could not deny the familiarity. Tosca up to her tits in a bathful of bubbles, teacup in hand, blathering away at him; him sitting on
the bog seat, partly listening partly daydreaming, his mind drifting between present and past. This was how things had been. This simple juxtaposition with a naked, garrulous woman had set like
gelatine in the mind as one of his ‘fondest’ memories. And he dearly wished he had a better word than ‘fond’ for it. It had ended in blood, hers and his, and half his left
kidney blown away.

Tosca stretched out a leg to soap and he saw the unmistakable marks of cigarette burns—the scars would be permanent—and the arm that held the soap still bore bruises that had faded
to medicinal yellow. Again he wondered, how hard had they hit her for the marks to last the best part of two months? He could not ask again until she was ready to tell. God only knew whether he had
the tact to discern such a moment.

Dressed, powdered, perfumed and, he thought, quite possibly pleased, he led her from room to room, each one still in the soft, powdery, floral colours in which his parents had found it in the
summer of 1910, five years before his own birth. Each colour had been maintained, restored. The blue room, the largest drawing room on the south-west corner of the house—Tosca paused over the
scratches on the window, where Sasha had carved her and Hugh’s initials in the glass with the diamond of her engagement ring—Alexandra Troy and Hugh Darbishire—AT & HD,
entwined above a heart and the date ‘30th Jan
^y
1933’.

‘Time and chance do that to you,’ said Tosca, tracing out the letters with her fingertips. ‘Make you look like a romantic fool, before you can so much as blink.’

‘Eh?’

“January 30th 1933”—the day Hitler became Chancellor of Germany.’

He waited to see if she would elaborate. She didn’t. But he thought he knew what she
meant—the lives of little people measured against the mark of history. What mattered at the time seen with the devastating benefit of hindsight. Sasha had meant to etch the date of her
engagement into glass for ever, and inadvertently achieved a different commemoration, of an event that would eclipse any other that day.

Troy threw open the doors to the smaller red room, with its bay window where a Christmas tree stood every year. And the rest of the year, his mother had often sat in the bay sewing or
lace-making or working at any one of a dozen quick-fingered hobbies that ruined her eyes by the time she was seventy. To the pink room—not so much pink as washed-out sainfoin magenta; to the
yellow room—primrose and cowslip, ‘Patent Yellow’ to the discerning eye; through the deep Prussian of the dining room, through the layers of the onion to his father’s study,
its colour a dark, obscure nothing, a faded something.

At some point his father had lined the room with bookshelves, and when they had been filled, he had stuffed books into cupboards and when they too had filled, he had left books in piles on the
floor, where they stood to this day. And in front of the books he had piled anything that caught his fancy. Three long-case clocks of differing height—remarkably, Troy now thought, like the
Amsterdam skyline—which no one had ever managed to synchronise. A complete orrery—complete but for the undiscovered ninth planet—in brass, which no one had wound and set in motion
in years. A harmonium whose leather lungs had long since perished. A player piano on which the hands of Gustav Mahler, Igor Stravinsky and George Gershwin could be brought to life from a
punch-paper roll. A large, hand-painted, flaking, plaster of Paris globe on an iron pedestal, depicting the world in pastel colours as it had appeared in the days of empire and eagles. Extinct
countries like Austria-Hungary, Imperial Russia, and no hint of neogeographic entities such as Yugoslavia. The existence of Poland was a mystery to the boy Troy, a country which came and went like
the little man in the weather house, now you see it now you don’t, and which, since his father’s death, in its most recent incarnation, had leapt bodily some five hundred miles to the
west. The old man had used the globe and his stamp album to teach Troy geography and history. His stamp album ran from a plethora of penny reds and the young head of Queen Victoria to the inflated
millions on the denominations of the Weimar Republic, to the tasteful browns of Hitler’s portrait, via vanished confederations of British East Africa, and the oddly colourful stamps of South
Sea islands, where the head of George V could be found offset by palm trees and giant tortoises. Troy wondered, did the king have a tortoise at home with him, grazing the lawns at Buckingham Palace?
And the naming of places puzzled him. Who was Gilbert? And were he and Ellice married? And did they have children after whom other islands might be named? The spelling of Yugoslavia, with its
interchangeable J or Y, had taken him an age to learn.

‘I’m almost sorry to waste your time,’ his father had told him. ‘I doubt it will be there long. You cannot invent a country. If you can invent yourself you’re doing
quite well enough.’

Tosca’s gaze came to rest on the wall between the windows, just above the desk.

‘I ain’t seen one of those in years.’

He could not make out what she was looking at, but then she reached up and took his father’s gun off the two wooden pegs that supported it on the wall. It was a large, heavy,
semi-automatic pistol.

‘It was my father’s,’ he said.

‘Yeah—my old man had one just like it. You know what it is?’

Troy shook his head. He had an aversion to guns at the best of times.

‘It’s German. It’s a Mauser 1896 Conehammer. A semi, a machine pistol—kinda like a hand-held machine gun.’

This meant nothing to Troy. It might as well have been a Howitzer.

‘My Dad had one in the Civil War. Shot his way across Siberia with the damn thing—least that’s the way he told it.’

‘Maybe that’s its purpose in life. It lends itself to legend. My father claimed to have shot his way onto the last train out of Russia in 1905.’

‘Don’t you believe him?’

Troy shrugged. He had never known how much to believe of anything his father told him. If his life turned out to be one colossal work of fiction, Troy would not be surprised. And, unlike his
brother, he would not be offended.

‘A train, perhaps. The last train, I doubt. Shot his way through, I doubt that too. Talked his way would be more in character. He may well have waved the gun around a bit while he talked.
Just for show.’

Tosca flipped out the magazine, checked it was empty and pushed it back into place in front of the trigger-guard.

‘It’s a cavalry pistol,’ she said with all the enthusiasm of a trainspotter. ‘It’s got a side-mounted hammer. You’re supposed to have it in a saddle holster. Then when you have to draw it, you roll it over your thigh, which cocks the hammer, so the gun
comes up ready, like this.’

So saying, Tosca stood on one leg, raised her right thigh and cocked and levelled the gun at him in a single action. He found himself looking down the barrel of a gun yet again.

Then there was silence, then there was stillness. Neither of them knowing what to do next, both of them rendered uneasy by the presence of a weapon, Tosca perched on one leg like a dwarf
flamingo. A burst of pheasant’s rattle from the garden broke the silence. She lowered the gun and her leg, blushing a little and clearly feeling as silly on her end of the gun as he did on
his. He took the gun from her awkwardly and put it back on its wooden pegs, in the mind’s eye seeing some burly Russian soldier teaching a little girl how to fire a lethal weapon, and
wondering at the nature of paternal wisdom.

‘Best place for it,’ said Troy.

‘Sure,’ she said softly.

In the green room—sage panels lined in deeper green—stood the Bechstein his parents had shipped from Vienna in 1911. He had spent hundreds of hours at this learning from his
mother.

Tosca ran a finger over the lid and came up with a crown of fluff.

‘You don’t play any more?’

‘Of course I play. I just haven’t played this particular piano for a while.’

He opened it and played a quick scale.

‘Still in tune,’ he said. ‘Any requests?’

‘One of the old guys. Cole Porter or Gershwin? I always loved Gershwin.’

‘Yip Harburg?’

‘You mean like “Over the Rainbow”?’

‘No, I mean like …’

He played the opening five chords that spelt out ‘April in Paris’. She smiled and he began again. He gave it his best shot, and when he saw that she was still smiling, propped
against the piano, her chin upon her hands, her eyes closing, he risked all and let his hands tinkle forth Monk’s interpretation, every angular note adding, as he thought of it, to the
romantic pull of the song, giving all and taking nothing. She let him get all the way through before she opened her eyes. He had half dreaded the protest of a purist.

‘Gee—but that’s beautiful. Even the bum notes work.’

‘I think you might have stumbled on a definition of Jazz. Bum notes that work.’

‘What’s new?’