Old Flames (51 page)

‘What the bloody hell are we doing in Cyprus? What in God’s name have we got to do with the Gyppos? It’s like the bloody Boer War all over again. What is this? The last bash at
the wogs? I thought all that malarkey went out when I was a boy; I thought we’d just fought a war for a better world?’

Onions was shouting now. It was by far the longest political statement Troy had ever heard him make, wallowing in confusion and half-articulate sentiment though it was.

‘No wonder the niggers are picking us off like flies. We’ve no business there. Let the niggers have bloody Cyprus, let ’em have the fucking desert!’

Out of the corner of his eye Troy could see the occasional turn of the head. Almost involuntary on the part of the odd lunchtime drinker. Not wanting to look. The entire street knew who Onions was. They must all know
of his loss.

‘What am I to tell our Valerie? That her husband was burned to a crisp with a bloody blow-lamp, had his teeth ripped out with pliers, just because we want one last go at the niggers before
the Empire finally slips through our fingers? Is that it? Is that what I have to tell her?’

Silently the barman appeared at their table and set a large brandy next to Onions’ elbow. Neither he nor Troy had touched their pints. Troy swapped his plate of bread and wedge for
Onions’ empty one. Stan downed the brandy in one, and started on his second plateful. He glanced up at Troy once or twice. There were tears in the corners of his eyes.

‘Are you not hungry?’ he said at last.

‘I had something on the way. Stopped off just south of here at Dunham Park.’

Onions responded to the tactical shift. Accepted the burden of small talk.

‘Know the place. Out Altrincham way. American base during the war, wasn’t it?’

‘From the look of it you’d think they left yesterday. Jerry cans all over the place, concrete bunkers, burnt-out jeeps. Mind you, a couple of centuries before that it was the delight
of the landscape painters.’

‘Sounds like a better reason for going.’

The silence fell like fine dust through sunlight. Onions ate. Fragments of pub talk began to filter through to Troy in meaningless snatches. He felt suddenly vacant in the teeth of Onions’
unanswerable, so justifiable rage, and on the momentary
tabula rasa
of his mind the pieces of conversation scored an image so bizarre he turned around in his seat to see who was talking.

‘Busby’s Babes’, the man was saying. It was the only decipherable phrase, and Troy saw in the mind’s eye floating kaleidoscopes of pretty pre-war women dancing to
formation camera-work and Irving Berlin tunes. Black-and-white glimpses of Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler. ‘Remember My Forgotten Man’. The many death had left undone. Appropriate to the
point of absurdity. Then the man holding forth jabbed the table top with his middle finger, drew a line in the sheen of beer-spill and said, ‘Bobby Charlton’s the man. He’ll get
us to the top this season,’ and the image popped like a bubble blown from a pipe, as the reality pricked through. Football. He should have known. They were talking about football.

He turned back to Stan. He had all but demolished the second plateful.

‘How is she?’ Troy asked.

Stan did not look up.

‘You’ll see soon enough.’

‘Taking it badly?’ It was a lame remark. Stan looked up. Tears dried.

‘Hysterical. You know Valerie. Any excuse.’

They turned the corner from Great Clewes Street back into St Clement’s. Troy’s car stood out like a Sherman tank. The only car in the street. The donkey-stoned
steps shone like false teeth—all except the Clovers’, where Jackie sat exactly where Troy and Onions had left her. The boy with the model-car obsession was sitting on the bumper of the
Bentley, a
Beano
in one hand, a slice of bread and dripping in the other. His lips moving softly as he read, oblivious to all around him. At the end house a young woman in a wrap-around
overall and a headscarf stood in the doorway taking the sun and smoking a roll-up. Wisps of auburn hair peeped out from under the scarf. It was a stunningly beautiful face. Troy stared a moment too
long and she puckered up, blew him a kiss and winked at him. It was the sort of thing Tosca would do, he thought.

‘Where’s your Mam?’ Onions said to the girl.

‘She said to tell you she’s gone for a lie down, Grandad.’

Jackie paused, screwed up her face to look straight up at Onions.

‘Will she be tekkin’ me ter Lewises?’ she asked.

‘I shouldn’t think so.’

‘But she promised.’

‘When was this?’

‘Last week.’

‘That was before … before …’

The child waited. Troy had little expectation that Onions would get to the end of the sentence.

‘If Val’s asleep,’ he said, ‘I’ve time to kill. No point in waking her. I’ll take Jackie into Manchester, if you like.’

Jackie stood up, went through elaborate gestures of dusting herself off and smoothing down her skirt.

‘Can I sit up front?’

Before Troy could grant her wish a small voice behind him said, ‘Can I have me tanner now?’

She let Troy buy her a pair of white ankle socks and an Alice band. They seemed to be all she wanted. The decision took most of the afternoon and necessitated a full,
floor-by-floor tour of Manchester’s largest department store, its cornucopia. For more than fifteen years there’d been next to nothing to buy. The modesty of her choice was entirely in
keeping with the modesty of the times.

On the way home she peered out of the window less intently than she had done on the way into the city. As they crossed the Irwell Bridge she asked Troy who he was.

Onions served tea with bread and jam on the oilcloth-covered table in the back room. Valerie made no appearance. Onions took up a tray and brought it down an hour later untouched.

‘Bugger,’ he said under his breath.

Troy lied when asked if he would stay the night. Told Onions he had booked a room at the Midland. He could see little point in exhausting the pair of them with boredom if tomorrow he had to face
Valerie, and do whatever it was that Onions felt himself ill-equipped to do.

It ought to be raining, he thought. Pissing it down in knives and forks like it did that dismal November when they buried his father. Tearing across the sky in sheets as it had
done at Debussy’s funeral—a snippet he only knew because his mother had remarked on the weather and the similarity. He had never known that she had known the man. All those years
practising the piano at her behest, and such was the woman’s nature that she had never before bothered to tell him that she had known Debussy in her youth, that he had taught her the
instrument when she was eight years old, that she had journeyed to France on a wet day in 1918 to see him buried in a godgiven storm, to the rival thunder of the German bombardment. A fact as
buried as the corpse until the funeral of her husband prompted the randomness of memory in her, exactly as it was now doing in Troy. Perhaps funerals were Chinese boxes, always another within.

Streaming, dazzling sunshine seemed irreverent to the dead. Detrimental to the living. It showed the black of mourning in all its shabbiness. Every streak and speck and fleck turned the garb of
mourning into a motley.

He had sat up front in the old black Rolls-Royce. Valerie sat between her father and daughter, crying silently throughout behind the veil. She had risen at noon that day, acknowledged Troy with
the single use of his christian name, accepted a peck on the cheek from her daughter and said nothing to Onions’ desultory attempt at chatter. She retreated to the bathroom with a cup of tea
and emerged forty minutes later in her widow’s weeds. They sat a long half-hour on the upright chairs in the front room, in the smell of lavender furniture polish and the stale air of disuse.
When the hearse arrived bearing the body of Flight Sergeant Clover, Onions whispered, ‘Are you ready?’ and she had nodded.

Troy stood at the graveside with the detachment of a camera—‘kodak-distant’, as Philip Larkin so succinctly had it. Neighbours paid their respects and brought Valerie to the
pitch of muttering. Onions stood holding Jackie’s hand, and as the last of the mourners left, Valerie put out a hand to summon Troy. He gave her his arm to lean on. Jackie rode up front on
the return journey, where she had wanted to be all along. Troy took her place.

There would be no funeral baked meats. No guests. No wake. Onions made plain tea once more. As he rattled around in the scullery, Troy heard a dull thumping through the ceiling from the room
above. He slipped quietly up the stairs and found Valerie sitting on her bedroom floor with the contents of the fireside cupboard scattered around her. She tugged at the perished rubber of a World
War II gas mask, watching it come apart in her hands.

‘Will you look at this junk,’ she said. ‘He’d never let me throw a damn thing away.’

She threw the gas mask at the wall.

‘Fuck ’im,’ she said.

There were no tears now.

‘Fuck ’im.’

Troy sat on the floor. A small folding-bellows camera, missing the eyepiece, lay on top of a photo album, where it had fallen from the cupboard. He took it off, set it gently down, and turned a
page. There was Jackie in her mother’s arms in 1946 in front of the house in Shepherd’s Bush. Six weeks old. Then the same set-up, the same place and pose, except that a proud father,
in uniform, now held his daughter.

‘But you’d surely want to keep some things?’ he said.

‘Right now I could torch the lot. Starting with the bloody house.’

She slammed the album shut.

‘I don’t want to see it. He dragged me away from that to live in this hole. Did you know he asked for this posting? When he got back from Korea he took us away from everything I had, everything I knew. I was seven when Dad went to the Yard. I hardly remembered Lancashire. I was a west London girl down to my toes. I never wanted to move. Fuck ’im.’

‘I didn’t know.’

‘He wanted to get me as far away from you as he could.’

‘I didn’t know he knew about me.’

‘He didn’t. He just knew there was somebody. My “fancy man”, as he called him.’

Troy had no idea what he should or could say to this.

‘Don’t flatter yourself, Troy,’ she said. ‘You weren’t the only one. And if you didn’t know that then I’m surprised you call yourself a
detective.’

It was almost a joke. A quick, grim smile flashed across her lips. Then the tears started to well in her eyes. She bowed her head and he could just hear her say, ‘Jesus
Christ, Troy. What am I going to do now?’

She stretched out her arms, draped them around his neck and sobbed into his shoulder.

‘Fuck ’im,’ she said between gasps. ‘Fuck ’im. I hope he rots in hell.’

She sobbed an age away. Troy saw the light shift into late afternoon through the back
window, looking out onto the privies and across the alley to the houses at the back. She had not moved in awhile. All he could feel was the slow, rhythmical rise and fall of her chest against him.
He put out a hand to her hair. It seemed the right thing to do. It seemed that he had to do something. She stirred. Her face came up to his. Close in the dimness. She was only thirty-seven. Still
very good-looking. Almost as blonde as her daughter, her father’s piercing blue eyes set in a broad, pale face. She kissed him on the cheek. Pulled back. Looked at him expressionless. Kissed
him on the lips and began to prise them apart with her tongue.

She could feel the lack of response in him. Lips like tentflaps.

‘For Christ’s sake, Troy.’

‘I’m married,’ he said simply.

‘Hah? Married?’

‘Yes,’ he said, and it felt more like a lie than all the lies he’d told lately.

‘I was married. What bloody difference did it make then? Troy, I don’t want you to tell me I’m the love of your life. I’m not so green as I’m cabbage looking, but I
know what’s going to happen. Dad will ride to the rescue like a knight in shining armour. We’ll lose the house. And good riddance. It’s a RAF house, Married Quarters, NCOs for the
use of—but Dad’ll take me back to bloody Acton. I don’t want Acton, Troy. I don’t want to be a little girl in my father’s house again. Fuck Acton, fuck my Dad. I just
need a break, a chance, a chance to stand on me own two feet. Me and Jackie. Just put a roof over my head till I can do that. Acton’ll kill me. He’ll get me back and he’ll never
let me go. I’ll be at 22 Veryneat Villas for the rest of my life. An eternity at Tablecloth Terrace. Do this for me, Troy. You don’t have to say you love me. Just help me. I couldn’t stand Acton. Help me,
Troy.’

Troy said nothing.

Onions had lit a poor excuse for a fire in the iron range of the back room. He sat in front of it smoking a Woodbine.

‘I was beginning to wonder,’ he said.

‘She’ll live.’

‘In what state, though? There’ve been times when she was younger she’d work herself into such a tizzy I thought she’d go mad.’

‘She’s a grown-up now, Stan. She’ll pull through quicker than you think. And I wouldn’t expect her to wear her widow’s weeds for long.’

‘Eh?’

‘She won’t mourn for Ken any longer than she has to. In fact, I rather think somewhat less than protocol would demand. She’s quite determined to get shot of the house, and
Salford, and get back to London. She won’t be erecting any shrine to Ken in this street or in her heart.’

‘She’ll be all right for money, though?’

‘Of course. Ken was a regular. There’ll be a full RAF pension. And he’ll count as killed in action. Maybe a bit more money, and a medal. I called my brother last night.
He’s still the darling of the Marshals, for those two years he served as Air Minister under Attlee. He says Valerie will want for nothing. He’ll see to that. There’ll be money to
put Jackie through school if you want it, and money to relocate back to London.’

‘Relocate?’ Onions said, querying the neologism.

‘If I were you I’d dust off her old room in Acton and have the two of them back till she finds her feet.’

‘Is that what she’s asking for?’

Troy shrugged, letting the gesture say whatever Stan wanted it to.