Now, they were staring. Alex Troy had not been seen in public for two years. He stared back. Only the gruff harrumph made by Churchill as he entered the room swung their attention to the front. Alex had hoped that Winston would wear one of his siren suits. He had a passion for dressing up. Peaked caps, pea jackets, Royal Navy battledresses, now romper suits for the grown up-a touch of silliness that Alex found an endearing characteristic. Churchill was not in mufti of any kind-black jacket, stripy trousers, waistcoat-with-watchchain, spotty bow tie. Alex waited. If he mentions Russia, if he tells these assembled hacks the truth, all well and good-if he does not…
Churchill looked straight at him. Not a trace of double-take. All the same, Alex knew he had not expected him. This was Beaverbrook’s game with the two of them.
‘Gentlemen,’ Churchill began. ‘Crete…’
§ 98
The wound in his side was giving gyp. God alone knew why. Who would have thought a potato peeler could inflict such damage? He lay on the chaise longue and ached.
Once on the mind, Russia was hard to shake off. It was not something Troy could take or leave-it was, after all, an ancestral homeland he had never seen, and given his father’s role in international affairs, one he never was likely to see. He suspended feeling about the country in much the same way many intellectuals willingly suspended their disbelief. Many a fellow-traveller had fellow-travelled to the old country in the years between the wars, and come back singing the praises of good order, collectivisation and the latest Five Year Plan. Wells had come close to falling for this himself. But to Troy-to any Troy sibling-over-exposure to their father’s abiding interest carried with it the danger of the arousal of a sense of longing-of what Troy could only render as ‘rodina’, a word for which he had found no precise English equivalent. He sated his longing by winding up the gramophone. He had recently acquired, on no fewer than six twelve-inch 78 r.p.m. records, Shostakovich’s ‘A Soviet Artist’s Practical Creative Reply to Just Criticism’, otherwise known as his Fifth Symphony. After ten minutes Troy could only conclude that the challenge of pleasing the Party had brought out the best in Shostakovich. It blew him away. This was an achievement that outstripped any of the man’s other symphonies. This put into the abstraction of harmony what Troy had felt when Cormack had described the Nazi plan for the enslavement of the Slavs, what he was certain he had passed on to his father when he in turn had told him-heartbreak. It was music to tear you to pieces.
During the Largo he heard a key turn in the lock on his front door, saw Kitty steal in. Instead of putting the key in her coat pocket and sinking her hands in after it-her habitual gesture-she laid it on the small table next to him, in the pale arc of light thrown by his reading lamp. She wasn’t wearing a coat, she was in a pretty summer dress. White, with pink flowers and green leaves, and a halter top. This wasn’t the old Kitty-but then, the return of his latch key had told him that at once.
‘Calvin’s asked me to marry him,’ she said.
Troy could not see her face. The voice fell on him from darkness. She sat on the armchair and one side of her face came into view. She displayed no given or visible emotion. Her face was as plain as her statement.
‘And?’ said Troy.
‘I said yes.’
‘How do his people feel about this?’
‘They’ll let him do anything that means he gets on that plane to Lisbon. The marriage is being rushed through.’
‘When?’
‘Tomorrow. Finsbury Town Hall. Mum’s lodger Miss Greenlees arranged it all. Special licence. Then I’m Mrs Cormack. Then I’m off to America. I’ll be a sort of GI bride.’
‘How do you feel about that?’
Kitty shrugged, but it didn’t work. Everything about her told him she felt anything but casual.
‘I feel… I feel like I’m caught in a riptide. You know, like the song says… caught between two loves… the old and the new.’
‘But you don’t love him. You told me so.’
‘I know… but…’
‘And if you loved me you never told me.’
‘I know… but…’
‘But what, Kitty?’
‘But… it gets me out of London, doesn’t it? Just like joining the force got me out of Stepney. You can’t imagine what it’s like to be me, can you? You grew up with a mansion out in the sticks, a town house in Hampstead. The only time you’ve ever lacked room to swing a cat is at that posh school you used to moan about. You never had to share anything. You never competed with your brothers and sisters for a damn thing. And you’re a youngest. Spoilt rotten they are. I’m the eldest, Troy. My childhood stopped when I was ten. I been sharing a room with Rose and Reen since I was three ‘cos me mum and dad always needed lodgers to keep up the rent. You ever wonder why I never asked you round to my place? You know what I got in Covent Garden? One room, that’s all. A bed at one end, a gas ring at the other and a tin bath trundled out in front of the gas fire on bath night. It’s a hole. But it’s a damn sight better than sharing a bedroom in my mum’s house in Stepney.’
‘A house in mourning,’ Troy said, tacking away.
‘Wot?’
‘You’re leaving your mother in the lurch. She’s lost two children and her husband. Has it occurred to you she might just need you?’
‘Need me? Mum don’t need me. If I stay it’ll be like being a kid again. It’ll be like being the eldest kid in a family of seven. I was minding Kev and Trev by the time I was five, I brought up Vera and Tel. My mum don’t need me. My mum’s got Vera now. You think Vera’s ever gonna give up her place in front of the Aga? That’s better than sitting at God’s right hand that is. You think Vera’s ever gonna get herself a man? She’s there for life, is Vera.’
‘I say again, your mother needs you.’
Kitty was crying now. Silent tears upon her cheeks. She moved off the chair, on to her knees, next to the chaise longue where Troy lay stretched out like an invalid, her hands touching Troy, one on his chest, the other wrapped in his hair above his ear. She looked up at him.
‘My mum needs me, does she? Troy-you don’t need me. That’s about what it comes down to, isn’t it?’
Troy said nothing. Kitty kissed him once on the lips. Got to her feet. Walked to the door and looked back at him.
‘I’m going now. I’m going to America. Do you hear me Troy? I’m marrying Calvin in the morning. I’m going to follow the yeller brick road and I’m going to live in America.’
‘And?’
‘And you could mind. Just a bit, you could mind. You could care just a bit more.’
No he couldn’t.
Shostakovich’s Largo spun on to its end. Troy heard it out, heard it spin to infinity in its final groove. He let it spin, over and over again. He did not bother with the Allegro non troppo. There would be another time.
§ 99
Reggie was sitting up in bed. A glass of brandy, a good book-The American by Henry James, the tale of a young, rich American-well, obviously-marooned among the importunate toffs of Europe. Pride and no-old-money versus innocence and oodles of new-money. Wasn’t that the plot of every Henry James? How can a chap get away with telling the same story over and over again? Anyway, it seemed appropriate. It put Reggie vaguely in mind of… and darnmit, what was it Maisie knew? He’d forgotten.