Troy declined to clean up. Skipping lunch, not making Wilson wait till he’d eaten, was all the concession Rod was going to get. If the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland wanted Troy’s attention he’d have to take him as he was in his grubby boiler suit, smelling somewhat of cow shit.
Wilson and Rod were in Troy’s study, without so much as a by-your-leave. Troy knew why Rod had done this. It was an icebreaker. Anyone who visited Mimram was curious less about the Troy brothers than about their father, Alex (deceased 1943), a near-contemporary of Churchill, and a quondam ally and sparring partner—they’d go months without speaking. The study had been Alex’s before it was Troy’s, and showing the enquiring pol in there bought time, answered questions by giving them a slice of history—the detritus of life in Russia and Austria, every object—the room was cluttered—every object an anecdote.
Wilson was smoking a postprandial cigar, thereby confirming what Troy had always thought, that the pipe was as much a prop as the plastic mac he habitually wore, if slightly less repulsive.
“Harold. What brings you all this way?”
Rod hissed in his ear, “Prime Minister!”
Troy hissed back, “Fuck off.”
Wilson had to be slightly deaf not to have heard them, but sat back down after the handshake, unperturbed.
“You’ll have heard the news?”
“Yes. New Beatles LP delayed until the autumn. Tragic.”
Troy felt Rod’s shoe tap sharply against his stockinged foot.
“No … no. I meant about Lord Brynmawr.”
Troy’s first and only thought was “Who the hell is Lord Brynmawr?”
Helpfully, Rod read his expression right down to the punctuation.
“You knew him as Hywel Thomas. He was our planning minister.”
The name rang a bell—little tubby bloke from South Wales. Union man—miners or steel workers or something.
“Oh. When was he kicked upstairs?”
“Not a phrase we use, Freddie.”
Wilson affected a chuckle.
“Not kicked, Freddie. Jumped. I needed an ambassador in Prague. Hywel fitted the bill. And he jumped at the chance. Never happy in Planning. Foreign Affairs was much more his sort of thing. But I could never move him to the Foreign Office with George still around.”
George was George Brown. Wilson’s deputy and until his sudden resignation, in a huffy fit about six months ago, he had been Foreign Secretary. He was a free-speaking piss-artist, a pain in the arse to Wilson, and, for that reason if for no other, Troy and Rod quite liked him.
Troy said, “Why are you talking of Hywel Thomas in the past tense?”
Wilson said, “You haven’t told him?”
“I missed Freddie at breakfast and he’s only just got in for—”
“—for the lunch I haven’t had yet,” Troy muttered.
“Hywel died last night, Freddie. Heart attack, I believe. Harold received a phone call early this morning. Dreadful news.”
“Sorry to hear that,” Troy said. “But what has this got to do with me?”
“Hywel died at the worst possible moment,” Wilson said.
Troy did not need this explaining. Just before midnight on the twentieth Russian tanks had rolled into Czechoslovakia and clipped short the Prague Spring.
“We need to a get a new man in place as soon as possible. By next week, in fact.”
“Well good luck with that. I can’t think of anyone I might recommend, so—”
A toe-shattering tap on the foot from Rod’s size-twelve beetle-crushers.
“You’re being an ass. Harold is offering you the job.”
Troy—almost speechless, but not quite.
“What?”
“I need a man right away,” Wilson said. “Above all, given that the Russians will not be withdrawing any day soon, I need a good Russian speaker. Someone who can talk to them face-to-face without an interpreter.”
Troy could only conclude that whatever file MI5 and Special Branch had on him had not been read by Wilson. He’d not seen it himself, but he’d readily conclude that every scrape he’d got into and got out of was recorded, and the fact that he had been cleared every time, exonerated every time, would not do a damn thing to diminish the suspicion that he was not entirely kosher, not entirely pukka and not entirely “one of us.”
“You’re mad. Both of you. Mad as hatters.”
A little more of the Wilson fake chuckle.
But Rod wasn’t laughing.
“Do excuse us a moment, Harold.”
Rod bundled Troy, approximately half his size, out into the corridor.
“Stop acting like a spoilt brat!”
“Freddie, get back in there, be polite and hear the man out. He’s our prime minister for God’s sake.”
“You never liked him! We used to call him Mittiavelli. You’ve always taken the piss out of him—remember? ‘How can you tell when Wilson’s lying? His lips move.’ I’ve heard you crack that one a dozen times.”
“I was probably pissed. But I’m sober right now and he’s not lying.”
“Rod, he’s a conman in a Gannex mac.”
“Not the point. I serve under him, and I’m happy to do so.”
“Happy?”
“OK. Not happy, but willing. Freddie, just hear him out and tell him you’ll think about it.”
Back in the study Wilson briefly outlined to Troy the duties of an ambassador. Troy didn’t ask any questions.
“And of course, the real advantage to us, the government, is that you’re free now—you retired last year, didn’t you?”
Troy had retired five years ago but said nothing.
“And you know the Russian mind.”
His heart sank. This was the anglicised version of the nonsense he had heard so often as child whenever two or three Russians were gathered together in the same room—the Russian Soul, that agonising, self-tormenting, invisible, elusive and possibly nonexistent organ. Berdyaev had written the lot—The Soul of Russia, The Fate of Russia and The Russian Idea. It would not surprise Troy to learn that there were ten or twenty books called The Russian Mind. He hadn’t read any of them. The Russian Mind/Soul/Idea/Fate were just more reasons to get drunk and maudlin and sing songs about women with black eyes.
Troy gave Rod what he’d asked for.
“I’ll think about it,” he said.
“Good, good,” Wilson replied. “Think about your title while you’re about it.”