It was going to be a blue day.
Alexei Troy had spent a morning looking back. It was heartbreak, heartbreak of the sweetest kind.
A cloud-puffed blue spring sky outside his window. Great bouncy billows of cumulo-nimbus. For the first time in weeks the skies over north London blissfully free of aircraft. Not so much as a training flight – all those young men, boys, boys, boys, those Poles and Czechs, the odd Canadian, the odder American – clocking up the hours on Hurricanes and Spifires before they got into a real dogfight. Only the barrage balloons, hawsers taut, tethered as though to some giant hand, broke the skyline.
And blue flowers in the window box that hung on the wall of his Hampstead home.
And a blue uniform clothing his elder son. Flying Officer Rodyon Alexeyevitch Troy, RAF. Interned, released, enlisted, trained and promoted all in less than three months. The insignia of rank barely tacked onto his sleeve. If the next promotion were as swift as the first he’d be a Flight Lieutenant by the end of the month. This had baffled Rod. He had tried to explain it to his father some time ago.
‘I said the obvious thing. “Are you sure I’m ready for this?” Sort of expecting the genial “Of course, old chap” by way of answer – and they said “Ready? Of course you’re not ready. Ready’s got bugger all to do with it. You’re thirty-three, man, you’ve held a pilot’s licence for ten years. We need people who can fly, people who can command a bit of authority, people who might look as though they know what they’re doing even if they don’t. You couldn’t grow a moustache, could you?’”
There were times when this seemed to Alexei Troy to be an apt summation of the precarious state of Great Britain a year or so after Dunkirk – a year in which the British had fought on alone. Finest hour stretched out to breaking point. All that stood between them and defeat was his son’s moustache (which he had never grown) – symbolic of the colossal bluff the nation and its leaders seemed to be perpetrating on the world stage.
And blue-lined paper on the legal pad upon his desk.
Alex had reached a natural hiatus in the writing of his Sunday Post editorial. It was known to working hacks as a ‘whip and top’, spinning the same words over and over again – getting nowhere.
When I first came to these islands in the winter of 1910, I knew I had seen the last of my native Russia, [move this??] The prospect of England opened up to me when I watched M. Blériot take flight and I entered into an exchange of letters with Mr H.G. Wells on the subject of powered flight, [more about HG? will the old fart take umbrage?] . . . Mr Wells invited me to visit him in England. I came. I stayed. My wife, our son, our two daughters and I ended our years a-wandering. [hiatus here, what?] Perhaps the luxury I have allowed myself of speculating upon the fate of that tragic unhappy [?] land has been the whimsical [nostalgic?] indulgence of an exile – or a necessity. In their fate lie [or lies?] all our fates. [Can I say all this again?] Two years ago, I warned my readers that the Nazi-Soviet pact was not the act on which to condemn a country making itself anew. I was all but deluged in mail, none of it complimentary. [Zinoviev letter?] Well, I am going to badger hector you again upon that same matter. Russia . . .
And on that word the axis of his thought, the top so whipped, spun to no conclusion. Time to read. When in doubt about your own prose, read someone else’s verse.
As ever he had a volume of poetry on his desk, next to the lamp. A blue-bound book. He riffled the pages to see if they fell open at a blue poem. He read a line of Lawrence.
Not every man has gentians in his house . . .
The blue flowers in his window box were pansies. He could see them from where he sat. The first pansies of spring – a late spring, the first day of double summertime. Long, light nights to come. A deep, velvety royal blue, not the sky blue of the Bavarian gentians Lawrence was describing. It had been years since old Troy had been in Bavaria. England had gentians. He had vague memories of a pinkish plant with a Saxon-sounding name like blushwort or bladderwort – English was full of worts – but the ‘true’ gentian would not grow in this climate. His country home in Hertfordshire was a high plateau, but high in English terms meant a couple of hundred feet. Bavarian gentians were subalpine. He was seventy-nine. He’d probably never see one again. If the war ended tomorrow, he’d probably never see one again.
Not every man has gentians in his house . . .
He read on. Few poets were so long a-dying, few poets had dealt in death so long as D. H. Lawrence.
‘What are you working on, Dad?’
His son Rod had come into the study. Doubtless sent by his wife to tell him lunch was ready. Old Troy looked up at his elder son, tore a page from his blue pad and balled it. Tossed it onto the growing pile in his wicker wastebasket.
‘The old, old story,’ he replied, not meaning to be cryptic.
‘Russia,’ said Rod, not inflecting the word as a question.
‘Russia,’ Alex muttered.
‘Tough going, is it?’
Alex looked at the pile. He had balled twenty sheets or more already.
‘You could say that.’
‘What about Russia?’
‘I was thinking about when she would join us.’
‘Join us?’
‘Us. The war.’
Odd to be spelling out the condition in which they all lived, so simply, so bluntly, to a man in uniform. The war was total – the war was, without exaggeration, England. History compressed. All history brought to fruition in this moment – this meaning. The meaning of England.
‘Sorry. I wasn’t being dense. I meant, isn’t it “if” rather than “when”? Can we be at all sure they will join us?’
‘That’s the problem, my boy. I’m sure. Hardly anyone else is.’
‘I mean, one could pose the same question of the Americans, couldn’t one?’
‘Quite,’ said the old man. ‘When I get round to it.’
Rod opened his mouth to speak, but his mother Maria Mikhailovna appeared in the doorway and cut him short and soundless.
‘Vite! Vite! Lunch has been upon the table these five minutes.’
Alex rose, gathered his dressing gown about him, rubbed with one hand at the two-day stubble of his beard. His wife would give him hell if he were late for a meal; she would not dream of commenting on his appearance.
As they followed her down the corridor, he turned to his son and asked, ‘Will Freddie be joining us?’
Alex had two sons, Vienna-born Rodyon, and London-born Frederick. His ‘English child’, as he thought of him. Frederick was twenty-five, and had sloughed off his blue uniform, almost as Rod had donned his, when Scotland Yard had made him first a detective and then a sergeant.
‘God knows,’ Rod replied. ‘Am I my little brother’s keeper?’