In the morning Troy dressed and packed, and when he could wait no longer for Charlie, shook him awake. ‘What time is it?’ ‘Past noon. I have to leave in a couple of hours.’ ‘Where am I?’
‘Monte Carlo.’
Charlie laughed till he coughed. He eased himself off the mattress. Propped himself up on one elbow. Looked around.
‘We should complain to the management. I asked for the Duke of Windsor’s room.’
He laughed again, muttered, ‘Russia, fucking Russia, what did I ever do to deserve you?’ and staggered into the bathroom to cough fitfully for several minutes.
When he had stopped Troy knocked gently on the door.
‘Charlie – we haven’t a lot of time.’
‘It’s not locked.’
Troy pushed, in some trepidation. Charlie was seated on the loo, red-faced and straining. It was a habit born of schooldays, where none of the stalls in the boys’ bogs had locks and half of them no doors. Defecation was communal. Troy had hated it.
‘I’ve just discovered a real disadvantage to Russian nosh,’ said Charlie. ‘It constipates you. I cannot shit for love or money. Shit, shit, shit, I cannot.’
‘Why did you get me here?’ Troy asked
‘Loose ends. The Russkis seemed surprisingly understanding about it, but then they’d want me to cut off any potential problems, wouldn’t they?’
‘And?’
‘And it’s chiefly the old dear. My mother. In fact it’s entirely my mother. She has a pittance of a pension. It will not keep her in the manner to which and blahdey blah. I’ve got money in England. Not as much as I had, and nowhere near as much as you’d think. But the old fart won’t touch it. Thinks it’s tainted. I cannot convince her otherwise. I’ve about twelve grand tucked away in Mullins Kelleher. I’ll write you a cheque. You take the money, and see she’s all right. Tell her whatever fib you think’ll work.’
‘OK,’ said Troy.
‘Old dear’ was just Charlie’s figure of speech. Mrs Leigh-Hunt was nobody’s old dear. She had been a child bride, eighteen when Charlie was born – and she had been born to raise hell. On the few occasions Troy had seen her in recent years she had been living modestly in a village in Hampshire or Sussex or somewhere, and hating it as much as Charlie now hated Russia. He was a little surprised to learn that she was quite so principled about money.
Twelve grand could turn her life around.
‘We never did have money, you know.’
This was an Englishman speaking. A Communist, a traitor, and, finally, a defector, but an Englishman through and through. Only an Englishman brought upas well as Charlie would ever speak of his circumstances thus. No money meant not enough money. Not enough after the public school fees and the house in the country. In English terms this was tantamount to poverty, and that clearly was how Charlie regarded it. One rung above the workhouse. It was rubbish, but Troy had no heart for the argument. He passed Charlie his jacket, Charlie fumbled in the pockets for his chequebook, Troy lent him his fountain pen and he scribbled out a cheque for twelve thousand pounds, the wage of the British working man for the best part of twenty years. Troy had no way of calculating how far such a sum would go towards the wage of the Russian working man. A lifetime, he thought, or perhaps two.
‘I always envied you, you know. Not the money. The security. At least I think that’s the word I mean. After my old man buggered off we seemed to move every couple of years. I’d get home for the hols – it seemed like every couple of terms there’d be a new house and a new bloke to call “uncle”. I could never hang on to anything. My stuff was forever going in or out of packing cases. Lost me teddy bear before I was seven. I used to envy you, and what I envied was the security of the home. You and your mother and your loony sisters and your big brother – I’d love to have had a big brother – and the house. The sheer solidity of it all. The junk of solidity. All that . . . all that sort of Troyness rolling back in time. I felt more at home in your dad’s house than I did in any one of the places I cannot dignify with the word home.’
This made some sense. Judy Leigh-Hunt had been cursed with good looks and a string of feckless men, usually purporting to be heroes of the First World War. On open days at school there was no knowing with which man she’d turn up, and Charlie withstood a lot of ribbing on the subject of his ‘uncles’ – and in the holidays he would find himself dragged from one watering hole to the next. The cheapskates took him to Scarborough, the spendthrifts to Biarritz. The out-and-out bounders would ditch him entirely, suggesting that perhaps Charlie would prefer to ‘spend the hols with a pal’ – which pal would inevitably be Troy. But in part it was nonsense.
‘Charlie, has it ever occurred to you that most of that junk of solidity was fake?’
‘Whaddya mean, fake?’
‘It didn’t roll back centuries. It didn’t even roll back to the start of this one. The old man left Russia with next to nothing. Most of the junk that you refer to he bought at one time or another – the solidity of time-treasured possessions, history as furniture, which I think is what you mean, was left behind. Most of it is probably locked away in the cellars and attics of the old house on Dolgo-Khamovnichesky Street.’
‘Ye gods, I’d hate to have to pronounce that when I’m pissed. However, what’s your point?’
‘That it was his creation. What you saw was the world as he made it. Not as he found it.’
‘A lesson for us all, eh?’
A short sentence shot through with silent sighs.
‘If you like.’
‘I can make my own solidity, my own junk, my own world?’
Troy said nothing.
‘Out of Russia? I can make my world out of Russia!’
Charlie was shrilly incredulous. Troy said nothing. He had said quite enough for the half-dozen microphones buried in the plasterwork of the walls and ceiling already. He had been speaking of the past, of lost possibilities. There was no world to make now. It was, as Charlie insisted, a time of unmaking. All Charlie had made was his bed and he had to lie in it, and if that bed was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, so be it. He closed the loo door on a ranting Charlie and as he did so heard him sigh, ‘Ah, bliss,’ and, knowing what it presaged, stuffed his fingers in his ears.