It was still winter when Troy returned home. England under snow. A flying, white visit to Charlie’s mother in Dorset. A small, white, utterly implausible lie about the money. A small mountain of work at the Yard. A small row with Rod.
‘Where’ve you been?’
What was the point? The pain he would give Rod if he said he’d been to Russia. The boredom he would let himself in for if he admitted it and Rod banged on with a thousand questions.
‘I can’t tell you.’
‘More lies, Freddie?’
‘No. Silence.’
‘There’s such a thing as lies of silence, you know.’
‘If you like, but I still can’t tell you.’
‘Sod you then!’
Rod could not hold a grudge. Partly because he knew that he might wait till kingdom come only to find Troy still silent before him. Partly because decency, that spurious Anglo-Saxon virtue, ran through him deeper than the word Brighton through the eponymous stick of rock. Within a week they were speaking once more. By the end of February affably so, and early one Friday evening, a couple of weeks before Easter, only days, it seemed, after the last evaporation of the most interminably lingering winter, Rod could be found almost horizontal on the sofa in Troy’s sitting room in Goodwin’s Court feeling very fridayish, a cupof tea balanced on his chest, rising and falling with his breathing like a small vessel at sea, red tie at half-mast, beetlecrusher shoes off, odd socks on, lamenting the lot of a member of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, lamenting in particular the small peculiarities of breeding and character that defined the leadership of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition.
‘They’re bastards. The pair of ’em. Bloody Brown. Bloody Wilson. Bastards.’
Troy had known Brown for several years – a young light from the trades union movement, outspoken, emotional, and impossible when pissed. He had met Wilson just the once, at a dinner party Rod had thrown for the Labour nobs – a former Oxford don, a professional Yorkshireman, whom Troy had thought about as fascinating as congealing custard, unredeemed by wit or wickedness or the prospect of a good indiscretion when drunk; a ‘man of the people’ who chomped on a pipe in public for the sake of the image and in private puffed away at cigars, and who habitually wore a hideous fawn macintosh, spun out of some new synthetic fabric, in an effort to make himself appear more ‘ordinary’. He always succeeded in this – effortlessly. Troy had on occasion wondered which of the Labour Party wags – Rod? Or the equally waggish Tom Driberg? – had told him he needed to be more ‘ordinary’, and why Wilson had not recognised that he was being sent up.
Of the two Troy preferred Brown, and this in no way took account of his politics within the internal, infernal machinations of the wretched party. Brown’s tactless unreliability at least smacked of honesty, not a word one would ever think of in the same sentence as the word Wilson. Wilson, it was, some old Socialist had dubbed ‘the desiccated calculating machine’. Rod was content with calling him ‘Mittiavelli’, a poor man’s Machiavelli. He had reduced himself and Troy to hysterics a while ago by asking, ‘What do you get if you cross Walter Mitty with Machiavelli?’ The answer – Harold Wilson. And he’d been Mittiavelli ever since. But if Rod was going to sit here and ruin Friday evening with a whinge about the pair of them, there was an obvious question lurking in the wings.
‘You made them a gift of the leadership. Why didn’t you stand?’
‘Why not?’ Rod said. ‘Perfectly good reason when it came down to it. Do you remember what Jack Kennedy said in his inaugural?’
‘Yep, he said watch out, commies, we’re a-gonna blast yer.’
‘Jesus Christ,’ Rod said softly. ‘Do you have to be quite so cynical? He said no such thing.’
‘Yes he did. Meet any challenge, fight any foe, zapany country, look out world. He’s a cold warrior, Rod. It was a speech of warmongering patriotic hokum.’
‘Freddie, I’ve met the man, you haven’t. He is not a—’
‘Yes I have.’
‘Have what?’
‘Met him.’
‘When?’
Rod looked at Troy in utter disbelief.
‘Just before the war. When his dad was the ambassador. You were busy doing your stint as the Post’s man in Berlin. The old man invited the Kennedys out to Mimram. Jack was this tall skinny thing, he’d be about twenty or twenty-one I suppose. I was not much older. The old man stuck us together on the assumption common age might yield common interest. Fat chance.’
‘Oh? What did you talk about?’
‘We stood on the verandah. Nice sort of evening, sort of balmy, the kind of summer evenings we don’t get any more. He said, “Sho this is the English countryshide?” Not exactly a conversation piece – all you can say is “yes”. “Sho,” he said, “what doesh a man have to do to get laid in the English countryshide?”’
‘You’re making this up.’
‘No, honestly—’
‘You know, cynicism will be the death of you.’
‘It’s true, all of it. I fixed him upwith Ted Driffield’s daughter.’
Rod’s voice rose to parliamentary peak, the polite bludgeoning of the House of Commons. How to shout down an opponent without getting slung out by the Speaker.
‘Cynicism and lies will be the death of you! The President of the United States does not come to rural Hertfordshire simply to get laid, and it’s got nothing to do with the point I was trying to make!’
He ground to a halt. Lost for words.
‘What was I saying?’
‘Inaugrual speech,’ Troy prompted.
‘Right. What he said was something about let the word go forth, et cetera et cetera, the torch – that’s it – the torch has been passed to a new generation.’
‘So that’s why you wouldn’t stand? The torch has been passed to Harold Wilson? He’s the “new generation”? You’re mad.’
‘It was too late for me and I knew it. The party wasn’t looking for a man for the next couple of years, it was looking for a leader to take them into the seventies. By 1970 I’ll be sixty-two.’
‘So?’
‘Too old. I knew it in my bones. Time to pass on the torch.’
‘Maybe – but younger men? Wilson and Brown!’
‘They’re ten years younger than me.’
‘So? Wilson’s a bore and George is a liability. For God’s sake, Rod, Harold Wilson was born middle-aged!’
‘As a matter of fact, they’re both younger than you.’
Troy shrugged a silent ‘so what?’
‘Don’t you ever get the feeling that it’s time to pass on the torch, that your generation has had its chance?’
‘No.’
‘You will. Take my word for it.’
Rod lapsed into silence, giving Troy time to digest this. Troy silently spat it out. The phone rang. And rang. And rang.
‘You going to answer that?’ Rod said at last.
Troy picked up the telephone and heard Anna’s voice for the first time in several weeks.
‘Troy. So glad I caught you. Look, are you free this evening?’
‘Depends,’ said Troy.
‘Don’t be so damn cagey. I was only trying to ask you out.’
Anna was an ex-girlfriend – a word that caused Troy on occasion to wonder how pertinent it could be when applied to a married woman of forty-three or four. She was also Troy’s doctor, and one of the few women to penetrate the male domain of Harley Street. It was her habit to call from time to time with just such lines as she was using now.
‘There’s a quartet playing in Notting Hill tonight. Paddy Fitz is putting together a bit of a crowd. We thought you might like to join us.’
Notting Hill was hardly a tantalising qualification to the offer. It was a rough, largely black area of London north and west of the park. For ten years now it had been the rising ghetto of Britain’s Caribbean immigrants, a run-down neighbourhood of large houses split into tiny flats and ruthlessly exploited by slum landlords. To call it ‘notorious’ would not have been overstating the case. But then, Anna thought like a doctor and Troy like a policeman.
‘Calypso isn’t really my cup of tea,’ he said.
‘’T’isn’t calypso. It’s jazz. Or I wouldn’t be asking. You think I don’t know you by now?’
‘Putting together a bit of a crowd’ brought out suspicion in Troy – a quality, if such it be, never far from the surface at the best of times – but the truth was, the invitation appealed. To go home to Mimram with Rod in this mood would clearly be to subject himself to a couple of days’ political whingeing. And whilst he could not rely on Anna’s opinion in music, Fitz was known for his discrimination. Fitz, put simply, had taste. He put a hand across the mouthpiece.
‘Can you drive yourself tonight?’
‘Don’t see why not. Your car, I assume?’
Rod drove one of the new mini cars that had swept Britain, and most other countries, over the last couple of years. Fashionable as hell in British racing green – the same deepgreen as Stirling Moss’s Vanwall – but tiny. Rod was a stout six footer and fitted into Troy’s 1952 five-litre Bentley Continental much more comfortably than he did into his everyman’s Mini Minor. Owning the symbol of Britain’s new classlessness, he took every opportunity to borrow Troy’s symbol of the old wealth.
‘OK. But I must have it back Sunday night.’
‘Done,’ said Rod.
‘Anna. When and where?’
‘I’ll pick you up around eight.’