The non sequitur seemed to be an essential part of Fitz’s modus operandi. They had circumnavigated Uphill Park straight after breakfast, down into Rye, wound their way through Peasmarsh, a drink at a country pub, and back up the steep flank of Uphill. It was a fair walk and Troy found himself acutely conscious as they came up the hill of the number of times Fitz had had to slacken off his pace or simply stop and wait for him. It was worth it. I may be out of shape, Troy thought, but it’s worth it. To see England roll away to nothing beneath them and the English Channel glisten in the light of noon.
Breakfast had been just the two of them. Fitz not only baked his own bread, he had found time last autumn to make his own bitter orange marmalade. Anna slept; there was no sign of Tereshkov or the Ffitch twins; Cocket, Pritch-Kemp and the mad painter woman had gone and the thump thump of the Dansette told Troy where Clover was and what she was doing. He and Fitz had rehashed his garden, his garlic obsession, his miniature roses, and Troy had told him of the delights of keeping pigs. Each man in his own private world striving for the vocabulary that might make it less private. The more Troy saw of Fitz the more versatile the man seemed to be and the more he liked him. He was banging on about his Old English roses, ‘so much nicer than the modern varieties, don’t you think, the looseness, the spread of them, rather than that artificial, almost plastic density of the modern thingies?’ Then, suddenly, as they crested the hill and as he was wont, Fitz tacked off.
‘Of course,’ he said, ‘you know Tommy’s trouble? No money.’
‘How does he live?’
‘He puts in a lot of time in the Lords, which gets him his daily allowance, and there’s a couple of firms have him as a director just for the sake of having a title on the headed notepaper. But the reality is he’s usually broke. I pay him rent of course. But it’s bugger all. The place was little more than a ruin when he let me have it. I spend a damn sight more maintaining it than he can ever ask in rent.’
‘How long has it been?’
‘Eleven years. Near enough. I took the lease in the July of ’52. I suppose you think it’s a pretty rum set-up?’
Troy didn’t know what he thought. He had found Fitz better company than he thought he might – far from flirting, he seemed oblivious to Troy’s peculiar way of making his living, and he doubted very much whether he had bothered to tell anyone else. And Troy had skimmed across the surface of an encounter with Tereshkov without fall, though not without surprise. And in the last hour Fitz had had enough tact not mention their own brief encounter in the small hours of the morning. All in all it was turning out to be a pleasant break – Anna notwithstanding. He did not want to be made to comment on the ‘rumness’ of it all. So he said nothing.
They had reached the croquet pitch. It no longer was a croquet pitch. Troy had a good view of Tommy Athelnay’s upturned backside, shod in heavy corduroy, as he serviced the contraptions that launched clay pigeons.
‘Bugger,’ said Fitz. ‘He’s got mad keen on this the last few weeks. He found all the clobber for it in a shed no one had looked in since before the war.’
‘Not your sport?’ Troy asked.
‘I’ve no idea what my sport is. But it’s the guns that I object to, the guns and the racket. I can’t abide guns. I’d even diagnose myself and say I’m phobic about them.’
‘How did you get through the war? I thought you were an ex-serviceman.’
‘Oh, I did my bit. Didn’t we all? North Africa, then France, with the Royal Army Medical Corps. But I never picked up a gun. They said it was obligatory for an officer to bear a side arm and know how to use it. If only to shoot our own side when they mutiny. “So court-martial me,” I said. Of course, they didn’t. You know what they did? They carved me one out of wood. I went right through the war carrying a wooden gun. The Army was like all authority. One colossal bluff. Taught me a valuable lesson. The best way to deal with the crassness of authority is simply to stand firm.’
Troy wondered how long he would have to go on listening to other people’s ‘war’. Everyone seemed to have it in them, though he was grateful to Fitz for the brevity and novelty of his narrative.
They came close. Anna was looking at an old shotgun as though to identify the object correctly were a parlour game – and Troy had had the feeling for the best part of two days that this whole venture was a form of parlour game. Tommy was loading clays, and a man in a white shirt, billowing in the breeze, impervious to the weather, stood in profile, pushing shells into a rather expensive-looking Purdey over-and-under.
It was a famous profile. The filmstar looks, the tall, elegant shape of Her Majesty’s Minister of State at the Foreign Office, Conservative MP for Somewhere-or-Other, Tim Woodbridge.
Tommy saw them.
‘You don’t fancy a go do you, Freddie? I’ve a spare gun. Woodbridge brought his own.’
Troy looked at Fitz.
‘Go ahead,’ Fitz said. ‘I’ll go back to the lodge and get on with lunch. Come up in about half an hour.’
He left them to it.
Anna made the introductions, adding, ‘You have something in common. You’re both patients of mine.’
Troy would not have been surprised to find that that was all they had in common. If there had been a mental list of ‘people I least expected/wanted to meet here/there/in any circumstances’, Wood-bridge would have been high on it.
He smiled a good, white-teeth smile and shook Troy’s hand. ‘I’ve crossed swords with your brother a few times in the House,’ he said, aiming at non-partisan affability.
Such vanity, thought Troy. Rod always wiped the floor with the arrogant bugger.
Anna had never shot clays before. She missed four in a row. Troy put down his gun and proceeded to teach her.
‘No,’ said Troy. ‘Lean into it. There’s almost no recoil, so don’t anticipate it. Put your weight on your leading foot.’
Anna shifted her balance, steadied the gun and called. A clay soared up from the left. She followed it, fired and missed.
‘What did I do wrong?’
‘Don’t follow. Pick your window, wait for the clay to enter it.’
‘What? Let it come to me?’
‘Sort of. If you pick your window, you’ll find you don’t swing the barrel wildly. In fact you’ll find you only need to put the gun to your shoulder to aim.’
The obvious example was at hand.
‘Just watch Woodbridge for a minute.’
Woodbridge never missed. Every time he yelled ‘pull’ two clays took to the air and he blew both to smithereens without even seeming to aim. He’d be chatting amiably to Tommy, weight on his left hip, gun at waist level, and would still be talking as he casually shifted to the right foot, put the gun to his shoulder and fired both barrels seamlessly. It was like watching Fred Astaire in one of his old films, whacking away at golf balls in the middle of a dance routine, a rhythm so perfect he never missed, an aim so true he must have been the envy of half the golfers on earth.
Troy talked Anna through it. It struck him as pitifully simple. He had been the world’s worst shot, and had paid for it with the loss of half a kidney to an assassin’s bullet twenty years ago. Only a lucky shot had saved his life. Recovering – long, still summer days of immobility and pain, the distant hum of traffic, the puttering sound the V1 flying bombs and deadly, ear-splitting explosion of the V2 – he had determined that he would never again rely on luck where guns were concerned, and a few lessons had long since taught him how to hit the bull’s-eye. As a copper he still disliked guns, and rarely felt the professional need of one, but he took a refresher course every year just the same.
Woodbridge was beginning to irritate him. After a couple of dozen more clays Anna had got the hang of it, and was hitting two in three. Woodbridge had not missed once. Woodbridge had pissed him off no end. Somehow Anna seemed to know this.
‘He’s rather flash, isn’t he?’
‘Just a bit,’ said Troy. ‘But he’s using a far better gun than you.’
‘Why do I have the feeling you’re being kind to me? Why do I have the feeling the quality of his gun matters less than his skill or my lack of it?’
‘Well fuck ’im,’ muttered Troy, and picked up his gun.
Anna stepped back. Woodbridge was still blathering with Tommy.
‘Load three,’ said Troy.
A silence followed.
‘Eh?’ said Tommy.
‘Three,’ said Troy.
He had Woodbridge’s attention now.
‘There’s only two barrels, Troy.’ Anna whispered the obvious.
‘Just stand over there and load up. When I throw you my gun, you throw me yours.’
Tommy synchronised the two traps and nodded to Troy.
‘Pull!’
He took out the first two effortlessly, threw the gun to Anna, caught hers, shouldered it and caught the third clay far and low and heading for the treetops. He knew from the way it spun that he had only nicked the rim with the shot, but it broke, it shattered and it counted.
‘Bugger me!’ said Tommy Athelnay.
‘Good Lord!’ said Anna.
‘Well done,’ said Woodbridge. ‘Fine shooting, but I’ll wager twenty quid you can’t do it again.’
Troy looked at him. He’d half expected him to try to top whatever he had done with a meretricious display of his own. He was smiling – smiling, but quite serious.
‘Twenty quid?’ said Troy a little peevishly.
‘If you hit all three.’
‘No,’ said Troy.
‘No?’ said Woodbridge.
‘A hundred,’ said Troy.
‘Bugger me,’ said Tommy Athelnay again.
Woodbridge looked to Tommy, who shrugged a ‘don’t ask me’, then he looked at Troy, grinned broadly and said, ‘You’re on.’
Troy and Anna swapped guns like jugglers trading Indian clubs in mid-air, but the third clay had flown wild and low. By the time Troy had it in his sights it was below the treetops and the barrel of his shotgun was nearing the horizontal. He took his finger from the trigger and lowered the gun, heard the distant crack as the clay hit the trees.
Woodbridge was behind him, standing where he could follow the clay from Troy’s point of view.
‘You know,’ he said, and Troy turned to him, ‘you could’ve hit that.’
‘It was too low,’ said Troy.
‘No, honestly you could have hit it. You’re really very good.’
‘Too low,’ said Troy. ‘Well into the woods. Could be people there for all we know. Aim too low and you never know who you might hit.’
He put a hand to his eyes, stared off into the woods for a moment. Nothing moved.
‘I owe you a hundred.’
‘Cheque’ll do,’ Woodbridge said in a ‘don’t mention it old chap’ tone of voice and before Troy could say anything Tommy Athelnay chipped in with, ‘I don’t know about you lot, but I’m starving. Why don’t we all toddle off and see what Fitz has rustled up?’
Woodbridge broke his Purdey, stuck it in the crook of one arm and held out the other to Anna.
‘Mrs Pakenham?’ he said, investing two words with several buckets of practised charm, and she took his arm and they strolled off towards the south lodge. After a dozen paces she turned to stick her tongue out at Troy.
‘You know,’ Tommy said, as he and Troy pulled the covers across the traps, ‘he’s not at all bad when you get to know him.’
‘When,’ said Troy emphasising his disbelief with an inflection lost on Tommy.
‘Terribly sad man. Terribly sad. Never got over his wife’s death.’
This was common knowledge. Sarah Woodbridge had died in a car crash along with their six-year-old daughter four years before. Woodbridge had been driving – the family’s annual holiday in Italy. A twisting road south of Naples, a reckless lorry driver and the car had plunged off the road and down the hillside. Somehow Woodbridge had walked away from it. Much of the time it seemed as though he wished he hadn’t. His grief had been public. The heart of the nation – an organ in which Troy found it hard to believe – had gone out to him. He had been the rising star of the Conservative Party, a man with, as the curriculum vitae demanded, a ‘good war’ behind him – he had roared across Europe to Lüneberg Heath in command of a tank battalion and picked up more medals, even, than Rod Troy – a safe Commons seat since the election of 1950; a wife heralded as an asset, the brightest, prettiest young wife of the man-in-the-making. Woodbridge was a future prime minister many said, certainly a future foreign secretary. He had been number two at the Foreign Office. But he had resigned at once. And no blandishments of Macmillan would make him reconsider. Last summer Macmillan had sacked half his cabinet in an effort to revive the standing of a flagging government and, if rumour were to be believed, had offered Woodbridge the post of Foreign Secretary. Woodbridge had declined, and at this juncture it might have seemed that it was all over for him – one can be a rising star for only so long before there comes a point at which one has either risen or one has not. And the role of bright young thing is best played by the young and, if at all possible in politics, the bright. It was all but impossible nearing fifty – and Woodbridge, Troy knew, was much the same age he was himself.
Then at Christmas he had suddenly relented. He had taken his old job back, Minister of State at the Foreign Office, number two to Lord Home – a man Troy thought not long for this politic world once Mac had sharpened his next case of knives – and since Alec Home sat in the Lords, Woodbridge was to all intents and purposes the Foreign Secretary for the Commons. It was a shrewd move. It gained him all the press attention, all the House attention he needed to renew his chances, but kept him out of the firing line. Anyone calling for heads to roll was unlikely to name him as the man who must go. The safe job was ‘Number Two’ – and it was in this capacity that he had turned up on Charlie in Beirut. Troy wondered in what capacity had he turned up on Tommy Athelnay and Paddy Fitz?
Right now this ‘terribly sad man’ was reducing Anna to hysterics. Troy and Tommy Athelnay walked to the lodge some thirty yards behind Woodbrige and Anna. Troy could not hear a word of what he was saying to her, all he could hear were her giggles. And then the gesture. The affectionate arm slipped from his to wrap itself around his waist, as his came around her shoulder. Last night Troy had humped her sore and not seen such affection from her. Only the rawness of her own need.