Bliss. He had slept. Not the night through, but he had slept. Had not seen dawn. It was almost eight o’clock. He felt he could safely nod off and sleep until ten. If he could sleep properly again, he might just get through this mortal mess.
At eight thirty a boom-boom-boom like rolling thunder woke him. It was not overhead. It was closer. It was inside his head. He yanked back the curtain. A large Bedford tipper truck was backed up to the kitchen garden, dumping a mountain of bricks. Rod was yelling and directing the driver. Troy would get up, get dressed, and then he’d kill him.
‘You’re up with the lark,’ Rod said by way of greeting. ‘You must be feeling better.’
‘What are you doing?’ Troy asked.
Rod was bizarrely dressed in undersized overalls that hovered about his shins, flashing half a yard of socks – as ever, they did not match – and he was wearing a tatty straw hat. If memory served, Troy thought, it had belonged to one of his sisters some time between the wars. He was mixing mortar, bending over a pile of sand and cement and stirring it with the end of his shovel. Whatever the purpose there seemed to be as much delight in making pretty patterns in powder grey and dull yellow as there was in achieving the mixture.
‘Building a brick wall,’ Rod said.
‘Do we need a brick wall?’
‘Yes. We most definitely need a brick wall.’
‘Well then, do we need it now?’
‘Yes. Been saving it for years, saving it for just such a moment as this.’
‘Since when?’
‘It was the summer of. . . oh bugger, when was it the summer of? ’29? ’30? Hang on ’30, yes definitely ’30. I’d be twenty-three. Winston was out of office. Start of that long phase that kept him in the political wilderness until Chamberlain asked him back to the Admiralty. Now when was that?’
‘Doesn’t matter. Get on with it.’
‘Eh?’
‘Doesn’t matter when it ended. You were talking about the start.’
‘Was I? So I was. Anyway. That summer Winston asks the old man and our mother down to Chartwell for the weekend. And the old dear won’t go. Winston irritates her. Clementine bores her. So the old man asks me to go instead. Wonder where you were? It was just the sort of jaunt he’d ordinarily ask you on.’
‘If it was 1930 I’d be fourteen. Hardly likely to gee up the dinner-table chat with the Greatest Living Englishman. He’d never have asked me.’
Troy knew exactly where he’d been. It was the summer he turned fifteen. Biarritz. With Charlie, his mother and one of the better ‘uncles’. After surrendering his own virginity to Troy’s sisters the previous summer, Charlie was determined to get Troy laid. Troy was determined that he should not, and when Charlie succeeded in pulling the chambermaid – ‘pour mon ami, le petit Russe’, as he had told her – Troy had left him to it. Hours later he returned from a ‘bracing’ walk to find Charlie still in bed. ‘Mireille was marvellous Freddie, bloody marvellous. You don’t know what you’re missing.’
‘Quite,’ said Rod. ‘He wasn’t the GLE in those days, but I suppose you’re right. Anyway. Winston is whiling away the time thinking up books. He has it in mind to do a “State of Europe” book, and he’s asking the old man to give him the gen on Russia. The old man succeeds in talking him out of it. “Don’t even try,” he says. “It’s a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”’
Troy raised an eyebrow at this. It would be typical of Alexei Troy to have pinched one of Churchill’s better lines and claimed it for his own. Equally it would be typical of Churchill to have picked up a throwaway line of Alex Troy’s and made poetry of it. It also reminded him that he had recently glimpsed the enigma (or was it the mystery?) and he wasn’t about to tell Rod this.
‘Winston accepts this, and as I recall they fell to arguing about Germany. “How long do you give Hitler?” Winston asks. “About two years, perhaps two and a half,” the old man replies, meaning about thirty months until the Nazis come to power. Should have had a tenner on it. He was absolutely right. “How long before the war starts?” Winston asks. And the old man spins him some line about there being no need for war but on the other hand it could come any time, and they start to argue and they go on arguing, and they went on arguing for the next ten years. Which, come to think of it, is why, when I got interned in 1940, the old man would not ask any favours from Winston. Even to get me out of jail.’
‘Rod,’ Troy said softly, ‘is this leading anywhere?’
‘Quite. I digress. On the Sunday morning, before they started rowing, I took a stroll. I came across old Winston down by the kitchen garden. He had a couple of tons of red bricks, a load of cement, a pair of overalls, a straw hat and a trowel. He said he was going to build a wall the length of his vegetable beds – massive, absolutely bloody massive – said it would balance his life nicely, and if he was out of office for any length of time would relax him purposefully. He invited me to roll up me sleeves and I laid two rows with him. I suppose I have been storing up the memory of that for these thirty-odd years. I have even, as you have doubtless observed, been saving the overalls and the straw hat. And now I find I have need of purposeful relaxation, I’ve ordered a ton of bricks and I too am going to build a wall for the kitchen garden. It will do for me what it did for Winston, pass the time and stop me from going mad with impatience. And I bet I’m as good at it as he was – after all, his rows wobbled more than a bit. He was well suited to the Admiralty, being, as he was, well acquainted with wavy lines.’
‘Impatient for what?’ said Troy.
‘We are a year away from an election. At the most. But it could happen any time. In the meantime, we are in for a period of what I shall call pre-electoral madness. I shall show patience and discipline. Better by far to lay bricks than drop them, say I.’