A Little White Death

It was a fortress of a building, dwarfed now by the larger, vulgar developments of the post-war years, but still dominant on its site halfway up Central Park West. It was easy to imagine it as it once was, standing alone on the edge of a virtually treeless Central Park, a mock-gothic castle in a sea of mud so far from the heart of fashionable Manhattan, at a time when rich New Yorkers lived no further north than Union Square, that they said you might just as well live in the Dakotas as live at One West Seventy-Second Street.

It was remarkably like his father’s old town house in Moscow, the same pale brick, black with dirt, the same extravagant use of copper, weathered to a startling powder-green, the same tiny turrets and dormers, islands in the sky. But this was the town house writ large, the town house on a monumental scale, ten or eleven storeys, the building running the length of a city block all the way to Seventy-Third.

Troy walked along from the corner – a row of black Neptunes peered at him from the ironwork – and stopped by a blue-uniformed, peak-capped porter, who had just stepped from his sentry box. The man pointed the way to the office. For a moment the fortress became a cathedral as he passed under a high vaulted ceiling, then up a flight of steps and into a small room to face another man in uniform, perched in front of the massed spaghetti of an ancient telephone exchange. Whatever this place was it could not be cheap. Either Tosca had landed on her feet or . . . but there was no end to the sentence, no speculation worth the thought.

It was pointless asking to be let in. The look on the doorman’s face told him that this was not the sort of place that let you in on a bluff or a whim.

Troy checked into a hotel and killed two days walking the streets of the city. A wet, misty late November. It seemed to him that with the closing year he had reached the year’s antithesis. Twelve months ago or thereabouts he had been in Moscow, the city without. Now New York, the city with.

His sense of the place, based on a single visit in 1928, was that they’d got round to finishing it. In 1928 it had struck him as being a construction site on an unimaginable scale. The Chrysler Building at Lexington and Forty-Second almost built, 40 Wall Street, almost as high and almost as built – and the Empire State Building, webbed with scaffolding, half-built, like the younger brother growing so fast it was all too evident he would soon outgrow his siblings. Troy searched for a metaphor. If Beirut had been London in the war, all black market and fiddles; if Moscow had been London in the bleak years, all want and worry . . . what, then, was New York? At dusk on the second day he found himself at Radio City, on Sixth Avenue, the cross-street led directly into the Rockefeller Center, rising topless from the concrete to vanish in the rain and mist, lit in lurid lilac by the floodlights. It looked hellish, supernatural, futuristic. A backdrop for The Shape of Things to Come. That was it. New York was London in the future. He was not at all sure it was a future he wanted.

He headed back to the Upper West Side, a maverick route up Ninth Avenue until it became Columbus, past the bulldozed tenements of the Jets and the Sharks, a voice inside Troy singing, ‘I like to be in Ameeerrriiika!’

At West Seventy-Second the same man said simply, ‘You can go up. She’s expecting you.’

He was admitted through the second gate, into the courtyard. The walls rose up around him like a keep. More than ever it resembled a castle. And right in front of him was a fountain. Little fishes spouted water, arched their backs and spread their fins around the base of huge conch shells from which rose the same yellowy-white lilies that graced the iron gates of his father’s house, spouting still more water. He began to wonder. All those years she had spent in Moscow. Had she made the same visit he had? A quick look at the closed gates of the Ministry of Agriculture, Subdivision of Planning & Production, Wheat & Barley, then on to the guided tour of the Tolstoy house. Is that what attracted her to this Victorian monstrosity? Its very Russianness, its seeming un-Americanness?

Yet another porter, a young woman in blue, wearing a pillbox hat, took him up in the lift, a marvel in mahogany, a plush confessional for the unrepentant, with its Neptunes now in brass, a brass so shiny it must be polished every day.

The door of apartment 66 stood ajar. Darkness within. He pushed gently. A very fat tabby cat, a good eighteen pounds of furry beast, lay on its back on the carpet, barring the threshold, legs in the air, head raised slightly so it could see who was coming in. He took a stepforward, expecting the cat to bolt. It didn’t.

‘He won’t let you in ’less you tickle his belly,’ said a voice from the darkness.

The floor beneath his feet began to float; the walls took wing. He’d heard that voice in a thousand dreams. Damn romance – of late he’d heard it in a dozen nightmares.

He scrunched his eyes. Willed his irises to widen to the light. A short figure assumed shape at the edge of vision. The cat rolled onto his feet and took flight. A barefoot Tosca padded slowly towards him.

She pecked him on the cheek, pushed the door to and walked on into the sitting room without waiting for his answer.

He looked around. Books from floor to ceiling, books in piles on the floor, books three layers deepadding six inches to the height of the coffee table. The Tosca he had known had read Huck Finn over and over again. In the mid-fifties, when they’d married, he had tried to broaden her taste. He’d no idea he had succeeded on quite such a scale. It was more a Troy household than a Tosca one. Troy Nation new-built in the New World. But then, as Fitz had said, she was Mrs Troy.

She was dressed of old. A blouse and slacks. He could not recall that he had ever seen her in a dress. He looked at her. She bloomed. She was older than he, fifty-two, but she had kept her figure. The starched white blouse, a cotton sculpture over big breasts, the black slacks clinging to the curve of her backside. Her neck had not gone, but that it would was inevitable with women. The neck went before the tits. The eyes shone, nut-brown, fleckless and cat healthy. She was looking back at him, smiling, so obviously glad to see him. He wondered what she saw when she looked at him.

Troy woke. A post-coital wakefulness, the kind that used to drive her nuts. She could sleep like death, and if he woke her she would complain. But she was awake first. He realised almost at once that she could see him in the half-darkness, the reflected light of the building opposite cutting through the curtains of the bedroom.

She threw off the sheets and disappeared down the corridor. A few minutes later she returned, a plate of warm pizza in her hand. Still naked. Tanned, trim. Tits up, arse firm. She took some form of regular exercise, he concluded. Cared for herself in a way he’d never found possible or practical. The job had blown him apart, time and Kolankiewicz had sewn him back together. Until now.

‘Figured you’d be hungry. You used to eat like a horse after. Ah, the joys of a Toast’R’Oven.’

He’d not eaten pizza in years. It had never caught on in England. Probably never would. His first taste of it from the PX during the war had struck him as exotically un-English. Now it seemed too rich, too greasy; it merely filled a space in his belly.

She ate more than he. A rolling tear of oil coursed from the corner of her mouth, down her neck and across her left breast. He dammed it just short of the nipple with the tip of a finger and traced its route back to her lips.

She was grinning as she said it. But she also meant it, he knew. As though his inhibitions were smothered by her lack.

He was astounded. The idea that there could be such a thing as ‘good’ sex. All sex was bad sex. It drew you and it bound you and it spent you. It took all your unspecified desire and then it tossed you aside with your desire still unsatisfied. But that was less than half her answer.

‘I love you. Took an age for me to accept it, but I do. Or to be precise, it took a world for me to accept it.’

Troy said nothing. She had not ducked her own words, had looked at him through every syllable.

‘I don’t know,’ he lied, knowing damn well he couldn’t. He did like to be in Ameeerrriiika; he just didn’t want to live there. ‘Could you live in England?’

The pause, the deep intake of breath, told him more was coming – that what followed would not be so flippant. ‘I had to do this my own way. You understand? I had . . . I had a world to make.’

This was her considered word on an absence of seven years. This was what his father had told him. This was what he had told Charlie. A world of difference, the one between the world as you find it and the world as you make it.

This was the question she had posed over and over again when she had fled Russia in ’56. It was a reasonable question after a life of deceit and disguise. A war spent with the US Army, a cold war spent with the KGB and the years since 1956 spent, if not hiding from, then avoiding, both. It seemed to Troy that she had fled one way almost as Charlie had fled the other. My friend the spy, my wife the spy. The pity of it was he hated spooks.

Now, he was startled by the combination of personalities she was displaying to him. The wise-cracking Lower East Side she-huckster who had seduced him effortlessly in 1944, now overlain by the Manhattan sophisticate – two styles of competence and confidence. And the broken-winged bird he had married in 1956 – endlessly pushing him out to arm’s length – was nowhere to be seen. It was he whose wings flapped hopelessly, he who had looked in the mirror and failed to recognise his own body.

‘Who am I?’ he said back to her, and departed from the script. He had never asked her that before. It was not a question he would ever have put to anyone.

Out in the corridor the cat struck up a wail. Only when Tosca got out of bed and opened the door to him did the beast shut up. All Troy saw was a flash of tabby fur as he shot into the room. A couple of minutes later he appeared on Troy’s pillow, silent, looking into Troy’s black eyes with his own merely slits of emerald green. He could not help the feeling that he’d seen this look before.

That night he dreamt of Clover again. Wet-footed, softly to his bed. The dead hand upon him. He felt no pain.

He woke to the brightness of day and a fit of coughing. He’d not hacked so badly in quite a while. He grabbed a handkerchief and spat blood into it. He’d never done that before. Maybe it was a mistake to have flushed all his pills down the bog, the TB tablets along with the uppers and downers.

He looked sideways. Tosca was on the floor. On the other side of the room, by the window. The cat next to her, eyes flashing. They were both staring at him.

‘You remember that window in the Blue Room at Mimram, where your sister scratched the date of her engagement and their initials in the glass. I kinda thought I’d do the same. Mark the date we got it back together in glass. Otherwise we’ll neither of us remember it. It was way after midnight, so it’ll be today’s date.’

She was right. He would not remember. He could remember nothing save that which tumbled headlong through his dreams.

Nothing. Nothing lasted. Everything changed. Everything passed. The brightest tent, its shining yards hung in tatters from the rail for moth and mouse to feed upon.

Why should not middle-aged men be mad?

She

who never knew a word of

Dante, who half-remembered

Oscar Wilde, and once,

long ago,

had heard

Dylan Thomas on the wireless . . .

who cares what the old books said?

who cares why middle-aged men should be

mad . . .

She had made her world, as she rightly, proudly put it. There was no place for him in it, though she did not know it – and there was no place in it that he wanted. He had lived so long without – without wife, without family, without feeling – without the value scheme, the moral scheme that life builds on reciprocal emotion. These were things he did not know and did not wish to know and would never know.

He had learnt a lesson too late in life – that other people’s emotions do not matter.

Other people’s emotions are out there somewhere beyond, beyond the bubble. The glass bubble. He had come to think of the glass bubble as the condition of tuberculosis, the White Death – but it was the human condition, the Living Death.

A fire engine roared up Central Park West, full siren song. He found himself gazing at her spine, bent over her etching. Naked but for knickers. She pulled back from the windowpane.

He saw his initials entwined in hers, and the date diamond deep. ‘November 22nd 1963.’

Epilogue