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Someone was following Frederick Troy.
Mimram House, Hertfordshire: July 1935.
He felt foolish. As though he’d rummaged in the dressing-up box and tried on something better suited to his brother.
The damn thing simply didn’t fit.
A voice from the doorway. Laconic and softly mocking.
“You look like a twat, bro.”
“Sasha, if you can’t be helpful, just fuck off will you?”
Just as his mother passed by his door.
“Pourquoi avez-vous appris l’anglais juste pour utiliser tous les gros mots de cette langue?” Why is it that you two learnt English just to use all the worst words it has to offer?
“Il nous reste une demi-heure avant le dîner. Nos invités vont bientôt arriver. S’il vous plaît, les enfants, s’il vous plaît.” We have half an hour before dinner. Our guests will be arriving soon. Please, children, please.
With that she was gone. Sasha stayed.
“As I was saying …”
“I know I look like a twat. It doesn’t fucking fit. I’ll be Constable Scarecrow, the laughing stock of Hendon.”
Troy was legally too short to be a copper. His father had capitulated to his wish to join the Metropolitan Police Force after much argument, but with good grace, and had pulled strings, of which he had plenty, to get his younger son accepted at Hendon College as a cadet. It had pained him, and pained him doubly. Troy was well aware of that. Eighteen months ago Troy had turned down an Open Exhibition, a lesser form of scholarship, to Christ Church College, Oxford, to work on one of his father’s newspapers as a cub reporter. Like Charles Dickens, he had begun as a court reporter, sitting on the hard benches of magistrates’ courts day after day and recording the fragmentary lives of shoplifters, drunks, and flashers. Then he had graduated to the Old Bailey, to the rank of crime reporter, and after a year of such reporting, his vocation, if such it be, had become apparent to him. He wanted to be a copper. Above all he wanted to be a detective. The uniform was simply a hurdle en route. What he didn’t know was how many hurdles he’d have to jump to get out of uniform.
This one bagged around his ankles, sagged at the arse, and would have accommodated another slim-ish person at the chest without bursting its silver buttons.
“It’ll never fucking fit.”
“Y’know, Freddie … it’s nothing a good tailor couldn’t work wonders with. When do you actually start?”
“Monday of week after next.”
“Fine. Whip round to your man in Savile Row and get it tailored.”
“I doubt very much whether Foulkes and Fransham bother with uniforms.”
“Then find another. God knows somebody must tailor uniforms. Think of all those RAF pilots, think of all those Guards officers. Do they go around saggy-baggy? Do they, fuck. Anyway, get it off now and get your black tie and togs on. Ma is right, there’ll be a posse of the old man’s oddities knocking back the gin any minute.”
“Then close the door.”
Sasha closed the door.
“I meant from the other side.”
She slumped in a chair and Troy realised that she had been knocking back the gin already, that she had, in fact, been holding a large gin and It in her hand all the time, concealed by the door frame, and that she might well be more than a bit pissed.
“Don’t be silly. We’ve never given toss about nudity.”
Indeed, they hadn’t, but …
“We’re not in the nursery any longer.”
She sipped, gulped her gin, but didn’t move.
She had a point, Troy knew, they had undressed in front of each other and his other sister, Masha, since childhood. They had only one rule … never comment on what you see. And he wondered why self-consciousness should become paramount at this moment, and he knew the answer. The uniform. It changed everything.
He stripped down to nothing, Sasha looking at him, then not looking at him, and all the time looking unconcerned, until he reached break point … the fastening of the black tie itself.
“Still can’t do it on your own, eh?”
She stood behind him, taller even when she was barefoot, but now she almost towered over him in heels, her hands at his throat, peering around him to see them both in the mirror, deftly knotting the bow tie, whispering about a rabbit down a hole.
“Oddities?”
“Eh?”
“You mentioned the old man’s oddities … his choice of dinner guests. Who’s coming?”
“Hmm … well. There’s Rosamond Lehmann.”
“I know that name.”
“Novelist. Pretty good one actually. Three or four to her name. She’s John’s sister … you know John. Rod was at Cambridge with him. One of the Trinity bright boys.”
“Will John be coming?”
“Yep. And then there’s Moura Budberg.”
“Again? Weird.”
“Dad seems to enjoy her company.”
“Ma doesn’t. Moura name-drops all the bloody time.”
“I think the Baroness Budberg brings a little bit of Russia back to the old man, and, needless to say, Ma doesn’t need or want any little bits of old Russia. And Moura makes for a good guessing game. Is she a Soviet spy or isn’t she?”
“I can’t see any point in the Soviet Union having spies who tell you they’re spies over the fucking soup course.”
“And then there’s Harold Macmillan …”
“And weirder.”
“Macmillan’s a rebel … you know how the old man loves troublemakers. Mac’s a charmer. A hopeless charmer, a backbencher with about as much chance of cabinet office as our cat.”
Sasha stepped back.
“You’re done.”
So he was. Troy looked in the mirror and could see himself again, something he had not been able to do dressed as a police cadet-cum-clown.
“If you’d asked me when you were thirteen and spotty if you’d ever be handsome only good manners would have restrained me from saying no, but I will say this, our Fred: for a little ‘un you’re really rather cute.”
Troy said nothing.
Sasha reverted to the subject.
“And then there’s that new bloke he’s got writing book reviews for one magazine or another … Burgess, Guy Burgess.”