Another postcard arrived from darkest Derbyshire. In an envelope. Not to conceal the sepia image—”The Annual Belper Toad Racing Festival” circa 1910, men in clogs and white tabards, each clutching what seemed to be a large, disgruntled toad—so much as for the content:
This is really hard. How do you move on without the sense that you are throwing your life away? Why does every little thing seem to matter? Has anyone ever moved on, moved away without a permanent ache of regret? Why isn’t nostalgia a sin? Why isn’t it illegal? Why isn’t there a motto for psychological good health dunned into every child before they’re ten: “Don’t Look Back!”
I begin to wish I’d known your parents. How did they ditch a country? All I’m trying to ditch is a one-horse mill town up north, possibly even a one-donkey mill town. Dunno, ‘cos I haven’t seen a horse or a donkey yet, just the fucking mill chimney. God—if only I could dynamite it.
I’ve thought about talking to your Uncle Nikolai, but I think the only country he acknowledges is between his ears, and all his “things” are ideas, the ultimate portable property.
I’ve thought of talking to Kolankiewicz, but who was it said “Poland is not so much a country as a state of mind”?
SFXX
That was a Crispism. Quentin Crisp’s faintly damning critique of a friend. Troy must have told Foxx this at some point, probably on one of those days when talking to the Yard’s senior pathologist proved too exasperating.
Troy was not at all sure how to help her with this. Telling her to burn her bridges was easy. His own childhood had left him with few loyalties, even though both morality and intellect told him loyalty should be valued as a virtue. He had no handle on nostalgia. He had never felt remotely English, yet not only did he know no other country, he still owned the house he was born in, and his brother owned the house he had spent much of his childhood in. Could one have nostalgia for what is, as well as what was? And logic told him nostalgia was possible even for what never was.
And the telephone rang.
“Are you doing anything this evening?”
Lady Stainesborough. The usual slip-sliding inflections of irony or sarcasm utterly absent from her voice.
“Just drinking alone.”
“Been there. Done that. A tableau of misery. Why don’t you come over here and drink in company? I might even join you in a glass or two if you bring a decent bottle.”
Troy’s wine cellar was less a cellar than the space under the sink, between two red brick columns, Chateau Stopcock with vintage old-growth lead pipe, in amongst the cartons of Vim, the bottles of Dettol, and the packets of yellow dusters he bought on the doorstep from the bloke who came around with the knife-sharpening contraption, and home to half a dozen spiders, but it abounded in decency. He’d even been known to keep a thoroughly decent first-growth claret in his desk drawer in case of an unforeseen claret emergency.
A Latour ‘34. That should do the trick.
And then he paused.
What, if anything, was “the trick”?