Troy heard Rod come in shortly after midnight and managed to avoid him at breakfast with a pretence of sleeping in. Pretence, as he had not slept a wink all night.
He breakfasted at ten. Peered through the French windows of his study, regretting that it was too late in the year to breakfast outside unless you liked porridge with added drizzle.
Rod would not be back till well after lunch, which he would take in the village pub with his party agent and some of the party faithful.
Troy reckoned he had five hours of uninterrupted thinking ahead of him. But only one thought to think.
“What have I done?”
He was, in summary, a married man seeking a divorce, co-habiting (at least he thought that was the neologism … his mother’s generation would have called it living in sin), and until two nights ago doing so faithfully—a palæogism if ever there was one, and not an adverb that had ever troubled him until now. Casual sex did not bother him because the adjective never occurred to him. Sex bothered him, per se, simply because it was sex, and he had from his first encounters with the opposite held that there was no such thing as “just sex.” Venetia was not “just sex.” She was an open invitation to fuck up every aspect of his life, every shred of stability he had achieved in the two and a bit years since Tosca had walked out on him, and now … now … mid-coitus … she had slid neatly, wetly, nipples dragging along his chest … from her erotic heaven into the mundanity of his work. It was bliss. It was a trap. She knew everything, she had said. How right she was.
On the north wall of the study was a seven-foot-tall armoire. Troy vividly remembered the day it had arrived in 1922 or 1923—hauled up from the station on the carrier’s cart by a gigantic Clydesdale, quite the largest living creature the boy Troy had ever seen. Mostly it was still full of his father’s junk. Almost fifteen years after the old man’s death Troy had still not sorted through it. He had, in fact, added to it. A dozen or more shoe boxes, crammed with scraps of paper he had turned out of his London house and stored here. He’d even attempted method. Each box bore a year that might or might not accurately reflect the nature of its contents.
He took out 1940.
Postcards from his best friend, Charlie, serving in France with a guards regiment.
Eight-page letters in Russian from his father, all in the vein of Montaigne, instructing Troy—twenty-five years old, but still a boy to his father—in “how to live.”
And a creased pen-and-ink sketch, once screwed up and lobbed mercilessly into the wastepaper basket, only to be retrieved, smoothed out, and stored the following day.
An obscene cartoon of Troy and Venetia fucking by the statue of Eros at Piccadilly Circus, captioned “Morituri te salutant.”
At the bottom was the artist’s note and signature.
If I were you, I’d fuck Venetia Maye-Brown under floodlights in the middle of a hundred-bomber raid.
Yrs Ever,
Guy.
They hadn’t bothered with the floodlights, but in every other respect it seemed like a prophecy merely delayed in its fulfilment. Burgess, a man Troy thought of as distinctly lacking in self-knowledge, knew him better than he knew himself.
He retreated to the armchair by the fireplace.
“Mind if I join you?”
Troy looked over Rod’s head at the grandfather clock standing on the other side of the room, exactly where it had stood for the last forty-seven years. Six o’clock. He had worried away a day. Low autumn light draining into the crepuscular plug’ole and he’d not even noticed.
Rod did not wait for an answer. Plonked himself on the far end of the sofa—his thumb curled around the neck of a bottle of whisky, two glasses held precariously against it by one finger each of one huge hand, and a soda siphon in the other.
The words “not for me” formed on Troy’s lips without utterance. Rod would not take no for an answer—he never did—and the sheer bollock-numbing boredom of listening to Rod and “the day I’ve had” would be a welcome, inane distraction.
“It’s a bugger,” Rod said after his first gulp of Strathpiddle.
“Yep,” said Troy with no idea what Rod was talking about and no inclination to ask. Sooner or later Rod would tell him.
“It’s a good thing no one goes into politics for the glamour.”
Ah—it was going to be a familiar complaint. Rod whinge No. 12 sub-section B: “The Hon. Member feeling unappreciated.”
“I dunno,” Troy said. “You get to hobnob.”
“Lloyd George knew my father,” said Rod, lyrically.
“Father knew Lloyd George,” Troy replied—the only two lines in a Great War marching song, properly sung to the tune of “Onward Christian Soldiers.”
“And with what nobs do I get to hob? George Brown? Doesn’t have the same ring to it as Lloyd George, does it?”
“No, but you know Uncle Harold.”
Their nickname for the Prime Minister.
“Quite.”
(Pause)
“He had me round to Number 10 not that long ago.”
“On what matter?”
(Pause)
“You.”
Troy shifted from the laconic near-horizontal to a semblance of the vertical attentive.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Freddie, I haven’t seen hide nor hair of you since Vienna.”
“And?”
“And he was checking you out … sort of. No real suspicion. Just the usual Mac caution mixed with the usual Mac subtlety to create the usual Mac ambivalence. He didn’t want you adopting Burgess as a cause. One thing he wasn’t ambivalent about, however, was that he wasn’t sending anyone out to Vienna to accommodate Burgess. Told me he didn’t want him back at any price.”
Troy doubted Rod could know about Blaine. He might have heard a whisper, but all sides had tried to keep it under wraps.
“Rod, try to remember. What exactly did Macmillan say?”
“I’m not addled and I’m not yet pissed. I can remember quite clearly. His exact words were, ‘There’ll be no de-brief, no attempt to bring him in from the cold.’”
“When was this?”
“My first day back. You were still in Vienna with your strange friend. Obviously.”
“You’re sure?”
“Absolutely. Unforgettable. It was the same day my PPS, Iain, quit on me because he’d been nabbed with a guardsman in the park. Macmillan brought it up in the same conversation. Switched from asking me about you and Burgess to asking me about Iain. Coincidence? Non sequitur? Just one of those things.”
“Just one of those queer things?”
“If you like,” Rod said, much as Troy might have done himself.
“The queer thing you didn’t get at Oscar Wilde’s tomb?”
“The queer thing I still don’t get.”
And Troy pondered the queer thing and everything Rod had told him. Just one of those things? It did not seem like coincidence to him.