Voytek arrived with the last of the day. Nights beginning to draw in. Just as the old boy who lit the gas lamps came around with his hooked pole. There were four lamps in Goodwin’s Court: three on brackets—one on the corner where the alley bent, under which Ruby the whore stood to advertise her trade; one outside Troy’s house; one at the back of Giovanni’s restaurant; and one on a post that shone through the arch from Bedfordbury. At best they threw soft hoops of light down to the ground; in mist or fog they glowed like angels glimpsed at a distance—less faithful light than self-adoring aura.
As she knocked on Troy’s door, the pole yanked on the chain that sparked the gas and a halo of light slowly rippled out over the short, dark figure of Voytek.
The lamp lighter doffed his cap to the lady, said “Evenin’ guv’ner,” to Troy, and ambled off towards the arch. Voytek watched him go, stared silently as he reached up with his pole and lit the lamp on the other side. Troy found himself mentally totting up two encounters in one day with living anachronisms—Old Bert and the lamp lighter with his prewar deference. Or was it his postwar piss-take?
“Such light,” Voytek said.
Troy remembered Ruby’s remarks about the postwar lights, wondered if Voytek felt the same but felt disinclined to ask.
“Paris in nineteen forty-five. I had lived so long in darkness. Paris was lit up. I felt . . . I felt . . .”
“Washed clean in light?” he ventured, in Ruby’s words.
“No. The opposite. Seared. Scorched. Scarred. I burnt in such light. As though every secret should be searched out and illuminated for all the world to see.”
“Do you have many secrets?”
She said nothing. Stood in front of Skolnik’s atrocious portrait and stared at it.
Troy ducked into the kitchen, returned with an open bottle of Brunello di Montalcino that he’d been saving since his last trip to Italy in 1939. “The good stuff” as his dad would have said.
She turned her back on the painting without comment, without apparently recognizing herself, thanked him for the wine, and said, “I felt I belonged in darkness.”
“With your secrets?”
“We all have those, Troy. You can make too much of a word. A secret may not be world shattering, it may just be a private, a very private piece of self.”
He heard the unspoken touché, and decided empathy might be better than enquiry.
“I have plenty of pieces like that. A jigsaw box full. Things that are probably harmless that I’d never tell anyone, all the same.”
“Exactly,” she said. “Harmless but secret.”
She could probably go on lying all night. So could he. The difference was he knew they were both lying.
He slowed his pace. He never thought he gobbled his food, and to gobble pike with all its small bones was nigh on impossible, but she ate so slowly he was in danger of finishing his plate while hers was three-quarters full.
She noticed. Said, eyes on her food, not on him, “I learned not to bolt my food. That had its risk. What you had not yet eaten could be stolen. And while there was nothing to be savoured in grey bread and watery soup, the more slowly I ate the more filling it seemed. I suppose it’s the power of illusion. But it seemed a worthwhile trick to play on myself. And now I find I cannot stop.”
“I remember when the first bananas arrived after the war. Children had no idea how to ‘open’ a banana, and I saw one of my nieces swallow one so fast she threw up most of it seconds later like a dog that’s emptied its bowl in a single gulp.”
“But we all empty our bowls. At whatever speed. And we all break the polite rules of the table and wipe our plates with bread.”
“Well . . . you’ll never see my mother do that, but yes, most of us do. I think we’ve become a generation that will always eat what is put before us. Speaking of which, there is more.”
“Thank you, but sufficient is sufficient.”
“I have an orange for dessert. We could split it.”
When he returned with the orange, Voytek had moved to the hearth rug and curled up with her legs underneath her. Troy peeled it with his thumbnails, digging into the pocky skin and tearing. He held out a half-moon of segments to her. Instead, she picked the peel up off the rug, scratched the skin to produce a burst of mist, pressed it to her face, and inhaled.
“All smells are precious. All good smells. Not death or decay or shit. The good ones. The ones you can lose.”
“I don’t wish to put you off your orange, but when I was at school, there was such a thing as a good fart.”
“Spoken like a dog, Troy.”
She was sitting close to the gas fire, much the way Onions did—but where Onions seemed no longer to care whether it was lit or not, she was almost toasting her hands against the bars, palms up at right angles to her wrists, rotating slowly, like paddles, as she stared at them, just as she had after Viktor’s funeral. Troy expanded his makeshift theory of “never enough of enough” from an attempt at understanding Onions to include anyone who’d ever been so cold they thought they’d never be warm again. It was possible she’d come close to dying of cold. It was possible she’d tell him this sooner or later.
He fetched a second bottle of Brunello ’37 from under the sink, with every intention of getting her drunk and loquacious, and had the corkscrew in his hand when she said, “Viktor told me you not practice enough.”
“He was right.”
For a moment the corkscrew stole his attention. Odd—after all, he’d used it for years, and not for the first time tonight. It was as ornate as the Fabergé gun that had killed André Skolnik. It was as ornate as the Fabergé cigar clipper. But for the incongruency of it ever being part of the same set, Troy thought it would match the kit his father had left on his desk. He was pretty certain his father had given it to him. He just couldn’t remember when. He had snapped out of the reverie, pulled the cork, flipped it neatly into the bin, and was about to pour for both when she said, “Play for me now, Troy. Play me one of your jazz songs.”
Troy stuck the bottle and the corkscrew on top of the Bösendorfer and lifted the lid.
“Anything in particular?”
“No. I do not know jazz. It hardly touched my youth. After the Nazis came it was forbidden to listen to it. They called it degenerate.”
Troy did degenerate. Did it in spades. It gave him a broad brief. He had always been partial to the music of Hoagy Carmichael. Just before the war there had been a forgettable Hollywood film starring the delightfully erratic John Barrymore, for which Hoagy had written one of his best songs, “The Nearness of You,” and someone—Troy could never remember who—had turned in one of his best lyrics: “It’s not the pale moon . . . dooby doo doo . . .” If it hadn’t reached Europe that was hardly surprising, but during the war Glenn Miller had recorded it and, years after his death, was there anywhere the sound of Glenn Miller did not now reach?
It occurred to him that he could play this as she and Viktor had played Debussy—he could add notes, flatten them, sharpen them . . . but would she notice? In all likelihood she would not know the song, and if she did, in all likelihood she would take anything he might do to the song as “jazzing.” He played it straight, or as straight as his jazz fingers would allow.
As he finished she appeared next to him on the piano stool, nudged him none too gently with her hip to make room for her.
“A Bösendorfer? I played one as a child. I would go home from lessons with Viktor on his concert Bechstein and practice on an 1859 Bösendorfer upright.”
“This is a little newer. 1907.”
“Viktor also said your forte was Debussy.”
“Imbibed the Préludes with mother’s milk. And she learned them from the man himself.”
“Really?”
“He taught her in Russia for a while. Long before the revolution. Just before it, they both found themselves in Paris. He was writing the Préludes then.”
“Russia? Ah . . . that could explain why some of them are so miserable. I always thought it was raining in Debussy’s world but perhaps it was snowing instead.”
Troy took this as his cue. Played the most miserable sodding prelude he could think of, La cathédrale engloutie—a stark, languid bog of belllike semibreves—dans une brume doucement sonore—guaranteed to make you reach for the booze to englout your sorrows in brume, in bog . . . and he tweaked it with sharps and flats, overarpeggiated, gave it a meaningless code, and still she did not notice.
He handed her a glass of Brunello. They did not move. She sipped at her wine, moved her left hand silently across the keyboard playing invisible chords.
Suddenly she was looking at Troy, her dark eyes only inches from his dark eyes.
“Did Viktor teach you En blanc et noir?”
“Yep,” said Troy.
“And you and he played it four-handed?”
“Dozens of times.”
“Me, too.”
She put her glass carefully on top of the piano. Framed the first chord with her hand. Something felt wrong but he followed suit and as the first crashing chord was sounded, he knew exactly what was wrong and she burst into giggles. Giggles that grew and grew until she was crying with laughter. Troy had never heard her laugh. It was like that moment in Ninotchka when Garbo laughs on-screen for the first time—it is not merely that she laughs but that she laughs so long and so loud.
As the laughter subsided she was grasping at words and not managing to get a sentence out.
“Oh, Troy . . . oh, Troy . . . this is . . . this is a farce. Don’t you see? Viktor taught us each the same part.”
“We’re two left-handed women trying to dance backward. Neither of us knows the man’s part.”
She reached up her sleeve for a handkerchief to dab her tears and found none. Troy gave her his, a huge square of Irish linen with an overfancy ƒ in one corner.
“We know the same part. We know Viktor. We both know Viktor. But we do not know one another, do we, Mr. Troy?”