He had always known he was a klutz, long before his wife had taught him the word. As a child if it could be dropped or broken he would drop or break it, and ball games struck him as a mystery. Golf in particular had baffled him until he realised that there was no ball in golf, and that the arm gestures were part of an arcane ritual of divine appeasement, probably dating back to the building of Stonehenge. Equally problematic were shoelaces and ties. Of late, say the last twenty-five years, he had coped fairly well, with his father’s oft-repeated dictum never far from his mind: ‘What does it matter, my boy?’
Today he had managed shoes but how to tie his black funeral tie was escaping him. Odd: he’d managed it without a second thought for Hugh’s funeral, but today he couldn’t do it for love or money. Right over left, left over right, the little rabbit goes down the little hole . . . were all right in their way, but then his father’s efforts to teach came back to him: his father being right-handed and Troy left, it had been like trying to learn the woman’s role in a tango and dance backwards, at the end of which footloose farce his father would say, ‘What does it matter, my boy? Do not wear the tie, go barefoot if it pleases you,’ et cetera.
He finally achieved something so bulky that his tie looked less like a tie than a small turban lodged at his throat. He glanced in the mirror. Good God, he looked like the Duke of Windsor, a man in the fierce grip of a fashion frenzy so absurd as to be anything but unobtrusive. He was not wearing a tie, he was making a statement. If only he knew what it was trying to say to him.
‘Come on, Troy. I’ve a cab out in the lane with the meter running.’ Kitty/Kate stuck her head in through the open door. ‘I thought you’d be ready by now.’
‘Can’t do the sodding tie.’
‘You can and probably will be late for your own funeral, Troy, but let’s not keep my mum waiting, eh?’
Kitty whipped it off him and, in a flurry of hand movements, retied it and pulled the knot up to his collar. A small, sensible knot, with nothing to say for itself. ‘If you had sons you’d know how to tie a tie backwards. Taught both of mine, after all.’
‘Where were you when my dad needed you to dance backwards?’
‘Are you feeling all right?’
‘You should never dance a tango with an Eskimo.’
‘I couldn’t agree more, but why tell me now?’
‘Never mind. It’s just the sort of meaningless connection that the mind makes when it has nothing better to do.’
Troy found himself face to face with Kitty, looking slighdy up at her as she spoke. She paused briefly, a sad sort of smile passing briefly between them, then she kissed him once, drew back, kissed him again and said, ‘Let’s go.’
They crossed the City in silence. Passing the Bank of England Troy said, ‘I didn’t ask you where.’
‘St George’s-in-the-East. Next to my dad. You weren’t at that one, were you?’
‘No, I wasn’t. If you recall, I got stabbed a couple of days after Walter was killed. I was sort of . . . laid up.’
‘Ah,’ she said, and looked out of the window away from him as though not remembering.
Then she said, ‘It was awful in so many ways. Dead Dad – as if that wasn’t bad enough, but the church was in ruins. Got hit in one of the last raids of the Blitz only a few weeks before Dad was killed. It would have been the May, May 1941. They just swept aside the rubble and carried on. I can still remember the crunch of dust and mortar under my shoes.’
Troy hadn’t been to St George’s since before the war. It was a Hawksmoor, but a Hawksmoor driven to the hilt. So many towers and turrets, urns and domes. It seemed to Troy that the architect had seen this first not in his sketches but in a dream, some opium-induced fantasy of Xanadu proportions. Buildings were the stuff of dreams, after all. Worse, the stuff of nightmares. It surprised him how often he dreamt of buildings and rooms and walls.
Inside the walls, the parishioners of St George-in-the-East had erected a tin hut. It looked for all the world like a chunk of a wartime RAF base plucked up by Dorothy’s tornado from a field in Kent and plonked down in London, into a frame by Nicholas Hawksmoor. It was utilitarian in the extreme. Tin and asbestos walls, stacker canvas chairs and a plug-in Hammond organ. Inside, all that was visible of the glory that had been was the dazzling mosaic gold of the Christ Crucified on the end wall onto which the hut had been built. A funeral service in a glorified Nissen hut? It seemed to Troy to be another symbol of the age in which they lived.
Troy had decided it would be no bad thing if this funeral failed to resemble the last one he had been to. Not that he expected any of the Stiltons to behave like Sasha. It would be just as well if it were different in every respect. He looked at the sky over the East End. It was ominously, pleasingly dark. They might be in for a summer cloudburst. That would be different – it would change the tone nicely.
Compared to the funeral of the late Hugh, this was on the grand scale. The Stiltons had turned out in force. Troy would have been happiest at the back, beyond the obvious questions surely being asked of ‘Who’s he?’ but Kitty rightly would have none of it. She was the eldest child, she had to sit at the front with her three sisters, her one surviving brother and all their many spouses. But that didn’t stop her whispering and pointing out every single member of her family to him.
Aunt Dolly and her inseparable friend Mrs Wisby. Troy had the dimmest recollection of meeting Aunt Dolly before the war. Brother-in-law Maurice White, probably London’s best-known self-made millionaire, formerly Maurice Micklewhite, who at some point had managed to lose the first syllable of his name as neatly as Troy’s own father had lost the last of his. Troy made no effort to log the list of cousinry, and diverted himself as Kitty whispered a lengthy chronicle of Kathleens and Michaels and Alberts and Marys by wondering if cousinry might not be cousintude or cositude or some such. His dad would know. It was just the sort of trivia his dad stored up in spades.
‘Have you heard a word I’ve said?’ she said.
‘Yes,’ he lied.
‘And, of course, old Mr Bell’s on the organ. You remember him? He was our lodger during the war. He still is Vera’s lodger.’
Vera was Kitty’s youngest sister. Scarcely out of her teens when the old man had been killed, she had taken control of the house and, with it, the lives of most of her siblings. She had a facial resemblance to her mother, but she had grown to her father’s bulk – a big woman, never far from an apron or a rolling-pin.
Troy drifted off. He was, he knew full well, just window dressing. An accessory Kitty could wear on one arm. It didn’t mean he had to pay attention or say anything, and with a bit of luck he might get through the whole caboodle without having to utter a word. He stood when Kitty stood, mouthed tunelessly when she sang, sat when she sat, whipped out his clean hanky when she sniffled, and the next thing he knew he was outside standing in the drizzle for the burial.
It was, by Troy family standards, all rather restrained, rather polite and rather ordered. The tearful daughters threw single roses into the grave, the son and sons-in-law stood steely and tearless, and no one flourished a revolver. In minutes, it seemed, he found himself walking slowly back from the churchyard towards the Highway in the company of George Bonham. It seemed odd having Bonham slow down for him: for years now it had been the other way round, Bonham slowed by bulk rather than age, the heavy-footed pace of a man the best part of six foot seven and, in former days, wearing his silly policeman’s helmet, nearer seven foot. He had dwarfed Troy from the day they’d met in 1936. And from that day forth Troy had dodged around Bonham like a mosquito, inflicting on him ideas and actions that either appalled or baffled him without, in either case, denting his loyalty. Troy was his protégé—- that much he understood.
‘I wasn’t sure you’d be here.’
‘Kitty asked me. But to be honest, until she did it had never occurred to me to come.’
‘Stirs up old memories a funeral, don’t it? And I suppose you’ve got a few.’
‘Since you put it like that. I was the copper called out to old Walter’s murder. I saw the body before it was even cold, sprawled on the cobbles with a bullet hole in the head. I’ve never felt much like facing Mrs Stilton since. I certainly never felt like answering any questions.’
‘Aah,’ said Bonham. ‘I meant memories of you and Kitty. Sort of.’
Troy knew George’s ‘sort of. It was uttered as a way of toning down whatever he had just said with a hint of uncertainty. It didn’t work. ‘She’s married, George. Let’s leave the past where it belongs, shall we?’
A path ran at right angles to the one they were on into another quarter of the churchyard. A small man in a cloth cap was hurrying down it towards them.
‘It’s old Arthur,’ Bonham said. ‘You remember Arthur Foulds? Lost his missus the same week I lost mine in the Blitz.’
Arthur turned into their path and scuttled right up to them. ‘Vandals!’ he shouted. ‘Teds and yobs and bloomin’ tearaways!’
Now that Troy could see him clearly he knew him. He’d been a resident of Stepney when Troy was a fresh-faced beat bobby. Another retired docker, characteristically built like a brick shithouse. A powerhouse of muscle packed into a five-foot-four frame that had turned slowly to fat in fifteen years of retirement.
‘Just the blokes I need. A couple o’ coppers.’
‘We’re here for a funeral, Arthur. ‘Sides, I’m retired and Mr Troy’s not on duty.’
‘But you’ll at least come and look?’
‘The missus’s grave. My Janet’s restin’-place. It’s been vandalised!’
‘Arthur, there’s not a lot—’
Troy interrupted: ‘Let’s look shall we?’
Bonham glared down at him. ‘By rights it’s the sort of thing you report to the nick and let them take care of it.’
‘Won’t hurt to look. Besides, we’re way ahead of the Stiltons. They’re still standing around gabbing. Bound to be a pecking order for the cars back to Jubilee Street. Let’s buy ourselves a little time.’
Bonham accepted silently. They followed old Arthur to his wife’s grave. It was a mess: every plant, and he seemed particularly fond of polyanthi, had been ripped up and left to die. The earth looked less like the carefully tended plot Troy knew it must have been and more like an allotment. The fresh marks of footprints were beginning to fill with water as the drizzle turned to rain.
‘It’s criminal,’ Arthur stated the obvious. ‘And something’s got to be done,’ he stated the unlikely.
‘A lot of it about, is there?’ Troy asked.
‘First time,’ said Arthur. ‘Been tendin’ ‘er grave for nigh on twenty years . . . and nothing like this has ever happened before. I come here two, maybe three times a week. And nothin’ like this has ever happened before. They’ve no respect. That’s what’s wrong with young people today. Got no respect.’
He was crying now. Bonham responded: ‘You leave it with us, Arthur. We’ll report it to the nick and something’ll be done. Trust me.’
A huge, avuncular arm embraced the shoulders of the older man.
‘What’s the country cornin’ to? What’s the bleedin’ country comin’ to?’
Neither of them answered.