Troy could not resist. It spelled temptation, it spelled stupid, and he did it just the same. He had to see for himself. Part of him, the larger part of him, was relieved when the box office at the Hippodrome told him they were sold out for the next two weeks: Vince Christy’s music did nothing for him. He would kill an hour or so in the pub, then wait by the stage door in an alley off Cranbourn Street, itself but a stone’s throw from Leicester Square.
What surprised him was the age span of Christy’s fans. He found himself at the back of a throng of thirty or forty women who were anything from fifteen to fifty. Not that that seemed a large number – Tommy Steele and the new teen heart-throb Cliff Richard had been mobbed at personal appearances, and forty-odd didn’t make a mob – but they screamed in what Troy could only think of as a sexual frenzy, the way women had at Sinatra in the late 1940s. If this ever became the norm, if Elvis ever got out of the army and played England . . .
He turned over a dustbin and stood on it to get a better view. Christy must be just inside the stage door, or they were screaming at no one. He saw a stout man with thinning hair crushed among the women. He turned, as though feeling Troy’s eyes upon him. It was Gumshoe. Gumshoe without his hat. Troy would hate to be Gumshoe right now, he thought. One step too far and they’d trample him. Troy got a good look at Christy as he ducked out of the stage door and into a white Rolls-Royce – the famously wavy hair, the famously orange suntan, a beaming, pearly smile as he threw signed photographs into the air and used the scrum he’d created to dive into the car with a leggy blonde in tow, her face hidden by dark glasses and a headscarf. Troy would like to be her even less – they’d rip her to pieces if they could. As the Rolls pulled away, a dozen of the younger women pursued it, banging on the doors and windows. At the end of the alley it turned left into Leicester Square, half the crowd was gone, and suddenly Troy could hear the murmur that remained. A sad, tearful sound of joy half glimpsed, of pleasure half denied. A girl of seventeen or so was kissing Christy’s photograph, and saying, ‘My lovely,’ to herself, over and over again. Some of the women were slumped on the ground where they’d dived to grab a photograph. It looked like the closing scene of Hamlet, after all the betrayal, after all the slaughter. He’d no wish to cast himself as Fortinbras. Too late the hero. It was . . . repellent.
Troy walked out into the square. A cab was parked a few yards down, towards the Empire, its back door open. The cabman waved at him. Troy ignored him. He cut through the alleys to St Martin’s Lane and emerged by the Salisbury, opposite Goodwin’s Court. The same cab was parked there, back door open. The cabman waved again. ‘Sorry to trouble you, guv’ner. The fare wants a word.’
Troy looked into the darkness of the cab.
A small woman, dressed in black.
‘Freddie?’
His sister Masha.
‘Oh, Freddie.’
‘What’s the matter?’
He held out a hand. Masha took it and pulled herself to her feet, stepped out of the cab and wrapped herself round him. He didn’t think she’d done this since they were children.
‘You’d better come in for a bit,’ he said. ‘I’ll put the kettle on … or something.’
A polite cough from the cabman.
‘How much?’ said Troy.
‘Twenty-seven an’ six, guv’ner.’
‘What?’
‘We was stood up by the ‘Ippodrome an age with the meter running.’
Troy fished in his pocket, found a pound note and a ten-bob note. The cabman trousered the lot, said, ‘You’re a toff, sir.’ And drove off.
Troy found himself supporting a sobbing Masha. Like it or not, the night was going to cast him, deus ex machina, as the late-arriving hero.
‘What is it?’
‘The bastard.’
‘Which bastard? There’ve been so many in your life.’
‘Vince.’
‘What’?
‘We went to the Dorchester. Wouldn’t even see us. Sasha just said “Well, fuckim, then.” But I couldn’t do that. I had to see for myself.’
‘I didn’t know you—’
‘His last tour, nineteen forty-nine. The winter he played the Palladium. Sasha and I . . . well, you know. We had him. Had him all winter. A lovely, juicy, Italian-American sandwich. Lots of lovely garlic and basil and mozzarella and Cole Porter all wrapped up in me and my sister. Now he won’t even speak to me.’
‘As you said. A bastard.’
‘Did you get a look at his bit of totty?’
‘Yes. Blonde. Tall – well, taller than you. That’s about all I could tell you.’
‘So that’s it. Blondes are in. And dusky beauties pushing fifty are on the scrap-heap. Bastard.’
‘Come inside. I’ll put the kettle on.’
‘Do stop saying that, Freddie. It’s so bloody English.’
He made a pot of tea that neither of them drank. It sat on its little tray with its china teacups, just to remind them they were almost-English. He sat opposite Masha while she dried her eyes and told him a tale of unequalled heartbreak.
‘Lawrence has left me.’
‘What?’
‘He’s gone off to live at Albany. Some old crony from his army days has lent him a flat. He’s having an affair.’
The words ‘pot’ and ‘kettle’ competed for space in Troy’s mind.
‘He’s having an affair with Anna Pakenham.’
‘I see.’
‘Do you, Freddie?’
‘You’re not blaming me?’
‘No, I’m not. You introduced them, but it’s hardly your fault if my husband decides to go off and fuck her, is it? There’s only one person to blame for that.’
‘Does Lawrence know about. . . ?’
‘About all my affairs? Yes. I’ve never rubbed his nose in it, but I’ve never made a secret of it either. I shouldn’t think for one second he knows the half of it, but to know even a fraction would be enough. And do you know what really hurts?’
Troy could not even begin to guess.
‘She’s younger than me. Isn’t she?’
‘I suppose she is.’
‘Suppose bollocks you know damn well the woman isn’t even forty!’
‘I think she’s thirty-nine.’
‘And I’m forty-nine!’
Masha dabbed at her eyes with her hanky, fought back a sob. ‘That’s why it was so important to me to see Vince, to – to have him again. I was thirty-nine that winter he and I and Sasha – but now I’m forty-nine, I’ll be fifty next spring. At thirty-nine I was perfectly acceptable. Now I’m an old bag!’
‘You’ve kept your looks. You don’t look anywhere near fifty.’
She didn’t, but it struck Troy as a minor miracle. This was a woman who had danced naked on the rim of hell for thirty-five years.
‘That’s very sweet of you, Freddie. But the fact of the matter is I’ve been turned down for younger women twice in one week. My life is in pieces. My children don’t want to know me. I can’t even begin to think how I’ll tell them if Lawrence opts for divorce. Dammit, Freddie, I’m fifty years old and there’s no one in my life. No one. A loyal, decent man has left me for one of your cast-offs – it is over between you and her, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ Troy lied. When was it ever over?
‘And a shit of a man I shouldn’t let near me with a bargepole, who I only want because I want to be wanted, treats me like a rag he’s wiped his thingie on and thrown away. Jesus Christ! I keep asking myself, what have I done with my life? What have I done to deserve this? To have it all come down to this. What have I done?’
She sobbed now without restraint, slid off the chair to her knees and puddled on the floor. Troy gently lifted her up, and sat her on his lap, much as she used to do with him when he was nine or ten and she was fifteen and he’d grazed or cut or bruised himself.
It was like watching a ship approach on the horizon. Troy could see. And seeing it so clearly did not offer any way out. It had that same sense of inevitability. Heading for them inexorably and, however indistinct, never less than obvious. Masha slumped on him, wept into his chest. A woman several times larger than life now seeming smaller than she was, curling up like a child, her feet not touching the floor. Then her head lifted and Troy saw the wind hit the sails, felt the rigging stretch taut, and saw her face approach his, a close and blinding blur. She kissed him, he kissed her back – foundered on the barren skerry of her want.
Masha fumbled. Clumsy as a teenager. His shirt tore, buttons pinging off like bullets; her knickers snagged on her heels and she ripped them off with one hand without bothering to look. She fell back on the floor, he banged an elbow and pulled back, wincing. Masha locked both hands behind his neck and drew him down.
‘Please,’ she said. ‘I have to have someone right now. Please.’
She wriggled and scrambled until she had her skirt round her waist, his trousers pushed below his arse, his cock in her hand ready and far too willing.
He found he had literary expectations of incest. An arsenal of clunky metaphors mostly to do with looking-glasses and cameras, all telling him what he was supposed to feel in the midst of the outrageous. But it didn’t feel outrageous. It felt like the culmination of a long seduction his sisters had begun on him before he was ten. They’d dressed and undressed in front of him, bathed in front of him, fucked all his friends, bored him with the details of every love affair they’d ever had. All, from the vantage-point of being flattened on her breasts and joined humping at the groin, seeming like a mixture of flirtation and proxy-sex. He wasn’t outraged at himself or her, simply because it felt as though they’d done this all their childhood days. And what was childhood but a journey without maps? What was the adult life but the piecing together of the jigsaw of childhood into a map, into the illusion of coherence? It felt natural. It felt like . . . like what? Like vengeance.
Part of his mind was asking when the searing light of common sense might return. As it usually did, one split second after the betrayal that was orgasm and ejaculation? But it didn’t. Once he had recovered an ounce of energy he took her by the hand and pulled her to her feet. She cast off the rest of her clothes, with not a hint of coyness, stepped out of her high heels, stood naked in the light of a forty-watt reading lamp while he kicked off his. Then they went upstairs and fucked again.
The cricket sat upon his shoulder. He flicked it off with a finger.