As a child Troy had learnt by the age of five that he could ride from the cellar to the kitchen to the dining room inside the dumb waiter, hauled through the entrails of the house by his elder brother. It was not a favour he could ever repay. Rod was always too big to haul anywhere. By the age of eight he had discovered that being packed off to bed while the grown-ups entertained – Rod at fifteen now counting as a grown-up-had its compensations. When the ladies retired the cook usually took to her chair and slept for half an hour in front of the range. A boy well placed with his body scrunched into the dumb waiter could hear all that the gentlemen had to say over the cigars and brandy. In this fashion Troy had been made privy to the thoughts of Lloyd George in 1926, and some ten years and countless eavesdroppings later, to the thoughts of Joachim von Ribbentrop, the new Reich ambassador to St James’s – or, as his father had called him, ‘that fucking Nazi’.
It was a matter of chance. When the terms of his father’s will dictated that the Church Row house in Hampstead be given to Rod, no one had argued. It was big enough for them all. What did it matter whose name was on the deeds? By then Troy had his terraced cottage in Goodwin’s Court, Masha and Lawrence had their house in Highgate, and Sasha’s money had bought Hugh what Hugh thought suited his position in society, a house in Lord North Street, so handy for the House of Lords. All the same, Troy had never quite got round to surrendering the keys his father had given him on his sixteenth birthday in 1931. Since Rod had taken up residence he had always rung the bell, and tried not to take his hospitality for granted – something Rod did all the time with Troy’s house in Mimram.
On the Saturday evening, Troy used the key for the first time in fifteen years and let himself in quietly. There would be no cook to outwit, just Rod’s wife Cid.
He approached the dining-room door. There was a crack in one of the upper panels, just about level with the eyes of an eight-year-old.
He peeked in. They were on pudding. And the only woman present was Cid. Troy doubted they would have had whatever conversation Lawrence had been summoned for with Cid in the room. She had ways of discouraging men from talking shop. When she left – ‘retired’ was scarcely the word to use in this day and age – they’d get to whatever it was. Troy went down to the kitchen and gently slid up the hatch on the dumb-waiter.
As he turned round he found himself face to face with his sister-in-law, mouth open ready to scream. He clapped a hand over her mouth and waited as she clocked who he was.
‘You lunatic, Freddie. You nearly scared me half to death. What are you doing down here in the dark? Come to think of it, what are you doing here at all?’
‘I came,’ he whispered, ‘for the cigars and brandy.’
‘Oh. You mean the conspiracy? I might have known.’
‘Is it a conspiracy?’
‘What else would you call it? No wives invited and dinner-table conversation that would bore the bum off a rhino. Of course it’s a conspiracy. Rod is up to something. I don’t know what and I don’t want to know what. But you do, don’t you?’
‘‘Fraid so.’
‘Well, I’m not staying up for it. Whatever it is, please don’t let Rod make a bigger fool of himself than is necessary. I’m off to bed.’
Troy was far too big to sit inside the dumb-waiter any more. He pulled up a chair and stuck his head into the shaft. He could hear perfectly – all that was required was to overcome the sensation that he was on the guillotine waiting for the chop. Rod had only to choose this moment to send a cold terrine back down . . . He wondered how the ice would be broken and by whom.
He even heard the scratch of a match as one of them lit up a cigar. Probably Maurice White, he thought. And it was Maurice who spoke first.
‘It’s very good of you to agree to meet us at short notice, Lawrence.’
‘I’d be a poor excuse for a hack if I couldn’t smell a story, Maurice.’
‘It’s not so much a story,’ Rod said. ‘It’s a . . .’
Troy knew his brother would never get to the end of that sentence. He always fluffed his lines when he was feeling guilty about something.
Maurice bailed him out. ‘I’m not sure it’s a story either. I’d prefer to think of it as a party matter. After all, we’re all members of the Labour Party. Aren’t we?’
Nobody said yes to the obvious.
‘And it’s less about creating a story than correcting one.’
‘Really? I can hardly begin to guess what you mean, Maurice.’
Rod found his voice again. ‘It’s a long story . . .’
‘Which one? The one we’re correcting or the one I’m creating?’
Rod doggedly ignored this.
‘We, that is the Party, mean to come into office with a committed programme of urban renewal. That’s hardly surprising. It’s been in every manifesto since the war and it’ll be in the next one.’
‘Why does that not sound like success?’
Rod ignored this too. It was the kind of remark that usually had him saying things like ‘I’ll knock your block off.’
‘A few weeks ago Maurice approached me with a project for redeveloping a site in the East End.’
‘You mean a bombsite?’
‘No,’ Maurice chipped in. ‘We mean the redevelopment of slums.’
‘Knocking houses down? When London has its biggest housing shortage since 1940?’
‘Knocking ‘em down, Lawrence, and rebuilding ‘em.’
‘I see . . . and where is this site?’
‘Watney Market. My manor. I was born there.’
‘And you want the next government, the next Labour government, to rubber-stamp this?’
Rod again: ‘It’ll be more than that. It’ll be a sort of partnership.’
‘A partnership? Between a Labour government and venture capital?’
Troy could almost feel Rod gagging on his Calvados.
‘Doesn’t sound exactly socialist to me, Rod.’
‘It’s not incompatible either. Think of it as a Public-Private Partnership.’
‘I’ll try, but it sounds to me like an acronym in the making, and a recipe for a scam.’
Ted Spoon spoke for the first time. ‘It’s detail, Lawrence, merely detail. We wish to be the contractors for this project. There’s no reason why we cannot build decent homes for working people. We are self-made men who simply want to put something back into the community. As a Fleet Street editor you are familiar with the work and lives of both Maurice and myself, if only for the purposes of writing our obituaries at some distant date.’
‘I wrote yours myself last summer, Ted. We try to plan ahead.’
Whether he meant to or not, Lawrence had broken the tension. Ted Spoon laughed out loud and Maurice and Rod joined in. As the laughter died down, Troy heard the clink of the brandy bottle doing the rounds. Rod’s sense of relief was almost palpable.
Someone complimented Rod on the brandy, sotto voce. Someone coughed loudly, and Spoon picked up where he’d left off, but with a lighter tone in his voice. ‘We’re both working-class boys made good, Lawrence. We’ve given away millions. Simple charity. Almost effortless. Sign a cheque and salve your conscience. It’s almost too easy. This . . . this is a project that takes us back to our roots. It’s a real chance to do something for a whole community.’
‘I see. And you want me to write something about this?’
‘I would be only too happy if you did, but no. Maurice was right when he said this is less the creating of a story than the correcting of one.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Lawrence lied, like Troy. ‘I don’t quite follow.’
Maurice took over. ‘You can hardly have missed the rumours about gangland villainy. It’s been in all the papers.’
‘All the papers except yours,’ said Rod, and Troy wondered about the curious path of genes: that his own father could have produced an eldest son capable of such stupidity, of such gaffe-making, foot-in-gob stupidity.
Lawrence said nothing, forcing Maurice to spell it out.
‘All those rumours concern two brothers called Lorcan and Patrick Ryan. They’re Danny Ryan’s younger brothers. They run several businesses out of Watney Market, and the rumour about them owning a nightclub up West is also true. Danny’s done very well since the war and so have his brothers. They’re partners in this project too.’
‘All of them? Danny too?’
‘No, not Danny.’
‘I see. And what is it you want me to do?’
‘We want you to print the truth.’
‘I always print the truth.’
Spoon again: ‘We came to you because you alone of the Fleet Street editors have chosen not to repeat these groundless rumours.’
‘Groundless? Perhaps. But if you ask me to refute I will inevitably have to repeat in order to refute. I cannot deny what I do not know to be false.’
‘Trust me,’ Maurice ventured. ‘It’s all lies.’
‘You know, Maurice, when someone says, “Trust me,” my journalist’s hackles rise.’
‘Lawrence, all the stories are bollocks. I know these people. I grew up among them. It’s a case of give a dog a bad name. You come from a place like Watney Market and trouble comes looking for you the minute you set foot out of the door. You don’t need to be bad: bad is the condition of living. I have a juvenile record meself, but I made good. And I can tell you now, the Ryan twins have no worse a record than I do. We’ve all been there. What I’ve seen in the papers in the last few weeks is a refusal to let working-class kids grow up and clean up. I don’t wholly blame the press for that. I blame the police, who seem to want to pin everything that goes down in East London on them. The truth is, there’s something in our society that cannot bear to see a kid from the slums make good, something that will always rake up their background and use it against them. That’s why we’re Labour. All of us, you, me, Rod and Ted. Because we don’t believe a man is damned by his beginnings. We believe in making good, we believe in equality and we believe in meritocracy. We take the Ryans on their merits. In a project like this we need local knowledge. Men who can speak for the community. Without the Ryans we’ve got a project, that I can’t deny, but without them it doesn’t connect to the lives of the people in that community. If we don’t get that local involvement then we might as well be a company from America or Germany just steaming in, knocking down and building up. Bricks and mortar, sure, but the life wouldn’t be there. We need these men. We need men like these men. Put simply, they’re being slandered.’
‘No, Maurice, they’re not. Not until someone names them.’
‘OK – all but slandered, a gnat’s bollock away from slandered. But they’re good blokes, we need ‘em. There has to be some way to set the record straight.’
It was a stunning speech. Rod would have been jealous of Maurice on the hustings. Troy could not see his brother-in-law falling for it for one second.
‘Rough diamonds, eh, Maurice?’
‘If you like. I’d call ‘em a new breed of entrepreneur. But rough diamond sounds kosher enough for me.’
‘Maurice, I’m a working-class kid. Don’t let the accent and the tie fool you. Listen to my surname. Stafford was Steafaoin when my dad was fresh off the boat in 1899. I was the sort of kid who could pass exams. I got a scholarship to Merchant Taylor’s, and then a scholarship to Oxford. An education that my family could no more have paid for than they could have bought the moon. I’ve no more ignored or forgotten my origins than you have and, like you, I’ve the odd blot on my record as a child. Things I did that I deeply regret and that I’ll be embarrassed to see in my own obituary if the buggers I work with are ever so crass as to show it to me. But the past is a foreign country. No one spreads rumours about me being involved in rackets. And to ask me to accept that the level of rumour that now engulfs London is simply the result of some sort of class prejudice or police conspiracy against two upright citizens is beyond belief. I don’t know what you think I can do for you. But it isn’t creating or correcting a story, it’s killing a story. A story is either an abortion or a living, breathing, kicking, screaming thing with a life of its own. I don’t know how you kill it. And there’s nothing you can say would ever make me want to try.’
Troy knew an exit line when he heard one. The meeting was surely over. Lawrence had just fired the final broadside. Time to make himself known. He raced upstairs and sat on the bottom step of the next flight trying to give the impression that he’d been there for some time. When the dining-room door opened, Rod emerged followed by Lawrence. He was clearly about to utter some sort of apology to Lawrence when he noticed Troy. ‘How long have you been there?’
‘Long enough,’ said Troy.
‘Are you going into town, Freddie?’ Lawrence said. ‘We could share a cab.’
They ducked out sharply. Neither of them turned round, but Troy knew that Rod was standing on the doorstep staring at them all the way to the end of the road.
Lawrence flagged a cab. ‘Your place or mine?’
‘I think it’s time we went to your office. Two cups of coffee and a typewriter, and tell them to hold the morning edition.’
‘Fleet Street,’ Lawrence said to the cabbie.
When they’d moved off Lawrence said nothing for a while. As they came within sight of King’s Cross he said, ‘Is that what you wanted?’
‘Wanted?’ said Troy. ‘It’s certainly not what I expected. Although Rod’s capacity to behave like an ass should surprise neither of us.’
This seemed to hit the mark. There was thinly held rage in Lawrence’s next remark: ‘What did those stupid buggers expect me to do? They call in the editor of a national newspaper to ask him to kill a story that’s already the talk of the town? And I have to sit there and listen to Rod defend the reputations of a couple of crooks? What the hell was he thinking?’
‘I think you could say he wasn’t thinking. That’s the problem. Rod is a believer. The number of things in which he is willing to believe, either temporarily or as a matter of lifelong commitment, are legion. One of which is that, by and large, people tell him the truth.’
‘Since you put it that way … I still find it hard to believe you’re related. And I’ve known the two of you for twenty-five years.’