A Little White Death (12 page)

All in all, Fitz adored rumours. Troy had long ago concluded that he spread most of them himself and took a wicked delight in seeing how long they took to come full circle. Nonetheless the power
of such rumour caused problems. Problems, to say the least, of protocol. Fitz might cultivate a friendship with Troy. Troy did not and could not cultivate one with him. He was thinking just this,
to the point of cold feet, when Anna tapped gently on the door.

‘Are you ready, you silly old sod?’

Troy could not remember when they had last met. Christmas? New Year? They had ditched one another as lovers years before, in the mid-1950s, and apart from an initially rocky period had managed a
passably loyal friendship ever since. Much like the one they had had during the war, the one they should never have surrendered to the futility of sex, when Anna had worked as Kolankiewicz’s
assistant at the Metropolitan Police Laboratory in Hendon, and their talk had consisted of little else but death.

‘You are coming, aren’t you?’ The eyes wide, the rising tone of hope frustrated in her voice. ‘Troy?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I suppose I am.’

She zipped them along Oxford Street, across the top of Hyde Park, in the direction of Notting Hill Gate, in her little Triumph Herald Vitesse. It was a sturdier, more stylish car than
Rod’s Mini. Strong, square lines, rather than the blown soapbubble of the Mini. But sitting inside it was womb-like, dark beneath the soft top, the first drops of evening rain beginning to
patter on the roof. The Triumph Herald would make a great summer car, Troy thought, if we ever had a summer again.

Anna swung the car right at the Gate, left into Portobello Road and brought it to a halt in St Aubyn Street, outside a garishly painted house – the blues and reds of the Cool in the Shade
Club, number 98 St Aubyn Street, or as it preferred to put it, 98.6. ‘Come in and cool your blood’ the sign seemed to imply, rather like the famous hippopotamus in mud, mud, glorious
mud.

Down a narrow staircase. Out into a wide basement, far far bigger than the outside proportions would ever have led him to guess. A small stage at one end, a scattering of tiny tables in the
centre, and a U-shaped row of booths around the edges. It took a minute for his eyes to get accustomed to the light – or rather the lack of light. It was dimly lit and the dimness augmented
by a hefty layer of smoke, a certain something in the air, and by deepblue walls, deepblue ceilings, scattered with myriad stars. To achieve the effect, the club’s proprietors had painted
over everything – no line had ever given the paintbrush cause to pause – light fittings, doors, windows, the lot, were all the same rich, dark blue.

Troy saw a hand waving at them from a centre booth. Paddy Fitz rose. Kissed Anna – the token tap on her cheek – shook hands with Troy and proffered the introductions.

‘Troy. You and Tommy know each other, don’t you?’

A tall, fat, balding, smiley man plucked himself from Anna’s embrace.

‘Of course,’ said Tommy Athelnay. ‘Long time no see, o’ man.’

This was their way. Troy was not his ‘old man’. Never had been. He and Lord Athelnay were at best nodding acquaintances. Old Tommy had had far more to do with Troy’s brother
and sisters than he ever had with Troy himself.

‘And’, Fitz went on, ‘the twins, Tara and Caro Ffitch. Frederick Troy.’

Tommy Athelnay resumed his seat. Whichever of the two blonde women less than half his age it was that had taken upwith him for the evening slipped her arm through his, smiled sweetly up at Troy
and kissed the old man softly on the ear.

He blushed. Troy could have sworn he blushed. The merest reddening of the ear and cheek, but a blush by any other name.

The other one of these women-like-bookends said hello to Troy and made no response whatsoever as Fitz stretched both arms out along the back of the booth and let his fingers rest lightly on her
shoulder. Troy and Anna squeezed in. He found himself facing Tommy Athelnay and one of the Ffitch girls. It was, he concluded instantly, a slumming night. A few Mayfair toffs deciding it would be
radically chic to spend an evening in a black club just beyond the boundaries of their known civilisation.

Fitz could be no more than fifty or fifty-one, he thought, but Tommy was in his sixties. He doubted these women were much more than girls, twenty or twenty-one, looking, with their dyed blonde
hair, their deepred fingernails and their expensive little cocktail dresses, like sex in a packet. Just add water – well, to be precise, just add man over forty. The women were gorgeous. And
whilst they clearly had the desired – or could it be undesired? Who in their right mind would want to be seen sexually aroused, sexually provoked in public? – effect on Tommy, Fitz was
as ‘cool’ as the club they sat in. His arm shot up. A waiter ambled over, casual enough to be ‘cool’, and took Fitz’s order for more champagne.

‘You’re going to like this, Freddie,’ Fitz said, stuffing a cigarette into the end of a short black holder. ‘In fact you’re going to love it. I thought of you the
minute I first heard these chaps play. Reminded me of you.’

Troy had no idea what to say to this, indeed could not remember when Fitz had heard him play. So often he played to and for himself.

They moved and spoke for Troy as though in a bubble. He was there and not there. Fitz flowed on with a languid, witty line of small talk and sat as though holding court, name-dropping,
name-gathering and slandering half London in the process. Dozens, it seemed, came upand said hello, and each time Fitz introduced Troy to, invariably, total strangers with a ‘You know Troy,
don’t you?’ – just as he’d done with Tommy Athelnay. At no point did he add to this. Troy was not an old friend of Anna’s, was not a policeman, was not
Scotland’s Yard’s chief detective. He was anonymous but for the uninformative label that was his name. He was glad of this. The job was a show-stopper and he had no wish to stop the
show. At the same time he could not help the feeling that it was all on the level of a private joke, that he knew and Fitz knew, but the endless stream of slumming toffs, cockney wide boys and
loudly dressed blacks did not. A feeling began to grow in him that he was somehow Fitz’s trophy.

All the time a private conversation was taking place in the corner as Tommy reduced his escort to giggles with inaudible nothings, and the movement of her arm told Troy that beneath the table
her hand was almost certainly caressing his cock. They were remarkably beautiful and physically identical, but they were not twins. He’d lived all his life with twins. His sisters moved as
one, more often than not thought as one. This pair did not. The sameness of face was not matched by sameness of posture, of gesture, the small, almost uncontrollable, unconscious actions of the
body. Even the look in their eyes was different. The one with Fitz radiated self-assurance to Troy; the one with Tommy did not. He could see why everyone else at this table was fooled by their
twins line, but he was not.

The band were brilliant, far better than Troy had even dared to hope. A tight, four-piece unit of bass, drums, trumpet and a tenor sax who occasionally played baritone too. He could hear hints
of Roy Eldridge and Miles Davis in the trumpeter; he could hear the milder, earlier Coltrane in the sax player, and the rumbling, grumbling influence of Gerry Mulligan when he switched to
baritone.

At the end of the first set they took a break. Fitz beckoned and the sax player came over. A tall, thin black man – skin of black hue that looked almost blue. He pulled up a chair. Fitz
called for another glass. The man introduced himself as Philly. Troy had made the immediate assumption, entering a club in Notting Hill, that a black band would be Caribbean, but Philly’s
accent and name told him otherwise.

‘Are you all Americans?’ he asked.

‘Well . . . I am. And I ain’t from Philly. I’m from Weehawken, New Jersey. Lou there . . .’ Philly squirmed in his seat, pointing to the trumpeter. ‘He’s
Harlem born and raised. Up on Lenox Avenue. Played with Ellington and Basie in his time. Errol on bass is from Barbados and Cliff on drums is English – citizen of Shepherd’s
Bush.’

‘Quite a mixture,’ said Troy, failing miserably at the small talk. ‘You stir it well.’

Philly accepted the compliment with a silent smile.

‘Gets kinda hard to keep it together sometimes.’

‘Musical differences?’ Troy asked.

‘Work permits,’ Philly said succinctly. ‘Way things are goin’, Cliff be drummin’ on his own.’

Troy looked at Fitz. He was never certain where Fitz was concerned what his motives might be. It crossed his mind that Fitz might just have got him here in the hope he would drop a word in
Rod’s ear. But then Fitz said, ‘Troy is the chap I was telling you about. Damn fine pianist.’

Philly nodded. ‘You wanna sit in on the second set, man? Blow the dust off the ivories?’

This was the last thing Troy had expected. It was embarrassing – it was flattering – to play with a man who played with Ellington. It was corrupting.

‘I . . . er . . . why not?’ he said, and Philly led the way back to the small stage and threw the dustcover off the upright piano.

Troy riffled through a quick couple of scales. It was tuned.

‘Just tell us what you want, man.’

‘Rodgers and Hart. Do you know “My Funny Valentine”? The version by Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker?’

‘The ’53 or the ’57?’

‘The ’53.’

‘Ain’t no piano on the ’53, man.’

‘I know,’ said Troy. ‘It leaves me a bit of room.’

‘You wanna lead?’

‘No, I’ll follow. Just give me the nod when you’re ready.’

The trumpet opened, passed the lead to Philly and from Philly to Troy, who managed not, he thought, to mess it up.

It was one of the most haunting tunes in the repertoire of standards, Troy had long thought. It ranked with Kern and Harbach’s ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ and rare, less
sentimental renditions of Arlen and Harburg’s ‘Over the Rainbow’. The audience clearly loved it, and as he rose to go back to the table he felt Philly’s hand pressing him
back onto the piano stool.

‘Just one more, man. Just one more. You got any other tricks up your sleeve?’

It did occur to him to suggest Gershwin’s ‘I Got Plenty O’ Nuttin’, from
Porgy and Bess
. Charlie seemed to have lodged the tune perpetually in his mind – but
it wasn’t ‘cool’; in fact it was downright perky. Instead he turned to the band and said, ‘How about “My Man’s Gone Now”?’

He had been tinkering for weeks with Grainger’s piano arrangement, his ‘fantasy’, deciphering the way the madman had spread Porgy and Bess across two pianos and four hands and
crammed it into twenty minutes, wondering how much of it he in turn could cram into his own two hands. But it suited the mood, that air of melancholy, almost outweighed by the heat haze of languor
that hung about the tune.

They said nothing. Put their heads together. Then Philly turned to him and said, ‘OK. Lou will pick up from you.’

This surprised and pleased Troy – a rare pleasure for a front-parlour pianist to alternate with a trumpet. He wove his cautious improvisation around the left hand and saw Lou stick in the
mute. He gave it two minutes, gently nodded and Lou picked up the melody with a lost-in-the-distance whine, a steam-train-somewherein-the-next-state, canyon-over-the-mountain whine, that almost
made his blood run cold. It was good, good enough to make the parlour pianist in him want to give up and listen for the rest of his life. The man blew like the Angel Gabriel. By the time he passed
back to Troy seven minutes later, he had the room on its feet stomping and whistling and clapping.

It pays to know when to quit. Troy rounded up the tune like a dutiful sheepdog, brought in the sax, and drew the song to a neat conclusion.

Lou leant in to Troy beneath the applause.

‘Not bad. Not bad at all.’

‘I know,’ said Troy. ‘This is where you tell me not to give up my day job.’

‘Well. Mebbe go fifty-fifty on it. Say, what is your day job?’

‘If I told you, you wouldn’t believe me.’

‘Why? You ain’t the heat are you?’

‘Hot as hell,’ said Troy, and the band laughed like drains. He headed for the lavatory and let them take a bow without him.

In the lavatory the aroma that had troubled him all evening finally showed its source. Two West Indians stood chatting and passing a reefer back and forth between them. Even the presence of a
middle-aged white man gave them no cause to do anything much more than glance upas he came in. They huddled against the wall, unsmilingly serious about the business, sucking in their cheeks to
squeeze the last hit out of a tiny stub, croaking in strangulated whispers as they attempted to hold in the smoke and talk at the same time. It was all too familiar.

He sat in a cubicle biding his time and giving them five minutes to go away. If they were still there when he came out, he thought, he’d arrest them. Well, he’d probably arrest them.
By the fifth minute ‘probably’ had dwindled to ‘might’, to an earnest wish that they would just bugger off. They did, and he emerged from the bog to that unmistakable heady,
herby smell of pot and a firm resolution that he and Anna were leaving, whether she liked it or not.

When he got back to their booth Fitz was on his feet helping Anna into her coat.

‘You don’t mind do you, Troy? I’m just . . . well sort of pooped.’

He leant well back in the seat. Closed his eyes and replayed Lou’s solo in the mind’s ear.

‘Well,’ Anna said.

‘Well what?’

‘What did you think of it?’

‘Band were good . . .’

‘I can hear a “but” bubbling to the surface.’

‘But . . . whatever the company of young women like those does for Fitz, it makes me feel old.’

‘You?! Old?! What the bloody hell do you think it does for me? You haven’t got tits heading for the equator faster than Blue Streak. You haven’t got dimples in your thighs the
size of lunar craters. You don’t put on half a stone if you just look at cream cake.’

‘Sorry I spoke,’ said Troy.