A Little White Death (2 page)

A tall young man in a black cashmere overcoat was coming down the steps towards her. It was Norman Somestein – Feinstein or Weinstein, one of the steins – one of the London
publishers she worked for from time to time.

‘Share a cab?’ he said, exactly as she had done to Fitzpatrick. ‘I’ve a room at the Ansonia.’

‘Sure. I’ll get out the other side of the park, then you can take it on to Broadway.’

Feinstein-Weinstein had better luck than she had had. He flagged down a checker cab and told the driver to take them to 72nd and Central Park West.

Seated in the back, he said, ‘I didn’t know you knew Fitzpatrick.’

‘We ain’t exactly bosom buddies . . . but he comes over from England a lot . . . and we always seem to be at the same parties. Asks me to look him up if I visit London. But I
ain’t been since 1960, so I haven’t. Maybe next time.’

‘I wouldn’t if I were you,’ said Feinstein-Weinstein. ‘He’s trouble.’

‘What kind of trouble? I mean. He’s very well regarded here. Did you know he’s here to see if he can prescribe for Jack Kennedy’s problem?’

‘Which one – his bad back, his roving cock or his Addison’s disease?’

‘The last – Fitz is some kind of expert in homeopathy.’

‘I’m sure he is – but this is America. The English aren’t so tolerant.’

‘Of what?’

Feinstein-Weinstein had to think for a second. And when he spoke his tone had changed. He was spinning out something far less tangible.

‘Fitz mixes it. Mixes everything. Class and race, sex and politics, perfume and passion, you name it. He’s a mixer.’

‘So?’

‘This time he’s concocted too rich a blend. It’s volatile. It’ll blow up in his face. There’ll be blood on the streets, mark my words.’

‘Blood on the streets?’

She assumed this was just an image, nothing more. Tears before bedtime.

‘And’, he added, ‘the English can be so unforgiving of a good scandal.’

‘Y’know. I think that’s kind of why I left them.’

Two days later she phoned the Waldorf.

‘Ah,’ said Fitzpatrick, ‘I thought you’d given me up. I’m leaving for the airport in an hour.’

‘I just wanted to ask. Do you ever see my husband?’

‘Time to time – perhaps three or four occasions a year. I usually manage to contrive at least one. Freddie’s not the most sociable of beasts at the best of times.’

‘Could you give him a letter from me?’

‘Of course, but you might find the US mail quicker, or a telegramme perhaps?’

‘No – seems so impersonal – and he hates telegrammes . . . but a note you could deliver personally . . .’

‘Fine. I understand. Now why don’t you hop in a cab. We can have one last drinkie before I dash to Idlewild.’

J
ANUARY
1963

E
NGLAND

When the snow lay round about. Deep. And crisp. And even. England stopped.

First the roads, from the fledgling six-lane autobahns, known as ‘motorways’ – a word used as evocatively as ‘international’ or ‘continental’ – to
the winding, high-hedged lanes of Hertfordshire, disappeared under drifting snow. Then, the telephone lines, heavy with the weight of ice, snapped. Then the electricity supply began to flicker
– now you see it now you don’t. And lastly, huffing and puffing behind iron snow ploughs as old as the century and more, the railways ground to a halt at frozen points and blocked
tunnels.

It was the worst winter in living memory, and when and where did memory not live? It squatted where you did not expect it. And where you did. Not-so-old codgers would compare the winter of 1963,
favourably or not, to that of 1947. Old codgers, ancient codgers, codgers with no calendar right even to be living at all, would trounce opinion with a masterly, ‘’T’ain’t
nothin’ compared to 1895.’

Rod Troy, Home Affairs spokesman in Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, a Labour MP since the landslide of 1945, had reason to be grateful to his father, the late Alexei Troy. When refitting
the stately Hertfordshire pile he had bought in 1910, as a final refuge after five years a wandering exile from Imperial Russia, he had installed electricity and the telephone – the first in
the village – and omitted to remove the gas lamps. Gas was a hard one to stop. It wouldn’t freeze and it had no wires to snap. So it was that, in the middle of a blanketed white January
Rod found himself cut off in Mimram House, marooned in snow, stranded in a post-Christmas limboland, bereft of wife and children, hunched over a traditional English pastime, by the romantic glow of
gaslight, facing a short, dark, irritating alien he ruefully acknowledged as his younger brother Frederick.

‘How can you?’ he yelled. ‘How can anyone cheat at Monopoly?’

‘That’s what it’s for,’ Troy replied. ‘If you can’t cheat, I can’t see the point in playing.’

‘Grow up, Freddie. For God’s sake grow up. That’s just the sort of attitude you had as a child.’

‘It’s a childish game, Rod.’

‘It’s about rules and trust and codes of conduct. All games are!’

Rod should have known better. Such argument had never cut mustard with Troy when they were children and in middle age it was inviting the pragmatic scorn he seemed to store up in spades.

‘No it’s not, it’s about which bugger can be the first to stick a hotel on Park Lane.’

Rod swept the board to the floor. ‘Sod you then!’ And walked out.

Troy passed an hour in his study, staring at the unchanging landscape, the monotony of white. He put John Coltrane’s ‘Giant Steps’ on the gramophone, but was not at all sure
that he was not kidding himself that he had a taste for the music, and he was damn sure it didn’t go with England in January. Did Delius write no
Winterreise
? Had Elgar left no
Seasons
?

It occurred to him that he should go and look for Rod before Rod found him. He would only want to apologise and Troy could not bear his apologies. It seemed wise to head him off at the pass.
They might, after all, have to spend days cooped up like this, and while the house was big enough to lose a small army within, they would inevitably end up together and if Monopoly brought them to
grief, God help them when Troy started to cheat at pontoon.

The cellar door stood open, a gust of icy air wafting up from below stairs.

Troy called out his brother’s name and waited.

‘Down here in the wine cellar!’

Troy moved cautiously down the stairs, the light dimly orange in the distance as Rod waved his torch beam around.

‘I think I’ve made a bit of a find.’ Troy could not see him, only the dancing end of the torch. Then the beam shot inwards, and Rod’s face appeared, pumpkin-headed, in
the light.

‘Hold this a mo’. I’ll get the gas lit.’

A rasp of match, a burst of flame, and Rod reached upwards and lit the gas jet. In the flickering hiss of gaslight Troy found himself framed by vast dusty racks of wine, countless bottles in
long rows stretching away under the house. Rod stood facing him, absurdly wrapped up against the cold in the eiderdown off his bed, belted around his chest and waist, looking like the rubber man in
the tyre adverts. He appeared to be clutching a solitary bottle of wine.

‘What have you found?’ Troy asked.

Rod wiped the label with his sleeve.

‘The paper’s a bit perished, but it says 1928 and I’d lay odds of ten to one it’s Veuve Clicquot.’

‘Does champagne keep that long?’

‘Haven’t the foggiest. But there’s only one way to find out.’

He unhooked two glasses from the side of a wooden rack, where they had sat untouched since before the war and wiped the dust from them.

The champagne burst into the glass in a healthy stream of bubbles. Troy swigged some of his and pronounced it ‘OK’. Rod sipped his gently and said, ‘OK? It’s bloody
marvellous.’

Then the pause, the reflective stare into the glass. The thought so visibly running through his mind and across his features that Troy grew impatient and wished he would speak.

‘Whenever I pull the cork on one of these . . .’

Troy knew what was coming. He could see the curve of Rod’s illogic arcing between them like static.

‘Or whenever I watch you . . .’

He sipped and stared into his glass a little more.

‘I think of the old man. Every time. Never fails. No matter what is on my mind or whatever shit you are giving me, as you are so wont to do – and age does not diminish it – it
gives me pause. I think of our father.’

‘Sort of like unholy sacrament. An atheist communion?’

‘Don’t piss on it, Freddie. I’m serious.’

‘So am I. Has it ever occurred to you that’s why he left us this lot, so that we should think of him from time to time?’

‘I didn’t say from time to time, I said every time. And who else would he have left it to? And I wonder, what else did he leave us of himself? If this is blood of his blood, where is
flesh of his flesh?’

Troy was not sure he could follow this.

‘Come again?’

‘Who the hell was he? Was he the same man he was to you that he was to me?’

‘Doubt it,’ said Troy.

‘I mean . . . I’m his first born, you’re his last, the child of his dotage—’

‘Hardly dotage. He wasn’t that old.’

‘There, there’s my point. How old was he? Did you ever know? When was he born? Did he ever tell you? Or where?’

‘Must’ve done. Moscow, Tula, I don’t know. And if he didn’t, his dad lived with us for fifteen years.
He
must have mentioned it. God knows he rambled on
enough.’

‘Quite. He rambled. His stories never went anywhere. But the old man was a master of precision. He told us everything – at least it seemed like everything – yet when I come to
look back on it there are gaps you could drive a tram through.’

Again the pause, long enough for Troy to refill both their glasses. Troy could see his brother’s point even if he could see neither the gap nor the tram. Personally he was sure such minor
details as the date and place of his father’s birth were simply and temporarily lost in his memory; it was not that he didn’t know, it was not that he had not been told. But at the
heart of the matter, the man was an enigma.

‘You’re right, of course,’ Rod resumed his musing. ‘He wasn’t the same man to both of us. I got sent away to school before you were so much as a toddler. You hung
around the house almost till adolescence—’

‘I was at home because I was a sickly child, Rod, they weren’t doing me any favour.’

‘Nonetheless you were there. He talked endlessly to you. You were his favourite.’

‘Rod, this is bollocks. I was the youngest, that’s all.’

‘Youngest. Hand-reared. Privy to his wisdom.’

‘Recipient of all his gags and anecdotes, if that’s what you mean?

Child corrupted by his view of history and politics, if that counts for anything.’

‘Corrupted?’

‘OK. That’s a bit steep. Let us say I was nurtured into an unfortunate precociousness by prolonged exposure to his didactic asides. He taught me the Theory of Surplus Value when I
was seven. Had me on the Second Law of Thermodynamics before I was ten.’

‘Bugger me! More booze, I think. I cannot listen to sentences like that and stay sober.’

Rod stuck out his glass again. It seemed a daft thing to be doing, sitting on beer crates in a dark cellar, scarcely above freezing, getting pissed on vintage champagne and pretending not to
mind the cold. Rod might not be feeling it, but Troy had on nothing thicker than his Aran sweater. Still, if this was how Rod wanted to spend the last hour of daylight, Troy would humour him.

‘Think of it,’ Rod went on. ‘I mean, think of him. Of what he did for us. I always felt secure in the world as he made it for us. I can’t help but wonder if my kids can
ever feel what that means. Wonder if they’ll ever feel the same security. The world he built around us.’

‘Troy Nation,’ said Troy softly.

‘Eh?’

‘That’s how I used to think of it. So often I ended up housebound, one damned ailment or another. The house was the world for a time. I used to think of it as Troy Nation. A country
entire unto itself.’

Rod looked up at the ceiling. Troy knew what he was thinking. In the mind’s eye, he was looking through the ceiling. Stripping away the layers in time and putting them back on in an order
of his own choosing. This house, these five storeys of junk-packed, book-lined, history-ridden rooms, looming above them like the edifice of memory, a world of its own through which the old man
moved mysteriously even now. The house ought to be haunted. It was made to be haunted. Yet they conjured him in words not spirit; he haunted not the structure of their house, but the structure of
their minds. Most of the time Troy could take him or leave him. He had long ago got used to being Alex Troy’s boy. At forty-seven, Commander of CID , Scotland Yard, half a dozen commendations
and an ex-wife to his name, he was still ‘Alex Troy’s boy’. Doubt caused him little conscience, but such conscience all but made a coward of Rod. Doubting the old man would nag
and nag at him, and he could not dismiss it. If there was one gift Troy would have given his brother, it was to free him from such doubt. He had, he knew, probably sown the seed himself.

Away over their heads Troy could hear a bell ringing. It seemed an impossible noise. Logic ruled it out as being simply the doorbell. In households such as this someone else usually answered the
door and told the caller whether or not you were at ’ome, regardless of whether you were. And no one had fought their way up the drive from the village in days. Clearly Rod was not going to
answer, half-pissed, wrapped up too cosily in his eiderdown, the Michelin man, still sipping the last of the Veuve Clicquot.

‘You’d better go and see,’ he said, smiling faintly. ‘It’s probably Titus Oates or Captain Scott.’

It was Driffield the postman. The surliest bastard alive, as far as Troy was concerned. Or – to be precise on the matter of titles – the surliest sub-postmaster, a man in whose eyes
Troy was still twelve and simply his father’s son, requiring no more in the way of courtesy than a clip ’round the ear ’ole from time to time. He was attired much after the
fashion of Rod: at least two overcoats had been added to a layer or more of pullovers and onion rings of collars and scarves obscured most of his face. All the same, Troy could see from the eyes
that it was him, and from the expression in them he was, as ever, not best pleased to have trudged up the hill. To do so in several feet of snow had merely refined what was fundamental in his
nature. No doubt he missed the days, long gone, when Troy’s father would send a donkey and cart to the village to collect the mail.