A Little White Death (21 page)

He squeezed. She did not move. He knew he was hurting her and he held her in his grip, and as the tears rippled silently down her cheeks, he said again, ‘Do you know what you’ve done
to me? Do you know?’

She was looking straight into his eyes, hers dark and glistening, his black and cold. She did not move, did not flinch, did not try to escape.

Her tears were hot beneath his hands, and still he held and still she cried. He let her go, wondering if he had not crushed the spirit out of her, and might she not fall at his feet, but she
rubbed one eye with her knuckles, picked up her handbag and left without looking back.

At five that afternoon Catesby summoned him to the wireless and the BBC news. Woodbridge had written to the Prime Minister, owned up to everything he had not long since denied,
apologised and resigned.

In the morning the
Herald
led with Tereshkov’s return home – ‘Where is Tereshkov?’ asked the headline, and then answered itself with the Soviet Embassy’s
statement that they would not say where he was, except that he was no longer in England – whisked away under notion of the diplomatic bag.

‘D’ye suppose they really put them in bags?’ asked Catesby.

‘Nothing would surprise me, bags, boxes or posted home airmail,’ Troy replied.

He’d no idea what the Russians had done with him, welcomed him back as a hero who’d embarrassed the British or as a candidate for the salt mines who’d embarrassed them –
all he was certain of was that he’d seen the last of Tereshkov.

For days afterwards – or was it weeks, surely it was weeks? – the same half-dozen photographs of the Ffitch girls were to be found in a hundred newspapers, hawked like dirty
postcards, again and again and again: Caro caught leaving her hairdresser’s; a little black dress flash photo of the two of them accompanied by Hooray Henries reprinted from an old Tatler; a
blurry grey snapshot of Tara topless on a Greek island (‘topless’ was a new world neologism – inseparable in Troy’s mind from the idea of dismemberment). He could not make
out whether they were regarded as national heroines or national villains. All he was certain of was the adjective: national, national whatever they were, the women now – indisputably –
public property.

Without the precision of the phrase the national obsession, at least the national press obsession, became one of ‘who fucks who’. Such precision as there was was
habitually blurred by being disguised as moral enquiry. And where it was not so disguised it became a round robin . . . the bishop fucked the duchess; the duchess blew the cabinet minister; the
cabinet minister licked the tart; the tart shagged the spy; the spy swung both ways and in his turn rogered the bishop, while the dog in his wisdom slept with his backside to the wall – and
only the poor duke got none. If this did not spur the nation to outrage, the moral enquiry did. Scarcely a Sunday passed without one of the newspapers running with an enquiry into the morals of
‘our young people’ – sex and kicks, the degeneracy of popular music, the excesses of teenage fashion – the sin of short skirts, tight trousers and winkle-pickers . . . and
so on
ad infinitum
.

On occasion Catesby would read such a piece to Troy, more for its comic value than its pretence of sociological analysis. Catesby was rueful, disbelieving. Geoff was the one to rise to outrage
– he seemed endlessly fuelled by it. One such piece, entitled ‘Do you know where your daughter is tonight?’, appeared the day Geoff was due to be discharged. They had all gathered
in the conservatory to see him off, the invalids in their dressing-gowns, Geoff, predictably, in the uniform of post-war man, the blue, shiny-buttoned blazer with military crest. Catesby read the
piece out as they waited for Geoff ’s wife to turn up. He smiled, his eyes twinkled, and when he was through said simply, ‘Piffle.’

Alfie leant over and looked at the photo the paper offered of a young lady of the night – some actress paid to pose as a teenage whore.

‘I quite fancy her meself,’ he said.

Geoff steamed.

‘Kids,’ he was saying. ‘Kids. What does she think she looks like? Painted hussy.’

More than most aspects of the world they watched from their confinement, the deeds and mores of teenagers provoked Geoff to a rage Troy could only see as proprietorial. It was his world, at
least it had been until they’d stuck him in The Glebe, and it would be again once he got out and got to grips with the world he did not know and turned it back to the one he did. Blinkers
would be useful. So would a bit of bluster.

‘I should think she looks like what she wants to look like,’ said Alfie.

‘She should know better. Where was she brought up?’

Troy thought Alfie might laugh in his face. He hoped he wouldn’t. Geoff would go from red to purple – it could not be good for him.

‘Wotsit matter where she was brought up?’

‘If you’re brought up in a good home, by decent people—’

‘Bollocks,’ said Alfie, as he was wont.

‘There’s no talking to you, there’s no talking to you. “Bollocks”, that’s your answer to everything.’

‘If she was brought up in a good home – by which, Geoff, you mean a posh one – she’d be learnin’ to do wot the bleedin’ ’ell she likes. ’Cos
that’s what the toffs do. You think Woodbridge gave a toss, you think this Fitzpatrick bloke gives a monkey’s bum what you think of ’im? You think all them lucky sods in all them
orgies at Uphill give a toss?’

Geoff stopped at the puce phase of coloration unto rage, and tried for a calm sentence. ‘That’s got nothing to do with it.’

‘It’s got everything to do with it. Wot’s sauce for the goose—’

‘Alfie, there’s no comparison. You cannot compare the actions of a cabinet minister and a feckless teenager!’

‘Wot about a feckless cabinet minister then?’

Geoff sighed with exasperation. He had spent his life being led by the Woodbridges, voting for the Woodbridges. He had marched behind the Woodbridges of England into battle and ballot.

Catesby filled the silence. ‘Alfie has a point you know. One does look to the Woodbridges of this world to set an example. Woodbridge has let us all down as badly as any tearaway –
worse if you think what his responsibilities were.’

Out in the driveway Mrs Geoff honked on the horn and cut short the argument.

Geoff shook a manly hand with them all. Told Troy that if ever he wanted a new Riley he knew where to come. Then he picked up his bag and stepped away from his brush with death, and his brief
encounter with the social melting pot – back to his own ‘walk of life’, as Nurse might have put it.

‘Would you adamaneve it,’ Alfie said. ‘A born bleedin’ NCO. He’ll be a fool till the day he dies. Do you know he was on the brink of tellin’ me he fought in
two world wars for the likes of that young tart?’

This was exaggeration. Geoff was far too young for this, no more than fifty, but it was a cliché of the times.

Catesby, however,
had
fought in two world wars.

‘How so?’ he said.

Troy dropped out of the debate. He had never really joined in, listened with half an ear. They argued across him as though he wasn’t there. Indeed he wasn’t. Man down glass well,
blown in a bubble. Invisible.

‘When I was in the army,’ Catesby was saying, his most frequent opening gambit, ‘it was understood, as so many things were, that one could not do certain things. Rank had its
responsibilities. It still does. Noblesse oblige and—’

‘Knob what?’ said Alfie.

‘Noblesse oblige.’

‘What like French? Like foreign?’

‘Do let me finish, Alfie, then you might understand what I’m saying. It was expected of us. It was our duty. We could not do what our men could not do. Even more, we could not do
what they did do. Avenues of behaviour open to the common man were not open to officers.’

‘S’at wot you fink I am, the common man?’

‘I did not say that.’

‘S’wot you fink, though, innit?’

‘Alfie, the social standing of you or I is hardly germane to the argument.’

‘Yes it bleedin’ well is!’

And Troy could hear Alfie momentarily suspend his wide-boy act long enough to strike home, and he had not asked what the old man meant by germane.

‘All you’re saying is Woodbridge was a toff, and it’s up to the toffs to set an example to the ’oi polloi. Well, what I say is, speakin’ for yer actual ’oi
polloi, is who the bleedin’ ’ell needs it?’

‘The nation needs it,’ Catesby said calmly, seriously, with a creeping hint of exasperation in his voice to tell Alfie that it was not a trifling matter, it was on a par with love of
country and loyalty to the crown. ‘It is up to some of us to set an example to the rest. And when I was a soldier it was understood that the example one set ran the length of one’s
chain of command. An officer cannot ask of the man what he cannot give, cannot do, himself.’

‘Wot’s
not
sauce for the goose, eh?’

‘If you like,’ said Catesby, much as Troy might have done himself.

‘I don’t like,’ said Alfie. ‘Bollocks to it.’

‘Well – if this is the level the argument has sunk to—’

‘And levels ain’t got nuffink to do wiv it neither. Wot I say is this. We don’t need your bleedin’ example. That went out years ago. Tell it to Mrs Noah. From hereon in
it’s every man for himself. If Woodbridge wants a bit of fanny, best of British luck to ’im. It’s got nothing to do with chains of command, it’s got nothing to do with the
likes of you setting a good example to the likes of me. And you know why? ’Cos if I had to wait on the likes of you for the likes of me to get a bit of fanny, I’d be waiting till
doomsday, and me right ’and’d be worn to the bone. The world ain’t what it was when you was young, general. Fings ’ave changed, fings ain’t never gonna be the way they
was again, not ever—’

‘Don’t tell me,’ Catesby said softly, invoking a West End musical hit of recent years. ‘Fings ain’t wot they used to be?’

Troy would not have thought the man had the wit in him.

‘Too bloody right they ain’t,’ Alfie replied. ‘And a bloody good thing too!’

Troy thought Woodbridge an unworthy subject of a national division. But clearly he was. He exercised the national conscience, put on, scratched and tore off the national hair shirt upon a daily
basis.

‘What do you suppose he takes me for?’ said Catesby, when Alfie had gone.

Troy said nothing. To say anything at all might be to compound an insult. Better by far to let the old man answer his own question.

‘A fogy, d’ye think?’

‘I should think to a man of Alfie’s age we’re both fogies.’

‘How old would you say he was?’

‘Twenty-five.’

‘Too young for the war?’ Catesby asked pointlessly.

‘War baby. Born before it. Brought up in the worst of it. An evacuee, I shouldn’t wonder.’

‘And we’re fogies?’

Catesby seemed to kick this one around a while, then said, ‘He’s wrong, y’know. I’m out of touch, but then, I’m sixty-five, and not as out of touch as some.
He’s a right to dismiss us. A right to his rebellion. I made mine in my day.’

And he led off along a line of thought Troy had not expected.

‘When I was sixteen the First War started. I lied about my age. Volunteered for the Public Schools Battalion, the Sixteenth Middlesex, Kitchener’s New Army, when the posters went up.
Kitchener needed me – but not half as much as I needed him. Got me out of everything. Home, school, the prospect of university in a year’s time. It looked . . . it looked like blessed
relief. And I wasn’t completely green, I wasn’t one of the ones who though it would all be over by Christmas. And I hope I wasn’t one of those who prayed it wouldn’t end
before I saw action. I saw action. One day of it. July 1st, 1916.’

Troy knew the date. Every schoolboy of his generation did. He was less than a year old then. He’d learnt it in school and before school. The Somme.

‘I was Second Lieutenant Catesby. Seventeen pretending to be twenty. Took a couple of rounds from a German machine gun in my thigh two minutes after I went over the top. No time to be a
hero. Shattered the bone in three places. Couple of our blokes got me back into the trench. One of them said, “It’s a blighty wound, sir. You’ll be going home.” Then he
stuck his head up too far and got it shot to pieces. I spent over a year recovering. Learning how to walk again. Transferred to the regular Army. I couldn’t face the thought of the old
regiment. None of them – at least none I knew – had survived. By the time I got back to the front it was 1917. The Americans joined us and the next year we began pushing the Boche back.
Did me time. Picked up me gongs. Counted up the dead friends and saw most of my illusions vanish. But it served its purpose, my personal, my selfish purpose. Got me away from all that bound me.
Created new ties that I thought would bind me for ever.

‘I was out by the summer of 1919. Married in 1923. First child in ’24. Very odd time. Very awkward time. Perhaps you remember it? You must have been a nipper yourself. Perhaps you
remember blokes like me. I couldn’t settle to anything. Couldn’t settle to anything sedentary. I was a fool. Took my inheritance, what there was of it, went into chicken farming and
went broke. Time was you talked to any chap with an accent like mine and a threadbare suit doing the rounds, looking for work, and he’d tried chicken farming. But I’d another string to
my bow. I’d been on the reserve list since 1919. So, in 1931, at the age of thirty-three, I applied to rejoin the army. I’d’ve signed on as a private just to be able to earn a
wage. I was lucky. My old regiment took me back at my old rank – captain. Old pals’ act? Who knows? Perhaps someone saw the day coming when we’d need an army again. Perhaps they
didn’t? Things moved so slowly. The thirties raced by. Every year seemed to throw up a new crisis – the Rhineland, Austria, Munich, Czechoslovakia. But Britain seemed to crawl along
– wallowed in its own misery, filled up with refugees, and failed to listen to what they were saying. I was only a major when the Second War broke out in 1939. I was a brigadier when it
finished. I’d seen Dunkirk, El Alamein, Salerno, D-Day and Germany. I picked up another lot of gongs, and this time I came through without a mark on me. At least no physical mark.