A Little White Death (3 page)

‘I don’t know why I does this for you buggers, but I does,’ he said. ‘Tel’grammes it is, you hev got tel’grammes, the blarsted pair o’ ye. Why ye gaht
to hev tel’grammes on a day like this, Gahd knows.’

It was, it seemed, deeply inconsiderate of the Troys to be in receipt of tel’grammes of which they knew nothing.

A mittened hand shoved two envelopes at Troy, and then returned to sink into its pocket once more as its owner set off back down the drive, ploughing the trench in the snow he had cut on the way
up.

‘Aren’t you going to wait for the reply?’ Troy yelled after him. More often than not the man would tell you what was in a telegramme before you could open it, would stand on
the step and recite it to you before you could so much as break the seal, but now nothing, it seemed, would keep him a moment longer.

‘Phone it through,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘There’s two blokes from the GPO up a pole in the lane. Ye’ll hev phones again in half an hour or so they
reckon.’

Rod appeared behind Troy. Troy handed him the small brown envelope and tore open the one with his own name on it. The telegramme meant nothing to him.

Troy read it again, wondering if the author’s economy with language and cost had left him to guess at a vital aspect of its meaning.

Rod snatched it from his hand. Stuck another in front of him.

‘Dozy sod’s put them in the wrong envelopes. You’ve got mine and I’ve got yours.’

The new telegramme scarcely made more sense than the last. But at least it was written with scant regard for cost in fully grammatical sentences.

It felt as though a ball and chain had tipped softly from the envelope in some sleight-of-hand magician’s trick and wrapped itself around him. The old weight, the old friend, the old lie.
Was he dying? Could Charlie be dying? Why couldn’t he just say so? Troy had not seen Charlie since 1957. He had asked much the same of him then. ‘I’ve taken a job in the Middle
East. See me off. Just for old times’ sake. It’ll be the last time.’ Now this was the last time. The last time for what? Could Charlie be dying?

‘Gaitskell’s dying.’

Rod’s voice cut through his reverie. Troy looked up from the telegramme to see Rod suddenly sober, casting off the Michelin outfit.

‘I have to get up to London. God knows how, but I have to.’

Gaitskell was the ‘Hugh’ of the telegramme Rod had just read. Leader of the Opposition and, since it was received wisdom that 1963 would be an election year, the next Prime Minister.
He and Rod, of much the same age, class and education, fought like cat and dog and were stubbornly loyal both to each other and to the party. For Gaitskell to die now would be a political
inconvenience and a personal tragedy for Rod.

‘The phones will be on soon,’ Troy said. ‘Driffield just told me.’

‘Did he say how the roads were?’

‘See for yourself,’ said Troy, pointing out through the open door at the snowbound drive and the three-foot-deep trench Driffield had carved in it.

Around the corner at the end of the drive, where the curving line of beech trees – resplendent green in summer, crisp brown in winter – shielded the house from the road, a
petrol-driven vehicle – Troy could on first sight be no more precise than that – appeared. Preceded by the peristaltic grunt of its engine, it rounded the curve, entered the trench and
chugged towards the house in a shower of obscuring and enveloping snowdust, ripping out the slender tracks of human feet into a wide chasm in the white wilderness of Mimram. It was a motorbike. A
motorbike with sidecar. A motorbike with snowplough. A motorbike with sidecar and snowplough driven by an extremely fat man in a leather helmet and an old Second World War London County Council
Heavy Rescue Squad navy-blue greatcoat.

The motorbike sliced through the drift immediately in front of the porch, and the snowploughing contraption deposited a pile of snow almost six feet high in a V-shape to either side.

The Fat Man pushed up his goggles.

‘Wotcher cock,’ he said to Troy.

Troy looked down at the contraption from the safety of the porch. He had never seen anything like it. The blades of the snowplough bolted neatly to the front forks of the bike and shot off at a
tangent to bolt themselves to the front of the sidecar. A large, round-knobbed lever on the handlebars appeared to raise or lower the device at the Fat Man’s whim via a pantograph. He had
even put snow chains on the tyres, attached an army-surplus five-gallon jerry can of petrol to the back end, and seemed to be transporting a large hessian sack of something in the sidecar. It was a
bike for all seasons, this one in particular.

‘What’s in the sack?’ said Troy.

‘Pignuts. I thought you’d be low on pignuts by now.’

‘We’re low on everything. You wouldn’t happen to have a loaf of bread or five pounds of spuds in there too?’

‘I’m ’ere to feed the pig, not you lot. You can fend for yerselves. But the pig – she needs lookin’ after.’

The Fat Man set his sack on the ground and from the depths of the sidecar produced a pair of snowshoes. The postman had looked like a lone idiot, stepping outside, quite possibly for some time,
but this was the full-blown expedition. The Englishman abroad. Man equipped, man kitted out with the best that an army-surplus store could provide. With such pluck and stuff as this, the British
had climbed Everest and chugged their way across Antarctica, and that in the last ten years alone. Troy never knew why it was that the army amassed such surpluses and in such quantities – and
perhaps mountains were climbed and wildernesses crossed just to diminish the stockpiles – but they did, and without them Sir Edmund Hillary might stand atop Everest in a string vest and half
the working men in Britain would be left khakiless and wondering what to wear for the messy jobs or, in this case, how to wade through three-foot snowdrifts down to the pigpens lugging half a
hundredweight of compressed dry pig fodder.

‘When was you last down there?’

‘Yesterday.’

The Fat Man regarded him sceptically.

‘Honestly,’ said Troy. ‘I took her fresh water, a huge bundle of cabbage leaves and a bucket of last year’s windfall apples I’ve been saving.’

‘And?’

‘And what?’

‘And how was she?’

‘Fine,’ said Troy. ‘Happy as a pig in . . .’

He could not quite think of the word. But it was straw. His Gloucester Old Spot sow, the third such he had bred in the last ten years, was happy as a pig in straw, if only because he and the Fat
Man had had the foresight to build an insulating wall around her sty late last autumn with twenty-odd bales of straw. Whatever the Fat Man thought, and it was his usual banter to deride
Troy’s pigmanship, he had looked in on his pig and had thought her sty somewhat warmer than his own house.

The Fat Man hoisted his sack, slipped his feet into the leather loops of the snowshoes and set off for the pigpens under the oaks.

‘I’ll be back,’ he said.

Troy did not doubt it. He had known him on and off the best part of twenty years, and, apart from an increase in his girth, he had changed very little. He was still the committed cockney,
determinedly unpredictable, quite the most secretive man he had ever met, and utterly, totally reliable. He had minded Troy’s pig, and pigs plural when she had farrowed, at no notice on
countless occasions. It had occurred to Troy that perhaps he read minds, for, whilst one could never be at all sure when he would turn up, or from where, he did so exactly when one needed him. Not
that Troy needed a pigsitter right now, that went without saying; what he needed the Fat Man had provided almost inadvertently. Transport. A vehicle that could get through snow and ice, something
that could get him to London. Something with wheels that did not spin pointlessly on the spot as Troy’s Bentley had done when he had tried her a couple of days ago.

He rushed upstairs and began to pack. From his bedroom window he caught sight of the Fat Man cresting a humpbacked ridge of snow like Ahab astride Moby Dick, the snowshoes stuck to his feet like
giant leaves miraculously letting him walk on water.

He had no idea what to pack for Beirut and threw an assortment of clothes together. Across the other side of the house he heard the phone ring. The first time in days. Heard the urgent tones in
Rod’s voice without actually hearing any of his words. Clutching his suitcase, he almost knocked Rod down on the stairs. He was dressed for a journey. Overcoat, trilby, gloves. He was
carrying his briefcase.

‘I have to get up to London.’

It seemed to be a remark hovering between apology and explanation.

‘I heard you the first time.’

‘He has to take me, Freddie. Hugh’s dying. Unless you can tell me it’s a matter of life and death I’m getting in that sidecar and he’s taking me as far as that
piece of Heath Robinson machinery will get us.’

Troy did not know what ‘it’ was – a matter of life and death? A matter of life and lies? It was half-formed or less in his own mind. He would not have dreamt of discussing
Charlie with Rod at this point. He said nothing. Just followed Rod down to the front door.

‘Are you going to tell me?’ Rod said, pulling on his wellies.

‘There’s nothing to tell. But I do need to get up to town.’

‘Secrets, Freddie. Secrets. You’re worse than the old man. You play every damn card so close to the chest. Well, I’m telling you now that if you can’t tell me honestly
that your business is more important than mine, I say sod you for your secrets. I’m commandeering the Fat Man and his motorbike and I’m going.’

Troy said nothing. The very word ‘commandeering’ made him wince inwardly. This was Wing Commander Troy in fully operational mode. Playing by the Queensberry Rules. Rules that let him
hijack the bike, but did not permit him to read a telegramme addressed to someone else.

‘Quite,’ said Rod. ‘Silence.’

When the Fat Man trudged back to his bike Rod made his pitch, plain and simple. A fiver to get him, as he put it, ‘to civilisation’. The Fat Man looked to Troy. Troy nodded almost
imperceptibly and, as Rod made a racket clambering into the sidecar, leant over and whispered.

‘Dump him at the nearest station and get back here. I may need you for a few days.’

The Fat Man tapped the side of his nose.

Rod looked ridiculous sitting in the sidecar. Knees tucked almost to his chin, hat rammed down to his ears, goggles over his eyes, briefcase pressed to his chest. He looked like an owl.

‘There is one thing,’ he said from his preposterous perch.

‘Of course,’ said Troy.

‘What’s the Second Law of Thermodynamics? Is it Einstein or one of those blokes?’

‘It’s Kelvin.’

‘Never heard of him. What did he say?’

‘Entropy. Everything expands into . . . nothing.’

‘Don’t quite follow . . .’

‘Everything turns to shit in time.’

‘And we need a “Theory” to tell us that?’

The Fat Man raised a giant’s foot off the ground, slamming down on the kickstart, and brought four 250cc cylinders spitting and roaring into life. He was back in less than an hour.

He had not thought Beirut would be cold. It wasn’t – it just wasn’t warm either. He had so looked forward to being warm. He had somehow seen himself in
shirtsleeves, a white sea-island cotton shirt clinging to him loosely as a gentle breeze blew in from the Mediterranean to ruffle his hair. It had been a dream conjured up after a night in a
run-down hotel on the Great North Road – where he had finally abandoned the Fat Man’s motorbike – another on a bench at Heathrow as his flight was postponed in half-hour chunks
– permitting the runways to be swept clear of snow just in time for the next storm, and permitting no one the resolution of checking into a hotel – and a third night on a bench at Orly
as his plane was grounded in a blizzard by French air traffic control and much the same stop-go, go-stop policy ensued.

The best part of four days had passed by the time he landed in Beirut. It was pitch dark and the less than gentle sea breeze, whilst hardly a howling North Sea gale that could cut through
clothing, was wind enough to cut through expectation, to chill the spirit if not the flesh. It blew across the runway, chased him through the terminal, pursued him to a taxi, raced him the length
of the city out to the Ra’s Beirut promontory, and was waiting for him fifteen minutes later when he got out. All that could be said was that it was warmer than England.

The taxi dropped Troy in front of the Saint-Georges Hotel, a squat block looming featurelessly over him in the darkness. Sleepless, exhausted, unshaven and unwashed, he felt sure he must stink
to high heaven after four days in the same clothes.

‘Yes,’ said the white-jacketed clerk at reception. ‘Mr Charlie instructed us to keep the room exactly one week. Everything is ready for you, Mr Troy.’

All Troy wanted was a bath and a bed, and he was not at all sure he would even bother to take them in that order.

‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Would you get a message to Mr Leigh-Hunt, tell him I’m here and that I’ll see him at breakfast?’

‘Mr Charlie has gone, sir.’

‘Gone?’

‘Gone, sir.’

For a moment the same thought passed through his mind that had first surfaced when he read Charlie’s telegramme – gone meant dead. A blunt, ineffectual euphemism. But from the look
on the man’s face that was clearly not the case. There was not a flicker of meaningless public display of regret.

‘Gone where?’ he said.

‘We never know, Mr Troy.’