A Little White Death (61 page)

Kolankiewicz phoned. ‘Damn,’ he said. ‘Missed the bastards!’

He passed the rest of the day without quite seeming to do anything. And by the third day he was restless. The pleasures of toast and coffee in bed while the rest of London slogged to work on
buses and tube trains were beginning to seem distinctly limited. He had choices. So many choices. He could go home, home, that is to Mimram, where Sasha would be waiting to adopt him. He’d
get to see his pig. He was already envious of Kolankiewicz having his book to write. Perhaps he could write a handbook of pig husbandry? But he’d be stuck with his sister. Or he could go
out.

He went to one of the music shops in the Charing Cross Road and bought the sheet music of the Well-Tempered Clavier Book One. He liked it less than the Goldbergs or the French Suites, but he had
never in his life attempted to play it. It was ‘new’. And the ‘new’ soon palled.

Within ten days – ten days in which he had banged his way badly through bits of Bach – he knew what the restlessness was telling him. Not that he had planned badly. He had not
planned at all. He knew that. What it told him was to get out of England, to ignore home, homes, any of his homes, and just go. What it told him was the opposite of what it had told him when they
had finally let him out of The Glebe. The last thing he had wanted was women. Now he wanted women. Or, to be precise, woman.

He seemed to recall a vague invitation to visit a shop in Carnaby Street. So he went in search of Foxx.

He crossed Soho Square, cut through Great Chapel Street, along Great Marlborough Street and came into Carnaby Street via the top end, next to Liberty’s store. The shop was not where she
had told him it would be. That shop was boarded up. He walked further down the street, towards the Beak Street end, to where a pile of old lath and plaster was piled on the pavement, to where a
shiny, new, white Lambretta motor scooter was parked. The windows of this shop were whitewashed to let in daylight and keep out prying eyes, but there was a light on and the door was not locked. He
pushed it open, and stepped into what had once been the front room of a small Georgian house, and for years since had probably been a tailor’s premises. The room had been gutted, stripped of
most of its plasterwork, its cornices and its wooden fittings. Dust lay everywhere, pieces of wallpaper many layers thick lay across the floor stiff as hardboard. The dividing wall to the back room
had been removed and a sheet of heavy transparent plastic cordoned it off.

A hand, then an arm, emerged through a gap in the plastic, followed by a torso. Foxx appeared like a large blonde butterfly from its chrysalis. Vintage Foxx, the Foxx he had first tumbled for
– T-shirt, blue jeans and frayed baseball boots. Plaster in her hair, the powdery residue of ancient paints dusting her cheeks.

‘What are you doing here?’

She kissed him, hugged him, before he could answer.

‘How did you find it? I got outbid for the last shop at the last minute. Had to move halfway down the street. I’m weeks behind with the reopening.’

‘I’m sure London can do without its blue jeans for a week or two.’

‘Oh, this won’t be just blue jeans and sneakers. I’m designing now. And I’m importing direct from Italy. I’ll have a range of new clothes. A little revolution
– my personal mission to get the Englishwoman out of potato sacks and her man out of Charlie Chaplin pants. All I need is a name. You couldn’t come up with a good name for the shop,
could you? I’ve been racking my brains.’

A piece of paper detached itself from high up on the wall to fall on Troy’s head. He plucked it off, looked at the layers, the generations, overlapping like the pages in a book.

‘You’ve taken on quite a task,’ he said.

‘Nothing I can’t handle. It’s great fun.’

She twirled to the centre of the room, arms outstretched, eyes bright with pleasure.

‘You won’t believe the dirt that was here. I don’t think anything had been done to this place since some time in the last century. Dickens was a boy when this place last got a
spring clean.’

He was still holding the paper. He’d counted eleven different layers in it. The last wasn’t even Victorian, he thought. It was probably put up in the reign of George III .

‘England was like that,’ he said. ‘There always seemed to be corners that gathered dust. Some cranny where things you thought you’d never see again lingered generations
after they’d gone from everyplace else. I was forever finding time compressed into the corners of Mimram when I was a boy.’

‘Well you won’t find it here in a fortnight’s time. I’m clearing the whole lot out.’

‘Off with the old and on with new? I rather think that’s becoming the philosophy of our times.’

‘I don’t know what we’ve been witnessing lately – the death throes of the old or the birth pangs of the new, but I know this. In a couple of years’ time it
won’t matter a damn. England is going to go boom!’

She reinforced her words with her hands, arms swinging upward to simulate the explosion, cheeks blowing out as she ‘boomed’.

‘I know,’ said Troy. ‘People keep telling me that.’

‘By 1965 or ’66 you won’t recognise the place. It’ll be a . . . a . . .’

‘A new world?’ Troy ventured.

‘Yes. That’s exactly what it’ll be. A new world.’

‘Then there’s the name for your shop.’

‘What? “New World”?’

‘I was thinking more of “Terra Nova”.’

‘That would be a bit beyond the grasp of most of my customers.’

‘Everyone’s heard of Captain Scott.’

‘Wanna bet?’

‘Doesn’t matter as long as they can pronounce it.’

‘How about just “Nova”?’

‘Sounds fine. For your customers, I mean. Personally I have heard “new” to the point of tedium this year. It’s part of the vocabulary of advertising. Advertising has only
three adjectives: more, real and new. I have grown suspicious of the new.’

‘Get used to it, Troy. It’s here to stay.’

‘On the contrary, it’s here only until the next “new” comes along.’

‘The king is dead,’ she said. ‘Long live the king.’

He threw down the piece of paper. It had set him musing now, musing out loud. But she was used to that.

‘When I was five or six – and I suppose that would make it about 1920 – my father took me for tea at the old Midland Hotel, you know, the one that stands in front of St Pancras
Station. Most people think it is St Pancras I’m sure, but it’s newer than the station and designed by a different bloke. George Gilbert Scott, the most lavish of the Victorian gothics.
I suppose the old man had taken me there many times as a toddler, but this is the only occasion I was old enough to remember, and it was the last. The war had been over just a couple of years.
Looking back I think the nation was desperately trying to create a sense of light and air and carefreeness. And what they did was to look at the preceding age – the Victorian – and see
that it had lingered those dozen or so years after the old Queen’s death, associate it with bloody mess that followed almost as cause and effect, and decide to whitewash it. Almost literally.
The Midland Hotel was a staggeringly beautiful creation, a myriad of hardwood grains, marble from Ireland streaked with lime-green swirls, stencil-work that ran for miles, iron fine as filigree and
murals fifteen feet high. It was, for want of a better word, a masterpiece. And in 1920 they painted it all over. They were putting on the coat of white in the corridors as we took tea. And white
became dull nothing, and dull nothing became brown. And we have lived with the shades of brown ever since. Seeking out light and air, carving out our clean lines, we brushed away colours we had
ceased to perceive.’

‘What’s your point, Troy?’

‘Are we now painting out the Britain we knew, twenty years after that in its turn ended? Ended, in a bloody war, much the same, and we have lived with its vestiges far too long, but . . .
are we now to be walled up alive in Pegboard, suffused in a sea of Magicoat, bound and gagged in strips of Fablon? . . . The last whitewash turned out to be philistinism on the grand
scale.’

‘If the only way to defeat the new philistinism is to defend all that is without discrimination, then philistinism wins – cannot lose, in fact.’

It was a shrewd answer, shrewder by far than his analysis.

‘Might we not come to regret the “boom”? Might we not come to regret the 1960s?’

‘Why not just roll with ’em’ Troy? It’s the only way we’ll find out. You’ve kicked against the pricks as long as I’ve known you. You’ve staged a
personal vendetta against the Britain that raised us. One more roll and we might well have seen the last of her.’

‘Come away with me.’

He had changed tack so suddenly she was visibly startled.

‘What? I mean where?’

‘I don’t know. Pick a country. Let’s just get away for a while.’

‘Troy, I can’t.’

‘Let your builders get on with it for a couple of weeks.’

‘No. It isn’t that. That would be fine. It’s . . . it’s just that I’ve already arranged to go away while the work’s done. I’m leaving tomorrow as a
matter of fact.’

‘Where?’

‘France. I’m spending ten days in the Cevennes.’

‘Woodbridge,’ Troy said simply.

‘How did you know?’

‘He was wearing blue jeans the last time I saw him. You’re starting your fashion revolution in the most unlikely places.’

‘Well,’ said Foxx. ‘Well, he did ask first. Troy, I’m so sorry. I’d love to go somewhere, but I’d be letting him down. Why didn’t you ask me a fortnight
ago? I’d’ve jumped at the chance. We could have gone somewhere warm. The Cevennes in November won’t exactly be April in Paris, will it?’

She hugged him. Kissed him once. Her way with apology.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ he lied. ‘Really it doesn’t.’

Troy phoned Anna. He waited almost a whole day after Foxx turned him down and then he called Anna. He could not remember when he had last called her.

‘I’ve been trying to reach you for two days,’ she said.

He thought she sounded tearful, an immense sadness in her voice.

‘I’ve been out a lot,’ he said lamely. ‘Just walking around.’

‘Could you come over right away?’

‘What’s up?’

‘Angus is dead. They’ve found his body. It appears he jumped in the river and drowned himself about a month back. Now the body’s washed up on the Essex coast by Jacob’s
Reach. The police came to see me two days ago.’

Tumbling through his mind, the kaleidoscopic explosion of paper as he had torn Angus’s manuscript free from his chest, the manuscript he had faithfully promised Angus he would deliver
safely to Anna, the last words he had spoken, ‘I knew it would get me in the end.’ Had he jumped before or after Troy had been pushed? Then the indelible words Charlie had uttered to
him – Jacob’s Reach, the muddy promontory on the Essex coast where the body of Norman Cobb had finally broken surface. Anna’s voice cut into his reverie.

‘Oh God, Troy. I can’t take any more. Just get over here pronto, will you?’

He listened to the buzz of the dialling tone, put down the phone and, wondering how long he’d be gone, packed a toothbrush and a clean shirt. Then he collected the Bentley, parked in
Bedfordbury almost exactly where it had stood the night Percy Blood had riddled it with bullets, and drove to Unbearable Bassington Street.

‘They asked me to identify him,’ she said. ‘I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to see my husband dead. I didn’t want the memory of him looking like a
half-decayed corpse. I spend my working life with the dead and dying. I wanted to remember Angus alive. I wanted him vital, I wanted him to be the man I married. I called you. You could have gone
instead. But I had to go. And I couldn’t swear that it was him. He was unrecognisable. The water, the fish, God knows. The eyes were gone. Troy! He had no eyes! A one-legged man with
Angus’s wallet in his coat pocket. And I wished they hadn’t made me look. So I asked for the leg. And there it was, that old tin leg with all the repairs he’d had made to it over
twenty years. And on the back of the calf a maker’s stamp. I’ll remember it till the day I die: ‘A. Futscher, Colditz, fecit. MCMXLII .’ So it was him, I said. Him or some
other one-legged RAF ace with a tin leg made by the same little man in the same little German town. God, Troy, where were you when I needed you?’

Angus was buried the following day. Troy had spent the night in Anna’s guest room, heard her cry till dawn and watched her emerge in black, decline his offer of breakfast, hiding her grief
beneath a layer or more of make-up.

A damp November day, ten thousand leaves waiting to be swept up, soggy underfoot, clinging to the soles of the shoes. No one came. Angus had few friends, no siblings, and his parents were long
dead. Troy stood with Anna on his arm while a priest, two gravediggers and an old lady who seemed to be a professional mourner watched Angus’s vast coffin lowered into the grave. He found
thoughts so idle, so pointless he could never utter them – had they buried his tin leg in the coffin with him?

They walked back to his car as the thud of earth hitting the coffin lid boomed out. He did not know how Anna felt, but he could not bear to hear this sound.

They stopped under a leafless chestnut tree. She slipped her arm from his.

‘Well?’ he said.

‘Well?’ she said. ‘Well? You bastard, you complete and utter fucking bastard.’

Her arms flailed and the blows of small clenched fists caught him on the chest, the cheeks, the ears. She laid into Troy just as Peggy Blood and Valerie Clover had done.

Troy held her fast, her arms with his, stilled the rain of blows and her head sank onto his chest and her tears rolled forth in flood.

‘Oh Troy, just hold me, will you?’

Minutes passed. He could not have guessed how many. The furious pounding of her heart slowed, the tectonic heaving of her breast calmed. At last she spoke again, her voiced muffled by the
tear-wet wool of his winter overcoat. ‘Oh Troy, just fuck off, will you?’

Troy resorted to cleaning up. The house was a mess. He’d done nothing to it since the end of August. He started with his own wardrobe. There hung the suit he had been
wearing the night Fitz and Clover had died. He hadn’t worn it since. Superstition? Fortuity. It was a good suit; too good be written off as he’d had to do with the remains of the one he
had been wearing the night – as things turned out – that wandering Angus had died.