Old Flames (45 page)

‘That’s the one. The whore has power without responsibility. The spy has responsibility without power.’

‘Now you have lost me.’

“What is the spy’s stock in trade? What is the commodity at the heart of his trade?’

‘Information.’

‘Knowledge.’

‘If you like.’

‘Portable property Dickens would have called it. Knowledge he can carry, trade or deliver, but on which he cannot act.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Knowledge is not power. Bacon was only half right. Knowledge is only power if you can act upon it.’

‘And if you can’t?’

‘If you can’t, then knowledge is a dead weight. The fate of the spy is to know in impotence.’

‘The burden of knowledge, eh?’

‘Something like that.’

‘And how do you come to know this?’

An honest answer might have been to say ‘because I married one’, but Tosca was a red herring to the argument. It was not her nature he was driving at, but Rod’s and his
own.

‘A few weeks ago you called me a spy.’

Rod opened his mouth. Troy knew that his unspeakable decency would lead him to apologise for any truth. He raised a hand to shut him up.

‘Of course I was a spy. I can hardly pretend otherwise. But what are you?’

‘You’re going to tell me. I can’t stop you. And I’m beginning to wish you hadn’t smashed the teapot.’

‘A spy is someone in possession of information to which he has no right and is powerless to use. You got a lucky tip over Cockerell, but you couldn’t come out and name
him.’

‘He wasn’t exactly my priority. The point wasn’t Cockerell or who killed Cockerell. It was the breach of faith by the Government.’

‘Quite. You went after the Tories over Cockerell without Cockerell being the issue. You scored a victory, but the storm you whipped up won’t die down. It’s murder. It always
was.’

‘It won’t die down because you’re raking it up.’

Troy ignored this.

‘The same tactic applies to Suez. You know what the buggers are planning, thanks to the CIA. But you can’t come clean and say it. The information strangles you. Knowledge without
power. You can’t stop Eden without revealing your source. I’ll go further—you
won’t
stop Eden. You won’t stop him, because you want to see him fuck up and then
your party can step in as the saviours.’

Rod sighed deeply. There would be no angry outburst. This was its cue and it wasn’t even waiting in the wings.

‘Freddie. Believe me, I’d give anything to stop this war happening. But I can’t. Not me, not heaven, not hell. All I can do is harass the bastards from the sidelines, see to it
that my own party comes through it untainted and in a position to pick up the pieces.’

Troy pushed himself to the edge of the sofa. Rod was leaning forward, elbows on knees, fingertips to chin. He met his brother almost nose to nose.

‘But, doesn’t it hurt to know?’ he whispered.

‘Not the word I’d have put to it yesterday or even five minutes ago, but yes, that’s exactly what it does.’

Troy got up. Walked a giddy walk to the kitchen. Rooted out the spare pot. God knows, Rod had earned his cuppa. He heard him sighing repeatedly over the gentle hiss of the kettle. He knew he had
hit him hard, more brutal than any physical blow he could have landed on him. He stuck a second tray in front of Rod and poured for the two of them. The soft, oriental waft of Earl Grey floating to
the nostrils, the airy illusion that they were good, solid Englishmen, at teatime peace with history.

Rod smiled, said, ‘Let’s see if we can avoid smashing this one, shall we?’

They sipped in silence. Troy could read Rod like a book. The pattern of guilt inscribing itself deep
in the soft yielding tissue of his good nature. He stared at the ceiling, sighed from time to time and seemed to be working his way to some kind of conclusion.

‘You know, I can’t even tell Gaitskell. I mean, that is, I haven’t told Gaitskell. In fact, you’re the only person I have told. It’s like holding the grenade in
your fist. I can taste the metal pin in my mouth. Teeth clamped, fist tight.’

He stumbled to a halt. Troy sensed revelation slouching.

‘You remember Ike called me?’

‘I doubt I shall ever forget.’ Rod did not ask Troy what he meant by this.

‘I told you he’d heard Eden’s address to the nation. It wasn’t quite what prompted the call. Truth is, he’d heard Hugh’s reply as well. He called not because
he thinks Eden’s war barmy—goes without saying—but because he fears Hugh and the Labour Party may well back him. Ike calls me up from the nineteenth hole almost every damn
Saturday. “Only phone in America that ain’t bugged!”—and he doesn’t laugh when he says it. Last weekend he was all but shouting at me. He’s really worried that
the country will fall in behind Eden.’

‘He has a point,’ said Troy.

Rod looked sharply at him but declined the bait. The struggle simply to get out what he had to say was taking all his strength.

‘Last month the Prime Minister of Malta paid us a visit. Hugh and I had a private meeting with him. He told us that the Royal Navy was amassing an armada off Malta. And that there could be
only one reason for this. And blow me, Hugh said, “I don’t believe you”! What the hell does he think is going on out there? A regatta? I can’t tell him. I don’t know
how to tell him.’

Rod slipped into staccato. Each phrase dragged up as though it were poetry, costing him the price of his soul at utterance. The pauses getting longer and more maddening with every attempt he
made at precision.

‘We’re embarking on a national madness—The last fling of Empire—It’ll damn us for a generation—We’ll be international pariahs—It’ll create
the biggest run on the pound in years—Sterling will go through the floor—Our gold reserves will be wiped out—And I can’t find a way to tell him—’

Troy thought the last pause would be infinite. He could hear Rod breathing, he could hear cabs honking in St Martin’s Lane, he could hear a London pigeon burbling on his windowsill. He
could hear the blood pulse in the cut on the side of his head.

Suddenly Rod rounded on the argument in a move swifter than a cracker-barrel loop.

‘You know, I can’t stop what’s going to happen—but you can stop investigating Cockerell.’

‘No I can’t.’

‘It’s Jack’s case now.’

‘You’ve known me all your life. Do you really think that’s going to stop me?’

‘Let it go, Freddie. We’re both in over our heads. That’s what you’ve been to considerable pains to tell me.’

‘I know, but don’t you wonder where it’s leading? Guilt or no guilt. Father or no father. Doesn’t the spook chase make you wonder into what corners it will take
us?’

Rod mulled this one over.

‘Corners. Corners? Not the word I would have chosen. Depths, perhaps.’

He sipped at his tea and mulled a new word.

‘Yes—depths. I don’t much care about the corners. Where would rooms, cardboard boxes and Pythagoras be without them? Depths. It’s the depths that bother me.’

He drained his cup. Set it back on its saucer with a penetrating plonk. He looked at his watch.

‘I must dash. I should be in the House.’

Troy was puzzled. The House did not sit in September.

‘Eh?’

‘Didn’t I tell you? We recalled Parliament while you were in the land of Nod. You know, the great experiment—democracy and all that?’

That was a family phrase, the et cetera of ‘all that’—their father’s pattern of speech. It had been his pleasure and duty to educate his children by anecdote and
aphorism, usually whilst doing something else, writing or eating, so that one always had the impression that such knowledge as he imparted was being imparted with extreme lassitude, the asides of a
relaxed, occupied mind. Troy, as the youngest and sickliest, so often at home, so often just ‘around’, was the most frequent recipient of ‘all that’.

‘History, my little Englander, can be divided into two categories. The actions of history are either a bad thing or a necessary thing. Take the Revolution, our Revolution. A necessary
thing. Take the present state of Mother Russia—the jury of history is still out. It will become a necessary thing or it will become a bad thing. There is no such thing as a good thing. Take
the American Revolution. A necessary thing. Take their President—Mr Hoover—a bad thing. Take their present state. A necessary thing? Democracy and all that? Perhaps, but not a good
thing.’

A few years later a schoolmaster and a journalist had got together and written a very funny spoof history of England, a terrific schoolboy howler in which there were good kings and bad kings and
good things and bad things. They had called the book
1066 and All That.
Troy had often wondered if they had, at some point, met the old man in garrulous mood, and simply got it wrong.

There was no easy dismissal of Rod’s ‘democracy and all that’—the phrase carried too much baggage and most of it was doubt.

He had lied to Rod. Thinking about the encounter afterwards, they were lies of imprecision rather than complete untruth. It all depended on how Rod took his line about the
common crook and the sophisticated spy. Troy had loaded all meaning he could onto the nouns, knowing these would lead Rod away from where meaning really lay, in the adjectives. He knew in his bones
that Cockerell was a spy—he just wasn’t a ‘sophisticated’ spy. Perhaps he was even an uncommon crook. The more he learnt of the man, the more uncommon he seemed to be
beneath the common façade. But Troy had surely and deliberately sent Rod away thinking that he had said Cockerell was not a spy. The less Rod knew the better.

The less Tosca knew the better. He could not face the explanations, could not face her with his head wrapped up in its skimpy turban.

He called her.

‘It’s Saturday tomorrow. Y’ comin’ home?’

It was as well she said—he had had no idea what day it was.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid I’ll have to work this weekend.’

‘The next then?’

‘Yes,’ he lied. ‘How … how are you … managing?’

He heard the word crash down like breaking crockery.

‘Not bad. Wish you were here. Bet that surprises you, don’t it? One of the women turned out to be a mensch.’

‘Which one?’

‘Lucinda.’

He was not surprised.

‘And the Fat Guy says you’re not to forget the pig is due to something or other.’

‘Farrow.’

‘Farrow?’

‘The pig is pregnant.’

They lapsed into silence.

Then she said, ‘Is that all we got to say to each other? The pig is pregnant? The goddam pig is pregnant!’

He had never felt much like a married man. Now he did not feel like one at all. She had been gone a week, more or less? He wasn’t really sure. Dreamless hell was timeless hell. He began to
wonder why he had any clarity of thought, what motive force enabled him to make sentences and utter speech. Dreamless hell was wordless hell. Mimram and Tosca seemed like images from another
lifetime. He caught sight of himself in the mirror. Took off the bandage and threw it in the bin. He looked worse than she had the day he found her in Amsterdam.

Jack phoned. His voice flat and emotionless. A courtesy call.

‘I’ve seen Bonser. He says he acted on his own initiative. Tore the pages out of Quigley’s book because he thought it was expected of him. Admits he was wrong. Even handed over
the pages.’

‘He’s lying,’ said Troy.

Jack exploded.

‘Of course he’s fucking lying! You think I don’t know he’s lying!?!’

‘Jack, I was only—’

But Jack had hung up on him.

He sat most of the evening playing, and playing again, Debussy’s
Estampes.
They fitted the night and fitted the mood. Limp and liquid. It was raining once more. The earth boomed and
shook with thunder like the rage of Zeus, the rain tore down in sheets and lightning ripped the sky with a sound like tearing canvas. When he got fed up with Debussy he switched to Bach, those
infuriating ‘pieces to be played in another room’, the
Goldberg Variations.
There was only one word for the
Goldberg Variations.
Flash. He loved the change of gear from
first to top, especially that between the first and second variations. And he felt he coped well with the fast bits. It was the slow bits that did for him. Clunking through like a man with ten
thumbs when, really, he needed three hands. The problem lay in the staccato nature of the work. Sharp—yes, staccato—but fluid at the same time. Tap, tap bonk just wouldn’t do.

But the tap tap tapping was coming not from the keyboard. As a peal of thunder rolled away into a complaining grumble he stopped and heard, once again, the distinct tap of a hand at his door. He
took the small golden automatic off the top of the piano and flipped back the slide, heard the metallic thunk as the bullet entered the breach. He seriously doubted whether a gun so small could
fire through an inch and a half of two-hundred-year-old oak, but as he reached for the handle with his right hand, his left held the gun against the door at chest height. He prised the door open.
Through the two-inch gap he could see a bedraggled figure standing in the alley just below the bottom step. The rain was falling so hard it was bouncing back off the flagstones to give the
impression that here was some unfortunate northern Aphrodite, rising from the foam, shrouded in the mist—and shivering to death. As a crack of lightning shredded the sky above him he could
see her clearly. It was Madeleine Kerr, in a sodden T-shirt and sodden blue jeans.

‘You must be freezing,’ he said and threw the door wide.

She stepped across the threshold, wiping the water from her face, and he ran to the bathroom for a towel.

She stood dripping on the mat. He kicked the door to and handed her the towel.

‘Do you know who I am?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘You don’t seem surprised.’

‘I’ve been around twins all my life. It doesn’t surprise me to know that one person can precisely resemble another. Besides, they never do, precisely.’

This woman had the same blonde hair, the same pale green eyes, but she was, in some way he could scarcely pin down, better-looking than her twin, a remarkably beautiful woman. Perhaps the wet
waif was a powerfully deceptive image. The difference he saw, he realised, was in the absence of a sense of decadence. The too-knowing look.