Second Violin (32 page)

‘You could have told me yesterday.’

‘I didn’t bloody know yesterday. I knew this bloody morning. I called by your bloody house on my way into the bloody Yard two hours ago, I hammered on your bloody door and you were
either in your bloody pit or you weren’t home all morning ’cos no bugger answered. Now, bugger off back inside,
Sergeant
Troy, and see to your family.’

Steerforth stomped off to the end of the street, doing what Troy always thought of as copper’s plod. A way of walking that summed up not so much a job as a generation. Inside hell had
cracked open and spewed forth.

The row was going on in three languages. His mother was yelling at his father in French, his Uncle Nikolai was attempting mediation in Russian and Rod was saying in English, ‘Will you all
just calm down, please.’

Troy cut through it.

‘For the last time will somebody tell me what’s going on?’

It was loud enough to turn all three heads, but it was Rod who spoke first.

‘There’s nothing to worry about, Freddie. And it isn’t a mistake. I am being interned as an enemy alien. The paperwork is all in order.’

‘Enemy? What enemy? Alien? What alien? You’re English. As English as I am.’

‘No, I’m not.’

His mother exploded again – something about idiots and missed chances. His father put an arm around her and was shrugged off as she fished up her sleeve for a handkerchief to stem the tide
of her tears.

‘Well?’

Rod embraced his mother. Much taller than any other man in the room, the embrace seemed all-enveloping and she did not resist.

‘Dad,’ Rod said simply. ‘Tell him.’

‘Let us all sit down,’ Alex said.

Nobody moved.

‘Let us sit. Please let us sit.’

Rod steered Maria Mikhailovna to the sofa, Alex and Nikolai took armchairs, Troy perched on a footstool – the youngest once more, the baby of the family lost at foot level, feeling, as in
childhood, that he was the only one who hadn’t a clue.

‘Many years ago . . .’

It was the sort of opening that had made Troy yawn as a child.

‘Many years ago, I suppose it would have been around 1919 or 1920 . . . when I accepted the baronetcy . . . I changed the family name . . . and I accepted British Citizenship . . . for
myself, for your mother and for the twins. For you it was not necessary. You were born in this house, the little Englander, as your mother was wont to call you. Nikolai and my father I left to
their own devices. Neither of them much wanted to give up being Russian. My father died a Russian and a Troitsky Nikolai still is Russian, and a Troitsky. The choice was his. But . . . we’re
not at war with Russia.’

‘We’re not at war with France either,’ Troy said.

‘Quite. But France is not the issue.’

‘Yes it is . . . Rod and the twins were born in France . . . they were French . . . now they’re English. I mean, dammit, you
are
English, aren’t you?’

Troy looked across at his brother. Their mother had straightened up and was now merely sniffling. Rod was braced as though for impact, one large hand on each large knee.

‘No,’ he said. ‘No, I’m not. And I’m not French either.’

‘Rubbish. You lot have always told me that you lived in Paris before you came to London. All of you. The twins and Rod were born there. Ergo . . .’

Alex cut in, ‘Before that we lived for some time in Vienna.’

‘Eh?’

‘I was born there,’ Rod said. ‘I’m not English or French, I’m Austrian . . . and in the present climate that means German.’

‘I don’t believe this. I don’t bloody believe this! Why are you German? Why didn’t you naturalize when everybody else did?’

Alex said, ‘It was my fault.’

Rod said, ‘No it wasn’t. Dad gave me a choice.’

‘And?’

‘I chose to stay as I was.’

‘Rod, I swear I’m going to fucking throttle you!’

‘I was thirteen . . . an adolescent . . . it was just a way of asserting my independence from family . . . a way of being different at school. You said the same thing yourself at about the
same age . . . nothing like an English public school for making you wish you weren’t English.’

Alex said, ‘I should have made you do it.’

‘No,’ Rod said. ‘You were right. You gave me the choice. God knows there’ve been plenty of opportunities to naturalize since and I haven’t taken them.’

‘Just a minute,’ Troy said. ‘Are you telling me you’ve been travelling all these years on an Austrian passport . . . all those trips into Germany? You were even in Vienna
in ’38. On an Austrian passport?’

‘Freddie, I haven’t got any kind of state passport. I never have had a passport as such.’

‘Then how do you get around?’

‘When I was younger, travelling with the family . . . no one asked . . . more often than not we arrived in foreign parts on a ship Dad owned or chartered . . . do you think anyone comes up
to Alex Troy and says “who are you”? After that, more often than not all I ever had to show in Germany was a press card. Even when they kicked me out there was no paperwork. In fact,
the only time I’ve ever had to show papers was Vienna.’

‘So what did you show them?’

‘My Nansen.’

Troy felt he might be in shock. He felt his jaw must have dropped and would not have been surprised to be told he was drooling. Nansen passports were the invention of the Norwegian diplomat, and
quondam explorer, Fridtjof Nansen, who, under the auspices of the League of Nations, attempted to give papers to the stateless, to people who might otherwise – in an otherwise world than the
one that existed after the Great War – have been citizens of countries whose borders had shifted or whose independent status had been simply obliterated. Specifically, the Nansen had been
introduced to help Russian refugees. It was easy to see how Rod had been inspired to ask for one. Harder to see quite why they had given him one. He’d have worn it like a badge on the back of
his lapel, as though he were a member of some secret school society. It reinforced his foreignness just when adolescence made it all the harder to be English. Nansen’s had been a noble
effort, almost half a million stateless people helped. Within the member countries of the League of Nations the passport had some validity. Notably neither the USA nor the USSR were members, and
since Germany had stormed out of the league in 1933, Troy thought a Nansen in the greater Germany was probably not worth the paper it took to print. About as much use as wearing the school
monitor’s badge. Half a million stateless now seemed like a redundant statistic, mathematics for another age . . . the zeroes as meaningless as those on a Weimar stamp – the homeless,
the stateless, the nameless were already teeming in the millions, and we’d been arguing about what to do with them for years – a world of bureaucracy, of quotas, of visas, of
‘send the Jews anywhere but here’, Madagascar, Uganda, the Dominican Republic . . . Pillar . . . Post . . . Palestine . . . anywhere but here. For Rod to be posing – was that the
word? posing – as one of them, to be playing the game of statelessness, to be travelling around Hitler’s Europe on a fifteen-year-old scrap of paper was little short of ridiculous.

‘A Nansen? You travelled around the Third fucking Reich on a fucking Nansen. Are you completely mad?’

‘That’s what Hugh Greene used to say. It’s what the bloke from SS said when he saw me off at Tempelhof. And I was careless, not mad, and I did get away with it.’

‘Rod . . . the Germans didn’t bang you up. That’s amazing . . . absolutely bloody amazing . . . now the British are going to do it!’

‘And I’m going to let them.’

Their mother seemed to snap to life.

‘What did he say?’

‘He said,’ Alex said, ‘that he will not resist this internment.’

‘But he must.’

The next thing Troy knew they were all talking at once, once more. Only Rod and Troy said nothing. Rod looked at him, sad in the eyes, biting on his bottom lip as though on the verge of
explanation and apology that Troy dreaded hearing. He tuned out to the family, stared at the ceiling. Then one word in emphatic English cut through the Babel racket, his mother at the top of her
voice, ‘Enough!’

And she was gone, banging out – nought but verbal rubble in her wake.

‘Jesus Christ,’ Alex said softly. Then more audibly, ‘Freddie, go to her. None of us can. Go to your mother.’

Troy stood in the hallway waiting for any sign that his mother’s feet had touched earth once more.

A matter of minutes later he heard the sound of a piano coming from the red room – his mother playing a note perfect but far too robust
Cathédrale engloutie.
The piece lent
itself to that – the left hand from hell or deep water, Poseidon plays. It was her way, one of her ways, of administering morphine to the soul. Anger had often driven her to the piano during
his childhood. She was an angry woman. His father was not an angry man, indeed Troy had scarcely heard him raise his voice, but the twins drove him to distraction (‘Is it my fault? Have I
taught them to so ignore the court of public opinion that they think they can get away with anything?’) and he and Rod drove his mother to rage. One summer, Troy was almost certain, she had
got through both books of Debussy preludes, one day, one prelude, at a time, as piano therapy for life with small children underfoot.

She stopped, hands poised, twitching above the keyboard.

‘Can’t remember what comes next.’

Neither could Troy.

‘Is it the ninth or the tenth?’

‘Tenth – I’m pretty certain of that.’

The lid slammed down.

‘Then I’m stuffed.’

She sat, fingertips on the lid as though still touching the keys. A silent chord played for no one.

Suddenly she was up, facing him and into a tirade in French so rapid he could not keep up.

‘
Lentement . . . lentement . .
. and preferably in some other language.’

She switched to Russian – ignored the hint – and spoke to him slowly in her French-tinged nineteenth-century Muscovite Russian, the sort of accent that got you put up against a wall
and shot these days.

‘Why are they doing this to me?’

‘To you?’

‘To me. You do not remember the old country.’

Of course Troy didn’t remember the old country – he’d never even been there.

‘You should know. I was born here, and unless you’ve shocking news for me, it was you gave birth to me.’

‘The old fortress,’ she went on, ignoring him. ‘Peter and Paul. Throughout my childhood people vanished into it. After we left, in 1912, my brother Pierre was arrested by the
Tsar’s secret police. He too went into Peter and Paul. And in 1921, after the putsch that Bolsheviks insist was a revolution, my brother André was snatched by the Cheka or the OGPU or
whatever set of initials they had for it in those days. He too went into Peter and Paul. I never saw either of them again.’

Good God, thought Troy, the things this woman had not told him.

‘Now the English Cheka want to put my son in a camp. They do not tell us what camp. They merely say present yourself at such and such a railway station at such and such a time. And I know
nothing. For all the English tell us it could be Peter and Paul . . . it could be Dachau.’

Troy said, ‘The station Rod has to turn up at is St Pancras. That’s the line that goes into Manchester Central. I’d say they were shipping him to the Isle of Man.’

‘The Isle of Man?’

‘It’s all on its own in the Irish Sea between England and Ireland and Scotland.’

‘And what is this island like?’

‘I don’t know. It’s British, but sort of independent. Its own parliament and that sort of thing.’

‘Independent?’

‘Sort of.’

The sigh was massive, continental in its breadth and exasperation.

‘Oh God . . . not another small, faraway country of which we know nothing?’

‘Sort of . . . I really don’t know –but I should hardly think it’s Dachau.’

Just before lunch the next day, Troy felt the specific gravity of the house change. It was close to mystical, the sense that something in the house had changed. He looked into
his father’s study. The old man was standing in the open window, holding his pince-nez in place with a forefinger and staring down at an open volume in the other hand. Yet again searching for
the verse that caught his mood or the mood. No change at all.

His mother passed him in the hallway, vanished into the red room before he could even turn to look at her, and he knew the source of the feeling. She was trailing her mood in a rough wake that
only his father would not feel.

He followed. She stood by the piano, dropped her handbag, pulled off her hat. The hat spun across the room to land neatly on a chair.

‘I have been into town.’

‘Liberty’s,’ he said, lying hopefully. ‘Harrods? Army and Navy?’

‘Downing Street. I have been to see that man Churchill.’

Oh fuck, thought Troy.

‘And how was that man?’

‘I do not know. I had assumed that in view of the number of times I have sat at the dining table with that man that whatever differences might now exist between him and your father I would
be received. They, that is the
Cheka Anglais
, would not let me in. I gave them my card and a flunky came out, a private or a personal or a parliamentary secretary – I could grasp
neither his name nor his title – returned the card and told me the Prime Minister was not available. I was left standing on the steps with a London bobby, feeling like a knife-grinder being
shown the tradesman’s entrance. Do you know what he said to me? This London bobby? He said “Don’t you know there’s a war on madam?” ’

She lifted the piano lid – began, appropriately, at the beginning – got halfway through ‘Danseuses de Delphe’ and stopped.

‘You play so much better than I. Play for me Freddie.’

Time was Troy would have agreed with her. The Troys had thrust music at all their children. The twins had sung like angels, Rod still wasn’t half bad on the violin, but in the eyes (ears)
of his mother it was her son Frederick who shone. Now, he felt rusty, suddenly out of practice – too long living in a house without a piano. He picked up ‘Danseuses’ pretty much
where his mother had left off.