Black Out (31 page)

‘What time is it?’

‘Just after eight. It’s Sunday morning. You’ve had a nice sleep since Friday. That nice Mr Klankiwitch phoned last night to see how you were. I told him you were sleeping like a baby.’

Troy made a mental note to ask Kolankiewicz what he had put in the Mickey Finn he called a sedative. Ruby pulled the curtains open. Troy could not remember when he had last seen the light of day; it seemed like another lifetime. Morning sun slanted into the yard from the east. For once it looked like spring. Temptingly like spring.

He bathed, he dressed, he went out. As he pulled the door behind him he caught sight of Ruby looking at him across the top of a magazine. He had no idea how long she intended to stay, but could not wrap his mind around the problem of letting a prostitute ply her trade out of his parlour. He smiled, imagining Onions’s reaction. He realised that he was still under the Mickey, or he would never have seen the funny side of it. He set off westward. If he could make it as far as Green Park then he might make up his mind where, if anywhere, he was going.

At Piccadilly he stood and looked back in the direction he had come. Across Leicester Square the sun shone gloriously in a sky that was bluer than blue and virtually cloudless, the like of which he could not remember having seen before. He was wrapped in his black overcoat, readily accepting that his mass of bruises was in some way to be equated with childhood illness and a voice in his head had told him maternally that he should not go out without his coat. At the foot of Eros’s pedestal two young women sat in shirtsleeves, daring all for spring sun, and shared a single cigarette.

He walked on into Piccadilly, watching his shadow dance before him. In the brightness of such light the city contrasted sharply with the weather. London thawed. London budded. London ached. Like muscle stretched and strained for too long it yearned to relax. The sense of action, the sense of an ending being almost tangible, Troy found himself wondering if the city would not expire with the first breath of spring like some old man who had spent his energy enduring the depth of winter and had none left for the
simple pleasure of living. What the sun revealed was a city of peeling, blistered paint, of broken, boarded-up windows, of shattered walls and open roofs, of four long years of make do and mend. It was a city scorched and scarred, patched and tattered in the light of spring.

At Half Moon Street he crossed the road into Green Park. A squad of United States military police, white-helmeted, whitegaitered, stood to attention. From somewhere in the park he had heard the sound of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’. As he came closer to the band, as yet unseen, they took up the tune of ‘Little Brown Jug’ and the soldiers swung into action, drilling to the upbeat of Glenn Miller’s arrangement, swinging their rifles from shoulder to ground and through cartwheels on to the other shoulder. The precise ballet of military training.

Troy sat on a bench, marvelling at the beauty of it, cynically curious as to what use it would all be on a French beach in a few weeks’ time. More cynically he had bet Onions ten shillings that the second front would open in Normandy. Onions had taken him up, a firm believer in the
Pas de Calais.
No one, not even the few Belgians Troy knew, was betting on the coast of Belgium. Dunkirk was all very well in such use as ‘the spirit of’, but who in their right mind would risk it all a second time?

The soldiers switched to formation-marching to the tune of ‘Chattanooga Choo Choo’. A crowd of more than a hundred had gathered, and a huge cheer went up as the Americans mapped out their military squares and sang a massed chorus of ‘Pardon me boy’.

All around him the park eased into leaf-hawthorn in its deepest green, the paler green of oaks and chestnuts. And, lagging behind, with hardly a bud to show for themselves, the elm and the ash-ash, always the last to burst into leaf in May and the last to grudgingly give them up, often hanging on until early December. Across the park the mingled scents of spring floated towards Troy. Mayflower, of that he was certain. Lilac? Wasn’t it too early, too optimistic to be thinking of lilac? They separated out like streams of water. Yes, it was lilac, it was lilac. And mingled again, the softness of the lilac overlaid by the sharpness of mayflower, never far from cat’s piss at the best of times.

A couple strolled by arm in arm. A young chattering woman on
the arm of an American first lieutenant. Her scent, caught on the breeze, added itself to the trail of blossom and suddenly Troy knew where he was going. He ran out into Piccadilly, stopped sharply on the pavement, feeling his head spin and his feet tread air, and hailed a cab.

‘Tite Street,’ he said.

At Tite Street he told the driver to drive on. They passed Detective Constable Gutteridge at the corner, slyly smoking on duty. In Tedworth Gardens Troy stopped the cabbie and paid him off. He had surrendered to an irrational hunch, as was so often necessary, and had been right. There, in the middle of the allotment, stooping over a hoe and gently shoving at the weeds was Diana Brack—tattily in mufti; jodhpurs, wellingtons and a moth-eaten Fair-Isle pullover, her hair pulled back into a single pony-tail by a rubber band.

Troy entered the square through a break in the fencing, tucked his hands in his pockets and approached. A few feet away from her the big man in Heavy Rescue uniform was on his knees in front of a large tin bath washing the pig. The pig looked up at Troy, smiled, winked and grunted with pleasure as the bristles of the brush scrubbed her to ecstasy.

‘Wotcha cock,’ said the man.

Brack had her back to Troy and turned to see whom the big man was addressing. She straightened her spine and looked him up and down.

‘What happened to you? You look as though you got hit by a steamroller?’

‘Something like that,’ said Troy.

‘Give me a few minutes,’ she said, and disappeared into a Nissen hut at the edge of her plot.

Troy watched the man scrub the pig, wondering if the pig had really winked at him and silently promising himself he would kill Kolankiewicz for giving him a drug that made pigs wink.

‘That’s a nice shiner you got yourself,’ the man said.

Troy rubbed gently at the eye with his hand.

‘The other day,’ he said, ‘when I came through here in the dark. How did you know I was a policeman?’

‘Stands to reason, old cock. You was chasing the Major. And I
had him tagged for a wrong ‘un months back. Besides, I spent a fair bit o’ my time ‘anging around the likes of you. Gets so I can spot ‘em. I did a lot of work before the war for a detective like – amateur, mind, a gentleman – in fact I’d be doin’ it now but that he took ‘imself orf to the army and one of those ‘ush-’ush jobs. Still, he’ll be back. And we shall like as not have new trails to follow, new murders to solve and new villains to bring to book.’

The man prodded the pig, who scrambled out of the bath and shook herself like a dog. She brushed past Troy, pausing a moment to rub herself against his trouser leg and ambled off to the other end of the allotment, nose to the ground. The big man drained the water and hung the bath on the side of the Nissen hut.

‘Take a look at this,’ he said, leading Troy along the narrow path between his allotment and Brack’s. ‘Know what that is?’

‘Cauliflower,’ said Troy.

‘Broccoli,’ said the man with infinite pride in the esoterica of his own knowledge. ‘White-heading winter broccoli.’

‘A cauliflower by any other name,’ said Troy.

‘Might smell as sweet, but wouldn’t be ‘alf as big. I put this in last May. This May, let’s say another ten days, and I’ll have the fullest, ripest head of broccoli you’ve ever mistook for a cauli. She’ll weigh seventeen pounds I reckon. I gets to eat the head and the pig gets to eat the leaves. What could be fairer?’

Troy looked at the bare, weedy patch that was Brack’s.

‘Not exactly green-fingered, wouldn’t you say?’

‘She tries, old cock, she tries. The Major he done the winter diggin’ for ‘er. All that frost broke up the ground nicely. And when she clears away the weeds she’ll find all those leeks she put in in February, nestling under there like little green needles in their ‘aystack. There’ll be some garlic too. Dunno why she grows that-foreign muck if you ask me - but she did insist.’

‘Why do you say the Major’s a wrong ‘un?’ Troy asked.

But before the man could answer Brack emerged from the Nissen hut, dressed in black skirt and jacket once more, her hair combed and brushed, pulling on her gloves.

‘Are you are a gardening man, Mr Troy?’ she asked in best formal mode.

‘I was when younger,’ he replied. ‘But I have a house in Goodwins Court now—there’s no garden attached.’

‘I see,’ she said, still playing the game for the benefit of the big man. She walked off along the path, slowly, toward the north end of the square, in the direction the pig had taken. The big man was not deceived by distance, physical or metaphorical. He picked up a hoe and returned to weeding his allotment.

‘One reason I’d say he’s a wrong ‘un,’ he said to Troy, ‘is his paying court to her ladyship. She can’t half pick ‘em. The odder the better. Don’t let her lead you too far, cock. She’ll run you ragged.’

Troy caught up with Brack as she left the square at the far side.

‘We cannot go to my house,’ she said at last. ‘You have a man watching it.’ She paused. ‘Of course, you could order him to leave.’

She stopped and turned to face Troy, awaiting his answer.

‘No. I couldn’t. I’m not even supposed to be in London.’

‘Then I suppose I must come to you.’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘That is what you want. You do want me to come to you, don’t you?’

‘I suppose it is,’ he said.

‘Then I shall.’

They walked on, around the perimeter of the square anti-clockwise, towards the corner of Tite Street.

‘What happened? I mean, what happened to your face?’

‘I was attacked. Two nights ago. A man.’

‘A man?’

‘The man.’

‘No – you are mistaken. I told you he’s gone.’

‘How can you be sure?’

‘Because if he were here he would have found me. Even with your man at my door, he would have found a way.’

They paused at the corner. Another yard and Troy would be visible to Gutteridge.

‘Tonight,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ said Troy.

‘As soon as it is dark.’

It was close to sunset. He had drifted all day. Aimlessly. He guessed that he had gone out of the house at nine or nine thirty. He had met Brack an hour or so later, and for the time elapsed since then he could hardly account. By four in the afternoon he had drifted into the Russian tea rooms in Davies Street, a little to the north of Berkeley Square. He had not been there in a while, since before Christmas at least. The tea rooms had been opened the previous spring by a couple of Russian women, serving tea straight from the samovar. Troy did not go for the tea – Samovar tea always tasted stewed to him, though the cakes were passable – he went for the sound, the sibilant susurrus of voices speaking Russian. Of voices speaking Russian and making none of the demands on his belonging that his family made. Here he could listen without obligation. Here he could hear Russian without his sisters’ moral blackmail – or the contempt with which Kolankiewicz occasionally flung the odd phrase at him. More and more he came to realise the ethnic mix that was North America as Canadians and Americans turned up in uniform ordering their tea and chatting to the women behind the counter in fluent, if accented, Russian. Perhaps his origins did not show after all – two young soldiers sat opposite and chatted in Russian as though not expecting him to understand and discussed how backward they thought the English were. They found the lack of refrigeration a puzzle and the quality of the beer objectionable. Imagine liquid wool, one of them said, and you have English beer. What made Milwaukee famous would do the Brits a power of good.

He listened without looking, learning in the language of childhood that he had grown up to be a member of the most tightassed race on earth. But he knew that. Tosca told him that with every other remark. Tosca. Her name tumbled through his nearvacant, narcoleptic mind all the way home, to no purpose and no conclusion. While the euphoria lasted he felt strangely free of desire. Cloudy and sexless. He could visualise the ties that bound him to her, floating out in front of him like streamers, but he could not see her, could not conjure up a face to the magic of the word.

Back home, Troy found a note from Ruby on the mantelpiece.

‘I can take a hint. Gone home to get some kip. If you need me you know where to find me – at the end of the street from half an hour before closing time onwards. Just don’t approach me if it looks as though I’ve got a fare. I can’t afford to lose business just ’cos you have a way of always looking like a copper. Love R. PS. Klankiwitch was mad as hell when I told him you’d gone out.’

It was dark now. He sat in his overcoat in front of the unlit fire, staring at the door. And when he had stared as long as he could he unlocked the door, took off his coat and shoes and crept upstairs to lie on his bed in the darkness. He heard the latch click on the door. He heard a soft shoeless tread upon the stairs. He saw Brack framed in the doorway, slipping her black cloak from her shoulders, flicking back the ever errant forelock from her eyes. Lust batted him in the groin, sharp and hard. The numbness lifted as the desire took him, and with it the pains of all his breaks and bruises returned to rack him.

She walked over to the window framed in the last of the twilight, slowly picking at the buttons on her blouse. Troy got up and stood behind her. She hoisted her skirt to her hips, leant against the window-sill and presented herself to him. He fucked her till he dropped and felt each muscle in his body tear itself free from the next.

He could not be certain, but it seemed that she had picked him up in her arms and lain him back on the bed. She was leaning over him, kissing him on the lips, drowning him in the oh-so-familiar scent.

‘What is it?’ he asked.

‘What’s what?’

‘Your scent.’