Old Flames (11 page)

Khrushchev sniffed the air.

Soot or madness or death? Troy wondered. Railways always put Troy in mind of Anna Karenina’s death under the wheels of a train. Grace Kelly had never, as far as he knew, played
Anna—the version he knew was Garbo’s. That mournful, miserable beauty. The moist smell of the underground, that ancient mixture of soot and humanity, was as strong as the reek of
cordite to him, inseparable from the thought of death, the thought of the woman in black laying her head upon the tracks.

Khrushchev’s gaze swept around from the low, dark, dirty roof, across the clutter of signs and posters to the lantern glow of the bar once more. He walked back towards Troy, his short legs
shooting out stiffly like a tin soldier’s, and placed his empty glass on the bar.

‘It lacks unity,’ he said.

Unity was an impossibility. Only in the 1930s had it even approached unity and that was in terms of aspects of style. Troy would put it no more strongly than that—Beck’s map, the
Nuremberg lighting at Arnos Grove, the modernist lines of the newer stations out along the far reaches of the Piccadilly line. By now, in the mid-fifties, that short burst of style had been
absorbed and the true nature of tlie system reasserted itself. There was only one word for it.

‘It’s ramshackle,’ he told Khrushchev. ‘But it works.’

‘It works, but can you be proud of it?’

‘I don’t think Londoners think of it with pride. I doubt whether they think of it at all.’

‘Why not?’ he said. ‘A little awe for the works of men would not be out of place. You have cathedrals and palaces galore. Where is the palace of the people?
What
is the
palace of the people if not a railway station?’

Troy had no answer as yet, and fielded Khrushchev’s question with one of his own that had been nagging at him for quarter of an hour.

‘What is it you can smell? You’ve done that at every place we stopped.’

Khrushchev breathed in deeply.

‘Soot,’ he said. ‘Soot and … and … despair.’

Troy looked out towards the tunnel, to the drizzling misery of a black night in London. For so long now it had struck him as some makeshift shanty, shabbytown, shorn of all pride, laid bare,
without dignity. But despair? How had Khrushchev noticed that? Where had he seen it—where, since it seemed his operational mode, had he smelt it? Was this what the national odour of wet
gabardine spelt out to the perceptive nose?

‘Soot,’ Khrushchev said again. ‘And despair … and someone frying bacon.’

He wanted Khrushchev to see Stepney Green. After his outburst to the Labour Party on the matter of who had done what in the war, it was fitting that he should see some of what London had been
through. They left the underground at Whitechapel. By the Blind Beggar, a pub gaining a reputation for trouble, and deemed by Troy to be highly unsuitable for the experiment they were essaying,
they crossed over the Mile End Road. At the junction of Hannibal Road and Stepney Green they turned right, down the side of the Green, past the London Jewish Hospital and rows of abandoned
houses—windowless, some floorless, with the zigzag shadows of collapsed staircases scorched onto the walls and blackened hearths stranded halfway up without rooms to wrap them—and out
into the blitzed remains of Cardigan Street.

It had not occurred to Troy before that every other street in this neck of the woods was named after one aspect or another of the last war Britain had actually fought with Russia—unless
you counted Murmansk, which Troy did not and Khrushchev surely would. The importance of Stepney Green to Troy was that it was as flat today as the day Hitler had levelled it in 1940. Hundreds of
homes blown to dust. Thousands of lives lost, many, many more disrupted and displaced. This corner of the East End had never recovered from the Blitz, had never retrieved its people from the
dispersal of the war, nor reclaimed its identity in the peace. It was grassed over now, but to Troy the lines of rubble were still visible beneath the wilderness of green. As Troy told him this
Khrushchev nodded, said nothing. Just looked and sighed. At last he said, ‘I saw Stalingrad. I saw Moscow. I was there when we took back Lvov.’

It was not a had-it-worse-than-thou comparison. The sadness in his tone told Troy it was identification. He’d known the solid world to dissolve about him, the permanence of life to crumble
in the dust of war.

‘You should rebuild,’ he said. ‘I noticed from the train last week. And around St Paul’s. So much of London is like this. I find it hard to see why. The Germans level our
cities; we rebuild them. We house our people.’

Troy felt almost in need of Brother Rod, who could give Khrushchev chapter and verse ad tedium on Britain’s failure to rebuild and rehouse in the aftermath of war. They walked along
Balaclava Street towards the end of Jamaica Street. A huge chimney stack lay on its side like a slaughtered Titan. It had fallen almost intact, back broken like a ship run aground, but not
shattered. Troy had no idea when. It had been standing the last time he looked, but that had been years ago. He usually avoided this route, almost unconsciously. It must have been five or six years
since he had walked this way. Twenty years ago, as a beat bobby, he walked it every day. He found it hard to admit, but the place held too many memories.

‘Do the English keep their bombsites as monuments?’ Khrushchev asked. Troy had never looked at it this way before, but silently agreed that that was exactly what they did. Their
finest hour laid out in blasted brick and broken glass. And when they were fed up with them as monuments, they turned them into car parks.

It had turned chilly. The warmth as Troy pushed open the door into the Bricklayer’s Arms was welcoming. The people’s palace sounded to Troy like a good name for a defunct music hall.
He thought the notion that it could be reapplied to a railway station, any railway station, an absurd piece of Soviet pseudo-realism. If anything the people’s palaces were public houses. In
their relentless, unvarying shades, dirty red, dirty brown, they were, he thought, some sort of refuge from the cloying English privacy, the world behind the rustling lace curtains, and an escape
from the new invader, the one-eyed god of the living room. The public bar was half full at best. Monday was hardly the best night of the week for an evening in a pub, nor was Tuesday, most people
being flat broke from the weekend, lacking the courage to run up a slate until pay day—Friday—was visible in the near future—but it would have to do.

‘Before we go in,’ Troy said to his companion, ‘I should warn you. It’s Monday. Don’t expect cheerful cockneys doing the Lambeth Walk and the
Hokey-Cokey.’

‘Hokey-Cokey,’ said Khrushchev. ‘What is Hokey-Cokey?’

‘Forget it,’ Troy said. ‘It’s too difficult to explain.’

And so saying concealed the truth, that he’d no real idea what it was himself.

The pub had hardly changed since the end of the war, it was if anything simply ten years shabbier, ten years deeper into its nicotine hue. Most noticeably, the spot behind the bar where
Churchill’s photograph had hung for so long was now occupied by one of the footballer Tom Finney, star of Preston North End, a suitably neutral team on turf naturally split between Millwall
and West Ham and, as it happened, the hometown of Eric the landlord, a man who had been known to crack heads over the matter of local loyalties.

Troy found Bonham at a corner table playing cribbage with two other men. He introduced Khrushchev as Uncle Nikki. Bonham looked down at Khrushchev from his six foot six plus and scrutinised
him.

‘No he’s not,’ he said. ‘I know your Uncle Nikki. He’s a little fat bloke with a beard.’

‘Well, this is a little fat bloke without a beard,’ Troy said. ‘This is my Uncle Nikki on my mother’s side. And he doesn’t speak English.’

‘Good Eefenning,’ said Khrushchev. ‘Good Eefenning to you oll.’

‘Well, that’s his limit,’ Troy said.

‘A pleasure to meet you,’ Khrushchev went on.

‘Mutual,’ Bonham replied and moved up the bench to make room for him. He looked at Troy.

‘Are you quite sure?’ he said.

Troy sat down opposite Khrushchev. ‘It’s just phrases, that’s all. He picks up the odd thing.’

‘Mind the gap!’ said Khrushchev, smiling at his own parrotry.

Bonham looked quizzically at Troy. ‘Are you two having me on?’

‘Honestly,’ Troy protested. ‘It’s just phrases.’

‘Sounds pretty damn kosher to me,’ said Bonham. ‘I think you’d better get them in, Freddie.’

Over a pint of best—Troy had no idea where Khrushchev had learnt ‘wallop’—they taught him the rudiments of cribbage. Khrushchev paid enough attention to pass muster but
was clearly far more interested in the players than the play. Next to Troy sat Alf and Stanley, a docker and a jobbing carpenter respectively. From Alf Khrushchev learnt of the power of the trades
union and the way they had wrestled a decent standard of living from their employers before the war under the leadership of Ernest Bevin. Khrushchev’s eyebrows rose a fraction at the mention
of the name. From Stanley he learnt of the uncertainties of casual labour on the building sites east of the Lea Valley, of tax-cheating cash in hand, no insurance and no questions asked, and of the
long lay-offs when no houses were built and no carpenters required. The reassuring proof, the quick quick slow of capitalism’s inherent cycle of boom and slump.

The kitten’s boundless curiosity humanised Khrushchev. The nutty brown eyes sparkled; the fat, fleshy lips parted in a revealing gap-tooth smile that needed only to chomp on a cigarette
holder to look just like Roosevelt’s famous letterbox grin. Khrushchev delved into everything, asked about their families, their wives, the education of their children, and of course, he
asked them how they voted and what they thought of their leaders. They were both solidly Labour, but Gaitskell was a mystery to them, too new a leader to have made any definite impression. Eden,
Stanley told him, was a joke, a living anachronism. Why not, Alf retorted, the whole country was one ‘bleedin’ great anachronism’—were they living in 1926 or 1956? Bonham
said he felt quite certain that life was better. There had been, he declared, progress. Lots of it.

‘What do you mean?’ Alf asked. ‘Washing machines? Fridges?’ And spitting contempt, ‘The telly?’

‘National Health Service?’ said Stanley. ‘Ain’t that progress? Heard the one about the National Health Service?’

Alf groaned. Who had not heard the National Health joke? Only Troy’s newfound Uncle Nikki. Troy dutifully translated it for Khrushchev, rendering Stanley’s poor version of Max Miller
as precisely as he could.

‘This bloke on the building site. Comes in every morning, picks up a full sack of cement, grunting fit to burst, then throws it down. Next day, does the same thing, and the next day and
the day after that. Eventually one of his mates comes over and says, “Bert, why do you fling a full sack of cement around first thing each morning?” “Well,” says Bert,
“I pays me stamp to the Government every week, and I’ve had me free pair o’ specs and I’ve had me free set of false teeth—I’ll be buggered if I won’t get
me free truss as well.”

Khrushchev laughed. It might well have been the funniest joke the man had ever heard. He threw back his head and roared, slapped the table with the flat of his hand and hooted with laughter.

It was almost ten-thirty. Troy felt exhausted. He dearly wished they could call it a night. He had never guessed that being an interpreter for the nosiest man alive would prove so taxing. Nor
would he have anticipated that the dialogue Khrushchev had sought so keenly would have touched himself so little. He added next to nothing of his own to the litany of complaint—the great
British whine—that Alf, dejected middle age and Stan, frustrated youth, poured out for Khrushchev’s benefit. It was left to Bonham to offer the inadequacies of moderation, the
unconvincing reassurance that we had emerged from the world war with ‘fings better than wot they was’ and that ‘never again’ would we suffer the tribulations of the
thirties. Troy had no heart for such argument, and when Stan aired his view that he’d be ‘better off in America’, that it was ‘years ahead of us, years’, and that
he’d ‘be off like a shot’ if he’d the price of the passage, he rendered it precisely and neutrally and watched the glint in Khrushchev’s eyes.

‘Is this your Britain?’ he asked of Troy. ‘The Forty-ninth state, a nation of second-rate, would-be Americans? Do you all want to be Americans?’

The Bricklayer’s Arms, like many local pubs, closed when the last policeman in the bar chose to go home. On the dot often-thirty, far from calling last orders, Eric the landlord came round
to collect empties and fresh orders.

‘Where’s the little feller tonight?’ Eric asked.

‘What little feller?’ said Troy.

‘That little feller,’ Bonham said, pointing off over Troy’s shoulder. Troy squirmed round in his seat. At the bar was a short, ugly man in a heavy black overcoat, glistening
with raindrops, Homburg pushed back on his head,
News Chronicle
sticking out of his pocket. If there was one man in London Troy could have done without tonight, it was Ladislaw Konradovitch
Kolankiewicz. Polish exile, Senior Pathologist for the Home Office, one of the finest minds at the Yard’s disposal, and the most foul-mouthed, bloody-minded, cantankerous creature ever to
walk the earth.

‘Oh God,’ Troy said to Bonham. ‘What’s he doing here?’

‘Mondays and Thursdays. Our regular crib nights. He’s been coming for about five years now.’

‘Why didn’t you warn me!’

Too late. Kolankiewicz had picked up his pint and was walking towards them, quizzically scrutinising Khrushchev. He sat down next to Troy.

‘Inch up, smartyarse.’

Then he paused to suck the foam off his pint, all the time staring at Khrushchev across the rim of the glass. He set it down.

‘Who’s the new boy?’ he asked.

‘It’s Fred’s Uncle Nikki,’ Bonham volunteered.

‘I know your Uncle Nikki, he’s a little fat bloke with a beard.’

‘A different Uncle Nikki. On my mother’s side,’ Troy said, and dropping his voice to a whisper he leaned in close to Kolankiewicz.