Second Violin (20 page)

‘We’d best get to the shelter, Freddie.’

‘False alarm, George.’

‘How do you know?’

Troy didn’t bother to look up from his papers.

‘Trust me.’

‘You know the procedure . . . how would it look to Joe Public if us coppers didn’t stick to the drill?’

‘George . . . nobody’s looking.’

‘Course not . . . they’re running for the shelters. Take a look out the window. The street was full half a minute ago. Now . . . they’ve just scattered like hens!’

‘I say again, false alarm.’

Bonham dithered.

‘At least one of us should turn off the gas. They tell you to turn off the gas.’

‘And then they give you a gas mask, just in case.’

‘It’s not funny, Freddie.’

Troy still didn’t look up.

‘Of course not. But we’ve read all the bumf, haven’t we?’

‘Course.’

‘And you taped up all the windows with sticky tape.’

‘You saw me do it . . . an’ you didn’t lift a finger to help.’

‘And you’ve got a stirrup pump?’

‘Yep.’

‘And a bucket of sand?’

‘We got lots o’ buckets o’ sand. I reckon we got six or seven scattered round the nick. I have to stop blokes from putting their fag ends out in ’em.’

‘Well, George . . . with a gas mask, a stirrup pump, seven buckets of sand and about five hundred feet of sticky brown tape across the windows I’d say we’re close to
impregnable. You go to the shelter if you like. I’m finishing this pile of bumf, then I’m nipping out for a spot of lunch, a bit of a stroll across the manor, and, if any Germans get
past our wall of firebuckets and sticky brown tape, I’ll let you know.’

After lunch Troy stood a while in the Whitechapel Road opposite the Underground station. People-watching, which might be deemed second nature to a policeman, had become a
pseudo-academic hobby of the Thirties, under the title ‘Mass Observation’. All over the country hundreds of volunteers, ‘observers’, who might otherwise have been out
youth-hostelling or playing mouth organs, had compiled reports on the state of the nation, from the results of nothing more scientific than people-watching. People had, as Bonham had declared,
‘scattered like hens’. Now, it was as if Troy was watching the same film run backwards. Most people seemed to be coming from somewhere rather than going to somewhere – although
Troy recognised that this was an entirely subjective point of view. The same people he saw coming up from the Underground – one of the sub-surface stations, hardly bombproof by any stretch
– could be ‘scattering’ as surely as those that had fled. There was a zebra crossing a few yards east of the station, broad black and white bands painted on the tarmacadam, and a
pair of belisha beacons – flashing globes of orange on striped poles that signalled safety to the pedestrian. When they had been introduced a few years earlier by Mr Hore-Belisha, the then
Minister of Transport, after whom they were named – a man now stuck with the unenviable task of Minister for War, and the same man subject to the rantings of those who wanted Jews out of
government – Troy had watched a drunk trying vainly to blow one out under the impression they were gaslit. The traffic was now stopped at the zebra stripes and the flashing beacons to let a
stream of pedestrians pass. Last of all was an old woman pushing a perambulator – no baby, it was piled high with her possessions – splashing through the puddles left by last
night’s thunderstorm. Coming or going? No matter. What mattered was the pair of well-dressed gentlemen poised at the crossing in the front seat of a sleek, grey, convertible, three-and-a-half
litre, six-cylinder Armstrong-Siddeley – top down, chatting to each other in the accents of received pronunciation. Everything about them said ‘toff’, the car, the clothes, the
inevitable if accidental hauteur. Indeed, Troy had met both at his father’s dinner table, although he knew damn well they would not recognise him out of that context in a thousand years
– Harold Nicolson, MP for Leicester, and Victor Cazalet, MP for Chippenham, one National Labour, the other Conservative, thereby demonstrating how in English life class so readily superseded
politics. They hadn’t noticed Troy, nor had they noticed the old woman still crossing at her snail’s pace. But she had noticed them. She left her pram and shuffled across to the
driver’s side, to harangue Cazalet.

‘’Ere. You. You lot. Toffs!’

Both heads turned.

‘This bleedin’ war. It’s all your fault. You fink the poor ever started a neffin’ war? What poor bloke ever started a neffin’ war. Wars is toff fings, they is.
It’s all your neffin’ fault. It’s all the fault of the neffin’ rich! You fink we wanna go through all that again –’

Cazalet cut her short, smiling politely all the time, slipped the car into gear and drove carefully around the pram.

The old woman pushed it to the edge of the road, up onto the pavement, banging into Troy as she did so. An arthritic hand, all bulging knuckles, beckoned him closer.

‘I lorst me ’usband in Flanders, lorst my Johnnie I did. I lorst two o’ me bruvvers an’ all. And this bunch o’ tosspots fink I’m gonna send me sons now.
Fuckem, fuckem all. We could’ve seen this ’Itler bloke off in thirty-three!’

She did not wait for a reply. Troy had none ready. It was, he thought, a bit like hearing one of his father’s editorials boiled down to the rub with a few choice foul words thrown in for
good measure. If only his father had the succinct freedom to print ‘fuckem’. If only she’d known to whom she had been speaking.

Troy looked up at the clear afternoon sky. It was cloudless, it was still summer. It was hard to imagine the sky darkened by bombers, yet every pundit in the land was predicting, and had done so
for years, that London would be pounded to dust. It was the received wisdom of the times. He looked up – trying to get through his head the simple notion of being ‘at war’. It
didn’t work. It just didn’t work. Besides, he’d had high hopes of being out of Stepney before the balloon went up. He’d never expected to see this war through in
Stepney.

17 September 1939
The Day Russia Invaded Poland

A one-word Latin telegramme arrived at Church Row:

What now? It would be the last word they would ever exchange directly.

What now? Alex knew only too well what now, and in the evening summoned his entire family into his study. With the exception of his younger son, Frederick, the policeman, they all managed to be
there. Rod, Rod’s wife Lucinda, known as Cid, his twin daughters Sasha and Masha, their respective husbands – the Hon. Hugh Darbishire and Lawrence Stafford – his wife of
forty-one years, Maria Mikhailovna, and his youngest brother Nikolai Rodyonovich, Professor Troitsky – the only other member of his family to cross to England with him, and the last one to
cling to the old family name.

‘I shall be retiring from public life – forthwith.’

There was a prolonged silence, a sigh from his wife that he took to be one of relief, and a little coughing from the sons-in-law. It was Lawrence who spoke first.

‘Might we ask why?’

‘Why? Because one lives with the consequences of one’s own words and actions. Because I have made a fool of myself in public and will henceforth be a fool in private. If that were
not enough . . . well . . . I am old . . . and we are at war.’

‘Actually . . . y’know it’s hardly even started yet . . . and there were these chaps in the club last night who reckoned it’ll all be over by Christmas,’ Hugh
chipped in. And everyone in the room looked at him as though he were the fool.

18 September 1939

It was an odd normality. As so many said, it didn’t feel like being at war at all. There was something fake and phoney about it. No lurid patriotism, no vicious
xenophobia. No raining death of shrapnel and cordite. It was, for want of a better phrase in Troy’s mind, business as usual. What had changed, in odd ways, struck him as changed for the
better. The city was darker, quieter, moonlit, almost enchanted. The nights suited him fine. To walk London after dark was to touch beauty, to immerse in . . . in what? He hadn’t found the
word. He had merely found the vision. To sit in Piccadilly Circus, freed from the electric rain of advertising and look at London as none had looked at it since the 1880s – and even then
they’d had gaslight. This embracing darkness, smothering night – surprised by a kiss – had not been seen in centuries.

It was a fortnight after the outbreak of war. Two weeks of apprehension and unreality. It was the day after Russia’s invasion of Poland. The telephone on his desk rang.

‘Stanley Onions,’ said a northern voice at the other end.

Troy shifted a little in his seat at the sound of Onions’ voice. A hint of sitting to attention. It had been ages since he’d heard that blunt Lancashire accent crackle down the wires
from Scotland Yard. Onions outranked Troy in spades. A superintendent, and, at that, the superintendent in charge of the prestigious Murder Squad.

‘You’ll recall I said I’d be in touch?’

Not that Troy could forget, but that had been the best part of three years ago.

‘I’ve been watching you. You’ve a few feathers in yer cap. A few scalps on yer belt.’

‘I’ve been lucky,’ Troy said with a modesty he did not much feel.

‘Luck’s got nowt to do wi’ it. I said, I said back in thirty-six that when the time was right I’d want you for the Yard. Now’s the time. You’ll get a
fortnight’s leave to mek the move, but I want you here at the end o’ the month.’

‘Just like that?’

‘Take it or leave it, lad, it’s not a negotiation.’

‘Then I take.’

‘Good. ’Cos there’s more. You’ll be stepping up a rank. From the thirtieth you’ll draw a sergeant’s pay. I don’t think for one moment you need it, but
I’ve never yet met a man who’d turn down a pay rise.’

Of course he wouldn’t. In fact his gratitude was inexpressible. Just as well. Onions rang off and left him no time to express it.

When the phone rang a second time, Troy had already made up his mind to sound a little more grateful, a touch more enthusiastic about a job he would have chopped off a leg to get. But it
wasn’t Onions, it was his father.

‘My boy, do you have any holidays owing?’

‘I’m twenty-four, Dad. I’ve left school. In the Police Force we call it leave. And as it happens, I’ve got a fortnight in hand. I’ll need a couple days of that to
sort a few things out . . . so tell me what you have in mind.’

‘Let us go abroad while we still can. Let us go to the Continent before Hitler’s tanks roll over it. Let us go to France and Italy before the lights go out all over Europe
again.’

Troy was acutely aware of how that sentence ended – Sir Edward Grey, Foreign Secretary in 1914: ‘We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime’. It was, Troy thought, less
the onset of war than awareness of his own age and mortality that motivated his father. It occurred to Troy that he did not even know how old his father was. But he was old. Possibly even over
eighty.

‘Not perhaps the grand tour, but France and Italy. Perhaps Le Touquet, and Paris and then on to Rome and Amalfi.’

‘Not Le Touquet, Dad.’

‘As you wish, but why not? Time was we would go
en famille
at least once a year.’

‘That’s precisely why not.’

Troy hoped his father would probe no further and he didn’t. Troy had no wish to offend the old man by letting him know, if he did not know already, how bored he had been as a small boy on
a French beach looking back at England, his parents conversing in multiple languages with decrepit strangers, the well-heeled, well-clothed, musty refugees of a revolution that, whilst it had
happened in his lifetime, might as well have happened a thousand years ago to a boy often. Troy had long since lost track of, ceased to pay heed to, M. le Comte de Thisanthat or Prince
Whateveroffsky and their well-wrapped, lace-enfolded, big-bosomed wives, the latter of whom seemed far too willing to be enchanted by his pre-pubescent surliness.

‘Why not choose your own itinerary, my boy?’

‘Really?’

‘Be my guest.’

‘Paris . . . of course, Paris. But I’d rather see Florence or Siena than Rome.’

Alex was thinking. Troy counted past ten before his father spoke again.

‘Good, good,’ he said. ‘Paris it is, and Siena. September in Siena is still outdoor weather. Who would not sit in the campo gazing at the night sky with a Campari and soda in
hand? But . . . would you mind a substitution for Florence?’

‘Try me,’ said Troy.

‘Monte.’

‘Monte?’

‘Monte Carlo.’

Bloody hell.

‘I think you need a little vice if not in your soul then in your fingertips. I have not been to Monte in years and you never have. Stop being a policeman for two or three days and indulge
in the sins.’

‘Do I get a choice of sin?’

‘Be my guest.’

Troy’s father had two
modi operandi
for breakfast when travelling. Silence behind a newspaper – the newspaper in any of four or five languages – and
garrulousness with strangers he had only just met but to whose geopolitical wisdom and crackpot theories he would listen with unfeigned interest. Neither mode required him to talk to his son. Troy
would either take breakfast in his room or sit in the dining room of the Georges V with a novel or a newspaper, ready to be distracted from it whenever his father decided to sum up what a night and
a morning of incessant natter had gleaned for him. He’d read that morning’s
Post
with a professional eye – the Old Bailey report on the conviction of two soldiers for the
savage murder and necrophiliac rape of one ‘Amaryllis’, prostitute of Hindhead, Surrey; a case his new boss, Stanley Onions, had chosen to handle personally. Scarcely in a lighter vein
he had chosen
Splendères et Misères des Courtesanes
by Balzac as his novel. Not possessing his father’s facility with language – two was quite enough, and French
made only two-and-a-half – he read a leaden Victorian translation. It seemed an appropriate book for Paris, and would last him well into Italy, if they ever got there.