Second Violin (28 page)

Troy opened his fist and let the boy trouser the sixpence. Turned to Nikolai and said, ‘Now do you believe me?’

Nikolai knocked back the last of his tea, and muttered, ‘Spoilsport’.

They parted at the Cromwell Road where a set of steps descend from a traffic island into a tunnel, and thence to the Underground. It had been a delight since childhood for Troy to vanish in this
way. Even at twenty-four it was a touch surreal to pop down a hole in the road like Alice after the white rabbit.

As the stairs emerged into the tunnel, hands grabbed Troy and banged him back against the wall with enough force to knock the air from his lungs. The hands that pinned him belonged to a man far
bigger than he, but the face that loomed up was Steerforth’s.

‘What do you think you’re playing at?’

‘I’m sorry, sir . . .?’ Troy feigned.

‘Tea Rooms, laddie! What were you doing in the Tea Rooms?’

‘Having tea. Eating lunch.’

A blow to the solar plexus told him this was not the right answer.

‘Who’s the old man?’

As Troy had no breath to answer Steerforth yelled the question again – into his face.

‘My uncle.’

‘Why there? Why that caff? Why not any other caff?’

‘He’s Russian. He came over with my father. He’s a regular at the Tea Rooms.’

‘A regular?’

‘He goes there to drink Russian tea and speak Russian. That accounts for about ninety-nine per cent of their trade, I should think.’

Another body-bending blow to the gut.

‘You are too fuckin’ clever by half. Did anybody ever tell you that?’

‘Frequently.’

Another hammer blow that took Troy to his knees.

People coming down the tunnel from the Museum end stopped. The Branch copper let Troy fall. Steerforth turned on his onlookers, blazing.

‘Police business. Move along! Now!’

And they did.

Troy was on the ground now – one more blow and he felt he’d puke. One kick to the belly and he did.

Steerforth knelt down next to him, a faux-avuncular tone in his voice.

‘Son, I’ve tried to tell you. You just don’t bloody listen. There’s copper business, and there’s Branch business. And you seem to get ’em mixed up. So you and
your uncle fancied tea in a Russian caff. You just picked a caff I had under surveillance. You blundered onto my patch like a bull in a china shop. Do it again, and I’ll make you wish
you’d never been born. D’ye understand laddie?’

‘Under surveillance?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then you need to learn discretion, Mr Steerforth. Your men stick out like redwoods in the desert. Those two blokes by the fireplace might just as well wear signs saying
“Copper”. If I spotted them, I’ll bet your target did too.’

Steerforth hauled off and hit Troy in the mouth with his fist.

‘You cocky little gobshite! This is your last warning! Stay off my patch!’

They left him there. On the floor of the tunnel. Puddled in his own vomit, a familiar reek of offal, a trickle of blood oozing from the corner of his mouth. A woman stopped, bent down to Troy
and asked if he was alright. If it weren’t that she spoke in English Troy would have been prepared to swear it was the same woman who had approached him after his last punch-up with
Steerforth.

‘I’ll be fine,’ he lied. ‘As soon as I get to my feet.’

And he’d no idea how long that would take.

She gave him her hanky. Women did that. He’d no idea why, but he’d soon have a collection of women’s handkerchiefs.

‘You’ve got to report him this time.’

‘No.’

‘You can’t let him get away with this.’

Troy spat blood into the basin, felt Kitty’s fingertips run down his back, healing, soothing, provoking.

‘He won’t. You’re going to kill him for me. Remember?’

‘Ha, bloody, ha.’

On the Sunday they had lumbered themselves. Lunch with the Stiltons. Dinner with the Troys.

Earlier in the week, the conversation had gone . . .

‘My mum wants to meet you. God knows why.’

‘What have you told her?’

‘I ain’t told her a thing. Not a sausage. It’s Dad.’

‘What does he say?’

‘How should I know? But it’s obvious, innit . . . we’re y’know . . . bound to be curious.’

They were in bed. Kitty slumped against him. His hand cupped around her left breast arousing a nipple.

‘We’re what?’

‘Don’t make me spell it out, Troy.’

‘We’re . . .’

‘Don’t you dare use that word! Don’t you dare!’

She squirmed to look him in the face.‘All the others is nicer.’

‘Of course. My mother is interested too. She asked if I’d care to bring my young lady to dinner on Sunday.’

‘Wot? Next Sunday? But I said we’d have dinner in Stepney.’

‘That’s fine . . . dinner in Stepney is surely in the middle of the day, whereas in Hampstead it’s never before eight in the evening.’

‘You don’t say?’

‘Are you sneering?’

‘Are you being snotty?’

It seemed to Troy that he had been in countless East End rooms just like this over the last few weeks. At the same time nothing had been quite like Edna Stilton’s vast
kitchen basement, with its constantly running coal-fired Aga, its table for a dozen or more and its constant stream of children and in-laws.

Mrs Stilton stared at the bruise on his face and seemed too embarrassed to ask. Walter said simply ‘You do seem to cop it, don’t you, lad?’

They were thirteen at table. He wasn’t superstitious, but he’d have difficulty keeping track.

Brothers Kevin and Trevor, two young naval ratings home on leave, who shook his hand heartily but thereafter seemed to communicate only with one another. Miss Greenlees, the lodger –
bottle-thick spectacles and a job at Finsbury Town Hall. Sister Rose and her husband, Tom, from the Ministry of Works. Sister Vera, not yet twenty and already her mother’s rival for control
of the kitchen – brother Terence, ‘Call me Tel’, the baby of the family, picked on by all who came before. And sister Reen and her husband, Maurice.

Troy had known Maurice Micklewhite before the war. He had thought him a wide boy. So many from Watney Market were, but Mo was clean as a whistle. Whatever it was he’d been up to he’d
not been nicked. And he’d married a copper’s daughter. Hence, this no longer being Troy’s manor, he earned the benefit of what doubt there had been.

‘I’ve volunteered, Freddie. Only way to beat the call-up. I’ll be in the RAF in less than a fortnight.’

‘Flying?’

‘I hope so. What’s the RAF if you’re stuck on the ground twiddling a spanner or mashing tea? Not for me – I’ve asked to train as a pilot. I’ve twenty-twenty
vision. They’re screaming for pilots. Can’t see ’em turning me down.’

Troy thought that class alone might be a reason the RAF would want Mo mashing tea rather than flying Spitfires, but he said nothing. Instead Maurice said it for him.

‘I know what you’re thinking. A cockney pilot. Accent like a pile o’ broken brick, and no ’andle-bar moustache. But them days is over. Just you wait and see, them days is
over.’

Crude, but touching. Troy hoped he was right. Troy sincerely hoped he was right. His sister-in-law clearly didn’t think them days were over at all, and from the look on Edna
Stilton’s face nor did she. Walter, Troy had concluded weeks ago, was a brick, a prince among coppers – neither impressed nor dismayed by the upper-crust accent that Troy did nothing to
leaven. Others there were who reacted as though the vowels of received pronunciation spelt snob – or as Kitty had put it a day or two back, ‘snotty’.

Over rabbit pie . . .

‘Your dad borrowed a shotgun and bagged four out in Essex.’

. . . Mrs Stilton quizzed Troy . . . about his job . . . his prospects . . . his family . . . and while Troy answered honestly and thought that there was no other way but honestly, Mrs Stilton
seemed to him to be flinching at every response, and all but reeling from his accent. No aspect of his world touched any part of hers.

‘So you ain’t really a Londoner, then?’

‘I don’t think so. In fact, I’m not sure what I am. It’s the kind of conversation I often find myself having with my brother.’

Uncertainty was not Mrs Stilton’s
modus operandi,
and it was what had geared his entire life from the day his father fled Russia.

‘I mean . . . I’m London born and bred. I was born in this house. My mum and dad bought this house straight off the builder in 1887. I lived here all me life. Till I married Walter
there weren’t even anyone from another borough in the family that I knew of. We was all Stepney.’

Stepney to Troy was more cosmopolitan than it was to Mrs Stilton. He’d spent weeks rounding up Stepney-ites whose origins amounted to a sampling of most of Europe, and if his dad’s
anecdotes were true, Joe Stalin himself had been one of Edna Stilton’s neighbours a few doors down in Jubilee Street before the last war.

He was being warned off. He knew it, she knew it . . . Troy wondered if Walter did.

Stilton had no questions. But then he knew the answers. At the end of the meal he lit up his pipe, popped the top button on his trousers and seemed content to play a benign
paterfamilias.
Troy could not help feeling that he had been found wanting. Wrong part of London, wrong school, wrong accent, wrong origins, wrong man. And he could not help feeling that Kitty had not even noticed
when her mother had slipped from questions into a busy, let’s-clear-away silence. No, them days were not over.

Kitty said she could not eat another meal.

Troy said that was OK. He’d call his parents and postpone.

Kitty said, ‘Nah – let’s get it over with.’

‘It isn’t meant to be an ordeal, you know.’

‘You sayin’ dinner with my lot wasn’t?’

Troy said nothing.

‘’Cos I know what it’s like. I know what they’re like. Me mum’s always got a thousand questions, me dad’s watching his plate for the chance of seconds or
watching my plate in the hope I’ll leave something – Tom and Rose can only talk about Tom’s job and Tom’s next promotion and Kev and Trev are wrapped up in a world made up of just the two of them.’

So – she had noticed after all. Troy deemed discretion to be the better part of valour.

‘I have twin sisters, you know.’

‘Fine. They can’t be as bad as my pair can they?’

But they could.

It was not one of his father’s good days. And if his father was not having a good day, the family wasn’t having a good day. It was one of those days when he never
got past the dressing-gown stage. A bee entered his bonnet at breakfast, usually over something he’d read in that morning’s paper, and shaving and dressing he went to the wall until
he’d worked through it.

His mother looked at the bruise on Troy’s face and said nothing. His father did not notice. His uncle said, ‘Ach, I leave you alone for a day and look what happens.’

Dinner was a poor showing. The twins’ husbands were away in the armed forces, leaving them bored and restless. The only other guest was his Uncle Nikolai, seated next to his mother, and
monopolised by her in French. Troy was seated next to his father as the one most likely to cope with his obsession if it ever found utterance, which left Kitty where he would not have put her,
stranded between the sisters, Sasha and Masha. It left him craving Rod’s company, the decencies and certainties of Rod’s social code, but Rod was holed up writing his book on Berlin and
Vienna and could not be tempted from it.

Troy heard Kitty telling his sisters that she was a policewoman, and he thought that perhaps they were all in a household where that remark might not be a show-stopper, when his father suddenly
surfaced.

‘Latvia.’

‘Sorry Dad. What was that?’

‘Lithuania.’

Ah, that was the bee – Stalin’s reoccupation of the Baltic States.

‘Estonia.’

‘Yes, Dad.’

‘Churchill was right. It is a war of conquest. A land grab from both sides. The puzzling thing is why now? Why did Stalin not roll over these pygmy nations when he rolled over
Poland?’

The plate was pushed away. Troy knew the gesture. He’d eat no more as it got in the way of talking. He wasn’t the only one not eating. Troy could see Kitty picking at her food, and
wasn’t sure whether it was the company that put her off or the alien nature of the dish itself – a casserole of cock pheasant, out of season. A bit odd, a bit high. As desperate a dish
as rabbit pie had been.

‘It is to give with one hand and to take with the other – Lenin granted independence to Georgia. Stalin, took it back . . .’

Suddenly Kitty was on her feet.

‘’Scuse me. I need the er . . . toilet.’

She dashed out.

As Troy got up Sasha said, ‘You might teach her the word “lavatory” while you’re up Freddie.’

And he knew the meal was over.

‘Sasha, you’re a bitch.’

He found Kitty on the doorstep.

‘I’m not gonna cry. I’m not.’

He pulled the front door shut behind them.

‘You can if you want to.’

He put his arms around her. Her head touched his shoulder momentarily and then rose up again, tears restrained in the corners of her eyes.

‘They was talking about shopping. About clothes and that.’

‘That’s what they do. They shop.’

There was one other thing they did, but Kitty had banned his use of the word.

‘And they asked me where I shopped. An’ I said I made this dress meself on me mum’s sewing machine and then it all went . . . went like they was taking the mickey out of
me.’

‘They were. They’re bitches. I told them so.’

‘Did yer?’

‘Yes.’

‘And then they started trying to give me make-up tips like I was some snot-nosed kid from the gutter who couldn’t put her lipstick on straight. Just ’cos I said I made me own
clothes. Everybody I know makes their own frocks. Me mum and Aunt Dolly, they was always sewing when I was a kid. They made all my clothes, all Rose’s and Reen’s and Vera’s. I
should think the only bespoke item in the whole house is me dad’s best suit what Billy Jacks made for him. What’s so bleedin’ odd about makin’ your own clothes?’