Second Violin (33 page)

‘I looked at the sheet music in that shop on the high street today. The one we could neither of us remember yesterday was “Puck”.’

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Play “Puck” . . . play anything.’

Rod had a small house on Holly Mount – about a quarter of a mile from his father’s house. From the top floor he could see across London all the way to Crystal
Palace and beyond that to the North Downs. Troy found him pretty much where he expected to find him – sitting at the top of Holly Bush Steps, settling for the lesser view down what he called
his
petit Montmartre
, to Heath Street, his two-year-old daughter, Nattie, sitting at his side displaying remarkable patience as Rod ad-libbed a story about fieldmice and hedgehogs. Troy sat
down next to him. Rod paused the narrative.

‘She’s furious,’ Troy said simply.

‘She doesn’t get it,’ Rod said as simply.

‘I’m not sure I do either.’

Rod sighed.

‘Perhaps you’d better tell me,’ Troy prompted.

Still Rod said nothing, and for a minute or more all three of them stared down at the slate roofs of Hampstead.

‘It’ll make us English at last,’ Rod said.

‘At last?’

‘Yes. At last, finally . . . in the end . . . dammit Freddie, you surely don’t think we’re English yet?’

‘Of course we’re not. I don’t feel English.’

‘And you were the only one of us born here.’

Troy nodded his head towards Nattie.

‘Different generation,’ Rod said. ‘That matters. I’m sure my son and daughter will grow up to be English. But I’m not and you’re not.’

‘You’re more the Englishman than I am.’

‘That,
brer
, is because I have not resisted it the way you have.’

‘And it’s why you’re not resisting now?’

‘Quite.’

‘So letting my flat-footed friends lock you up and bung you in a camp will somehow make you English?’

‘Yes.’

‘A camp in all likelihood devoid of the English, but full of Italians, Germans, Austrians . . .’

‘And Nazis . . . and Jews. Yes, Freddie, a thousand times yes.’

‘Then I still don’t get it.’

‘Daddy,’ said Nattie. ‘What happened to the mousie?’

Rod whispered in her ear. She stood up and ran for the house – through the front door and clattering down the hallway.

‘What happened to the mousie?’ said Troy.

‘I told her he was living under the squeaky floorboard in the dining room.’

‘Do you know what kind of a camp you’ll be going to.’

‘No – but I’m sure you’ll be able to tell me. Besides, it can hardly be Dachau, can it?’

‘That’s what I told Mother. That’s what she doesn’t get. She equates any camp with Peter and Paul, which is pretty well Dachau in her vocabulary. People disappear into
them and vanish without trace.’

‘I won’t, and we both know I won’t. And with a modicum of effort we can get that through to her. You can describe the camps to her surely?’

‘Some . . . I’ve never seen the inside of any of them. I know there’s an old mill in Lancashire somewhere. That sounds grim. Most likely it’ll be the Isle of Man . . .
“come to sunny Douglas” . . . they’ve cordoned off whole streets of B&Bs with barbed wire.’

‘So . . . if the worst comes to the worst, I’ll be getting a cheap prewar holiday just like thousands of Manchester mill workers. I won’t be in Peter and Paul or anything like
it.’

Troy weighed up his next sentence – uttered it just the same.

‘She lost two brothers in Peter and Paul.’

Rod leaned back – sprawled full length across the flagstones – big feet in odd socks dangling off the steps.

‘Good God. The things that bloody woman doesn’t tell you.’

Troy walked back via Hampstead High Street, bought a second-hand piano at Parker & Trewin – an upright Bösendorfer made, they told him, in 1907, the year of his brother’s birth,
in Vienna, the city of his brother’s birth. It seemed somehow appropriate whilst packing his brother off to an unknown fate on a remote island in the Irish Sea to install a wooden substitute
at home. It symbolised the nature of the problem in walnut and ebony. He wrote a fat cheque and asked for the piano to be delivered to Goodwin’s Court.

They were prompt. 10 a.m. Sharp. Troy had wangled a morning off by convincing Stilton that a visit to St Pancras Railway station to ensure the departure of a detainee was work.
He had omitted to mention that the detainee was his own brother and, if Steerforth had told Stilton, Stilton wasn’t giving so much as a hint. 10 a.m. Sharp. Two men from Parker & Trewin
turned up with his chunk of old Vienna rattling like a badly improvised boogie.

‘Are you sure you want it in ’ere guv’ner. Room ain’t much bigger than the joanna.’

That was the problem, the price he’d paid for beauty. Houses in Goodwin’s Court were tiny. They looked as though they had started their life as shops sometime in the eighteenth
century – bow-fronted, narrow, beautiful. The first time he had seen it he’d been able to imagine the Tailor of Gloucester sitting cross-legged in the window. After East End digs the
house had felt big enough when he’d moved in, and he’d moved in early 1937 after a blow to the head had left him senseless at the battle of Cable Street the year before and the
impossibility of recuperation without privacy had come home to him. He had had all the privacy he could have asked for in any of his father’s homes. He’d none at school, and the former
forever failed to compensate the latter. Living ‘on the manor’ had been considered a necessity to learning the shoe-leather, corn and blister craft of coppering as a beat bobby, and
he’d given it more than a year before he succumbed to the lure of a place of his own. The price was living accommodation only marginally better than boarding school – although the food
was much the better. Goodwin’s Court, cramped and cosy, was the first home he had chosen for himself. His mother referred to it scathingly as his ‘bachelor quarters’.

‘There’s nowhere else,’ he said simply. ‘It’s got to fit in here.’

They tugged and strained and manipulated the beast in burr walnut until it sat spanning most of the right-hand wall of the living room.

‘We’s’ll tune up in a mo, guv’ner,’ the first man said, while the second leaned on the piano and muttered something about being ‘parched’, a phrase Troy
had come to accept was only ever used by tradesmen. He took the hint, stuck the kettle on and looked at his watch. He’d have to be out of the house in ten minutes. He sat at the piano, lifted
the lid and struck a minor chord. It was off.

‘Like I said, guv’ner, we’s’ll tune ’er up when we’ve had a cuppa. I’m just a shifter me, but Ted ’ere . . . he’ll ’ave the old girl
singin’ for you in half an hour.’

Troy ignored the bum notes and began to play.

‘’Ere . . . know this one . . . it’s . . . don’t tell me . . . it’s . . .’

Troy stopped, took his jacket of the peg, fished around for his house keys and tossed them to the shifter.

‘It’s called ‘Tea for Two’. And you two’ll be making your own. The caddy’s on the draining board. It’ll be rationed any day now, so try and leave me
some, will you?’

Troy followed a cab all the way into the station, hoping to flash his warrant card and be able to just leave the car among the cabs between platforms 5 and 6, but the concourse was awash with
people. He’d not seen a scene like this since the mass-evacuation of children last September in the final forty-eight hours before the declaration of war.

He stopped the car and got out. Dozens if not hundreds of people milled around him. In and out of uniform. Soldiers, sailors . . . children. Half a dozen children numbered and labelled like
luggage. All met by joyous parents. All but one. This one grabbed Troy by the hem of his jacket.

‘Have you seen me mum?’

A little girl, aged ten or thereabouts, in a summer frock, a cheap plastic slide in her dirty blonde hair – a worn man’s tweed jacket for a topcoat, frayed at the collar and cuffs
– a brown paper parcel tied up with string and bursting, a yellow, balding teddy bear under one arm.

‘Me mum said she’d be here.’

Troy looked down at her. He was useless with kids and he knew it.

‘What are you doing here? Are you going to the country?’

‘Nah. Been there. We comin’ back now. Had enough of the bloomin’ country, I ’ave. You can stuff yer bloomin’ country.’

‘All of you?’ Troy asked. ‘All of you coming back to London?’

‘’Spose so. I don’t know none o’ them others. I was vaccywated wiv me cousin. Only ’e done a bunk in March. We was in Llandudno. We ’ated Llandudno. We was
wiv Mrs Sproat. Mrs Sproat ’ated us. ’Ated all cockneys. Me, I’m a Stepney girl, I am.’

This was madness. A winter away from bombs that never fell, and now they returned in droves just as Hitler seemed to have London and the Southern Counties in his sights.

‘Stepney you say? I may be able to help you there.’

The child reached up and took his hand, and as she did so he caught sight of his brother, mired among the mites, trying to stride over them like a giant in seven-league boots.

‘I thought you’d never make it!’

It pleased Troy that some anxiety had etched itself into his brother’s expression.

‘Is Cid here?’

‘No, no. She’s not. It’s not the place for a farewell, is it? Not the place for the wife and kids.’

‘Really?’ said Troy, holding up the child’s arm, her hand still locked into his.

‘Who’s she?’ Rod said, as though it was only now he’d noticed that his brother was welded to a child.

‘No idea,’ Troy replied. ‘I’ll find out when you’re on the train.’

A uniformed copper examined Troy’s warrant card at the barrier.

‘I’m to see him onto the train,’ Troy lied.

‘Must be someone special – a right villain if the Yard send a personal escort. Most of ’em we herd in two dozen to a bobby.’

‘Oh, he’s special alright,’ said Troy moving on.

‘That might not exactly be helpful, you know, Freddie,’ Rod said. ‘I don’t want them thinking I’m any sort of a fascist.’

‘I think this is where I mutter something about bed, made, lie in it.’

‘That doesn’t help either, you know.’

Rod looked at him, sadly, Troy thought. They rarely understood one another.

‘When you get on that train, nothing will help. You have no idea with whom you’ll be banged up. For all you do know it’ll be every half-arsed Hitler impersonator in Britain.
It’ll make Saturday night at the music hall look like high realism.’

Rod looked at him, angrily, Troy thought. They rarely understood one another.

‘But you do know, don’t you, Freddie. ’Cos you’re the one banging them up. So,
brer
, don’t take your guilt out on me, just tell me the truth. How many little
Hitlers have you found in the last few weeks?’

Troy thought of Billy Jacks and smiled.

‘Well . . . mostly you’ll be sharing digs with Italian chefs and Jewish tailors. But take it from me . . . one or two of those really will be little Hitlers.’

As the train moved off, Rod yanked on the leather strap, sent the window clattering down, stuck his head out and yelled, ‘Tell Cid . . .’

But the train chose that moment to let rip with a head of steam, and whatever it was Troy had to tell Mrs Rodyon Troy was lost in the great black cavern of St Pancras’s engine shed. Over
Rod’s shoulder Troy could almost swear he’d seen a pair of eyes glaring out at him from the darkness of the carriage.

The train chugged out of the engine shed. Troy watched until the lamp on the last carriage became a dot and disappeared. His brother had waved until the curve in the track leading to Kentish
Town had obscured his view, and Troy had thought of a lifetime of arrivals and departures, of a common childhood spent at docks and railway stations and aerodromes, of a big brother with whom he
was usually at loggerheads and often felt he hardly knew. It seemed possible now that he might never know him. It seemed odd in the extreme that Rod had waved like a schoolboy packed off for the
new term.

Something small and warm appeared to be attached to him, and as the noise dipped he could hear a small, high voice saying, ‘Bye . . . Bye bye.’

The child was still waving at the back of the train.

Troy said, ‘Your mum promised to meet you, did she?’

‘Not ’zackly. I wrote and said she was to meet me please.’

Troy led her back down the platform, towards his car.

‘When did you post the letter?’

‘Las’ night just before I got on the train. There was a pillar box on the platform.’

‘Stepney, you said.’

‘S’right. I’m a Stepney Stunner, I am. Me mum says if we lived in Bow I’d be a Bow Belle, but we lives in Stepney so I’m a Stepney Stunner.’

The space around his car had cleared. Kids had been met and collected. Instead a group of soldiers in khaki were sat in front of his Bullnose Morris, perched on kitbags, smoking and dealing
cards. He reversed neatly away from them, under the arch, spun the car around on the ramp and set off again in the direction of Stepney.

‘We goin’ ’ome now, are we?’

‘Yes. Just tell me where you live.’

The girl looked at the numbered tag on her tweed jacket as though needing to be reminded not of where she lived but of the official record of living somewhere.

‘Child number 1155, female, White Horse Lane, Stepney Green, London E1. Sept. 2nd 39. dob. 3.8.30.’

Troy dodged an errant cyclist as they crawled up the Pentonville Road, then said, ‘September 2nd? Is that how long you’ve been gone?’

‘Yeah. Ages. Wonder I don’t sound bloomin’ Welsh, init?’

She launched into what Troy took to be a mickey take of her recent foster mother.

‘Eat it up now, ’cos if you don’t there’s plenty of little gurrls’ll be glad of it. What do you mean “gristle”! ’Ow durr you call my best streaky
bacon gristle!’

Pulling into White Horse Lane Troy asked what number, and when she said 11a stepped so hard on the brake they both shot forward.

‘What did you say your name was?’

‘Child 1155, but really I’m Sallie Jacks.’

Oh shit, thought Troy, oh shit, oh shit.