Riptide

§ 20

Frederick Troy had arrived at Church Row, Hampstead, for an early dinner with his parents. His mother had insisted. They were so rarely in town these days, and Troy so rarely found his way out to Mimram, the country home in Hertfordshire, that she had taken to nagging him. Particularly if his brother Rod was on leave.

‘How else am I ever to see my family all together?’ she asked pointlessly. And once in a while it worked. Troy would have a day off that coincided with Rod’s leave, and their sisters, the twins, Maria and Alexandra, would be whipped in from their conjugal homes.

‘Dinner will be a little late,’ said his mother as he kicked the front door shut and hung up his coat. He dutifully pecked her on the cheek-she stood, shorter than he, poised for the gesture as of right-before she finished what she had to say.

‘Your father and Rod are in the study. We have a visitor.’

‘Who?’ Troy asked her vanishing back.

‘You’ll see.’

She was full of phrases like that. She was not past saying to a man of twenty-five, and at that a Scotland Yard detective, that if he asked no questions he’d be told no lies.

Troy looked in through the open study door. Rod was perched on the edge of a sagging, tatty armchair, an eager, argumentative look on his face. Troy knew that look. The keenness of argument, the triumph of intellect over adversity could lead him to a single-minded honesty that knew no tact. His father was behind his desk. Another blue notepad in front of him. A pencil behind one ear and a pile of balled blue pages tumbling forth from the upturned wastepaper basket. Today he had shaved. Today he had dressed. A stout man sat on the chesterfield with his back to Troy. All Troy could see of him was a thinning pate and the broad expanse of back in its brown striped jacket.

‘No,’ said Rod.

‘No,’ said his father, and then he noticed Troy.

‘Freddie,’ he beckoned him closer. ‘You know Bert, do you not?’

Troy moved tentatively into the room-if they were arguing about Russia again, he was just going to leg it and leave them to stew-and the stout body turned to look at him. A round, ruddy face, a small moustache, beady eyes. It was Wells. Herbert George Wells. HG to the world, Bert to his friends.

‘I was just saying,’ he began in a high, strained, middling-posh English voice, ‘who was it uttered the platitude about Russia-about the Soviet Union?’

‘Which platitude?’ said Troy. ‘There’ve been so many.’

His father smiled at this. Rod didn’t. Wells looked plainly puzzled.

‘I meant,’ he continued, ‘the one about “I have seen the future and it works”.’

‘Don’t say Shaw,’ Rod chipped in. ‘We’ve done Shaw.’

‘I thought it was you,’ said Troy.

‘Me? Surely I’d remember if I’d said it myself!’

‘Wasn’t it in The Shape of Things to Come?’ Troy persisted.

‘No it wasn’t!’ said Wells, and Troy could see him reddening into annoyance. Wells could be such a crosspatch.

‘You’ve said so much, Bert,’ Alex said. ‘Who could blame you if you forget?’

‘I didn’t forget it. I never bloody said it in the first place!’

Rod-ever the peacemaker, ever the inadvertent troublemaker, arbiter of truth, dispenser of English decency-stepped in with, ‘Bertrand Russell? That thing of his. Theory and Practice of Bolshevism.’

Alex and Wells shook their heads and said a simultaneous ‘no’.

Alex picked up the thread. ‘Didn’t Philip Snowden’s wife do a book after her Russian trip? Across Bolshevist Russia by Dog Sled or something? About ten years ago it seemed that anyone who got to go there wrote a damn book about it.’

‘If she had,’ said Wells, ‘would we any of us remember it?’

Polly the housemaid appeared in the doorway with a dinner gong. She looked at Troy, listened to the burgeoning argument, and froze, her big eyes wide, her hand poised.

‘Just hit it,’ Troy mouthed at her. And two of the Western World’s greatest thinkers were gonged off.

He found himself seated between his sisters, Masha to his left, Sasha to his right. He hoped their affairs were going well. If they, in the absence of husbands who’d enlisted at the first blast of war’s trumpet, were manless, they could be peevish beyond measure and would take it out on him. In their eyes he was still eight years old. They guarded him alternately viciously and preciously, as though his supposed virginity might somehow balance the spent currency of their own. Worse, sooner or later, since they knew no guilt, they would want to boast to him. He never wanted to listen. The last time, Sasha had described her unstoppable adulteries as her part of the war effort. Her mission to make English manhood happy. Those about to die got the chance to salute her.

‘Got a girlfriend these days?’ she said without preamble.

Troy said nothing.

Masha leaned over him.

‘Didn’t I tell you? He ditched that little WPC he was with, didn’t you Freddie?’

Troy said nothing.

‘Just as well,’ said Sasha. ‘Not your type. Honestly.’

‘What is my type?’ and he regretted instantly having spoken.

‘Dunno. Just not wotsername.’

‘You know,’ said Masha, ‘I’ve forgotten her name too. Milly or Molly or something?’

At the other end of the table, where Troy dearly wished he had been seated, Rod, their father and Wells had moved on from Russia to the only topic of the moment. The war. Rod had been holding forth for some minutes on the subject of a second front. Wells, having endured as much of his own silence as he could manage in the course of a single meal, said, ‘Surely that’s why he’s here? Hess was sent to avert that possibility. To offer some sort of alliance and so pre-empt a second front.’

They both looked at Alex, as though this were his cue.

‘A second front?’

‘Second to North Africa, I meant,’ said Rod.

‘I know what you meant. But it seemed to me only the other day that we were fighting on half a dozen fronts at the same time, even if we do not call them fronts.’

‘Were we, I mean are we?’ Rod looked nonplussed.

‘North Africa… we have barely left Greece…’ Alex went on.

‘And we have barely begun in Crete,’ Wells added.

‘The skies above us, and the waves below us, at least above us here and below those of our people stuck in the mid-Atlantic with German U-boats on the prowl.’

‘That’s five, four and a half really-I don’t think you can have Greece and Crete in their entirety,’ said Rod unhelpfully. ‘There’s not a British soldier in Greece, other than the POWs, and not a German one on Crete.’

‘Not yet,’ said Alex, ‘not yet.’

‘So what’s the other?’ Rod said.

‘Iraq,’ Troy said from the far end of the table.

‘Quite right.’ A nod of acknowledgement from his father. ‘Iraq it was. Five and a half fronts-if you like. However, I cannot but think of it in terms of the last war. Eastern Front and Western Front. Sooner or later the pattern will reassert itself. And as to Hess being here: I don’t know why he’s here. I’d dearly love to be able to ask him.’

‘Perhaps Churchill will let you,’ said Wells.

Alex tilted his bowl, scooping at the last of a thin clear soup which Troy had found so tasteless as to be unidentifiable.

‘Winston and I are no longer as close as we were. I cannot remember precisely when we last spoke, but it must have been in 1939 or thereabouts.’

‘It was just after your editorial on the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Dad,’ Rod said.

Troy would not have bothered. They all knew when it had been. The row had been volcanic.

He felt hot breath upon his ear. Polly, clutching a bowl of steaming cabbage, was whispering to him.

‘It’s that Onions bloke from the Yard, young Fred. He wants you on the blower.’

Troy ducked out, feeling his mother’s eyes upon him. Back in the study, the phone lay off the hook on his father’s desk. He picked it up and heard Superintendent Stanley Onions’ Lancashire growl.

‘Are you free?’

It didn’t matter if he wasn’t.

‘Body for you. A Mrs O’Grady, lla Hoxton Street, phoned in. Lodger tripped and fell down a flight of stairs. Dead as a doornail. Better check it out. You never know.’

‘You never know’ just about summed up the working lives of two detectives on the Murder Squad.

Troy made his excuses in the dining room. Saw his mother rise and throw down her napkin, coming round the table to him.

‘My dear, we have only just started the main course. Does Scotland Yard want you to starve?’

Her words all at odds with her gestures, she kissed him on both cheeks, escorted him to the door and made no effort beyond the formality of words to detain him.

‘Is he still trying to write the same article?’ Troy asked as he slipped into his coat.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And he will tie us all in knots until he has done so. At the moment the idea is that he and Wells will write it together. I’ll be amazed if it survives the evening. They’ll be at each other’s throats before the dessert if Rod doesn’t stop stirring.’

‘He doesn’t mean to. In fact he doesn’t know he’s doing it. He just drops bricks.’

‘Your faith in innocence would be touching were it not for your odd choice of profession.’

It was odd. And she’d never let him forget it.