riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.’
‘I know, you told me. The day before yesterday.’
‘Winston meant Russia. But he might just as well have been describing your old man. I say again, do you really want to know?’
Troy said nothing. Stared at him till he cracked.
‘It’ll take a while. I’ll need to get my knees under the table. I’d have to trade a few secrets. But I’ve plenty of those. The real problem would be how could I
tell you? We’d need a code.’
Troy felt momentarily helpless. This was not his world, not his vocabulary.
‘Mind,’ Charlie went on. ‘I’ll think of something. Bound to think of something.’
§ 18
It was still winter when Troy returned home. England under snow. A flying, white visit to Charlie’s mother in Dorset. A small, white, utterly implausible lie about the
money. A small mountain of work at the Yard. A small row with Rod.
‘Where’ve you been?’
What was the point? The pain he would give Rod if he said he’d been to Russia. The boredom he would let himself in for if he admitted it and Rod banged on with a thousand questions.
‘I can’t tell you.’
‘More lies, Freddie?’
‘No. Silence.’
‘There’s such a thing as lies of silence, you know.’
‘If you like, but I still can’t tell you.’
‘Sod you then!’
Rod could not hold a grudge. Partly because he knew that he might wait till kingdom come only to find Troy still silent before him. Partly because decency, that spurious Anglo-Saxon virtue, ran
through him deeper than the word Brighton through the eponymous stick of rock. Within a week they were speaking once more. By the end of February affably so, and early one Friday evening, a couple
of weeks before Easter, only days, it seemed, after the last evaporation of the most interminably lingering winter, Rod could be found almost horizontal on the sofa in Troy’s sitting room in
Goodwin’s Court feeling very fridayish, a cupof tea balanced on his chest, rising and falling with his breathing like a small vessel at sea, red tie at half-mast, beetlecrusher shoes off, odd
socks on, lamenting the lot of a member of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, lamenting in particular the small peculiarities of breeding and character that defined the leadership of Her
Majesty’s Loyal Opposition.
‘They’re bastards. The pair of ’em. Bloody Brown. Bloody Wilson. Bastards.’
Troy had known Brown for several years – a young light from the trades union movement, outspoken, emotional, and impossible when pissed. He had met Wilson just the once, at a dinner party
Rod had thrown for the Labour nobs – a former Oxford don, a professional Yorkshireman, whom Troy had thought about as fascinating as congealing custard, unredeemed by wit or wickedness or the
prospect of a good indiscretion when drunk; a ‘man of the people’ who chomped on a pipe in public for the sake of the image and in private puffed away at cigars, and who habitually wore
a hideous fawn macintosh, spun out of some new synthetic fabric, in an effort to make himself appear more ‘ordinary’. He always succeeded in this – effortlessly. Troy had on
occasion wondered which of the Labour Party wags – Rod? Or the equally waggish Tom Driberg? – had told him he needed to be more ‘ordinary’, and why Wilson had not recognised
that he was being sent up.
Of the two Troy preferred Brown, and this in no way took account of his politics within the internal, infernal machinations of the wretched party. Brown’s tactless unreliability at least
smacked of honesty, not a word one would ever think of in the same sentence as the word Wilson. Wilson, it was, some old Socialist had dubbed ‘the desiccated calculating machine’. Rod
was content with calling him ‘Mittiavelli’, a poor man’s Machiavelli. He had reduced himself and Troy to hysterics a while ago by asking, ‘What do you get if you cross
Walter Mitty with Machiavelli?’ The answer – Harold
‘I know, you told me. The day before yesterday.’
‘Winston meant Russia. But he might just as well have been describing your old man. I say again, do you really want to know?’
Troy said nothing. Stared at him till he cracked.
‘It’ll take a while. I’ll need to get my knees under the table. I’d have to trade a few secrets. But I’ve plenty of those. The real problem would be how could I
tell you? We’d need a code.’
Troy felt momentarily helpless. This was not his world, not his vocabulary.
‘Mind,’ Charlie went on. ‘I’ll think of something. Bound to think of something.’
§ 18
It was still winter when Troy returned home. England under snow. A flying, white visit to Charlie’s mother in Dorset. A small, white, utterly implausible lie about the
money. A small mountain of work at the Yard. A small row with Rod.
‘Where’ve you been?’
What was the point? The pain he would give Rod if he said he’d been to Russia. The boredom he would let himself in for if he admitted it and Rod banged on with a thousand questions.
‘I can’t tell you.’
‘More lies, Freddie?’
‘No. Silence.’
‘There’s such a thing as lies of silence, you know.’
‘If you like, but I still can’t tell you.’
‘Sod you then!’
Rod could not hold a grudge. Partly because he knew that he might wait till kingdom come only to find Troy still silent before him. Partly because decency, that spurious Anglo-Saxon virtue, ran
through him deeper than the word Brighton through the eponymous stick of rock. Within a week they were speaking once more. By the end of February affably so, and early one Friday evening, a couple
of weeks before Easter, only days, it seemed, after the last evaporation of the most interminably lingering winter, Rod could be found almost horizontal on the sofa in Troy’s sitting room in
Goodwin’s Court feeling very fridayish, a cupof tea balanced on his chest, rising and falling with his breathing like a small vessel at sea, red tie at half-mast, beetlecrusher shoes off, odd
socks on, lamenting the lot of a member of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, lamenting in particular the small peculiarities of breeding and character that defined the leadership of Her
Majesty’s Loyal Opposition.
‘They’re bastards. The pair of ’em. Bloody Brown. Bloody Wilson. Bastards.’
Troy had known Brown for several years – a young light from the trades union movement, outspoken, emotional, and impossible when pissed. He had met Wilson just the once, at a dinner party
Rod had thrown for the Labour nobs – a former Oxford don, a professional Yorkshireman, whom Troy had thought about as fascinating as congealing custard, unredeemed by wit or wickedness or the
prospect of a good indiscretion when drunk; a ‘man of the people’ who chomped on a pipe in public for the sake of the image and in private puffed away at cigars, and who habitually wore
a hideous fawn macintosh, spun out of some new synthetic fabric, in an effort to make himself appear more ‘ordinary’. He always succeeded in this – effortlessly. Troy had on
occasion wondered which of the Labour Party wags – Rod? Or the equally waggish Tom Driberg? – had told him he needed to be more ‘ordinary’, and why Wilson had not recognised
that he was being sent up.
Of the two Troy preferred Brown, and this in no way took account of his politics within the internal, infernal machinations of the wretched party. Brown’s tactless unreliability at least
smacked of honesty, not a word one would ever think of in the same sentence as the word Wilson. Wilson, it was, some old Socialist had dubbed ‘the desiccated calculating machine’. Rod
was content with calling him ‘Mittiavelli’, a poor man’s Machiavelli. He had reduced himself and Troy to hysterics a while ago by asking, ‘What do you get if you cross
Walter Mitty with Machiavelli?’ The answer – Harold
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