Old Flames by John Lawton

ten minutes—but decided instead to tell him the old chestnut about the American tourist mistaking it for St Pancras’ church and respectfully removing his hat as he
entered. Khrushchev shrugged. Knowing nothing of the sheer beauty of Sir George Gilbert Scott’s unearthly masterpiece of turrets and gables and countless tiny, dormer windows, he probably
took it as merely indicative of American naiveté. The anecdote neither amused nor interested him. He was thoroughly preoccupied with the recorded announcements urging him in the strangled
tones of pre-war received pronunciation to ‘Mind the gap!’ One day, Troy thought, when presumptive classlessness had rendered all England gorblimey, RP would survive in dark corners of
the London Passenger Transport Board, still warning people to ‘stand clear of the doors’ and ‘mind the gap’ in the superfluous diphthongs of a lost age.
    A far better place to change, Troy concluded, was Liverpool Street, London’s terminus for the old Great Eastern Railway, where a Piranesi-like nightmare of catwalks in the sky, usually
shrouded in a miasma of soot and steam, was mirrored by an equally labyrinthine network of gloomy tunnels underground. Besides, it was the only place on the entire Underground system where you
could prop up a bar, pint in hand, without even leaving the platform.
    Troy bought halves. He didn’t want to be here all night.
    Khrushchev sipped at his beer and pronounced it good. It wasn’t, but Troy had instigated an expedition in search of the common man—it was not for him to reject the common man’s
taste. Tom Driberg had often urged him to drink beer as the first and simplest way to break the ice with the lower classes, but Troy hated the stuff and did not, in any case, share Driberg’s
sexual fascination with the working man. Khrushchev stood on the down Metropolitan platform, elbow on the bar, shoulder to shoulder with a working man, who was nose-deep in the late final Evening Standard and oblivious to his presence.
    The platforms were deserted, devoid of Londoners but strewn with their litter, a windswept mess of toffee papers—the British had binged on confectionery ever since it came off
ration—cigarette ends and old newspapers. Troy watched Khrushchev watching an old Standard with Grace Kelly’s face on the front being wafted across the platform and onto the
track. It flipped over completely as it left the edge and Princess Grace’s face gave way to Khrushchev’s own. Troy wondered, as the picture disappeared under the wheels of an oncoming
train, whether Khrushchev had just felt someone walk over his grave. Instead he took his glass in hand, walked out to the middle of the platform and looked up the line, the knowing train-spotter
once more. Past the end of the platforms, the blackened walls of buildings rose like a canyon before the tunnel to Moorgate swallowed the tracks. Beer and bar apart, it was a depressing pit. It
required an odd mentality to like it, a twist in the mind that could enjoy this cold, subterranean world, neither indoors nor out. Sometimes Troy had it, sometimes he hadn’t. Sometimes he
could spend whole evenings down here. Sometimes he loathed the place. A couple of years after the war, Johnny Fermanagh had taken him on a classic pub crawl around the bars of the Circle line.
Starting out from Sloane Square’s southside bar with a horde of Johnny’s drinking cronies, pockets stuffed with miniatures, they had boozed and schmoozed their way to the
Hole-in-the-Wall at King’s Cross, to Liverpool Street, to come full circle at Sloane Square, shedding cronies all the way, until just he and Johnny remained to attempt the round one more
time, only to fall short and end up at Liverpool Street again, pissed and penniless in this pit of soot and iron. Years, decades after the ending of steam-hauled trains, the underground still smelt
of soot. Aldgate, one station down the line towards Victoria, was quite literally