Riptide by John Lawton

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