Old Flames (27 page)

It could not last. The Kedleston was a hole. A hole that had last seen a paintbrush or a new roll of paper sometime in the reign of Edward VII. His room was tiny and the bed the width of a
coffin. Its springs, long since exhausted, protested to him most of the night and when they did not the man in the room next door, from which Troy seemed to be divided by two sheets of wallpaper
glued back to back, broke wind frequently as though in sympathy with the tortured bedsprings.

He awoke, aching and tired, to find himself facing the only item of twentieth-century furniture in the room. Designed and built to be makeshift, the rational extension of the wartime motto
‘make-do-and-mend’, Utility furniture had proved surprisingly durable, and God knows, there might even have been people who found the plain plywood tallboy, an identical item to which
could be found in homes the length and breadth of the land, attractive. It was alchemy in wood, necessity transmuted into virtue.

He washed and dressed to the sound of thumping water pipes and the deafening roar of emptying lavatory pans. The hot ran cold, and as he waited for the trickle of water to gain temperature, the
sound of feet descending the stairs banged past his door and rattled the ornamental vase of plastic flowers on top of the tallboy.

He was the last down. The small dining room was full. Men with moustaches. Men in brown suits, who all seemed to know each other, and to be deeply submerged in greasy eggs, greasy bacon, greasy,
milky tea and knowing shop talk. A smell of stale tobacco and hair oil glided gently across the worst that breakfast could exhale. One or two of the brown suits said, ‘Mornin’,’
to Troy, and the one nearest to him asked him what he sold. Listening to their proud, jargon-ridden banter, Troy soon realised he was sharing a table with pioneers at the cutting edge of the brush
and bathroom-fittings trades.

He emerged into the street. An Indian Summer’s day. The bright light of belated sunshine, racing to make up for the cold of August. He looked around him. A bustling main street, banks and
drapers and building societies and butchers, drenched in a sudden rush of smoke and steam as a northbound express roared through the cutting in the heart of the town. He looked up past the painted
shop fronts to the stone upper storeys and the town shot back a century or more to the plainer solidity of the original Victorian; and above them all rose green hills, wrapping the town on three
sides. It was not the landscape he had seen from the train, just before he had last nodded off. This was not the flood plain of the Midlands, this was a stone-built, sturdy northern town, climbing
the sides of a Pennine valley. The landscape, if his matriculation all those years ago in School Certificate Geography served him well, of cotton and coal.

The waitress who had served him a disgusting breakfast of congealed something with cold something, which had to recommend it only that fact that there was lots of it, had drawn him a rough plan
of the town. He turned it this way and that, trying to find north, and set off up the main street towards the eastern hill, looking for the Heage Road, for the address Mrs Cockerell had given him.
He had not seen quite so much stone since he last killed a dull afternoon in Westminster Abbey. The town seemed to be carved from it. The odd outburst of brick seemed like an afterthought, a failed
gesture in the direction of modernity. The town, like so much of Britain, did not strike him as well-to-do. The age of austerity had gone, but its defining attribute lingered on like a persistent
cobweb. An air of the poor, stopping short of poverty.

So many of the houses were shabby, the paintwork peeling and the woodwork rotting, the people Orwellian, seeming to Troy like characters from
The Road to Wigan Pier.
Ascending the steep
hill out of the town centre he passed what was obviously a doss house. A gaunt man stood outside wearing the remains of an army greatcoat, the flashes of a regiment still visible, the buttons dull
and unpolished ten years or more, the hands clutching the lapels, one above the other as though cold in the warm light of morning, and the lips moving softly. As he passed him, Troy heard the
syllables clearly ‘che, che, che …’—a stammer leading nowhere. He would never get past the first syllable of whatever it was, and the worn, post-war, post-what figures
emerging, shuffling and farting, from the blistered maroon door of the doss house did not wait for him to finish. They shuffled on, up or down the hill. Sad and silent. Post-war, post-what? Troy
often wondered what private tragedy brought men to this. Britain after the war, any war, the First had been no different, seemed to litter itself with its unhealing casualties. But it was hard to
believe that the public tragedy could account for all this. Beneath, beyond, the tangible fact of war were the multitudes of intangible facts of God-knows-what. As a child Troy had thought that
there must be some special place from which such men came, almost like the factory of a mad scientist where rags were arranged into the form of man, the island of Dr Moreau where the half-men were
half made. So often would he meet them in the dusty lanes of Hertfordshire, so often would a talking bundle of rags ring the bell at the kitchen door of his parents’ house to be given
leftovers. The reason Jimmy Wheeler’s rice pudding joke was not funny was not that it had been told too often. It was not funny because it was true.

From the crest of the hill he could look back on the town. Over to his right, looking north, was a vast, blackened, brick chimney. So, it was a mill town after all. And, doubtless, if he’d
been up and about earlier he would have passed streams of women pouring out of stone cottages in stone streets, walking in for an eight o’clock shift. Instead, at nine-thirty going on ten he
was checking the names on the gates of large houses in a street of a different kind. Heage Road was, clearly, the posh end of town, the houses bigger, better maintained, further apart, lacking
uniformity, suffering the gables and crestellations of passing architecture. He found Jasmine Dene, a large, between-wars Tudorish bungalow in black and white, set well back from the road, behind
double gates, each gate post topped by a large square, wooden basket of hanging flowers. He opened one of the gates, parting Jasmine from its Dene. The garden was immaculate. Perfect to the
artificial—rollered turf in stripes like the grain in wood, a razored edge, with borders of precisely aligned bedding plants, verging on the regimented, verging on the unattractive in the
precision of their symmetry. The author of this British line and square was bending over the blades of an upturned lawnmower. A man of seventy or so, in black trousers, black waistcoat and a
collarless, patterned cotton shirt. He looked up at Troy through enormous grey eyebrows. It was Uncle Todger come to life.

‘Art lookin’ fert missis?’ he said.

Troy had no idea what he’d said. ‘Yes’ seemed like a good answer to try, then if the man whipped out a subscription to the
Reader’s Digest
or a pledge to
Jehovah’s Witnesses he could try sign language.

‘Yes,’ Troy said.

‘Tha’d best ring t’bell then, anntya?’

It didn’t seem like a question, but Troy heard the upward inflection that implied it might be. He resorted to a ‘jolly good’, always handy in time of doubt. The man bent over
his jammed lawnmower once more and Troy stepped between two half-barrels, in the ubiquitous black and white, chockful of primulas, and yanked on an iron bell-pull.

Grief is a deceiver. This was not the woman he had seen in Portsmouth. This woman was a well-preserved fifty. Tall, slender and elegant, and whilst he could not honestly say she was
good-looking, she kept herself; carried herself and dressed herself in a way that made it seem inconceivable that she was the same person.

‘Mr Troy, you’re bright and early. Do come in.’

She smiled and threw the door wide, and when she smiled her eyes lit up. She was wearing a boiler suit of many zips in mid-blue, the same colour as her eyes, doubtless dyed from its wartime
dirty grey, belted tightly around her narrow waist, and the blue was smudged and smeared with a hundred different hues. And in her left hand she clutched two paintbrushes, one with a dab of Chinese
White and the other with a shade Troy recalled from childhood as Burnt Umber, fixed in his memory with an unanswered question as to why a box of watercolours had no paint called Raw Umber. She
pulled a Liberty scarf from her head, shook her hair, part brown and part grey and well-cut, free from its bond.

‘You’ve stayed in the town somewhere? God, I bet you could kill for a decent cup of coffee. Let me rinse the brushes and I’ll get a pot going.’

A long corridor led to the back of the house. Mrs Cockerell strode off down it, leaving Troy to follow at his own pace. She had disappeared like the white rabbit, through a doorway to the right. Troy paused by the first
door, knowing she was somewhere at the back of the house. Double doors opened into a front-facing sitting room. Nosiness drew him to the threshold; discretion kept him hovering on it. There, in the
piercing eastern light, breaking incongruously through the leaded windows of the original mock-Tudor, were the artefacts and icons of the new, the substance of the gospel according to Cockerell.
Ashtrays on stilts. A portrait of a stern Chinese woman, whose skin was green. The skater-pattern carpet, the coffee table with its laminated, clear plastic top and its inlay of plastic
sea-shells—the factory version of Mother Nature’s bug-in-amber—the non-matching wallpapers, whereby two walls faced each other in pale stripes and two in dark swirls and spirals.
And the curtains—curtains in Mediterranean, sun-bleached tints, depicting an assortment of ubiquitous Chianti bottles, the symbol of all we were not—a sun-loving, easy-going,
mañana
people. It was not a room in which he could have felt comfortable. The studio-style, studded PVC leatherette furniture, so delicate on its black tapered legs and brass-shoed
feet, seemed fragile compared to the robust representatives of the new technology—the double-doored television set, the huge, multi-functional radiogram, with an array of creamy, off-white
push-buttons rictus-grinning like false teeth in a tumbler. You could not be comfortable. The furniture might break beneath your weight, then the machines might eat you.

‘Arnold gave you his lecture, then?’

She had appeared quietly at his side. He was about to apologise, but suddenly it seemed unnecessary. She leant on the door jamb and peered in.

‘You know. The Contemporary Look. All this tat.’

Troy smiled.

‘Yes. He did.’

‘Bet he bored you silly with it, didn’t he? He’d have done the whole house out this way if I’d let him. Come and look. I kept one room, just for me. Arnie’s allowed
in on condition he changes nothing.’

Right at the back of the house was a large room opening out to the garden through french windows. It was an afternoon room, facing south and west, but even in the morning light it was obvious
what she meant. Not a scrap of Contemporary had made it past the door. Walls papered in a pattern of English wildflowers, muted yellows and washed-out blues; a polished parquet floor; a few old,
worn Persian rugs, a deep, sturdy Edwardian three-piece suite, reupholstered in pale colours; large Colefax and Fowler flowers on a cornfield chintz. A solid wall of tatty, broken-spined, well-read
books. And twenty to thirty watercolours scattered across the other walls. It was traditional, it was comfortable, and it had more of an individual mark on it than the other room would have if
lived in for fifty years.

She had gone again, away to the whistling of a kettle. Troy was drawn to the paintings. Mostly, he assumed, they were her own. The peaks and valleys of Derbyshire, the watercolours of the Early
British style. Unfashionable now, but she worked through that, pushing, it seemed to him after he had looked at half a dozen, through the representation of landscape to an unsentimental
abstraction. He had gazed a minute or more at one such abstract until the signature told him otherwise: ‘Janet Cockerell. Combe Martin, Devon. 1948.’ What he had taken as abstract was a
seascape dazzling in the silver light of North Devon, the beaten-metal sea, the red-rippled, iron rocks of the coastline. He blinked and looked again. It was abstract once more.

He was staring, envious of her taste, at the few paintings that were not her own work—a portrait by Gwen John, a pseudo-religious scene, quite possibly a gospel story, in the unmistakable,
irresistible heavy hand of Stanley Spencer—when she returned.

‘Shall we have coffee in the garden? After all that rain I think we might be in for an Indian Summer.’

He followed her out through the french windows. The same division of property seemed to apply to the garden. This was not the immaculate military layout of the front; this was a wilder place
altogether. Herbs and flowers competed with vegetables in the same bed—a straggling thyme bush, the crisp, blackened flowers of marjoram, dozens of onions, their tops folded over to ripen in
maturity, a ragged, unpruned late-flowering red rose, petals bright as blood, a rambling, fruit-laden quince, a thousand wallflowers turning woody, and being left to seed themselves.

An easel stood facing the south-west, across the smoking chimneys of the town, down across slate roofs, over the Orwellian maze of stone streets. The merest outline of an image appeared. She had
clearly been at work a matter of half an hour or so before Troy’s visit distracted her. She set down her tray on a wicker table—a cheap and cheerful Suzy Cooper pattern of crockery, and
a large pot of steaming hot coffee. Troy took the chair furthest from the house, and found himself perched almost on the edge of a cliff, looking down into the overgrown remains of a quarry.
Instinctively he pulled his chair a foot nearer the house.

She said nothing until he had a cup of aromatic, strong, black coffee in his hands.

‘I know I’m playing with your sense of paradox, Chief Inspector, but my husband is not dead.’

‘Not dead.’

‘Not dead. Running.’

‘Running?’

‘Hiding.’

‘From what?’