a room in Covent Garden, near the police station, she said. But I never went there. I never knew the address. I wondered if you knew.’
‘Fraid not. I never went there either. I think it’s Kitty’s little secret. But if I see her I’ll tell her.’
‘Could you tell her it’s urgent? I know everything is in a country that’s at war, but I mean it. It’s about as urgent as things can get.’
‘A matter of life and death, eh?’ said Troy.
‘Well… life, for sure.’
Troy watched him go down the yard towards St Martin’s Lane. Then he listened. He’d not heard a sound from Kitty while Cormack had told his tale, but he could hear her now.
Upstairs Kitty was in the bog, throwing up again. When she’d stopped, washed-out and drooling, Troy said, ‘Whose baby is it?’
‘What do you think, clever dick? Cal’s a good soldier. Uncle Sam gives him a gross of frenchies to see he don’t catch the clap, and he uses them. Wellie on, glasses off. Always in that order. And every single one stamped “Made in the USA”. You, you can never be arsed, can you?’
§ 96
It was a going to be a red day. His red woolly dressing gown with the black piping. The last, late crimson wallflowers nestling in the cracks between the paving stones just beyond his window. A ruby red broom by the flint wall at the back of the terrace. Delicate, beautiful crimson bergamot like burst pincushions in the herb bed. A streak of pink in the sky, and a startling magenta legal pad to replace the blue one he had used up in the effort to finish his Russian leader.
Alex was searching for a red poem in an anthology of First War poets-Owen, Graves, Sassoon-weren’t half the poems of 1914-18 called Flanders Poppies?-when he noticed his younger son leaning in the doorway of his study.
‘Still on Russia?’
‘Need you ask?’
‘Wells still helping?’
‘Bert and I no longer see eye to eye on the matter. I shall write my piece, and Bert will surely write his.’
‘I thought I might give you a hand.’
‘Freddie-if your contribution is to be as helpful as your last, I may do better without it.’
Troy pulled out a chair and sat opposite his father.
‘I have news of the invasion.’
Alex scarcely looked at him, nicked through the index of first lines, still looking for a red poem.
‘Unless you have a date for it I doubt it will help. The world and his wife know it will come. When is what matters.’
‘June 22nd. About dawn.’
He had his father’s attention now. Alex let the book fall closed and reached for a pencil.
About an hour later Alex had scribbled furiously over half a dozen of the magenta sheets. Troy said, ‘Are we ready for this?’
‘No,’ said his father. ‘We are not ready. Stalin has had most of the cream of the Red Army shot. We were better equipped in 1935 than we are now. But it will be the Germans’ greatest folly nonetheless…’
Realising he had unleashed a lecture where he had wanted merely an answer, Troy ducked out when the telephone rang. His father picked up the receiver and waved to him.
‘Alex?’
Beaverbrook. Again.
‘I thought I’d plan ahead a little this time. Winston wants to see the editors.’
This was wishful. Most of the newspapers would send deputies and flunkies to any briefing.
‘I was wondering-let me add your name to the list.’
‘When?’ said Alex.
‘Tomorrow at ten. In the bunker.’
‘The bunker?’
‘Cabinet War Rooms under Storey’s Gate-you know, round the back by Horse Guard’s Parade. Now-can I add your name to the list?’
‘What is it the Prime Minister has to say to us?’
‘You won’t know that unless you turn up. What do you say?’
‘I’ll be there. But Max-a favour. Just put “representative of Troy
papers”. Don’t put my name.’
‘Of course-it’s Winston’s show-he’d hate to be upstaged.’ Beaverbrook laughed at his own joke and hung up. Alex leafed through the pages of notes he had taken as his son talked. June 22nd. He reached for his diary, wondering what day of the week that was. A Sunday-or, as Hitler most certainly saw it, very late Saturday night. Hitler pulled all his strokes on Saturdays. He had butchered Roehm and the SA on a Saturday, he had reintroduced conscription on a Saturday, he had retaken the Rhineland on a Saturday. Perhaps he thought to catch Russia napping or ‘gone fishin’?
§ 97
In the morning Alex shaved and dressed in a black suit with waistcoat. It must be his age. At seventy-nine, even in summer a trip out seemed to require more layers than it had a year ago. He rang for Polly the housemaid. She came, still wearing her firewatcher’s outfit from the night before.
‘I ‘ope this is nothing urgent. A night on the roof is about as knackering as a night on the tiles.’
‘No matter, child. It is my wife I seek. Would you find her and ask her to have the Crossley brought round to the front. I am going into town. And do not say “blimey”, “stroll on” or any other of your cockneyisms. I am not housebound.’
‘Can’t do that. Your wife drove down to Hertfordshire two hours ago. In the Crossley.’
Alex thought about it.
The Morris, then.’
‘You gave the Morris to young Fred in 1939.’
‘The Lagonda?’
‘Up on blocks in the garage in Hertfordshire.’
‘The Rolls?’
‘Well-the Rolls is actually here. It’s in the mews, but no-one’s driven it since last autumn.’
‘Fine,’ said Alex. ‘Tell the chauffeur to have it out front in fifteen minutes.’
‘No, boss. Not fine. The chauffeur joined up just after Dunkirk. And I doubt the Rolls’ll start. Battery’s gonna be flat as pancake Tuesday.’
‘Battery?’
‘Battery-as in electricity, you know?’
‘Nonsense. I may not be able to drive a motor-car, but I know for a fact that they run on a petroleum derivative. My brother runs his Armstrong-Siddeley on kerosene. They’re not electrical.’
Polly led him outside, round to the mews, pushed back the garage doors to show him. Rats had eaten the tyres. There was no point in even demonstrating the silent frustration of a flat battery.
‘I could get you a cab.’
The two of them walked back to the end of Church Row and stood ten minutes without a single black taxi passing. Alex looked at his pocket watch.
‘Urgent, is it?’ Polly asked.
‘A meeting with the Prime Minister.’
‘Why didn’t you say so? Come on, we’ll get the tube.’
She slung her tin hat over one arm, extended the other to the old man and lugged him across the road in the direction of the Northern line.
‘We?’ said Alex.
‘You think you can make it on your own, do you?’
He capitulated quietly. He had not been on the tube in donkey’s years. It might even be an adventure.
It was a little after ten when they arrived at Storey’s Gate. A naval lieutenant with a list of names did not ask Alex for his. He simply turned to a colleague and said, ‘It’s Alex Troy!’
Alex insisted on Polly accompanying him inside, described her as his ‘amanuensis’-a word he doubted meant much to any of these young sailors who waited on Churchill, foot as well as hand. In the press room, the reaction was the same. A rising whisper that ran round the room and turned every head as they took their seats-‘Good God, it’s Alex Troy.’
He recognised hardly any of these men. Most of them had risen in Fleet Street as he had retreated to his study and his garden. But he knew their papers. The Times, which had wilfully ignored the reports coming from their own man in Berlin throughout the early thirties, the Observer, which had applauded Hitler’s invasion of the demilitarised Rhineland in 1936, the Daily Mail, which had been stupidly pro-Nazi, and Beaverbrook’s own Daily Express,-which had repeatedly furthered the shaky cause of peace by urging ‘no intervention’ as Hitler tore up treaties, broke rules and extended his territorial imperative. Since 1930 Alex had opposed, criticised and, as he saw it, used his papers to alert the world to the menace of both Hitler and Stalin. When, in 1939, he had reacted to the Nazi-Soviet pact with a leader urging Britain not to judge Russia on this act, every single one of these newspapers had sent him to Coventry-a metaphor, but also a city that might not now be in ruins had such people not so espoused the little corporal at a time when he was still vulnerable.