A Little White Death Read Online Free PDF Page B

That’s the nature of the job. But it was Charlie who made those journeys; it was Charlie who gathered enough information to support his own column and
Arthur’s news file. Most of the time you can’t prise Arthur out of the bar here. We don’t live here – even Troy Newspapers can’t afford that – but we might just
as well. It has its pluses – anyone who’s anyone passes through here eventually – and its minuses, in that you can delude yourself that the Saint-Georges Hotel bar is the world.
Until very recently Charlie never fell for that. There was always a world elsewhere for Charlie. True, he drank like a fish, I’ve never met an English reporter that did not, but until last
autumn it never interfered with his work.
    ‘Last October he was due three weeks’ home leave. He never went home. Charlie’s idea of leave was Spain or Morocco – I never heard of him taking home leave to go home to
England. Perhaps you will say this is just as well – a man living under a cloud. Perhaps he did pick places where no one gave a damn whether he’d spied for Russia or even whether he
still spied for Russia. Last year he chose to go home. He spent his usual ten days in Morocco and then he flew on to England. He visited his mother in Dorset – I gather they had not met in
years – and he spent a weekend in London – I think he might have done the round of his old haunts, but the look on your face, Mr Troy, tells me that you did not see him. Whatever, he
came back a changed man, dejected, angry, less willing to humour the insufferable Arthur, and his interest in the job vanished. I saw it evaporate like a dish of water put out in the noonday sun
for the dog.’
    The image seemed a suitably Levantine one on which to pause, inhale deeply from his cigarette, and let the words sink in. He blew a billowing cloud of aromatic smoke at the ceiling and levelled
his eyes on Troy.
    ‘And I heard the will to go on snap in him like a rubber band coiled too tight or a bowstring stretched too far. Something in Mr Charlie snapped.’
    Troy sat in silent awe of the man’s command of a language not his own, startled by his own recognition of this final metaphor. Years ago – in the 1920s – his father had taken
him to France to one of those damningly nostalgic cultural get-togethers, organised by the then vast body of Russians in exile – Russians in hope – of Russian arts. Such were their
numbers so soon after the Revolution they even ran their own émigré magazine, Teatr i Zhizh , and under the auspices of the Teatr crowd the then less than fashionable Le Touquet
had staged Chekhov in the original. He had sat in the stalls through The Cherry Orchard , aged thirteen or so, enraptured by the play of ideas he soon learnt were wasted on more than half the
audience – who surely were those cherry trees? – beautiful, useless. And then as the curtain fell, then rose again for the bows of the cast, his father rose too. ‘Where was the
breaking string?’ he said. Cast and audience stared at him. No one answered. ‘Where was the bloody breaking string that comes with the sleep of Feers?’ he yelled. ‘Chekhov
is quite clear: “My life has passed as though I’d never lived. I will lie down now . . . nothing . . . nothing . . .” a distant sound, as though coming from the sky, like the
breaking of a string! Where was the breaking string? What do you think the play means without the sound of that string snapping?’ Troy had fled up the aisle to escape his father. Even then he
was too important to the émigrés to be thrown out. They would have to reason with him, and Troy knew damn well that was nigh impossible. But in the ear of the mind he had heard that
string snap even as his father launched full rant on the unfortunate players. He read the play on the train on the way back from Paris Plage to Calais and finished it on the Channel crossing. He
could hear the sound of the breaking string and the life that