Black Out by John Lawton Page A

tendency to self-sufficiency that was all but natural in Troy. The trouble was, self-sufficiency could not make a meal of snoek or whalemeat. By comparison, five loaves and thirteen fishes were more malleable. Troy, like the nation, was bored and irritated by the wartime shortages. The longer the war went on, the worse, it seemed, the diet became. The national loaf, his uncle assured him, was nutritionally almost perfect, but it tasted like wet newspaper. Occasionally and bizarrely the diet was enlivened by the sudden short-lived availability of various fruits. Once, years ago, it had been cherries, then it was oranges and for days afterwards the streets of London were littered with peel as a reminder of the orgy. Troy turned to the kitchen cupboard and sought his salvation in a box of eggs given to him by his mother. Out on the heights of Hertfordshire, Maria Mikhailovna had turned her east-facing lawn into a chicken run and had quadrupled the size of the kitchen garden the day war was declared. In the spring of 1941 she had forsaken fripperies for the duration and given the orchid hothouseover to tomatoes. In the depths of 1942 she had surrendered her much-prized south lawn from the windows to the ha-ha and turned it over entirely to potatoes. By 1943 she felt there was little else one woman could give. Her regular treat for her children was a half-dozen eggs at any time, bolstered by fresh leeks all through autumn and a long summer of changing varieties of fresh, earthy smelling potatoes. At odd, unexpected moments one sister or the other would arrive on his doorstep tooled up with what appeared to be half a barrowload of Covent Garden’s finest, from common spud to uncommon capiscum straight out of one of the greenhouses, thrust them at Troy and tell him he neither called nor visited often enough. Masha in particular would go through his kitchen cupboard and berate him for not meeting her standards. Troy felt that was entirely his business and none of hers and asserted that he looked after himself quite well.
    The cupboard yielded an onion, greening a little on the outside, a couple of King Edwards and three speckled, large brown eggs. It called, Troy told himself, for a Spanish omelette – oh, for a capiscum out of season! – a meal that would be a treat in any restaurant, but for the fact that few restaurants in town would now run to a three-egg omelette. Such was the desperation to fill a menu nowadays that he knew of more than one restaurant that had served roast rook. Under the sink he had several bottles of wine from a cellar laid down by his father before the war. On his death late in 1943 Troy’s mother had offered the cellar half each to her sons. Troy had paid no attention on those frequent occasions when his father had tried to teach him about wine, or when he had merely drunk enough to become lyrical on the subject. What discrimination brother Rod showed Troy didn’t know, all he tried for himself was to remember whether such and such a year had been a good summer, and to follow the vaguest rule about fish and meat – not that this said anything about eggs. He reached for a Pauillac ‘27 with no recollection whatsoever of the weather, only that it was most certainly the summer his brother had blown up the old potting shed with the device he had cobbled together out of carbide gas and cocoa tins.
    He had drunk his first glass – so fine a wine that he felt sure he was violating a long-held cache of his father’s, knocking back somespecial reserve – and had softened the vegetables in a pan, when there was a knock on the door. A blast of cold air rushed in. Constable Wildeve stood on the doorstep sniffing the scents that wafted out from the kitchen and smiling expectantly.
    ‘I thought it was you. I’d just stepped out of Joe Lyon’s and I thought it was you. I called out but you probably didn’t hear me.’
    Troy swung the door back.
    ‘Come in before all the warm air goes out.’
    Wildeve