The Madness of July (24 page)

As they pulled up, Abel was ready to spring from the car. Babble said, ‘Off you go then. You’re home.’

Abel got out, and Babble drove round the house and out of sight.

From the gable end, where he stood in a sunny spot, Abel saw his brother on the path leading up from the loch, and caught his profile. Still slim, leaning into the slope, he had kept the lithe ease that Abel had envied in him as a boy. Flemyng was walking slowly towards the house. As if he’d caught some movement by the door, he turned his head.

Abel raised one arm in greeting and he stopped, copied his gesture, and with hardly a pause ran forward to greet him. They met in a haze of relief and after a silent moment fell into each other’s arms.

Neither seemed ready to speak first; time passed before they stood back, and Flemyng looked him up and down. ‘Welcome home. And healthy as a horse.’

Abel laughed. ‘You too, despite it all.’

They walked back together in silence, Abel’s arm on Flemyng’s shoulder, and there was Mungo in the doorway, a broad smile on his face and arms outstretched. ‘A sharpener, I think,’ he said. ‘We’re all here.’ He reached for the whisky bottle that he’d placed on the hall table as a sign of welcome. ‘Old Pulteney. We deserve this, for all kinds of reasons. Your very good health.’

For half an hour they caught up with their stories, and settled into each other’s company. Mungo announced, ‘We’re going to sit down at eight, just like the old days. Babble as well, which is important.’ Flemyng caught Abel’s expression, with its passing hint of surprise.

They went to the orrery, and enjoyed memories of boyhood games, falling under the spell of its shiny mechanism. ‘Time for a lunar eclipse before dinner,’ said Flemyng, fiddling with the lever. They laughed together. Mungo slipped upstairs. Then Abel, refusing to allow the chance to pass, said, ‘I hope we’ll have a good catch-up later, apart from the family.’ Flemyng nodded. They went to their rooms to prepare themselves for an evening whose course neither of them tried to predict.

After his bath, Flemyng went to the window that looked towards the woods and stood, unclothed, to enjoy the laziness of early evening. The light was softening, the shadows stealthy. As he watched, one of the dogs appeared beneath him and then Mungo, favourite walking stick in hand, setting off with purpose for the orchard where he had planted his saplings. It seemed he had regained some of his old poise; he was straighter and his tread regular. Flemyng’s eyes followed his course into the trees, then he turned away.

He heard the phone ring downstairs in the hall, and knew before he picked it up that it would be Paul.

‘Sorry to come back so soon, but there are developments.’

Flemyng said, ‘Take me through.’ No preliminaries.

‘No details on this line. But I do want you to know that our friend left more behind than we thought. More messages from the notebook and some intriguing papers. Newspaper cuttings as well, that he managed to winkle out from somewhere. I’ll tell you now that they will interest you.’

‘Why?’ said Flemyng.

‘Because they show that you were one of his interests. Maybe a target.’

Flemyng said nothing.

‘I wanted to give you fair warning,’ said Paul. ‘When we see each other we’re going to have these complications to sort out. I’ve put some material in your box. I’ll see you at eight tomorrow.’

Flemyng went back to the window. The light had faded. He was being tested. The warmth of the reunion with Abel ebbed as shadows lengthened on the hill. Sam’s warning and Paul’s message brought a chill. Shaved and changed, he turned his mind to dinner. As he left his room, he told himself that if Paul had planned to put him on edge he could hardly have managed it better. He leaned over the banister, looking down at his mother’s pictures on the staircase wall.

Sometimes, alone at Altnabuie with Mungo, Babble enjoyed the gentle absurdity of ringing the Malayan gong that hung in the hall as a call to the table. He would swing the long mallet padded with faded tigerskin as if he were calling a party of a dozen or more from all corners of the garden. Tonight he had good reason. He checked the table, savoured the kitchen smells, and stepped into the hall with the dogs at his feet.

Three mighty beats on the gong summoned the brothers to their table.

15

A ceremony took place before dinner that neither Flemyng nor Abel had expected. Mungo laid on the side table a photograph and a medal with a ribbon attached, and then placed a battered black tin, his deed box, on the floor. At first they were silent. Flemyng inclined his head; Abel had his hands clasped behind his back, schoolboy-style. After a moment Mungo said, ‘It seemed appropriate,’ gesturing to the black-and-white photograph in its plain silver frame. It showed their mother picnicking on the grass with friends, a long wooden hut visible behind them, its windows open to the sun and doors flung wide. She was laughing, with one arm flung high in the air. Were it not for the two military cars parked end-to-end at the side of the hut, and a uniformed RAF officer striding towards the edge of the frame, it would have seemed a carefree scene.

‘Bletchley Park, in the summer of 1943,’ said Mungo. ‘It’s dated on the back. A happy lunch-break, I’d say. What was going on in the hut behind? U-boat chatter, traffic from the eastern front, Goering’s troubles, who can say? Both of you were here, home from school. I was on Salisbury Plain, tramping about in a backpack and sodden boots, waiting for something, knowing nothing. And there she was, all the while.’

Abel said, ‘I’ve heard tell of a decoration, but I’ve never seen it.’ He peered down. The silver disc attached to a short green-and-blue ribbon lay against a cushion of purple velvet in a slim leather-covered box.

‘From my excavations,’ Mungo said. ‘The secret medal that she could never wear, for unmentionable services that we can now start to acknowledge.’ He turned to them in response to their silence.

‘Why are you puzzled?’

‘It’s odd,’ said Flemyng, tapping the table with one finger. ‘This photograph. Why was it allowed? Station X was the biggest secret of all. Codebreakers wandering everywhere. Yet somebody was snapping away with a camera.’

Abel laughed. ‘You’ve probably hit the nail on the head, as usual.’

‘He has,’ said Mungo, taking his seat at the dinner table and drawing them round it before he explained, ‘I know who took that picture. The man whose letters are in the deed box over there. Our mother’s lover.’

Abel would describe it afterwards as Mungo’s finest hour, when he fought off the temptation to slip and slide into his story, trailing loose threads behind him. There would be no false start, no breaks for the brothers out on the terrace to help them avoid the point and take a breather. He had reached his conclusions and would lay them out at his own steady pace, refusing any opportunity to ramble or let random recollections take over. Abel believed that Mungo wanted to set the scene for a memorable tale, properly told. Boldly, with style.

And, in the same way, it was Flemyng’s moment. Abel had recognized his troubled spirit from the first phone call and their meeting two hours earlier, despite his happiness at the reunion. His brother’s relief at the homecoming gave him a sprightly air, but the strain beneath was obvious to those who had always known him. His shoulders were taut, face grey-tinged in the half-light of the dining room. Abel had noticed earlier that the scar on his neck was rubbed red.

Piecing the story together much later with Maria, he correctly identified Mungo’s opening play at dinner on that Saturday as a summons to Flemyng, a private call to arms that was heard and obeyed. Dealing with the family story was the means by which he could beat despair in his other life, and perhaps the fear of failure. A chance for the shadows to lift. So Abel saw it. Describing the change to Maria, when it was all over, he said that on that evening their mother became the alchemist’s stone, her magic come back.

Mungo told them that he had felt her presence in recent weeks as he had read the letters he had uncovered. At first there was a single note, lodged by mistake with some family papers in the attic – a puzzling message on one side of the sheet, signed with an initial, and using a nickname that he didn’t recognize. But it was an alert, and he was convinced that the letter would lead him to others. He often said that historians believed in hidden treasure because they had to. He checked all the drawers and chests in every corner of Altnabuie, delving into leather suitcases bulging with letters and cartons of family photographs, and one day came upon the deed box, tucked under the eaves at the west end of the house and locked, with a leather belt strapped tight around it. With Babble’s help he had gone through the jumble of keys in a wide stone jar in the cellar and found one that could be forced to do the job. In the course of one long Friday afternoon, he started on the journey that led to this dinner table and his brothers.

‘I know she would have approved.’ He turned to look out of the window, heavy-lidded eyes following the sloping garden towards the loch and the rolling clouds above that would surely bring rain from the west before the night was over, and Abel wondered if he was feeling a shiver of doubt. ‘It wasn’t spooky,’ Mungo said. ‘No ghost on the scene. Just a sense that it was right, despite the pain I felt at first. Embarrassment, I suppose.’ Abel was watching Flemyng, who had seemed immobile since Mungo’s announcement.

But quickly, Flemyng urged him on. ‘You told me there was a surprise hidden in her war story,’ he said. ‘I assumed it was a Bletchley thing, because of what we’ve found out in the last few years. But you said it was a personal story that could change everything. Then nothing, except that I should prepare myself. I have, and I need to know, from the beginning.’

‘Me too,’ said Abel.

‘Lover,’ said Flemyng. ‘Let’s start with that one word.’

‘Concise as ever,’ Mungo said, turning to face them both. ‘I’ll give you the story. It seems that Mother’ – he waved to suggest that he was trying to find a word that eluded him, then found it – ‘… decided to have an affair. A long one, lasting years and years. Full-blooded, you might say. I found the main cache of letters in the attic, then some that were deposited in the bank in a file with a misleading name, thrown together with other family stuff, and I found that cousin Kirsty over in Blairgowrie had a box that she’d never opened. Sure enough, there was another bundle inside. I’ve now been through them, and I’ve got them all here. Believe it or not, there are hundreds of them. Hundreds.’

Mungo took a sip of wine and passed the bottle, to let the revelation sink in. Babble dropped in a question of his own. ‘You used a funny word.
“
Decided”. I always thought affairs were things you just fell into. They’re accidents, generally speaking.’ That had certainly been his experience, the remoteness of Altnabuie having proved no barrier to his passions down the years.

‘I used the word deliberately,’ Mungo said. ‘Let me tell it in my own way.’ They were eating cold salmon and cucumber as he spoke, and the conversation was punctuated by periods of silence. To Abel, it seemed as if they were all glad that there were opportunities to pause.

Mungo said, ‘I was putting the other family papers in order for my own researches. I’ve been through the far past – I’ve got the Jacobite business all wrapped up – and in the last few weeks I’ve been trying to work out the story of the various things that were done to the house over the years, how the estate expanded and all that kind of thing, the story of the shipbuilding years, and then this came along.

‘I should say that I was a bit slow at first, and didn’t recognize them for what they were. Maybe naïve. But they soon became clear, and when I looked at them chronologically, well, everything took shape. They tell her story. It’s not there yet in every detail – not by a long chalk – but I know a good deal more than I knew three months ago about my own mother.

‘Our mother, I should say.’

The letters were now in order and covered a period of many years. There were dozens written by the man with whom she had certainly been in love, but many more written by her. At some point, Mungo said, it was clear that they had been returned to her. He assumed, from their level of intimacy, that no one else had read them all before.

‘You can imagine that I was quite knocked out by the discovery at first,’ he said, and looked to them. ‘Not in the head, mind you.’ He looked up for reassurance.

‘Were we meant to find them?’ Flemyng asked. ‘Did she want this?’

Mungo shook his head. ‘I can’t say, except that she didn’t burn them.’

‘Which means the answer is yes, and she knew they’d be found,’ said Abel. ‘And I’ll bet they’ve been edited. But I’ll be quiet for the moment. Keep going.’

‘Now we come to the big question, the first one anyway. Who?’

Mungo drummed his fingers on the table edge. ‘I’m going to have to ask you to wait, because the truth is I’m not sure. I know that sounds strange.’ He got up and walked to the window, leaving them at the table, so that he could turn away for a minute. ‘I want to come back to the word that puzzled you, Babble.
Decided
. It’s the key, I think. She loved Father, as we know, although he had quite a few years on her. And this place was everything to her. But there was something else at play, and I think I have worked out what it was.

‘She wanted to escape. Safely. The affair was her way.’ He was back in his seat, frowning a little.

‘Escape,’ Babble said. ‘From what?’

Mungo didn’t answer directly. ‘That’s what moves me. It wasn’t some silly… dalliance. I’ll explain in a moment.’

The natural pause brought Abel in. ‘I should say to you all,’ he began, looking at his brothers and then Babble, ‘that I’m a little farther ahead in this game than you are.’ Everyone was aware of a tightening in the atmosphere. ‘When you wrote to me with the one or two facts you had, Mungo, I didn’t say. But I knew more than you did.’

Babble murmured that the lamb would be ready and left the room – his timing at such moments never failed – and Abel was ready to change tack. ‘Let’s begin with the fact that shapes everything.’