The Madness of July (25 page)

He hunched forward, the youngest child, bearer of her surname by a choice made in adulthood, the one who had always cherished most the visceral thrill of rolling American beaches and snug log cabins, fiery barbecues in the dark and adventures in the mountains when the family had crossed the ocean for the first time. His concentration kicked in, the famous strength that had carried him through the shadows and been his protector.

‘Her lover was an American,’ he announced.

Mungo nodded, and said, ‘Exactly.’

Flemyng leaned back in his seat, and for the first time his astonishment became obvious.

‘Back to you,’ Abel said, with his broadest, most dimpled smile.

Mungo said he would come back to the question of identity in due course. ‘It’s been a slow business,’ he admitted, as if he’d wanted to speed it up. ‘There are more than three hundred letters. Gaps in the dates, of course. Whether we’ll find others, I can’t be sure.’ He had sorted them out chronologically and there were sequences covering two or three years at a time. ‘I was helped by the fact that there is not much in them about us. At first that upset me, a good deal if I’m honest with you. But I found as time went by that I was grateful for it. We were a different part of her life, but no less precious because of that.’

Turning to Abel, he confirmed he had learned quickly that the lover was American. There was the language used in the letters, then the family references. He had found one or two episodes in New York when she had taken the long sea trip to visit her own mother’s family in New England, the Graubers, whom they had all known. At least once, the lovers had met when the three brothers had been with her in post-war America, when Mungo was in his early twenties, on a journey that they would never forget. It was the trip that Abel believed had changed the course of his life. Mungo said it had been an opportunity for one of the lovers’ last meetings. But he’d discovered that mostly they met in London.

Mungo had now recovered from his hesitation. ‘As I read myself into the relationship it made sense, remembering the way Mother taught us years afterwards about America and her family, and gave us such an exotic picture. The thing began to seem quite natural to me. It fitted her.

‘The letters reveal, but they also conceal. And, Abel, you’re right. They’ve been weeded, I think, to keep his identity obscure. There are no envelopes. I don’t know how she received them. She was meticulous about covering that up, and successful.’

Mungo said the strength of the affair was clear from the endearments exchanged between the lovers from the start. But, and he emphasized how important this was to him, he was convinced that the man had never come to Altnabuie. She would have thought about him as she sat in the bedroom that was her studio and looked down to the loch – must have, night after night – but the letters made it obvious that right to the end he had never seen the place. It had flourished in his imagination.

‘He longed for it, knowing that he would never see it. That was their pact, the pain that they accepted would always run through the affair. She says as much in some of the earlier letters that I’ve got. Wartime ones. He has to stay away, and she says later that it wasn’t for Father’s sake – though surely it must have been, in large part – but for hers. She had to be able to keep her two lives apart. I don’t know whether that was kind or cruel. Who’s to say?’

There was a period of silence while they ate, and Mungo left them with that thought while Babble made a circuit of the table to refill their glasses.

Flemyng opened the next phase. He said that they could leave the speculation for later. There were facts to be established.

‘Dates,’ he said, quite loudly, so that the word was slapped on the table.

Abel looked to Mungo, who still showed no sign of agitation, although he had risen from the table once again. No lights had been lit in the dining room, and with his back to the bow window he had taken on the appearance of a silhouette against the dusky landscape. The last flicker of daylight was disappearing. Babble had returned and the four men enjoyed the silent intimacy of the table. Flemyng let his question lie, and waited.

‘About the end of the affair, I can be specific. But I am afraid there is no such certainty about the beginning. If you read the letters in that box, you only pick up the story after the relationship is established and up and running. When it began, I can’t say.’

‘Which means,’ said Abel, ‘that our journey has hardly started.’

Mungo pointed to the photograph on the side table. He described a letter telling the story of the day the picture was taken at Bletchley. Her lover was serving in the American forces’ liaison office in London, flitting from one clandestine world to another, and had reason to visit Station X from time to time. ‘He was one of the few Yanks who knew its real purpose,’ said Mungo, ‘and I wonder if it was through his connections that she was picked for secret service in the first place.’ The letters had hints of that. They’d met regularly, in Bletchley and in London, and Mungo suspected that it was in those years that the affair was at its zenith. ‘It continued for some years afterwards, before it tailed away. They were ageing. The end is heartbreaking, in its way.’ He found himself unable to continue. ‘I’m sorry.’

Flemyng picked up, and led Mungo back on to difficult terrain. ‘If you have reason to believe that his connections may have led to her recruitment, then we know something for certain.’

‘I’m afraid we do,’ said Mungo.

‘That they knew each other before the war,’ Flemyng continued, ‘so maybe they were lovers at that time. The question is – when precisely did it start? Before we came along, or afterwards?’

Abel smiled. ‘It rather matters, doesn’t it?’

When they had come to the table, Flemyng had appeared the most serious, without his usual sparkle. Mungo was in charge and confident in his story, Abel alert and smiling. Now Mungo was feeling the weight of his revelations, and as he lost some of his poise he seemed to shrink. Flemyng, by contrast, was alive with interest. Abel was watching every gesture, his face a mirror of Flemyng’s excitement. Faced with uncertainty, perhaps a discovery that would oblige them to question their own identities, the two youngest brothers had found new energy. Flemyng was leaning in, his hands flat on the table. The tiredness on his face had gone, and his eyes were eager.

He turned deliberately to Babble, and his eyes widened. ‘Can you help?’

‘Maybe I can,’ he said, every eye upon him.

Flemyng smiled at the confirmation. ‘You knew.’

‘Oh aye, I knew.’

Mungo turned away again, and Abel saw the physical response as evidence that he was re-entering the state of shock that had come on him when he first delved into the letters, on his own. He had to find something to do because he didn’t want to speak. He moved from the window to the side of the room and found the switch beside the table where the picture lay. Two wall lights on either side of the fire threw a soft yellow glow across the table. Babble was illuminated in profile, and Abel thought it was as if he was being picked out on-stage by a light from the wings. He was waiting for Mungo to return to his chair. ‘I’m sorry,’ said Babble as he sat down. ‘I’ve kept it to myself.’

Mungo had known this man nearly all his life, and as a boy had been a companion to the cockney with thick auburn hair and a bark of a laugh, a ragamuffin in his twenties bent on adventure when he’d become part of the household. The streetwise boy without a city to play in, let loose in the hills. Pot boy, apprentice gamekeeper, jack of everything. So close had they become in the endless summers of Mungo’s early years, in long walks through the woods and lost days on the hill, and so much of what he knew about the place had been discovered alongside Babble as they mapped their world, that the friendship was inseparable for him from family memories. It remained a pillar to which he could cling on lonely nights. Warm evenings on the loch; late-summer harvest days at the home farm when they fed the threshing mill with corn and barley into the dusk for a solid week; cool early mornings on the burn before the mist had risen, when he might catch a trout in the shallows with his hands. Together they lived the working out of the year.

Now, a secret that divided them was opening up. Babble addressed his boys.

‘I did know. It wasn’t a dark secret – more a gift. It was precious then, and still is, because she trusted me. It meant deceiving your father, of course, and I never enjoyed that. I had to choose. Whether to keep your mother’s trust or to tell your father, which would have doubled the deception, if you think about it. So I didn’t.’

He lifted his glass as if to make a silent toast and the others did the same, obliged to follow his lead.

Flemyng spoke first. ‘When?’

Abel never forgot, in the days that followed, the smile that Babble gave them then. His face was only half lit and his hair was a rich bronze, with the overhanging eyebrows dark outcrops on his face. He raised his hands, palms out. ‘I saw a letter by accident, after the war, and she told me everything. I think she wanted to. There was trust, and I helped her. I burned the envelopes, put some of the letters away. She was careful which ones she kept. As for dates, what can I say? They had known each other before she went away in the hush-hush time – definitely – but as for when it began exactly, I can’t be sure.’

Flemyng then steered them back to Mungo’s tale, as if to give Babble’s intervention time to bed down before they questioned him further. Mungo spoke with relief, and Abel suspected he had felt embarrassment that verged on panic. ‘I said I had reached some conclusions about what the affair meant to her. Can I go back to that?’

He spoke. ‘I began with a feeling of weariness, sadness. At first it made me feel sad… weary… to read about it. A burst of anger, too. Now, I confess, I’m more taken by the colour of the thing, its sheen and its verve. That’s the odd thing. The vivacity is so attractive. If it had been seedy, I’m not sure I would have coped, being honest with you. Is that a wee bit precious? Perhaps.’

Flemyng said he knew why his brother was able to accept what had happened. Mungo raised his eyebrows with a touch of theatricality, and said, ‘Go on. I knew you’d understand.’ He leaned back.

Flemyng said, ‘You’re convinced that without this secret side to her, Mother couldn’t have been what she was, to all of us.’

‘Precisely.’

Abel intervened then. ‘What do you know of him?’

‘Very little,’ Mungo said. There were mysteries, despite the stories told in the letters. The man’s first name was not uncommon – Lewis – but he’d never seen a surname. ‘As Babble says, the envelopes have been destroyed.’ Abel wondered how many had turned to smoke in the Altnabuie fireplace with dogs asleep on either side and the boys sleeping upstairs.

‘They’re intimate letters. Of course. I’ll leave you to read them for yourselves. But they had a physical relationship that was evidently… fulfilling. There’s more to it, though. A better side to it than that.’ Flemyng smiled – dear Mungo. ‘He painted too. That’s clear. They spoke about the world of their imaginations, and she told him, often, how much she loved Father.’ His voice faltered for a moment. ‘And us.’

For the first time, Mungo’s eyes filled up. ‘I’ve come to realize that without this we might not have had such a happy time. And that goes for Father, too. A difficult thought to accept, turning everything upside down as it does. But I have.’

And Abel said, ‘So have I.’ Before he spoke, while his brothers waited, he brought his mother to mind. She was on the stairs, clattering back from the henhouse and through the kitchen door carrying a pail with fresh eggs sitting on a high nest of straw. Her long black hair, with the natural grey streaks that had come early, her thin pianist’s hands and high bearing, all contributed to an imperious demeanour that was at odds with her character, which was – in her own favourite phrase – as warm as pie. She painted in the first-floor room at the far end of the house, where her oils and varnishes gave the place an odour that he liked to think had never evaporated. A place full of light.

There were some easels still leaning against a wall in the cellar, a few tubes of sticky paint thrown together in an old potato sack, and three pictures on the staircase. Two were of their own glen, one showing it in the depths of a famously hard winter, and the other of a Maine seashore where she’d introduced them all to the rough touch of the Atlantic and the first frontier. Each bedroom held a little portrait of a member of the family. Flemyng’s had his father – dark and alive, and smiling.

Abel imagined he was hearing sounds from the gunroom on a damp October morning when they were heading for the hill, or the splash of the first fish of the day. Maybe his mother straight-backed at her easel, wrapped in folds of violet and red and whispering to herself as she reached for the palette and looked out of the window towards the high places. Sometimes the boys would hear singing while she painted, her voice carrying along the long bedroom corridor.

He spoke up. ‘You’ve got it, Mungo. There’s a completeness in this that we all understand. Without this, she’d have been a different person and not the one we knew. Think of the paintings, and the life in them. The fulfilment.’

Then his own revelation. ‘I’ve known for a while. There’s one of her pictures in my club in New York. I recognized it about three years ago when they took it out of store and hung it in a big sitting room – the style was so obvious, it hit me like a rocket. There are two paintings, in fact – one’s not on display. I took the trouble to trace their history. One’s signed, the other not. The archivist was interested, he’s a sharp guy, and it helped that I bear her name.’ His brothers smiled. ‘I learned of their life together. The lover was a member and the pictures came from him. Left to the club when he died. I’m still following the story backwards. More later.’

And then it was obvious that they had gone far enough for one evening. It was time to pause.

Mungo’s relief was obvious. The deed box stayed shut; the letters would be examined another day. Like exhausted lovers, Abel thought, they knew it was time to rest.