The Madness of July (26 page)

Babble responded to the atmosphere and raised his glass – ‘Your mother.’ Mungo stood, falling back on formality, and his brothers followed suit. It was a natural break. ‘Let’s draw the line there for tonight,’ Mungo said. ‘There’s just too much.’

Flemyng said he understood. It was time to breathe.

He put a hand on Mungo’s shoulder, and felt it steady. ‘We’ll settle it, never you fear. For now, you need to feel happy that this is all out. We’re with you. Babble too.’

He poured whisky for all of them, and they moved outside. The heat of the day was gone, and a breeze floated up from the loch. They could feel its moisture on their faces. ‘Rain on the way,’ said Babble.

Flemyng felt a pang at the thought of leaving Mungo to climb the stairs to bed alone, but he had to talk to Abel in private. Babble understood. He took Mungo’s arm. ‘Let’s go down the garden and take the air before the rain.’ They left.

Abel said, ‘They know we need to be alone.’

Moving to the stone bench outside the window, glasses in hand, Flemyng began, ‘After all that, we can speak more frankly, don’t you think?’ In the light cast from the drawing room, Abel’s eyes were bright against the deepening darkness as his brother made his leap.

‘I need to know why Manson came here,’ he said with no preamble, watching Abel’s face in profile.

‘All I can tell you right now,’ he said, untroubled by the abruptness, ‘is that it was private enterprise on his part, and dangerous. Maria Cooney didn’t know. She was angry – fit to be tied – and that makes her more distraught now. He wanted to confront a certain individual, and we don’t know who. That’s the truth. You’re telling me you know nothing more?’

‘Almost nothing,’ said Flemyng. ‘A confrontation?’ he went on. ‘About what?’ Abel had avoided the question of motive.

‘Personal,’ said his brother sharply, giving a signal that there would be no more.

‘Personal?’ Flemyng picked up. ‘Nothing’s personal in our game. Outside the family, away from here and all this, we can’t afford the personal, can we?’

Abel agreed. Fear of the personal had caused them to drift apart years before, and it need never have happened. ‘Why did we get worked up about that rivalry, operations we couldn’t share, just because we were playing the same game for different people?’ It shouldn’t have stopped them, he said, but it had. They had realized too late that their paths had taken them away from each other.

‘We needed time to grow up, that’s all,’ Flemyng said. ‘But it cost us.’

And politics poisoned the personal, he said, sometimes killed it. ‘I’m watching it happen now, day by bloody day.’

A quietness came on them, and the mood changed. Against all Flemyng’s instincts he had opened up a secret corner of his mind. Now, instinctively, Abel and he were contemplating their lives, and they felt the grip of competition.

‘It’s all going to come to a head in the next few days,’ Abel said after a minute or two. ‘We’re agreed on that, I think?’ Flemyng nodded. ‘What I’m able to say – from Maria, who salutes you from afar, by the way – is that our worry isn’t what brought Joe here – a personal obsession, we think. It’s what he might have said about other matters in chasing it that worries us.’

He showed no surprise when Flemyng answered this with, ‘Berlin.’ But it wasn’t the time to answer.

Instead, silence. Abel shook his head. Then, dropped into the awkwardness, the question, ‘Did Manson call you?’

Flemyng was emphatic in his reply. ‘No. I was unaware. He didn’t try to get to me, as far as anyone knows. I mentioned Berlin, just so you know, because that came from elsewhere.’ It was a challenge, and his brother ducked it.

Drawing back from intimacy as quickly as they had rediscovered it, Abel took charge with a question of his own. ‘The Washington embassy. Brieve said at dinner last night that there’s been no decision.’

‘Brieve?’ Flemyng’s eyes flashed. He slapped his thigh. ‘Something’s gone wrong. I don’t know what.’ Another admission of ignorance from the minister who knew nothing. ‘But that’s got nothing to do with Manson, has it?’ his eyes coming up. Abel was still and quiet, so he pressed on. ‘Where did you see Brieve?’

‘A dinner thing.’ Abel tossed his head, added, ‘Wherry,’ and threw in another quick question, piling it on. ‘You’re troubled about something else, on top of that. Who cares about ambassadors? And don’t forget how well I still know you. Tonight’s been a reminder of that.’

Flemyng said, ‘You’re right. There is some trouble. I’m feeling battered.’

‘Is it everything here? Mungo’s treasure hunt? Mother?’ Abel gestured into the dusk, where Mungo had disappeared with Babble on their walk towards the loch. ‘It churns me up too.’

Flemyng shook his head. ‘No, a different thing. But I’ve found myself using the family stuff as cover with Francesca. She’s worried. And it’s maybe cover for me too. Keeping panic at bay, I suppose. A family crisis is always the trump card. I can’t decide if that’s what I’ve done or whether it’s true that this is taking over, because of what we’re learning. Maybe I’m using it as a diversion from another problem I’ve got, and have to see through. They’re inseparable, and one covers for the other.’

‘Inevitable,’ said Abel. ‘Part of the choice we made, the two of us.’

Flemyng said he’d grown aware of something else. ‘You don’t shed emotions as time goes by. They multiply.’

They had reached a natural break in their conversation and, after a few moments in the silence of the darkening landscape in front of them, turned together towards the door. Approaching the threshold, Flemyng was lost in thought, but Abel was ready to exploit the moment. He had a story to finish.

‘There’s more,’ he said simply.

Flemyng turned with his back to the hall. His arms were folded. ‘I assumed from what you said that there was something else about the American end. Not for Mungo’s ears?’

‘Until later. It’s about how I came into the game. How and why, I suppose. You know I was spotted at Princeton. Twenty-two, I suppose I was, on that graduate programme. What you don’t know is that it was Mother’s lover who managed it, through one of his people.’ There was little light, and his face was a happy jigsaw of shadows.

‘He’d come back from London towards the end of the war with a reputation, and I’ve learned since what he did with it. You’ll laugh.’

‘Try me,’ said Flemyng, and Abel laid it out, seizing the quiet moment towards the end of the day to produce a climax.

‘He invented Maria’s outfit, became the godfather of the network. Lent it spirit and lustre, I’m told. And, early on, he wanted some people who might make whoopee in London. I was a natural. You’d already signed up here. Mother knew all about that; must have told him. So I got the tap on the shoulder, and jumped.’

Flemyng, sounding calm, asked if Abel had met the man. No. He had turned into legend before Abel arrived, after careful preparation in his last two semesters at Princeton and a learning stint in London. By then the maestro had gone. Judging by Mungo’s timeline, Abel said, the affair was over by then too, before the sixties had been dreamed of. But there were now clues to the completion of the story. Even Abel’s decision to take their mother’s family name when he made the American move had been encouraged by her. He now recognized that as part of the plan, an element of her contentment. There must be letters, he said, that would show how they’d spoken about it, how it was done, and how pleased they had been when he followed the script. Had they gone on the fire, he wondered aloud, or were they in the box?

‘I know it now: I do this because of him. They must have loved the sight of us, both in the family business.’ Abel laughed.

It was natural that at such a juncture they should pause. His brother’s revelation was a spur to Flemyng’s imagination, but he needed time in which to reflect. Moving closer, he said, ‘It will take a while to sink in. Coincidences often do.’

Mungo and Babble were coming up from the garden, their faces splashed with light as they came through the door from the dark, and they joined them in the hall. Mungo stopped at the long barometer, and tapped it hard. ‘The glass is falling. Good.’

They lingered for a moment, reached towards each other, and said their goodnights.

In his bedroom, he looked at his father’s portrait, and went to the window. At night, there was not a light in the whole world that he could see from his room, as if the house had drawn a cloak around itself. He could follow the shape of the hills, but there was no moon and no glint from the loch below. As he undressed, he heard the creak of a floorboard. Abel was pacing his room along the corridor. On his bed, a book of poetry in his hand, he heard the boards creak once again.

Downstairs, Babble switched off the last lamps in the dining room, and stood at the front door for a moment to enjoy the approach of the freshening rain. The dampness touched him. Eventually, he turned towards the west end of the house, his books and his bed, casting Altnabuie into darkness as he went.

‘The brothers,’ he said to himself half aloud as he closed his door behind him, ‘together again.’

Sunday

16

Flemyng’s locked red box was one of five dispatched northwards on Saturday afternoon, secured together in a train that arrived in Edinburgh late in the evening. Three were taken immediately to the homes of ministers living in the city, another delivered to a country house an hour away to the south where one of Flemyng’s colleagues was spending a short weekend. The instructions accompanying his own – they were Lucy’s, but originated with Paul – were that it should arrive at Altnabuie as early as possible on Sunday. As the first colours of the morning appeared on the hills, a government driver was leaving the main road and relishing the winding route through the trees, the box lying safe and secure on the seat behind him.

He had left a wet city. Now the rain had gone and the eastern sky was bright behind him.

At the house, rivulets of water had poured from the roof all night, and when Babble went to his window an hour before dawn he heard the rough splashing of the downpour on the gravel behind the house. Through it, he caught the sound of the burn as if it had burst into action in a gesture of thanks for the deluge. The air was fresh again, with the cooling lift they had all missed. As familiar as sea spray to a sailor, it would come from stony grey skies that lingered stubbornly for days and then broke, or from the softer rain that crept in from nowhere and turned to mist, coaxing the greenery on the hills and in the woods into life, so that there was a trickle from every branch on the dark pines, their needles fattening with the water, and a shine on the leaves of the larch and the holly.

He could hear little streams of water falling from the overhang outside his window and a steady, heavy drip from the stone lintel above the back door. By mid-morning the garden would be full of colour and plumped up, parched places soft and damp and the blooms turning towards the sun. Lifted by the thought, he felt an exhilaration that he attributed in part to the difficulties of the previous night. Emotions in the house were high, and Flemyng sometimes told him that he was the most romantic man he knew.

At the other end of the house, Flemyng was awake too. He was listening for the car.

He planned his morning, stretched out under a single sheet, and relaxed himself deliberately, limb by limb. After the box had been delivered into his hands, by old rules that he knew the driver would follow to the letter, he would walk in the early light, taking the dogs up the hill for a scramble through the heather. He would go to a spot high above the back of the house where the landscape opened up to every point of the compass, and when the last of the rain clouds had gone his reward would be a fresh panorama of hill and moorland stretching into the far distance, washed in pastels, with trails of mist on the shoulders of the crags and a diamond sparkle on the loch below.

He didn’t expect to see another human soul.

While Flemyng made his plans, Babble was reading. He pulled his favourite armchair to the window, picked up Dickens and took himself to London. On his rare solo expeditions, he would visit an old girlfriend who lived near Southwark Bridge, because for him that was close to London’s beating heart, the old Babb home standing only a mile or two away, and still the hub of a throbbing network of cousins and their broods. Wandering around Borough High Street, Babble was in the city to which he returned again and again in the pages on his shelves, walking the streets of his imagination. The Marshalsea prison where Little Dorritt’s father was banged up, Jacob’s Island not far away where Bill Sykes met his end, the old city across the water with its dark tangle of passages and alleys that had once teemed with rough life, the river itself with its barges and lightermen and all the secrets that were revealed when the tide fell back and the mud banks lay exposed. His private playground.

He held close the vision of that London gone, a place of fables and violent rumour, the tumbling fairground of thrills and sadness that moved him still. It was lost, and he knew that was why he had come to love the empty places around him. He could dream there, and remember that which he’d never known but wished for. He had created a second life.

Picking up
Our Mutual Friend
he left Altnabuie behind for the dark fantasy that lured him back.
‘The white face of the winter day came sluggishly on, veiled in a frosty mist; and the shadowy ships in the river slowly changed to black substances; and the sun, blood-red on the eastern marshes behind dark masts and yards, seemed filled with the ruins of a forest it had set on fire.’
He floated off.

Mungo was stirring upstairs, and aware of the water all around. He lay for a while and listened. He had been awake twice in the night, and the patter on the roof and the soft rattle of his window in the wind gave him pleasure. His greatest satisfaction was home. For a few minutes he considered the difficulties of the last few weeks. He ran through the table talk of the night before, and the openness the brothers had tried to find as they edged into their past, remembering the shades of darkness that had sometimes touched Abel’s face and the pulse that had quickened in Will as he began to relish a secret that he thought had scared him. Mungo was relieved, and surprised. He had expected his brother’s journey to take him in the other direction, from confidence to doubt.