The Madness of July (29 page)

They talked about the weather, enjoyed the peace of the day, and opened themselves to their landscape, which this morning had agreed to look its best. Mungo was not over-dressed, but smart in his light tweed jacket and golden yellow tie, his sharp silver hair swept back neatly on each side and curled behind, still full for a man in his mid-fifties. His broad features were welcoming, cheerful on a day like this and he was apple-cheeked. ‘Hello, Alasdair. That’s some fine barley you’ve got over at Balnagask. Fine indeed.’ The farmer acknowledged the compliment with a deep nod. ‘Ah, well. The weather has helped, for once.’

Mungo turned to Aeneas and said, ‘We need to have our little talk. I’ll see you at the house when you’re done.’

After a few minutes more, he eased himself away from the crowd – ‘Business at home, I’m afraid’ – and drove his car up the slope through a corridor of yellow broom to join the road that would take him over the hill. At the top, he stopped for a few moments and looked back over his shoulder. Abel did the same. The sun was high now, and the loch a sheet of light.

They said little on the short drive to Altnabuie, but Abel confessed, ‘I was moved. D’you know what hit me? How ordinary it was, which made me wonder why it ran so deep. To be honest, I’d expected to be repelled, because it’s too far back for me.’ He laughed. ‘You’ll be glad to hear that I wasn’t put off. I found it strangely natural.’

Mungo smiled. ‘Let me tell you something. Sometime in the night – last night – I felt a wave of relief. And then I was cast down again with sadness. Perplexity. I feel there’s something I must do for Will, but I don’t know what. He’s so up and down.’ Abel shook his head.

‘He’s working through it. He’s always at his best when he’s faced difficulties, dragons in the woods. I know that. There’s been danger sometimes, as you well know.’

‘I hope you’re right.’

They were quiet again on the last run down the hill towards Altnabuie. Babble would soon have a lunch ready. The hotpot, and some crumbly sheep’s cheese. Before that, Mungo and Abel would take a glass of warm beer on the terrace. Aeneas would join them in half an hour or so, and Mungo intended to tell him that the family silence had been broken on the subject on which he and the priest had shared thoughts over many months.

Talking to Abel of Aeneas, he said, ‘This is my rock, you know, still. What’s yours?’ Abel smiled.

For the last two miles they stayed quiet, Abel rolling down his window and letting a warm breeze fill the car.

*

As they swung round the long curve of the drive to the house, Flemyng was preparing to board his plane in Edinburgh. Home was behind him, but he felt as if he was carrying a box of secrets wherever he went. He had time for phone calls at the airport, quick ones to Lucy and to Sam, whom he would try to see in the afternoon. He avoided the lounge, where there might be friends lurking, even on a Sunday, and stood at the payphone in the corner of the departures area, back to the wall and eyes on the thin morning crowd. There was no one he knew. His conversations were brief, and quiet. He’d see Lucy before Paul. ‘I need you here,’ she said in response, and that was nearly all. ‘Lots of stuff. Too much.’ She knew better than to say much more. With Sam, he made a quick date. ‘Why don’t we look at your favourite painting?’ he said, not even identifying himself. ‘At about four.’ Nothing more. ‘Yes,’ said Sam, and hung up.

Flemyng stood at the phone when he had finished, and barely moved. He had taken the sun, and his tan had deepened, so that the hollows in his cheeks were more obvious. He was wearing a loose shirt in white linen and dark blue cords, and held a light jacket in his hand. A passer-by would put him down as a man at ease, relaxed and in no hurry. In the time he spent at the payphone he didn’t look once at his watch. His face spoke of contentment not alarm, and there was no patina of fear. He watched the doors, and scanned the clusters of passengers at each gate, smiling at a mother scampering after a runaway child, running a hand through his hair. Then, in a quick movement as if the silent phone behind him had rung, he turned and picked up the receiver, coins ready in his other hand.

He dialled. Francesca was in the garden, and Schubert was coming through the French windows from the radio. Despite the sun, she wanted to go on a melancholy journey and was listening to
Winterreise
, which spoke of a lover’s pain. She looked at her watch when she heard the phone ring over the singing, and went quickly inside.

‘It’s me. I’ve made a decision.’

‘Will, darling?’

‘I’m going to tell you the whole story.’

Her voice was cool. ‘Thank you.’

‘As far as I can,’ he said.

17

A quartet of latecomers to the plane recognized Flemyng. He was in the window seat in the front row where ministers were always placed, unless they wanted to make a point and move back or there was a posse of them on the early Monday flight that had to be dispersed, and although at first his face was turned away he missed none of the greetings. A couple nodded at him and seemed about to speak, but he interrupted smoothly with a confident smile and waved them on their way down the aisle with an easy gesture. A man who might have been an acquaintance arrived immediately behind them and gave a slight bow that was more formal and might have had an ironic edge – hadn’t he worked in the office, long ago? Flemyng bobbed his head without speaking, as if joining in a mime, and watched him move without another pause towards his seat, four rows behind. Reaching across for the newspapers on the seat beside him, he was greeted finally by one of his outer circle of friends, an Edinburgh lawyer named MacGillivray, who stopped for a word, conscious that the passengers round about were watching and listening, and barely lowering his voice.

‘Will. How’s that government of yours? God knows, they need the likes of you. Keep it up.’ He waved away an answer, to demonstrate that he had no intention of invading his privacy, and caught everyone’s eye as he went to his seat. When he flopped down he gave a satisfied gasp that was heard by a dozen passengers, and loosened his tie in a quick fumble that suggested that he might have been about to choke.

Later, MacGillivray would report to his wife that Flemyng had seemed to be in a summer reverie. ‘He’d no papers, not like him. But on the way to London, so work no doubt. A moment of freedom on the plane, I’d say. From events. Who knows?’

A flight attendant who knew Flemyng as a regular and a public man offered him a drink, but she did so with a silent gesture that acknowledged the answer would probably be no and that on this day she need say nothing. She left him alone, and passed on.

Had the separate witnesses been called upon afterwards to assemble a composite mosaic of his mood, even the state of his mind, it would have been accurate. He was alert, missing none of the comings and goings that might touch him, and had abandoned none of the obligatory politeness of his trade. Yet MacGillivray as he blundered past had picked up with his cold, practised eye the nervous shiver underneath. He had never seen Flemyng display a tic or a tremble in his cheek, but told Mrs MacGillivray in their bedtime phone call that he had detected an edginess that startled him. And the passenger sitting four rows behind Flemyng, who had not expected to see him and who spent the rest of the flight trying to remember where and when they had last met, recognized an alertness that he associated with high excitement, because that’s how it had been when he and Flemyng had ploughed the same furrow, mostly on different continents, an age ago.

Left alone after take-off, Flemyng deliberately put the other passengers out of his mind and turned to his family. In his hour of solitude on the hill that morning, he had accepted that Mungo’s concern for him was justified. Abel had known the secret, to a degree that had startled him, and Mungo was protected by the security blanket of the historian: even his mother was fair game, because the truth must out. And Flemyng, of the three of them, had known least. That awareness cut deep. Mungo knew it, and Abel too. But with the acceptance of fragility, a tenderness that was being touched, he had felt a frisson of confidence running through him, just enough to raise him up. A challenge. He had tried on the drive to Edinburgh to identify its origin, and failed. Something had been said, a connection had been made, but the source eluded him. It would come, he told himself. It always did.

He stretched out his hand towards the flight attendant as she passed, and she understood. One drink. Lawrence would be waiting to take him straight to the office. Flemyng sipped his wine, put his seat back, and prepared for the afternoon in studied relaxation, thinking all the while.

*

Jackson Wherry had spent the morning in the office, Sunday or no Sunday. He was the first man in his post to have worn shorts there on such days, and the bravura was an inspiration to the boys he led. He bulged and waddled, and they loved him for it. To work. Three months in London and already he had done enough favours to be able to start to call them in, even on the Sabbath. He’d learned one more fact about the Manson investigation and composed a message for Maria, which he sent himself. It would have reached her at breakfast time. Two of his new friends in town turned out to be in their own offices, which did not surprise him on this weekend, and he exchanged a few thoughts. A name or two. On his way home for lunch and a snooze in the garden, he wondered about Sam Malachy.

Safely stretched on his sun lounger, a Bloody Mary to hand and a rumpled heap of newspapers on the grass, he saw Betsy coming through the garden doors with the extension phone in her hand. ‘Here, baby.’ He didn’t have to rise. She handed him the phone and blew him a kiss.

‘Jackson… Will Flemyng. I’m terribly sorry to ring you on a Sunday.’

The response held no hint of caution. ‘Will! My pleasure. I’m afraid I’m half naked in my garden, but you’ll be relieved to hear that we don’t run to a pool. I’m enjoying what I’m told is going to be the last of the summer. How’re tricks?’ He knew Flemyng would enjoy the friendly shamelessness of his greeting, as if nothing was disturbing the Wherry weekend.

And in turn he would enjoy the artifice of their conversation. Knowing some of what Flemyng must conceal, and aware that there would be much more of which he knew nothing, Wherry relished the game. ‘I’m all yours, Will.’ Then, upping the pace, ‘Where are you?’

Flemyng said he was back in town from Scotland, though he left it at that, and his weekend was a mess. Wherry knew that he’d stop there. He waited.

‘Look, Jackson, it’s simple. Turns out that Guy and I – Sassi – have a couple of mutual friends in DC. I didn’t make the connection when we spoke at Covent Garden. I’m in the States in September – your embassy folk know that – so I want to try to put something together with us all personally. Not through the office – more informally than that. So forgive a Sunday call. Can you help? He’s not on my radar – Guy.’

Wherry said happily, ‘He’s not on most people’s.’

Flemyng continued, despite the risk of clumsiness, even farce. ‘Is he still around… or…?’

Wherry teased. Having spun yarns all his life, he cherished them. ‘He’s still in Europe. Maybe here, maybe elsewhere. Not sure. “They seek him here, they seek him there…” I’m stuck with other things this weekend… it was just good for him to have a friend at the opera.’ He didn’t blush as he said it, as Flemyng would realize, and their little dance went on.

But Wherry then changed tack. ‘Would you like to talk?’

And, with hardly a pause, ‘Now?’

‘Yes.’

Done. Their fan dance over, Wherry asked where Flemyng would be in the course of the afternoon, and got the number of his private line at the office. He said he’d pass the message before he got on with turning his turkey-red scorch marks into a real tan. ‘I’m here now,’ Flemyng said. They laughed, rounding off their exchange with the happy pretence that it hadn’t happened.

‘Drink, soon,’ said Wherry, and added with glee, ‘when everything is over.’

Flemyng sat at his desk, aware that he wouldn’t have to wait long. Unlocking his drawer, he removed the photocopied letter. He recalled Lucy’s questions, and read it again, wondering why he was still convinced that it lay at the centre of things. His mind turned naturally to Mungo and his box of recovered letters, and he realized with the sharpness of a mild electric shock that he hadn’t taken time that morning to start on them, or even to ask his brother to provide him with just one that would give him the full flavour. There would be time, but he was startled by the ability of the single sheet that lay in front of him to cast the rest of his life into shadow, even the part that touched his mother. Its secrecy was all-consuming, telling him that until the spell was broken nothing would resume its rightful place and his world would remain unbalanced and perplexing. He considered the puzzles that tormented him and felt again the approach of the enlightenment that had excited him in the course of his flight two hours earlier, only for it to evaporate before he could give it meaning, and leave him tantalized. It was very close.

The private line rang.

‘Hey, Will, good to hear from you again.’ Sassi. They hadn’t spoken since Thursday night, but never mind.

‘Guy. I’m afraid I was less than entirely open with Jackson a few minutes ago.’ The only way.

‘I assumed that.’ Then, to take the wind out of Flemyng’s sails, he said without warning, ‘Let’s talk about Joe Manson.’

Flemyng, almost forgetting that his conversations with Abel hadn’t involved Sassi directly, hesitated for a moment and got the second blast.

‘And Abel, my friend.’

There was nothing for it now but to say, ‘Where are you?’

Flemyng was unsurprised by the reply. ‘Not far away from your office, as a matter of fact. Near Sloane Square,’ said Sassi. Well, they could meet that afternoon: Flemyng thought he could make it in an hour. Done.

St James’s Park played its customary role as comforter and bringer of calm when Will left the office, having promised Francesca that he’d try to drop home about six. The canopy of willows over the water and the little bridge, with a long flotilla of water lilies winding under its arch, was a picture of innocence and simplicity. He lingered on the way as he struck out west, making detours to avoid the posses of tourists and a few drunks sleeping off the afternoon, pigeons scavenging their picnics as they snoozed.