The Madness of July (33 page)

Babble waited, and Mungo went on. ‘I realize – maybe Will hasn’t got there yet – that becoming older doesn’t mean you solve questions more easily. You relish them more. Things don’t become more certain as you get older, they throw up more doubt. I’m learning to enjoy that, because it has come as a surprise. Would it change what I’ve been, the way I’ve lived, if I discovered that I had a different father? Mother is still Mother. I’ve realized in the last few weeks – I know I’ve been preoccupied and you’ve been worrying about me – that my relationship with Will and Abel is the one that we’ve made for ourselves. It’s not only a gift of blood. It’s man-made. That’s Aeneas’s view too, by the way. An enlightened man, to my way of thinking.’

He returned to his whisky. ‘Our own decisions are the making of us.’

Babble raised his glass high in agreement.

The whole story was travelling southwards with them. Mungo had stowed the black deed box carefully on the shelf above the narrow bunk in his compartment, and tucked the key in the pocket of his green tweed waistcoat, which he touched as he spoke. ‘This is going to affect Will quite a bit. Must do.’

Babble said, ‘And Abel.’ He allowed a pause. ‘Why do you think he’s over here? Not just family, I’m assuming.’

‘It’s work, right enough,’ Mungo said. ‘Funny the way we’re all holding things back at the moment. The other boys are having to keep silence, on this and that, I suspect. I feel freer now.’

Babble nodded, and lifted his dram.

‘It’s lovely, really, for me. The piece I’ve written for this week’s
Tablet
– it’s quite long by their standards – takes us all back through the earlier history of the family, the eighteenth-century mess, the religion and blood, heroism, the hollow triumph and the fall. Betrayal. And running through, it, old friend, is a strong thread. An adherence, a refusal to bend to the wind. Whatever I turn out to be – who I am – I feel connected to that. So I’m confident enough to wonder.

‘My problem is that I’ve always been most interested in what we don’t know.’

Babble raised his glass again.

‘I used to think of it as a weakness. Now I think it may be making me strong. People believe we cling in panic to our personal histories, and especially to religion, to settle on a simple answer. Often, and Aeneas and I speak about this all the time, it’s the other way round. I want the freedom to doubt.’

Which brought them back to the family, the deed box, and Flemyng and Abel. ‘Now I find that just where I thought I’d established the most obvious, ordered part of my life – Altnabuie, the hill and the loch, the dogs and the deer… you, for God’s sake! – everything changes. I find I want the unknown, and... do you know?... it doesn’t scare me after all. I never expected that, and it excites me. I hope it might be the same for Will and Abel.’

Mungo lifted his glass as he said it, and signalled to the steward with a raised finger. ‘Maybe not. Funny, when they’re the ones who’re supposed to be good with secrets. Your very good health.’

Babble was moved by the conversation, because it touched on territory they avoided in their daily round. The cycle of their week was generally untroubled, interrupted by nothing more serious than the weather, or a little bit of Altnabuie tumbling to the ground, or marauding deer, maybe local gossip taking off for a day or two and spreading as far as Pitlochry. Tranquillity would always be restored. Now Mungo’s discovery and his reflections suggested a turning point he hadn’t expected. With the other brothers in attendance in London it would, thought Babble, be like flying towards a hairpin bend at high speed. He was braced for fun, despite everything.

They recovered the silence that they’d first enjoyed getting on to the train, and Mungo produced a book. Babble, in his turn, made a few notes in his diary, where he kept dates and reminders and little sketches of moments that seemed significant. He had two dozen volumes of notes on his shelves. He scribbled a favourite line:
the wing of friendship never moults a feather!
And, in keeping with his long habit, made a notation in brackets afterwards (Dick Swiveller
, The Old Curiosity Shop
) before taking another glass.

Each lost himself in words and memories, and let the night come on.

Twenty minutes later they began to weave their way along the narrow corridor to their compartments, next to each other, squeezing past posses of heavy-booted walkers and a line of Scandinavian boy scouts. ‘Sleep well, old friend,’ said Mungo. Their arms locked. Each closed and locked his door, and got ready to slide into the hard bed, feet to the window. Mungo eased his blind up for a few moments, and saw nothing but blackness outside. His face was reflected on the glass, and his eyes were bright. They must be in the Borders. There were no clusters of lights to be seen, only some distant pinpricks on an invisible hillside, and he felt the presence of the undulating landscape in the dark. There were five hours of rest ahead.

*

Flemyng was leaving Paul’s office, light-headed and distracted, aware that he should be sunk in seriousness but perplexed by a feeling that came close to exhilaration, a reaction against the chaos he felt around him. There were snares on every pathway, it seemed, and whenever it looked as if he might break free he was pulled back. Paul was now sunk in alarm, and his habit of massaging the right side of his nose when disturbed was a feature of almost every conversation. Flemyng knew that he was the subject of anxious enquiry in Paul’s own mind.

Paul would be obliged to wonder if Flemyng was concealing a link with Manson. Then there was Sam’s tip off about ‘the bastard Flemyng’, and Manson’s note about
Friend Flemyng
, who knew something, Abel’s unknown game and Flemyng’s own suggestion that there might be a surveillance operation of which Paul was humiliatingly unaware.

Yet considering the alarm running through him, he felt the return of a sense of bravado, long-buried, that had troubled him by its absence. When he made his first move – was it only on Thursday? – he had in part been trying to recover some of the old verve, knowing that it had drained away in recent times. Now it was back, and he could think.

He ran through the observations lodged in his mind in the course of the day: Sam’s knowledge that behind one locked door there was another, Maria’s way with allies, the role of pride, and Sassi’s startling suggestion that he had as much to lose as anyone in London.

Walking from Whitehall back through the courtyard from King Charles Street, he surprised the night-time security guards. But they nodded him through with no trouble, and when he went up the great staircase he could understand why. There was a light in his office and the door to the corridor was ajar.

He checked the time, and saw that it was nearly midnight.

Pushing back the door with two fingers he stepped quietly into the outer office. From the inner room he could hear the clicking of typewriter keys. Walking carefully to the door, he looked in.

Lucy.

He laughed, she gave a start, put her head in her hands. There was embarrassment, a touch of concern on his part, but his mood of strange lightness was enough to ease the atmosphere.

‘What on earth are you up to?’

She sighed, and pointed to a heap of files on the floor beside her. ‘I’ve been here for a while. I just had to get through all this stuff, because it will be wild later in the week when they all get back from Paris. Mad catching up and everything. And… I had to write something personal, too.’ He let that pass.

‘I might ask the same question of you,’ she said, turning it round as quickly as ever.

He motioned her into his own office and took one of the dark green armchairs, giving her the other. ‘This business is moving very fast.’ She noticed that he was smiling. ‘This, as it happens, is a very fortuitous encounter. Let’s talk about something we’ve let slip in the last day or two. It’s time.’

‘The letter?’

‘Of course,’ said Flemyng. ‘Where has it taken you?’

Lucy understood that he wanted no preamble. ‘I tried to think who fitted the bill, mentally.’

‘And?’ He was at attention.

Shifting sideways in her seat, Lucy slung both legs over one of the arms. She was in jeans and a loose pink shirt, and threw her head back so that her hair hung down from the other arm of the chair. ‘All that self-examination… the pleading… you name it. It’s peculiar.’

He asked her to think back to their conversation after he’d shown her the letter for the first time. ‘I asked you to read it very carefully, to think about why it was written, and you seemed puzzled from the start.’

Lucy said, ‘I was. At first sight it seemed straightforward. He was complaining about being betrayed, and floundering in self-pity. I told you I had wondered at first if it might be sex, but thought that it wasn’t – for some reason I can’t quite identify I still don’t, to be honest. But something else has occurred to me in the last day or so – I was thinking about it only about an hour ago – that makes it seem very strange indeed.’

Flemyng’s eyes were shining. ‘So?’

Lucy said she’d gone over the thing in her head a dozen times, and had begun to think that, far from being an outpouring of emotion straight from the depths, it was a concoction. ‘I don’t know anything about furniture,’ she said, out of the blue, ‘but I suppose it must be like coming across a perfect Chippendale chair or something and then having a suspicion that it’s a fake. Once you get the idea, there’s no stopping. You can’t go back. The thing becomes an obvious piece of invention, a kind of insult.’

Flemyng nodded, and waited because he knew that she would take the next step, too.

‘It brings us back to the fact that whoever wrote it, copied it. Assuming that he did that himself. Incidentally, I’m sure he did – I now think that fits with everything else. When you told me, I said I thought it was mad and I still do in a way, though you could also argue that it’s consistent. That’s the point, isn’t it? Put the copying together with what I’ve just said about its… sentiments, and you get something that’s really strange. A cry of pain that’s been… managed, created… for a purpose. And that is where I thought I was stuck. Because we don’t know who was going to receive it. No name at the top.’

‘Can you guess?’

Their eyes had met now, for the first time in the conversation, and he waited for Lucy.

‘No.’

He nodded. ‘I share your ignorance, but I think I know
why
it was written. Out of rivalry that turned to obsession. The letter wasn’t written to an enemy, but to a friend.

‘That’s the thing about this letter. It isn’t passive – a cry of pain. It’s active – a weapon. As sharp as a knife, and deadly too.’

He took his own copy from his briefcase. ‘Listen.

‘I have come to the conclusion that you are bent on a cruel destruction of our relationship. This can’t be happening by chance. I would beg you to stop, but it may be too late. Is this inevitable in our lives? Did you always know?

‘I think it’s a lesson in how to drive somebody mad.’

Lucy said they’d both identified cruelty in it, but couldn’t be sure they were right. ‘The letter could be genuine, just as it stands. We think it’s the opposite of what it seems, but there’s no way of proving it isn’t a cry for help but an attack.’

Then, as was her habit, she asked the simplest and most important question. ‘Why?’

Flemyng found that he could recite from memory the sentences that spoke of death for one or both of them. ‘There’s no reason I can see. That’s why I use the word mad, useless though it is. I think that’s what he is, whatever the word means. He’s ambitious, no doubt. But it runs deeper in this person, and makes him dangerous. We’re both assuming it’s a man, I notice.’

‘Definitely,’ Lucy said. ‘If I did this, it would be quite different.’ She smiled.

Flemyng said, ‘You see my difficulty. To tell or not to tell.’

Lucy was nodding, keeping up with every thought, ahead of him at times. He laid out his problem. ‘The complications are terrible. Here’s an obvious one. Imagine he is one of the people who may be sent to Washington as ambassador. Possible. I say nothing and he’s sent, a glorious fanfare with him, safely out of government and off the stage. This nonsense goes away. For all I know, he gets over it and rebalances himself. Normal service resumes and everyone is happier, especially his victim. Or, by contrast, catastrophe. It all turns very ugly. And it’s my fault, for saying nothing.’

He went on, ‘So I have a duty, don’t I? He may well be off his rocker. That seems the best way to put it. Seriously, can I stay quiet? The trouble is that if I show it to Paul, we can’t know what might happen. A leak, it goes public. Anything. We’re lighting a fuse. Bang, and all of us are burned up.’

She said, ‘You’re sure of what we’re dealing with, aren’t you?’

‘No. But… maybe I’m getting close.’ He smiled at her.

Flemyng asked her to think about it overnight. In the morning they had to decide together what was to be done.

‘Think?’ she said. ‘You said that’s what Paul wants you to do. Not rake around like a policeman, but think. You turned this letter round in your head. You’ve done what he wanted. Isn’t that your answer? Tell him what you believe. I think you’re nearly there.’

Flemyng saw that it was after midnight, and realized he hadn’t heard Big Ben. His eyes rested on her for a few seconds; they were bright and black and full of life. ‘I had a call to make. It’s too late.’ He didn’t mention Abel. ‘We should go. The next day or two are going to be…’

‘Fun?’

‘I was going to say…’

‘Testing?’

‘I’m sorry, was I?’ said Flemyng. The meeting with Paul and Gwilym now seemed hours away, its gloom and edginess superseded by the energy and even gaiety of the last hour. There was a death, a crisis, maybe the horror of a confrontation with a friend, unknown. No way back.

He realized, sitting at his desk with the letter in front of him, that the exhilaration disguised an exhaustion underneath that was rising like a tide on the turn and would have its way. Suddenly he wanted to get away.

‘Time to go,’ he said.