The Madness of July

by James Naughtie

  And Flemyng gave a laugh. ‘There always is. That’s what I’ve learned to live with.’

  Then Babble at the door, with a clatter of plates and a shout to the dogs, said it was time for the gunroom and the rods.

  The ghillie at Altnabuie was called Tiny, on account of his considerable height. He wouldn’t be with them today, because he’d loped over the hill to deal with fishermen exploring a high stretch of water whose secrets only he knew. He could guide you to any pool to find the fish you were after, knew exactly how the weather seemed to the trout, and in his tin box of fishing flies could find anything you needed, Greenwell’s Glory or Bloody Butcher, producing a favourite March Brown or Invicta at just the right time of day, when he’d had time to watch how the fish were at play. He knew every stone in the burn, and he’d lead you through the woods to show you the paths of the young deer, take you into the jumbled maze of trees that Flemyng had known since boyhood, maybe find signs of a capercaillie or a pine marten’s tracks. At night, he and Babble would settle down at the Pole and tell their tales. The old stories. They’d passed them on to the brothers, and Flemyng sometimes wondered if it was the lore, as much as blood, that held them together.

  Tiny had left the rods in perfect order. They checked the lines and the reels, found their boots and hats and decided that it wasn’t a day when there was a chance of getting wet. The heavy gear could be left behind. Off to the boat, and away.

  ‘What larks, Will,’ said Babble. ‘What larks.’

  Within half an hour they were in the middle of the loch. To the south, they could see the triangular peak of Schiehallion, its top strung with mist, two herds of deer on the side of their own hill, grazing well apart, and behind them the house picked out by the sun, the bow windows catching the light for the first time that morning and the gardens dropping down in a cataract of greenery and red and purple from the rhododendrons and azaleas. The woods on the hill were thick, and from their right they could hear the water in the big burn falling over the rocks, mingling with the soft splashing around the boat and the clatter of Babble’s oars as he pulled them out. He paused and stowed them. The boat swayed on the water.

  They began to fish. For ten or fifteen minutes at a time they would stay still and quiet, then take the boat to another spot. Mungo stole a smoke after a while, the smell of the rich shag from his pipe hanging over them. Babble produced a couple of bottles of beer about eleven – his joke was that he had waited for opening time – and by then they had pulled in five respectable fish, one of them a substantial two-and-a-half pounder. The brown trout lay in Babble’s canvas bag, supper for someone.

  There was little conversation. They had taken to the water in order to leave some things on land.

  Flemyng absorbed the rhythms of home. He listened to the water gurgling from the burn where it ran into the loch, watched the birds that dipped and crossed from side to side of the glen or fed by the waterside, and breathed in the smells that he had always known. Mungo spotted a straight streak of blue against the high bank on the other side: a kingfisher. Flemyng ran his eyes along the treeline, as if committing it to memory.

  As the sun moved overhead, the clouds were dispersing. Babble thought, and the brothers agreed, that the fish had more sense than to rise in that heat. They’d be deep down, sheltering over cool stone. So they turned to the bank, tied the boat up at the little wooden jetty and headed back to the house with their haul, quiet as they took the path home, the brothers abreast with Babble coming on behind with the fish.

  Mrs Mackenzie was on hand with tea, greeting Flemyng with warmth. She did well for Mungo, knowing that Babble had first call on the kitchen and that the rest of the house was hers. The brothers had a stroll in the garden, Mungo proud of some of his spring planting that had produced the goods, until Babble said he was leaving for the Pole. ‘Anybody for a wee outing?’

  Mungo excused himself. ‘You’ll be coming, Will?’ said Babble, and he was.

  Escaping to his library, Mungo considered the sadness in always feeling obliged to ask ‘why?’ when it came to Abel. But there it was. So much of his life was unknown. Mungo had been given a careful insight more than two decades ago, and only a few were so trusted – as with Will, who had gone the same way a little earlier. The discipline determined much of their relationship since.

  With Abel, there was the layer of distance produced by his adopted name. Grauber. And with Will, Mungo had an extra difficulty. He knew that during Abel’s time in London a decade ago when the sixties were changing everything fast, there had been a breach which had never been explained. Abel’s return to Washington and Will’s posting to Paris had been simultaneous, directed by different masters, and he had been aware down the years that his two brothers never spoke of that passage in their lives. Through the veil that shrouded their work, which Mungo was obliged never to draw back, he discerned a rupture that he could not explain. He couldn’t ask, only wait.

  Mungo turned with relief to the papers piled on his desk, and sank himself in the past.

  Up at the Pole, Babble and Flemyng were the centre of attention. As a favour with a slight swagger attached, Babble had brought two trout for the kitchen. They were admired, although the two hefty stuffed salmon in dusty glass cases high above the bar seemed to cast dismissive looks at the puny specimens in their wet newspaper shroud. There was a happy crowd in residence, and Flemyng enjoyed a glass or two of beer with Alasdair and Neil, who were about his own age. The talk today had to be about the glen and the hill. They spoke of the need for more rain, the state of the crops, and the prospects for the shooting from August. About the government and its people, not a word. Flemyng appreciated the kindness, recognizing it for what it was. When he and Babble got in the car an hour or so later, he was reinforced in his feeling of restoration.

  It only took ten minutes to get to Altnabuie, so he had to be quick. ‘Why do you think Abel really rang?’ If it had been a family affair, and nothing else, wouldn’t he have asked to speak to Mungo? As far as he knew, his elder brother hadn’t left the estate all week.

  ‘To tell you the truth, I can’t say,’ said Babble. ‘We spoke about the weather and how things are here, and I asked about the kids – they’re capital, by the way – and there wasn’t much else apart from the suggestion that he might be here before long.’

  ‘Nothing else?’

  Babble thought for a moment as the car breasted the last hill before turning for home. ‘Well, he asked after you, of course. Wondered if you were bearing up. If I remember rightly, he said that he wouldn’t be surprised if you were a bit distracted – with things as they are. Could have meant anything. Politics,’ he sniffed.

  ‘Aye,’ said Flemyng, his voice tuned in to home.

  Their conversation changed direction. Babble said, ‘Why did you want to get away north? If there’s something big going on I’d expect you to want to be in the middle of it.’

  His defences breached, Flemyng was vulnerable. ‘I can’t tell you. Everyone thinks I can always handle trouble. I’m known for it, so they say. But it’s not really true, old friend. I had to get out for a day or two. You understand.’

  In the same tone of voice, without warning of his change of subject, he asked whether any strangers had been in the area in recent days. ‘No one poking about? An odd visitor? Just wondering.’

  ‘I worry about you,’ said Babble, with a sidelong glance. ‘There’s been nothing. No one.’

  Flemyng nodded. ‘Don’t worry. It’s not serious. Now tell me more about Abel. What time did he ring? I wonder if he might have tried me too.’ He looked straight ahead, and gave no sign of the importance he attached to the answer.

  ‘I suppose just before six,’ said Babble. ‘I was out at the hens.’

  There had been no message left in Flemyng’s office then; no missed call. Abel had kept his distance. ‘I was wondering,’ he said, ‘if he talked about any troubles. That’s all.’

  ‘No. Only one other thing,’ said Babble. ‘He
said it was important that the three of you had some time together.’

  They pulled up at the back door and Flemyng went for a stroll in the garden, admiring Mungo’s brave efforts with his spindly new fruit trees and the explosion of bloom on the old wall that separated them from the edge of the woods. Back in the house, he said he needed to work through his red box, abandoned the previous night. He went to the study off his bedroom, closed himself in and sat looking out of the window to the glen below, with the box unopened in front of him and his hand on the little pile of poetry books he kept there.

  On that still landscape, everything was starting to move, but in his mind there was no pattern to it. Reverting to old habits, he stripped away all the assumptions that his mind might be using to force events into shape, and tried to expunge any false coincidences. Paul Jenner had arranged the opera party in an unusual hurry. Francesca had commented on it. Paul had said that Sassi was a big fish. Berlin was on their lips, and Paul’s mind had turned to the Washington embassy, telling Flemyng, unprompted, that he expected him to be pleased with the new ambassador, though he couldn’t say why. An uncharacteristic hesitation on his part. And Wherry, as Paul must know, was a-pound-to-a-penny a top house spook in Grosvenor Square. Like the alarm produced by the letter itself, it all resisted explanation. And time, he knew, was short.

  The phone rang in the hall downstairs and he ran to it. ‘Hello? Will Flemyng.’ Then a voice that was familiar, from a long way away. A querulous but welcome word.

  ‘Abel.’

  For a moment, Flemyng couldn’t speak.

  ‘Hi. I’m here, as you’ll know,’ Abel said, making it sound as if there was nothing unusual about the call.

  ‘I do,’ said Flemyng. ‘And not just from Babble.’

  They laughed at that, and for a few moments took refuge in family matters, speaking quickly. Wives, Abel’s children, Mungo.

  Afterwards, Abel recognized the calm that his brother brought to their first conversation for two years. That had been warm enough, in New York, but brief. With the years, the distance had remained. Neither brother wanted to encourage it, but nor was there a reason to break the habit that had taken hold. Each knew that this might be the moment, and that it had been forced on them.

  Abel’s method was direct, as ever.

  ‘I’m glad to say there’s one thing that would suit us both, might help us along. Because we’re both aware that we need to talk about my American friend, right?’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Flemyng, ‘and I’m at your service.’

  ‘I know it, so I’m coming north right now. Tell Babble I’m on the three-fifteen plane. Get my old bedroom ready. I’ll be with you for the evening.’

  There it was. The years fell away. The front door from the hall was open as Flemyng answered, and he felt the warm flow of the afternoon. ‘This makes me glad, you know.’

  Abel said goodbye. ‘There’s work to be done. It always helps.’

  When Flemyng had told Mungo, they walked together to the front terrace, watching the ribbons of light on the loch below. They decided not to speak for a few minutes. Mungo lit his pipe again, rare in the afternoon, and Flemyng spent a little time on the path that led towards the river. The bees were in the honeysuckle and he felt the summer warmth from the stone dyke that ran alongside them. After a while they sat together on the bench near the front door, the roses scrambling up the wall behind and the light casting a long shadow from the holly tree beneath the window that had given light to their mother’s studio.

  ‘Shall we tell each other what’s wrong?’ said Mungo. ‘Before Abel arrives.’ He laughed. ‘Maybe that’s why he’s been sent. By one of the people who run your lives.’

  ‘You were right earlier,’ Flemyng said. ‘I’ve been pretending to myself that it’s you who’s taken the family thing badly. But it’s not you, it’s me.’

  Mungo let him continue.

  ‘Sometimes my mind gets taken over by other things. Held hostage, you might say. Politics, really. It leaves me drained, then emotional stuff hits me harder. I suppose I once believed that my life wouldn’t be shaped by other people’s problems. I’ve learned. Listen to me. I’ve discovered something in the last few days that’s been turning me inside out. It may change the game for me. And maybe for ever.’ He stopped speaking for a full minute, letting the pause roll.

  ‘You glimpse something by chance,’ Flemyng said eventually. ‘Maybe something quite small. And you recognize the worm in the apple. The beginning of everything.’

  Mungo said nothing, giving him the time he needed, pulled on his pipe, and looked steadily towards the loch.

  His brother stood up from the stone bench and took a few steps to the front of the terrace. Rousseau came up from the garden and brushed past him on his way to the door. Bending down to touch the dog’s head, he looked up at Mungo.

  ‘I’ve stumbled on something evil. I do mean evil.

  ‘Someone who’s a power in the land is trying to destroy one of my colleagues. I know it now, although I can’t be sure who they are. I do mean complete destruction, nothing less. He’s trying to drive him mad.

  ‘And I don’t know why.’

  13

  Lucy answered Paul Jenner’s summons at a little after three o’clock. It was unusual for her to be in town at the weekend, let alone near the office, and she realized the depth of Paul’s distress by the fact that when he had rung that morning he’d made no reference to the awkwardness of the meeting, speaking as if it were one of their regular Tuesday mornings or Thursday afternoons. The crisis had reset his clock, the pattern of his days unrecognizable. She went to his office.

  ‘I have a difficulty,’ he told her.

  ‘A new one?’ she said, thinking she might get away with that. He was more serious than she had ever known him, the light in his eyes dimmed and the physical sharpness blunted.

  ‘I am going to have to ask you to be very frank with me,’ he said. ‘That may seem insulting, because you’re well aware of the rules and conventions that we all follow, and adhere to them meticulously. I know it, and have no reason to doubt it now. But you’re aware that we are afloat on treacherous waters and they could swallow all of us up. For once it’s not inflation or trouble in the streets. Something worse. Melodramatic, I know, but there’s no point in deceiving you. I need to emphasize that you must be open with me, however much you may feel a countervailing pressure.’

  ‘Countervailing pressure?’ she asked, surprised by the phrase and startled by Paul’s heavy formality.

  ‘Loyalty to your minister. To Will.’

  For the first time, Lucy understood for a certainty that nothing would be the same when the alarm was over. They wouldn’t disappear for the summer on a tide of relief and reappear with balance restored and adrenalin running strong. Paul might as well have made an announcement: they’d all be changed by the coming days. Alone with the cabinet secretary, capo di tutti capi in her world, watching him in the shadows of an office from which the sun seemed to have been deliberately excluded, she knew that he believed the crisis might, in some way, be the end for him. His eyes said as much.

  She spoke steadily, without expressing any alarm. ‘So what do you want from me?’

  Paul separated two files on his desk, pushing them apart. He left them both closed, and Lucy wondered if they had been placed there as props, to give his hands something to do. A bureaucrat’s lifebelts.

  He began, still talking with a formality that was unnatural.

  ‘You are aware that I have asked Will Flemyng to assist in handling the difficulties brought on by Thursday’s events, because of certain qualities – and knowledge – that he can bring to the task. You are aware of his past experience. This, you will realize, is because of my trust in him.’ Paul looked up, as if to check her response. ‘He is doing that now, and I’m still hoping we shall all meet – you, me, Gwilym, Will, and maybe one other – tomorrow. I’m expecting to hear from Will later this afternoon with his thoughts. Has he spo
ken to you today?’

  ‘Nothing from Scotland. Mind you, I wouldn’t expect it. He has his speech tomorrow, and he’s due down in the afternoon immediately afterwards. He has his box. I made sure it was an unexciting one. He’ll have another in the morning. Nothing too onerous, I promise.’

  Paul shook his head. ‘The speech is off. Make the arrangements. I need him here. I’d be grateful if you could handle that now, with all the usual apologies – ministerial business, and so on. And there’s something else.’

  Lucy’s mind roamed back over the meeting in the same room the day before, and felt the frisson of collective fear.

  ‘Something has come to my attention that troubles me greatly.’ He sounds as if he’s giving evidence to a parliamentary committee, she thought. ‘You should be made aware of that, although there is much in this business I’m afraid you can’t be told, even you, because your minister is dealing with exceptionally sensitive matters. You know more than enough from day-to-day business to understand that. What I do need to know now is whether Will is pursuing something else of his own, wandering down another path. Because I am told he is, and that he is very upset as a result.’

  Paul was looking down at his desk while he spoke, which Lucy took for a sign of embarrassment.

  Before she could answer, he added awkwardly, without looking up, ‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you how I know this. I’m very sorry.’

  The awkward codicil was a painful confession of discomfort. She tried to keep her hair back, and avoided any physical response to his statement, giving no signal of anger, let alone contrition. But they knew that a line had been crossed.

  As a consequence, the balance in the room shifted. Paul remained cabinet secretary, master of a rolling domain, with phones that could connect him to anyone he wanted, night and day, and the power to summon or dismiss. But he had revealed a lack of inner conviction, let her glimpse that his heart was not in the interrogation he had begun.

  That was enough for Lucy. She took him on.