The Madness of July

by James Naughtie

  ‘No. There’s nothing. If you insisted, I could pass on some of his views on certain colleagues, though you know I’d fight not to. They’re no more or less spicy than anyone else’s in politics, and a good deal more generous than most, as you’d expect. There are confidences that I wouldn’t give you – personal ones – and I’d go to the wall with them, resign if I had to. But I assume that’s not what you want, because I think I understand your loyalties.’

  Emboldened by his hesitation, she held the floor. ‘Will’s helping you with the business we spoke of in this room yesterday, and I know no more about it now than I knew when I left you two alone. He disappeared yesterday afternoon, on your business, then went to Scotland later on. There’s nothing else to report. What do you know that has changed all this? Don’t I have a right to know, even if he doesn’t?’

  Paul sighed. ‘Yes, you do.’

  She remained straight-backed in the chair opposite him, holding her gaze steady.

  ‘Let me put it like this,’ said Paul. ‘I’ve been given a version of his current state that suggests he has developed an obsession with a particular colleague – I know not whom – and that he has become somewhat…’

  For the first time in her experience, Paul was lost for the right word.

  ‘… disturbed. That’s the talk in certain quarters.’

  Lucy took her time replying. Her alarm didn’t show, and deciding to deceive him was not difficult. Her task was to defend Will Flemyng.

  ‘If you are suggesting that my minister is veering off the rails, or starting to talk to himself, you’re living on another planet.’ She picked up pace. ‘Disturbed? Nonsense. He’s never been more focused, more interested in analyzing all the things that come across his desk, picking them apart until he understands every detail. If you think his balance has gone, then you’re the one who’s off the rails.’

  She thought she had gone too far. But it produced the first smile from Paul she had seen since arriving in his room. As with her fear, she hid her relief.

  ‘I’m glad you’ve stonewalled,’ he said. ‘I hate moments like this – I’ve had plenty – when people fold up and collapse. I don’t know what I’d have done if you had. I’m sorry if I went over the top a moment ago. I need Will, and it’s obvious to me that he’s firing on most cylinders. But there is talk around here. I can’t ignore it. You do understand?’

  He waved a hand to show that he could say no more and they should move on.

  ‘We both know how cruel this game is, don’t we? Glad you and I are on our side of the fence, rather than theirs?’

  She murmured agreement, and waited.

  ‘There are things going on around this place that you wouldn’t believe, even you,’ he said.

  ‘Do me a favour, Lucy. Talk to Will. Don’t mention this conversation, which I’m glad we’ve had. Tell him about the speech and so on, and get him to ring me tonight. I’ll be here, I’m afraid. I’ll update him on our late American friend. We’ll meet at eight tomorrow evening, come what may.’

  Lucy got up and thanked him, with no apology for her forthrightness.

  When she had left, Paul opened one of the files on his desk. Before him lay an account of everything that was known about Joe Manson’s movements in London after he was tailed to the Lorimer Hotel. It was thin. On Wednesday night, according to a helpful member of staff, he had left cheerfully for what seemed likely to be a night on the town. No one remembered seeing him again.

  But Chief Inspector Osterley himself had returned to the hotel early that morning, alone, in case there might be something more to be gleaned. He had spent some time in the lobby, and had a coffee round the corner with a front desk clerk who had last been on duty on the Wednesday and had therefore not been interviewed after what Osterley now called the second coming, enquiries having been carried out in a routine fashion by local officers. He was rewarded with an intriguing fact.

  When Manson was leaving the hotel, mid-evening on Wednesday, he asked at the desk if there was a public phone box nearby. An unusual request. The desk clerk offered him the use of the switchboard. He declined, with the explanation that he had an American calling card that would let him use a box cheaply. The clerk thought nothing of it, knowing that such cards existed, and told him of two telephones within a hundred yards, with the warning that he would be lucky if either was working.

  Osterley’s note to Paul ended: ‘Let’s hope one of them was.’

  14

  Sassi and Abel lunched early and heartily in a Greek restaurant near the Lorimer. Sassi reported that he was making progress and would report that to Maria. ‘Bases loaded,’ he said, and they raised glasses of rough retsina to success. ‘But not home yet,’ said Abel, and shook his head. ‘Not by a long way. We’re asking a lot of them, and there’s pride at stake here.’ He spoke of his coming visit home, his hopes for his brother, and Sassi said he would ride with him to the airport – in a black cab, not an embassy car, so that they could talk.

  Abel knew that he had to answer one question, and it came even before they had manoeuvred their way through the west London football crowds, skirting the beginning of a street fight in Fulham. They were moving slowly along a police line that was preparing for battle when Sassi said, ‘How much do you think your brother knows?’

  Abel’s response involved a gentle deceit. Sassi’s store of knowledge did not include the course of the relationship with his brother, let alone the intimation from Mungo of a family drama, so he said that he could be quite sure of his answer because they were still close. ‘Not too much. You think Paul Jenner has been discreet, and I think you’re right. My brother won’t know what went wrong. I’ll know for certain by the end of today,’ he said. ‘I have to ask him straight out whether Manson rang him and spoke about Berlin.’

  Sassi nodded.

  ‘I’m assuming, Abel,’ he said in return, ‘that Paul knows who you are. Your name didn’t come up at the opera, but there was no reason why it should. Even we didn’t know you were coming. He is aware of you, isn’t he?’

  Abel’s mind went back to another time, before Will chose politics, when they had revelled in the fate, an ocean apart, that had set them on the same path in parallel worlds. His path had crossed Paul’s when he was working his way up in the foreign and defence superstructure, which it was Abel’s job, in part, to understand. But whether or not Paul knew of the way the brothers had found themselves distanced at that time, he couldn’t say. That wasn’t for Sassi’s ears. ‘He knows me all right. Have no doubt of that. He may not know that I’m here – but if I were Paul, I’d be expecting me. Wouldn’t you?’

  They agreed that they should speak late that evening. Sassi said that he and Wherry were summoning a council of war in a couple of hours. ‘Jackson’s been pounding the trail all day. He’ll have the story straight. You?’ Abel said that he planned to make a couple of calls from the airport, and by evening would expect to have some more pieces of the puzzle in hand.

  Sassi laughed. ‘Well, you have a family dinner to come. Enjoy it. Tomorrow’s gonna be a hard day. I’ll be reading files, but it should be celebration time for you tonight. It’s a homecoming.’

  ‘Truly,’ said Abel. ‘A homecoming.’

  *

  Babble was in the kitchen at Altnabuie, wrestling with a leg of lamb. He’d pulled four long sprigs of rosemary from the bushes on either side of the back door leading to his vegetable patch, rubbed the spikes to release a good aroma, and laid them with some of his own carrots round the lamb that would sit in the iron cooking pot for hours, with potatoes from the garden thrown in towards the end. That was all. It was how he and Mungo liked it, the way things were done. He had picked up the lamb at Macdonald’s in Pitlochry on Friday and got some fresh salmon at Loch Rannoch, where he’d spent a while at the waterside. He’d poached the fish and it lay in the cold room. Their Sunday lunch had now become Abel’s Saturday night welcome home dinner. He’d laid in a haul of cheese and cobbled together a creamy pudding
, with the help of generous splashes of his fifteen-year-old Dalwhinnie. It looked to have worked, and it would be a proper meal for the boys. With luck he’d have Abel home from Edinburgh by six, and they’d sit down to a feast at eight. A night of nights. He hummed to himself in the kitchen, and the dogs responded to his lifting mood.

  Babble savoured the excitement of Abel’s coming arrival, and he sensed its importance for them all. He’d become used to Mungo’s habit of talking more about his mother, dead these fifteen years, and knew that he was exploring her history.

  Babble had warmed to her from the summer of his arrival here and spent days on the hill at her side, seeing her as the great stabilizer of life at Altnabuie, a fact made more remarkable by her artist’s wayward spirit. She had taken the boys on American trips, to her family’s old haunts and playgrounds, which had left them exhausted and high for months, speaking of beaches that rolled away for miles and dark woods covering hills where they could disappear for days. Babble’s bond was close. Alone of those at Altnabuie, he’d called her Helene in later years. He’d felt her an electric presence in the house and now he knew that she was causing excitement, maybe trouble, from beyond the grave. He cared about Mungo, and had worried on the nights when he retreated for long hours in his study. Now there was Will, in whom he identified an anxiety that ran into the depths.

  Mungo and he were planning to spend the next week in London, and both of them were looking forward to a break from the routine they loved. They’d catch the night sleeper from Pitlochry on Sunday, and he wanted nothing to interfere with their plan.

  He loved the old house and the hills, and knew he imparted something of his own restless temperament to the place. Life never became too sleepy, nor complacent. Mungo was leading a well-ordered and untroubled life, now that he had given up his university teaching and had rooted himself at Altnabuie full-time. Babble wanted to make sure that there was always bustle around the place, comings and goings. He had a secret terror that visited him sometimes in the night in his rooms on the east side of the house, that it might become a mausoleum, with dustsheets and closed-off rooms. Never.

  On his shelves he had a substantial personal library and he read with a youngster’s relish, always having a book of poetry on the go, and especially cherishing Dickens, who was his passion. He reckoned that he could re-read the novels comfortably in a regular three-year cycle, although he did enjoy fiddling with the chronological order, just for fun. A copy of Our Mutual Friend was lying by his bed.

  In the dining room, even by mid-afternoon, the table was ready. The dark blue cloth was well-pressed, with the best glasses perfectly set out, and in the middle stood a silver stag, not tall enough to be overbearing, which had been the invariable adornment when Mungo’s father had entertained. Without it, Babble thought the table bare. He had brought up and opened two bottles of good Burgundy, then made it three. The syllabub had set nicely. To help them along there was a pot of honey from the hives that sat down the slope at the end of the garden, close to the carpet of heather that would soon come into purple flower and prolong his bees’ summer ecstasy. Altnabuie was ready.

  There were flowers in Abel’s room again, and Babble knew that the dogs had picked up the quickening in the air, as well as his own exhilaration. They were circling at his feet, and followed him on a walk towards the loch. He checked that he had enough time to get to the airport, and gave himself twenty minutes before setting out. When he had reached the gate where the long path swung away to the loch, he stopped and looked back to the house.

  From where he stood it seemed broken-backed, sagging in the middle, because of all the joins that had been made over the years. One corner went back four hundred years, but most of it had been put together much later in fits and starts. It creaked like a ship in the wind and seemed to hold itself upright with a great effort, which was one of the reasons why it stirred up affection. When a pipe cracked, or a slate slid off, everyone clustered around as if they were at the bedside of an old relative, offering support against the coming of the last collapse.

  Inside, Altnabuie was well-worn and unmodernized. The plumbing wasn’t up to much, although drinking from the taps was a joy because of the cool clear stream that fed them. There were uneven black-and-white diamond tiles on the floor of the hall, and the pictures hanging above were so dark and dense you couldn’t identify the faces. The drawing room ahead was a vast space with an assembly of friendly things – paintings and photographs, sofas, books everywhere, and nothing you would be scared to touch. A battered partners’ desk stood in one corner and near it the lopsided skeleton of a harp with only two strings.

  Babble knew the outline of the shadows on the roof at any time of the day, Altnabuie’s every mood. As he watched, a jackdaw took off from the chimney stack above the west gable, and all was still. He gazed on a scene that might have been etched on glass. The dogs broke the spell, turning for home. As they did so, Babble saw Mungo come on to the terrace. He strode up the slope and through the garden to join him.

  ‘I’m glad Abel will see it like this,’ said Mungo. They stood together at the front door, Babble in his favourite well-worn, loose blue-and-brown tweed suit, with a dark green open shirt. ‘The water’s low,’ Mungo said. They couldn’t hear the rush under the footbridge at the edge of the woods. Although the springs behind the house had never failed in their lifetimes, the long dry spell meant that the trout were fewer than usual this summer. They could do with more rain; it would come. They spoke for a moment with relish about the night sleeper to London on Sunday. Then they sat on the stone bench outside the dining-room window and enjoyed the silence for a few minutes more.

  After a little, Mungo said, without any preliminaries, ‘We’ll need to talk about Mother, you and I.’

  And Babble said, ‘I know.’

  ‘With Abel here it can’t be put off any longer,’ Mungo said. The curtain was drawn back a little. Then, as if relieved to postpone the conversation once more, he looked at his watch. ‘You’d better be on your way.’ He smiled at his old friend. ‘You never know, he may be on time.’

  When he stood up, Babble noticed that Mungo’s colour had risen and his jaw set. It was odd, because Babble considered that of all the boys, Mungo, the first-born, had been closest to her. There had been times of awkwardness – when Abel decided to adopt their mother’s family name for settlement in America, there had been a frisson that took a year or two to pass – but he had known it as a placid family. She had been a wilful figure and given to occasional remoteness, but her fire had warmed Altnabuie from start to finish. He knew enough of Helene Grauber’s history, wartime secrets that clung to her and imbued her with mystery, to understand how she had come to dominate so many lives.

  Babble recalled the times when he would watch her from his window coming up from the loch not long after dawn, her long black coat shining with dew and her eyes bright. She’d have a sketchbook under one arm, and the dogs as outriders in the long grass beyond the garden, and would approach the house with the vigour of the morning in every step.

  He couldn’t allow his mind to wander. A few minutes later he was in the car and away. Flemyng watched from the wide window of his bedroom as it turned from the house and disappeared in the tunnel of trees that met across the drive. He joined Mungo downstairs, and without anything being said they set off in step through the garden, pausing only when they reached the low stone wall that enclosed the old orchard. There they sat down together.

  ‘It’s a good thing,’ said Mungo.

  Abel’s homecoming. Flemyng said, ‘We’ve all been wanting this for a while. But it took something out there’ – he waved towards the loch – ‘to make it happen. We wouldn’t have been together otherwise.’

  Mungo said, ‘I won’t ask what’s up. I know better than that. But let’s make tonight about other things, too. I’ve got the letters in my box upstairs. I’ll show you them together.’ It was the first time he had spoken of them in such a matter-of-fact way. They would
have a grand night, and Babble would be in on it. ‘It’s his story too,’ said Mungo.

  His brother nodded at that. ‘Of course. The way it should be.’ He stood up and stretched. ‘Let’s take a turn down to the water.’

  Mungo said he’d go back to his study. He had some things to arrange. ‘See you when you get back.’ He walked through the garden, slowly, stopping at a favourite climbing rose and taking some lavender to rub in his hands. Flemyng made for the burn, to the place where he had most often fished as a boy. He knew each rock in the water as if by name.

  By the time Abel’s plane touched down, they were both back in the house. Mungo was deep in his papers, occasionally raising his head to look through his study window down the glen, towards the hills and the blue-grey line of the mountains far beyond. Flemyng sat at the desk in his bedroom, then went to the hall to ring Sam at home.

  ‘How’s the weather in the bonnie highlands, then?’ The greeting was cheery enough but Flemyng was alert to the edge in his voice. Sam’s voice seemed distant, and Flemyng detected a tremor of irritation somewhere underneath. Could there be anger there?

  ‘Never better,’ he said, unconvincingly. ‘I’m in heaven here, as you know. How are tricks?’

  ‘When do you get back?’ That was all.

  ‘Tomorrow. Not sure when. But I may want to meet.’

  ‘Fine,’ Sam said. ‘I have something on earlier, but I’ll be there if you need me. Just ring.’

  Flemyng was conscious of sounding nervous, and kept it short. ‘Grand,’ he said. They wasted no more time, but Sam said, ‘Take care. By which I mean – look after yourself.’

  After a moment, he added, ‘I mean it.’

  Flemyng spent some time in thought. He tried to read some poetry, but found that his mind wouldn’t settle. So he rang Paul. ‘When do you want me?’

  ‘Eight as planned. I’ve cancelled your speech and Lucy’s putting you on the noon flight,’ Paul said. ‘I’m not going to say much on this line, but I believe – hope, certainly – that we may be getting somewhere with our American friend. More tomorrow. Enjoy your night at home. And think, Will, think.’