‘The letters reveal, but they also conceal. And, Abel, you’re right. They’ve been weeded, I think, to keep his identity obscure. There are no envelopes. I don’t know how she received them. She was meticulous about covering that up, and successful.’
Mungo said the strength of the affair was clear from the endearments exchanged between the lovers from the start. But, and he emphasized how important this was to him, he was convinced that the man had never come to Altnabuie. She would have thought about him as she sat in the bedroom that was her studio and looked down to the loch – must have, night after night – but the letters made it obvious that right to the end he had never seen the place. It had flourished in his imagination.
‘He longed for it, knowing that he would never see it. That was their pact, the pain that they accepted would always run through the affair. She says as much in some of the earlier letters that I’ve got. Wartime ones. He has to stay away, and she says later that it wasn’t for Father’s sake – though surely it must have been, in large part – but for hers. She had to be able to keep her two lives apart. I don’t know whether that was kind or cruel. Who’s to say?’
There was a period of silence while they ate, and Mungo left them with that thought while Babble made a circuit of the table to refill their glasses.
Flemyng opened the next phase. He said that they could leave the speculation for later. There were facts to be established.
‘Dates,’ he said, quite loudly, so that the word was slapped on the table.
Abel looked to Mungo, who still showed no sign of agitation, although he had risen from the table once again. No lights had been lit in the dining room, and with his back to the bow window he had taken on the appearance of a silhouette against the dusky landscape. The last flicker of daylight was disappearing. Babble had returned and the four men enjoyed the silent intimacy of the table. Flemyng let his question lie, and waited.
‘About the end of the affair, I can be specific. But I am afraid there is no such certainty about the beginning. If you read the letters in that box, you only pick up the story after the relationship is established and up and running. When it began, I can’t say.’
‘Which means,’ said Abel, ‘that our journey has hardly started.’
Mungo pointed to the photograph on the side table. He described a letter telling the story of the day the picture was taken at Bletchley. Her lover was serving in the American forces’ liaison office in London, flitting from one clandestine world to another, and had reason to visit Station X from time to time. ‘He was one of the few Yanks who knew its real purpose,’ said Mungo, ‘and I wonder if it was through his connections that she was picked for secret service in the first place.’ The letters had hints of that. They’d met regularly, in Bletchley and in London, and Mungo suspected that it was in those years that the affair was at its zenith. ‘It continued for some years afterwards, before it tailed away. They were ageing. The end is heartbreaking, in its way.’ He found himself unable to continue. ‘I’m sorry.’
Flemyng picked up, and led Mungo back on to difficult terrain. ‘If you have reason to believe that his connections may have led to her recruitment, then we know something for certain.’
‘I’m afraid we do,’ said Mungo.
‘That they knew each other before the war,’ Flemyng continued, ‘so maybe they were lovers at that time. The question is – when precisely did it start? Before we came along, or afterwards?’
Abel smiled. ‘It rather matters, doesn’t it?’
When they had come to the table, Flemyng had appeared the most serious, without his usual sparkle. Mungo was in charge and confident in his story, Abel alert and smiling. Now Mungo was feeling the weight of his revelations, and as he lost some of his poise he seemed to shrink. Flemyng, by contrast, was alive with interest. Abel was watching every gesture, his face a mirror of Flemyng’s excitement. Faced with uncertainty, perhaps a discovery that would oblige them to question their own identities, the two youngest brothers had found new energy. Flemyng was leaning in, his hands flat on the table. The tiredness on his face had gone, and his eyes were eager.
He turned deliberately to Babble, and his eyes widened. ‘Can you help?’
‘Maybe I can,’ he said, every eye upon him.
Flemyng smiled at the confirmation. ‘You knew.’
‘Oh aye, I knew.’
Mungo turned away again, and Abel saw the physical response as evidence that he was re-entering the state of shock that had come on him when he first delved into the letters, on his own. He had to find something to do because he didn’t want to speak. He moved from the window to the side of the room and found the switch beside the table where the picture lay. Two wall lights on either side of the fire threw a soft yellow glow across the table. Babble was illuminated in profile, and Abel thought it was as if he was being picked out on-stage by a light from the wings. He was waiting for Mungo to return to his chair. ‘I’m sorry,’ said Babble as he sat down. ‘I’ve kept it to myself.’
Mungo had known this man nearly all his life, and as a boy had been a companion to the cockney with thick auburn hair and a bark of a laugh, a ragamuffin in his twenties bent on adventure when he’d become part of the household. The streetwise boy without a city to play in, let loose in the hills. Pot boy, apprentice gamekeeper, jack of everything. So close had they become in the endless summers of Mungo’s early years, in long walks through the woods and lost days on the hill, and so much of what he knew about the place had been discovered alongside Babble as they mapped their world, that the friendship was inseparable for him from family memories. It remained a pillar to which he could cling on lonely nights. Warm evenings on the loch; late-summer harvest days at the home farm when they fed the threshing mill with corn and barley into the dusk for a solid week; cool early mornings on the burn before the mist had risen, when he might catch a trout in the shallows with his hands. Together they lived the working out of the year.
Now, a secret that divided them was opening up. Babble addressed his boys.
‘I did know. It wasn’t a dark secret – more a gift. It was precious then, and still is, because she trusted me. It meant deceiving your father, of course, and I never enjoyed that. I had to choose. Whether to keep your mother’s trust or to tell your father, which would have doubled the deception, if you think about it. So I didn’t.’
He lifted his glass as if to make a silent toast and the others did the same, obliged to follow his lead.
Flemyng spoke first. ‘When?’
Abel never forgot, in the days that followed, the smile that Babble gave them then. His face was only half lit and his hair was a rich bronze, with the overhanging eyebrows dark outcrops on his face. He raised his hands, palms out. ‘I saw a letter by accident, after the war, and she told me everything. I think she wanted to. There was trust, and I helped her. I burned the envelopes, put some of the letters away. She was careful which ones she kept. As for dates, what can I say? They had known each other before she went away in the hush-hush time – definitely – but as for when it began exactly, I can’t be sure.’
Flemyng then steered them back to Mungo’s tale, as if to give Babble’s intervention time to bed down before they questioned him further. Mungo spoke with relief, and Abel suspected he had felt embarrassment that verged on panic. ‘I said I had reached some conclusions about what the affair meant to her. Can I go back to that?’
He spoke. ‘I began with a feeling of weariness, sadness. At first it made me feel sad… weary… to read about it. A burst of anger, too. Now, I confess, I’m more taken by the colour of the thing, its sheen and its verve. That’s the odd thing. The vivacity is so attractive. If it had been seedy, I’m not sure I would have coped, being honest with you. Is that a wee bit precious? Perhaps.’
Flemyng said he knew why his brother was able to accept what had happened. Mungo raised his eyebrows with a touch of theatricality, and said, ‘Go on. I knew you’d understand.’ He leaned back.
Flemyng
said, ‘You’re convinced that without this secret side to her, Mother couldn’t have been what she was, to all of us.’
‘Precisely.’
Abel intervened then. ‘What do you know of him?’
‘Very little,’ Mungo said. There were mysteries, despite the stories told in the letters. The man’s first name was not uncommon – Lewis – but he’d never seen a surname. ‘As Babble says, the envelopes have been destroyed.’ Abel wondered how many had turned to smoke in the Altnabuie fireplace with dogs asleep on either side and the boys sleeping upstairs.
‘They’re intimate letters. Of course. I’ll leave you to read them for yourselves. But they had a physical relationship that was evidently… fulfilling. There’s more to it, though. A better side to it than that.’ Flemyng smiled – dear Mungo. ‘He painted too. That’s clear. They spoke about the world of their imaginations, and she told him, often, how much she loved Father.’ His voice faltered for a moment. ‘And us.’
For the first time, Mungo’s eyes filled up. ‘I’ve come to realize that without this we might not have had such a happy time. And that goes for Father, too. A difficult thought to accept, turning everything upside down as it does. But I have.’
And Abel said, ‘So have I.’ Before he spoke, while his brothers waited, he brought his mother to mind. She was on the stairs, clattering back from the henhouse and through the kitchen door carrying a pail with fresh eggs sitting on a high nest of straw. Her long black hair, with the natural grey streaks that had come early, her thin pianist’s hands and high bearing, all contributed to an imperious demeanour that was at odds with her character, which was – in her own favourite phrase – as warm as pie. She painted in the first-floor room at the far end of the house, where her oils and varnishes gave the place an odour that he liked to think had never evaporated. A place full of light.
There were some easels still leaning against a wall in the cellar, a few tubes of sticky paint thrown together in an old potato sack, and three pictures on the staircase. Two were of their own glen, one showing it in the depths of a famously hard winter, and the other of a Maine seashore where she’d introduced them all to the rough touch of the Atlantic and the first frontier. Each bedroom held a little portrait of a member of the family. Flemyng’s had his father – dark and alive, and smiling.
Abel imagined he was hearing sounds from the gunroom on a damp October morning when they were heading for the hill, or the splash of the first fish of the day. Maybe his mother straight-backed at her easel, wrapped in folds of violet and red and whispering to herself as she reached for the palette and looked out of the window towards the high places. Sometimes the boys would hear singing while she painted, her voice carrying along the long bedroom corridor.
He spoke up. ‘You’ve got it, Mungo. There’s a completeness in this that we all understand. Without this, she’d have been a different person and not the one we knew. Think of the paintings, and the life in them. The fulfilment.’
Then his own revelation. ‘I’ve known for a while. There’s one of her pictures in my club in New York. I recognized it about three years ago when they took it out of store and hung it in a big sitting room – the style was so obvious, it hit me like a rocket. There are two paintings, in fact – one’s not on display. I took the trouble to trace their history. One’s signed, the other not. The archivist was interested, he’s a sharp guy, and it helped that I bear her name.’ His brothers smiled. ‘I learned of their life together. The lover was a member and the pictures came from him. Left to the club when he died. I’m still following the story backwards. More later.’
And then it was obvious that they had gone far enough for one evening. It was time to pause.
Mungo’s relief was obvious. The deed box stayed shut; the letters would be examined another day. Like exhausted lovers, Abel thought, they knew it was time to rest.
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 g
ot 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?’
The Madness of July Page 20
