The Madness of July

by James Naughtie

  ‘Until later. It’s about how I came into the game. How and why, I suppose. You know I was spotted at Princeton. Twenty-two, I suppose I was, on that graduate programme. What you don’t know is that it was Mother’s lover who managed it, through one of his people.’ There was little light, and his face was a happy jigsaw of shadows.

  ‘He’d come back from London towards the end of the war with a reputation, and I’ve learned since what he did with it. You’ll laugh.’

  ‘Try me,’ said Flemyng, and Abel laid it out, seizing the quiet moment towards the end of the day to produce a climax.

  ‘He invented Maria’s outfit, became the godfather of the network. Lent it spirit and lustre, I’m told. And, early on, he wanted some people who might make whoopee in London. I was a natural. You’d already signed up here. Mother knew all about that; must have told him. So I got the tap on the shoulder, and jumped.’

  Flemyng, sounding calm, asked if Abel had met the man. No. He had turned into legend before Abel arrived, after careful preparation in his last two semesters at Princeton and a learning stint in London. By then the maestro had gone. Judging by Mungo’s timeline, Abel said, the affair was over by then too, before the sixties had been dreamed of. But there were now clues to the completion of the story. Even Abel’s decision to take their mother’s family name when he made the American move had been encouraged by her. He now recognized that as part of the plan, an element of her contentment. There must be letters, he said, that would show how they’d spoken about it, how it was done, and how pleased they had been when he followed the script. Had they gone on the fire, he wondered aloud, or were they in the box?

  ‘I know it now: I do this because of him. They must have loved the sight of us, both in the family business.’ Abel laughed.

  It was natural that at such a juncture they should pause. His brother’s revelation was a spur to Flemyng’s imagination, but he needed time in which to reflect. Moving closer, he said, ‘It will take a while to sink in. Coincidences often do.’

  Mungo and Babble were coming up from the garden, their faces splashed with light as they came through the door from the dark, and they joined them in the hall. Mungo stopped at the long barometer, and tapped it hard. ‘The glass is falling. Good.’

  They lingered for a moment, reached towards each other, and said their goodnights.

  In his bedroom, he looked at his father’s portrait, and went to the window. At night, there was not a light in the whole world that he could see from his room, as if the house had drawn a cloak around itself. He could follow the shape of the hills, but there was no moon and no glint from the loch below. As he undressed, he heard the creak of a floorboard. Abel was pacing his room along the corridor. On his bed, a book of poetry in his hand, he heard the boards creak once again.

  Downstairs, Babble switched off the last lamps in the dining room, and stood at the front door for a moment to enjoy the approach of the freshening rain. The dampness touched him. Eventually, he turned towards the west end of the house, his books and his bed, casting Altnabuie into darkness as he went.

  ‘The brothers,’ he said to himself half aloud as he closed his door behind him, ‘together again.’

  Sunday

  16

  Flemyng’s locked red box was one of five dispatched northwards on Saturday afternoon, secured together in a train that arrived in Edinburgh late in the evening. Three were taken immediately to the homes of ministers living in the city, another delivered to a country house an hour away to the south where one of Flemyng’s colleagues was spending a short weekend. The instructions accompanying his own – they were Lucy’s, but originated with Paul – were that it should arrive at Altnabuie as early as possible on Sunday. As the first colours of the morning appeared on the hills, a government driver was leaving the main road and relishing the winding route through the trees, the box lying safe and secure on the seat behind him.

  He had left a wet city. Now the rain had gone and the eastern sky was bright behind him.

  At the house, rivulets of water had poured from the roof all night, and when Babble went to his window an hour before dawn he heard the rough splashing of the downpour on the gravel behind the house. Through it, he caught the sound of the burn as if it had burst into action in a gesture of thanks for the deluge. The air was fresh again, with the cooling lift they had all missed. As familiar as sea spray to a sailor, it would come from stony grey skies that lingered stubbornly for days and then broke, or from the softer rain that crept in from nowhere and turned to mist, coaxing the greenery on the hills and in the woods into life, so that there was a trickle from every branch on the dark pines, their needles fattening with the water, and a shine on the leaves of the larch and the holly.

  He could hear little streams of water falling from the overhang outside his window and a steady, heavy drip from the stone lintel above the back door. By mid-morning the garden would be full of colour and plumped up, parched places soft and damp and the blooms turning towards the sun. Lifted by the thought, he felt an exhilaration that he attributed in part to the difficulties of the previous night. Emotions in the house were high, and Flemyng sometimes told him that he was the most romantic man he knew.

  At the other end of the house, Flemyng was awake too. He was listening for the car.

  He planned his morning, stretched out under a single sheet, and relaxed himself deliberately, limb by limb. After the box had been delivered into his hands, by old rules that he knew the driver would follow to the letter, he would walk in the early light, taking the dogs up the hill for a scramble through the heather. He would go to a spot high above the back of the house where the landscape opened up to every point of the compass, and when the last of the rain clouds had gone his reward would be a fresh panorama of hill and moorland stretching into the far distance, washed in pastels, with trails of mist on the shoulders of the crags and a diamond sparkle on the loch below.

  He didn’t expect to see another human soul.

  While Flemyng made his plans, Babble was reading. He pulled his favourite armchair to the window, picked up Dickens and took himself to London. On his rare solo expeditions, he would visit an old girlfriend who lived near Southwark Bridge, because for him that was close to London’s beating heart, the old Babb home standing only a mile or two away, and still the hub of a throbbing network of cousins and their broods. Wandering around Borough High Street, Babble was in the city to which he returned again and again in the pages on his shelves, walking the streets of his imagination. The Marshalsea prison where Little Dorritt’s father was banged up, Jacob’s Island not far away where Bill Sykes met his end, the old city across the water with its dark tangle of passages and alleys that had once teemed with rough life, the river itself with its barges and lightermen and all the secrets that were revealed when the tide fell back and the mud banks lay exposed. His private playground.

  He held close the vision of that London gone, a place of fables and violent rumour, the tumbling fairground of thrills and sadness that moved him still. It was lost, and he knew that was why he had come to love the empty places around him. He could dream there, and remember that which he’d never known but wished for. He had created a second life.

  Picking up Our Mutual Friend he left Altnabuie behind for the dark fantasy that lured him back. ‘The white face of the winter day came sluggishly on, veiled in a frosty mist; and the shadowy ships in the river slowly changed to black substances; and the sun, blood-red on the eastern marshes behind dark masts and yards, seemed filled with the ruins of a forest it had set on fire.’ He floated off.

  Mungo was stirring upstairs, and aware of the water all around. He lay for a while and listened. He had been awake twice in the night, and the patter on the roof and the soft rattle of his window in the wind gave him pleasure. His greatest satisfaction was home. For a few minutes he considered the difficulties of the last few weeks. He ran through the table talk of the night before, and the openness the brothers had tried to find as they edged i
nto their past, remembering the shades of darkness that had sometimes touched Abel’s face and the pulse that had quickened in Will as he began to relish a secret that he thought had scared him. Mungo was relieved, and surprised. He had expected his brother’s journey to take him in the other direction, from confidence to doubt.

  He wondered if their discussions in the coming days might be easier than he had imagined, and turned his mind to the papers he’d assembled in his library, ready to go south on the night sleeper. The black tin box had been prepared with special care. Inside, the selection of letters was tied with pink ribbon – he’d unconsciously bundled them up in lawyer’s style, as if for a courtroom – and they would be worked through again in the week ahead, carried alongside the old leather suitcase that Babble had taken from the cellar in preparation for their expedition, buckles and straps buffed up for the journey that they loved, rolling south from the hills through the dark.

  As Mungo prepared in his mind for the day ahead, he settled on a course that had come to him in the last moments before sleep. After his brother had left, he would make a call to London, to someone who might understand his anxiety, and to whom he could talk with frankness. He had the number stored away, although he had never used it before. The moment had come.

  Sleep was over. He got up, let Rousseau through the door and down the stairs, and dressed without any hurry. He took the bottle of water which he always kept by his bed, drawn from the spring on the hill behind the house, and went directly to his library. He climbed the short spiral staircase and sat at his desk with his papers in front of him. He was looking west, and saw that the first patches of light from behind the house were giving a pale wash to the shadows on the hills. Soon the water in the loch would pick up the sun, and Altnabuie would be awake.

  He opened his deed box, the black tin lid squeaking as he eased it up, undid the ribbon on the letters, and began to read them again.

  ‘The boys are well. I wish you could see them…’

  ‘Let me describe this place to you, when the spring comes…’

  ‘I have your painting in the room where I work. No one else knows.’

  ‘Tell me how it looks in New York right now…’

  For more than an hour, the house was quiet. The dogs were anxious for the hill, but they responded to the atmosphere of a morning that would be precious, thanks to the departing rain. He read for a little, taking time over a short story he’d loved from boyhood. When he came down to the kitchen, the animals were at his feet in an instant but made little noise. Mungo fed them, made a few preparations for the breakfast that everyone would share in an hour or so, and got his boots on.

  *

  Flemyng was ready. A few minutes later he heard the car on the drive.

  ‘A fine morning, sir.’ He knew the driver, who’d done the run from Edinburgh often enough before, and offered him tea. They stood outside and enjoyed the coming warmth. ‘Freedom, don’t you think,’ said Flemyng, making it a statement. Taking the leather-covered box from the driver’s hand, he said he’d work through it immediately, before leaving for London. The driver smiled, knowing ministers’ ways and innocent pretences. Babble would give him some breakfast, and he could sit in the garden or take a drive into the hills, for the views. They’d meet again in two hours. Flemyng would be driven to the airport, and deal with any unfinished papers in the car. They would be delivered safely to his office by the next morning. He went to his room, climbing the stair as quietly as he could with the lead-lined red box in his hand.

  Unlocking it with his own key, he saw a collection of Lucy’s familiar files. Green for parliamentary business, red for office telegrams, blue for correspondence. There were two sheaves of papers tagged with pink ribbons that separated them from the ordinary, although he knew that the intelligence assessments they contained would have been sanitized before being put in his box. If he wanted more, he’d have to ask. Halfway down the pile was a large white envelope, firmly sealed, bearing his name handwritten.

  He went to the window to open it, as if he needed all the light he could find. The note from Paul, in his own hand, was clipped to some photocopied sheets. ‘Will: These are items from our friend’s belongings – one is a newspaper cutting, as you will see. The other is a copy of one page of his notebook – there are others, which you will see later. I wanted you to have time to consider these before we meet, but you will understand that I didn’t want to discuss them on the telephone. Please give me your thoughts when we convene this evening. P.’

  He placed the two pages side by side on the small table under the window.

  The newspaper cutting was familiar, and Flemyng almost laughed. The headline read Gang of the Future, and above the text was a photographic montage of faces. It was a cutting from a Sunday newspaper dating from October the previous year, an article which he remembered well because it had irritated him. ‘We’re stuffed now,’ Ruskin had said when it appeared. ‘Everyone’s after us,’ although he smiled as he spread the word. And there they were, Flemyng and Forbes, Ruskin and Sorley, McIvor at the Treasury with his swot’s spectacles, even flaky little Sparger at the Home Office, pink-faced and done up in his stripes. And for good measure Brieve was part of the team, tagged as the invisible fixer and photographed at an angle that showed his mouth as tight as a zip. Ruskin was laughing, Forbes seemed about to speak, and Flemyng himself wore a lazy smile that he had thought at the time held a touch of arrogance. They were labelled as the coming men. Sorley had been especially pleased.

  On the photocopy, someone had drawn circles in thick red marker pen around the heads of Ruskin, Forbes, Sorley, Brieve and Flemyng himself.

  He looked at the other photocopied page, from Manson’s notebook. There was one handwritten line, and an indecipherable doodle underneath.

  It read, Friend Flemyng knows.

  He stood for a few minutes at the window, conscious of the sunlight bringing the loch to life, and thought of the question Paul would ask in the evening.Whose friend?

  There was no better time to walk. He placed the sheets in Paul’s envelope, put them at the bottom of the papers in the box, and locked it. As he went downstairs he heard nothing in the house, and stepped quietly through the kitchen. The car had gone: the driver must have taken to the high road to enjoy an hour in the hills. Flemyng took the glass case from the orrery and set it going, with the cheerful guilt of a schoolboy wasting time. In the quiet, he heard the sound of the mechanism pushing the planets on their trajectory and hauling them back, and for a few minutes the years fell away. When the spindle stopped turning and the brass arms were at rest, the cycle complete and everything still, he didn’t replace the top – he knew that Abel would be drawn to the orrery again and let it take him on a journey – and stepped through the connecting door to the kitchen, closing it gently behind him. From the back door he could see the light streaming over the hill, looked to the clear skies and decided that he needed neither coat nor jacket. He got his favourite stick, a shepherd’s crook with a curved ewe’s horn at the business end, and set off with the dogs, who jumped at his heels and then charged on ahead.

  In a few minutes he was through the lower trees and out on the hill, following the wandering track through the heather that would take them to the top. The dogs put up some birds from a copse and sniffed for rabbits around the trees. As Flemyng bent himself to the climb, though it was neither hard nor long, they disappeared in the bracken, the only evidence of their scampering being a movement in the long sun-browned fronds that shook with their passage, making an undulating wave that raced up the hill.

  He called the dogs to him as they reached the top and they burst from the bracken. He was fit and on his game, his senses stirred. There was a little cairn of stones when he stopped at the highest point of the hill, where the ground fell away to the south before it rose sharply in a rocky slope and offered a steep climb to a higher summit about a mile away. All around him, the landscape opened up and allowed him to turn like a weather vane and surv
ey the land in every direction, point by point. He looked northeastwards towards Blair Atholl and the rounded mass of Beinn Dearg, south to the hills that lay beyond Loch Rannoch, and in the west he could see the jagged line on the horizon that was the grey fringe of Glen Coe. The clouds were thin, evaporating in the blue. Within an hour there would be a clear sky and a sharp landscape of sudden peaks and long ridges, guarding the glens that ran away from him west and north towards the highest mountains of all.

  For a few minutes he leaned against the cairn and took in the smells of summer carried on the lightest of winds. He was breathing easily, the tension gone, and a feeling of loosening spread through his limbs as he took in the scene. Below him, on the eastern side of the hill looking away from Altnabuie, a few deer were huddled in a shallow corrie. They were living statues. He’d missed them when he first took in the landscape. Letting his gaze run slowly across the hillside, he stopped when he sensed their presence, and after a few seconds he was able to focus on the stag and his entourage, perfectly blended with the colours of the hill so that they almost disappeared into its folds and shadows. Even with a stalker’s spyglass he would have taken time to pick them out.

  They were watching him, having caught the first hint of his scent on the breeze, and he knew that at one movement from him they’d be off like the wind.

  He had time to think. For a little while he was as still as the deer. He felt the calm of the morning, but knew he must break it.

  *

  Back at the house, Babble was spooling the events of the weekend through his mind. Abel had asked him on the drive from the airport on Saturday if he would keep to himself the news that his visit was not a matter of family duty alone: he had to talk to Will. Babble knew he was being asked to keep the fact from Mungo for good reason, not as an act of deceit. It was well meant. But he was unsettled, and worried that he was engaged in a tricky manoeuvre which would interfere with their plans. He put the two warnings together, naturally. Abel was involved, and, to put the tin lid on it, he’d been compelled at the dinner table to reveal the deception of his own that had lasted so many years. Mungo had been gracious, although Babble knew he was shaken.