But the spirit awakened in him the previous night was running strong. Years had fallen away. When he’d dressed in the casual trousers and blazer folded carefully at the bottom of his Gladstone bag, and stowed away his pinstripes, he was eager to step out. He did retain his naval tie, because he found it difficult to abandon it without strong reason, and when he brushed his hair he neatened it with the cream he always used for the office. There was a flattened fedora in his bag, and he got it into shape, ready for the day.
There were warm rolls for breakfast and a miserable piece of fish, but Craven was happy. On the road, the alarms that had taken him from Paris were overtaken by expectation. At Edinburgh, he was packed and ready before the train clanked to a halt, and he was on the platform in a moment, his fedora squarely on his head with the front rim folded nicely down, almost to a point.
He slammed the door behind him and stood still on the platform. A few passengers ambled past, one with pyjama bottoms showing below his long coat. There was no rush. A porter wheeled a heavy cart carrying suitcases and two wicker cages of racing pigeons. After a minute or two he was alone. From a wooden bench near the taxi rank, he saw a figure rise and approach him steadily, an arm raised in greeting.
‘Freddy Craven.’
‘Hello, Mungo. This is such a pleasure.’
‘All mine, I assure you.’
They shook hands and seemed an ordinary pair of old friends, Mungo Flemyng beaming as he picked up the Gladstone bag and waved towards his car, parked only a few yards from the platform in the waiting area, next to a long barrow piled high with milk churns. The station was quiet, and they looked like men in no hurry.
Mungo placed Craven’s bag in the boot, and a young dog on the back seat jumped up to press his nose against the window. ‘Rousseau – because he thinks for himself. Don’t mind him. He’ll settle.’
Soon they’d driven slowly up the ramp and out of the station, Craven leaning forward to catch his first glimpse of the cragged city skyline above them.
‘We’re going home,’ Mungo said. ‘You’re sure that’s what you wanted?’
‘Very much so,’ Craven said.
And quietly, with no air of alarm, he began to explain why he’d come. The message relayed from London, letting him know that Mungo needed to get in touch, had arrived at a happy moment. He guessed that it must be a request for help, and he was in the same predicament. ‘So you see, it all made sense. We needed to talk. And Will, of course, doesn’t know I’m here. So we have a chance.’
Mungo nodded. ‘This means a great deal to me. Thank you.’
He said he had hesitated before using the number that he had been given for emergencies. ‘It’s all the stranger because there’s nothing wrong that I can put my finger on. No crisis, just a sense that things aren’t right. Was I overanxious? I confess I was a little alarmed at your reaction – that you wanted to come straight here – because it rather confirmed my worries. I’m afraid I hardly slept last night. The relief that it’s you in person is – well, very great indeed. I had hoped for it.’
Craven laughed. He recalled the first weekend they’d spent together, at a history conference in London eight years before. Mungo had given a paper on Roman Scotland, and found Craven an enthusiastic member of his seminar, revealing that he knew every fort on Hadrian’s Wall and relished the mystery of the whereabouts of Mons Graupius, the battle where Agricola’s legions had crushed the Caledonians before taking their leave. ‘Perhaps I’ll show you the marching camp near home,’ Mungo now said as they drove. ‘For them, a temporary stop along the way, but full of interest. Tacitus mentions it in passing. When the light fades, you can see the layout quite clearly against the hill.’
Craven’s presence at the conference where they met had come about as a consequence of another mystery, involving a Polish historian who had signalled that he might be a willing informer, and Mungo would have been surprised to learn that Craven spent each of the three nights in a cramped room on the attic floor of the Regent Palace Hotel off Piccadilly in conversation with his potential recruit, well supplied with cigarettes and vodka, to decide whether or not he was a genuine catch. Two of Craven’s juniors, one of them the young Sam Malachy, were listening on headphones in the next room, perched side by side on a creaky bed and drinking instant coffee through the night. The Pole turned out to be a star who was still shining, and so the weekend had a happy place in Craven’s memory, alongside the pleasure of his first acquaintance with Mungo, to whom, as a result of high spirits at his success with Warsaw, he confided before the weekend was over that he had a professional connection with his brother. No more than that, but enough.
They’d met again three years later, when Mungo had come to a lecture in Vienna. Will Flemyng had returned for a month to Berlin, so Craven made sure that he was in the audience to welcome Mungo, and that a good dinner followed.
But they had never met in Scotland.
‘I’ll take you the back way,’ Mungo said as they dropped down on the other side of the castle rock and the Old Town and headed west with the morning sun at their backs. ‘We’ll have a small detour. I do enjoy a city with hills, don’t you? That’s the hospital, on the slope there, where Sassoon and Wilfred Owen were confined together in the first war. Such strange luck.’ Then Craven learned why they had taken that route. ‘We’re not too far from Will’s school here,’ said Mungo. ‘You can see the rugby posts through the trees. He was happy there.’
And Craven asked, ‘Abel’s too?’ although he knew the answer.
‘Abel’s too,’ said Mungo, and so they began to talk, as decisively as if Craven had said open sesame.
He asked Mungo what was wrong.
‘We talk sometimes on the phone, though not very often and rarely on a Saturday, just because that’s not been our habit. I was thrown a little because Will was very agitated. Extraordinarily so.’
‘About anything in particular?’ Craven asked.
‘Yes, that’s the point. Abel.’
Mungo asked Craven if he could offer any comfort, cast any light. ‘You can see why I’m worried. Will is usually calm and clear. Not at all the mysterious man, if I can put it like that.’
‘You certainly can,’ Craven said, and laughed by way of encouragement.
‘Brothers have a sixth sense with each other, I suppose,’ Mungo went on. ‘Maybe historians, too. We spend our lives looking out for turning points, don’t we?’
Then Craven surprised him. ‘Are you expecting to see Abel soon?’
‘How did you know? He’s coming home in a couple of weeks, and I was hoping Will would be with us, too. But he’s not sure. Paris edgy he says, and I do see the newspapers. But, Freddy, what do you know about Abel?’
‘That he’s heading our way, that’s all. And for rather longer than a weekend, I’m told.’
‘Oh.’ And the intimacy was interrupted, Mungo aware of the doors that couldn’t be opened and Craven that he had broken a piece of news. There were some minutes of silence, then they spoke instead about spring, and the fields around them, the shadowy hills ahead of them to the north. They settled back, and Mungo drove happily for more than two hours. They spent equal time in conversation and silence.
Having made a loop of a few miles to get a view of the marching camp where a small excavation team was setting to their day’s work digging and scraping, Craven got his first sight of Altnabuie.
‘I’ve heard a good deal from Will,’ he said. ‘How satisfying this is.’
Mungo was moved by the intimacy, and let Craven continue. ‘When you know your time is limited, you treasure the things that are fresh to the eye. They lighten the days.’
Mungo’s old car had carried them on the twisting road that came to the house from the east, and as they took the last bend through the trees Craven saw the rooftop with its crooked chimney on the western gable and beyond it a flash of water. The wind was picking up from the west and the loch was streaked by ripples that shimmered and seemed to race toward
s them. On its fringes were the thick woods that brought an emerald softness to the glen – birch and alder, holly and fir – and on the rocky heights above the lochside a forest of broom had burst into colour, as bright as splashes of ochre laid on the landscape by an artist’s hand. The scene was alive, yet still.
‘You see how peaceful we are,’ Mungo said.
He turned the car to park by the back door, and Babble raised a hand in greeting. Taking Craven’s bag, they laughed together at the picture Flemyng had painted of him when he first spoke of home in Vienna. ‘He still tells the old stories, I suppose,’ Babble said. ‘Well, we wouldn’t want it any other way.’
The sun was high and Mungo said it might be worth walking for a little while before lunch, to get the best of the day. Rousseau leapt ahead of them and disappeared in a thicket. Another dog came from the house and chased him.
There was a rickety bench by the high wall on the garden’s northern side and they stopped there.
‘You were right that I have concerns,’ Craven began. ‘Your message that was passed to me was a godsend really, timing that made it seem meant, if you follow me. I want you to help me, and then I’ll do everything I can to help you.’ It was a gentle instruction, sympathetic but firm. ‘Tell me the whole story.’
So Mungo spoke of the twin phone calls on Saturday night, expressing embarrassment that such a family episode, apparently small and insignificant, should have brought them together to share their alarm. But being a meticulous man, he reconstructed the two conversations with accuracy, getting the timing right. Abel’s excitement at coming home and Will’s discomfiture at the fact. He remembered Will’s very words – ‘Did he mention me directly? Ask what I’m doing? I need to know.’ As Craven would understand, Mungo said, the questions had lodged stubbornly in his mind.
‘Of course I told him that Abel had said nothing of the kind. Nothing but the news of his homecoming. Babble and I were celebrating the fact when Will come through a few minutes later, and d’you know, I still can’t understand why he rang me. He didn’t say. But he was in a state of alarm.’
Craven asked if he sometimes felt that, as the third brother, he was used as a conduit between the others, or asked to keep a secret, and whether he minded.
‘I know that I am and, Freddy, I can say to you that I find it difficult. It helps them, no doubt, but I know nothing of their lives and that sometimes disturbs me. I’m a man who likes order. History offers no certainty, as you know, and that excites me. Away from my books, I am quite different. I want to know exactly who I am.’
Craven said, ‘I understand. But you are doing them a great service. Because of what they do, they need you.’
‘Abel once explained it to me, in a letter,’ said Mungo. ‘Obliquely, but it was clear enough. He said that hidden knowledge was always the most precious kind. As a historian, he thought I would understand that. The belief in a secret had great power, he said, even if the secret didn’t exist. We need to have them.’
Craven said that he wished he had met Abel.
They stood for a while, taking in the sunshine. ‘You can see the colours changing,’ Mungo said. ‘That hillside will be a riot of yellow in the first week of May. It’s when everything starts to turn.’
For a few minutes they didn’t speak, and listened to the birds and the rushing water close by.
Craven had lit a cigarette, and drew deeply. ‘I think I can tell you that Will has been troubled,’ his voice rough. ‘Of course there was the Isabel business, upsetting to a man who cares about his feelings, but there are other matters that you’ll realize I can’t delve into, even for you. But you know enough for me to be able to say that he is involved in a sensitive piece of work that is bound to take its toll. All of us learn that along the way.’
They spoke for a few minutes about Flemyng’s love of his trade, the excitement that had lifted him up from the start and which he was able to transmit to Mungo. ‘I have never known any detail,’ his brother said, ‘and I understood that from the start. I’ve asked him nothing. But I’ve let him confide his feelings when he has needed to, so I’ve learned a little of the pattern of his days. The accidents, the satisfactions.’
The two men walked to the lochside, Mungo saying that they had half an hour before lunch, and they fell quiet as they dropped down the long slope. The wind had settled into a gentle breeze that lifted the trees at the garden’s edge, and in their shelter they absorbed the spring warmth. Craven could smell the woods, and a freshness that he hadn’t known for months lifted his spirits as they reached the carpet of late daffodils that lay between them and the water. There was a rowing boat out in the loch and in it they could see the motionless figure of Tiny, the ghillie, with his rod. ‘We have a heronry in the trees yonder.’ Mungo pointed. ‘No sign of them this morning.’
Content, their anxieties shared, they spent a little time walking on the bank. There were birds wheeling above them, and from the hill to the south came the sound of a tractor starting up. As if it had been a signal, Mungo said that Babble would be ready with lunch. They turned for home.
A few steps up the slope, as they approached the gate in the garden wall and Mungo leaned forward to open the way, Craven said, ‘I’ll explain why I’m concerned, Mungo, as best I can, and I know you will understand. Then I must rest, if you don’t mind.’
They stood together facing the house, and Craven, a little tired from the walk, put his weight against the wall.
Mungo said, ‘Look, you’ve had a long day. Have the afternoon to yourself and we’ll have an early night. We can talk properly tomorrow – you’ll stay?’
‘We must talk, and I shall stay, with pleasure,’ Craven said. ‘You know that I care about Will deeply, and that’s what pains me. For the first time, I know he’s not telling me the truth.’
THIRTEEN
Quincy caught Flemyng a few minutes before he left his apartment to walk to the metro. He was in his small kitchen, a cup of coffee teetering on the edge of the table and two newspapers open in front of him. The ringing of the phone from the high iron stand in the lobby surprised him. With both Craven and Bolder away he wouldn’t expect to be troubled before work. Memory kicked in with a shock: as a consequence of their absence he was in charge of all station business. Why hadn’t he prepared more carefully for the possibility of trouble? A message from London that demanded action and a request from Janet to pick up one of Freddy’s tasks of which he had previously known nothing. So he was quick to the phone, schoolboyish with guilt as he picked up the receiver.
Relief. The voice said, ‘Will, it’s Grace.’
‘Well, hello.’ His excitement showed. She spoke as if their conversation at Hoffman’s party had only been interrupted for a minute or two, enthusing about the company they’d shared, wondering how his weekend had been. ‘Partying again?’ His account of a solitary and disjointed couple of days produced laughter at the other end, and he found himself in a conversation that had turned flirtatious from the start.
‘You mentioned lunch,’ she said, grasping the moment. ‘Can we do it as soon as we can? Like today.’
The tasks he had set himself for the office shrivelled away in his mind. They could wait. He had the ambassador’s round-table meeting – to everyone in the embassy, morning prayers – where he’d have to listen to Bridger’s account of a trip to NATO in Brussels the previous day, but there was nothing else that couldn’t be shunted into a long afternoon. He had his eye on one Sorbonne student who looked eager to talk, but he could wait until the evening. ‘I’d love that. You understand that something may come up, but there’s no reason to expect it. I’ve a place here on the Left Bank that I like, and you would. One o’clock?’ He gave her the address on the rue de Seine and promised a good glass of wine.
Ringing the restaurant, he asked for a quiet table – he was happy to say that it was because he would have a woman friend coming for the first time, and all was understood – and in double-quick time he prepared for the office.
Leaving the apartment block with a cheery word to the concierge at her post, he set off for rue du Bac and the metro with a new lightness of foot.
Janet had some telegrams ready on his desk, Freddy Craven’s morning bundle as well as his own, and he closed himself in with a pot of coffee and, unusually, an open packet of cigarettes. There was a copy of a telegram from Prague that was the most interesting overnight news, because the resistance to Moscow was said to be hardening. Warsaw was quiet and with heavy political traffic from Washington he sensed that the office in London had turned westwards for the moment. But there was an account from Jonny Hinckley in Brussels of NATO discussions on deployments in Berlin that he read with special care, knowing that he would hear Bridger on the subject in a few minutes. He thought of Jonny, near his age, skinny and dark with thick round glasses that made him look like a librarian. But when it came to missiles, he knew everything.
The ambassador summoned his troops three times a week to a long dining table in his outer office that was swathed in green cloth and used as a gathering place. The glass cases along one wall were filled with richly patterned china plates and tureens, so that Flemyng often felt he was on a visit to the V&A. Ten of them sat down on this Tuesday, a mixture of the powerful – Bridger was at the ambassador’s right hand – and minor fonctionnaires. Flemyng, because he was acting up, found himself placed on the boss’s other side and remembered that he would have to give a report, Craven-style. Having watched the old man at work as bag carrier he knew that brevity was cherished at the top of the table and a pithy sign-off could leave the impression of a job well done, even if nothing of substance had been said. As he sat down, he rehearsed in his head.
Paris Spring Page 12
