The Madness of July (21 page)

‘You too,’ Flemyng said, and smiled.

‘Where? I didn’t know.’ A sign of disturbance underneath.

Babble had kept the news to himself. Flemyng considered his brother’s surprise, although Mungo followed up his questions with a slap of his hand on one thigh, to pull himself round. ‘Good. We must get him up here.’

Flemyng said he had been thinking the same, and would try to make contact.

Babble came in and announced a plan for the morning: two hours on the loch and a drive up to the Pole for a lunchtime drink. The afternoon would look after itself.

The weather was going to be fine, but he hoped for cloud to persuade the fish to rise. Too much sun and they’d stay in the depths. ‘Whatever you’re worried about, forget it. You’ll have sorted it out in your head by the time we come out of the Pole. Alasdair and company will be there. Old friends. The whole catastrophe, as you might say.’

Flemyng laughed with him, remembering past times. Mungo was beaming now. He gave his brother a playful punch and ruffled the dogs’ coats as they gathered round, sensing an outing. Sitting across from one another at the pitted wooden table, speaking softly, they talked of the trees planted on the hill, the burn, the state of Altnabuie in its fine old age.

Flemyng asked what Mungo was up to in his library, in the contented hours he spent at the desk above the iron spiral staircase in the gallery where he could absorb the silence and the view down the glen.

‘You know it all started as a book that would explain our territory here – the topography, Gaelic turning to English in a few miles, the highland line the Romans couldn’t cross, or didn’t want to. All that. But a later family story’s taking over, and I think of it now as private research. The eighteenth-century stuff is my bag, Jacobites and all their gang, but it’s Mother now. We can’t avoid her. What a story.’ Flemyng watched Babble, who seemed untroubled by the course of their conversation.

‘I want to show you the papers before you go to St Andrews, the ones I’ve mentioned to you. I’ve got plenty more, and the story is filling out. Quite a saga.’ Awkwardness tinged the silence that followed, and Mungo’s smile was forced, for the first time. They were quiet for a minute or two, enjoying the warmth and the smells of the kitchen, the light playing on the trees outside the window, the snuffling of the dogs at their feet, and the prospect of a morning on the loch. ‘I’m so very grateful to you, Will. I wanted you here.’

His eyes were full as he looked at his brother across the table. ‘Of course,’ Flemyng said. Then, ‘I miss Abel so much.’ The words came from nowhere and surprised them both.

‘Me, too,’ said Mungo. ‘We need him here for this. He can’t stay away. It’s family.’

For the first time he could remember, Flemyng felt panic in these surroundings, his attempt to conceal the turmoil wearing thin after only one night. He tried to keep it down. ‘We haven’t been alone together for a long while.’

Babble, standing by the sink, heard Flemyng’s language change. He phrased things differently at home, dropped in old words. They both enjoyed that, and after a week at Altnabuie it was as if he had never left.

Mungo said, ‘I suppose it’s difficult for you to talk easily. And for Abel. Both of you. We’ve all had to be so careful over the years. The three of us’ – a gesture towards the listening Babble – ‘know how awkward it has been. I suppose, probably, how dangerous for you, and for Abel? D’you think we’ve been too protective?’

‘Maybe,’ Flemyng said. ‘There’s a reason why I must see Abel,’ he added, and caught Mungo’s eye. ‘More than one.’

His brother sighed. ‘I worry about you.’

Flemyng started to speak. ‘You’re the one who…’

‘No,’ said his brother with emphasis. ‘You forget, I’m used to being here on my own. I can handle things. This place, and so forth.’

‘I know.’

‘Will, it may be that things are disturbing you more than you realize,’ Mungo said. ‘I know I’ve opened up this secret chamber in the family, or whatever we’re going to call it, and it’s disconcerting. Maybe frightening. Don’t pretend. You may be the one who finds it hardest to deal with.’

‘I can take whatever you have to tell us. I care, of course. But I’m not… unbalanced by it.’

His brother said, ‘Neither am I. But maybe there’s more going on underneath than you think. Inside.’

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.