The Truth (2 page)

He gave a short reply, short because he was unable to express how frustrating it had been writing the book, knowing that every manager on the site was breathing down his neck. O’Connolly made his apologies and left shortly afterwards, giving Mabbut a powerful handshake – he was not the sort of man for a bear-hug. The atmosphere relaxed. The food was good and, knowing that the company was paying, those who stayed moved from beer to wine and even some curious Indian
digestif
that Rani produced from a back cupboard. Mabbut fell into a long conversation with Laurie from Accounts, who had lived on the island all her life and was desperate to get away and see the world. She’d never been to London, and no matter what Mabbut told her about it, she still wanted to go. As the evening wore on, those who lived out of Lerwick bade their farewells and began to drift off. Soon only Mabbut, Roscoe Gunn and Mae Lennox were left. Roscoe was a dour man on whom alcohol appeared to have no effect at all. He was, however, that even more deadly combination, a dour man who likes company, and it was long
past midnight before he shook Mabbut’s hand one final time and headed off into the night. Mabbut waited for Mae Lennox to settle up. As they stepped out on to Bank Lane the sky was wonderfully clear and a small crescent moon hung so sharp and bright above the bay that neither felt they could turn their backs on it. Instead they walked down towards the waterfront, where the outline of a recently docked Norwegian three-master rose against the night sky. They turned south along Commercial Street, whose solid and sturdy old manses ran parallel to the sea, which lapped gently at the flights of stone steps leading from the houses to the water.

Of all those he had met during his work at Sullom Voe, Mae was the person he’d miss most. She was in her mid-forties and had never been married, except to her work. She must have had offers because she was lively and bright and looked good, without ever seeming to put in much effort. They’d spent a lot of time together and grown fond of each other, but whereas her friendliness had been chummy rather than intimate, his feelings were more complicated.

‘Walk to the Knab?’

Mae feigned horror.

‘The Knab! I’ve to be at work in the morning, Mr Mabbut.’

‘It’s my last night.’

‘I’ve not got the right shoes on.’

‘I’ll carry you.’

Mae snorted with laughter and looked up at the sky.

‘Well, we’ll go a little way more. It’s a rare old evening.’

They pulled up their coat collars as they cleared the protective walls of the houses and the wind caught them straight off the water. At the top of the next hill they found cover again, in the lee of an ill-starred assortment of modern bungalows and large stone houses with pointy roofs. A roller-coaster path led down between them to a low cliff and then wound up again past a cemetery. Serried ranks of silver tombstones stretched up the slope, like a silent army watching them. Neither spoke until they’d reached the headland known as the Knab, where a small shelter had been provided as part of a tourist trail. Here they sat, looking out into the star-studded night with the silver-grey waters of the Sound rippling gently below.

Mae flicked her hair free of her collar.

‘I feel like a teenager again.’

Mabbut put his arm around her, protectively and companionably, but with enough pressure to feel her compact shape between waist and ribcage.

‘I can’t remember that far back.’

She turned towards him.

‘Are you looking for sympathy or something? Look at me. Halfway through my forties already.’

‘Ah, but you still have a lot of life ahead of you, Mae. Most of mine is behind me.’

‘Oh, don’t give me that. What are you? Fifty-six?’

‘You should know, you’re the one who employed me.’

‘Fifty-six is nothing.’

‘It’s nothing times fifty-six,’ said Mabbut bleakly.

Ahead of them, a few clouds were drifting above the southern horizon.

‘If someone had said to me on the journo course that, by the time I was pushing sixty, I’d be being thanked by an oil company for making them look good, I’d have left and become a toilet attendant.’

‘Thanks a lot.’

‘You know what I mean. It’s nothing personal. Just a nagging reminder that success is something that happens to other people.’

Mae shook her head impatiently.

‘There you go again, Keith. Always beating yourself up.’

‘I’m not the only one beating me up. You remember what O’Connolly said when I came up with all that interesting stuff about the early days and the local council being told one thing and the oil company doing another? “They were troublemakers, Keith, people who dinnae know a gift horse when it sits on their heed.” That’s what he said.’

Mae gave a short laugh.

‘We’ve done all right out of it.’

Mabbut snorted angrily.

‘Oh, sure, but only because some of you caused trouble. Made the companies pay up. But they wouldn’t let me put that in the book.’

A cloud flitted across the moon and the sea turned from silver to black.

‘You know, Mae, I sometimes have this dream that I’m walking across a bridge at rush hour and everyone else is coming the other way.’

‘You make things difficult for yourself. You don’t have to do that. None of us is perfect, you know.’

‘I’m not talking about perfect, Mae, just honest reporting. I’ve given them what they wanted, but it wasn’t what I wanted.’

This wasn’t what he wanted either. Not with Mae Lennox, not on his last night on Shetland. He tried a grin but didn’t quite convince.

‘I’m sorry, Mae. It’s my despair gene. There’s nothing I can do about it.’

He turned, leaning in close to her.

‘I’ll miss you, Mae.’

‘I’ll miss you too.’

He moved his arm lightly across her shoulder.

‘Come to London.’

Mae laughed, a little more heartily than he’d have liked.

‘Me? No. I promised my mother I’d never go south of Berwick-on-Tweed.’

‘I’m not joking. I’m serious.’ He pulled away. ‘Come to London. Come and live with me.’

Mae stopped, laughed, shook her head then laughed again.

‘Why not? It would be wonderful. We get on so well. You understand me, Mae.’

‘
Why not?
Because you’re a married man for a start. Are you going to keep me in a wee room somewhere?’

Mabbut was aware of the silence around them. The moon had disappeared, and the wind too.

‘Just a silly thought,’ he said.

She leaned across and kissed his cheek.

‘We’ve both had a lot to drink.’

‘That’s why I can tell you these things, but it doesn’t mean I’ve just thought of them . . .’

Mabbut broke off. Staring into the inky darkness, he took two deep breaths.

Mae put her hand on his.

‘You’re a good man, Keith Mabbut. You should remember that more often.’

They sat for a moment, neither speaking. Mae peered out of the shelter.

‘Weather’s changing.’ She checked her watch and got rapidly to her feet. ‘And it’s two o’clock!’

They walked back into the town. As they passed the Point, a different wind hit them, a north wind so brisk and searching they had to huddle close, which is how they were when they stopped at the bottom of the short, steep alleyway that led to Keith’s hotel.

He gave her a long last hug.

‘I hope we’ll see each other again, Mae. One way or another.’

‘Me too.’

‘A night of rapture in Berwick-on-Tweed?’

She smiled, squeezed his hand and turned away, walking quite briskly up Commercial Street, her heels clicking on the flagstones. He watched her for a while, but she didn’t look back.

The first flecks of early morning rain pattered across the windows of the Clickimin Suite.

‘Cooked breakfast this morning, sir?’

Waking from his reverie, Keith noticed a cheerful Filipino standing beside him with a notepad.

Mabbut shook his head.

‘No, no thank you.’

He peered out of the window. He could just make out the sea between the trees and the garages. He was glad he hadn’t told Mae the full truth about Krystyna last night, although he couldn’t stop himself wondering what the effect might have been if he had.

It was three days ago now that he’d heard the news. He’d spent the morning cooped up at the terminal running last-minute checks on things like surge-tank capacity and pre-fabrication ratios, and he was heading back from the Voe when his mobile had sounded. It was Krystyna. Since the split, these calls had followed a fairly strict and regular pattern: Monday evenings around eight, basic information exchanged, emotion avoided, all over in less than ten minutes.
So this was an exception. Her voice was a little highly pitched too. She had asked him if he was able to talk, and he had pulled off the road on to the cinder-track driveway of a small, whitewashed farmhouse. It had been one of the island’s better days, a late afternoon breeze barely troubling the clouds in a bright blue sky.

His wife delivered her message succinctly. She had met a man. There was mutual attraction and he had asked her to go and live with him. At the moment she was still sharing a flat with their son Sam, but it wasn’t altogether satisfactory and she intended to accept the offer.

Mabbut took this in, his attention distracted by a pair of sea eagles straight ahead of him, slowly dipping and rising on the air currents. He thanked her for letting him know, and with a clumsy attempt at insouciance asked why she had thought it so important to ring him now. And that was when she had told him that she wanted a divorce.

This shouldn’t have been a shock. They had been apart for so long that he’d begun to see their separation as a sort of bond between them. Not being able to live together was something only the two of them shared. The day before he’d bought her a rather expensive Shetland wool sweater. She was never easy to buy for, but this one, with its traditional wave-like pattern and delicate combination of greys and pale blues, had been just up her street. Giving it to her would have confirmed that there was still some business as usual, apart from just the children.

Not wanting to go back to the hotel, he had retraced his journey along the road as far as Brae, a village grown into a small town as a result of its proximity to the terminal. Oil money, skilfully extracted from the companies by a dogged council, had provided a new school and a leisure centre that a town twenty times its size would have been proud of. An area of bright new Scandinavian-style homes, nicknamed Toytown by the locals, had advanced up the hillside. New restaurants and shops had opened to service them. The previous winter Mae had rented one of them for Keith, so he’d be closer to the terminal on those days when the sun sank at three and didn’t reappear until ten the next morning.

Instead of going straight on to the terminal, he took a secondary road to the west, across the narrow bridge that led to a rocky,
red-granite island. Driving on until the road ended, he’d walked the half-mile or so that led to the edge of the cliffs. He had sat down on a grass-tufted ledge and looked out to sea. Across the water lay the convoluted outlines of the islands of Papa Little and Vementry. To the west, the Atlantic stretched away, unbroken, until it reached the coast of Greenland. Gulls wheeled and cried as the waves rushed and sucked at the shiny black rocks two hundred feet below him.

Krystyna Woniesjka had been one of the students on a creative writing course that he’d taught at Leeds back in the early 1980s. Mabbut, a voracious reader from early childhood, had started writing stories as soon as he could spell. At Huddersfield Grammar he’d vied with a boy called Clive Attwell for top honours in English. Attwell had been a winner in every way and ended up with an Exhibition to Cambridge. Mabbut, the better writer, had ended up at the University of Hull, where some brooding resentment at the way things had turned out drew him towards politics. After three years as a minor firebrand he secured a second-class degree and a place at the local school of journalism. It took him a further three years to realise that his politics were lukewarm, more about reaction than action. Then, thanks to a good friend’s wife, with whom he’d had a very brief affair, he found himself applying, successfully, to be the first creative writing tutor at Leeds Polytechnic. He’d had a patchy history with girlfriends. He fell for women easily, and his choices had generally been unfortunate. He was more of a romantic than a predator, and it had taken him quite a time, and some unhappiness, before he realised that Krys was different from the rest. She was Polish for a start, the youngest of six children, and daughter of an air force couple who’d stayed on in England after the war. What had attracted him at first had not been her looks but her defiance. Unlike her English counterparts she was unapologetic about everything she did. If she’d made a mistake or a misjudgement her chin would go up and her black eyes would flare like those of some dangerously wounded animal. This put a lot of people off, but for someone like Mabbut, who was good at argument but bad at confrontation, it was irresistibly appealing. So much so that he began deliberately to find fault with her work in order to provoke the desired reaction. On one occasion she had been so angry at his comments that she had
demanded a personal interview with Mabbut and his superiors to discuss her grievances. Mabbut managed to steer her away from an official hearing, but agreed to meet her out of college hours to discuss it.