The Madness of July (27 page)

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 survey 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.

Flemyng had spoken as they rose from the table of all the complications crowding in, and Babble remembered his own reply. ‘You never wanted it any other way, Will. Never.’

Before Mungo’s revelation, they had gossiped about some of Flemyng’s colleagues. Babble had never met Brieve, the spiky one, and had heard enough not to want to. He had once spent a happy evening in Edinburgh in Ruskin’s company, when he had been reminded of the sheer exhilaration in some of those who surrendered themselves to political life. Babble wouldn’t easily forget Ruskin’s impersonation of the mysterious Brieve, nor the warmth of his bond with Will. They’d spoken of boyish adventures together, and Ruskin had quoted Kipling with zest. Babble remembered the light that had come into his blue eyes as the words rolled out. He’d thought that Ruskin and Will seemed to read each other’s minds, conversing in a vivid shorthand that had become a language of their own.

Forbes came to mind, too. He’d spent a day and a night at Altnabuie the previous year in the course of an official trip to Scotland, and attracted mixed reviews. He’d entertained well at table, even played the piano without being asked, and Mungo had enjoyed his relish for political history. They had talked of whigs and covenanters late into the night. Outside, it was a different story. Tiny believed that Forbes imagined he could shoot just because he was a defence minister, and on the evidence of one day’s long stalk he had concluded that the armed forces could do better than have this man trying to run them.

Forbes had also boasted about hunting stags with dogs on Exmoor, and Tiny was appalled. By trade he was himself a killer on the river and the hill, but thought it barbaric to set dogs on deer.

Flemyng had defended his friend but enjoyed passing on a Ruskin observation on Forbes that had entered the folklore of the gang: ‘Jay dreams that some day they’ll name a missile system after him.’

Babble replayed in his head the conversation from the previous night. He knew that Flemyng was troubled at the start of the evening, because he had an uncommonly careworn look for someone who’d just been fishing, and his scar seemed to Babble to be nagging him again. But, like Mungo, he’d noticed a change for the better as they talked of their mother, which surprised him because secrets were supposed to be troubling things. Flemyng’s response went against the flow.

In a mood of expectation about the collective mood, Babble thought of the journey ahead and the next few days in London. He’d meet some old friends as well as having fun with the boys. There was
The Tablet
’s summer party at the Travellers’ Club that was tickling Mungo’s fancy because of the article he’d written for the magazine – and first a promised lunch in a pub that was an old Babble haunt.

He’d be packed up by lunchtime. There was a hotpot sitting in the low oven, and they would spend the afternoon in the garden. Then Pitlochry, and the train. Babble was ready for anything. The streaming sun turned his bronze hair into a glow.

Out on the hill, Flemyng was making his way down. Turning westwards he took in the house and the loch beyond, where he thought he could see Tiny bent over a fence near the boathouse. He stepped forward, the dogs ahead of him, bounding down the hill, Rousseau with a long tassel of sticky willow attached to his tail, flying behind him like a streamer at a party.

They all stumbled and jumped their way down, leaving Flemyng breathless as he took a detour round the house to visit a favourite pool in the burn. Mungo was talking to Babble in the kitchen, and had the kettle on the range.

‘Well, we’ll soon be on our way.’ It was many a long year since they had used names for each other when they were alone, and they were perfectly fitted to each other’s company. At Altnabuie they had found a pace that suited them both, and after Mungo stopped teaching he was relieved to find that his permanent presence in the house didn’t disturb Babble. Three or four times a day they’d sit down together, to eat or talk, and they’d often walk side by side to the woods or the hill, or fish quietly in the burn or on the loch. For the rest of the time they’d go about their business, Mungo in the library or the little estate office at the back of the house, Babble on his domestic rounds. In the evenings they’d usually spend some time together after they had eaten, and in the winter they’d have a hand of cards by the fire as often as not.