The Convenience of Lies (30 page)

Chapter Two

Garth Hall, half-timbered Tudor with a Georgian wing of soft red brick, rested in weak winter sunlight, the ribs of its sagging roof shading through like the carcass of an exhausted animal. McCall had never thought of Garth as anything but unassailably permanent, rather like Bea and Francis themselves. But that morning, he saw the house for what it had become – hauteur all gone and as impoverished by age as an ex lover met by chance. Yet the remembered pull of this place on McCall would never slacken. This was where his life began and all his journeying would end.

Bea was pegging out washing on the orchard lawn as McCall drew into the stable yard. He thought her a princess once, someone conjured from the pages of a picture book. Even now, silvery-haired and buttoned into the pelage of Francis’s old gardening coat, she kept her allure if not her elegance.

‘Mac – you lovely boy. Come here.’

It had been almost a year since his last visit. They embraced then each smiled into the face of the other with wordless affection. Bea seemed hale enough but close-to, McCall detected a slight yellowy greyness about her face. They went indoors, arm in arm. Margaret Thatcher had all but broken the miners’ strike yet Bea’s kitchen was still full of candles in wine bottles in case of more power cuts.

‘That damned woman, Mac. Working people deserve a decent wage.’

‘Of course, but she thinks the strike’s all been a plot by the hard Left – ’

‘Typical.’

‘– and the miners just pawns to break a democratic government.’

‘Because the workers won’t bend the knee, it’s all a communist conspiracy.’

Bea shooed her ginger cat off the table and served leek and potato soup. Politics were put aside then. The talk was only of all their yesterdays. It felt to McCall as if he had never been away. Garth always took back its own eventually, made them warm, made them safe so they never wanted to leave again.

‘Where’s Francis?’

‘Can’t you guess?’

‘Gone to Russia.’

‘Where else would he be?’

*

The eastern boundary of Garth’s ten acres was Pigs’ Brook, haunt of kingfishers and grass snakes and fat little fish. It eased off to a trickle in summer but with the rains of winter, it became a swell of fallen branches and debris washed down from the Shropshire hills. Over time, it had elbowed its way into Garth Woods, nibbling at the banks where oaks, beech and ash held sway. This was where Francis built his shed, his dacha, like those he had seen in the Soviet Union during missions in the iciest days of the Cold War.

On weekends home, he would shout ‘Off to Russia!’ then be away in Garth Woods till supper, writing official reports to the accompaniment of gramophone records. But often, he would just sit and listen to the wind in the trees and the wash of water over pebbles for Francis had much to forget.

The dacha was constructed of timber and sheeted in corrugated iron, painted red oxide. Inside were two rooms with shelves of books and files, a pot-bellied stove and a pair of soft leather armchairs. Power came from an overhead line beyond Pigs’ Brook so it had electric light and sockets for a kettle and toaster. This was Francis’s demesne.

McCall’s earliest memories were in this private, brambled place, overgrown with rhododendrons and trees that shielded the dacha from those who would steal its secrets. When it snowed and the light faded, Garth Woods became quiet. Creatures that hunted, creatures that cowered, none moved in a landscape sewn into a winding sheet of its own making, tired and needing to rest.

McCall, the urchin child, would stand with his backside to the hot stove like Francis the man, Francis his hero. There would be stories then, tales of battles and bravery and the way the world had been before God’s British Empire was blown to bits.

*

McCall saw Francis through the dacha’s side window, setting up the Eumig projector he bought during a posting to Vienna. Francis was rarely without a little movie camera. Much of McCall’s childhood was preserved in the square yellow boxes of mute Kodak stock lining the dacha shelves.

Francis laced in one of the black spools, unaware of McCall by the door. He closed the curtains and switched on. The Eumig’s worn cogs squeaked and its light cut a beam through a swirl of twinkling motes.

Then they were in the past.

Somewhere on an empty beach where sunshine splintered on the crest of every wave, a man and a woman run barefoot across gleaming wet sands. They stop short of the camera, put their arms around each other and dance a can-can, breathlessly hoofing their legs in the air till they collapse in a heap, happy and giggling. The picture changes and there is Francis again, an Englishman-on-holiday – trousers rolled to the knees, bowling a ball to a kid in a vest and flappy white shorts, slogging away with a new cricket bat and running like the wind. Bea, her long black hair untidy in the sea breeze, smiles as she returns from the Alvis with their basket lunch. Francis chases the boy across the hummocky sand dunes then carries him, kicking and bucking through the spiky grass and back to Bea at their beach towel camp.

The child blinks against the sun then grins at the camera and is gone.

It was as if some escape hatch had opened from all the hideous and bloody complexities of the day and McCall had slipped back to life as it once was but could never be again. He had no recollection of that trip to the sea, only of what was lost.

The footage tailed out. Everything in the dacha went dark. Francis switched on the light and saw McCall. Both were trapped between then and now and it took a moment for them to shake hands, almost formally.

*

McCall lit a fire to get the panelled drawing room warm for supper. Bea wore a sheer silk dress stitched with beads of French jet and in the half light of evening, still looked like a beguiling Deborah Kerr cast against Francis’s ageing David Niven.

McCall told them about Evie and asked if she might come for Christmas. Bea could hardly contain her delight. Francis remained quiet as he had for most of the meal. Then he left, saying he had matters to attend to.

Bea and McCall moved to the wing backs either side of the sooty brick inglenook. She rested her feet on a small, embroidered stool. The table candles died one by one and the pious whiff of wax drifted in the silence between them.

‘I’m overjoyed you’ve got a new girl, Mac – ’

He nodded and fixed his gaze on the child’s alphabet sampler behind her, sewn in the days of smocks and fealty.

‘– because you have to start afresh. Never forget that one gets over absolutely anything in the end.’

‘Is that what you believe, Bea?’

‘It’s what I know, dear. Love’s a cruel sickness… never easy to recover from it.’

The wind was getting up. It tore through Garth Woods and bits of twig shot against the drawing room’s leaded windows as they talked. The forecast was for rain turning to snow. Bea asked McCall to check the buckets for her.

‘What buckets?’

‘In the attics. The roof’s leaking all over the place.’

‘Why don’t you get the builders in?’

‘Have you any idea what that roof would cost to repair?’

The six attics were reached by a narrow wooden stairway, winding up from the back landing which servants once used to get to their beds.

McCall unlatched the wide plank door and felt at once the draught of childhood unease which frightened him the first time he dared to walk up. The treads were gritty with peeling lime-wash and grains of fallen plaster. Here and there were the folded husks of dead bats amid the frass and fume of decay.

A moment later, he stood where once he played in the magical land of his own imaginings – a kingdom only he could see, only he could rule.

He saw again the forgotten soldier’s helmet from the Great War, the guts of old wireless sets, broken tinplate trains, brown boots and white pumps, sepia portraits in wormy frames and drawers full of gossipy letters from the Empire’s outposts, slowly being torn to bedding by the generations of mice which ran in the dancing dust.

Here were ghosts and treasures caught in the cobwebs and slanting sunshine where he would hide and seek that which could not be found or properly explained. All was as it had been and it transfixed him now as much as then.

Who am I… who am I?

A jump cut newsreel of memories flickered through his head – rope swings, secret hideouts in the woods, a cowboy outfit and a silver six-shooter firing caps in a cornfield bloodied with poppies… always a confusion of poppies, soaking into the earth.

Bang! Bang! You’re dead.

And they all fell down and didn’t get up again but it was only playing, wasn’t it?

*

Alone at her bedroom dressing table, Bea was conscious of not feeling entirely well. An odd, almost out-of-body sensation came over her, as if she was drifting away from her reflection to somewhere between this world and the next.

She was an intruder in a house she knew intimately and wanted to cry out but the mouth in the mirror would not form any words. Then, without warning, Bea dropped to the floor. Her face pressed into the rough carpet pile yet she could not move – not her hands, her legs or even her eyelids to blink. All that was familiar became remote. It felt like dying, afraid and alone, her confession unheard, her sins unforgiven. She saw the first flakes of snow blow across the window. And Bea was drawn back into a past she had never left.

*

It is dawn, pitilessly cold but the sunrise sky is clear. The puddles in the narrow street of worn cobbles glisten gold like pools of smelted metal. They catch Bea’s reflection. There is fear in her eyes. Something is happening, something full of dread. Dark figures flee through cramped alleyways below the verdigris cupolas of great baroque churches and across the ancient bridge above the sly waters of the Vltava. Its stone saints look down upon them, powerless in the face of the coming enemy. A clock face moon and sun spin in their orbits and a clashing of metal hammers signals the end of time. All colour drains from Bea’s world. A column of troop carriers grinds over the granite setts of the sepia streets, guns snouting for prey. The hot breath of cavalry horses condenses in the chill air and soldiers in greatcoats, rifles raised, march where only trams once rumbled by.

Still the mechanised invaders come, drilling across the martyred square until, in one final balletic movement, their weapons all point at her head and her eyes are drawn into the infinite blackness of their barrels. As this image dissolves, so Bea hears the droning of bombers and fire begins to fall to earth from a molten sky. Then she is running, running through empty medieval cloisters, past campaniles ringing with muffled death… running so hard her lungs feel full of powdered glass. A door is opened and she is suddenly within a walled yard with tall iron gates. And in the icy street beyond stands a human tide of shadow men, each sewn with a yellow star, eyes wet with weeping, wide with terror, soft with pleading.

Help us… save us… help our children.

Who are these people? What is she to do… what can she do? She sees one man, alone… one among so many. His beautiful, agonised face implores her like Christ’s on the cross. Bea goes to him, takes his supplicating hand and leads him away as she knows in her heart only she can do.

And as she does, so the engines of destruction start up and the black gas begins to seep through every street and house, over the green fields and silver trees and into all of God’s holy places for there is nowhere this poison cannot reach.

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