The Convenience of Lies Read online

  Of the woman she became, of her guile and alluring beauty, only crushed traceries of fluted bone remained, white and brittle like fossils from a desert and held in a cardboard box.

  But it was time to part so McCall let her go, let her fly into the wind that whispered her home and into the ancient earth once more.

  When it was done, when he was finished, McCall turned and walked away, her dust on his hands and her face in his head.

  *

  He drove through oak woods and hill farms on his way back to Garth Hall. Here was his refuge, a place of genteel decay where he began his bewildered childhood, journeying through the remains of other lives in rooms no one used anymore and nothing was properly understood. This was his own subconscious border country, the poet’s land of lost content where all was safe. Yet however hard McCall searched for the place to cross back into what he once had, he was never able to find the path. There was no right of return.

  He parked the Morgan in the stable yard and heard Hester shout a welcome from the open kitchen window.

  ‘I’ve made some elderflower cordial,’ she said. ‘You want some?’

  ‘Please, yes.’

  He made for the deck chairs in the shaded cool beneath the great copper beech on Garth’s meadow of a back lawn.

  Hester came through the slanting sunshine in a saffron kaftan she’d made herself, wayward grey hair held in a peasant scarf.

  She’d arrived at Garth in a psychedelically daubed camper van five years before, an American earth mother on the wrong side of sixty seeking out her family’s Celtic ancestry.

  ‘My, what a magical old house,’ she’d said. ‘Feels like in that poem… you know, that one about Wales having no present, only the past… all wind-bitten towers and castles.’

  Bea hadn’t long since gone to see out her widowed days with an ex-lover in Israel, leaving Garth to its ghosts and McCall to cope alone. So Hester took one of the guest rooms and lived rent-free in return for gardening and keeping house.

  She placed McCall’s drink on the wicker table between them.

  ‘So, you did it, Mac… scattered her ashes?’

  ‘Yes, not easy… had to be done, though.’

  ‘Sure it did, but you know she’s at peace. It’s your turn now.’

  She’d not known if McCall’s withdrawal into himself was due to grief over Bea’s death or something which happened in Africa. His refusal to say why no story about the assignment ran in any of the Sunday colour supplements or on television, only added to her concern.

  She tried to coax him into her confessional, to admit to what was causing him pain. But he’d a politician’s way of ducking difficult questions.

  ‘Mac, when a sculptor is working a great piece of stone, every blow from the chisel might seem like an injury but in the end, something of beauty can be achieved because that’s what was in the artist’s mind all along.’

  McCall sipped his cordial and said nothing. For him, the matter was closed. He’d grown fond of Hester, even allowed her to badger him into seeing the shrink. But she didn’t know the half of anything in his world.

  The gentlest wind soughed through the tree above them. He looked across at Garth and thought yet again how like a once-beautiful woman it was, sustained by prayers and potions and nursed along by those who knew little more could be done.

  But when the sun shone, when they remembered how she had been, then the diamonds of crinkly yellow glass sparkled in the windows, its raspberry-red bricks glowed and all the coupled chimneys stood proud above the many gables of the mossy green roof.

  It was all of a piece, organic, as if it had grown from the earth without any architected symmetry. And as always with the old, there were secrets and stories within.

  Hester was sure she’d once seen a lady in a long pale skirt pass through the panelled walls of the drawing room. McCall hadn’t the heart to say it’d just be a trick of the light filtering through the ancient copper beech where they now sat.

  She refilled his glass without being asked.

  ‘Mac, don’t you think it’s time you got stuck into a project or some journalism?’

  For all her clairvoyant tendencies, Hester couldn’t read his mind.

  ‘Yeah, maybe. Give it a while.’

  ‘The world has plenty of wickedness for you to choose from.’

  ‘All your usual suspects, Hester?’

  ‘Too right, my friend. The military, big business, all their spies and lackeys, they’re the ones with the real power who manipulate events to suit their own purpose.’

  Before she could set off on another of her conspiracy theories, a blue Volvo estate drew into the yard. An elegant woman in dark glasses and a chic designer dress got out carrying a large leather shoulder bag. She peered around like an insouciant model posing on a photo-shoot.

  Then she saw McCall and began sashaying towards him through the coltsfoot and clover, smiling with private satisfaction, as only Lexie Nadin knew how.

  Three

  The swallows dipping through the flower-scented air of Garth Hall’s gardens were much as Lexie herself - creatures of iridescent grace and exuberance, instinctive and beyond the wit of man to catch or tame and gone the moment autumn beckons.

  McCall watched her approach, superficially annoyed he’d been spotted in Oxford but intrigued that she’d wanted to see him again. He was also conscious of how unprepared he felt for whatever drama was about to unfold. He knew only that Lexie would cast herself in the central role and have the camera on her throughout. McCall was predestined to play his part, however demanding, whatever the hurt.

  This much was written and had been since the unforgettable accident of their first meeting on that bitter winter’s day in 1965.

  *

  A wind of Baltic iciness sheers across the black fens and gusts into the cloistered reaches of Cambridge, burning the face and watering the eye.

  Some of those huddled on the pavement outside Miller & Sons, television and music dealers, are close to tears anyway - women in headscarves and thick woollen coats, stiff ex-servicemen who’d survived to count the cost of war.

  They brave the chill of January to mourn Winston Churchill, their leader throughout it all and watch from afar as he is borne through the sooty streets of London on a gun carriage.

  A line of dockside cranes bow their jibs in unison as a barge carries his coffin along the iron-grey Thames beneath. It is making for Waterloo Station, to the place of departure which railwaymen call the platform of laughing and crying. From here, a train of Pullman coaches will deliver him home to the earth of Oxfordshire and the bones of his ancestors.

  A high angle camera slowly widens out from the gleaming, steaming engine as it picks up speed and passes through wreaths of its own smoke then is lost in the gloom of a winter’s day.

  McCall turns a corner into Sidney Street and registers the little crowd by Miller’s window. He still feels fragile from the boozy midwifery required to get another issue of Varsity to press and is poorly kitted out for such weather. Beneath his borrowed parka he wears only an incongruous white dress shirt, jeans and tennis pumps.

  He is in urgent need of tea and toast and a place to sit and feel better - physically, if nothing else. It isn’t just his hangover which weighs heavy. It is Cambridge itself. His dread of tutorials is becoming phobic. Each week’s essay crisis is worse than the last. He is fast being exposed for the chancer he is, trying to bluff his way through the oral-formulaic theory of Anglo Saxon poetry or the structural unity of Beowulf.

  His grades had been borderline. Only his shmoozer’s charm at interview – and some Wrenn family string pulling – won him a place. Barely into his second term and McCall knows the end is nigh.

  A man and woman hold hands outside the television shop. Side-on, the man seems in his early thirties, studious and intense and wearing a Gannex overcoat like the Prime Minister.

  McCall cannot see the female’s face yet but she appears younger with hair the shade of ripened whe
at and cut to the shoulder. She has a dancer’s legs in stockings with a Beatles motif and is very svelte, even in a sack-like duffle coat. Mcall is less than three yards away. For no apparent reason, she turns her head. She looks directly at him. It is as if he has been expected but is late.

  She gives him the slightest hint of a smile and appears almost relieved -she need worry no longer. He has arrived. Her eyes say it all - and more - in that primitive, wordless way only those who are to be lovers understand.

  For McCall, it is exactly the same. He has known this stranger all his nineteen years. He goes to her, stands by her side. Neither notices anyone else. He could kiss her – and she him. It would be the most natural response either could make.

  ‘Look, I’m going for breakfast,’ McCall says. ‘Please, you must both come with me.’

  It feels weirder than a rag week stunt, a command based on an assumption. Yet the couple grin at each other and agree. Something strange has just happened, something uniquely particular to them and within their subconscious selves, each recognises the significance of the moment.

  The girl suggests they go to The Welcome, a café near the Arts Theatre where she works. McCall’s depression has already swung into a mood of elation. His hangover is a memory. He is volubly at ease - politically radical about growing US imperialism in Vietnam or lampooning the drunken cabinet minister in Harold Wilson’s government he’d interviewed for Varsity.

  The girl laughs and is captivated. The man laughs but not as much for he has eyes to see. Then it’s lunchtime and she and he have to be somewhere else. McCall sits where they leave him; suddenly aware he’s no idea of their names – or they of his.

  He runs into the street but it’s empty so he chases down to the Arts Theatre stage door in St Edward’s Passage. The theatre is deserted except for a man sticking up posters for next week’s production of Loot. McCall feels breathless with anxiety. Something of his has just been taken from him and he must get it back.

  *

  Perceptive, protective Hester didn’t need telling Lexie and McCall had history. Yet even she would struggle to understand its complexity, how torn the curtain between love and loathing had become, if only for McCall.

  He tried not to appear too fazed by Lexie’s unscripted arrival and introduced the two women. They exchanged notional smiles. Hester admired her dress, bud-green silk, plain and minimal yet sensual.

  ‘It’s a Dries van Noten. He’s getting quite well known.’

  ‘Is that a fact? Well, I guess I should look out for his stuff.’

  ‘Do that darling, but I’m not so sure he goes up to your size.’

  Very little rattled Hester yet she knew it wiser to retreat. She got up and walked back across the yard to the embrasured safety of the kitchen.

  A wheelbarrow full of onions needed plaiting to dry with the herbs she’d already gathered. The long farmhouse table by the Aga was already heaped with pears for bottling and courgettes and runner beans to cut and freeze for winter soup.

  She always understood why a sixth century holy man thought gardening virtuous and godly. The rhythm of life at Garth gave Hester a sense of contentment and well-being, brought her closer to the scheme and order of things which she’d sought in the collectives of California but failed to find.

  Yet Lexie’s arrival had put Hester strangely at odds with herself in this most gentle of seasons. Her karma was upset, maybe even the feng shui of the old house itself. Hester knew intuitively Lexie was trouble. Yet McCall was under her malign spell. That much was obvious. Too bad for him there were none so blind as those who will not see.

  Hester paused to deadhead one of the old English roses in the bed by the kitchen window. They were fading now but a few still managed to raise their defiant colours like the flags of a routed army.

  *

  ‘Please don’t tell me you’re sleeping with that dumpy old matron,’ Lexie said.

  ‘She keeps house while I’m away. I like her. She has insight and real spirit.’

  ‘If you say so. Now listen, you saw me filming in Oxford. Why didn’t you wait?’

  ‘I could ask why you didn’t wait for me all those years ago.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose you could… but what would be the point?’

  McCall studied the faced he’d so adored. She was right, there wasn’t any point. Whatever she answered would change nothing.

  ‘Then tell me why you’re here.’

  ‘Because I need your help. You’re still a reporter, aren’t you?’

  ‘In theory.’

  ‘Well, something awful’s happened in my family and it’s like it’s all become mixed up with the script for the “Inspector Morse” I’ve just done.’

  ‘I don’t understand. Acting is entertainment, not real life… remember?’

  ‘Sure, but a kid disappears in Morse and it turns out she’s been murdered and you’ll never believe it but my sister’s little girl has just vanished, too.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that but it doesn’t mean she’s been murdered.’

  ‘No, but I’ve got this terrible premonition that something wicked’s happened to her.’

  ‘That’s just your vivid imagination, Lexie.’

  ‘You’re not taking me seriously. I’ve got this terrible feeling. I’m worried sick.’

  McCall knew how Lexie could make a production out of nothing but thought it best not to remind her.

  ‘I take it the police are involved.’

  ‘Yes, they’re out looking for her.’

  ‘Then I don’t see what I can do to help.’

  ‘Let me see if I can change your mind,’ Lexie said. ‘But can we get out of this pollen stuff first? It’s really getting to me.’

  He took her through the drawing room, lined with paintings of whiskery old gents who’d been lawyers and adventurers, soldiers and diplomats but now mouldered in the vaults of St Mary and All Angels on the far side of Garth Woods.

  From the hallway beyond, McCall led her up a staircase fashioned from chestnut and wide enough to take a horse. The wallpaper was 1920s Chinoiserie - pagodas and rare birds amid cherry blossom. Here and there, the dimly silvered paper was slightly foxed through where paintings had once hung.

  ‘I’d forgotten how spooky this old place is.’

  McCall didn’t answer but carried on down a landing of oak planks polished smooth by the efforts of maids long gone and the daily passage of those they’d served. They stopped at the last door.

  ‘I work in here,’ McCall said. ‘It’s quiet and out of the way.’

  It was hardly more than a servant’s chamber with an iron bedstead, a kitchen chair and an old pine table, empty but for an electric typewriter and a wire tray heaped with papers and press cuttings. Lexie looked about her, smiling, slowly shaking her head.

  ‘This little room reminds me of Staithe End, Mac… the cottage, Norfolk, remember?’

  ‘How could I not?’

  ‘Happy times… if only we’d known it. Such happy times.’

  ‘For a while, I guess.’

  ‘You were my Byron, my skinny boy, always so intense. You still look consumptive.’

  ‘And the golden curls aren’t what they were.’

  ‘Life can be a bit of a bastard, can’t it?’

  Lexie looked at him almost sadly but with great fondness and held out her hands.

  ‘Come on, Mac. We’re both a little older… what we had is still ours, still precious.’

  She pressed him to her and he sensed her breasts against the crib of his chest. They kissed in silence. If neither spoke, the spell could not be broken and they were young again and every dream might yet come true.

  They lay on the bed and as they did so, the afternoon sun caught a row of six brass bullet casings on the mantelpiece and cast their shadows across the wall till the moment passed.

  Four

  Lexie had flipped McCall’s life into the air on that morning of incalculable chance in Cambridge all those years ago. Heads or tails, so
meone wins, someone loses.

  Each waking hour since they first met, McCall thought of little else but finding her again. He’d loitered about the Arts Theatre that weekend. On the following Monday morning, he saw her coming down St Edward’s Passage in her camel-coloured duffel coat. And she wasn’t with Mr Gannex. McCall would have her to himself, if only for a moment.

  She immediately gave him that smile again – that leftward tilt of her slightly parted lips, the slight widening of those eyes which knew so much and promised more.

  ‘Hello, what are you doing here?’

  ‘I thought… well, I often come this way. My college, not far from here.’

  ‘Aren’t you terribly cold?’

  ‘No, not really.’

  ‘You look it. Want a coffee or are you going to a lecture?’

  ‘Coffee, yes. I’d like that.’

  She winked broadly at the elderly stage door keeper, part concierge, part spy, peering from behind the fug of Woodbine smoke clouding his sentry box.

  ‘Friend of yours, is he, Miss?’

  ‘My brother. Just want to show him around.’

  ‘’Course you do, dear.’

  It all smelt of sawn timber and fresh paint. Stagehands up ladders were finishing off flats of scenery. Here was a parallel reality which that night’s audience would pay to enter before disappearing back into lives from which there was no escape.

  A song called My Girl played on a transistor. McCall thought it an omen but that was an illusion, too. He followed her through an un-swept corridor and down a set of concrete steps to a storage area lit by a bare electric bulb. Somewhere on the stage above, a nasally hysterical Kenneth Williams was in a final run-through with the other actors.

  ‘It’s our big night, tonight. A premiere.’

  ‘What’s it about?’

  ‘These two thieves who rob a bank then hide their loot in a dead woman’s coffin.’