Believing the Lie

  Ian, alas, had not shared her passion. He’d been fond enough of Manette but there had finally come that one dreadful and never forgotten moment when he’d taken her aside during a half-term holiday, had handed her a shoe box of every one of her letters unopened, and had said to her, “Listen. Burn these, Manette. I know what they are, but it’s just not on.” He’d spoken not unkindly because unkindness had never been his way. But firmness had, and he’d been firm.

  Well, we all survive these things, Manette had thought eventually. But now she wondered if some women weren’t constituted in a way to do so.

  She went in search of her father. She found him on the west side of Ireleth Hall, far down on the lawn and quite near the lake. He was speaking to someone on his mobile phone, his head down as if with concentration. She considered coming upon him stealthily, but before she could do so, he concluded his call. He turned from the water to move towards the house, but when he saw her heading in his direction, he remained where he was and waited for her.

  Manette tried to assess the look on his face. It was strange that he’d come out of the hall to make a phone call. He could, of course, have been having a walk and received a call in the midst of it. But somehow she doubted this. There was a furtiveness to the manner in which he slid the mobile into his pocket.

  “Why’ve you let all this go on?” she asked her father as she came to his side. She was taller than he, just as her mother was.

  Fairclough said, “Which part of ‘all this’ are you referring to?”

  “Freddie’s got Ian’s books. He’s printed the spreadsheets. He’s got the programmes. You must have known he’d be putting things in order after Ian.”

  “He’s demonstrating his competency, is Freddie. He’d like control of the firm.”

  “That’s not his style, Dad. He’d take control of the firm if that’s what you asked of him, but that’s the extent of it. Freddie doesn’t scheme.”

  “Are you certain?”

  “I know Freddie.”

  “We always think we know our spouses. But we never quite know them well enough.”

  “I hope you’re not accusing Freddie of anything. That’s not on.”

  Bernard smiled thinly. “As it happens, I’m not. He’s a very good man.”

  “As it happens, he is.”

  “Your divorce … It always puzzled me. Nick and Mignon”— Fairclough fluttered his fingers in the general direction of the folly— “they had their demons, but you didn’t seem to. I was pleased when you and Freddie married. She’s chosen well, I thought. To see it end, to have it dissolve as it has… You’ve made very few mistakes in your life, Manette, but letting Freddie go was one of them.”

  “These things happen,” Manette said shortly.

  “If we allow them,” was her father’s reply.

  Now those were truly infuriating words, Manette thought, all things considered. “Like you allowed Vivienne Tully to happen?” she asked.

  Bernard’s gaze didn’t leave her face. Manette knew what was going on in his head. It was that rapid assessment of all the potential sources from which had sprung his daughter’s question. It was also a wondering of what, exactly, Manette did know.

  He said, “Vivienne Tully is in the past. She’s been gone a very long time.”

  He was casting his line most delicately. Two could fish in these waters, though, so Manette cast hers. “The past is never as gone as we would like it to be. It has a way of coming back to us. Rather like Vivienne’s coming back to you.”

  “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “I mean Ian’s been paying her off for years. Monthly, it seems. Years and years of monthly. You’ll know that, of course.”

  He frowned. “Actually, I know nothing of the sort.”

  Manette tried to read him. His skin wore a glittering of sweat and she wanted that to mean something significant about who he was and what he might have done. She said at last, “I don’t believe you. There was always something about you and Vivienne Tully.”

  He said, “Vivienne was part of a past that I allowed to happen.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “That I failed myself in a human moment.”

  “I see,” Manette said.

  “Not everything,” her father countered. “I wanted Vivienne, and she agreed to my wanting. But neither of us ever intended— ”

  “Oh, people never do, do they?” Manette heard the edge of bitterness in her words. Its presence surprised her. What, after all, was her father saying that in her heart she’d not suspected for years: a long-ago affair with a very young woman. What was this to her, his daughter? It was nothing at all, yet everything at once, and the hell in the moment was that Manette did not know why.

  “People don’t intend,” Fairclough said. “They get caught up. They start to think rather stupidly that life owes them something beyond what they have, and when they go in that direction in their heads, the result is— ”

  “You and Vivienne Tully. I have to be honest. I don’t mean to hurt you but I can’t see why Vivienne would have wanted to sleep with you.”

  “She didn’t.”

  “Sleep with you? Oh, please.”

  “No. That’s not what I mean.” Fairclough looked towards the hall and then away. There was a path along Lake Windermere, rising towards a woodland that marked the far north edge of the property. He said, “Walk with me. I’ll try to explain.”

  “I don’t want an explanation.”

  “No. But you’re troubled. I’m part of what troubles you. Walk with me, Manette.” He took her arm and Manette felt the pressure of his fingers through the wool sweater she was wearing. She wanted to loosen his grip and walk away from him and make that departure a permanent one, but she was as trapped as was her sister by the fact that Bernard had wanted a son so badly. Unlike Mignon, who’d spent her life punishing him for this desire, Manette had tried to be that for him, adopting his ways, his postures, his habits, his manner of speaking and standing and gazing intently at someone with whom he was conversing and even working in his business from the time she was able, all to show him she was a worthy son. Which, of course, she could never be. Then the son he’d had was unworthy from the start, no matter how he’d redeemed himself recently, and even that had not been enough to turn her father’s eyes upon her so he could see her merit. Thus, she didn’t want to walk with the bastard and she didn’t want to hear his lies about Vivienne Tully, whatever they were going to be.

  He said, “Children don’t like to hear about their parents’ sexuality. It’s unseemly.”

  “If this is going to be about Mother… some rejection of you…”

  “God no. Your mother never once… No matter. It’s about me. I wanted Vivienne for no reason other than I wanted Vivienne. Her youth, her freshness.”

  “I don’t want— ”

  “You brought her up, my dear. You must hear it through. There was no seduction involved. Had you thought there was?” He glanced at her. Manette saw his look but she kept her eyes fixed ahead, on the path, the way it followed the shore, the way it climbed a rise to the woods that seemed to keep receding no matter how she and her father pressed onward. He went on. “I’m not a base seducer, Manette. I approached her. She’d worked for me perhaps two months at that point. I was frank, as frank as I’d been with your mother the night I met her. Marriage between us wasn’t possible, it wasn’t even a thought. So I told Vivienne I wanted her for my lover, a discreet arrangement that no one would know of, something that would never stand in the way of her career, which I knew was important to her. She had a brilliant mind and an excellent future. I didn’t expect her to waste that mind for a lifetime in Barrow-in-Furness or to give up that future because I wanted to be in her bed for however long she remained in Cumbria.”

  “I don’t want to know this,” Manette told her father. Her throat aching so badly that she found speaking difficult.

  “But you brought her up, so now you’ll hear. She a
sked to have time to think about it, to consider all the ramifications of what I was proposing. For two weeks she thought. Then she came to me with her own proposal. She would try me as a lover, she said. She’d never thought of herself as anyone’s mistress and she’d certainly never thought of herself as a woman attached in some way to a man older than her own father. This, she said frankly, was rather distasteful because she was not the sort of woman who found a man’s money an aphrodisiac. She liked young men, men her own age, and she didn’t know if she could manage even once putting up with me in her bed. She couldn’t see me exciting her, she said. But if I pleased her as a lover, which she frankly did not expect, she’d agree to the arrangement. If I didn’t please her, there would be— as she put it— no bad feeling between us.”

  “God. She could have taken you to court. It could have cost you hundreds of thousands. Sexual— ”

  “I knew that. But it’s the madness of wanting that I was speaking of earlier. It can’t be explained if you haven’t felt it. It makes everything seem so reasonable, even propositioning one’s employee and accepting her proposition in return.” They walked on, their pace slow and the wind beginning to come off the lake. Manette shivered, and her father put his arm round her waist, pulling her closer, saying, “There’s likely to be rain soon.” And then he said, “So for a time, we played two different roles, Vivienne and I. At work we were the employer and his executive assistant with never the slightest indication that there was something more between us; at other times we were a man and his mistress with those daylight hours of fierce propriety providing the stimulus for what happened at night. Then, at last, she’d had enough. Her career called out to her, and I wasn’t so much a fool as to stop her. I had to let her go, and as I’d promised to do so from the first, there was nothing for it but to wish her well.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “I’ve no idea. The job she was offered was in London, but that was some time ago. I’d think she would have gone on from there.”

  “What about Mother? How could you— ”

  “Your mother never knew, Manette.”

  “But Mignon knows, doesn’t she?”

  Fairclough looked away. A moment passed during which a V of ducks flew overhead, swooped down towards the lake, rose above them again. He finally said, “She does. I don’t know how she found out, but how does Mignon find out anything?”

  “So that’s why she’s been able to— ”

  “Yes.”

  “But what about Ian? These payments he was making to Vivienne?”

  Fairclough shook his head, then looked back at her. He said, “As God is my witness, I don’t know, Manette. If Ian was paying Vivienne, it can only be that he was doing it to protect me from something. She had to have contacted him, threatened something…? I just don’t know.”

  “Perhaps she threatened to tell Mother. Like Mignon. And that’s what she’s doing, isn’t it? Mignon’s threatening to tell Mother if you don’t continue to give her what she wants? What would Mother do if she knew?”

  Fairclough turned to her then and it came to Manette that for the first time her father looked old. Indeed, he looked fragile, capable of breaking within someone’s hands. “Your mother would be completely devastated, my dear,” he said. “After all these years, I’d like to spare her that.”

  BRYANBARROW

  CUMBRIA

  Tim could see Gracie from the window. She was on her trampoline. She’d been out there for a good hour now, jumping and jumping, with her face a picture of concentration. Sometimes, she fell on her bum and rolled round on the matting. But she always got back up and resumed her jumping.

  Earlier, Tim had seen her out in the garden, at the back of the house. She was digging, and he noted next to her on the ground a small cardboard box tied up with a red ribbon. When the hole she was digging got deep enough and wide enough, she put the box inside and buried it. She used a pail for the excess earth, which she spread around neatly throughout the garden, although at this time of year the garden was such a wreck that this nicety was entirely unnecessary. Before she did that spreading, though, she knelt and crossed her arms over her chest: right fist to left shoulder, left fist to right shoulder, her head tilted to one side. It came to Tim that she looked a bit like one of those angels one saw in old Victorian cemeteries, which clued him in to what she was doing. She was burying Bella, giving the doll a proper funeral.

  Bella could have been repaired. Tim had done a fairly good job of destroying her, but her arms and legs might have been reattached and where she’d been scratched up from his attack upon her, the scratches might have been smoothed away. But Gracie would have none of that, just as she would have none of Tim once he’d returned from the soaking he’d given himself in Bryan Beck. When he’d changed his clothes, he went to Gracie and he’d offered to brush her hair and French-braid it, but she didn’t want him near her. “Don’t touch me and don’t touch Bella, Timmy,” was how she put it. She didn’t sound sad, merely resigned.

  After the doll’s funeral, she went to the trampoline. There she’d been ever since. Tim wanted to stop her, but he didn’t know how. He thought about ringing their mother, but he dismissed that notion as soon as it came into his head. He knew what she’d say: “She’ll stop jumping when she gets tired. I’m not going to drive all the way to Bryanbarrow to pull your sister off that trampoline. If you’re so bothered by it, ask Kaveh to get her off. He should enjoy the opportunity to be paternal.” She’d say that last bit with a snarl in her voice. Then off she’d go to that wanker Wilcox to get herself seen to by a proper man. And that was how she’d think of it. Charlie Wilcox wanted to do her, so he was the real goods. While anyone not wanting to do her— like Tim’s father, for example— was shite on oatmeal. Well, that was the truth anyway, wasn’t it? Tim asked himself. His dad was shite and so was Kaveh and Tim was learning that everyone else was shite as well.

  He’d come back to the house after going after the ducks in the beck. Kaveh had followed and tried to talk to him, but Tim wasn’t having anything off that bloke. Bad enough that the wanker had put his greasy mitts on Tim. To have to talk to him on top of that …It just wasn’t on.

  Tim thought, though, that Kaveh might be able to get Gracie off the trampoline. He might also get Gracie to let Tim dig up the doll and take her off to Windermere to be repaired. Gracie liked Kaveh because that was Gracie. She liked everyone. So she’d listen to him, wouldn’t she? Besides, Kaveh hadn’t done anything to hurt her, aside from wrecking her entire family, of course.

  Tim himself would have to talk to Kaveh, though. He’d have to go downstairs and find him and tell him that Gracie was outside jumping. But if he did that, Kaveh would probably just point out that there was nothing wrong with jumping on a trampoline, that’s what trampolines were for, weren’t they, and wasn’t that why they’d got one for Gracie in the first place, because she liked to jump? Then Tim would have to explain that when she jumped for an hour as she’d done so far, it was because she was hurting inside. Then Kaveh would say the obvious thing: Well, we both know why she’s hurting, Tim, don’t we?

  Tim hadn’t intended. That was the problem. He hadn’t intended to make Gracie cry. Gracie was the only person who actually mattered to him, and the truth was she’d just been there, in his way. He hadn’t thought of what came after the moment when he snatched Bella up and pulled her arms and legs off. He’d only wanted to do something to make the boiling inside of him go away. But how could Gracie understand that when she had no boiling inside of her? She could only see the meanness within him that had snatched up Bella and dismembered her.

  Gracie stopped for a moment outside. Tim saw that she was breathing hard. He also noticed something new about Gracie, which brought him up short. She was growing breasts and he could see the buds of them poking at the jersey that she was wearing.

  This brought a searing sadness upon him. It clouded his vision, and when the cloud passed, Gracie had gone back to jumping again. And this ti
me, he watched her little breasts as she jumped. Something, he knew, had to be done about her.

  How useless would it be to pick up the phone and ring their mother? he asked himself a second time. Gracie growing breasts meant Gracie needing her mum to do something like take her to town and purchase her a baby brassiere or whatever it was that little girls wore when they started growing breasts. This went beyond just getting Gracie off the bloody trampoline, didn’t it? Yes, it did, but wasn’t the truth that Niamh would see this the same way she saw everything? Tell Kaveh about it, she would say. Kaveh can handle this little problem.

  That was everything tied up with a bow: Whatever Gracie was going to face in her growing-up years, she was going to have to face without a mum to help her, because the one thing in life that was an absolute certainty was that Niamh Cresswell had plans for herself that didn’t include the children she’d had with her louse of a husband. Thus Tim knew it was down to him or it was down to Kaveh to help Gracie as she grew up. Or it was down to them both.

  Tim left his room. Kaveh was somewhere in the house, and Tim supposed now was as good a time as any to tell him that they needed to take Gracie into Windermere to get whatever she needed. If they didn’t do it, the boys in her school would start to tease her. Ultimately the girls would tease her as well. Teasing her would turn into bullying her soon enough, and Tim wasn’t about to have his sister bullied.

  He heard Kaveh’s voice as he descended the stairs. It seemed to be coming from the fire house. The door to the room was partially closed, but a shaft of light fell on the floor from inside and he heard the sound of a poker stirring coals in the grate.

  “…not actually in my plans,” Kaveh was saying politely to someone.

  “But you can’t be thinking of staying on now Cresswell’s dead.” Tim recognised George Cowley’s voice. He also recognised the subject. Staying on meant they were talking about Bryan Beck farm. George Cowley would be seeing the death of Tim’s father as his chance to sweep in and buy the place. Obviously, Kaveh wasn’t having that.