He told me about his family – convoluted to the point of interlooping – after a while working his way to telling me about a relative who was potentially of interest, whose diary he had just rediscovered and who he thought he might write a biography on, if anyone still read at all, he said.
‘He called himself James Lennoxlove,’ he said, ‘but nobody knows what his real surname was.’
‘Did he call himself Lennoxlove?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’
‘Then that was his real name,’ I said. Pretty smugly, if I’m honest.
‘Well, maybe. If you think of it like that. It’s just – there were no Lennoxloves recorded before him, and I mean anywhere, though he claimed he had an older illegitimate brother. He claimed also to live in Bitterhall, which is a place that does not exist. It’s possible he meant “Bitterhaugh” or “Bitterhill”, both of which might. The only thing I’ve found that’s real with Lennoxlove attached to it is Lennoxlove Hall, but the Maitland family lived there. Lennoxlove Hall is in East Lothian – not far from here. The mysterious James Lennoxlove wrote in his diary with no firm locations or even dates.’
‘Pretty weird for a diary.’
‘Mmm. It covers a small section of his life in, best guess, the early part of the nineteenth century when he was, apparently, a young man. I’ve had the book analysed by a codicologist and handwriting expert who told me that the writing marks it out as from that time, and done by someone educated, though most Scots were literate, so that narrows nothing down. The only thing she could find odd about it was the ligature of the binding, which is made of an unusual material – black silk threads of Turkish origin.’
‘Pretty interesting stuff,’ I said.
‘Ah, you don’t have to be polite – I know it’s probably not, but,’ he said, ‘that’s not the fascinating part, really. Lots of things have details lost to time. In the book, you see, he describes witnessing a murder that I have reason to believe, though no evidence as yet, that he might have in fact been involved in.’
‘A murder,’ I said.
‘I know, right?’ Mark said. He stopped briefly to bring me over a coffee. The wine with its grating heft and wordy descriptions had left me tired. I had nowhere to be while I was able to pretend to be in a meeting/liaison with a client. The house had this unbearable gentle luxuriousness to it and Mark though hideous to look at was a clever, funny bloke, and he pushed a plateful of small cakes covered in thin icing in my direction.
‘Thanks very much,’ I said, stuffing one in my mouth. The icing was lemony. From the study on the floor above I could hear Mr MacAshfall singing and bashing down operatically on the keys. ‘How do you know he was involved?’
‘Family secret,’ he said.
‘Are there skeletons in the cupboard?’
‘Something like that,’ he said. ‘Either way the diary is fairly well written, full of strange tensions. But anyway I’m stuck right now with either proving that my relative committed some horrible deed – I don’t even know for sure who it was that was murdered, I’d have to delve into local records, if I can figure out where is “local” – or writing my book on him even if he didn’t do it whatever he might have done wherever. But also, I’m stuck for a very stupid reason.’
‘Oh?’
‘Diary’s gone missing.’ He made a vanishing shape with his hands.
I came away from the house of the MacAshfalls with a short-burning curiosity and a promise to help Mark publicise his book somehow if it came about – he assumed I must know the right kind of contacts. I forgot about all this until a few months later when the book materialised before me in the Minto house, in the grasp of the man who my heart was at that time choking on. And I stole it myself, and read, and didn’t tell Mark I’d found it, obviously. Though my own reason for getting stuck was. Well. You know.
Diary
James Lennoxlove told me his story. I saw right away why Mark was suspicious, even without the sudden and unlikely name. The entries seemed intent on stuffing in the details of a life as much as possible but without any sense that they were something a person would write. Best comparison I could make was that they were like the fluffy mini-series my grandmother used to love: well-made and sumptuous but not like the way people would have actually lived. Aristocratic lifestyle porn.
According to Lennoxlove, he was a friendless young man, living in a manorhouse of honey brick in the East of Scotland, with most of his forty rooms overlooking wide butter-coloured oat fields and an ancient wood where his father had taken him hunting. He saw fairies, he said, once by a bridge near a ruined churchyard, but provided a way to shrug this off by saying it was while he was on some tonic for a migraine. Lennoxlove wrote for his readership (whoever that might be was unclear) unreal thickets of smoke-like mists trailing over coursing grounds, and drew attention to the curling steam off a horse’s back and the thick spongy quality of the paper his lover used to write to him, that kind of thing. The sheer volume of detail made the eyes water. The foxes’ tails hanging dripping blood from the servants’ windows. A huge book of accounts that had landed on a child’s foot, leaving them lame. Memorable was the duel he fought with his brother over ‘some jest’, naked except for their swords, on a moorland, both giving up immediately due to the cold. Nothing dull happened to him, even as nothing happened. BBC costume drama, like I said.
From twelve to eighteen, I used to keep a diary. Days don’t happen the way James’ days did. Lots of ‘nothing important happened today’ and football scores and how I’d got fucked off with my best friend at the time and we’d fallen out because he had said something dismissive about my favourite band. James Lennoxlove had no friends at all to bitch about, no attachments barring his brother, and, later, the lover who he only seemed to be with hunting in the woods – and in the inn, which got honestly wrenching in the superfluous detail, not just the encounter that happened there, but the beds and aspect of the room and the sound of feet creaking over the boards outside. If it had been today he would have featured threadcounts and the wifi quality in amongst the descriptions of humping (which were weirdly vague, but I suppose about right for the time).
But I couldn’t stop reading and chuck it as a wholesale lie. There was some point to it. And like Mark said, something that drew you in: his lies were beautifully crafted and winking, I thought. I don’t have time to read many books these days but I know the difference between ornate fakery for a laugh and trying to muddy things for a secret reason of some kind, a hidden narrative that leads somewhere. A hidden motive. I pride myself on picking up on these things. And the façade holds, I think, up until the point where Lennoxlove reports how he went to the Hogmanay ball and saw the murder in the stable, then it sort of – crumbles. And I imagined everyone would have got that. Now I wonder.
Lennoxlove talked about seeing the glint on the knife and feeling the heat rising from the wound – he couldn’t have felt that from across the room. He could perhaps see the light on the knife but it was as if that was all he could see – the point of focus of his eyes trained down to just that as if to avoid – as if not to see – the man murdering or the victim, I still don’t know. And at one point he wrote ‘I must keep going, I thought, as I rushed and then I turned and I made strides for my horse.’ I must keep going at what? Leaving the stable? There’s a problem there, right, with the order of the words. I would tell Mark, I thought, reading it the first few times. I would go to him and give it to him. James Lennoxlove was his relative – he implied direct ancestor – and he would want to know and to have the time to choose what to do with the information.
I held onto the book though, fidgeted with my ideas of it. Not doubting myself exactly but looking for enough proof to show – before I went accusing a stranger’s great-whatever-grandad. Daniel was always above me in our house, wandering, looking for it. He would be embarrassed – the thought ran through me like battery acid in the chest, that idea, that Mark knew Daniel had taken it – I did not know they were good friends;
I imagined a scene and my part in it as instigator. Who likes to be exposed like that? Who likes to be the exposer? So while I held off deciding what to do I read it again, up to that part, to see if there were clues of a growing madness that made the incident unlikely, or signs the whole thing had been written as if to lead up to this part for some other, special reason I could crack.
Timing and Presentation
I stayed up. I procrastinated. I listened to the walls creak. I must have read that first part of the book six times. It isn’t long. A possibly-pretended year of a life. I stayed with it. I grew to love the richness and the textures. How the youngest servants would run out and pick up windfall apples, scampering, he said, like rabbits in caps. I was sold on its vision even as I knew it was fake. It was like a film I watched over and over. No, like an ad. I was being sold an image of warmth and complexity, and behind that I thought I could see what the company was, what its mission statement was, the inept marketing manager and the brilliant young art designer. That kind of thing. I kept on my path. I put off having to show Daniel up. I’d plumb the mystery, and Mark would just be in awe at what I’d found, and in the end everything would be smoothed over. By my last read-through I’d almost decided it was too like modern life, wasn’t it? That pretence of perfection. I had deleted all my social media accounts a while back. Bad relationship moment, too many reminders of my own failings and that didn’t allow for a clean shift into the future. I was good at clearing out old Cloudberry tweets and online docs too, kind of famous for it because at work that’s the kind of sad thing you get famous for and get told you’re famous for in meetings as you let the pen fall slack in your hand and you time and pitch your laugh precisely. I fucking love the internet. I hate it for my own self, as I said. I hate conflict and exposure and drama, but I love the kind of cultivated reveal that’s possible. For people who like to make a display of their minutia and make it stilled and beautiful in a way you can’t manage in real life, all heavy breathing and stumbled words and tangle. James Lennoxlove didn’t have the luxury of writing allowing his work to be read and then deleting afterwards. It had to be all out there forever or not at all. But he managed its presentation so well, it became a kind of curation that wasn’t possible, I thought, for things made long before the idea of the internet. I wondered if this might lead me to the secret. I don’t think it did. The book was still old. The life in it was still fake but beautiful. The purpose wasn’t embedded; there was nowhere to click through to another site, the one that expanded on the original idea. It was just lines one in front of another. I read it again to make sure.
I got to the point where I gave up re-reading it, satisfied I’d inferred everything, but still couldn’t find the answers. And so I sat, the whole book in my head, running the images back and forth, with a funny tick to my heart and too much of it. It was the same night, a long one that held me like fingers in a fist, I slipped out – did he hear me go? Órla didn’t shift – and got a night bus to the gym – one of the few things in this city that never closed and worked out for two and a half hours hard, nodding at the other insomniacs with shadows under their brows and furrows of overlit teeth showing – got up a steam on me like any number of James’ real or imaginary horses, then went for a run in the darkness. I had the book in my kit bag with the dirty clothes. I wore a warm coat though it wasn’t that cold yet. I don’t know now what date it was, what day of the week, but I was gone all night. Like a dream I ran without effort, bag on my shoulders, striding easy under streetlights and by a canal at one point and past countless empty shopfronts and a handful still with goods inside, lights on but doors locked to all comers – I don’t know, I try to recreate it like James would have done, but the order’s muddled and my life is chaos now and catastrophe even then, when I didn’t know it. Running through this insolvable problem made it feel at least like it could be something easy, even though I was no nearer to getting it. I stepped on another night bus and got off at the part of the city that’s on the beach and not really the city at all and then I ran along the shore, heading south – I think – blood full of bright horses and servants’ aprons and crystalising lights in front of my eyes and I was dropping tired when I climbed on another bus and sailed homewards. At the end of the run I presented my findings to the air just outside the Minto house.
There was no way to know, there was no evidence only toneless text and I might understand it okay – I understood most things, if I had the full facts – but I’d never have proof that it was a story told out the side of its mouth let alone work out why. I wanted to believe that James Lennoxlove was lying to perk himself up. He might have been a poor man with a bad life trying to build himself a nice fantasy mansion. Perhaps he had given himself a newly discovered brother for just the same reason I gave myself back my parents.
That wasn’t a deep dig for the amount of effort spent. I went inside and stood in the hall. Mrs Boobs sat on the stairs glowing white as the space inside a circle and looked at me with narrowed eyes.
‘Darling,’ I whispered to her, putting my hand out to meet her bending ear, ‘you don’t know, do you?’
I was cold in my sweat and my lungs still burned and though I was strong I was dizzy and all this might explain the sudden shift of the hairs on my neck and the sound – close, Christ I jumped – in my ear, of a voice right up near it as if from someone standing behind me.
‘I can tell you,’ it said, ‘if you’ll let me.’
James, James
I never loved a boy, and that’s a fact. I never fancied a man. I had no space in me for it. I never saw a ghost either, or believed in them, or believed anyone who said they had seen a ghost wasn’t doing it for the attention or because they had dodgy eyes and wanted to see one. I never heard voices. I was a picture of gleaming mental health. I was so in my body I had to give it to other people hard just to make it through the weekend. I had no twinges and no weak parts and nothing deviant and nothing branching and nothing but that straight path that goes all the easiest ways, paved with primo paving stones. I didn’t even have to wear glasses. I still don’t need them but other than that I am not what I was. Past me would say I’ve diminished: it’s true I can’t be looking good, here, now. I can smell myself. The last time I saw my reflection it laughed at me and was another man. There are waves in my hair and I mean water waves, and my lymph glands are swollen with nineteenth-century dirt. I’d also say that I’m not diminished enough. Don’t look at me like that. I fucking know.
I didn’t see James that night in the hallway of the Minto house. I saw Minto. He had just unlocked the door in mime-like silence; that’s the way he moved. I didn’t know it was him at first – in the mostly dark hall, and never having seen him – and thumped the space above my heart, that gesture you do for shock, and muttered, ‘Oh, hallo.’
‘Hallo and halo to you, fair youth,’ this white-haired blur said. Like that.
I made my way towards the kitchen as if I had been going there before the interruption. Minto followed behind. He held his hands in a funny way, like a tired praying monk, limp. Praying to the pale flowerbeds, I think now, that line the sides of the corridors wherever he walks, (he told me this another time – it was a method he used to make himself go anywhere, to think of a way prepared beautifully). I made myself cheese on toast and he hung about the whole time in silence behind me, or sometimes shifting to the side of me, not in a creepy way, but watching what my hands were doing. His face was padded weirdly, most of it going under his eyes and some on his cheeks, making them disconcertingly full.
‘You haven’t asked what I know,’ he said.
‘Mm,’ I answered. I was at that point stuffing my mouth with hot food and my body was loving it. Liquid cheese oozed on the diagonal and between my buttery fingers.
‘I know that you’re the new boy,’ he said. I nodded without looking up, ‘I know that you have a follower.’
Minto: this large and crumpled man, bristly, pale husky eyes, pyjamas under a shabby but expensi
ve-looking striped suit blazer, primrose woollen scarf, hot pink slipper-booties. He was swaying lightly on his feet. I thought through my own shit; posh old drunk, what a shame. Insomniac too, or up ridiculously early. They say old people stop sleeping so much. My grandmother stopped sleeping the night through a month before she died. She had a lot of photos to organise she said, but after death the albums were not around. I remember a fire in the back garden, odd yellow smoke falling flatly over the edges of the pit. Obliteration is organisation of a kind, a controlled permanent filing into particles of carbon. Me and her were a lot alike, really.
‘Ah-huh?’ I said, thinking food food food, and waiting for the total exhaustion to take me down though still I felt all awake. Minto raised a thin, red hand and extended his pointing finger towards the empty space to my left.
Bitterhall Page 17