by William Boyd
I took up an uncomfortable post in the wood behind my parents’ house, armed with a pair of powerful binoculars, and watched the comings and goings. I saw Frank arrive the next day, homing in unerringly. Saw them walk in the garden, go out for drives. Saw Frank take my place at the family dinner table, pouring wine, recounting anecdotes that I should have been telling.
In fact, William hated Frank with all the energy he could summon. Hated his lean, permanently tanned face, his fake self-deprecating smile. Despised his short fingernails, his modishly scruffy clothes. Loathed his intimate knowledge of current affairs, his casual travelogues. And he ached when Louella touched his arm in admiring disbelief as Official Secrets were dropped, off-the-record confidences disclosed. Suffered when she showed her pale pulsing throat as she laughed at his smart in-jokes.
Sorry. Sorry. It’s a lapse, I know. I promised. But fiction is so safe, so easy to hide behind. It won’t happen again.
It was a Sunday afternoon when I became really alarmed. My vigil in the wood had lasted three days (sleeping in my car: extremely uncomfortable) and I was beginning to wonder if I’d overdramatised things rather. Mother and Father had gone out on some interminable Sunday ramble in the car. (I sense that I haven’t really done my parents justice—not that they’re all that interesting really—but they play no significant part in the following events.) Then Frank came round in his car—a Triumph Stag: pure Frank, that. There was some activity in the house. Frank appeared briefly in the sitting room with two suitcases. I scampered through the garden and peered round the corner of the house. Frank was rearranging luggage in the boot. I saw him take out a fishing rod and repack it. Then Louella appeared. She seemed quite calm. She said, “Have you left a note for them?”
Frank: “Yes, on the hall table.”
Louella: “What about William?”
Frank: “Oh, don’t worry about him. Ma and Pa will break the news.”
Reader, imagine how I felt.
They drove off. I knew where they were going. I went inside and read the note Frank had written to my parents. It went something like this.
Louella and I have gone away for a few days. We have fallen very much in love and want to think things over. Please break this to William as gently as possible. Back sometime next week.
Love, Frank.
The family have a small cottage on the west coast of Scotland. We have spent many summers there. I knew that was where Frank was heading. The fishing rod gave it away. Fly fishing is his great “passion.” He thinks it somehow both intellectual—respectable literature on the sport—and gentlemanly: Alec Douglas Home and the Queen Mother do it. I filled my car up with petrol and went to London. There I dropped in on a few friends and made some calls. Then, that night, I followed them north.
The family cottage—more of a house to be honest—lies off the main road near the village of A———. (Funny how this is meant to make it more realistic. It seems so obvious. Why not give the name. It’s Achranich, not far from Oban. I’m not interested in misleading you.) Behind the house is one of those typical Scottish hills, khaki-green, shaded with brown and purple, covered in a thick, moss-sprung grass. An energetic hike over this and you find one of the best stretches of Highland salmon-river in Scotland. That was why Frank brought his fishing rod. He can never resist it.
Picture the scene. Me, huddling chilled in a damp clump of bracken, exhausted after an overnight drive. Waiting for Frank to appear. And, sure enough, he does, after a late breakfast. (Porridge, kippers, toast and marmalade. That’s just a guess. How could I know what he’d had for breakfast?) He looks disgustingly pleased with himself as he strides up the hill with his rod and his bags and his tackle, passing—oh—within thirty yards of my hiding place. I keep still. After all, I know where he’s going.
Thirty minutes later I catch up with him. He’s at the big pool. The river hurtles and elbows its way down the hillside. It’s the colour of unmilked tea and is shallow, with a bed of rounded pebbles and stones. Except at one point. Here there is a cascade that froths into a large, deep, chill pool. A great angled slab of rock juts out into the pool, setting up eddies and deflecting currents. Beneath this the fish lurk. Stand on the lip of the cascade (thigh waders obligatory) leaning back against the nudge and pressure of the water, cast down into the pool below the rock and you can’t go wrong. Frank was positioned exactly so. Two small creaming waves where his green rubber waders broke the solid parabola of the falling water.
I enter the stream twenty yards above the slosh down. Frank can’t hear me because of the noise of the falling water. I stand behind him. I tap his shoulder. He looks round. His eyes widen in wordless surprise. He instinctively jerks back as though expecting a blow. It is enough. He loses his balance and, with a despairing, grabbing whirl of arms, is flipped over the edge into the pool. I don’t even wait to see what happens. Waders filled with water, heavy clothes sodden, freezing water. He’d go down like … like a stone.
I was in London by late evening. I was summoned home by a phone call just before lunch the next day. Dreadful news. I have to take the twin blows of my fiancée’s infidelity and my brother’s accidental death. My parents are grim and unforgiving; they think Louella is in some way responsible. I am shocked and stunned. But poor Louella. She has to turn somewhere. I am deeply hurt, but relent under the shared burden of grief. We go for drives and talk and, to cut a long story short, we …
But I’ve lost you, haven’t I? Where was it? That bit about me hiding in the wood? Or setting up my alibi and following them to Scotland? It wasn’t a question of continuing to suspend disbelief, but rather the belief beginning to crumble away of its own accord. You were saying: “If he wants us to believe him; if he wants us to think we’re reading something true, then surely confessing to a murder in cold print is, well, a bit implausible?”
You’re right, of course. I got carried away. Fiction took over once again. Anyway, I could never do a thing like that, could I?
P.S.: Frank and “Louella,” wherever you are, if you should happen to read this—no hard feelings? It’s just a joke.
ALSO BY WILLIAM BOYD
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AN ICE-CREAM WAR
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THE BLUE AFTERNOON
Sprawling across three continents and two eras, this atmospheric novel opens in Los Angeles in 1936, when architect Kay Fischer is approached by an elderly man named Salvador Carriscant, who claims to be her father—and who insists she accompany him to Lisbon in search of the great lost love of his life.
Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Fiction
Fiction/Literature/0-679-77260-X
THE DESTINY OF NATHALIE X
A tourist stranded in the Dordogne valley in the 1920s finds a French countess waiting amorously in his hotel room. A widowed Englishwoman and a Portuguese poet meet every Christmas in 1930s Lisbon to share an erotic delirium before parting for another year. These and nine more stories chart the euphoria of love, the anguish of loss, and the gnawings of ambition.
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