Believing the Lie

by Elizabeth George

  “First of all,” Freddie replied after a moment of thought, “he’s in a very good school where he can sort himself out if he’s a mind to it. Our part is to give him that mind. He’s wanting a mum and a dad to stand behind him and believe in him and in the possibility that one can actually pick up the pieces of one’s life and go on.”

  “Oh, very well and good, but how long can we give him that if we take him now?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Come along, Freddie,” Manette said patiently, “don’t be obtuse. You’re quite a wonderful catch and one of these women you’re dating is going to reel you in. Then Tim and Gracie will face another broken situation and how can we ask either one of those children to go through that?”

  Freddie looked at her steadily and said, “Ah. Well. Have I been wrong, then?”

  “Wrong about what?”

  “About us. Because if I have, I’ll dash back upstairs and get myself out of my wedding togs.”

  She looked at him till she could no longer see him for her blurring of vision. She said, “Freddie… Oh, Freddie… No. You’re not wrong.”

  “Excellent. I was feeling … well, a bit more certain than perhaps I should have done, so I spoke to the registrar, who’s perfectly willing to make an exception in our case and allow us a wedding. Today. I’ll need a best man and you’ll want a bridesmaid. Shall I rouse Tim for the job?”

  “Do,” Manette said. “I’ll phone Gracie.”

  ST. JOHN’S WOOD

  LONDON

  Zed Benjamin sat in the car park outside his mother’s flat, and he stared at the route he needed to walk to get inside. He knew what awaited him there, and he wasn’t anxious to confront it. It wasn’t going to take long for his mother to work out the fact that he’d lost his job, and that was going to be a real teeth grinder to deal with. In addition to that, there was Yaffa to be faced, and what he really didn’t want to see was her expression when she listened to the tale of how he’d failed in every possible way pursuing his story of the century in Cumbria.

  Worse, he felt like hell. He’d awakened that morning in a budget hotel along the motorway. He’d left Cumbria at once on the previous day, directly after speaking to Rodney Aronson and collecting his things in Windermere. He’d driven as far as he could towards London before he’d had to stop for the rest of the night. That night had been spent in a grubby room reminiscent of those Japanese sleeping boxes he’d once read about. He felt as if he’d attempted slumber inside a coffin. Make that a coffin with a loo, he thought.

  He’d risen that morning as rested as a man could be after having a fight break out in his hotel corridor at three A.M., necessitating an appearance by the local police. He’d got back to sleep at half past four, but at five the various workers for the day shift in the various shops and takeaway food stalls of the services area had begun to arrive, and they did their arriving with the accompaniment of the slamming of car doors and the shouts of greeting to each other, so round half past the hour, Zed had given up on sleep altogether and crammed himself into the upright packing crate that went for a shower in the bathroom.

  He’d gone through the rest of his morning rituals by rote: shaving, cleaning his teeth, dressing. He hadn’t felt like eating, but he wanted a cup of coffee and he was in the cafeteria of the services building when the daily newspapers arrived.

  Zed couldn’t help himself. It was force of habit. He’d picked up a copy of The Source and had taken it back to his table to see that the tabloid was running a follow-up to the earth-shattering Corsico piece about the mixed-race child of the minor royal. The paper was giving it Major Breaking Story treatment, this time with the banner headline He Declares His Love accompanied by suitable photographs. It seemed that the minor royal in question— who appeared to be getting more minor by the moment— intended to marry the mother of his bastard child since the revelation of his relationship to the woman had just obliterated her career as a third-rate Bollywood star. Turn to page 3 to see who the mother of the bastard child might be…? Zed did so. He found himself looking at a sensuous woman with more than her share of mammaries, posing with her royal suitor cum fiancé with their child abounce on the royal’s knee. He was grinning toothily, on his face a self-satisfied expression declaring to the men of his country, “Look what I managed to get for myself, you wankers.” And it was true. The idiot had a title to recommend himself. Whether he had brains to go with the title was another matter entirely.

  Zed had tossed the paper to one side. What a load of tosh it all was, he thought. He knew what would be going on at The Source as a result of this piece and the one that had preceded it, though. It would be celebration of Mitchell Corsico’s unerring ability to sniff out a story, shape the public debate, and manipulate a member of the Royal Family— no matter how obscure— to take an action predetermined by the tabloid. He— Zedekiah Benjamin, struggling poet— was better off shot of the place.

  He shoved his way out of his car. He could no longer avoid the inevitable, he thought, but he could damn well paint it as a positive alteration in his life if the proper words would come to him.

  He had nearly reached the door when Yaffa came out of the building. She was wrestling with her rucksack, so he reckoned she was on her way to the university. She didn’t see him, and he considered ducking into the shrubbery in an attempt to hide from her, but she looked up and clocked him. She halted.

  She stammered, “Zed. What a… well, what a… a lovely surprise. You didn’t say you were returning to London today.”

  “It won’t be so lovely when I give you the news why I’m here.”

  “What’s wrong?” She sounded so concerned. She took a step towards him and put her hand on his arm. “What’s happened, Zed?”

  “The sack.”

  Her lips parted. How soft they looked, he thought. She said, “Zed, you’ve lost your job? But you were doing so well! What about your story? The people in Cumbria? All of the mystery surrounding them and what they were hiding? What were they hiding?”

  “The how and why and who-knows-what-and-when about having babies,” he told her. “There’s nothing else.”

  She frowned. “And Scotland Yard? Zed, they cannot have been investigating having babies.”

  “Well, that’s just the worst of it, Yaff,” he admitted. “If there was anyone from Scotland Yard up there, I never saw him.”

  “But who was the woman, then? The Scotland Yard woman?”

  “She wasn’t Scotland Yard. Haven’t the foggiest who she was and it doesn’t much matter now I’m through, eh?” He was carrying his laptop, and he shifted it from one hand to the other before going on. “Fact is,” he said, “I was rather enjoying our little charade, Yaff. The phone calls and all that.”

  She smiled. “Me, too.”

  He shifted the laptop again. He didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands and his feet all of a sudden. He said, “Right. Well. So when d’you want to schedule our breakup? Better be sooner rather than later, you ask me. If we don’t engineer it in the next couple of days, Mum’ll be talking to the rabbi and baking the challah.”

  Yaffa laughed. She said in a way that sounded like teasing, “And is that such a very bad thing, Zedekiah Benjamin?”

  “Which part?” he asked. “The rabbi or the challah?”

  “Either. Both. Is that so bad?”

  The front door opened. An elderly woman toddled out, a miniature poodle in the lead. Zed stepped aside to let her pass. She looked from him to Yaffa to him. She leered. He shook his head. Jewish mums. They didn’t even have to be one’s mum to be one’s mum, he thought with resignation. He said to Yaffa, “I don’t think Micah would much like it, do you?”

  “Ah, Micah.” Yaffa watched the old lady and her poodle. The poodle lifted its tufted leg and did some business against a shrub. “Zed. I fear there is no Micah.”

  He peered at her earnestly. “What? Damn. You broke up with the bloke?”

  “He never was the bloke,” she said. �
��He was… Actually, Zed, he never was at all.”

  It took Zed a moment. Then the moment felt like the dawn although it was morning and broad daylight in front of his mother’s flat in St. John’s Wood. He said, “Are you telling me— ”

  She broke in with, “Yes. I’m telling you.”

  He began to smile. “What a very clever girl you are, Yaffa Shaw,” he said.

  “I am,” she agreed. “But then I always have been. And yes, by the way.”

  “Yes to what?”

  “To wanting to be your wife. If you will have me despite the fact that I set out to ensnare you with your own mother’s help.”

  “But why would you want me now?” he asked. “I have no job. I have no money. I live with my mum and— ”

  “Such are the mysteries of love,” she declared.

  BRYANBARROW

  CUMBRIA

  Gracie came dashing outside the moment the car stopped at the front gate. She flung herself at Tim and clung to his waist and Tim could barely take in her words, so rapidly did they come at him. He was having a bit of trouble taking in the rest of things as well. Cousin Manette had phoned Margaret Fox School to bring them up to date on his whereabouts; she’d requested permission for Tim to miss just one more day; she’d promised she’d have him back there tomorrow; she’d dressed herself in a peacock silk skirt and a milky-coloured cashmere pullover and a grey tweed jacket with a scarf that made all the colours good together; and she’d said they all had a wedding to attend at which Tim was going to have to be best man. That is, if Tim was willing to do so.

  Tim saw from her face that the wedding was her own. He saw from Freddie’s face that he was going to be the bridegroom. He said, “I guess,” but he looked away quickly from the happiness that was blazing between his cousin and her soon-to-be-once-again husband and he thought how he didn’t belong in that blaze, how to enter it even for a moment promised the bleak reality of leaving it as well. And he was tired of the constant leaving that had been colouring his life. He added, “What’m I s’posed to wear?” because clearly he had nothing suitable in Great Urswick.

  “We shall find something perfect,” Manette had replied, her arm through Freddie’s. “But first, Gracie. Kaveh’s kept her home from school because, of course, I shall need a bridesmaid.”

  Which was the topmost subject on Gracie’s mind as she hung on Tim’s waist. “A wedding, a wedding, a wedding!” she sang. “We’re going to a wedding, Timmy! C’n I get a new dress, Cousin Manette? Should I wear white tights? Will there be flowers? Oh there must be flowers!”

  Gracie needed no answer to any of this, for she went on to other matters, all of them having to do with Tim and Bella. “You must never run off again,” she told him. “I was that worried and scared, Tim. I know I was cross with you but it was ’cause you hurt Bella, but Bella’s only a doll and I do know that. It’s just that, see, Dad gave her to me and he let me pick her out himself and she was special ’cause of that, but I’m so glad you’re back, and what’re you going to wear?” And then to Manette and Freddie, “Will there be guests? Will there be cake? Cousin Manette, where will you get flowers? Are your mum and dad coming as well? What about your sister? Oh, I expect the walk would be too much for her.”

  Tim had to smile, and it was odd because he hadn’t felt like smiling in more than a year. Gracie was like a newly bloomed flower, and he wanted to keep her that way.

  All of them went into the house so that Tim could find something to wear to a wedding. He climbed the stairs to his room while Gracie remained chatting to Manette and Freddie below but once inside, the place looked different to him. He saw things and knew them for his belongings, but somehow they weren’t really his. He resided there, but he didn’t reside there. He wasn’t sure what this meant or how to feel about it.

  He had nothing nice to wear to a wedding. All he had was his school uniform and he certainly didn’t intend to wear that.

  He thought for a moment about what it would mean if he took the next necessary step. It seemed an enormous one, something that might engulf and drag him under in ways he could neither anticipate nor recover from. But there was a wedding, and it was Manette and Freddie’s wedding, and there seemed nothing else to do but to go into his father’s bedroom and to search round and ultimately pull from beneath the bed the black garbage bags of his father’s clothing that Kaveh had shoved there, preparatory to carting them all off to Oxfam in advance of bringing his bride to the farm.

  Ian’s trousers were large on Tim, but a belt did the trick and in another year they would probably fit him anyway. He sifted through the rest of the clothing: more trousers and shirts, ties and waistcoats, tee-shirts and sweaters, and he thought of how well his dad had dressed and of what this meant about who his dad had been. Just a bloke, Tim thought, just an ordinary bloke …

  Hurriedly, he grabbed up a shirt, a tie, and a jacket. He went back to the others, who were waiting for him in the old kitchen of the manor house, where Gracie was taping a note to Kaveh onto the cupboard in which he kept his tea. Gracie and Timmy have gone to a wedding! was written on the note. What fun!

  After this, the lot of them set off to Windermere. On the way out to the car, though, they saw George Cowley removing the last of his belongings from the tenant’s cottage. Daniel was there, hanging back a bit, and Tim wondered that Dan wasn’t in school. Their eyes met, then slid away from each other. Gracie called out, “Bye, Dan. Bye, Dan. We’re off to a wedding and we don’t know if we’ll ever be back!”

  It wasn’t until they’d wended their way from Bryanbarrow village to the main road through the Lyth Valley that Manette turned in her seat and spoke to them. She said, “What if you never came back at all, Gracie? What if you and Tim came to Great Urswick and lived with Freddie and me?”

  Gracie looked at Tim. She looked back at Manette. Her eyes were round with expectation, but she turned her gaze to the window and the passing scenery it offered her. She said, “Could I bring my trampoline?”

  Manette said, “Oh, I think we have room for that.”

  Gracie sighed. She moved on the seat to be closer to Tim. She rested her cheek on his arm. “Lovely,” she said.

  So the drive to Windermere was spent in a tangle of plans being laid. Tim closed his eyes and let the sounds of their conversation wash round him. Freddie slowed the car as they came to the town and Manette said something about the register office, which was when Tim opened his eyes again.

  He said, “C’n I do something first? I mean, before the wedding?”

  Manette turned to him and said of course he could, so he directed Freddie to the appliance repair shop where he’d left Bella. The doll had been seen to. Her arms and legs were reconnected. She’d been cleaned up. She wasn’t what she’d been before Tim had pounced upon her, but she was still unmistakably Bella.

  “Thought you wanted it posted,” the woman behind the counter said to him.

  “Things changed,” Tim said as he accepted the doll.

  “Don’t they always,” the woman said.

  In the car, he handed Bella to his sister. She clutched the doll to her budding little bosom and said, “You mended her, you mended her,” and cooed to the thing as if it were a live baby and not a realistic depiction of one.

  He said, “I’m sorry. She’s not as good as new.”

  “Ah,” Freddie said as he moved the car away from the kerb, “but which one of us is?”

  12 NOVEMBER

  CHELSEA

  LONDON

  When Lynley and Deborah arrived back in London, it was after midnight. They’d made the drive mostly in silence although Lynley had asked her if she wanted to talk. She knew he understood that she was carrying the heavier of both of their burdens because of her part in Alatea’s flight and her death, and he wanted to relieve her of at least part of the weight. But she couldn’t allow it. “May we just be quiet with each other?” she’d asked him. And so they had been, although from time to time he’d reached over and covered her ha
nd with his own.

  They hit traffic near the junction for Liverpool and Manchester. They came upon road works near Birmingham and a tailback from an accident at the junction for the A45 to Northampton. At this last, they got off the motorway for a meal and spent ninety minutes hoping the route would be less congested at the meal’s conclusion. They didn’t reach the Cricklewood roundabout until midnight and Chelsea at half past the hour.

  Deborah knew that her husband was still up, despite the time. She knew he would be waiting for her in his study on the ground floor of the house because before she climbed the front steps to the door, she saw that the light was on.

  She found him reading. He had the fire on, and Peach was snoozing in front of it on a cushion that Simon had placed there for her. The dachshund removed herself from this only slowly as Deborah entered, and she stretched her front legs and then her back legs before toddling over for a late-night greeting.

  Simon set his book to one side. Deborah saw it was a novel, which was unusual for him. Simon was strictly a nonfiction reader, favouring biographies and the recounting of superhuman acts of survival in the wild. Shackleton was his foremost hero.

  He got to his feet, always an awkward business for him. He said, “I wasn’t sure what time.”

  She said, “Traffic was bad in places.” And then, “Tommy told you?”

  He nodded, his grey eyes taking in her face and gauging— as he always would— her expression and what it said about her state of mind. He read upon her the heaviness she felt and he said, “He rang me when you stopped for petrol. I’m terribly sorry, my love.”

  She stooped to pick up the dachshund, who squirmed in her arms and tried to climb to her face. “You were right about everything,” Deborah said to her husband as she rubbed her cheek against the dog’s silky head. “But then, you usually are.”

  “It gives me no pleasure.”

  “Which part? Being right always or being right just now?”