Believing the Lie il-17

by Elizabeth George

  She was acutely aware of the need for a decision of some sort. Life as she’d known it was something of a shambles now, and she was going to have to work out how to repair it: which pieces to keep, which pieces to replace, which pieces to send to the rubbish tip. She was also aware of how much the burden of responsibility fell upon her shoulders. For she had known all along about Bernard and his life in London, and that knowledge and what she’d done with that knowledge were the sins that would weigh on her conscience till the end of her days.

  Ian had told her, of course. Although it was his own uncle whose use of the firm’s money he was reporting upon, Ian had always recognised where the true power in Fairclough Industries lay. Oh, Bernard ran the day-to-day business and, indeed, made many of the decisions. Bernard, Manette, Freddie, and Ian had together kept the concern moving forward, modernising it in a way that Valerie would never have considered. But when the board met two times a year, it was Valerie who took the position at the head of the table, and not one of them ever questioned this because that was how it had always been. You could climb the ranks, but there was a ceiling and breaking through it was a matter of blood, not strength.

  “Something curious and rather unsettling,” was how Ian had reported it to her. “Frankly, Aunt Val, I’d thought not to tell you at all because… Well, you’ve been good to me and so has Uncle Bernie, of course, and for a while I thought I might be able to move funds around and cover the expenditures, but it’s got to the point where I can’t quite see how to do it.”

  A nice boy Ian Cresswell had been when he’d come to live with them to attend school after his mother’s death in Kenya. A nice man Ian Cresswell had become. It was unfortunate that he’d hurt his wife and children so badly when he’d decided to live the life he’d been intended to live from birth, but sometimes these things happened to people and when they did, you had to muddle on. So Valerie had seen his concern, she’d respected the battle of loyalities he was fighting, and she was grateful that he’d come to her with the printouts that showed where the money was going.

  She’d felt ghastly when he’d died. Accident though it was, she couldn’t help thinking that she hadn’t stressed enough the perilous condition of that dock in the boathouse. But his death had given her the opening she’d been looking for. The only suitable manner in which Bernard could be dealt with, she’d decided, was humiliation in front of his entire family. His children needed to know exactly what sort of man their father was. They’d abandon him, then, to his London mistress and his bastard child, and they’d circle the wagons of their devotion around their mother, and that would be how Bernard would pay for his sins. For the children were Faircloughs by blood, the three of them, and they would not brook the obscenity of their father’s double life for an instant. Then, after a suitable amount of time had passed, she would forgive him. Indeed, after nearly forty-three years, what else was Valerie Fairclough to do?

  She went to her bedroom window. It looked out upon Lake Windermere. Thankfully, she thought, it did not look out on the children’s garden that now probably would not be. Instead, what she gazed upon was the great wide platter of the lake itself, still as a mirror flung onto the earth, reflecting — as a mirror would do — the fir trees along the shore, the fell rising opposite the land of Ireleth Hall, and the great cumulous clouds, which were the usual aftermath of a stormy night. It was a perfect autumn day, appearing clean and polished. Valerie looked upon it and knew she didn’t belong in it. She was old and used up. Her spirit was dirty.

  She heard Bernard come into the room. She didn’t turn. She heard his approach and she saw from the corner of her eye that he’d brought a tray with him and was placing it on the demi-lune table between the room’s two lakeside windows. Above this table, a large mirror hung, and reflected in it Valerie saw the tray held an offering of tea, toast, and boiled eggs. She also saw reflected her husband’s face.

  He was the one to speak first. “I did it because I could. My life’s been like that. I’ve done what I’ve done because I could do it. I suppose it was a challenge to myself, much like winning you. Much like making more of the firm than your father and grandfather had been able to do. I don’t even know what it means that I’ve done what I’ve done, and that’s the worst of it because that tells me I might well do it all again.”

  “Isn’t that a comforting thought,” she said dryly.

  “I’m trying to be honest with you.”

  “Another highly comforting thought.”

  “Listen to me. The devil of it is that I can’t say it meant nothing to me because it did mean something. I just don’t quite know what.”

  “Sex,” she said. “Virility, Bernard. Not being such a little man, after all.”

  “That hurts,” he said.

  “As it’s intended.” She looked back at the view. There were things to know before she decided and she might as well know them, she told herself. “Have you always?”

  He did her the courtesy of not misunderstanding. “Yes,” he said. “Not all the time. Only occasionally. All right, frequently. Usually when business took me elsewhere. Manchester, perhaps. Birmingham. Edinburgh. London. But never with an employee until Vivienne. And even with her, it was like the rest, at first. It was because I could. But then things went further between us and I thought I saw a way to have two lives.”

  “Clever you,” she said.

  “Clever me,” he replied.

  She glanced at him then. Such a little man, actually. He was shorter than she by nearly five inches. Small, a little delicate, mischievous looking, cocky, grinning… My God, she thought, all he needed was a hunchback, a doublet, and tights. She’d been as easily seduced as the Lady Anne. She said to him, “Why, Bernard?” and when his eyes narrowed, she added, “Why two lives? One is usually more than enough.”

  “I know that,” he said. “It’s the curse I live with. One life was never enough for me. One life didn’t… I don’t know.”

  But she knew and perhaps she’d known all along. “One life couldn’t prove to you that you were more than Bernie Dexter from Blake Street in Barrow-in-Furness. One life could never do that.”

  He was silent. Outside the honking of ducks drew Valerie’s attention back to the window, and she saw a V of them flying in the direction of Fell Foot Park, and she thought of how ducks taking flight or landing made such a silly, awkward spectacle but ducks in flight were as graceful as any bird and the equal of any bird doing what birds do. It was only the getting there that was strange and different.

  Bernard said, “Yes. I suppose that’s it. Blake Street was the pit I climbed out of but its sides were slippery. Any wrong move, and I’d slide back down. I knew that.”

  She moved away from the window then. She went to the tray and saw he’d brought only enough for her. One cup and saucer, two boiled eggs but only one egg cup, cutlery for one, a single white napkin. He wasn’t so certain of himself after all. There was a small mercy in this.

  “Who are you now?” she asked him. “Who do you want to be?”

  He sighed. “Valerie, I want to be your husband. I can’t promise that this — the two of us, you and I and what we’ve built — won’t all end up going down the Fairloo in another six months. But that’s what I want. To be your husband.”

  “And that’s all you have to offer me? After nearly forty-three years?”

  “That’s all I have to offer,” he said.

  “Why on earth would I accept that? You as my husband with no promise of anything else, such as fidelity, such as honesty, such as…” She shrugged. “I don’t even know any longer, Bernard.”

  “What?”

  “What I want from you. I no longer know.” She poured herself a cup of tea. He’d brought lemon and sugar, no milk, which was how she’d always taken it. He’d brought toast without butter, which was how she’d always eaten it. He’d brought pepper but no salt, which was how she’d always seasoned her boiled egg.

  He said, “Valerie, we have history together. I�
��ve done you — and our children — a terrible wrong and I know why I’ve done it and so do you. Because I’m Bernie Dexter from Blake Street and that’s all I’ve had to offer you from the first.”

  “The things I’ve done for you,” she said quietly. “To you, for you. In order to please you… to satisfy you.”

  “And you have,” he said.

  “What it took from me… You can’t know that, Bernard. You’ll never know that. There’s an accounting that needs to be made. Do you understand that? Can you understand that?”

  “I do,” he said. “Valerie, I can.”

  She was holding her cup of tea to her lips, but he took the cup from her. He placed it carefully back onto its saucer.

  “Please let me begin to make it,” he said.

  GREAT URSWICK

  CUMBRIA

  The police had taken Tim directly to hospital in Keswick. Indeed, they’d radioed for an ambulance to do so. Manette had insisted that she ride inside the vehicle with the boy because if she knew nothing else about Tim’s condition and the prospects for his healing, she knew that he needed to be close to what was standing in place of his immediate birth family from this time forward. That was Manette.

  The alarm had still been howling like a warning of the apocalypse’s imminent arrival when the police burst onto the scene. Manette had been sitting on the makeshift bed with Tim’s head in her lap and his body shrouded by the nightshirt, and Freddie had been crashing about looking for the guilty parties — long since flown — as well as for evidence of what had been going on in this place. The camera was gone, as was any sign of a computer, but in their haste the other members of the cast and crew of the spectacle being filmed had overlooked such items as a jacket containing a man’s wallet and credit cards, a woman’s bag containing a passport, and a rather heavy safe. Who knew what would be inside? Manette thought. The police would find out soon enough.

  Tim had said nothing other than two numbly spoken sentences. The first was “He promised” and the second “Please don’t tell.” He wouldn’t clarify who promised what to whom. As to what he meant with “Please don’t tell,” that was fairly clear. Manette rested her hand on his head — his hair too long, too greasy, too unnoticed by anyone for far too long — and she repeated, “No worries, Tim. No worries.”

  The police had comprised uniformed constables on the beat, but when they saw what they had walked into, they’d used their shoulder radios and made a request for detectives and officers from Vice. Thus Manette and Freddie had found themselves face-to-face with Superintendent Connie Calva once again. When she stepped into the room and swept her gaze over the Victorian bedroom, the open window, Big Ben in the distance, the dog at the foot of the bed, the discarded costumes, and Tim lying with his head in Manette’s lap, she had said, “Did you ring for an ambulance?” to the constables, who nodded. Then to Manette, she said, “I’m sorry. My hands were tied. It’s the law,” and Manette had turned away. Freddie had said, “Don’t tell us about the goddamn law,” and he’d spoken so fiercely that Manette felt such a wave of tenderness sweep over her that she wanted to weep for how stupid she’d been not to see Freddie McGhie clearly before this moment.

  Superintendent Calva took no offence. She fixed her eyes on Manette and said, “You stumbled upon this, I take it? Heard the burglar alarm, saw the mess outside, and reckoned what was going on? That’s what happened?”

  Manette looked down at Tim — he’d begun to shiver — and she made her decision. She cleared her throat and said no, they hadn’t just stumbled upon the scene, although thank you, superintendent, for assuming they might have done. She and her husband — she forgot to refer to Freddie as former or erstwhile or anything other than what he’d once been to her when she’d had common sense — had broken into the place. They had taken the law into their own hands and would have to embrace the consequences. They hadn’t arrived soon enough to stop some piece of filth from raping a fourteen-year-old boy and filming it for the delectation of perverts around the globe, but she and Freddie would leave that part of it in the hands of the police, as well as what the police wished to do about the fact that they — she and her husband, as she referred to him again — had broken and entered, or whatever the police wished to call it.

  “An accident, I think,” Superintendent Calva had said. “Perhaps malicious mischief by persons unknown? In either case, these wheelie bins need to have better braking devices on them, ones that lock, I daresay, so they can’t get out of hand and roll into the front doors of shops.” She’d looked round the place and directed her officers to begin the process of collecting evidence. She’d concluded with, “We’ll need a statement from the boy.”

  “But not now,” Manette told her.

  They’d taken him then. Tim had been handled tenderly by the emergency staff at the hospital in Keswick and ultimately released to his cousin Manette. She and Freddie had taken him home, provided him with a warm bath, heated soup for him, buttered soldiers to go along with it, sat with him as he ate it, and put him to bed. Then they had retired to their separate bedrooms. In hers Manette had spent a sleepless night.

  In the early morning, with darkness still pressing against the windows, she made coffee. She sat at the kitchen table and gazed unseeing at her reflection in the glass, backed by night outside and the pond somewhere in that night and somewhere on the pond the swans tucked into the reeds together.

  She considered what they had to do next, which was to phone Niamh. She’d already phoned Kaveh to tell him only that Tim was safe and inside her own home at this point and would he please let Gracie know so that she wouldn’t worry about her brother?

  Now she had to do something about Niamh. As Tim’s mother, Niamh had a right to know what had occurred, but Manette wondered about Niamh’s need to know. If she were informed and Tim learned she had been informed and she did nothing after being informed, the boy would be further devastated, wouldn’t he? And wasn’t that one pill of pain he didn’t need to swallow? On the other hand, Niamh had to be told something at some point since she knew her son had gone missing.

  Manette sat there at the kitchen table going back and forth and in and out, trying to make a decision. Betraying Tim seemed unthinkable to her. On the other hand, he was going to need help. Margaret Fox School could give it to him if he cooperated with them. But when had Tim been known to cooperate? And did what happened to him mean he might cooperate now? Why should he, for God’s sake? Whom could he trust?

  God, it was such a mess, Manette thought. She didn’t know where to begin to help the boy.

  She was still sitting at the table in the kitchen when Freddie came into the room. She realised she must have dozed in her chair, because it was fully light outside by then and Freddie was dressed and pouring himself a cup of coffee when she snapped to.

  “Ah, she lives.” Freddie came to the table with his mug of coffee, took hers, and dumped its cold contents into the sink. He gave her a fresh cup and rested his hand on her shoulder briefly. “Buck up, old girl,” he said to her affably. “You’ll feel better after having a good run on that blasted treadmill of yours, I daresay.”

  When he sat opposite her, Manette noted that he was dressed in his best suit, which was not something he ever put on when he went to work. He had on what he called his weddings-baptisms-and-funerals togs, which he wore with a crisp white shirt with French cuffs and a linen handkerchief folded into the breast pocket of his jacket. He was 100 percent Freddie McGhie, at ease with himself and sparkling from his head to the tips of his polished shoes, quite as if the previous day had not been a nightmare beginning to end.

  He nodded at the handset of the phone, which Manette had left sitting in front of her on the table while she dozed. He said, “Hmm?” in reference to this, and Manette told him she’d phoned Kaveh. He said, “What about Niamh?” to which her reply was, “That’s the question, isn’t it?” She told him that Tim had begged her not to tell his mother. He’d amplified on “Please don’t tell” when
she’d gone into the bedroom to make sure he had everything he needed for the night.

  “I suppose I should ring her, though,” Manette concluded, “just to let her know he’s with us, but I’m reluctant even to do that much.”

  “Why?”

  “The obvious,” she said. “The same reason Tim doesn’t want me to tell her anything from yesterday: Sometimes it’s just easier to speculate what might happen rather than to know the truth about people. Tim can think — or I can think, let’s admit it — that she won’t care or she won’t do anything or she’ll just feel bothered by the news and that’s it. But he — and I — won’t know for sure, will we? So he — and I — can also think, Perhaps if she knew, though, she’d jump into action, she’d shed this skin of indifference that she’s been wearing, she’d … I don’t know, Freddie. But if I phone her, I can’t avoid finding out the complete truth of Niamh Cresswell. I’m not sure I want to know it just now, and Tim certainly doesn’t.”

  Freddie listened to all this in his usual fashion. He finally said, “Ah. I see. Well, that can’t be helped, can it,” and he reached for the phone. He gave a glance to his watch, punched in a number, and said, “Bit early, but with good news early is always welcome.” And then after a moment, “Sorry, Niamh. It’s Fred. Have I awakened you? … Ah. Bit of a restless night here… Really? So glad of it… I say, Niamh, we’ve got Tim over here… Oh, bit cold from exposure. He was sleeping rough, the imp… Ran into him in Windermere, quite by chance. Manette’s looking after him… Yes, yes, that’s just it. Could you phone the school and let them know… Oh. Well, of course. Certainly… You’ve put Manette on his card as well, eh? Very good of you, Niamh. And I say, Manette and I would very much like to have Tim and Gracie stay here with us for a while. How d’you feel about that?… Hmm, yes. Oh grand, Niamh… Manette will be thrilled. She’d quite fond of both of them.”

  That was it. Freddie ended the call, put the handset back on the table, and took up his coffee once again.