Paris Spring

by James Naughtie

  With midnight not far away, Hoffman’s time was coming. He’d filled the room, and the accomplishment had settled him. He’d even been able to spend a little while in Max’s chair, holding court in his own tentative way. The waiters, from an Irish bar on the other side of République, dispensed Guinness from a tin barrel and oysters from sheaves of wet newspaper in a basin, as well as Hoffman’s favourite whisky, and his plan had turned into a shrewd success. ‘You party well, Jeffrey,’ said Quincy, and it warmed him.

  As she spoke she could see Maria and Will Flemyng together at the tall windows at the end of the room that opened on to a small balcony. They were standing close, shoulder to shoulder, and while Quincy watched something passed between them that caused each of them to turn to face the other. For a moment, she saw them both in outline. A street lamp outside lit them from behind and below, as if on a stage, and they were etched against the night, Flemyng’s longish face motionless as Maria spoke. His black hair shone, his shoulders were relaxed, and with his slim, gentle profile he was a picture of easy balance. Maria leaned towards him, the light from the room picking up the gleam in her hair, and her hands were on the move, punctuating the story she was telling. Quincy concluded that they knew each other very well.

  Across the room, Max was in conversation with Maria’s English journalist friend. Edward Abbott was a picture of gentility, as ever, though a fire burned inside. Impeccably polite, his manners were misleading, particularly to Americans. Moved equally by the cracks appearing in Eastern Europe and the smell of protest in the West, he had passions that outsiders often missed, because they confused elegance with detachment. Quincy watched him give Max more time than she would, listening to his state-of-Europe speech and, she had no doubt, to his take on her. It would be sharp.

  But Quincy was happy, because her short conversation earlier with Flemyng had intrigued her. Within a few minutes he’d picked up her trail across Eastern Europe and they exchanged memories of Berlin and Vienna. He knew Warsaw just well enough to follow her story of the student riots she’d watched a few weeks before, and they talked about the panic that had gripped the authorities after the police went on the attack outside the theatre and the kids fought back. He turned to the first upheavals in Prague, and revealed as they spoke that he had the eyes and ears of a natural observer. She recognized a listener when she met one. He knew the price of milk in Warsaw, the history of the party boss in Prague who’d been sacrificed in the first desperate purge in March, and when they began to speak of Paris she realized that he knew the names of the very students at Nanterre who were planning their next madcap advance.

  ‘You could be a correspondent,’ she said. ‘Writing it through. Ever tried?’

  ‘Don’t have the flair,’ he said with a laugh, and they both knew he didn’t believe it. As for the embassy, she recognized his story as one she’d heard so often: settled routine, tedious bureaucracy, wrestling matches with French ministries on treaties and trade, sorties to Brussels to leap on the roundabout of negotiations that was turning backwards.

  ‘My life,’ he said. ‘Just that.’

  Quincy laughed at him, shaking her head. ‘And the band played on.’

  Then she said, ‘Bullshit.’

  She showed the thrill she felt when Flemyng shrugged and gave his broadest smile.

  He left her side, and they toured the room. Even Max had succumbed to the fatal charms of Guinness and whisky and Hoffman, round and curly and now graced with a permanent smile, knew that for the first time since he’d settled in Paris he’d pulled it off. Maria squeezed him, and the crowd egged him on, determined to stay in the room until the sound of his birthday boomed out on the stroke of midnight from the church tower across the boulevard. He swung from one side of the room to the other like a champion.

  Max, back in a huddle with Edward Abbott, eased him away.

  When the hour came, Quincy moved towards Flemyng just as Hoffman was opening the glass doors on the balcony to let in the sound of the bells. When the first boom struck, Max took to the out-of-tune piano at the other end of the room and began to play, so that everyone would sing for Hoffman. As a gift it was perfect, and Max, who had a hidden softness, understood. The boy had made it.

  And to finish it off, Max rose, quite unsteadily, and roared out another toast. ‘The Movement of 22 March.’ They all cheered.

  Maria was with Max when he rose from the piano and now she saw Quincy, just as she had watched her with Flemyng half an hour before, silhouetted at the window – Flemyng’s head back and a laugh on his face, Quincy alive and sparkling, waving a hand above her head. She was telling a story that entranced him, his excitement as obvious to Maria as Quincy’s delight.

  She forced herself to turn away and sought out Hoffman, saying goodbye with an arm round his shoulder, and wished him a happy weekend. Then, before she joined the stream of guests moving towards the door, she reached Flemyng’s side. Quincy was with him. Maria touched one cheek with his, and he pulled her close, a hand tight on her back. ‘We’ll talk soon,’ he said quietly. ‘I meant it when I said I needed help. Have a good weekend.’

  Maria was hardly able to reply. She nodded, and waved at Quincy, getting a blown kiss in return. Glancing back at Flemyng, she felt as if a shadow had fallen on his face, and caught a hint of desperation. Before it was too late, she moved forward. In a flood of determination, she pulled Quincy’s arm.

  If there was hesitation, Maria couldn’t feel it.

  Turning from Flemyng, she led Quincy downstairs.

  SEVEN

  The brothers spoke to each other more often by letter than telephone.

  Flemyng’s weekend was a muddle, and he wanted to talk. After the party, his Saturday dragged. He walked beside the river, followed the sound of a jazz saxophone to a café near Odéon where he tagged on to a student crowd for an hour, then decided to find a cinema where he could sit in the dark. The weather had turned and there was spring warmth, and plenty of light, but he spent the next two hours in happy isolation watching a gloomy film of young love. By the time he got to his apartment, the evening was cooling and the walkers on his boulevard were wrapped up. He realized that in the whole day he had not had a conversation of more than a few words. He brewed some tea, and prepared for his call, thinking of home.

  In the family house at Altnabuie, Mungo Flemyng kept a file of light-blue airmail envelopes that held the story of the travels of Will and Abel down the years. And because he was a historian, Mungo’s archive was complete and arranged in date order, from the mid-fifties onwards. But any of his students would have found it an unusual correspondence to explain, because the letters among the brothers, although regularly spaced, were usually brief and invariably cryptic. They hinted at an unseen story in which the boys played different roles as they grew up.

  When Mungo himself opened the wooden box in his study where he kept the letters, which he did more frequently as the years went by, he would weave tales of his own, imagining a grey Berlin winter or spring in Vienna. Summers in America, perhaps, with Abel coming and going. Experiences he had never had, but he liked to think the best of his brothers and brought his natural optimism to bear on their adventures. Imagining was perhaps even better than knowing. As the oldest of them, and therefore keeper of Altnabuie and its memories, he treasured the archive as a matter of duty as well as reassurance.

  He knew it was only a part of the story, sketched out in the letters that had come home. A set of clues, no more. And of the communications between his brothers when they were both abroad he knew nothing.

  But they had never lost of the habit of writing – Abel’s scribbled postcards filled another box in Mungo’s study – which meant that phone calls from abroad were rare. Never on Sunday, an undisturbed time when he prepared for the students he’d see in Edinburgh the next afternoon, and rarely on Saturday, which was a day for a settled routine.

  So at the sound of the first phone call he felt a pinprick of alarm. There was no reason for fear, but
Mungo’s life was usually free of the unexpected.

  He was in the garden, feeling the first brush of spring. Only in the last few days of April had some warmth come. The frosts had persisted long after they should have slackened, leaving the ground bone-hard and frightening the spring flowers that Mungo was trying to encourage. Easter had been hard all round. The south-westerly winds that were funnelled up from the loch had blown strong, leaving clusters of broken branches along the side of the house and piled in a jagged trail towards the hill. There were bare slopes beyond, showing no signs of life, and the birch and sycamore that circled the house weren’t in leaf. Only now was there a first, tentative softening in the air and some hope that the season was on the move. Mungo was having a smoke against the old wall at the top of the garden, wrapped up against the evening chill, when he heard the phone ringing inside the front door. He walked slowly to the house, but the bell still rang.

  Picking up the black handset, he heard the voice of an American operator – ‘person-to-person’ – as he gave his own quiet greeting, ‘Lochgarry two-two-oh.’

  Abel.

  ‘I’ve got good news,’ he said, after Mungo had established that there was nothing wrong, his first impulse. ‘I’ll be home in a week or two. Don’t know the dates yet. Alone, I’m afraid. Hannah has to stay stateside with the baby. Is that all right?’

  Mungo, who could see the rounded happiness on his own face in the hall mirror, began to talk about how they’d spend the days – who’d come for a drink, how they’d lay the table full out like the old days, where they’d walk on the high paths and how they could spend the evening by the fire, telling family tales.

  ‘I missed you last week at Easter,’ he said. ‘It was a little lonely here, to be honest. Especially with it being so bright.’

  But they could make up for it in May. Will would be bound to join them, because a coming together was so rare these days, and Mungo had received a letter from Paris two weeks before, suggesting that it was his intention anyway. Everything was falling into place as if it had been planned. Abel’s presence would surely make it certain that Will would come. And Abel responded to Mungo’s evident excitement with relish, his voice rising. He spoke of the house, his memories and his hopes. Most of all of Will, and how he missed him.

  ‘We’ll have an old-fashioned time,’ he said. ‘Babble on hand from start to finish.’

  Arthur Babb, handyman and virtual housekeeper, had arrived in their lives after a chance encounter with Mungo’s father in the hills where he was wandering in the empty time before the war. Taken on for summer work, the Cockney teenager had stayed because there was no good reason not to. The boys had known him for most of their lives. Now in his sixties, he would always be Babble to them – Abel’s name for him had stuck – and, with their parents gone, he was the physical link to their past. On their landscape, he had been the pioneer. Mornings on the burn trying to spot a fish lying in one of the shallow pools, long walks through the wood and on to the hill in the hope of an eagle sighting, evenings when he’d tell them stories of his family in London – a tribe that the boys found numerous beyond their imagination, driving barges on the Thames and seeming to run every market stall from Borough to the dark, teeming byways of the East End. There was a happy wildness in Babble that the boys loved and concluded early on that they wanted for themselves. He uncovered every secret for them. One spring afternoon he had been with them when they saw their first adder dance, holding them back but urging them to enjoy the passionate ritual of the young snakes at the edge of the wood. He shared most of their memories.

  Mungo listened to Abel speaking of his hopes for the visit, and gave him news of the house, the hill, the loch. His brother’s voice was distant, coming and going in waves on a line that echoed, and Mungo was conscious as always of the limits to their intimacy in such calls. Before they parted, he returned to his first question. ‘All well with you?’

  Was there a hesitation? ‘Never better,’ Abel said. ‘And I’ll have some news for you when I come.’

  There was no more, so Mungo went to find Babble. He was in the kitchen, organizing their supper, and their moods lifted. Only two weeks, and Abel would be back. So would Will, surely. Mungo said they should raise a glass. A Saturday to remember.

  The phone rang again.

  ‘Will! Now here’s a coincidence,’ Mungo said, back in the hall. He was flustered. ‘Guess who else has just rung? I can hardly believe two brothers on one night.’

  ‘What?’

  Something was wrong.

  ‘What did Abel have to say for himself?’ His brother sounded tense.

  Mungo spoke to him directly only once a month or so, and he was sensitive to his tone, the pace of conversation. Tonight there was no laughter in his voice. Mungo felt the return of the alarm that he’d encountered fleetingly a few moments before, and this time it settled.

  ‘Only that he’s going to be here soon. Briefly, I imagine. The dates have to be settled. Just himself – no Hannah, sad to say. But I was hoping it could be you, too, just as you’ve said. That’s what I assumed when we were talking.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, you wrote. I thought you were planning…’

  ‘But this has come out of nowhere,’ Flemyng said.

  ‘All the better for that, surely. Abel’s thrilled at the thought of the three of us here.’ He knew that his puzzlement must be obvious.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mungo, I can’t be sure that I’ll be able to arrange it. Things here are busier than I thought they’d be. Complications, and so on.’

  Mungo, who hadn’t heard Will so uncertain for years, said that Abel had sounded like a schoolboy again. Full of excitement.

  ‘And do you think that’s why he rang?’ Flemyng sounded agitated.

  ‘I don’t understand this, Will. What on earth’s the matter?’

  Flemyng spoke slowly, and to Mungo it sounded as if he was addressing someone whom he hardly knew, and not a brother. They were careful, hard words.

  ‘Did he mention me directly? Ask what I’m doing? Mungo, I need to know.’

  Babble had taken a drink from the kitchen and was placing it on the hall table. He stopped when he saw that Mungo was pale. The bonhomie of a few minutes before had evaporated. Without a word, he pulled a chair from the other side of the hall and slid it behind Mungo so that he could sit down. He remained at his station for the rest of the conversation, standing at Mungo’s shoulder.

  His brother’s voice was cold. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Will, I’m sorry about this but I don’t know what’s gone wrong,’ Mungo replied. ‘We don’t speak often these days, and I’m thrown, to be honest. What’s wrong? Abel wondered how you were – that’s all.’

  From Paris, his brother spoke sharply.

  ‘Nothing. I can’t talk now. But please let me know what Abel said, exactly. Perhaps we shouldn’t speak like this. Write to me, would you?’

  Then, after a pause, he said, ‘Please.’

  His voice had changed in a way that alarmed Mungo, because he picked up a tremor in his brother’s voice that he’d seldom known. A touch of panic.

  Of course he would write, Mungo said, though he was already worried about what he might say.

  His brother’s last words were, ‘I’ll explain in due time. I’m so sorry.’ And he was gone.

  Mungo, still wearing a shooter’s long tweed jacket against the cold, stayed in his chair. Babble was standing by him, and asked if he wanted another drink. At Mungo’s nod he disappeared towards the kitchen.

  Mungo stood up, and shedding his coat he opened the front door and looked down the slope towards the loch. Darkness wasn’t far away. The last of the sunset had thrown a fringe of pink on the rim of the far mountains and the landscape was dappled in the dusk, its black places already lost to view. Soon all the contours would disappear. He heard no sound outside. Taking in the silence for a few minutes, he turned back to the house when he heard the grandfather clock in the hall striking th
e hour, and it broke the train of thought that had taken him far away. Babble had another drink for him, and their supper was ready.

  They sat together at the kitchen table. Mungo’s round and jovial features were unnaturally glum and Babble’s lugubrious face, surrounded by a dark red mane, added to the picture of anxiety, even sadness. Mungo’s shirt was splayed out, and his thick hair, usually neatly swept back, had sprung up. He was uncomfortable as they ate Babble’s pie. ‘This should be a happy night with such good news,’ he said. ‘A great pity.’

  ‘Why?’ said his old friend.

  ‘I can’t really say. That’s what disturbs me.’

  Babble said that hearing only one side of the conversation with Will, he’d understood that there was a puzzle that Mungo couldn’t unravel. He wanted to know what had been disturbing about the conversation. ‘Both boys on one night. It should be a celebration,’ he said. ‘Will is coming back, isn’t he?’

  Mungo shook his head, and fidgeted with his fingers. ‘We’ve been thinking that for weeks now, and Abel makes it perfect. But Will’s troubled, more nervous than I’ve known him for a long time. Wary and unsure of himself. And that’s not Will.’

  Certainly not, Babble said. He was clearing the table, and he pushed a wine bottle towards Mungo. On Saturdays, Babble always brought one in from the old cold room that acted as an indoor cellar. Through the shooting season the wine racks had collected some stray feathers and a few streaks of blood from the carcasses hung above them, and Babble had plans to move his bottles to a proper home that he was preparing in the empty stables, but there was no rush. Their time was their own.