The Summer of the Bear

by Bella Pollen

  There were so many clues that the crossed wires in Jamie Fleming’s head would not spontaneously unravel. Somebody should have noticed but nobody was paying attention. If only they had been. If only his family had understood the strange workings of that clever little mind, they would have watched him so much more carefully.

  4

  Letty Fleming was not a confident driver. She sat stiff in her seat, gripping the steering wheel as though scared that it might, in a moment of whimsical rebellion, decide to hurl itself out the window and roll merrily along the motorway. In the divvying up of marital chores, Nicky had bagsed driving while Letty had been allotted map-reading, a job she negotiated with more calmness and tact than most, considering the mild abuse that came with the position. Even when Nicky wasn’t around, he was still dictatorial, forbidding her to drive in bad weather or after dark, and it had always suited her to accept this as a sign of love rather than a slur on her capabilities. Now, at the thought of the seven hundred-odd miles in front of her, a trench-size furrow of concentration cut into her forehead.

  An atmosphere of quiet discontent pervaded the Peugeot. Surely car journeys had not always been like this? A grim determination to get from A to B. She missed the ragging and the giggles and the half-hearted threats that accompanied them. It no longer felt as if they were a family. More like a collection of damaged souls bound by a set of rites and rhythms over which they had little control – but then maybe that was the definition of a family. She’d never had to think about it before. Unless there was enough pain to keep them awake, people tended to sleepwalk through their lives, disregarding the present to wait for the future, capable only of happiness retrospectively – until something happened that was monumental and only then did life divide into the before and after. People were destined to become haunted by those moments when everything was perfect – if only they had known it. Before the bomb, before the flood, before the . . .

  Letty felt brittle with exhaustion. If only Nicky could be here, if only Nicky could take over everything for her. If only. These were the words that governed her every waking moment and now she was terrorized by the force of her wishful thinking. If only she had known. If only she had done things differently, but the further back she tried to roll time, the more paths opened up to her. Painstakingly, she had gone down every one of them looking for a different journey, another road, but in the end they all led to the same place. Fate was fate precisely because its outcome could not be manipulated or changed. Who knew why some people’s lives worked out and others’ did not?

  5

  Bonn, West Germany

  Information was Nicky Fleming’s religion. He respected it, he traded in it, he made his career out of it. He was the missionary who wished to convert all others to his faith and so, as soon as the Fleming girls were old enough to read, he announced that each of them should find an interesting story in the day’s paper and discuss it with him. This new rule was an extension of, but by no means a replacement for, his habit of lobbing general-knowledge questions at them when they least expected it.

  ‘What is tax?’ he might demand as the children sat unsuspectingly down to the dinner table. ‘What does it pay for and is it fair?’

  All three children were in agreement. News was a drag, but their father was adamant. They were to take an interest in the world around them. Besides, he argued, there was bound to be one story, one headline, however small and insignificant, that would appeal to them, and thus a daily ritual was born. Every morning, along with the General-Anzeiger Bonn and the embassy’s digest of all the main national newspapers, a copy of the London Times was delivered. Nicky worked his way through both broadsheets over a breakfast of boiled eggs mashed onto fresh baked Brötchen. After he was done, he would shuffle The Times back into pristine order with the skill of a croupier at a gaming table and the paper would be passed to the children in reverse order of age.

  Jamie liked animal stories: the sighting of a grey wolf in the Bavarian forest; the discovery of fossilized dinosaur eggs; the story of a Hungarian dancing bear rescued from its persecutors. He was fascinated by pictures of natural disasters and spent long hours planning to save his family from them. He was particularly intrigued by earthquakes and the idea that the world could, and sometimes did, open up and swallow whole, people, buildings, cities.

  In the evening, after Nicky returned from the embassy, he would sit in his favourite chair, a chaise longue with matching footstool that had travelled from country to country with them – a chair that had absorbed so many chapters of Our Island Story it was almost a historical expert in its own right – and he would invite his three children to sit with him and justify their pick of the day.

  ‘So this earthquake,’ Jamie would say after the article had been read to him. ‘How did it feel to fall? How long did it take to reach the centre of the earth? Would everyone’s houses and cars still be okay when they got there?’ And Nicky, hardly wanting to think how it might feel to be crushed between the vengeful arms of nature, having no intention of describing the agony of a man whose lungs were being filled with pebbles while his bones were ground to dust, abandoned his passion for facts and turned instead to his imagination. No, people didn’t die! Of course they didn’t fall forever! Yes, there was salvation down there, a terra firma, and not only was there terra firma but also entire cities where buildings had landed intact and precisely into their allotted space. There was a train station too, just like the one in Bonn, complete with uniformed station-guard who announced in loud staccato German the arrival times of new citizens. ‘Herr Henkel, vierzebn Ubr!’ His lovely wife, twenty minutes later! Every parent does what they can to protect their children from the concept of death until such time as they can cope with it, and down in the centre of the earth, Nicky told his son, was a whole new world where people lived and worked and mined the earth’s core for untold riches.

  ‘But what happens if the people want to come home and see their children?’ Jamie asked.

  ‘They have to be patient,’ Nicky declared. ‘They must wait for another earthquake to split the earth and then up they climb, quick as they possibly can.’

  Whilst he never tired of hearing about natural hazards or the poor maltreated Tanzbdr, Jamie’s real love, as he grew older, was the Cold War. The Cold War, the Cold War, the Cold War. He would roll the words around his mouth, giving them different emphases and inflections, sometimes adding a dramatic little chatter of his teeth for effect. Jamie’s inability to read meant stories had to be picked for him, but he recognized the phrase ‘Cold War’ when it appeared in a headline and was entirely au fait with all its associated acronyms: CIA, KGB, NATO, MI6, SIS. For Jamie, as for most spy-mad boys, the Cold War conjured up a James Bond world of dissidents and traitors – of intrigue and deceit. Of the ‘umbrella murder’ and Markov’s fatally unaware stroll across a foggy London bridge. He had little idea that the Cold War was the actual world in which he lived. That a hop, skip and one very high jump away from the capitalist excesses of the Bonn embassy stood the physical and ideological divide of the Berlin Wall. And in this matter, as in the matter of those long-suffering souls diligently working the earth’s core, his father was unwilling to bring anything even close to stark reality into his small son’s life.

  With Alba, such qualms were a waste of time.

  Alba’s taste ran to sensationalism. Nothing made her happier than the gory nihilism of a family murder or the brutality of an armed robbery. Her chief aim when choosing her story du jour was to find something so subversive, so blatantly unsuitable for Jamie’s ears that her father would be required to fudge the more sordid details, whereupon Alba, with the self-righteousness of the child who catches her exhausted parent skipping pages of a bedtime story, would take a sadistic delight in correcting him. Fortunately for Nicky, Alba’s preferred genre of news was not often to be found in The Times. Nevertheless, she used the newspaper sessions as an opportunity to milk her father for criminal know-how with the fervour of a lifer who�
��d suddenly discovered her new cellmate was a habitual escapee.

  Finally, though, it would be Georgie’s turn. There would be a redistribution of limbs on the side of the chaise longue, Nicky would slide his arm around his eldest daughter’s waist and say, ‘What about you, my George? What has caught your attention today?’

  But Georgie was shy. The whole business of preference- stating had always made her self-conscious and besides, she could never dredge up a particular interest in any of the headlines, so she would fidget and tug at the piping of the loose cover and say, ‘Um, I’m not sure,’ all the while turning the pages of the newspaper as slowly as she dared, growing increasingly miserable, praying that something would jump out at her before it was too late. She knew her father to be a patient man, yet, as the minutes ticked by, the room seemed to go very still with the weight of his expectation. How she envied Jamie with his headlines, pre-edited and presented as multiple choice. Why couldn’t she be of Alba’s gothic persuasion? She desperately wanted her father to think of her as an intelligent child, but all she felt during these sessions was uninteresting and stupid.

  ‘There must be something,’ Nicky would urge as she stared in mounting desperation at the newsprint while Jamie fidgeted and Alba sighed until finally, when she could stand it no longer, she stabbed her finger arbitrarily at the nearest headline.

  ‘President Defiant in Bucharest,’ her father read. ‘Why this one, Georgie?’ he probed gently. ‘What is it about this one you find so intriguing?’

  And she would turn her head and blink back the tears while Alba groaned cruelly.

  On 21 January 1979, no papers were delivered to the Flemings’ house in Bad Godesberg. If they had been, the children would have found only one page of The Times to be of collective interest.

  6

  Outer Hebrides

  It was futile, his continued battle with the elements. For as long as he could remember he’d been pitted against a single adversary but the sea was an opponent that did not play by the rules and he was no match for it. Water was coming at him from all sides – enormous swells tossed and turned him, salt burned his throat. The undertow grabbed at his legs and cold squeezed his chest, leaving him no oxygen for the next round. Survival was an instinct lodged into every one of his bones so he conceded defeat, blinked his sore eyes and allowed the current to float him towards the island as though he were as weightless as a piece of driftwood.

  It was not the friendliest of landing spots: a stone plateau, guarded by sentinels of rock that buffeted him between each other like the levers of a pinball machine. A wet tumble of seals barked at his approach. The swell withdrew, then in one almighty forwards rush propelled him up and out of the water, dumping him on land below.

  There was a frenzy of splashing as the seals streaked by. A lifetime spent lolling on the rocks had not prepared them for such an oddity dropping unannounced into their world. But he was not the first creature to have underestimated the power of the northern elements. At one time or another various migratory birds – a snowy owl, an African stork, even a flamingo – had found themselves in a gale so powerful that it skewed the delicate compass in their heads, resulting in a dizzying free fall and crash landing. Over the years this barren Hebridean isle had been a refuge for all manner of lost souls. Now it was his turn to be blown off course, and it was a late summer slot he was destined to share with an equally adrift family of four.

  7

  Bonn

  The day after Nicky died, the machinery of the Embassy Wives’ Club began to turn. The kindness of the women was as overwhelming as it was stifling but the order had come from the top. Letty Fleming was not to be left alone, not even for a minute. A rota was formed, food was purchased and cooked, the kettle boiled in shifts. A grieving widow, it was agreed, simply could not be made to drink too much tea.

  Every afternoon at precisely the same time, the Ambassadress came to the house in person. Letty stared at the woman’s ramrod back, at the way her knees were pressed together in perfect symmetry, and wondered whether she herself had overlooked the chapter entitled ‘How to Sit Elegantly in a Pencil Skirt’ in her guidance book of embassy etiquette. The Ambassadress poured the tea but, noting that Letty made no move to pick it up, gently took the younger woman’s hand and placed the cup and saucer in it. ‘Are you sleeping, Letitia?’

  ‘A little, thank you,’ Letty lied.

  ‘And you’re eating, I trust?’

  Letty nodded. She had no desire to be either rude or ungrateful. She knew she was supposed to find comfort, sanity even, in routine, but heaven knows there were only so many times a day she could answer the same questions without screaming.

  ‘And the children?’ the Ambassadress asked. ‘How is little James?’

  Letty turned her head to the wall.

  ‘My dear, you must be strong. The children will take their cue from you. Too much emotion will only upset them unnecessarily’ The Ambassadress produced a handkerchief. ‘Show them you can get through this, and they’ll soon find that they can too.’

  Letty blew her nose and promised to grieve quietly and considerately.

  ‘There is one more thing,’ the Ambassadress announced with the delicacy for which she was renowned. ‘My dear Letitia. Naturally, I don’t have to explain how these things work. You understand that a replacement for Nicky must be found.’

  A film of ice began to form around Letty’s heart. No, it had not occurred to her. There had been no time to think of England and the blip in its global diplomatic relations. Still, the Ambassadress was right. A gap had been opened. The business of Queen and Country could not shut up shop for weddings or birthdays or untimely deaths.

  ‘Of course,’ Letty murmured.

  ‘There’s a good man just arrived back in London,’ the Ambassadress continued. ‘He’s spent the last three years as cultural attaché to the ambassador in Japan. Made quite a success of it from everything we’re told. Excellent references. He was hoping to stay in England for a bit, but we believe he’ll be willing to rise to the occasion.’

  Letty projected herself into the future through sheer need. Nicky had left no will, made no provision for his family. The house, the children’s schools, their entire way of life came courtesy of the government. Quite how courteous the government would feel towards them under current circumstances remained to be seen.

  ‘How long, do you think?’

  ‘Sir Ian believes we can bring him over by the end of next month.’

  Panic rolled through her like a rogue wave. What was she to do? Where were they to go?

  ‘So.’ The Ambassadress placed her teacup carefully back in its saucer. ‘You can manage that?’

  It had not been a question. The Ambassadress patted her arm. ‘Good for you, Letitia. Sometimes the thought of positive action is all it takes to make one feel a little better. I give you my word we will help you with any arrangements you might require.’

  As always, the Ambassadress’s word was her bond. Within a matter of weeks, the Fleming family were out of their residence and on a boat back to England.

  8

  Scotland

  Letty had come to resent borders. Those pencil-thin divides where culture, power and religion were destined to grate interminably against each other. She resented them for the intolerance they represented, for the secrets and lies they necessitated and above all for the amount of Nicky’s time they had stolen. How much more pleasant would life be were borders treated as celebratory places – auspicious spots where flags were raised and flowers strewn. The Scottish border, however, was not such a place. Distinguished by a commonplace lay-by, it offered only a warped sign for Gretna Green and a van whose paintwork was jauntily stencilled with ‘The Frying Scotsman’.

  Letty bought bacon baps and sugary tea in stout paper cups. The bacon was spitting hot and salty, the inside of the rolls soft and warm. Even before the children had wiped their mouths of the dustings of flour, Letty ordered a second round.

  A
few miles short of Inverary they stopped at a petrol station for a lunch of sweets and crisps, and not long after that on the verge of the road for Jamie, whose stomach had suffered the consequences. Letty hovered a respectful distance behind, a clutch of tissues in her hand.

  ‘It won’t come,’ he sighed apologetically. ‘I want it to, but it won’t.’

  ‘Never mind.’ She folded the tissue back into her pocket. ‘Does your tummy still hurt?’

  ‘A little,’ he fibbed. He waited until his mother began picking her way back to the car before hastily taking the map from his pocket and concealing it under a large stone. It was the third such map he’d hidden since leaving London. Two had already been safely stowed, one in the petrol station, the other impaled on a fence post somewhere in Cumbria, but this was a long stretch of road without distinguishing landmarks and another clue would surely help his father to follow them. As Jamie straightened up and wiped his hands on his shorts, the shadow of a passing coach fell over him. To his utter amazement, he saw that its side was painted with an immense picture of a grizzly bear.