The Summer of the Bear

by Bella Pollen

You have to understand, Georgie remembered her father saying, treason is the worst crime imaginable.

  Georgie’s burnt tongue felt enormous in her mouth. She had sworn then and there. She would tell Norrell and Porter nothing. She would never tell her mother.

  Towards the horizon, clouds were merging. Warm air from the high-pressure system meeting with cool air from the low-pressure system. A sudden confluence of weather-related phenomena. A rumble deep in the belly of the sea.

  ‘My father was a traitor,’ Georgie whispered.

  Aliz was sitting cross-legged. The bone of his ankle jutted out from underneath his trousers, hard and round as a pebble.

  ‘My father was a traitor.’ She said it louder and his face closed down in acknowledgement.

  Georgie lay back against the cold rock. She took Aliz’s hand then lifted her jumper and slid it onto her stomach. Above them, the storm hovered in the sky like a temper about to burst.

  70

  Ballanish

  Afterwards, when it was too late, Alba wondered at her capacity for cruelty. Where had it come from? When had it begun and how had it evolved into such a white-hot tool for her to wield against her family? She must have been born that way, otherwise why else would it feel so comfortable, so much like second nature to her? In some distant part of herself she knew Jamie had done little to deserve the brutality she consistently meted out to him, but if he couldn’t help who he was then nor could she. They might not like each other, but they had learned to live together and Georgie should never have forced a change in the status quo. It wasn’t that she had found the last few weeks of being civil to Jamie particularly arduous. It wasn’t even that her contract had expired. It was that when he raced into the house – literally flew into the kitchen, with that ghostly white face of his so full of hope, Christ, so full of naked want – it had both enraged and panicked her. She’d been sitting at the table, her father’s letter in her hand – or should she call it his suicide note, because wasn’t that what it was? Dated the day of his death, confused scribbles of admission and regret – for what, she had no idea, but hell, just add it to the list of everything else that had been kept from her.

  Taken the only way out, her father had written, forgive me, my love. And then he had given up on them all. Alba choked on a sob. Had he really loved them so little that death was preferable?

  She wanted to shred the letter into a thousand pieces, but she knew it would make no difference. You couldn’t rid yourself of knowledge once you were in possession of it, but then hadn’t she known already? Hadn’t she always known there was something more? Grown men did not tumble off roofs. They did not fall to their deaths. But why? How could he have done such a thing? That her mother was somehow responsible, she had little doubt. Why else had she been hiding the truth from her children? Alba read and reread the terrible lines, stoking the fires of her rage, adding up all the minutes and the hours and the days her mother had lied to her, treated her like a child, treated her like an idiot, making her guess and search for answers. As if her father’s death was a game of charades. As if it didn’t make any difference how he’d died – as if she didn’t have the right to know – and, on top of everything, daring to shush her when she’d had the audacity to question it, shushing her every time she mentioned his name. Of course she had concocted stories, of course she had invented fantasies, but of all the far-fetched scenarios, this had been the one that had never occurred to her. Her Dada had killed himself; Dada had jumped.

  It had been at that moment, at the very apex of her anger, that Jamie careered through the door like a runaway truck. He’d opened his mouth and tipped a full load of his screwy thinking down on her like two tonnes of gravel until she could no longer breathe under the weight of it. She watched his mouth opening and shutting with the effort of coherent explanation. She heard intermittent snatches – bears, mosquitoes, caves, Roddy, ghosts, heaven – but his voice kept passing in and out of audio and there was no way it could compete with the roaring static in her head. Suddenly the noise stopped. She opened her eyes to find Jamie staring at her, a look of disbelief on his face.

  ‘Alba, you’re crying,’ he stated flatly.

  ‘Shut up.’ She balled her hands into a fist.

  ‘Alba, don’t cry.’ He took a hesitant step towards her. ‘Don’t be sad, it’s okay’

  ‘Get away from me.’

  Jamie saw that she was shaking and his heart ballooned with sympathy. He remembered every day he’d spent grappling with his father’s disappearance. He felt the customary pains shoot up and down his leg. ‘Alba, don’t be sad, we’ll go to the Kettle. You were right all along, that’s where he’ll be.’

  The absurdity of what Jamie was suggesting meant nothing – but his face, shining, almost evangelical with conviction, was too much. How dare he have hope when she had none?

  ‘I love you, Alba,’ he announced simply. ‘You were the first person I wanted to tell.’ He plucked at her sleeve.

  It had been a reflex. At his touch, her hand swung back and she struck him with the cumulated force of her atomic misery. Jamie spun backwards, his foot caught on the mat’s curling edge and he landed hard on the floor. For a second he lay stunned then his hand floated slowly to his face. ‘Alba?’ The disbelief in his voice was pitiful.

  ‘Get away from me,’ she shouted. ‘Just leave me alone.’

  ‘Alba, I don’t understand.’ A scarlet weal shone on his pale cheek like a burn from an iron. ‘I thought . . .’

  ‘You thought what?’ she spat contemptuously.

  Jamie remained absolutely still. He felt watery, diluted. As if everything meaningful was slowly draining out of him.

  ‘Oh, hell’s teeth,’ she said, shame driving her on. ‘Don’t start crying. What have you got to cry about?’

  ‘It wasn’t real.’ He touched his raw cheek. ‘You being nice to me. I thought it was real.’

  Alba was almost frightened at how badly she wanted to hit him again.

  ‘You’re talking about people coming back as mosquitoes and bears and you’re worried about whether me being nice to you was real?’

  Her face was pinched, hard as granite, a thin blue vein pulsed on her forehead and despite the distance between them, he shivered at her coldness. It quenched the flame of his hero worship, it froze his unconditional love and in that instant it was over. He felt curiously lightheaded. Free.

  ‘I’m going to the cliff.’ He pushed to his feet. ‘I’m going to find him.’

  ‘Yes, well off you pop, Jamie. It’s a marvellous idea. Go to the cliff in a storm, why not? In fact, you know what’s an even better idea? Why don’t you just jump off the bloody cliff and have done with it.’

  Part Four

  71

  Even with his wretched shortsightedness he had known who it was. From the way he was standing, the way he was holding that bucket. And suddenly it was all over. The big wrestler had come for him. Home was no more than a few hours away and all he had to do to get there was put one foot in front of the other. The sight of the bucket worked like a crank on his hunger and he moved towards the wrestler, drugged by the promise of salvation, the smell of fish so intoxicating his eyes began to water.

  What happened next, the fact of his stopping, no one would ever pretend to understand. All anyone could do was attribute it to the strangeness of the beast’s half-human heart.

  When the image first entered his brain, it was as faint as the muffled note of a piano or a Polaroid yet to develop. Then it sharpened and his mouth filled with the sour anticipation of tragedy. The fear was so strong it felt as though it had the power to cleave his skull in two, to prise loose the very soul from his body. For the image was not the one haunting him these many weeks - the children standing silhouetted at the top of the cliff, the girls with their bright anoraks and long hair blowing across their mouths, no, it was not that one, so familiar, so dear to him now. It was a new picture, a terrible vision, the boy lying at the bottom of the cliff, as still and lif
eless as the washed-up gannet. He faltered. For a moment he didn’t know where he was. Then, out of the blackening sky, the wind picked up and breathed life back into his numbed soul and finally he understood. Finally he recognized himself, and ignoring the shouts of the wrestler, he turned towards the cliffs and ran.

  72

  The waiting room was fogged up with cigarette smoke, the meaty fumes of frying bacon and industrial shots of steam from a catering urn that was dispensing tea to a shuffling line of people. Letty stopped in the doorway in surprise. She had never seen the airport so busy. Lonely-eyed army wives nursing babies were regulars, so too were the handful of islanders looking quietly terrified at the prospect of floating up in the sky with no visible support. But there were also huddles of men, bulky canvas bags slung over their shoulders, some queuing for the single payphone, several with cameras dangling around their necks and almost all woefully equipped for the stormy welcome the island afforded them. From the atmosphere of mild hysteria Letty guessed they were journalists. Every decade or so some minor dignitary paid a visit to the island, if only to check whether it was still there. Or possibly the Outer Hebrides were hosting a convention, Birdwatchers of Great Britain or some similar dubious collective, but suddenly there was a screech of brakes on the runway and the knot in her chest tightened as if a wrench had been taken to it. Over the last months, Tom had become synonymous in her mind with the government. Her hatred for both divided equally between the two, but from the moment she’d raised the courage to call him, she’d been surprised to find that although her fury hadn’t diminished, the details of it had become blurred. Had their fight been weeks or days after the accident? Had Tom’s refusal to help Nicky really been a betrayal rather than a desperate attempt to prevent his friend from risking his career? Then she remembered Tom’s brutal denouncement of Nicky, Jamie’s high conspiratorial whisper – Daddy’s a spy, isn’t he? . . . Tom said – and she was almost relieved to feel a spark, a rekindling of all her frustration and anger. What Tom had said had been unforgivable. Christ, why had she even called him?

  She’d spent the drive figuring out what to say but now, faced with the sight of him, stooping a little as he levered his big frame out of the plane, she forgot her lines. Instead she found herself back in the London Ballroom, the music of the waltz all around her. She remembered the feel of his hand tightening on her shoulder even as Nicky cut in and danced her away and she felt a prickle of shame. It didn’t matter what she told herself. She had known, she’d always known how he’d felt, but she’d never been brave enough to do anything but ignore it. She shook herself, tried to reorganize her thoughts, but Tom was already walking across the runway, his tweed overcoat blowing about his legs, and nothing felt natural. Should she wave? Not wave? Should she smile or frown? She darted into the loo and splashed cold water on her face. Her hair was damp and frizzy from the rain. Her skin freckled and brown. What would he think? Did she look older? Defeated? She swiped on fresh lipstick and, pulling herself together, went back out with the intention of waiting for him in a calm and collected fashion, but he was already standing right by the door, his hair blown over his face. When he said her name and took hold of her shoulders, to her utter mortification she burst into tears.

  On the drive home, she tried to paper over the awkwardness with geographic reminders – look, there was the track down to Maleshare where Nicky had once taken him for a walk; on their right was the turning to the lobster factory, remember? But these dried up long before she reached the causeway and an unreasonably long silence formed around them.

  ‘Letty . . .’ Tom began judiciously, cleaning his glasses with his handkerchief. ‘Letty, I’m glad you called.’

  Letty gripped the wheel and frowned at the road.

  ‘I tried to see you in London. I wrote to you.’ He turned to look at her helplessly. ‘I was never sure whether—’

  ‘I got your letters, Tom.’

  ‘But you never wrote back.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Letty’ He pressed on in a low voice. ‘Despite what you thought, despite what you may still think, I have always been Nicky’s friend. I am still your friend.’

  Letty stared straight ahead. The moment she had picked up the phone to the Foreign Office, she had decided. She would tell him nothing of what she had discovered. She would betray Nicky to no one. Tom was here for Clannach, and Clannach alone. Guilt was a powerful tool and she was not above using emotional blackmail to get what she wanted. ‘There’s no point dredging it up again, Tom. God knows, nothing can be changed now.’

  ‘Letty,’ he said vehemently. ‘We must talk about this.’

  Letty swerved the car into a passing place and switched off the engine.

  ‘You want to talk about it.’ She turned on him. ‘Fine, we’ll talk about it. You were not a friend to Nicky. You didn’t help him or believe in him. You were as quick to condemn him as everybody else.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You even tried to turn me against him and then you told Jamie. Dear God, of all people, you told Jamie.’

  ‘Jamie?’ Tom looked baffled. ‘Told Jamie what?’

  She gave a bitter laugh. ‘That his father was a spy.’

  ‘Good God, Letty, how can you say such a thing?’

  ‘Jamie told me. He said he knew his father was a spy because you told him.’

  ‘I swear on my life I did no such thing.’

  ‘Jamie might be an odd little boy,’ she said vehemently, ‘but he’s the most truthful child I know.’

  ‘Letty, whatever Jamie thinks I said to him, or whatever I did say to him, he must have misunderstood. Surely you know me better than that.’

  ‘You were his best friend,’ she said, and the words caught in her throat. ‘Whatever he’s done, you should have fought for him.’

  ‘Of course I fought for him. MI6, the Foreign Office, the Ambassador; I fought all of them, but you can’t disprove suspicion. It’s as futile as trying to prove you never received a letter.’

  Letty bit her lip miserably. She had no appetite for this. No strength for it.

  ‘Letty!’ he implored.

  ‘He would never have betrayed his country – and if you don’t believe that, then you’re no friend of his. Nicky was never the man you thought he was. Isn’t that what you threw at me that day?’

  Tom grimaced. ‘It was a stupid thing to say, I’ve regretted it since.’

  ‘But you meant it, didn’t you?’

  Tom sighed, pulled his overcoat around him. ‘Letty, if Nicky had to choose between his family and his country, what would he have chosen?’

  ‘I don’t – ’ She felt wrong-footed. ‘What—’

  ‘You want to know if I trusted him? Yes, I trusted him. As a husband, as a father . . . and yes, as a friend.’ Tom’s eyes refused to leave hers and Letty felt the colour rise in her cheeks. ‘But a man signs up to work for his country, he thinks he understands what that means. He thinks it makes him a particular kind of person. He walks into the job with an unshakeable set of principles and the belief that he has the moral backbone to maintain them in some precise and unyielding order, but in the end it never works out that way. If you were to ask me whether I trusted Nicky to put his loyalty to his country over and above his wife and children? Then no. Most people are fortunate enough not to have to make that choice. Maybe Nicky wasn’t.’

  ‘Tom, what are you saying?’

  ‘I think Nicky stuck to his own moral code, no matter what side of the line it put him on.’

  Tears were rolling down her face. ‘They never found anything. There was never anything to find.’

  ‘Letty,’ he said gently.

  ‘No, I don’t want to hear it.’

  He handed her his handkerchief and waited while she dabbed it over her eyes. ‘Did I ever tell you why I recruited him?’ he asked softly. ‘First-rate mind, an apparent ability to gobble up languages notwithstanding?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘At school he was ass
igned as my fag the first day. By lunchtime he’d talked me out of the practice. More than once I witnessed him persuading older boys not to bully younger ones. He was utterly protective of others, with a keen sense of right and wrong. He was idealistic, fair, passionate about Britain’s democratic principles, loathed the Communist regime for obvious reasons. Nicky was a born diplomat – except in one respect.’

  Letty suppressed a childish urge to put her hands over her ears.

  ‘He was a romantic, an impulsive and occasionally reckless one, and there is nothing quite as dangerous as that.’ Tom’s expression was unreadable, and once again she was aware of the nuance. ‘It’s why he didn’t get Rome, Letty. He wasn’t ready. He may never have been ready.’

  ‘Oh, Tom.’ Tears welled up again.

  He waited till she had finished. ‘When you called me last week, I did some snooping. It’s not my department, as you know, but, well . . . Letty, did Nicky ever mention this proposed site on Clannach to you?’

  No.’ She blew her nose. ‘Never. Why, do you think he knew?’

  ‘It’s possible. He was privy to so much information. It just seems like too much of a coincidence.’ Tom was watching her closely.

  A little coincidental, Porter had said. A little convenient, don’t you think?

  ‘I had no idea until I looked at the map,’ Tom went on. ‘Clannach . . . the range . . . it would be right on top of you.’

  ‘Yes.’ She held his look. ‘It would be.’

  ‘What about Gebraith, the missile firing-range? Did he ever mention that?’

  ‘No.’ She looked down at her hands. Of all people, she should know better than to underestimate Tom.

  ‘Letty,’ he said quietly. ‘Don’t make me do this on my own.’

  A sudden wave of loneliness overwhelmed her. Her world looked so much less distorted through his eyes. Maybe it was better for everything to come out. The painting, the car. It was the not knowing, the half-knowing. Secrets were corrosive and they made the living of any kind of truth impossible. ‘All right,’ she said, defeated. ‘All right.’