Believing the Lie

Yaffa. What do you think of that? He likes to hide everything. Such a humble boy. He’s always been that way. Yaffa’s like that, too, Zedekiah. Every bit of information must be dragged out of the girl. Born in Tel Aviv, father a surgeon, two brothers working in cancer research, mother a clothing designer, my boy. Clothing designer! Isn’t that wonderful? Of course, I couldn’t afford a single thing she designs because her clothes are sold in… What did you call them, Yaffa dear?”

“Boutiques,” Yaffa said, although she’d gone so red in the face that Zed feared a stroke or seizure was in the offing.

“Knightsbridge, Zed,” his mother intoned. “Just think of it. She designs all the way in Israel, and the clothing comes here.”

Zed sought a way to interrupt the flow, so he said to Yaffa, “What brought you to London?”

“Studies!” Susanna Benjamin replied. “She’s going to university here. Science, Zedekiah. Biology.”

“Chemistry,” Yaffa said.

“Chemistry, biology, geology… it’s all the same because think of the brain in this sweet head of hers, Zed. And isn’t she pretty? Have you ever seen a prettier little thing than our Yaffa sitting here?”

“Not recently,” Zed said with a meaningful look at his mother. He added, “It’s been at least six weeks,” in the hope that the sheer embarrassment of having her intentions brought out into the open would force her to wind down.

That was not to be. Susanna added, “He likes to make fun of his mother, Yaffa. He’s a tease, my Zedekiah. You’ll get used to that.”

Used to that? Zed cast a look at Yaffa, who was shifting uneasily in her chair. This told him there was more to be revealed and his mother revealed it forthwith.

“Yaffa’s taking your sister’s old bedroom,” Susanna said to her son. “She’s come to look at it and she’s said it’s just what she needs now she’s having to move from her other lodgings. Won’t it be lovely to have another young face in the flat? She’ll be joining us tomorrow. And you must tell me what you like for breakfast, Yaffa. Starting the day out with a proper meal is going to help you with your studies. It did for Zedekiah, didn’t it, Zed? First-class degree in literature, my son. Did I tell you he writes poetry, Yaffa? Something tells me he’s likely to write a poem about you.”

Zed stood abruptly. He’d forgotten he had his teacup in hand, and the Darjeeling sloshed out. Thankfully, most of it went onto his shoes, saving his mother’s carpet. But he would have liked to dump it onto her neatly coifed grey head.

His final decision was as instantaneous as it was necessary. He said, “I’m off to Cumbria, Mum.”

She blinked. “Cumbria? But didn’t you just — ”

“More to the story and I’ve got to go after it. Very time-sensitive as things turn out.”

“But when are you leaving?”

“Soon as I pack my bag.”

Which, he decided, ought to take him five minutes or less.

EN ROUTE TO CUMBRIA

The fact that he wanted and needed to leave posthaste before his mother built the chuppah right in the lounge forced Zed to catch a train that would get him to Cumbria by a most circuitous route. That couldn’t be helped. Once he packed his bag and tucked his laptop into its case, he was gone, effectuating a very clean getaway. The bus; the Tube; Euston Station; slapping down a credit card to pay for his ticket, four sandwiches, a copy of The Economist, The Times, and the Guardian; wondering how long it was going to take him to find something — anything — to sex up his story; wondering even more how long it was going to take him to break his mother of bringing women in off the street like his procurer… By the time he was able to board the train, he was ready for the distraction of work. He opened up his laptop and as the train left the station, he began to search through his notes, which he’d meticulously recorded during every interview, which he’d meticulously typed into the laptop every night. He also had with him a set of handwritten notes. He would check those as well. For there had to be something, and he would find it.

He reviewed the subject of his story first: Nicholas Fairclough, thirty-two years old, the formerly dissolute son of Bernard Fairclough, first Baron of Ireleth in the county of Cumbria. Born into wealth and privilege — there was that silver spoon — he’d squandered throughout his youth the good fortune that he’d been handed by Fate. He was a man graced with the face of an angel but in possession of the inclinations of Lot’s next-door neighbour. A series of rehabilitation programmes had seen him as an unwilling participant from his fourteenth year onward. They read like a travelogue as progressively more exotic — and remote — locations were chosen by his parents in an attempt to entice him into healthy living. When he wasn’t taking the cure somewhere, he was using his father’s money to travel in a life-owes-me-a-living style that led him time and again directly back into addiction. Everyone threw in the towel on the bloke, after wiping their washed hands upon it. Father, mother, sisters, even a cousin cum brother had-

Now that was something he hadn’t thought about, Zed realised. The cousin-cum- brother angle. It had seemed a nonstory, and Nicholas himself had certainly emphasized that during interviews, but there was a chance that Zed might have missed something he could now use… He flipped through his notebook first and found the name: Ian Cresswell, employed by Fairclough Industries in a position of some quite serious responsibility, first cousin to Nicholas, eight years older, born in Kenya but come to England in late childhood to be a resident in the Fairclough home… Now that was something, wasn’t it, something that could be moulded somehow?

Zed looked up thoughtfully. He glanced at the window. It was pitch-dark outside, so all he saw was his own reflection: a redheaded giant with worry lines becoming incised on his forehead because his mother was attempting to marry him off to the first willing woman she was able to find and his boss was ready to deposit his well-written prose into the rubbish and he himself just wanted to write something marginally worthwhile. And so, what did he have in these notes? he asked himself. What? What?

Zed fished out one of his four sandwiches and began to devour it as he checked his paperwork. He was looking for a clue, for the way he could spin his story, or at least for a hint that further digging in one area or another might produce the sizzle that Rodney Aronson said was required. The cousins-as-brothers angle was possible. Reading, however, Zed found that his thoughts were dominated by Old Testament tales, which took him into the land of biblical allusion and metaphor, where he could ill afford to wander. But if the truth were told, it was difficult to read what he’d uncovered in his interviews with all the principal characters without thinking of Cain and Abel, my brother’s keeper, burnt offerings of the fruits of one’s labour, and being pleasing or not-so-pleasing to whoever was standing in place of God in the story, which would probably be Lord Fairclough, Baron of Ireleth. And if one truly wanted to be biblical about things, the Peer could be Isaac, faced with Esau and Jacob and their battling birthrights to contend with, although how anyone on earth could have mistaken the skin of a dead lamb — or whatever it had been — for hairy arms had always been way, way beyond Zed’s willingness to believe. The whole idea of birthrights, however, drove Zed deeper into his notes to see if he had any information about who actually stood to inherit what, should something untoward happen to Lord Fairclough, in addition to who stood to run Fairclough Industries should the baron meet an untimely end.

Now that would be a story, wouldn’t it? Bernard Fairclough mysteriously… what? Dies or disappears, let’s say. He falls down the stairs, becomes incapacitated, has a stroke, or whatever. A little digging turns over the fact that days before his untimely end or whatever it was, he’s met with his solicitor and… what? A new will is drawn up, his intentions as to the family business are made crystal clear, lifetime settlements are made, language is inserted into his will, his trust, his papers, as to — what would it be? — an indication of an inheritance, a declaration of someone’s disinheritance, a revelation of… what? The son is not his actual son. The nephew is not his actual nephew. There’s a second family in the Hebrides, there’s a mad and deformed elder sibling long hidden in the attic, the cellar, the boathouse. There’s something explosive. Something kapow. Something sexy.

Of course, the problem was that, if Zed wanted to admit the entire truth of the