Believing the Lie

there was?” He glanced at her. Manette saw his look but she kept her eyes fixed ahead, on the path, the way it followed the shore, the way it climbed a rise to the woods that seemed to keep receding no matter how she and her father pressed onward. He went on. “I’m not a base seducer, Manette. I approached her. She’d worked for me perhaps two months at that point. I was frank, as frank as I’d been with your mother the night I met her. Marriage between us wasn’t possible, it wasn’t even a thought. So I told Vivienne I wanted her for my lover, a discreet arrangement that no one would know of, something that would never stand in the way of her career, which I knew was important to her. She had a brilliant mind and an excellent future. I didn’t expect her to waste that mind for a lifetime in Barrow-in-Furness or to give up that future because I wanted to be in her bed for however long she remained in Cumbria.”

“I don’t want to know this,” Manette told her father. Her throat aching so badly that she found speaking difficult.

“But you brought her up, so now you’ll hear. She asked to have time to think about it, to consider all the ramifications of what I was proposing. For two weeks she thought. Then she came to me with her own proposal. She would try me as a lover, she said. She’d never thought of herself as anyone’s mistress and she’d certainly never thought of herself as a woman attached in some way to a man older than her own father. This, she said frankly, was rather distasteful because she was not the sort of woman who found a man’s money an aphrodisiac. She liked young men, men her own age, and she didn’t know if she could manage even once putting up with me in her bed. She couldn’t see me exciting her, she said. But if I pleased her as a lover, which she frankly did not expect, she’d agree to the arrangement. If I didn’t please her, there would be — as she put it — no bad feeling between us.”

“God. She could have taken you to court. It could have cost you hundreds of thousands. Sexual — ”

“I knew that. But it’s the madness of wanting that I was speaking of earlier. It can’t be explained if you haven’t felt it. It makes everything seem so reasonable, even propositioning one’s employee and accepting her proposition in return.” They walked on, their pace slow and the wind beginning to come off the lake. Manette shivered, and her father put his arm round her waist, pulling her closer, saying, “There’s likely to be rain soon.” And then he said, “So for a time, we played two different roles, Vivienne and I. At work we were the employer and his executive assistant with never the slightest indication that there was something more between us; at other times we were a man and his mistress with those daylight hours of fierce propriety providing the stimulus for what happened at night. Then, at last, she’d had enough. Her career called out to her, and I wasn’t so much a fool as to stop her. I had to let her go, and as I’d promised to do so from the first, there was nothing for it but to wish her well.”

“Where is she now?”

“I’ve no idea. The job she was offered was in London, but that was some time ago. I’d think she would have gone on from there.”

“What about Mother? How could you — ”

“Your mother never knew, Manette.”

“But Mignon knows, doesn’t she?”

Fairclough looked away. A moment passed during which a V of ducks flew overhead, swooped down towards the lake, rose above them again. He finally said, “She does. I don’t know how she found out, but how does Mignon find out anything?”

“So that’s why she’s been able to — ”

“Yes.”

“But what about Ian? These payments he was making to Vivienne?”

Fairclough shook his head, then looked back at her. He said, “As God is my witness, I don’t know, Manette. If Ian was paying Vivienne, it can only be that he was doing it to protect me from something. She had to have contacted him, threatened something…? I just don’t know.”

“Perhaps she threatened to tell Mother. Like Mignon. And that’s what she’s doing, isn’t it? Mignon’s threatening to tell Mother if you don’t continue to give her what she wants? What would Mother do if she knew?”

Fairclough turned to her then and it came to Manette that for the first time her father looked old. Indeed, he looked fragile, capable of breaking within someone’s hands. “Your mother would be completely devastated, my dear,” he said. “After all these years, I’d like to spare her that.”

BRYANBARROW CUMBRIA

Tim could see Gracie from the window. She was on her trampoline. She’d been out there for a good hour now, jumping and jumping, with her face a picture of concentration. Sometimes, she fell on her bum and rolled round on the matting. But she always got back up and resumed her jumping.

Earlier, Tim had seen her out in the garden, at the back of the house. She was digging, and he noted next to her on the ground a small cardboard box tied up with a red ribbon. When the hole she was digging got deep enough and wide enough, she put the box inside and buried it. She used a pail for the excess earth, which she spread around neatly throughout the garden, although at this time of year the garden was such a wreck that this nicety was entirely unnecessary. Before she did that spreading, though, she knelt and crossed her arms over her chest: right fist to left shoulder, left fist to right shoulder, her head tilted to one side. It came to Tim that she looked a bit like one of those angels one saw in old Victorian cemeteries, which clued him in to what she was doing. She was burying Bella, giving the doll a proper funeral.

Bella could have been repaired. Tim had done a fairly good job of destroying her, but her arms and legs might have been reattached and where she’d been scratched up from his attack upon her, the scratches might have been smoothed away. But Gracie would have none of that, just as she would have none of Tim once he’d returned from the soaking he’d given himself in Bryan Beck. When he’d changed his clothes, he went to Gracie and he’d offered to brush her hair and French-braid it, but she didn’t want him near her. “Don’t touch me and don’t touch Bella, Timmy,” was how she put it. She didn’t sound sad, merely resigned.

After the doll’s funeral, she went to the trampoline. There she’d been ever since. Tim wanted to stop her, but he didn’t know how. He thought about ringing their mother, but he dismissed that notion as soon as it came into his head. He knew what she’d say: “She’ll stop jumping when she gets tired. I’m not going to drive all the way to Bryanbarrow to pull your sister off that trampoline. If you’re so bothered by it, ask Kaveh to get her off. He should enjoy the opportunity to be paternal.” She’d say that last bit with a snarl in her voice. Then off she’d go to that wanker Wilcox to get herself seen to by a proper man. And that was how she’d think of it. Charlie Wilcox wanted to do her, so he was the real goods. While anyone not wanting to do her — like Tim’s father, for example — was shite on oatmeal. Well, that was the truth anyway, wasn’t it? Tim asked himself. His dad was shite and so was Kaveh and Tim was learning that everyone else was shite as well.

He’d come back to the house after going after the ducks in the beck. Kaveh had followed and tried to talk to him, but Tim wasn’t having anything off that bloke. Bad enough that the wanker had put his greasy mitts on Tim. To have to talk to him on top of that …It just wasn’t on.

Tim thought, though, that Kaveh might be able to get Gracie off the trampoline. He might also get Gracie to let Tim dig up the doll and take her off to Windermere to be repaired. Gracie liked Kaveh because that was Gracie. She liked everyone. So she’d listen to him, wouldn’t she? Besides, Kaveh hadn’t done anything to hurt her, aside from wrecking her entire family, of course.

Tim himself would have to talk to Kaveh, though. He’d have to go downstairs and find him and tell him that Gracie was outside jumping. But if he did that, Kaveh would probably just point out that there was nothing wrong with jumping on a trampoline, that’s what trampolines were for, weren’t they, and wasn’t that why they’d got one for Gracie in the first place, because she liked to jump? Then Tim would have to explain that when she jumped for an hour as she’d done so far, it was because she was hurting inside. Then Kaveh would say the obvious thing: Well, we both know why she’s hurting, Tim, don’t we?

Tim hadn’t intended. That was the problem. He hadn’t intended to make Gracie cry. Gracie was the only