Believing the Lie (6 page)

“Ian?”

Tim felt his insides harden at the sound of Kaveh Mehran’s voice. Cautious, it was. A little tense?

Tim said roughly, “No. It’s us.”

A pause. Then, “Timothy? Gracie?” as if it might actually be someone else mimicking his voice, Tim thought. There was noise from the fire house, something being dragged across the flagstones and onto the carpet, a bleak “What a mess,” and Tim experienced a wonderful moment in which he understood they’d probably had a fight—his dad and Kaveh going after each other’s jugular with blood everywhere and wouldn’t
that
be a treat. He headed towards the fire house. Gracie followed.

To Tim’s disappointment, all was well within. No overturned furniture, no blood, no guts. The noise had come from Kaveh dragging the heavy old games table from in front of the fireplace back to where it belonged. He looked down-in-the-mouth, though, and that was enough for Gracie to forget that she herself was a walking emotional smash-up. She hurried over to the bloke straightaway.

“Oh, Kaveh,” she cried. “Is something wrong?” Whereupon the bugger dropped onto the sofa, shook his head, and put his face in his hands.

Gracie sat on the sofa next to Kaveh and put her arm round his shoulders. “Won’t you tell me?” she asked him. “Please tell me, Kaveh.”

But Kaveh said nothing.

Obviously, Tim thought, he and their dad had had an argument of some sort and their dad had taken off in a temper. Good, he decided. He hoped they both were suffering. If his dad drove off the side of a cliff, that would be excellently fine by him.

“Has something happened to your mummy?” Gracie was asking Kaveh. She even smoothed the bloke’s greasy hair. “Has something happened to your dad? C’n I get you a cup of tea, Kaveh? Does your head hurt? D’you have a tummy ache?”

Well, Tim thought, Gracie was taken care of. Her own cares forgotten, she’d bustle round playing nurse. He dropped her rucksack inside the fire house door and himself crossed to the room’s other door, where a small square hall offered an uneven staircase to the first floor of the house.

His laptop occupied a rickety desk beneath the window in his bedroom, and the window itself looked out on the front garden and the village green beyond it. It was nearly dark now and the rain was coming down in sheets. The wind had picked up, piling the leaves from the maples beneath benches on the green and tossing them helter-skelter into the street. Lights were on in the terrace of houses across the green, and in the ramshackle cottage where George Cowley lived with his son, Tim could see movement behind a thin curtain. He watched for a moment—a man and his son and it looked to him like they were conversing but what did he know, really, of what was going on—and then he turned to his computer.

He logged on. The connection was slow. It was like waiting for water to freeze. Below him, he could hear the murmur of Gracie’s voice and in a moment the sound of the stereo being turned on. She was thinking that music would make Kaveh feel better. Tim couldn’t think why, as music did sod-all for him.

Finally. He got onto his e-mail and checked for messages. There was one especially that he sought. He’d been waiting anxiously to see how things were going to develop, and there was no way he could have assessed this from his mother’s laptop. Absolutely no way.

Toy4You had finally made the proposition that Tim had been angling for. He read it over and thought for a while. It was little enough to ask for what Tim expected to get in return, so he typed the message he’d been waiting to type these many weeks of playing Toy4You along.

He hit send and couldn’t help smiling. He knew exactly what he wanted in exchange for the favour that was being asked of him.

LAKE WINDERMERE
CUMBRIA

Ian Cresswell had cooled off long before he reached the lake, as reaching the lake necessitated a twenty-minute drive. But the cooling off only applied to Ian’s need to explode. The feelings beneath that need had not changed, and betrayal was first among them.

Our situations are different
didn’t appease Ian any longer. It had been fine at first. He’d been so besotted with Kav that the fact that the younger man might not himself do what he’d successfully demanded of Ian had barely registered in Ian’s mind. It had been enough to walk out of the house in the company of Kaveh Mehran. It had been enough to leave behind his wife and his children in order—he declared to himself, to Kaveh, and to
them
, for God’s sake—to finally and openly be who he was. No more slithering off to Lancaster, no more nameless groping and nameless fucking and feeling the momentary relief of taking part in an act that was, for once, not such a miserable
chore
. He’d done that for years in the belief that protecting others from what he’d admitted to himself when it was too late to do anything about it was more important than owning himself as he knew now he was meant to be owned. Kaveh had taught him that. Kaveh had said, “It’s them or it’s me,” and had knocked on the door and walked into the house and said, “Do you tell them or do I tell them, Ian?” and instead of saying
Who the hell are you and what’re
you doing here?
Ian had heard himself make the declaration and out he’d walked, leaving Niamh to explain to the kids if she cared to explain, and he wondered now what the hell he’d been thinking, what sort of madness had overcome
him, whether he had actually been suffering from a mental disease of one kind or another.

He wondered this not because he didn’t love Kaveh Mehran and still wanted him in a manner that felt like a form of insane obsession. He wondered it because he hadn’t stopped to consider what that moment had done to them all. And he wondered it because he hadn’t stopped to consider what it might mean if Kaveh didn’t do the same for Ian as Ian had done for him.

To Ian, Kaveh’s making the declaration seemed simple enough and far less damaging than what Ian had done. Oh, he understood that Kav’s parents were foreigners, but they were foreigners in culture and religion only. They’d lived in Manchester for more than a decade so they were hardly adrift in an ethnic sea of which they had no understanding. It had been more than a year now that they’d lived together—he and Kaveh—and it was time for Kaveh to speak the truth about what he and Ian Cresswell were to each other. The fact that Kaveh could not embrace that simple fact and share it with his parents…The unfairness of it all made Ian rail.

That need to rail was what he wanted to get out of his system. For he well knew that railing would accomplish exactly nothing.

The gates stood open at Ireleth Hall when he arrived, which generally meant that someone was visiting. Ian didn’t want to see that someone or anyone else, however, so instead of heading towards the medieval house that loomed above the lake, he took a side route that led directly down to the water and to the stone boathouse built on its shore.

Here he kept his scull. It was sleek, low in the water, tricky to climb into from the stone dock that ran round three sides of the boathouse’s dim interior, and just as tricky to climb out of. This trickiness was intensified at the moment by the lack of illumination in the boathouse itself. Generally the light provided by the waterside doorway was sufficient, but the day had been overcast in the first place and now it was getting dark. That, however, couldn’t be allowed to matter because Ian needed to be out on the lake, digging the hatchet blades into the water, increasing his speed and burning
his muscles, till the sweat pouring from him allowed him to experience nothing but effort alone.

He untied the scull’s dock line and held the shell close to the dock’s edge. There were three stone steps into the water not far from the lakeside entry to the boathouse, but he’d found that using them was risky. Over time the lake water had encouraged algae to grow upon them, and no one had cleaned the steps in years. Ian could have done it easily enough, but only when he used the scull did he actually think about the matter of seeing to the steps, and when he used the scull it was generally because he
needed
to use it and he needed to use it as soon as possible.

This evening was no different. With the dock line in one hand and the other on the gunwale of the shell to hold it steady, he lowered himself gingerly into the scull, balancing his weight precariously so that he didn’t flip the craft and fling himself into the water. He sat. He coiled the line and placed it into the bow. He fixed his feet into the stretchers and he pushed off from the dock. He was facing outwards so it was a simple matter to ease the scull towards the archway and onto the lake.

The rain, which had begun during his drive to Ireleth Hall, was falling more determinedly now and had he not wanted to work the tension out of his body, Ian knew he would not have continued at that point. But rain was a small matter and it wasn’t raining as hard as it could. Besides, he didn’t intend to be out that long. Just for the time it took him to send himself flying over the water north in the direction of Windermere. When he’d worked up enough sweat, he’d return to the boathouse.

He fixed the long oars into their rectangular locks. He adjusted the position of the looms. He gave an experimental movement of his legs to ensure that the seat ran smoothly on its slides and then he was ready to set out. Less than ten seconds saw him some distance from the boathouse and heading to the centre of the lake.

From there, he could see the shape of Ireleth Hall with its tower, its gables, and its many chimneys telling the tale of the centuries that had gone into its making. Lights shone from the drawing room’s bay windows and from the first-floor bedroom of the owners of the
place. On the south side of the building the massive geometrical shapes of the topiary garden—gloomy against the evening sky—rose above the stone walls that enclosed them, and some one hundred yards away from this and partly hidden from Ireleth Hall itself, more lights poured from every floor of another tower, twin to the structure that was the earliest part of Ireleth Hall but in this case a folly built to resemble the stern and square pele towers of Cumbria and used to house one of the most useless females that Ian Cresswell had ever encountered.

He turned from the sight of the hall, the tower, and the topiary garden, country home of his uncle, a man whom he loved but did not understand. “I accept you so you must accept me,” Bernard Fairclough had said to him, “because we all live lives of accommodation.”

Ian wondered about this, however, just as he wondered about debts to be paid and to whom such payment needed to go. It was one other thing on his mind this evening. It was one other thing that kept him out on the water.

The lake was not a lonely place. Because of its size—the largest body of water in Cumbria—a few small towns and villages sprang up intermittently on its shores, and in scattered areas within the rest of the undeveloped landscape the occasional slate-fronted house stood, either a country home long ago converted into a high-priced hotel or a private domicile that usually spoke of a well-heeled individual with the funds to live in more than one place because as autumn gave way to winter, the lakes became unwelcoming to those who weren’t prepared for heavy wind and snow.

Thus, Ian felt no sense of isolation out on the water. True, he was the only one rowing at the moment, but there was comfort along the shore where boats used by members of a local club and boats, kayaks, canoes, and sculls belonging to inhabitants of the lakeside houses had not yet been removed from the water for the coming winter.

He couldn’t have said how long he rowed. It couldn’t have been long, he thought, as it didn’t seem as if he’d gained much distance. He’d not yet come upon the Beech Hill Hotel, from which he’d be
able to see clearly the hulk of Belle Isle lying low in the water. That usually marked the halfway point of his workout, but he realised he must have been more exhausted than he thought from his discussion with Kaveh because he found his muscles were growing weary, telling him it was time for turning back.

He sat for a moment, still, unmoving. He could hear traffic noises from the A592, which ran along the east shore of the lake. But aside from the rain hitting the water and against his windcheater, that was it. Birds were abed, and everyone of sense was indoors.

Ian breathed deeply. A shiver shuddered through him, someone walking on his grave, he thought wryly. Either that or the weather, which was far more likely. Even in the rain, he caught the scent of wood smoke from a chimney nearby and in his mind he pictured a warming blaze, himself in front of it with his legs stretched out, and next to him Kaveh. In a similar chair, holding in his hand a similar glass of wine, taking part in a desultory end-of-day conversation of the kind millions of couples had in millions of homes all over the planet.

That, he told himself, was what he wanted. That and the peace that came with it. It didn’t seem so much to ask: just a life moving forward as other lives did.

Some minutes passed in this way: with limited sounds, Ian at rest, the scull moving gently with the rhythm of the water. Had it not been raining, he might even have dozed. But as it was, he was becoming progressively wetter and it was time to head back to the boathouse.

He reckoned he’d been on the water for more than an hour, and it was in complete darkness that he made his final approach to the shore. By this time, trees were mere shapes on the land: angular conifers as solid as standing stones, wispier birches line-drawn against the sky and among them maples with palmate leaves trembling as the rain beat upon them. A path among them led down to the boathouse, a fanciful structure when seen from the water, for even now despite the weather and the hour, the shape of it formed a mass of crenellation, slate, and limestone and its weatherside doorway rose in a Gothic arch more suitable to a church than to a shelter for boats.

The light had burned out above this doorway, Ian saw. It should have come on with the fall of darkness, illuminating the exterior of the boathouse even if it did little enough to shed light on the building’s insides. But where a yellow glow would have—at least in better weather—attracted moths, there was nothing at all. Along with the algae on the jetty steps, it was something else to be seen to.