The Truth Read online

  ‘Gertrude, truth is a very complex thing’

  OSCAR WILDE, An Ideal Husband

  Contents

  Cover

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Part One: The Problem

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Part Two: The Solution

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Part Three: Everything Else

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Acknowledgements

  Also by Michael Palin

  Copyright

  PART I

  *

  The Problem

  Keith Mabbut was a writer. Of that he was convinced. He lived in London on two floors of a red-brick, gabled house in Upper Holloway. He would have preferred to have lived nearer to the heart of the capital, but needs must and he was only a short walk from Finsbury Park station and on a good day could be at the British Library within thirty-eight minutes of leaving home. He lived with Stanley the cat, and Julia, his daughter, who was nineteen and known to all as Jay. He had another child, Sam, who was training to be an actor and didn’t live at home. Mabbut and his wife Krystyna, who was Polish, were separated. Mabbut’s father and mother had died quite some time ago, within a year of each other. He had an older sister, Lucy, who lived in Australia.

  Though he had made a career out of the written word, and indeed had a British Gas Award to show for it, he had reached the age of fifty-six with nothing resembling the success of his great literary heroes, George Orwell and Albert Camus, both of whom had died in their forties. Setting aside the clear, if unpalatable, correlation between genius and early death, he had formed the opinion that his best work was yet to come. And in a way he least expected, so it was.

  ONE

  The atmosphere at breakfast in the Stratsa House Hotel was as overcast as the skies outside. Regret seemed to have the upper hand over expectation; yesterday, rather than today, seemed uppermost in people’s minds. This was certainly true in Keith Mabbut’s case. He had completed his history of the Sullom Voe oil terminal and his work on Shetland was over. In three hours he would be flying out of Sumburgh for the last time.

  He examined the buffet. It was always the same but he lived in hope that one day a fruit compote might appear, or a thick Viking muesli, or just anything not in a packet. Today there was less than usual. Not even a banana. He slit open a small bag of Alpen, which he tipped into a bowl, adding some yogurt, a spoonful of raisins and a dried fig.

  He ordered tea and took his usual corner table by the window, looking out towards the sea.

  A middle-aged couple, two single men sitting separately, and a lone female with bobbed blonde hair and a very large book were the only other occupants of the thickly carpeted, curtain-swagged restaurant and bar known as the Clickimin Suite, named after a loch on the outskirts of Lerwick. One thing he’d miss about Shetland was the joyful exuberance of the place names. Spiggie, Quarff, Muckle Flugga, Yell and Gloup, the Wart of Scousburgh, the Haa of Funzie and the Bight of Ham. Beside these, Lerwick itself, derived from the original Norse, Leir Vik, meaning ‘a muddy bay’, seemed disappointingly mundane.

  Gales had blown hard across the muddy bay this last week, but had dropped quite suddenly overnight, and instead of the customary rattling of the windows, the only sounds in the Clickimin Suite this morning were the buttering of toast and the low gurgle of the coffee machine. Up in his room, Keith’s bag was packed and ready to go.

  Last night the oil company had given a party at Rani’s, an Indian restaurant at the northern end of the harbour, to celebrate the completion of his book, which was to be called Triumph In Adversity. The Official History of the Sullom Voe Oil Terminal. Commissioned by NorthOil, one of the consortium of ownership companies, to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of the start of production at the terminal, the book had been the brainchild of the Edinburgh office, therefore never wholeheartedly endorsed by the local management, who preferred to get on with their work with as little fuss as possible. So the fact that Howard Michie, the chief manager at NorthOil, had a prior engagement was not unexpected, and it was his senior assistant manager, Kevin O’Connolly, who had been deputed to attend on his behalf. Mabbut didn’t like O’Connolly at all. He was a professional Scotsman, parading a hard-bitten Glaswegian mythology as transparent as glass. There were also familiar faces from public affairs – Harry Brinsley and Sheila O’Connell, both young, bright and woefully underemployed – as well as Roscoe Gunn from Planning, tall and tedious, Laurie Henneck from Accounts, Rob Taggart, who had been taken off development to co-ordinate collection of all the material Mabbut might require, and last of all, Mae Lennox from Human Resources, who was responsible for seeing that Keith was paid and housed while he was up in Shetland.

  When he had made his first visit sixteen months earlier, Mabbut had been struck by how little was known about the terminal, whose input and output had, after all, transformed the British economy. In the local bookshops there were shelves devoted to fishing and birdwatching and local music; there were three or four histories of the Shetland Bus, an operation which had used the island’s fishing boats to assist the Norwegian resistance in the Second World War, but the few books on the oil industry were long out of print. The smart and comprehensive new Museum of Island Life, itself paid for by oil revenues, had several displays of Neolithic stone dwellings and only one devoted to the source of the windfall that had changed the inhabitants’ way of life. The Shetlanders’ reticence about their riches had rather encouraged Mabbut. Embarrassed at first by the lowliness of the commission he’d accepted, he began to see a role for himself, not as a company man, but as an outsider who could write honestly and objectively about what Sullom Voe really meant to Shetland. Pretty soon he realised this was not what was required. Oil companies, traditionally secretive, were, after disasters like the spill in the Gulf of Mexico, compulsively paranoid, and NorthOil was no exception.

  As security was tightened at the thousand-acre complex forty miles to the north of Lerwick, it was made increasingly clear to Mabbut that he was being paid to accentuate the positive. References to the chaotic early days of construction when an imported workforce was quartered on a desperately unprepared island, or the IRA bomb that went off on the day the Queen officially opened the place, or the two potentially catastrophic oil spills that happened near by, were discouraged or simply struck from his text. Some of the local managers had made their objections to the book personal. Not only was Mabbut seen as an outsider – what they called up here a ‘soothmoother’, one who had come into Lerwick harbour from its southern mouth – he also had form as that most despised of the breed, an environmental journalist.

  Kevin O’Connolly prided himself on his informal, folksy style. He was a reformed alcoholic and had been a company man since his teens. As steaming dishes of biryani, murgh massallam and rogan josh were brought to the table, he clapped his hands for silence.

  ‘Before you all get stuck into yo
ur curries, I’d like to say thank you on behalf of NorthOil to Keith and all those who’ve helped him produce this book about what we’re all doing up here. Especially for those who were never quite sure.’

  Laughter.

  ‘The oil business is blamed for just about everything these days and it’s nice to read some good things about ourselves, like the fact that we turned a peat bog into the biggest oil terminal in Europe within four years, and that we’ve kept it running day and night for thirty years. If the Greenies had their way, we’d be a peat bog again, but thankfully we have someone like Keith to tell our side of the story, and it’s a great story that we can all be proud of. So on behalf of the company, and I know our managing director would join me in this, I’d like to thank Keith for doing a grand job – for a Sassenach . . .’

  Nervous laughter.

  ‘. . . in capturing the skill, the enterprise and the resilience that Sullom Voe has embodied these past thirty years. If you want to be reminded of how important our business is and how well it’s doing, this will be the book for you to read. And we all look forward to receiving our free copy.’

  Laughter again.

  ‘So thank you, Keith.’

  He reached down and picked up something that Rob Taggart had slipped on to his chair.

  ‘. . . and from all of us at NorthOil, we’d like you to accept this as a wee token of our thanks.’

  ‘A lifetime security pass!’ shouted someone, which raised a good laugh; ‘a Scottish passport!’, which raised an even better one. In fact the present turned out to be an all-weather jacket, as worn on the rigs, with ‘NorthOil’ picked out in bold yellow capitals across the back of it. Not something Mabbut could see himself wearing to the next Greenpeace meeting.

  He gave a short reply, short because he was unable to express how frustrating it had been writing the book, knowing that every manager on the site was breathing down his neck. O’Connolly made his apologies and left shortly afterwards, giving Mabbut a powerful handshake – he was not the sort of man for a bear-hug. The atmosphere relaxed. The food was good and, knowing that the company was paying, those who stayed moved from beer to wine and even some curious Indian digestif that Rani produced from a back cupboard. Mabbut fell into a long conversation with Laurie from Accounts, who had lived on the island all her life and was desperate to get away and see the world. She’d never been to London, and no matter what Mabbut told her about it, she still wanted to go. As the evening wore on, those who lived out of Lerwick bade their farewells and began to drift off. Soon only Mabbut, Roscoe Gunn and Mae Lennox were left. Roscoe was a dour man on whom alcohol appeared to have no effect at all. He was, however, that even more deadly combination, a dour man who likes company, and it was long past midnight before he shook Mabbut’s hand one final time and headed off into the night. Mabbut waited for Mae Lennox to settle up. As they stepped out on to Bank Lane the sky was wonderfully clear and a small crescent moon hung so sharp and bright above the bay that neither felt they could turn their backs on it. Instead they walked down towards the waterfront, where the outline of a recently docked Norwegian three-master rose against the night sky. They turned south along Commercial Street, whose solid and sturdy old manses ran parallel to the sea, which lapped gently at the flights of stone steps leading from the houses to the water.

  Of all those he had met during his work at Sullom Voe, Mae was the person he’d miss most. She was in her mid-forties and had never been married, except to her work. She must have had offers because she was lively and bright and looked good, without ever seeming to put in much effort. They’d spent a lot of time together and grown fond of each other, but whereas her friendliness had been chummy rather than intimate, his feelings were more complicated.

  ‘Walk to the Knab?’

  Mae feigned horror.

  ‘The Knab! I’ve to be at work in the morning, Mr Mabbut.’

  ‘It’s my last night.’

  ‘I’ve not got the right shoes on.’

  ‘I’ll carry you.’

  Mae snorted with laughter and looked up at the sky.

  ‘Well, we’ll go a little way more. It’s a rare old evening.’

  They pulled up their coat collars as they cleared the protective walls of the houses and the wind caught them straight off the water. At the top of the next hill they found cover again, in the lee of an ill-starred assortment of modern bungalows and large stone houses with pointy roofs. A roller-coaster path led down between them to a low cliff and then wound up again past a cemetery. Serried ranks of silver tombstones stretched up the slope, like a silent army watching them. Neither spoke until they’d reached the headland known as the Knab, where a small shelter had been provided as part of a tourist trail. Here they sat, looking out into the star-studded night with the silver-grey waters of the Sound rippling gently below.

  Mae flicked her hair free of her collar.

  ‘I feel like a teenager again.’

  Mabbut put his arm around her, protectively and companionably, but with enough pressure to feel her compact shape between waist and ribcage.

  ‘I can’t remember that far back.’

  She turned towards him.

  ‘Are you looking for sympathy or something? Look at me. Halfway through my forties already.’

  ‘Ah, but you still have a lot of life ahead of you, Mae. Most of mine is behind me.’

  ‘Oh, don’t give me that. What are you? Fifty-six?’

  ‘You should know, you’re the one who employed me.’

  ‘Fifty-six is nothing.’

  ‘It’s nothing times fifty-six,’ said Mabbut bleakly.

  Ahead of them, a few clouds were drifting above the southern horizon.

  ‘If someone had said to me on the journo course that, by the time I was pushing sixty, I’d be being thanked by an oil company for making them look good, I’d have left and become a toilet attendant.’

  ‘Thanks a lot.’

  ‘You know what I mean. It’s nothing personal. Just a nagging reminder that success is something that happens to other people.’

  Mae shook her head impatiently.

  ‘There you go again, Keith. Always beating yourself up.’

  ‘I’m not the only one beating me up. You remember what O’Connolly said when I came up with all that interesting stuff about the early days and the local council being told one thing and the oil company doing another? “They were troublemakers, Keith, people who dinnae know a gift horse when it sits on their heed.” That’s what he said.’

  Mae gave a short laugh.

  ‘We’ve done all right out of it.’

  Mabbut snorted angrily.

  ‘Oh, sure, but only because some of you caused trouble. Made the companies pay up. But they wouldn’t let me put that in the book.’

  A cloud flitted across the moon and the sea turned from silver to black.

  ‘You know, Mae, I sometimes have this dream that I’m walking across a bridge at rush hour and everyone else is coming the other way.’

  ‘You make things difficult for yourself. You don’t have to do that. None of us is perfect, you know.’

  ‘I’m not talking about perfect, Mae, just honest reporting. I’ve given them what they wanted, but it wasn’t what I wanted.’

  This wasn’t what he wanted either. Not with Mae Lennox, not on his last night on Shetland. He tried a grin but didn’t quite convince.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mae. It’s my despair gene. There’s nothing I can do about it.’

  He turned, leaning in close to her.

  ‘I’ll miss you, Mae.’

  ‘I’ll miss you too.’

  He moved his arm lightly across her shoulder.

  ‘Come to London.’

  Mae laughed, a little more heartily than he’d have liked.

  ‘Me? No. I promised my mother I’d never go south of Berwick-on-Tweed.’

  ‘I’m not joking. I’m serious.’ He pulled away. ‘Come to London. Come and live with me.’

  Mae stopped, laughe
d, shook her head then laughed again.

  ‘Why not? It would be wonderful. We get on so well. You understand me, Mae.’

  ‘ Why not? Because you’re a married man for a start. Are you going to keep me in a wee room somewhere?’

  Mabbut was aware of the silence around them. The moon had disappeared, and the wind too.

  ‘Just a silly thought,’ he said.

  She leaned across and kissed his cheek.

  ‘We’ve both had a lot to drink.’

  ‘That’s why I can tell you these things, but it doesn’t mean I’ve just thought of them . . .’

  Mabbut broke off. Staring into the inky darkness, he took two deep breaths.

  Mae put her hand on his.

  ‘You’re a good man, Keith Mabbut. You should remember that more often.’

  They sat for a moment, neither speaking. Mae peered out of the shelter.

  ‘Weather’s changing.’ She checked her watch and got rapidly to her feet. ‘And it’s two o’clock!’

  They walked back into the town. As they passed the Point, a different wind hit them, a north wind so brisk and searching they had to huddle close, which is how they were when they stopped at the bottom of the short, steep alleyway that led to Keith’s hotel.

  He gave her a long last hug.

  ‘I hope we’ll see each other again, Mae. One way or another.’

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘A night of rapture in Berwick-on-Tweed?’

  She smiled, squeezed his hand and turned away, walking quite briskly up Commercial Street, her heels clicking on the flagstones. He watched her for a while, but she didn’t look back.

  The first flecks of early morning rain pattered across the windows of the Clickimin Suite.

  ‘Cooked breakfast this morning, sir?’

  Waking from his reverie, Keith noticed a cheerful Filipino standing beside him with a notepad.

  Mabbut shook his head.

  ‘No, no thank you.’

  He peered out of the window. He could just make out the sea between the trees and the garages. He was glad he hadn’t told Mae the full truth about Krystyna last night, although he couldn’t stop himself wondering what the effect might have been if he had.