The Truth Page 2

  It was three days ago now that he’d heard the news. He’d spent the morning cooped up at the terminal running last-minute checks on things like surge-tank capacity and pre-fabrication ratios, and he was heading back from the Voe when his mobile had sounded. It was Krystyna. Since the split, these calls had followed a fairly strict and regular pattern: Monday evenings around eight, basic information exchanged, emotion avoided, all over in less than ten minutes. So this was an exception. Her voice was a little highly pitched too. She had asked him if he was able to talk, and he had pulled off the road on to the cinder-track driveway of a small, whitewashed farmhouse. It had been one of the island’s better days, a late afternoon breeze barely troubling the clouds in a bright blue sky.

  His wife delivered her message succinctly. She had met a man. There was mutual attraction and he had asked her to go and live with him. At the moment she was still sharing a flat with their son Sam, but it wasn’t altogether satisfactory and she intended to accept the offer.

  Mabbut took this in, his attention distracted by a pair of sea eagles straight ahead of him, slowly dipping and rising on the air currents. He thanked her for letting him know, and with a clumsy attempt at insouciance asked why she had thought it so important to ring him now. And that was when she had told him that she wanted a divorce.

  This shouldn’t have been a shock. They had been apart for so long that he’d begun to see their separation as a sort of bond between them. Not being able to live together was something only the two of them shared. The day before he’d bought her a rather expensive Shetland wool sweater. She was never easy to buy for, but this one, with its traditional wave-like pattern and delicate combination of greys and pale blues, had been just up her street. Giving it to her would have confirmed that there was still some business as usual, apart from just the children.

  Not wanting to go back to the hotel, he had retraced his journey along the road as far as Brae, a village grown into a small town as a result of its proximity to the terminal. Oil money, skilfully extracted from the companies by a dogged council, had provided a new school and a leisure centre that a town twenty times its size would have been proud of. An area of bright new Scandinavian-style homes, nicknamed Toytown by the locals, had advanced up the hillside. New restaurants and shops had opened to service them. The previous winter Mae had rented one of them for Keith, so he’d be closer to the terminal on those days when the sun sank at three and didn’t reappear until ten the next morning.

  Instead of going straight on to the terminal, he took a secondary road to the west, across the narrow bridge that led to a rocky, red-granite island. Driving on until the road ended, he’d walked the half-mile or so that led to the edge of the cliffs. He had sat down on a grass-tufted ledge and looked out to sea. Across the water lay the convoluted outlines of the islands of Papa Little and Vementry. To the west, the Atlantic stretched away, unbroken, until it reached the coast of Greenland. Gulls wheeled and cried as the waves rushed and sucked at the shiny black rocks two hundred feet below him.

  Krystyna Woniesjka had been one of the students on a creative writing course that he’d taught at Leeds back in the early 1980s. Mabbut, a voracious reader from early childhood, had started writing stories as soon as he could spell. At Huddersfield Grammar he’d vied with a boy called Clive Attwell for top honours in English. Attwell had been a winner in every way and ended up with an Exhibition to Cambridge. Mabbut, the better writer, had ended up at the University of Hull, where some brooding resentment at the way things had turned out drew him towards politics. After three years as a minor firebrand he secured a second-class degree and a place at the local school of journalism. It took him a further three years to realise that his politics were lukewarm, more about reaction than action. Then, thanks to a good friend’s wife, with whom he’d had a very brief affair, he found himself applying, successfully, to be the first creative writing tutor at Leeds Polytechnic. He’d had a patchy history with girlfriends. He fell for women easily, and his choices had generally been unfortunate. He was more of a romantic than a predator, and it had taken him quite a time, and some unhappiness, before he realised that Krys was different from the rest. She was Polish for a start, the youngest of six children, and daughter of an air force couple who’d stayed on in England after the war. What had attracted him at first had not been her looks but her defiance. Unlike her English counterparts she was unapologetic about everything she did. If she’d made a mistake or a misjudgement her chin would go up and her black eyes would flare like those of some dangerously wounded animal. This put a lot of people off, but for someone like Mabbut, who was good at argument but bad at confrontation, it was irresistibly appealing. So much so that he began deliberately to find fault with her work in order to provoke the desired reaction. On one occasion she had been so angry at his comments that she had demanded a personal interview with Mabbut and his superiors to discuss her grievances. Mabbut managed to steer her away from an official hearing, but agreed to meet her out of college hours to discuss it.

  It turned out that her tendency to intransigence was as much of a cover as his tendency to conciliation. With five siblings, life for Krystyna had been a constant battle, as had growing up with an unspellable Polish name in a rural English village. Finding a similar taste in books and films, they began to go out together. Physical intimacy had been the very last thing to happen, but when it did it was good in a way Mabbut had not known before and he fell very deeply in love with the difficult, contrary, utterly unique woman that fate had sent his way. The attraction he held for her was more enigmatic. She didn’t really discuss things like that. She wasn’t philosophical or particularly curious (which made her a rotten creative writer) but his considered, more thoughtful approach to things tempered her fiery nature and with him she found that there was less to be indignant about. She looked glorious on their wedding day and he felt proud, privileged and relieved that his life finally had some meaning. They had vowed to love each other as long they both should live.

  Mabbut had been staring down at the ocean without really focusing, and when he raised his eyes and looked beyond the shore, he could see that the water was covered with whitecaps. A gull-wing of dark grey cloud was approaching fast from the west. It was a dramatic sight and he was tempted to sit and watch it, but he knew these Shetland storms could beat about for hours, so he stood, bracing himself for a moment against the wind, before stumbling back to the car.

  By the time he had returned to Lerwick the full fury of the storm had struck the island, so he had sat in the hotel car park, turned off the engine and watched the rain as it streamed down the windscreen.

  Many times since they had split up Mabbut had prodded about in his memory, trying to dig out the moment when he knew it had all gone wrong, as if that might give him the key to make sense of all the other evidence. So far he had found nothing. There were memories of angry, hurtful words, even tantrums on occasion, but none of them was The One. The only explanation he could find lay in a process that, now he came to think of it, had begun as soon as they met. They had changed their behaviour to suit each other. Krystyna had become less volatile and he had become less apologetic. This had suited them for a long time, even made them pretty good parents, but at some point it had begun to turn into something negative. Krys, as he always knew, was bright, and with the chippiness rubbed off, she was also charming and popular. Once the children were at school she began to take on secretarial work, at home to start with, then later in offices. Thanks to a colleague of Mabbut’s she became first secretary and then general assistant to one of the big fish in the Transport Union. From being steadily employable, she became positively sought after, working for some important committees, poached by the occasional MP with a book to write. He, on the other hand, her erstwhile teacher, had had a much more volatile career. He had made some headway as an environmental journalist, and become quite well thought of. His exposure of a water company involved in releasing toxic discharge into a local river brought him an a
ward and some notoriety, but when he tried to follow up this success, he found many of the old doors closed. Refusing to accept that his days of exposing major scandals might be over, he became increasingly stubborn and unapologetic – ironically, the very qualities that had first attracted him to Krystyna. So their roles changed. She became the one doing the comforting, while he became increasingly unpredictable. Mabbut put it down to the fact that life had moved on, journalism had changed and people like himself, writers with a conscience, were increasingly being crowded out by interfering proprietors and pusillanimous editors. The Thatcher years had knocked the stuffing out of people. They didn’t want uncomfortable exposure. They wanted consensus and job security. And, like everyone else, they wanted more things.

  After many pub lunches with an ever-decreasing band of like-minded colleagues, Mabbut had convinced himself that it was time to provoke by other means. While the bills were, just about, being paid by work for newspaper supplements and company reports, his mind began to turn to his first love, fiction. He’d taught it, he’d met his wife through it, but he’d never had the self-belief to write it himself. Instead he’d been lured back to journalism, and look where he’d ended up. Now, before it was too late, it was time to correct the course of his life.

  He had started working on ideas during the Shetland winter and had come up with something that had surprised and excited him. Something bold and ambitious in scope, a project that would need time and care and attention, but which, if it worked, could be breathtaking. He had made it quite clear to his agent that this time he would not compromise truth and integrity by selling himself to the highest bidder. He would use what savings he had from selling out to business to buy the time he needed to nurture this new work.

  Krys, meanwhile, had begun to enjoy the rewards of her practical good sense and efficiency, and could not understand why he could not simply buckle down and do the same thing. All that he found so stifling she found both stimulating and usefully lucrative. For a while her orderly success made her tolerant of his wayward ambitions, but as the children left school and wanted things that their father could no longer afford, she found herself having to bear more and more of the burden. The money she made from her hard work should have bought her the little luxuries she saw friends and colleagues taking for granted. Instead it was now funding a mortgage on their son’s flat and a university course for their daughter. It wasn’t that she didn’t respect her husband any more; she no longer understood him. She had settled into life. He hadn’t. She demanded practicality, he pleaded creativity. It was an argument they’d had from the moment they met. It was what had brought them together. Now, twenty-five years later, it was pushing them apart.

  ‘Shall I take that, sir?’

  Mabbut looked around him. The Clickimin Suite had emptied. The girls were cleaning, wiping and re-laying tables. He finished his tea, paid his bill and with a round of farewells to the staff, stepped out of the Stratsa House Hotel and into the waiting taxi.

  TWO

  ‘I just want you to meet him.’

  ‘You want my approval?’

  There was a pause at the other end.

  ‘I know it’s difficult, Keith, but I want us always to be honest and open with each other. Otherwise we lose everything. We end up hating each other.’

  Mabbut had the phone on a long line that stretched from the bay-windowed sitting room into the hall. He had been vacuuming the hall carpet when Krystyna rang, and was about to start on the stairs, which were also footprinted with Shetland mud and sand. Strictly this should have been Beryl’s work, but Mabbut had dispensed with her services two months earlier, as a cost-cutting exercise. Krystyna and Beryl had been close and he hadn’t as yet had the heart to tell her. Another reason for being on the defensive.

  ‘I’m just being honest, Krys. I don’t want to meet this jerk.’

  ‘Keith, we have been living apart for nearly two years.’

  ‘Seventeen and a half months actually.’

  ‘We parted by mutual consent because we weren’t happy together.’

  ‘You weren’t happy.’

  There was a squeal of exasperation.

  ‘Oh, please! Let’s not get into all of that again, or I shall have to remember all those names you called me, and all those times you weren’t there when I needed you and Jay and Sam needed you.’

  ‘I took on too much, OK? I’ve said I’m sorry. Someone had to bring in the money.’

  ‘And that was me! I spent four nights a week – after I’d finished at the House, after I’d cooked for you all – copy-editing reports that should have been written properly in the first place, to make enough money because you . . .’

  ‘I know, I know. But things are different now.’

  ‘What’s different, Keith?’

  ‘I’ve at last got time to take on something I really want to do.’

  Krystyna sounded suspicious. ‘A visitors’ guide to a nuclear power station?’

  A low blow, which he chose to ignore. He tugged at the phone cord, which had twisted itself around the cast-iron umbrella stand that had so delighted Krystyna when she’d spotted it in a local junk shop.

  ‘I’m going to write fiction again.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘I was good at that, remember? When I taught you.’

  ‘You knew a lot about everyone else’s work.’

  Stanley, their large, lazy black cat, appeared at the top of the stairs, looking down at him. He arched his back, stretched his legs and brushed himself against the newel post. Mabbut jabbed his left foot on the off-switch. The noise from the cleaner died.

  ‘I’m much more confident now. Fiction’s what everyone wants these days, Krys. And I’ve been thinking a lot about it. I’ve an idea that could make big money.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘A trilogy. Set at the dawn of human history, when humans began to socialise for the first time.’

  ‘Science fiction?’

  ‘It’s not science fiction!’ Mabbut clouted the bottom stair so hard with the cleaner-head that Stanley scampered back into one of the bedrooms. ‘That’s other worlds and space and ray guns. This is historical re-creation.’

  ‘And who’s bought this? Who is paying you?’

  ‘No one’s paying me yet. That’s the point. I’m deliberately not settling for an advance until I’ve material to show. Then I’ll be in a much stronger position for film rights and so on.’

  He could hear a forceful exhalation at the other end of the phone.

  ‘Keith. Sam’s mortgage payments are three months behind. Jay wants her own place. Get real.’

  ‘OK, I understand. But right now I don’t see how a divorce will help.’

  ‘Look, Keith. It’s confirmation of where we are. I can’t live with you and you can’t live with me. I have a good job and I’ve met someone who cares about me and about the children and at last I have some chance of getting my life back together.’

  ‘And what about me?’

  ‘You’ll be free to write your masterpiece without having to worry about me.’

  ‘But I like to worry about you.’

  ‘Look. All I’m asking is that we act like grown-ups. I can tell you lies or I can tell you the truth. The truth is that I’ve met someone I want to spend the rest of my life with.’

  Silence.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘That is so painful.’

  ‘But it’s the truth. What do you want me to say?’

  ‘Anything. Just don’t call it the truth.’

  ‘He’s a good man, Keith.’

  ‘I’ll take your word for it.’

  ‘Just come and meet him.’

  ‘I can’t. I’m too busy. Honestly, Krys, I’m not interested.’

  Mabbut put the phone down. His breathing was fast and short, as if he’d come up from under water.

  ‘She’s known him for a bit. He was an MP, I think. He’s on committees, that sort of thing. She met him whil
e she was temping.’

  ‘I didn’t know your mother was temping.’

  ‘That’s because you never bothered to ask.’

  It was evening and he was at the kitchen table, absently flicking through the pages of what turned out to be yesterday’s Evening Standard. Jay had prepared supper for the two of them, as always a little stronger on the lettuce than he would have preferred. As she moved around the table she reminded him so much of her mother. Brisk, darting movements. She wore her dark hair close cropped, which suited her slim figure and accentuated her wide hazel eyes, the only feature that indicated he might be her father. He closed the paper and tossed it towards the recycling box.

  ‘So. What’s he . . . this man . . . what’s he like? Her new friend.’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘Short, fat, old, young. Rastafarian.’

  ‘Rex? He’s OK.’

  ‘Rex? Who calls themselves Rex these days?’

  ‘He’s about your age. Maybe older. Bit of a tummy. He was probably quite good looking once. Sam and I think he might have a false eye.’

  She giggled and scooped some food from a dish.

  ‘Plate?’

  Mabbut held it out and received a dollop of something.

  ‘Weren’t there supposed to be sausages with this?’

  ‘Sausages? You must be joking. You know I don’t do sausages.’

  They ate together in silence. Jay with fork in one hand, her mobile in the other.

  ‘He’s quite posh,’ she added finally.

  ‘Posh?’

  ‘Yes, you know, he’s a bit lah-di-dah. “Awfully good” this and “awfully good” that. Knows everybody. Sam does a great Rex.’

  ‘Well, I’ll remember that.’ Mabbut sank his fork, all too easily, into something maroon and semicircular. ‘If Sam ever deigns to speak to me again.’

  Jay shook her head. ‘Dad. What’s bugging you so much? Coming back to see us all?’