The Convenience of Lies Read Free

Mynd, places of myth and legend, battles and sorcery, of bronze-age burial sites and the still-used pathways of Neolithic traders. Bea played games in these ice-gouged valleys as a child, made camp fires, feasted on sweet wimberries and ran herself ragged in a breeze which blew from all the counties at her feet and the world beyond.
    Of the woman she became, of her guile and alluring beauty, only crushed traceries of fluted bone remained, white and brittle like fossils from a desert and held in a cardboard box.
    But it was time to part so McCall let her go, let her fly into the wind that whispered her home and into the ancient earth once more.
    When it was done, when he was finished, McCall turned and walked away, her dust on his hands and her face in his head.
    *
    He drove through oak woods and hill farms on his way back to Garth Hall. Here was his refuge, a place of genteel decay where he began his bewildered childhood, journeying through the remains of other lives in rooms no one used anymore and nothing was properly understood. This was his own subconscious border country, the poet’s land of lost content where all was safe. Yet however hard McCall searched for the place to cross back into what he once had, he was never able to find the path. There was no right of return.
    He parked the Morgan in the stable yard and heard Hester shout a welcome from the open kitchen window.
    ‘I’ve made some elderflower cordial,’ she said. ‘You want some?’
    ‘Please, yes.’
    He made for the deck chairs in the shaded cool beneath the great copper beech on Garth’s meadow of a back lawn.
    Hester came through the slanting sunshine in a saffron kaftan she’d made herself, wayward grey hair held in a peasant scarf.
    She’d arrived at Garth in a psychedelically daubed camper van five years before, an American earth mother on the wrong side of sixty seeking out her family’s Celtic ancestry.
    ‘My, what a magical old house,’ she’d said. ‘Feels like in that poem… you know, that one about Wales having no present, only the past… all wind-bitten towers and castles.’
    Bea hadn’t long since gone to see out her widowed days with an ex-lover in Israel, leaving Garth to its ghosts and McCall to cope alone. So Hester took one of the guest rooms and lived rent-free in return for gardening and keeping house.
    She placed McCall’s drink on the wicker table between them.
    ‘So, you did it, Mac… scattered her ashes?’
    ‘Yes, not easy… had to be done, though.’
    ‘Sure it did, but you know she’s at peace. It’s your turn now.’
    She’d not known if McCall’s withdrawal into himself was due to grief over Bea’s death or something which happened in Africa. His refusal to say why no story about the assignment ran in any of the Sunday colour supplements or on television, only added to her concern.
    She tried to coax him into her confessional, to admit to what was causing him pain. But he’d a politician’s way of ducking difficult questions.
    ‘Mac, when a sculptor is working a great piece of stone, every blow from the chisel might seem like an injury but in the end, something of beauty can be achieved because that’s what was in the artist’s mind all along.’
    McCall sipped his cordial and said nothing. For him, the matter was closed. He’d grown fond of Hester, even allowed her to badger him into seeing the shrink. But she didn’t know the half of anything in his world.
    The gentlest wind soughed through the tree above them. He looked across at Garth and thought yet again how like a once-beautiful woman it was, sustained by prayers and potions and nursed along by those who knew little more could be done.
    But when the sun shone, when they remembered how she had been, then the diamonds of crinkly yellow glass sparkled in the windows, its raspberry-red bricks glowed and all the coupled chimneys stood proud above the many gables of the mossy green roof.
    It was all of a piece, organic, as if it had grown from