The Convenience of Lies Read Free Page A

the earth without any architected symmetry. And as always with the old, there were secrets and stories within.
    Hester was sure she’d once seen a lady in a long pale skirt pass through the panelled walls of the drawing room. McCall hadn’t the heart to say it’d just be a trick of the light filtering through the ancient copper beech where they now sat.
    She refilled his glass without being asked.
    ‘Mac, don’t you think it’s time you got stuck into a project or some journalism?’
    For all her clairvoyant tendencies, Hester couldn’t read his mind.
    ‘Yeah, maybe. Give it a while.’
    ‘The world has plenty of wickedness for you to choose from.’
    ‘All your usual suspects, Hester?’
    ‘Too right, my friend. The military, big business, all their spies and lackeys, they’re the ones with the real power who manipulate events to suit their own purpose.’
    Before she could set off on another of her conspiracy theories, a blue Volvo estate drew into the yard. An elegant woman in dark glasses and a chic designer dress got out carrying a large leather shoulder bag. She peered around like an insouciant model posing on a photo-shoot.
    Then she saw McCall and began sashaying towards him through the coltsfoot and clover, smiling with private satisfaction, as only Lexie Nadin knew how.

 
    Three
     
    The swallows dipping through the flower-scented air of Garth Hall’s gardens were much as Lexie herself - creatures of iridescent grace and exuberance, instinctive and beyond the wit of man to catch or tame and gone the moment autumn beckons.
    McCall watched her approach, superficially annoyed he’d been spotted in Oxford but intrigued that she’d wanted to see him again. He was also conscious of how unprepared he felt for whatever drama was about to unfold. He knew only that Lexie would cast herself in the central role and have the camera on her throughout. McCall was predestined to play his part, however demanding, whatever the hurt.
    This much was written and had been since the unforgettable accident of their first meeting on that bitter winter’s day in 1965.
    *
    A wind of Baltic iciness sheers across the black fens and gusts into the cloistered reaches of Cambridge, burning the face and watering the eye.
    Some of those huddled on the pavement outside Miller & Sons, television and music dealers, are close to tears anyway - women in headscarves and thick woollen coats, stiff ex-servicemen who’d survived to count the cost of war.
    They brave the chill of January to mourn Winston Churchill, their leader throughout it all and watch from afar as he is borne through the sooty streets of London on a gun carriage.
    A line of dockside cranes bow their jibs in unison as a barge carries his coffin along the iron-grey Thames beneath. It is making for Waterloo Station, to the place of departure which railwaymen call the platform of laughing and crying. From here, a train of Pullman coaches will deliver him home to the earth of Oxfordshire and the bones of his ancestors.
    A high angle camera slowly widens out from the gleaming, steaming engine as it picks up speed and passes through wreaths of its own smoke then is lost in the gloom of a winter’s day.
    McCall turns a corner into Sidney Street and registers the little crowd by Miller’s window. He still feels fragile from the boozy midwifery required to get another issue of Varsity to press and is poorly kitted out for such weather. Beneath his borrowed parka he wears only an incongruous white dress shirt, jeans and tennis pumps.
    He is in urgent need of tea and toast and a place to sit and feel better - physically, if nothing else. It isn’t just his hangover which weighs heavy. It is Cambridge itself. His dread of tutorials is becoming phobic. Each week’s essay crisis is worse than the last. He is fast being exposed for the chancer he is, trying to bluff his way through the oral-formulaic theory of Anglo Saxon poetry or the structural unity of Beowulf.
    His grades had