Elizabeth George - Believing the Lie

She smiled. “Me, too.”

He shifted the laptop again. He didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands and his feet all of a sudden. He said, “Right. Well. So when d’you want to schedule our breakup? Better be sooner rather than later, you ask me. If we don’t engineer it in the next couple of days, Mum’ll be talking to the rabbi and baking the challah.”

Yaffa laughed. She said in a way that sounded like teasing, “And is that such a very bad thing, Zedekiah Benjamin?”

“Which part?” he asked. “The rabbi or the challah?”

“Either. Both. Is that so bad?”

The front door opened. An elderly woman toddled out, a miniature poodle in the lead. Zed stepped aside to let her pass. She looked from him to Yaffa to him. She leered. He shook his head. Jewish mums. They didn’t even have to be one’s mum to be one’s mum, he thought with resignation. He said to Yaffa, “I don’t think Micah would much like it, do you?”

“Ah, Micah.” Yaffa watched the old lady and her poodle. The poodle lifted its tufted leg and did some business against a shrub. “Zed. I fear there is no Micah.”

He peered at her earnestly. “What? Damn. You broke up with the bloke?”

“He never was the bloke,” she said. “He was… Actually, Zed, he never was at all.”

It took Zed a moment. Then the moment felt like the dawn although it was morning and broad daylight in front of his mother’s flat in St. John’s Wood. He said, “Are you telling me — ”

She broke in with, “Yes. I’m telling you.”

He began to smile. “What a very clever girl you are, Yaffa Shaw,” he said.

“I am,” she agreed. “But then I always have been. And yes, by the way.”

“Yes to what?”

“To wanting to be your wife. If you will have me despite the fact that I set out to ensnare you with your own mother’s help.”

“But why would you want me now?” he asked. “I have no job. I have no money. I live with my mum and — ”

“Such are the mysteries of love,” she declared.

Gracie came dashing outside the moment the car stopped at the front gate. She flung herself at Tim and clung to his waist and Tim could barely take in her words, so rapidly did they come at him. He was having a bit of trouble taking in the rest of things as well. Cousin Manette had phoned Margaret Fox School to bring them up to date on his whereabouts; she’d requested permission for Tim to miss just one more day; she’d promised she’d have him back there tomorrow; she’d dressed herself in a peacock silk skirt and a milky-coloured cashmere pullover and a grey tweed jacket with a scarf that made all the colours good together; and she’d said they all had a wedding to attend at which Tim was going to have to be best man. That is, if Tim was willing to do so.

Tim saw from her face that the wedding was her own. He saw from Freddie’s face that he was going to be the bridegroom. He said, “I guess,” but he looked away quickly from the happiness that was blazing between his cousin and her soon-to-be-once-again husband and he thought how he didn’t belong in that blaze, how to enter it even for a moment promised the bleak reality of leaving it as well. And he was tired of the constant leaving that had been colouring his life. He added, “What’m I s’posed to wear?” because clearly he had nothing suitable in Great Urswick.

“We shall find something perfect,” Manette had replied, her arm through Freddie’s. “But first, Gracie. Kaveh’s kept her home from school because, of course, I shall need a bridesmaid.”

Which was the topmost subject on Gracie’s mind as she hung on Tim’s waist. “A wedding, a wedding, a wedding!” she sang. “We’re going to a wedding, Timmy! C’n I get a new dress, Cousin Manette? Should I wear white tights? Will there be flowers? Oh there must be flowers!”

Gracie needed no answer to any of this, for she went on to other matters, all of them having to do with Tim and Bella. “You must never run off again,” she told him. “I was that worried and scared, Tim. I know I was cross with you but it was ’cause you hurt Bella, but Bella’s only a doll and I do know that. It’s just that, see, Dad gave her to me and he let me pick her out himself and she was special ’cause of that, but I’m so glad you’re back, and what’re you going to wear?” And then to Manette and Freddie, “Will there be guests? Will there be cake? Cousin Manette, where will you get flowers? Are your mum and dad coming as well? What about your sister? Oh, I expect the walk would be too much for her.”

Tim had to smile, and it was odd because he hadn’t felt like smiling in more than a year. Gracie was like a newly bloomed flower, and he wanted to keep her that way.

All of them went into the house so that Tim could find something to wear to a wedding. He climbed the stairs to his room while Gracie remained chatting to Manette and Freddie below but once inside, the place looked different to him. He saw things and knew them for his belongings, but somehow they weren’t really his. He resided there, but he didn’t reside there. He wasn’t sure what this meant or how to feel about it.

He had nothing nice to wear to a wedding. All he had was his school uniform and he certainly didn’t intend to wear that.

He thought for a moment about what it would mean if he took the next necessary step. It seemed an enormous one, something that might engulf and drag him under in ways he could neither anticipate nor recover from. But there was a wedding, and it was Manette and Freddie’s wedding, and there seemed nothing else to do but to go into his father’s bedroom and to search round and ultimately pull from beneath the bed the black garbage bags of his father’s clothing that Kaveh had shoved there, preparatory to carting them all off to Oxfam in advance of bringing his bride to the farm.

Ian’s trousers were large on Tim, but a belt did the trick and in another year they would probably fit him anyway. He sifted through the rest of the clothing: more trousers and shirts, ties and waistcoats, tee-shirts and sweaters, and he thought of how well his dad had dressed and of what this meant about who his dad had been. Just a bloke, Tim thought, just an ordinary bloke …

Hurriedly, he grabbed up a shirt, a tie, and a jacket. He went back to the others, who were waiting for him in the old kitchen of the manor house, where Gracie was taping a note to Kaveh onto the cupboard in which he kept his tea. Gracie and Timmy have gone to a wedding! was written on the note. What fun!

After this, the lot of them set off to Windermere. On the way out to the car, though, they saw George Cowley removing the last of his belongings from the tenant’s cottage. Daniel was there, hanging back a bit, and Tim wondered that Dan wasn’t in school. Their eyes met, then slid away from each other. Gracie called out, “Bye, Dan. Bye, Dan. We’re off to a wedding and we don’t know if we’ll ever be back!”

It wasn’t until they’d wended their way from Bryanbarrow village to the main road through the Lyth Valley that Manette turned in her seat and spoke to them. She said, “What if you never came back at all, Gracie? What if you and Tim came to Great Urswick and lived with Freddie and me?”

Gracie looked at Tim. She looked back at Manette. Her eyes were round with expectation, but she turned her gaze to the window and the passing scenery it offered her. She said, “Could I bring my trampoline?”

Manette said, “Oh, I think we have room for that.”

Gracie sighed. She moved on the seat to be closer to Tim. She rested her cheek on his arm. “Lovely,” she said.

So the drive to Windermere was spent in a tangle of plans being laid. Tim closed his eyes and let the sounds of their conversation wash round him. Freddie slowed the car as they came to the town and Manette said something about the register office, which was when Tim opened his eyes again.