Elizabeth George - Believing the Lie

He logged on. The connection was slow. It was like waiting for water to freeze. Below him, he could hear the murmur of Gracie’s voice and in a moment the sound of the stereo being turned on. She was thinking that music would make Kaveh feel better. Tim couldn’t think why, as music did sod-all for him.

Finally. He got onto his e-mail and checked for messages. There was one especially that he sought. He’d been waiting anxiously to see how things were going to develop, and there was no way he could have assessed this from his mother’s laptop. Absolutely no way.

Toy4You had finally made the proposition that Tim had been angling for. He read it over and thought for a while. It was little enough to ask for what Tim expected to get in return, so he typed the message he’d been waiting to type these many weeks of playing Toy4You along.

Yeah, but if I do it, I need something in return.

He hit send and couldn’t help smiling. He knew exactly what he wanted in exchange for the favour that was being asked of him.

Ian Cresswell had cooled off long before he reached the lake, as reaching the lake necessitated a twenty-minute drive. But the cooling off only applied to Ian’s need to explode. The feelings beneath that need had not changed, and betrayal was first among them.

Our situations are different didn’t appease Ian any longer. It had been fine at first. He’d been so besotted with Kav that the fact that the younger man might not himself do what he’d successfully demanded of Ian had barely registered in Ian’s mind. It had been enough to walk out of the house in the company of Kaveh Mehran. It had been enough to leave behind his wife and his children in order — he declared to himself, to Kaveh, and to them , for God’s sake — to finally and openly be who he was. No more slithering off to Lancaster, no more nameless groping and nameless fucking and feeling the momentary relief of taking part in an act that was, for once, not such a miserable chore . He’d done that for years in the belief that protecting others from what he’d admitted to himself when it was too late to do anything about it was more important than owning himself as he knew now he was meant to be owned. Kaveh had taught him that. Kaveh had said, “It’s them or it’s me,” and had knocked on the door and walked into the house and said, “Do you tell them or do I tell them, Ian?” and instead of saying Who the hell are you and what’re you doing here? Ian had heard himself make the declaration and out he’d walked, leaving Niamh to explain to the kids if she cared to explain, and he wondered now what the hell he’d been thinking, what sort of madness had overcome him, whether he had actually been suffering from a mental disease of one kind or another.

He wondered this not because he didn’t love Kaveh Mehran and still wanted him in a manner that felt like a form of insane obsession. He wondered it because he hadn’t stopped to consider what that moment had done to them all. And he wondered it because he hadn’t stopped to consider what it might mean if Kaveh didn’t do the same for Ian as Ian had done for him.

To Ian, Kaveh’s making the declaration seemed simple enough and far less damaging than what Ian had done. Oh, he understood that Kav’s parents were foreigners, but they were foreigners in culture and religion only. They’d lived in Manchester for

more than a decade so they were hardly adrift in an ethnic sea of which they had no understanding. It had been more than a year now that they’d lived together — he and Kaveh — and it was time for Kaveh to speak the truth about what he and Ian Cresswell were to each other. The fact that Kaveh could not embrace that simple fact and share it with his parents… The unfairness of it all made Ian rail.

That need to rail was what he wanted to get out of his system. For he well knew that railing would accomplish exactly nothing.

The gates stood open at Ireleth Hall when he arrived, which generally meant that someone was visiting. Ian didn’t want to

see that someone or anyone else, however, so instead of heading towards the medieval house that loomed above the lake, he took a side route that led directly down to the water and to the stone boathouse built on its shore.

Here he kept his scull. It was sleek, low in the water, tricky to climb into from the stone dock that ran round three sides of the boathouse’s dim interior, and just as tricky to climb out of. This trickiness was intensified at the moment by the lack of illumination in the boathouse itself. Generally the light provided by the waterside doorway was sufficient, but the day had been overcast in the first place and now it was getting dark. That, however, couldn’t be allowed to matter because Ian needed to be out on the lake, digging the hatchet blades into the water, increasing his speed and burning his muscles, till the sweat pouring from him allowed him to experience nothing but effort alone.

He untied the scull’s dock line and held the shell close to the dock’s edge. There were three stone steps into the water not far from the lakeside entry to the boathouse, but he’d found that using them was risky. Over time the lake water had encouraged algae to grow upon them, and no one had cleaned the steps in years. Ian could have done it easily enough, but only when he used the scull did he actually think about the matter of seeing to the steps, and when he used the scull it was generally because he needed to use it and he needed to use it as soon as possible.

This evening was no different. With the dock line in one hand and the other on the gunwale of the shell to hold it steady, he lowered himself gingerly into the scull, balancing his weight precariously so that he didn’t flip the craft and fling himself into the water. He sat. He coiled the line and placed it into the bow. He fixed his feet into the stretchers and he pushed off from the dock. He was facing outward so it was a simple matter to ease the scull towards the archway and onto the lake.

The rain, which had begun during his drive to Ireleth Hall, was falling more determinedly now and had he not wanted to work the tension out of his body, Ian knew he would not have continued at that point. But rain was a small matter and it wasn’t raining as hard as it could. Besides, he didn’t intend to be out that long. Just for the time it took him to send himself flying over the water north in the direction of Windermere. When he’d worked up enough sweat, he’d return to the boathouse.

He fixed the long oars into their rectangular locks. He adjusted the position of the looms. He gave an experimental movement of his legs to ensure that the seat ran smoothly on its slides and then he was ready to set out. Less than ten seconds saw him some distance from the boathouse and heading to the centre of the lake.

From there, he could see the shape of Ireleth Hall with its tower, its gables, and its many chimneys telling the tale of the centuries that had gone into its making. Lights shone from the drawing room’s bay windows and from the first-floor bedroom of the owners of the place. On the south side of the building the massive geometrical shapes of the topiary garden — gloomy against the evening sky — rose above the stone walls that enclosed them, and some one hundred yards away from this and partly hidden from Ireleth Hall itself, more lights poured from every floor of another tower, twin to the structure that was the earliest part of Ireleth Hall but in this case a folly built to resemble the stern and square pele towers of Cumbria and used to house one of the most useless females that Ian Cresswell had ever encountered.

He turned from the sight of the hall, the tower, and the topiary garden, country home of his uncle, a man whom he loved but did not understand. “I accept you so you must accept me,” Bernard Fairclough had said to him, “because we all live lives of accommodation.”