The Convenience of Lies by Geoffrey Seed Page B

she?’
    ‘Yes, everyone falls in love with Bea eventually.’
    McCall shows Evan to a spare bedroom and they say goodnight almost formally. Later, in the dark and where he has slept since childhood - and where Lexie lay with him only days before - McCall finds it impossible not to dwell on the nature of his duplicity and why Evan is showing him such concern.
    It makes life more complicated. He cannot get a fix on Evan’s motives. They defy all male instincts, however base those generally are. But the effect on McCall is for him to think even less of himself, to believe he is wretchedly dishonourable.
    *
    By coincidence, Francis arrives back from Moscow next morning. He’s driven up from London and parks the Alvis in the stable yard. Bea takes his suitcase and is kissed on both cheeks. She introduces him to Evan. They have coffee together then Francis suggests they walk down to his dacha. He doesn’t change his travelling suit, bird’s eye in grey worsted made for him by Bodenhams of Ludlow.
    The dacha is his place of safety where he can hear the wind move through the trees and the stream bubble over its pebbles. And thus for a while, the perils of his world become as nought.
    McCall thinks he detected an ease between Francis and Evan, a familiarity almost. It contrasts with McCall’s own feeling of Francis being cool towards him since the great disappointment of Cambridge. What else did he expect, though?
    He watches from an upstairs window as they head across the orchard lawn then pass through the wicket gate into Garth woods. Again, McCall feels excluded, as if the grown-ups are deciding important matters about him behind his back. Within an hour they return. Evan has to drive home to Cambridge. McCall sees him to his car.
    ‘So are you interested in what I mentioned earlier?’
    ‘What was that?’
    ‘Meeting the fellow who likes your writing. Mr Wrenn thinks you should.’
    ‘I suppose so. Who is he?’
    ‘He’s called Roly Vickers, an Oxford man but we shouldn’t hold that against him.’
    ‘What does he do?’
    ‘He publishes books on international affairs. Has great contacts who’ll help you.’
    ‘To become a journalist?’
    ‘That’s what you want, isn’t it?’
    ‘Do I have much say in the matter?’
    ‘We all have free will, Mac. It just depends how we choose to use it.’
    Evan starts his car and winds down the window.
    ‘There’s a pub called the Ye Olde Mitre in Holborn,’ Evan says. ‘It’s down an alleyway - Ely Place, I think. Vickers has lunch there most days.’
    ‘How will I know him?’
    ‘You don’t have to. He knows what you look like.’
    With this, Evan hands him an envelope and drives away. On the card inside are words printed in gold which McCall never wanted to read.
    Mr Evan Dunne and Miss Alexandra Nadin cordially invite you to their wedding at noon on Saturday the 7th of August 1965 in the Cambridge Register Office to be followed by drinks in the RAF bar of The Eagle in Bene’t Street.
    So she is going ahead with it. She will marry Evan as Evan always said she would. McCall’s pleading had only won him a consolation prize - a pint in a pub with a man who might get him a job.
    ‘Marriage is only a piece of paper, Mac,’ Lexie had said. ‘Nothing more.’
    ‘It’s not nothing. You’ll be legally together and for always.’
    ‘You’re a hoot – and so old fashioned.’
    Lexie insists such things don’t matter. McCall cannot agree. For him to attend Lexie’s wedding, to walk the streets of Cambridge again and pass those ancient halls where he’d neither the wit nor wisdom to stay the course, would be to compound his sense of failure. Yet not to see her on such a day cedes all victory to Evan, albeit theirs was never a struggle between equals.
    So he’ll go, tough it out at the ceremony, find a brave face for the reception. He will kiss the bride and shake the groom’s hand. If he gets maudlin drunk then that is what happens at weddings when all that’s