The White Lie (12 page)

They were interrupted by Henry, who was striding towards them out of the yellow glare and across the sun-faded grass, past sun-faded shrubs, the greenish-grey stone of the flower garden wall rendered near colourless. Henry’s feet remained unshod and unsocked. They were surprisingly youthful feet, almost shockingly youthful, as if from a different generation from his hands.

“Are you? Are you really going to leave him down there?” Ursula asked him, raising her hand to shield her eyes from the light. “Michael. In the loch. Isn’t that a crime?”

Henry said, “Ursula, go to the cottage and dress, and then come back and see me in the study, please. Directly to the study.” Then he turned and walked away.

***

The study is a lovely old room, positioned at the back of the hall. More or less untouched for over a hundred years, it retains its original tartan wallpaper and clashing plaid chairs, its leather globe on a stand, its 19th-century photographs of other Salters, busy upholding the empire. It’s a big room, with sofas and seats, but dominated by the vast, heavy desk, which is made of thick oak, and the captain’s chair that sits behind it. When Ursula got to the study an hour or so later, having taken her time dressing, sitting on her bed between items, she found that it wasn’t just her father but a group of people that awaited her. They were looking towards Henry: Joan and Euan and Vita, turned away from her; Mog, red-eyed in a dowdy floral dress; Pip, shock-haired in torn jeans; Edith, in the same clothes as yesterday, but her usual clash of heavy beads missing.

Henry had his back to them. He was standing on a chair trying to force the upper half of the window sash down, saying that he couldn’t recall ever opening it before and that it seemed to be painted shut, the words drying in his mouth as he spoke, making me think of something dead and dried to a husk on a beach. An ex-bird, eyeless. But it wasn’t that. When he turned to them, his face was almost too painful to look at, the courage overlaying it only transparently.

Henry saw Ursula first. She was standing in the doorway: it was towards Ursula that Henry’s torment and courage were directed.

“It’s like a greenhouse in here,” Ursula said. “Why don’t we go outside?”

“Because we can’t risk Ottilie seeing us,” Joan told her, looking at Edith and widening her eyes.

“You should know that I’ve told them what you said to me earlier,” Edith said to Ursula, her face and voice fervent, leaning forward and extending her hands. “I’ve just been telling them, so they know where you stand. And we all have sympathy for you.”

There were murmurs that could have been dissent.

“Edith—” Henry began.

Edith raised her voice. “Anyone here who doesn’t have sympathy for Ursula, please speak up now.”

No one said anything but the space between them all was bisected again and again by silent eye-to-eye exchanges.

“Look,” Edith said, getting to her feet. “This is painful. This is painful and in a way absurd. But decisions have to be made and they have to be made now, before anything is said or done that will . . .” The sentence petered out. “This is how this is going to have to be. Henry and I have discussed it. Protecting Ursula is our priority. About the dead we can do nothing.”

“Dad,” Joan said in a warning voice.

“I don’t want to talk to you now, Joan,” Henry told her. “I’m too tired for arguments. There’s nothing to discuss.” She ignored him and began to speak. “Quiet!” he said. “I’ve told you already. Go away and think about it, and at three o’clock I want you back here, all of you, with your decision. And that’s absolutely all I have to say for now.”

Joan lingered as the rest filed out. Henry pre-empted her.

“I’ve told you. I’m not going to debate it individually with people. This has got to be a family decision. A family process of deciding.”

“But you’ve already decided for us.”

“That’s what we need to talk about. At three.”

“Just one point. I have a point to make that I want you to think about between now and then.”

Henry looked at his watch. “Which is?”

“Murder will out.”

“That’s a terrible thing to say. You shock me. You appal me.”

“I appal you?”

“I’m not going to discuss this now.”

“But he’ll be found. What do you think—that he’ll stay neatly tucked away at the bottom of the loch, and we can all pretend he isn’t there and resume our lives? What kind of madness is this?”

“I’m not going to discuss it with you. But you’re wrong about—if you think that the remains . . .” His voice began to break.

“Dad. Please.”

“I don’t think even the police divers would find him. Not if they spent days. What you have to understand is that the water is too cold. It takes people and it doesn’t give them back.” He saw that her face was sceptical. “It’s happened before, you know. Michael isn’t the first.”

“What do you mean?”

“In the loch. People have gone missing there.”

“I know that, Dad. I’ve been here all my life.”

“Not because of any moronic stories about monsters and evil spirits, but just because it’s dangerous. You must know about James.”

“Jock’s brother.”

Mog brought it up with Henry later, the story of Jock’s brother on the loch.

“They never found him?”

“They looked and they looked. And there have been others. Over the years. You know there have. People get out of their depth, get cramp, whatever it is. They ignore the sign.”

There’s a danger sign planted in the beach.

“We ignore the sign all the time,” Mog told him. “There was another one when you were younger. Similar case. All over the papers. Someone older than you at your school. Swimming at night. A dare. You might remember.”

“I don’t remember.”

“I think you were quite young.”

Henry said to me once that Peattie is like a ravine full of water. Imagine falling, falling off the edge of the boat down and down into that ravine, the water incidental to your fall, proving merely to be a cushioned form of slow and smothering gravity.

***

At their three o’clock meeting in the study, the family had already arrived at a quiet, hopeless unanimity.

“You see—if there was any chance at all of their finding him . . .” Henry didn’t finish the thought.

“But that isn’t really the reason,” Edith clarified.

“Each of us must come to our own position,” Henry said. “It’s too much to ask of us that we think all alike. But we can agree on what it is we must do, and that’s something different.” Everyone was sent away again until seven.

“Hear me out,” Joan said at the evening meeting. “What if we were to pick up the phone right now, and tell the police. I’m just thinking aloud. But we have to discuss it at least.”

Euan cut her off. “Not possible.”

“They’d put her in prison,” Edith said.

“No, they wouldn’t,” Joan asserted. “Of course they wouldn’t.”

“You have a romantic idea of justice,” Euan snapped at her.

“They’d put her in an institution.” Edith’s eyes swam with tears. “Is that what we want?”

“This is what we will do,” Henry told them all. “We will consecrate the place where he was lost, in our own family way. We will regard it as a burial at sea. As if it were a burial at sea.”

The idea of a ceremony was a lovely one, but nothing like it was put into action—not on the water, at least, because the practicalities came up against the problem of ensuring privacy, and the thing was dropped. The wood was a different matter. Memorial activities in Sanctuary Wood would always be assumed to be to do with the great uncle.

“Dad,” Joan said. She looked around at the others. “Is it just me? Dad, this is all quite bizarre. You’re not thinking straight. You won’t be able to make this work.” Nobody else spoke. “How can we make them see?” she said, but nobody answered her. “What are we saying—that we’re prepared to keep this quiet for the rest of our lives? It’s too much, Dad. It’s insane.”

“This isn’t a matter of debate,” Henry said, blowing his nose. “This—the way we have explained it to you—this is our decision. This is what we are going to do. And I’m afraid that anyone who can’t agree to honour our wishes had better find somewhere else to live.”

“I need to talk to you,” Joan persisted. “This isn’t the end of this discussion.”

“Yes Joan, it is” Henry told her.

6

After she’d written Vita’s six-point test for husbands in the journal, Mog came to the wood, her feet on the grit of the path making the only noise in the absolute stillness. She sat for a long time on the beach with a notebook in her lap, not writing anything but the date.

Finally she spoke. “Here’s the thing,” she said to me.

Then nothing. Then, “All I want is a light heart. When will it get light again? It’s been so long. Ten of those years I’ve spent living with Pip. A ridiculous length of time to be temporary.”

I waited. People talk differently to me than they do to anyone else. They speak to me with unfiltered sincerity, because really they think they’re just talking aloud to themselves. Sometimes I feel like a confessional priest, and sometimes like God.

“Everything is shrouded in the same heaviness now,” Mog went on. “I don’t know how I managed it, when I was young, when everything was so difficult at home; the bickering, trying to outdo each other with their meanness. But it seemed easy.”

She scuffed at the soil, the old leaves, with her shoe.

“Lately, so heavy, Michael. So heavy, so weighed down. Like I’m physically carrying something around. So weighed down I can feel it against my ribs, pushing against the top of my stomach. You’ll laugh at this: I thought I had a tumour. I went to the doctor. Had an ultrasound. Nothing there. Marked as a hysteric in the notes. Big red emphatic H.”

“Hypochondriac,” I said to her.

“I can’t get free of it. Can’t see how to get free of it. No longer believe it’s possible to get free of it. I was sent to a psychotherapist. She was repellently sympathetic. Said the heaviness was a reservoir of tears. I should have asked to see her qualifications at that point. I’m too polite. That, I blame my parents for. I sat there for another 45 minutes, trying to come up with the answers she wanted, aware I was failing the test. I couldn’t talk back to her in her own language. It turned out the session was almost all about her, reassuring herself of her own expertise.”

She took some chocolate out of her bag and snapped off a line and ate it. “My mother wonders why I don’t eat at the gatehouse. Simple: because chocolate has to be explained. Chocolate’s noted and logged.” She ate another line. “I don’t know how I feel about leaving Edinburgh. I don’t seem to feel anything. This is one of the problems, one of the other problems. Not feeling things. The psychotherapist said I had to start taking responsibility for making myself happy. I didn’t go back. But I tried the homework: making an effort with Angelica’s friends at the drinks party they had for her birthday. Impossible. Humiliating, actually. I was gregarious and rabbited on and asked questions and they couldn’t have cared less.”

Poor Mog.

“The problem is that I don’t really like people. Not really. Not beyond the people here. I don’t know why that is. But it means I’m on my own a lot. I spend a lot of time reading, now; you’d be amazed. Angelica wasn’t impressed. She thinks reading’s something you do on holiday; certainly not something you do when the dishwasher hasn’t been emptied. Turns out she’s pretty much my mother’s deputy and clone. My mother’s thrilled about Angelica, and you can see it crossing his mind sometimes, crossing Pip’s mind; dawning that this might not be a good sign.” She laughed, making that characteristic noise afterwards, the long “hmmm” that’s almost laughing, subsiding into a long note. “And I’ve realised something about people who read. People who read: it’s not quietness. It’s not passivity. They’re having conversations with the writer, with the characters, are part living in that other situation. It’s like a judgment on everyone they know, that they go there, into the quiet world looking for friendship. That’s how it’s been for me, at least. I said a lot more than that—to the therapist. Some of it was stuff of yours. I plagiarised a bit. Adolescent and simplistic, that’s what she thought. It’s the kind of thing we thought we knew when we were 19. Well, you were 19. I was younger. I’ve never found anybody else who talks to me the way we spoke to one another.”

Most of our interactions with other people are rehearsed and cowardly
. That’s the kind of thing it says in the notebooks. It worries me, that Mog seems still to be living in the world of that thinking. I was very sure of myself then, reading philosophy and interested in the failings of language, the disconnect from thoughts, (I used the word
disconnect
a lot), the way we absorb the limitations of language into ourselves, tipping complex things into a crude vocabulary like pigs into sausages. It helped explain things to me, the life language delivers up to us. We’d stretch out together on the linen room shelf, Mog’s head in the crook of my arm and the rain beating down. We lie to ourselves, thinking the embryo life we’ve had frozen and stored will stay viable until we’re ready for it. It won’t, and in any case we’re never ready. It’s perhaps the most frustrating thing of all: not being able to tell Mog that there’s hope, that there’s every kind of compensation imaginable in love, in partnership in life. It would take some explaining, how it is that I know that; what my life has been since I left Peattie. Ironic, isn’t it, in the circumstances, that I’m the one who’s moved on.

“Johnnie left a message on Pip’s answerphone,” Mog said, “the day before I came home. He said he was worried for me. If Johnnie says he’s worried for you, you’re in trouble. His being worried is a reprimand. He said that I was something hollowed out: that was the phrase he used, hollowed out. Pip and Angelica heard it first. So humiliating. That I wasn’t really a person and that I needed help. The horrible thing was that I believed him. I did. It rang true to me. And then I had this weird thought. I thought, I’m like a piece of furniture that’s had dust cloths laid over it, more and more of them until the edges and outlines are blurred. I don’t know why I thought of that, of furniture and dustcloths. Peattie, I suppose, from way back, from when I was little. Seeing Edith closing up rooms. Johnnie said he wanted to have one conversation: just one last conversation, and that I owed him that much. I thought,
Well damn you to hell, I don’t owe you anything
. After that, the truth is that I hid. There was actual literal hiding. I barely went out. I’ll do almost anything to avoid confrontation. Even if I’m plainly in the right. Being in the right makes it worse. If I’m in the right I make sure to put myself in the wrong at the first opportunity. I tell you, Michael, it’s just an absolute disaster, my trying to have relationships with anyone outside this wall.”