The White Lie (13 page)

***

I knew about the depression. I saw her living in Edinburgh, just occasionally in fleeting visits, the window opening and closing. I saw her napping on Pip’s sofa with a novel on her face. I saw Angelica come home from the office and rip the book away from her like a plaster from a scabby knee.

“Sleeping again; sleeping your life away,” she’d said, proceeding into the kitchen and tutting over the sub-pristine state of things. Angelica thought she needed a kick up the jacksie. Pip defended her; she’d been unwell.

“Feeling sorry for herself, you mean,” Angelica said. They were in the kitchen together while Mog dozed on. “You need to stop pandering to her. Stop going to the bookshop for her. Stop making her eggs on toast.”

Later, sitting with Angelica watching the news while Pip was cooking up pasta, whizzing up pesto in the mixer, the smell like the meadow when it’s just been cut, herbs mixed into the warm grass, Mog announced that she was leaving Edinburgh, that she’d decided against going back to the office on Monday after all. She said that she was going home. Angelica hadn’t said anything, just left the room, still holding the TV remote. A few minutes later Pip had come in and crouched beside her.

“You’re sure about this? We’ll miss you.”

“I’m sure about it.” He got up to go. “Pip?”

“Yes?”

“How do you do it?”

“Do what?”

“This. All this. How do you keep going?”

“I don’t understand you.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

In fact she had been sure for months, since long before the break-up with Johnnie. The world—and Edinburgh was as little and as much
the world
as anywhere else—seemed opaque to her, seemed closed. At first she’d blamed it on youth, inexperience, newness: her mother had concurred with this. But nothing developed. Nothing changed. It was hard to get a job, she said, and then when you did it just went on and on: a life of working and then recovering from and anticipating work. Pip made work the centre not only of his life but also of his identity and seemed to be thriving. Was she missing something? A social life, Joan insisted, would make everything fall into place. Mog knew people, but knew, also, that she was never other than peripheral to these other people’s lives; this was unsentimentally just the fact of the matter. No social circle drew itself around her and embraced her into itself, breaking hands to link with hers and admit her, and nor did it seem likely to. She went to the pub on Fridays with workmates. On Saturdays she went shopping—even if only for socks or toiletries, it got her out of the flat—and then to the cinema. She went to the Botanic Gardens in all weathers on Sundays and sometimes met people she knew there (awkwardly swapping dull news, as she put it), but sometimes she didn’t, sitting alone on the café terrace, self-conscious among the chattering groups, watching small children frolic and shout on the lawn. That was her week. That, it seemed certain, would continue to be her week, until weeks ran unchecked into decades.

The irony was that Euan and Joan had encouraged her so much and so long to be a person of achievement, of
substance -
that was Euan’s word. It had started early. “This year, now that you’re 12, you need to be thinking hard about your future,” her father had said. “If it’s writing you want, you should be writing and not talking about being a writer. Talking’s nothing and nowhere. Write. Get submitting. There’s no reason why it shouldn’t be you. I have pretty good contacts.”

Joan had joined in, bright-eyed. “There’s a girl of 14 who’s just published a novel.”

The Christmas presents Joan bought for her offspring tended to the practical. For Mog there were books in French, to help with her language difficulty, and clothes a size too small as an incentive.
I’m a project
, Mog confided to her diary,
and I’m not going terribly well
.

***

When she went back to the house it was her mother she saw first.

“What on earth’s wrong with you?” Joan asked her.

“Nothing. Everything’s fine. Why?”

“You look like you’re about to burst into tears.”

“I’m fine. Just a bit of a headache.”

“Well, take some pills and get back down here. I need a hand.” She frowned at Mog as if reading faraway print on a sign. “Where have you been?”

“Just at the wood.”

“Ah.”

“Ah what?”

“Talking to Michael. Spilling out all your deeply underprivileged woes.”

“I’ve never said I’m under-privileged. Where do you get that from?”

“Emotionally so, I imagine. You fit with the coming generation. Expect their parents to be their staff and to behave only as permitted, for their own well-being. There was a piece on the radio. Modern children think parents who are also humans with human vices are guilty of abuse.”

“Right. That’s me exactly. Spot on again. What do you need a hand with?”

“He isn’t there, you know.”

“Come again?”

“Michael. He isn’t there.”

“Okay.”

“What is it with this family? Constantly wallowing. Terrible things happen to people. Boo hoo. Shocking and tragic. But there comes a point when grief becomes a sort of disorder.”

“Just tell me what you want a hand with.”

“You see. You see. Exactly. Exactly.”

“I’m not wallowing. I’m trying to get on with things. Isn’t that what you want? But you know, Mother, since you brought it up, you haven’t ever seemed overly dynamic to me.”

“My god, you have a lot to learn.” Joan opened her handbag and took out her Filofax. “Sit down.” She flicked through and sat opposite Mog at the kitchen table. “There’s a ridiculous amount to do. If only people had made an effort, the party could have been tremendous. It could have been important to us. You children might have been invited back to things. But it’s the same old problem. It’s not appropriate to be happy, or to make an effort or to have things look nice. It’s morally far preferable to have pony shit on the lawn and peacock droppings in the hall.”

“What?”

“There used to be. After Seb died. It was emblematic, you see. Being not clean. My sister turning all Bohemian, which as we know is just another word for dirty. The place is going to rack and ruin. Mrs Welsh is worse than useless.”

“That’s unfair.”

“She doesn’t get into the corners, and nobody cares. Slut’s lace under the tables.”

“Slut’s lace?”

“Dog hair and dust, gathered into hairy piles. Chairs on the point of collapse. Chipped paintwork. Nobody cares. Cobwebs on every window. The windows! What am I supposed to do about them, by Saturday? There are dead flies inside the glazing. I can’t do it all on my own. I can’t.”

“It doesn’t matter. It’s one evening. People will drink and talk and not notice any of it. They’re not going to be running their fingers along the mantelpieces.”

“You’re just as bad as Edith. The two of you. Don’t think I haven’t seen you. Having confidential chats.”

“You’re objecting to my talking to my grandmother.”

“It’s a discourtesy.”

“What? What?”

“You know exactly what I mean.”

“I’ve had enough of this.” Mog left the room, Joan calling after her, “Oh that’s right, that’s the thing you always do: just run away from things instead of facing up to them.”

***

Out of the frying pan and into the fire. Euan was in the drawing room, at the card table by the window, a pile of essays and a pen sitting in front of him. He was on the phone and had his back to her. She heard him say into his mobile, “I came over here to get away from her and lo and behold, she had done the same.” Mog stood stock-still. If he concentrated on the changed configuration of shapes and colours reflected back by old glass, her father would realise she was standing at the door. She backed out of the room and returned down the corridor.

Edith was in the hall going through the mail, which lay unopened for days sometimes, accruing in the clay rack Ottilie had made for her mother at school, its ochre-yellow glaze dotted with acorns and oak leaves. Mog came up behind Edith on stockinged feet, and saw that what she held in her hand was a brochure for a residential home. It was dense and fat and glossy, saturated with design and ink and money. Young adults smiled out of the cover illustrations. Edith turned to find Mog standing behind her.

“Mog! What are you doing creeping about?”

“I didn’t mean to intrude, sorry.”

Edith and Mog both looked at the brochure, still in Edith’s hand.

“It’s because I’m thinking about Ursula.”

“Ursula?”

“Henry and I are both getting old. We need to think about what happens to Ursula when we’re gone. We can’t expect any of you children to take on her care. She doesn’t need care. That’s not the word. Her supervision. It wouldn’t be fair.”

“I think you might have trouble convincing Ursula to move.”

“It’s more for you children’s sakes. I’ll leave it in the office drawer with the wills.”

“You are feeling alright?”

“Perfectly. But I’ve had a reminder lately, being so ill, that we’re none of us immortal.”

“I thought you believed we were.”

“It’s good to see you. It’s been so long. I was beginning to think something was amiss. Putting us off and off.”

“I wasn’t well. Just a virus that wouldn’t go away. And busy at work, and the weeks passed. I kept meaning to come and then it didn’t happen.”

Edith hugged her, lingering over it, running one hand over her hair and down her back, and rubbing at the place between her shoulder blades. “You don’t have to explain. Just very glad to see you.”

***

The last time Mog had been to Peattie was almost two months before. She’d volunteered to relinquish her bedroom at Pip’s flat for a long weekend so that Joan could have it. Joan had been hinting for over a year that she’d love a weekend visit, and finally Angelica had invited her.

Euan and Joan are pleased unanimously with Pip. Pip they agree about. Jet they agree partly about, united in seeing that he’s a disaster, though Euan considers him lost, has written him off and has told him so, flat calmly, without the opinion seeming to affect him at all, like dispensing with a car that hadn’t been worth much to start with. Joan still thinks that Jet will change, that his revelation and ambition are on their way to him. All four of her children, she says, will turn out to be exceptional in some way or other, though one or two of them might mature late and take their time.

Even Joan had to concede that the Edinburgh visit hadn’t been a great success. She didn’t know enough people in town and Pip worked long hours at the bank. Angelica seemed to expect her to have things to do, her own friends to see, arrangements of her own. She had been surprised to get home to the flat in the evening and find Joan there, watching television. Her surprise had seemed exaggerated. She’d given the unmistakable impression that she’d really rather be alone.

Joan had picked up on this, and then Angelica saw that she had, and became immediately more solicitous. “I hope you’ve helped yourself to coffee, cake, lunch.”

“No, but I’ve been fine,” Joan told her, returning to the newspaper, feeling satisfied that she’d managed in some part to replicate Angelica’s don’t-fuss approach, her shrinking from elaboration, which Joan, quick to absorb and adapt, was fast making her own.

When Pip came home, his shirt sleeves turned up, bringing in a photocopier scent and the smell of fabric conditioner mixed with sweat, and had been into the kitchen to see Angelica, he’d come and sat by his mother bearing two gins, and had mentioned, with studied casualness, Joan’s lack of initiative with the kettle.

“I don’t like to poke about in other people’s cupboards,” Joan told him.

“Other people? I’m hardly that.”

Pip saw at once that his mother’s refusal to relax and treat the flat as a home from home was a punishment. She was punishing him for his being too busy to welcome her properly (though he had warned her of this on the phone beforehand), for not making more time to ensure she was happy.

They’d taken her to a drinks party in a flat across the road. Joan stood at the window of this other flat and pointed out her son’s equally grand accommodation, just visible through the trees: there was a private garden, accessible only by key, in the centre of the square, which wasn’t a square at all, in fact, but rounded—two handsome, semi-circular stone terraces known collectively as a circus. She’d taken up position at the window, intercepting others there. Going into the kitchen for another drink, she’d found three women standing together, work colleagues, their briefcases piled on a chair. They were kind enough to welcome her and agreed good-humouredly to change the subject from that of the bank and banking’s travails. One of them was having an affair, it transpired. The lover and the husband were both there, in the other room.

“How long has this been going on?” Joan asked, fascinated.

“Two years.”

“How do you manage it, keeping it secret?”

“Actually it’s easy. I’m not having a problem with it.”

“I have a secret,” Joan told her. “One I’ve had to keep for over a decade. I’m finding it almost impossible. It gets worse as time passes, not better: be warned.”

“Thanks, but I’ll be fine,” the woman said.

“You say that now.”

“That’s right. I do.”

“So what kind of secret?” one of the other women asked. “Well, you know, if I told you that . . .”

“Give us a hint.”

“It’s something that—how do I put this?—something that makes you sit up in bed in your sleep and open your eyes and fight to breathe.”

“Bloody hell.”

“You’re a callgirl,” the affair woman chipped in, gesturing with her drink and delighted. “No, wait, I’ve got it. You do those older woman sex chat lines.”

Everybody had laughed, even Joan. Then she said, “Actually, that’s not the secret. The secret is that I dislike my husband.”

Pip came into her field of vision from the left. She could tell by his face that he’d heard. Angelica took her elbow and steered her away. They’d gone out of the room and out of the front door, straight down the stairs without pause, and into the car. Nobody spoke on the way to the Private View, and immediately they got there Joan was forcibly seated, shoulders pressed gently down, into the soft deep welcome of an armchair, placed there by Angelica and told not to move, a soda water with lemon slices put into her hand, a black coffee placed on the side table. She’d fallen asleep and had woken with her head thrown back against the wall, mouth ajar and a crick in her neck. The crush had diminished into a last lingering half-dozen, Pip and Angelica among them, coats over their arms, the dark sculpted voids of the exhibit rising behind.