The White Lie (16 page)

“Why’s that?”

“Because Henry had them taken down and put away.”

“Angry with him.”

“Grieving.”

“So what was the trouble, what was it that made him go off?”

“You know how they say everybody has a story,” Mog said to her. “Sometimes a trivial thing. Mine is not finding what Dad calls my vocation, so far, anyway, or even a job I can bear to do. Well, anyway. That’s very dull news. Michael’s story was his being fatherless. He was obsessed. Even from ten years old.”

“How do you mean, obsessed?”

“With not knowing who he was.”

“Who he was?”

“Michael. Didn’t know who his father was. Ottilie wouldn’t tell him.”

“Oh god. That’s horrible.”

“You don’t know about Ottilie getting pregnant, the whole scandal, then.”

“No. I think I might have been protected from something so shocking.”

“Well. Ottilie, my mother’s twin, goes to a house party the weekend after my parents are married, while they’re off in Italy on honeymoon, and sleeps with some boy. Some random boy she met there. She’s 18 and one week old at the time. Exactly 18 and a week. I know that because my parents got married on my mother’s 18th birthday.”

“Also Ottilie’s birthday, surely.”

“Also Ottilie’s birthday. But because my mother declared she wanted to marry on her 18th, that only her 18th would do, the party that Gran was planning had to be cancelled, and the family across the valley, the Grants, offered to host it there instead, feeling sorry for poor Ottilie, done out of her 18th birthday.”

“I’m getting the feeling that Joan and Ottilie didn’t get on.”

“Rivalry. Bitter rivalry. Always.”

“That was kind of mean of your mother, hogging the limelight.”

“You’re right. Mean is the right word. Well, anyway. Ottilie goes off to this party, sleeps with some boy, won’t tell anybody who it was.”

“But surely. Process of elimination.”

“Fourteen boys. But don’t think Henry didn’t try. He went all over the county eliminating.”

“Ouch.”

“They didn’t know she was pregnant until ages later. Four months gone, when she started to show. Was never sick or anything. Too scared to speak up.”

“Blimey. And she never married?”

“No. No partners, boyfriends that we know of. Though Pip has a theory that she has lovers abroad, that that’s what all the trips overseas are really about.”

“Poor Ottilie.”

“Michael was always fighting with his mother. Like they say, it’s never about what it’s about. It was always really about his father, not knowing. He was angry a lot of the time. Everybody was irritated. But now I think, well, why didn’t you just tell him, Ottilie? If you’d just told him the name of the boy, the man. He could have tracked him down, confronted him, upset his wife, freaked out his halfsiblings. Lots of upset, maybe, but then over. Over. The boil lanced. She wouldn’t talk, though. He couldn’t get her to talk about it.”

Even in my very earliest memories it’s clear that my mother didn’t want to talk much about anything. Not unless it was about the work. She didn’t mean just her own work, by that, but any kind of creativity. She was absolutely clear that a life without it—
the work
—was a waste. That was a cultural divide with other people; a cliff, a wall, quite often a hole. She had very few friends, few I knew about, anyway. But this was the point, I suppose, and it’s something I’ve had time to think about, that the real romance of my mother’s life is with herself, her experience of being alive, her journey: this ongoing dialogue she has with her own consciousness. It made the rest of us pretty much redundant. She approved of me, as a teenager, in so far as I was a voracious reader, always reading, would walk down the street with a book open, walking into things. And writing. I was always writing something. So I passed muster, as far as it went. We had something to talk about, but it wasn’t a frequent conversation and of course it wasn’t what I wanted to talk about.

Not that I was neglected; people use that word and they’ve got it totally arse about face, but there’s no small talk with my mother, and even those who love her most would agree that she’s benignly self-absorbed. Shining a positive light on her behaviour would involve words like drive, focus, concentration. She has admirable levels of these. Her first thought when she wakes is how quickly she can get coffee and get into her studio. Sometimes eating is neglected. Foraging was the norm when I was young, and so I learned from an early age to help myself to something to eat. Often it was as if my mother forgot I was there, that I lived there. I’d interrupt her and she’d be surprised to see me, genuinely so, as if my being there was unexpected.

Our confrontations were tediously repetitive, seemed often to repeat almost word for word.

“You know I don’t talk about that, Michael.”

“But why not?”

“I don’t talk about it. It’s private. It’s a long time ago. It’s irrelevant.”

“Not to me.”

“Yes. To you. It was a one-night stand. I’ve told you and told you. He didn’t love you, Michael. He wasn’t interested.”

“But he’s my father. Imagine not knowing Henry. Imagine Edith not believing you had a right to know who Henry was.”

“A right! A right?”

“Yes. A right.”

“I’ve told you. A hundred times. You don’t have anything of his. He’s made no impact, negligible impact on you. You’re a Salter. You’re a Maclean. You’re Grandpa Andrew, you’re me, you’re Henry, you’re Vita. He doesn’t figure. He’s irrelevant to both of us.”

“Have I met him?”

“Michael!”

“Is he dead?”

“He might as well be.”

When I was 17, 18, it was Mog I talked to about it. Later, at 19, there developed for a time an odd intimacy with Ursula, but at 17 and 18 Mog was the confidante. That was the period of barely ever speaking about it with my mother; two years that she thought were years of improvement, ceasefire, peace. She’d talk to me more about the work, thinking it was safe to talk because things wouldn’t escalate. She thought I was listening and that we were getting on better. Edith would say to me as much: “I’m glad you and Ottilie are getting on better.” So it was an unpleasant surprise to all when the question began to itch again. It itched and it wouldn’t stop. The spring and summer weeks before I disappeared: that was the time of my most concerted and organised digging. I would do anything, embarrass anyone, create a scene anywhere. I had no sense of propriety, as Henry reminded me, though he slipped up one evening, telling me angrily that bad genes on my father’s side were no doubt to blame for my being so lazy and feckless (both of which I admit to readily).

Mog and Rebecca were walking back to the house. “It wasn’t just at home, either,” Mog said. “He was constantly in trouble. Fighting. Arguing with teachers about homework, grades, fairness, school policies, a real pain in the arse. Then when he’s 17 he decides he’s not going to go to university, he’s not going to sit his exams, he wants to work for the forestry commission, write, travel round the world—round countries that have forestry, anyway. Ottilie goes into a decline and Henry has
caniptions
. There’s a lot of arguing. Michael gets worse at school. They send him to an educational psychologist. Michael argues with her as well. Then he’s caught with drugs on him at school and expelled.”

“Oh god.”

“Quite. So he goes to the sixth-form college and lasts a week. Gets a series of low-paid jobs around here and doesn’t last long in any of them. Starts spending more and more time at Peattie. And then . . .”

Now is the moment to tell her about Ursula. It would be a relief to confide. “Then one day he leaves home. Not even a big fight, Ottilie says. Just the same kind of conversation they’d been having for years. But something snaps. Evidently. We don’t know why. He packs a bag, drives away, leaves his car at the loch, goes off on foot. Leaves a note in his room here.”

“In his room here?”

“Yes. They took a while to find it.”

“So he still had a room from when he was 11?”

“We all have rooms here. It’s a big house. It makes my grandmother happy. We can come and go. Stay any time. We help out while we’re here. It’s a good system.”

“What did the note say?”

“Hardly anything. No real clues. The father. Unhappiness about Ottilie’s attitude. His wanting to make a new life. That kind of thing.”

“Can I see it?”

“I don’t have it.”

“Why did he leave his car at the lake?”

“Mystery. That’s the mystery. Don’t know. Decided he didn’t want it, maybe. It was a present from Henry for his 18th. He’d had a row with Henry, too.”

“About his father?”

“About his father, about his treatment by the family.”

“What do you mean, treatment?”

“He never felt Henry treated him the same. Because he was illegitimate.”

“Surely that was wrong, he was wrong.”

“And he thought Henry knew.”

“Who his father was.”

“Yes.”

“And since that, nothing.”

“And since that, nothing,” Mog agreed.

8

On the fourth day after I disappeared, Joan invited Alan to tea. She said she needed clarification on a few things. She said to the family that she was going to have a conversation with Alan, at teatime, and that she’d welcome their being there. They were, of course, going to be there anyway. She was warning them against interfering, signalling that she was going to be running the show. Alan got there expecting tea with Joan but found himself in a situation rather more like an interview by a board of directors, with Joan chairing.

“It was good of you to come, Alan,” she said, handing him a teacup. “I wanted to ask you a last few things. I hope that’s alright.”

“Of course,” Alan said, “I’m happy to help in any way I can.”

Joan consulted her notes. “You said that you lost your shoes in the loch. The day Michael disappeared. New trainers I think it was.”

“That’s right.”

“That seems odd to me.”

Joan was suspicious of Alan at this time, believing him more likely than her sister to be the killer. By the autumn she would come to a different conclusion, deciding that I was alive and Alan a liar and Ursula easily indoctrinated, though I think that most of the impetus of this change rested in exonerating her parents from their inaction: if there was no death then there was no need for guilt, after all, and licence was granted to concentrate on the liar and the person misled. For now, however, Joan was the suspicious inquisitor general. “Why still have your shoes on? You didn’t remove them to go into the loch? You’re saying you took your trousers off over your shoes and left your shoes on?”

“I took them off, took off my trousers, then I put them back on.” Alan looked and sounded nervous.

“But why would you do that?” Joan asked him.

“I always swim in the loch in shoes. Don’t you? Everyone does. The pebbles are sharp. I’ve never swum there barefoot. Never. Nobody does.”

“Did you lose your shoes every time you swam there? Seems an expensive way to go swimming.”

“Not usually. But that day, I was in a panic. I didn’t tie them tight enough. That wasn’t even it. The point is, I didn’t untie and retie them. I shrugged them off, then forced my feet in again. I was in a hurry. You understand that. I’d seen Michael hit across the head, I’d seen him disappear into the loch. In fact, I was undressing even before she hit him. I didn’t tie them tight, like I would usually. They came off.”

“Even before she hit him? How do you mean?”

“I had a bad feeling. It came over me. A bad feeling.” He swam out there, he said, just in his underpants and his shoes and it was freezing cold. There was no sign of me. He dived and dived, and he couldn’t see anything. There was no trace of me. Gone like a stone.

Joan interrupted the flow of the narrative. “Forgive me, but I have trouble with this part of the story.”

“It’s not a story.” Alan’s contempt was obvious. “It’s just as I told you. No matter how many times you ask me it will be the same. And this will be the last time. I should tell you that. I’m not going to talk about this again unless it’s to somebody in uniform.”

“Are you threatening us?” Joan’s hostility was just as obvious.

Euan got hold of her arm. “I’m sorry, Alan. Joan isn’t herself. This will be the last time we ask you, unless, as you say, we wish you to present your story to the police.”

“My
story?”

Alan’s breathing had quickened into panting; the weather continued freakishly hot. He wiped his brow with one of his large white handkerchiefs, and folded it carefully up again. The implications of Euan’s words weren’t lost on him. Perhaps he was thinking, as I was, that Ursula’s credulity could swing two ways. Perhaps all it would take would be for someone to take her aside, and say they saw Alan kill Michael. Furthermore, that they saw that
she
saw Alan kill Michael.

Joan was sceptical about his not being able to see me under the water. But I’ve been down there and I can tell you that there’s nothing at all to be seen, there’s nothing he could have seen, unless he went very deep into the dark and was lucky enough to blunder into me. It would have had to be that accidental. And it’s likely he didn’t go far down. You will have to take my word for this, but conditions beneath the surface, out there in the middle of the loch, are claustrophobic and also agoraphobic. A phobia paradox. There is a feeling of enclosure, visibility being so poor, and yet at the same time this fact whispers in your brain: that the water stretches underneath you for hundreds of feet, stretching dizzyingly away, first of tea-coloured brown like strong milkless tea (peaty, in fact), but then, but then blackness, the abyss deep and unknowable as a starless night. Though actually it’s worse than that, is more like something grasping, a void that wants to clasp itself about you. It will pull you down and down in its embrace. Beyond a certain point there is the illusion of a gentle and constant suction, an uncompromising suction that will not let you rise. It’s occurred to me that people who’ve survived near-drowning here have spoken only metaphorically about the creature.