The White Lie (18 page)

“I’m going out in the boat,” I said to her. That was the only thing I could come up with in order to shed Ursula and her judgments.

Her response astonished me. “Can I come with you?”

“You don’t ever—I thought you didn’t . . .” I was taken aback.

“If I come out in the boat, I can change,” she told me, her face deadly earnest.

“No, no,” I said. “That’s such a bad idea.”

“Bad?”

“Well, look. Well, look, alright. If you’re sure.”

“I’m sure.”

“You can come out in the boat,” I told her. I had my own discreditable reasons for changing my mind. “Would you like to row?”

She shook her head, eyes shut. “I could never do that.”

She got into the boat where it stood, beached high on the shore. She was so slight that her weight made very little difference to the effort involved in the launch. She gasped as the water took hold, as her seat lifted and slid into buoyancy and the oars began their work. She was wearing Great Aunt Tilly’s pale blue dress, which had bluer embroidery, cornflowers, raised and silky on the bodice and around the scalloped hem. I would see her sitting there in the boat very many times in the days that followed: Ursula smiling at me from under her white hat, also one of Tilly’s, a hat woven out of a kind of knitted white nylon straw, broad-brimmed and opaque, throwing open-weave shadows over her face.

I had a plan now. One I’d had to improvise. I’d done a stupid, reckless thing telling her that I was leaving. Unless I took Ursula with me in the boat there was nothing I could do to delay her running back to the house and raising the alarm, shouting out her news and bringing them all running down here. Finding that I’d already left, they might have given chase in the old car: an absurd, Buster-Keatonish scenario but also one that was possible. Here was a way out of the problem. Here’s what I could do. I could get her out into the middle of the loch and I could leave her there. I could dive into the water, out of the boat, leaving her stranded there until Alan came for her. That way her news would be greatly delayed and I’d have plenty of time to make a head start. This would work. Alan was already on his way. I looked at my watch. We’d arranged to meet on the beach in 20 minutes and I needed to get on with this.

Had Ursula left the loch immediately, running off to tell my mother that I was leaving, she would in any case have found the drawing room deserted. It was too early yet for the afternoon assembly. Edith and Henry had been into town, each with their own mission; it had been so long since Henry had left the estate that he’d had first sight of the then eight-year-old one way road system. It was only blind luck that he didn’t blunder in on the scene at the loch when he got back. Ordinarily he’d bring the dogs down to the beach for a swim when they’d been penned in for any time, but he was tired and hot from driving and shops, and took them out the other way, a shorter greener way, through the planted arch that leads towards the folly and pond, over the stile and into the pasture, walking along in the tree shade at the edge of the field while the dogs ran about sniffing and peeing.

Edith, who was finding the heatwave exhausting, was having a nap. Mog was in her room at the gatehouse. Joan and Euan were on their way back from Glasgow with Pip and Izzy. Jet was in his cottage, which had been granted to him, at 17, on the same terms of domestic half-independence as Ursula’s; the minimum conditions he’d accept in order to stay in the vicinity of home. Jet was no longer speaking to his father, having, according to Euan, purposely sabotaged his future by doing zero work for his exams. Jet said he was asleep and didn’t hear or see anything useful.

Which leaves Vita and Mrs Hammill. They were in the drawing room together. Mrs Hammill was doing puzzles from her crossword book, using the tortoiseshell-rimmed glasses that hang around her neck on a chain, fingering the back of her hairline, saying to Vita that she must make an appointment for another permanent wave. Vita, who has poor circulation and feels cold almost all of the time, was dozing by the window, enjoying a warming patch of sunlight, which fell in window-blocked rectangles that flowed like draped cloths over the furnishings and onto the floor. Because she had her chair on a three-quarter tilt, Vita saw no one come up the steps, though she did hear footsteps above her, she said, running across the ceiling and running back a few minutes later. Of course, as she pointed out at the time, her not seeing an approach from the front wasn’t really significant anyway; it was just as possible Michael had come in the rear entrance. The doors weren’t locked during the day. She didn’t say anything to Mrs Hammill at the time, about the footsteps; Mrs Hammill was engrossed and didn’t appear to have noticed. Pity, as she would have known the time and Vita had no idea, couldn’t even guess at it. She didn’t think anything of it, the footsteps creaking on the stairs and on the floor above, the sounds of doors being opened and closed. Children were always running about, in and out: Izzy and her friends from the village, other children here to play tennis, she said. Mog and Michael had been playing almost every day.

***

Pressed for more details, Mog told Rebecca about the money and the picture: about my theft, on the day I disappeared, of two things, of £2000 from Henry, from a supposedly secret drawer in Henry’s bureau, and of a watercolour of Sanctuary Wood that used to hang above it. These things I am assumed by strangers to have taken with me when I left. The brown-paper parcel with the £2000 in it has prompted several interesting questions. What was it doing there?

“Isn’t it amazing how the opportunistic burglars of old folk are always finding great wads of cash in tea caddies and in sock drawers?” Christian Grant had said to Mog over their ill-starred dinner, having heard about the money and trying, unsuccessfully, to winkle more out of her. Christian, a widowed neighbour, was invited to ask Mog out by her mother, and Mog had only agreed because it was too embarrassing to refuse. It had been a stilted evening in a solemn restaurant, waiters outnumbering diners, cutlery noisy on china; there had been an inept kiss goodnight, Mog turning away and kissed on the ear. But he’s right, it is amazing that Burglar Bill has such luck with the old folk, when the rest of us—bank-trusting, ATM-savvy, plastic-trained—might only be able to offer him some loose change in a plant pot behind the kettle amounting to £4.55.

Here’s the family version:
Michael ran up the stairs unseen. He went along the corridor to his room, where regularly he spent the night and where he kept some of his things. He may have taken some personal effects; the drawers were left askew, suggesting haste and upset, though as nobody knows what was there it’s hard to say what. He went into his grandparents’ bedroom and took the watercolour from the wall. He opened the secret drawer of Henry’s bureau, hidden inside what appears to be the moulding, and took a brown envelope containing £2000
.

Except it wasn’t me. It was Alan Dixon.

9

When she arrived at the high school Ottilie was told to wait in the corridor outside the rector’s office. The rector: that’s what they call headteachers round here. It was a cold and blustery day, and having been summoned to see him, she was on a recognisably war footing; at her most disarmingly anachronistic, wearing a long fitted dress in a green that flattered her colouring and a dark blue velvet cloak, her hair elaborately up. The rector came round the corner holding a bulging buff-coloured file, and seeing Ottilie waiting, and her armouring, he was thrown off his stride for a moment; thrown sideways, but only for a moment. Tall, crop-haired, flat across the hips and shoulders, long legs an undefined presence in his trousers, Mr Dunstane looked like an ex-policeman and that’s what he was. He loped along with a swinging gait, big feet pointed slightly out, in his dark grey suit and school tie, his shoes and identity pin gleaming, and when he caught Ottilie’s eye he glanced quickly away again. The proffered hand was cool and dry.

Mr Dunstane spent a few moments arranging his jacket around his chair, easing his trousers free at the knees before sitting. His fingers flicked through the file. One finger caressed his nose, up and down and along the line of the septum, up and down as he was reading. Then the file was closed. Now he was ready to look at Ottilie. He told my mother that I was to be asked to leave.

“What? Just like that? On what grounds?”

“I’m coming to that.”

“Because of the Coterie?”

“That and other things.”

“What harm does the Coterie do, can I ask?”

Mr Dunstane’s brow furrowed. His nostrils flared. “The
Corrupt
Coterie,” he said, by way of reply.

Ottilie couldn’t keep from tutting. “It’s just a reference,” she said impatiently. “For heaven’s sake.”

“A reference?”

“It wasn’t a name they dreamed up. Have you read the membership book? It was the name of a society at Oxford that a relative of his was involved in. It’s a sort of homage.”

“That’s what worries me.”

Anticipating this conversation, she had a copy of the book, skinny in its faded paper covers, really only a pamphlet, folded lengthwise in her hand, and she placed it on the table between them.

“You do know about the family connection?”

“David Salter. The soldier. Thank you, I have my own copy.” He took it out of the back of the file and opened it at centre pages that were heavily marked in yellow highlighter.

“Articles of Faith. Item one. There is no god but pleasure.” He looked at Ottilie as if expecting a reaction but didn’t get one. “The Coterie have been introducing drugs in the school.”

“Marijuana, you mean.”

Mr Dunstane produced a small plastic bag, in a corner of which a variety of pills had clustered. He reached across to hold it up in front of Ottilie’s face. “This, I believe, is not marijuana.”

“Michael wouldn’t—”

“Michael won’t deny that these are his property.”

“Where did you find them?”

“In the common room, behind the encyclopedias.”

“How did you know they were there?”

“We were tipped off. I’m not prepared to say more than that at this time.”

“And how do you know they are Michael’s?”

“Information received. He hasn’t denied that they are his property.”

“What did he say? I presume this happened today.”

“This morning. Michael and I had an interview and then Michael left the school.”

“He’s not here?”

“We imagined he’d gone home.”

“He’ll have gone to Peattie.”

“Ah.”

“What did he say at this interview?”

“He wouldn’t speak to me.”

“He hasn’t said anything at all?”

“He said ‘it makes no difference’. That was all.”

“Will you go to the police?”

“No. Not if you take Michael out of sixth year by Friday.” Mr Dunstane put his fingertips together, making a triangle of his hands, and looked intently at it. “I’m a great believer in facing facts, and the plain fact is that Michael doesn’t want to be here. He’s 18; he should be doing something that interests him. He has no interest in learning.”

“I’d dispute that.”

“His apathy is highly infectious.”

“It’s a Corrupt Coterie thing, that young men should look charmingly bored.”

“He has been coming into school wearing make-up.”

“Eyeliner, cravat, cigarette holder, black nail polish. Look at photographs of David Salter—I have one here and you’ll see that—”

“Please.” His hand came up. “Article two. Awake from the opium dream of the cosy life.”

“He’s quoting Edmund Gosse. Misquoting him.”

“What would you say about this? I quote: the lower classes must learn once more to know their place.”

“It’s satire.”

“Is it? Michael’s set to inherit Glen of Peattie estate, I believe. I’m afraid that one of our teachers interprets these sorts of statements as harassment of the less privileged.”

“That’s idiotic.”

“That’s how she feels, and I have to tell you that she has some support here.”

“It’s been decided Michael won’t inherit singly, as it happens. Peattie’s to be divided up, in ownership I mean, not literally, between the grandchildren equally. Him and his cousins.” Now she spoke more irritably: “You do know what it means, Peattie, don’t you? It’s a responsibility, it’s a tie, it’s a money pit. It’s more of a burden than anything. It costs a fortune to maintain.”

“And Michael knows this: that he won’t inherit singly?”

“Of course.”

“And how does he feel about it?”

“He isn’t happy. That’s my point. You ought to make allowance for that. He isn’t as privileged as he thought.”

Why did she tell him all this? I wish she hadn’t. It would be all round the Rotary Club by Saturday.

“Miss Salter,” he said, wearily. “It is
Miss
Salter, isn’t it? The ethos of a school is very important, I think you’ll agree. Its spirit. Its collective sense of purpose.”

“Which is undermined by black nail polish and silly undergraduate humour?”

“Which is undermined by drugs.”

“I need to talk to Michael,” she told him, rising and leaving the room.

“Jet,” she said to her driving mirror. “He will come forward and confess or I will have his guts for garters.”

At Peattie, Edith counselled caution.

“Did you mention Jet’s name to the school? As the likely party?”

“No. Has Jet been dealing in drugs, Mother? Has there been any hint from Joan?”

“Absolutely not. It isn’t possible, Ottilie.”

“Of course it’s possible.” She didn’t mention that she knew Jet had been selling marijuana around the sixth form. The school knew that most of the sixth form had been smoking weed. It was smoked on such a scale that they didn’t really have a choice but to ignore it: one expulsion would have led to mass expulsions, and inevitable media disgrace.

Now I came into the room.

“I’m leaving school anyway,” I said, before Ottilie could speak. “I’d rather do the exams at the college. No point getting Jet booted out as well. Let me deal with him.”

“The college is a terrible place,” Edith piped up. “Do they even do Highers? I thought it was all welding and hairdressing there.”