The White Lie (19 page)

“You sound like Vita, Mother,” Ottilie said. “Of course they do Highers. Not Latin, though. But we can get around that.”

***

We’re moving on, to a day about 12 months later, to an afternoon in the study at Peattie. Edith and Henry were talking about what was to be done with me, the 19-year-old me. I was there also, but they were talking over my head. I was sitting and they were standing. There were other times in my life in which I was a ghost.

“And why was he sacked from the bookshop?” Henry was pacing, slapping a thin hardback volume against his thigh as he paced. It was Tilly’s book once. Every time he slapped it, it released its sickroom smell.

“For reading,” Edith admitted placidly.

“And the gallery job Ottilie got him? Tardiness. And the hotel position? Persistent scruffiness, despite being warned in writing. You can’t serve tourists their cream tea in torn jeans. What’s wrong with black trousers and a clean white shirt? Turning up late with his hair unbrushed and over his eyes.”

“He’s a teenager, Henry,” Edith said. “And six feet two inches tall. He’s grown like a beanstalk this year. He’s tired a lot of the time. And he maintains that the denims were new.”

“He keeps too-late hours,” Henry told her. “A man can’t expect to go to bed at two and rise for work at seven.”

He caught sight of me now as if I’d just appeared. “You keep too-late hours, Michael. You have to grow up a bit. If you’re not going to college you need to take work seriously. Your mother can’t afford to keep you.”

I didn’t respond to this, although I could have, pointing out that Ottilie volunteered a sizable chunk of her earnings to estate maintenance. Henry opened the book and looked at it blindly, before throwing it on to the desk. “It’s like you don’t really have respect for the working week, Michael,” he said. “Like it’s beneath you.”

“Of course it’s beneath me,” I said. “It’s beneath everybody.” I didn’t make the speech that I wanted to, the one in which I’d point out that Henry didn’t know much about the working week either, and was in no position to judge.

Looking back on these encounters, I’m not sure what kind of a human being I was then or whether I was adequate, even. I think I’m kinder now. Teenagers, boys especially, aren’t renowned for their engagement with others, and especially not with those who have or assert authority. If they have fires, these boys, they’re damped down in the presence of those people, or misdirected. If they have vital sources of empathy, they might reveal them only obliquely or not at all. In many ways I was a typical teenager, though whether I was typical of myself, my hidden self, I couldn’t say. There seemed too much that was inexpressible. A lot of the time damping down was overdone. I felt as if I were standing on the wall of a vast dam looking out at a great dry valley, aware of millions, trillions of tons of water at my back. You could have taken a photograph of it from the air, that vast wide dam, and spotted a tiny figure supporting it, his arms held wide, and that would have been me.

Embarking on anything amounting to a shared confidence, any admission of weakness or doubt, felt as if it would ease open a low door in the wall, that the door wouldn’t hold, that the pressure would bow and break it and torrents would rain down. When I was young I loved that 1960s film
Jason and the Argonauts
, the one with all the stop-motion characters in it. We didn’t have television at the cottage but Henry would alert me if it was on and we’d watch it together, sound turned low, on his secret bedroom TV. It was taken out of a locked cupboard, a small black-and-white set, and placed on the bureau top; the internal aerial took endless fiddling with to bring any picture out of snow and crackle. Talos, the giant bronze figure who in mythology had one vein running from head to toe, a vein that could be undone via a single brass nail in his ankle (Achilles-like, then, but with a much more obvious case of fundamentally bad design): Talos, I understood. Bad news about my father: it’s possible that it would have undone me far worse than no news, so perhaps my mother’s judgment was good. At least in the arena of ignorance there was also mystery, and mystery could talk itself into a romance. Dam walls; metal gods with fatal weaknesses: the metaphors mixed themselves in dreams. And of course, a key point, one you will already have noticed, is that I thought of myself, my situation, too much and too deeply. Too much and too often. It was a fatal, unbreachable inwardness. Not that I think it was particularly unusual, to be that way. It’s a condition common to teenage boys, I suspect; not that lack of rarity helps anybody. The circumstances were atypical, but not that weight of emotion, that pressing weight, and the contradictory (it seemed at the time) pressure to be self-contained, certain, strong, unemotive at all costs. Because that was manly. The example of the great uncle hung heavily over all of us.

I loved and hated my mother. This simultaneous reality seemed to be unique to me. It wasn’t something I could talk even to Mog about, which was ironic because she would have generalised her own experience and told me that it was a state of affairs near universal in its ordinariness. There are certain subjects that can’t be discussed: there are things that once entertained as possibilities set themselves into fact, though they are also just the sorts of things that retreat from factualness when re-examined. These are things that change our relationships, not least with ourselves. They’re things that are true only in their own inconsistent, paradoxical way, and that dissolve when we grasp them; sometimes it’s only by speaking the words that something becomes true. Trying to be definitive on questions of love and hatred didn’t help. Hatred wasn’t in any case even remotely the right word. If anyone spoke out against Ottilie, if they speak up against her now, I feel my blood rising to her defence.

I’m embarrassed to admit to this, but I’m afraid that all the clichés about insecure children testing parental boundaries applied illustratively to me. Could my mother find me intolerable to live with and still love me? Could she put up with constant questioning about my father and my rage, and still love me? Would the family—by which I meant Edith and Henry—take in their stride my distaste for school, for “getting on in life” via university and a profession, and be able to respect my intention to work in forestry, to earn little and live simply, and still love me? Looking back, there was something more than a little tedious in this, in the daily unrelenting task of living in and with this mind and travelling its daily circumlocutions. But these are among the memories that have persisted and survived. So much has been forgotten, so much lost. I wish often, in the wood in the night, that I could live my life over again in sequence, eidetically and a day at a time, and pencil in my footnotes. But memory won’t allow for that. So much has been lost.

What do I remember from my very early life? As little as most people. Running along topiary hedges. The iconography of the house, a sequence of rooms that seemed gigantic to me as a small boy, each with its own mood and smell. I remember wearing a small stiff coat in light blue tweed, its dark velvet collar, the matching short trousers, and thick white tights that showed between knee and patent shoe. Why would anyone dress a modern child that way? It was done for Christmas, aping old traditions, for Henry’s sake, no doubt. I remember being put into this uncomfortable clothing. Or maybe I don’t remember it. Maybe what I’m remembering is what I imagine happened when I saw the photograph—as often I did as it was mounted in a dark wood frame on the wall of Henry’s study for years. It showed me in the blue tweed, standing by a vast tree in the hall, its lights glinting behind me, the nose of a recumbent brown Labrador reaching up to sniff at my hand from beneath. It’s one of the photographs Henry took down from the wall, moving silently and methodically around the house with a box. It’s possible that I looked at it once and imagined what it must have been like to be three and dressed that way, and that the imagining has taken root as fact.

I’m sentimental about these early photographs. I have my own internal ones to add, especially of first days at school. There are images of a happy boy there. By six, though, the look had arrived: the look I’d have ever after. At six my mother had begun to educate me. She wanted me to know that my father was worthless, and that it wasn’t to be talked about other than for this key fact, one that prevented it being talked about. A single fact should be enough. In later years there was a little more elaboration. She wanted me to know how frequently and how casually men abuse women, that even a happy marriage abuses women in its pleasant dreadful way: that abuse of every kind was the norm from which she was determined I’d prove exceptional.

It was only when I’d gone that Edith noticed the look.

“He seems so angry in the photographs,” she said to Henry, two weeks after my disappearance, the two of them together late at night in their bedroom. “Look at him, Henry.” She began laying down successive images of me, one after another on the dressing table. “Look at him, Henry. Here, look at that defiance. Did you see that defiance? When he was—when he was with us?”

Henry didn’t answer.

“I don’t know why I haven’t seen it before” Edith said. “Was it there before? It looks new. It’s new to me.”

Henry went over to his wardrobe and began rearranging sweaters, taking them out of the cupboard in a heap, flicking their empty arms into position before folding and restacking them.

“Henry.”

“Yes,” Henry said. “I think there was something psychological from the beginning.”

“Psychological?”

“Some predisposition, I mean.”

“Predisposition—to be sad?”

“I think we should have pressed Ottilie to get him seen and onto medication of some kind.”

“You don’t think that her refusal to talk about Alan was enough of a reason? In itself?”

“I’m tired, Edith. I need to go to bed and to read.”

This was Henry’s way of bringing her late-night attempts at discussion to a halt, a historic one with many citable precedents. Tiredness can only be contested by the unsympathetic, after all, and Edith is never going to be that. Wanting to read: that’s a sacred desire.

***

When I was small and we lived at Peattie, I spent much of my time under the supervision of my grandmother. Henry was doing a little farming still at that time and wasn’t to be seen in the house and gardens much, so it was predominantly a female household of middle-aged and elderly women, comprising not just Edith but also Vita, Great Aunt Tilly, Mrs Hammill. My mother was absent most hours of the day, at the art college or else working.

My cousins at the gatehouse weren’t friends, in those early years. That only happened later, when we were teenagers and I came to the house alone. Chess with Jet, swimming with Mog, tennis with Pip and Mog: these were the beginnings of my intimacy with the Salter-Cattos, when I was 14. Before sport began to be a bridge, relations had remained formal and mutually suspicious. I was a serious child, sullen, given to sullen pronouncements, attempting serious reading beyond my age and scowling at interruptions. The gatehouse children kept their distance. Other boys were imported from the village for me to play with, when I lived at Peattie, but these experiments weren’t often a success. It was clear that special and hypocritical effort was being made, and children can sense that. I’d watch from the window seat in my room, watching the car coming up the drive, the mother reassuring the boy in the passenger seat that he was going to have a fun time, and clear knowledge of exactly the opposite written all over the victim’s face. I’d make an effort, at least for a half-hour or so, but then I could feel it failing, my interest in them, my determination to make the afternoon a success. Making an effort was almost worse. I asked about the fathers and how they made their money. I didn’t know this was rude. Why should it be rude? I was trying to be interested in them. I was just trying to do what Edith recommended and look interested.

It’s easy to point the finger at Ottilie, at the way she brought me up, at her remoteness, and I’ve been as guilty of this as anyone when it suited me. Generally, though, I’d speak up for her—to Joan and Euan, specifically, who were forever on our case once we’d left the estate, chipping away at what confidence remained. They weren’t buying Ottilie’s earnest pronouncements about hands-off parenting being best for children, about boredom leading to resourcefulness. The disdain was mutual. Ottilie was horrified by Joan’s approach to motherhood, and told her so, that she disapproved of Joan’s monitoring every hour of her children’s development, her scheduling-in of activities that filled the evenings. Poor Mog had ballet on her schedule, which she loathed, and also piano and French and gymnastics. Ballet and gymnastics were torture for a heavy child. Ottilie said that Joan wasn’t prepared to let her children be separate people with separate personalities and ideas. In turn, Joan made occasional threats about social workers.

But I might not have defended my mother energetically enough. There were times when I enjoyed Joan and Euan’s claims that they felt sorry for me, though it became obvious over time that this didn’t entail their attention or love. If I think of Peattie throughout my childhood and imagine how it would have been with no Joan and Euan in the gatehouse, having decommissioned them from the family, I’m afraid that it would have been vastly improved (though I’m not willing to let go of the cousins, who would’ve had to be painlessly orphaned). Joan and Euan were like two chemicals that when mixed together appear not to react very much—no explosions, no smoke—but who seep their poisons into the surroundings in a steady and deadly way. And of course, as is the way of these things, certainly for the deeply insecure, the harder a nut to crack their approval of me grew, the more I craved and yielded to it and offered up the sledgehammer.

From Joan there was constant advice to widen my social network.

“Don’t you have friends you can go to tea with after school?”

“Not really.”

“You’d be properly fed at least.”

“It’s fine.”

“You could come to us, of course, but we’re here and you’re there. Not exactly handy. There must be someone nearby. Do you have friends at school who’d let you spend the weekend with them?”