The White Lie (20 page)

“I come to Peattie at the weekends.”

“Of course you do. At least you have Peattie.”

From Euan there was the manifesto of single-minded hard work.

“You do a lot of reading at the cottage, I hear.”

“That’s right.”

“Well, at least, not having a television, you get your school work done. Ours is on all the time.”

I couldn’t think of a reply to this.

“You’re very able, and you apply yourself, and that impresses me, Michael.”

“Thanks, Uncle Euan.”

“I wish I could convince Joan to get rid of our TV. Pip’s barely read a book he didn’t have to since he was ten. Good for you—you’ll go far.”

Why does this outstandingly banal conversation stick in my head? I think they were the kindest words Euan ever spoke to me.

***

In the autumn Edith got the photographs out of the box again. Henry came into the bedroom late at night, as was now his habit, much later than had ever previously been usual. He’d begun staying up drinking, alone in his study with the dogs watching him. He wouldn’t talk to anybody about it. He’d wait until he was sure Edith must be asleep before he came to their room, dreading the intimacy of conversations held in the dark. But on this particular night she was lying in wait patiently in her nightclothes, a rug wrapped around cold shoulders, sitting on her bed with the box. Henry came into the room and turned on his heel when he saw what awaited him. Edith pleaded for just one more conversation about the photographs, just one more and she promised there wouldn’t be another. After this the box would be resealed and would go into the attic to be among the photographed dead.

“I know you’re tired,” she said. “I’m tired too. It’s a relief, sleep. It takes us out of this. Reading takes us out of this. Drinking takes us out of this. This situation.”

Henry considered her words, and then he said, “The thing is, Edith, that we don’t think the situation is the same.”

“Not that again.”

“It’s not an
again
. It’s a
still
. I still feel it. I’ll keep feeling it. And that’s that.”

“Henry,” she said. “I admire you. I admire your hanging on to the hope that Michael’s not dead. But Henry.” Her hands turned palms upward. “I think it would be better for you if you didn’t.”

“You’re saying to me that it would be better if he had drowned, Edith. Is that really what you’re saying?”

“It would be better if you could let go of your anger. Thinking he’s out there and doesn’t care, hasn’t loved us enough to spare us this. To take this burden from us. Thinking there’s a kind of evil in him.”

Henry was looking intently at his shoes. Flexing his toes in his trainers.

“You have to face facts,” Edith told him. “Face them, Henry. Ursula has never told a lie. Alan has his faults but there’s no earthly reason why he’d claim Michael was dead if he wasn’t. Alan, of all people. And look.” She paused. “Here’s the thing, Henry, that I want to say to you. Michael loved you. He loved you, Henry.”

Henry was in tears. He took his handkerchief out of his pocket and pressed it folded to his eyes. His fingernails were bitten short.

“The trouble is,” he said through his hands, “the trouble is that I’m sure Michael’s alive.”

“How? Why are you sure?”

Henry didn’t answer.

“Henry. This is important. Look at me. Promise you’ll answer this question honestly. Henry. Promise.”

“I promise.”

“Have you heard anything of Michael, since he disappeared? Something you’re not telling me?”

“No.”

“You promise.”

“I promise.”

10

On the ninth day after I disappeared my mother was well enough to talk, or at least it was the first day that Edith found her willing to. Edith went out to the coast, driving very slowly in the lumbering old car (a vehicle they didn’t have road tax or an MOT for, thinking it hardly worth the effort, it was used so seldom), not really wanting to arrive anywhere and with no expectations. She sat parked for quite a while, her face registering her internal battle, before she got out and went to the door. It wasn’t just the events and politics of my disappearance that kept her coming here, day after day. She had something she wanted Ottilie to know, something she’d never talked about with anyone. She thought that Ottilie knew already. She thought it probable that Ottilie didn’t know that Edith knew: at this point in the thinking the whole thing presented itself as a knot, knotted up with possibilities, and Edith was desperate for it to be unknotted. What she wanted was for the two of them, she and Ottilie, to admit to each other the truth, long-buried and long-mourned. This was her seventh day of visiting, and the previous six attempts had all ended in failure, in ducking out; she’d been too nervous to embark.

For a seaside house the cottage is surprisingly gloomy. It was built in the early 18th century, and its tiny windows were designed to keep the sea and the weather out. It’s in an unshowy working village, with harbour walls of a thick grey stone, walls thick enough to promenade along the top of in fine weather, ascending from precarious, worn stone stairways. The cottages along the harbour-front are harled with gritty outer coatings and painted in sugar almond colours, and stand shoulder to shoulder against the wind. Creels are piled on the quayside, smelling powerfully of seaweed and stale water and foul crustacean panic, alongside coils of blue rope and oddments of orange twine. Outsized metal rings remain set into concrete for the tying-up of ships that no longer visit; the hobby yachts bob on their moorings among the few remaining fishing boats, though no one makes much of a living any more; a modest net of haddock’s landed for the locals, and a box or two of lobsters take the overnight train. This is the community that my mother has made fiercely her own. She’s seen often at the wilder stretches of coast, a few miles’ drive away, taking photographs and sketching. Lately she’s been working on big canvases that look like they are made up of patches of scratchings and doodles up close, but resolve themselves, once the viewer steps back, into almost life-size observations of sections of cliffside geology and botany, cross-hatched by rain.

Ottilie hadn’t left the cottage for a week, other than to go out onto the road to get groceries when the mobile shop came round. She spent the days in the studio and the nights in my old room, in my unwashed sheets with my unwashed pyjamas bundled up as a pillow. Edith knocked on the main door and, getting no answer, went round to the rear of the house and was let into the studio without a word. It’s a separate building, converted and extended from a shed: the conversion won an architectural award. Ottilie was immersed, had reimmersed herself there, in work and in ocean light. Charcoal in hand, she had already noted, guiltily, that sorrow seemed to have improved her line. Work was going surprisingly well.

This is the world after a bereavement, a self-bereavement, self-mourned. Days and nights continue their cold-hearted progress, undaunted by your loss, the numbers on the calendar and minutes on the clock continually in motion. In the days following my death the allium opened in their hundreds in the woods, in garlic-scented massed ranks. Nothing comes to a slow stop to accommodate grief. The world fails to tip its cap. The sun might shine, the morning after you’re gone, and it’s hard not to take offence at such blatant disregard. Dogs need feeding, and so do people, and washing piles up, and there’s little point in forsaking clean socks. From that inevitable basis a kind of normality springs. Whether it should or not is moot. You could make a case for the need of greater ritual. You could make a case, in this instance, for some vital link having been missed out in the family’s journey from catastrophe to stoicism; you could argue that it moved from catastrophe to stoicism all too smoothly.

Ottilie let it be known in various unspoken ways that she wasn’t pleased to be interrupted.

“We have to talk about Michael,” Edith said to her, following her in.

Ottilie’s answer was immediate and forceful. “There’s nothing to say though, is there? You don’t want to talk about justice. All you’re interested in is protecting Ursula.” She scrutinised her mother’s face. “You don’t look well.”

“I’m fine,” Edith said. “Is that coffee hot?”

It was difficult to know how to proceed. Ottilie poured their coffee from the pot in silence, and they drank in silence, each looking in different directions, Edith out at the view, Ottilie towards her sketchbook on the table.

“Please don’t think that I don’t understand,” Edith said at last, quietly to the dunes and the sea.

“Understanding isn’t the point,” Ottilie told her.

“No justice could be possible now, though, could it? Not now. We’ve passed out of the zone of justice; we’re in the zone of disaster here, and all that can be done about a disaster is that people try to recover. That’s how it is after an accident.”

“It was no accident.”

“After an accident blaming is natural; it’s natural but futile, my darling. All we can do now is grieve. Not just for Michael, but also for Ursula. The way her life has changed.”

“The way her life has changed?” Incredulously.

“Yes.”

“You can’t just let her go unpunished—that’s monstrous,” Ottilie said. She got up and poured her coffee down the sink. “What upsets me is that you never look at this from Michael’s viewpoint. It isn’t fair that he’s thought to have run away and never got in touch again. Think for a moment how that makes me look. And please: come on.
Come on
. You’re not thinking straight about the gravity of this.”

“Accident,” Edith murmured.

“It makes no sense to me that you of all people would deny your grandson a Christian burial, Mother.”

While Edith and Ottilie were having this conversation, Henry was going methodically around the house with the box, removing all remaining photographs of me and photographs that included me, as if I were being disinherited: more and worse than that, as if I were being disborn. Edith was distressed by this, by getting home to find the box of photographs sitting by the study door, but said nothing. The one of me in the little blue coat sat on top of the pile.

***

Edith said that she would leave Ottilie to it; she could see that she was busy.

“Please don’t be huffy with me,” Ottilie said. “I can’t take it. I can’t.”

“I’m not being huffy. There was something I wanted to talk to you about but this isn’t the time.”

Ottilie didn’t rise to the bait. “Okay,” she said, opening the door. “Another time. And can you call me before you come again. It’s very hard to take up the spirit of a drawing again once you’ve been interrupted.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Come at lunchtime next time.”

As Edith went back to the road, she could hear Ottilie weeping, a loud and uninhibited weeping, desolate and unrestrained. Coincidentally it sounded as if she was saying
her
over and over: her-her-her-her. A-her, her, her her. Edith paused on the path listening; it looked for a few minutes as if she’d return to the studio, but she didn’t return. She turned away. She said aloud to herself, “If it was me, I’d rather do that alone.” She herself began to weep, then, and her journey home was one in which she had frequently to wipe her face and blow her nose, driving one-handed, fumbling for fresh tissues from a box on the passenger seat of the car.

“You’ll have to tell her that you know,” she said to herself several times.

Her eyes were puffy and her nose pink, and so, feeling that she couldn’t go back into the house, Edith went into Peattie via the loch entrance, parked by the back door and went down the path to the wood. As she drew closer she could hear shouts, shouts interrupted by laughter, a high-spirited argument, and as the loch came into view she saw that kids from the village—four boys, about 14 years old—had helped themselves to the boat and were having a high old time. Three of them, that is, were having a high old time: a fourth was the unfortunate they were trying to throw into the loch, his pleas reverberating along the valley. They promised him that he was about to have an encounter with Michael Salter that he wouldn’t forget. He’d been manoeuvred almost to loss of balance, his back braced and one leg raised ready to kick, hanging on tight to the edge of the boat with determined white hands. Edith hurried back down the path to the house. She had to tell somebody. Who could she tell? Not Henry. Who then? Joan was sitting in the kitchen looking at paint charts, and so it was Joan that she told.

“Oh god. What will we do?” Joan jumped up. “What will we do? We have to do something.”

“It’s got to the village,” Edith said. “They know in the village. It must have been Alan.”

“I’m going to find him and have this out,” Joan said, leaving the room. Edith paced up and down the kitchen while she was away. Twenty five minutes felt like hours, but when Joan got back she looked more relaxed.

“It’s alright,” she said, as she came back in. “It’s alright. I’m sure it wasn’t Alan. He seemed as horrified as we are. But he had an explanation. Suicide. There’s a suicide rumour.”

Privately, Joan wasn’t as sure as she made out that Alan hadn’t started the rumour, but she wanted, above all else, to provide her mother with certainties.

***

The first time that the family used the boat again was on the first anniversary of my disappearance.

Pip came home for the weekend from his new job in Edinburgh, full of carefully disguised enthusiasms for it, for the city, for work, for the shabby rental over a video hire shop that he shared with three law students. He knew that, diplomatically, it must always be said that it’s hard to be away from home. Almost the same minute he arrived, he announced that he and Mog were going out on the loch, that they’d decided that it was time. Joan protested that it was too soon. Euan said that was nonsense and they could do what they liked, but they had better not be seen doing it.

“There isn’t any aspect of this that’s about searching,” Pip argued. “It’s the opposite of that. It’s about resuming. Has it occurred to you that in the village they’ll also be wondering why nobody uses the boat any more?”