The White Lie (21 page)

“That’s a good point,” Joan said immediately.

Pip and Mog went down the loch path in silence. Together they hauled the boat from the shore, dragging furrows in the shingle, and they rowed out, still not having spoken, away at a diagonal towards the ruin that hugs the western side, a stumpy medieval relic, its walls weathered lower than man high. They rowed to the orange buoy, a fishing buoy, tied the boat off and stowed the oars. Though it was June, heavy sweaters were worn over shorts; there would be no repeat of the heatwave summer. They took two mildew-spotted cushions of faded cotton paisley out from under the tarpaulin that was stored folded at one end, adjusting them into pillows for their heads, and slouched down each at their own end of the boat, positioned just high enough to see each other’s faces across the thwart, the boat’s central raised plank.

At 19 Pip was slight, delicate-looking, and appalled to resemble his mother. By 25 he would become a different Pip entirely, having remade himself at the gym, and would return to Peattie wider across the shoulders, densely muscled in the upper arms, his neck and jawline bulked decisively away from their earlier femininity, in good tailoring in an open-top car, and would make them all, every last dismissive villager, eat flies open-mouthed. For now though, he was still mistaken with humiliating frequency for a girl.

They lay in silence for a while and then Pip said, “Do you think he’s dead? I don’t think Michael’s dead.”

Mog sat up straighter and looked out across the water. They were safely out of the death zone, having positioned themselves over at one side, a place in which it was just about possible to interact with the loch in the old way, free of associations and fears. She put a hand into the water, pushing it to and fro, feeling its weight and resistance, then raised it wet to her lips and kissed her fingers.

“What are you doing?”

Mog didn’t respond.

“Where did the money go?” Pip asked her. “And where’s the picture?”

“Into the boat with him.”

“Crap,” Pip said. “Crapissimo. Multo, multo turdo.”

“Maybe Henry misplaced it, lent it out, left it at the framer’s, sold it years ago and then forgot.”

“Nope.” Pip tapped his fingers against the boat interior, his hands above his head. There was safety in lying so low, at or under the waterline, the gunwales cupping around you. When we were young this was the ultimate venue for private talks: we’d drape the tarp across and make a cabin and take picnics that we’d eat lying almost flat, propped up just enough to avoid choking.

Mog twisted sideways to lean her forearms against the boat edge, for once unselfconscious about it, looking out with real curiosity across the water. They’d dream about it: each had confessed this to the other, about me in the loch: stumbling upon me washed up on the shore half-rotted, or encountering me while swimming, diving down and blundering into me, the thing I’d become. Mog had written about it in her journal.
Michael is down there somewhere, his flesh floating from his bones in long pale strands, waving gently like pondweed, his face obliterated. Even though Henry says not. What’s that Eliot line? “Those are pearls that were his eyes.” Though that always makes me think of a cooked trout on a plate
.

“He’s alive then,” she conceded. “He went off with the picture and the cash and left his clothes and his wallet in the car. Odd behaviour, but okay. I’ll buy it. So where is he? Why hasn’t he been in touch?”

“Ursula told him a secret. One so terrible that we can never be forgiven. But what could it be, this secret? Really? Other than the obvious, Alan’s the father, so what? So terrible that we can never be forgiven?”

He spoke to the sky, which was low and uniformly cotton-woollish, the clouds having laid themselves out in regular soft pleats. He was rapping lightly, in repeating sequences; a steady, piano-like chord-making against the wood.

“You’re saying that Ursula made it up. Ursula and Alan, both. That Michael survived: he left Ursula and swam across the loch and took Henry’s cash and the painting from the car, but left his clothes and his wallet and his books. And then left Peattie on foot in dripping wet clothes.” Pip began to answer but Mog’s voice drowned him out. “And it’s still not a good enough excuse for not phoning or writing. Not just an excuse; not a good enough
reason
. Michael wouldn’t do that to us. I knew Michael. He wouldn’t.”

“But you didn’t know him, did you? As it turned out.”

“I knew enough.”

“Look,” Pip said. “It isn’t just me, you know. Henry doesn’t think he’s dead either.”

“Why does Henry think he’s alive?”

“It’s a trick he lets his brain play on him. I don’t know. Maybe he knows something he’s not telling. He grows—what’s the word?—sheepish. He turns a bit sheepish and coy when I mention it.”

“You mention it?”

“We don’t talk about it often. But sometimes. On the phone. He’s unexpectedly forthcoming and frank on the phone. He told me a story about a young man, old enough to have young children, who died in the mountains and wasn’t recovered. True story. He was encased in ice. His son grew up and went into the mountains looking for him, and came upon him unexpectedly. He was perfectly preserved. The two of them looked almost identical, and his father was younger than he was.”

“Imagine if that were true of Michael, in the deeps. Michael, suspended in the water and still 19.”

“I know. The night after Henry told me the glacier story, I dreamed we found Michael, you and me, a long way in the future, that we had him retrieved once everyone else had died.”

“Everyone else had died?”

“We were old and grey, and he was younger than your grandchildren.”

“Mine? You didn’t have grandchildren?”

“My son didn’t live long enough. Curse got him. Don’t you ever dream that the curse gets you? Course, I don’t believe in it when I’m awake.”

“I can’t bear to think about it. Michael. Michael hit hard with the oar and drowning.”

“Apparently I shout in my sleep. I see her face, Ursula’s. The look on her face. You don’t beat somebody about the head with a heavy wooden object by accident.”

“Don’t tell me you’re sceptical. It’s not a small thing, you know, her fear. She was frightened and struck out and hit harder than she meant to.”

“Or she’s a psycho. One we protect and are prepared to perjure ourselves for. Who might do it again.”

Mog looked at him, eyebrows raised, and shook her head. “I don’t think you’ve ever taken it seriously enough. Her aquaphobia. If that’s the right word. Her water-terror.”

“What do you mean ‘not seriously enough’? I know what you know. I know she’s terrified of water.”

“I don’t think you do, Pip. Did you hear about Shetland?”

“Gran told me. She flew up to Shetland to see the wool, to the farm where they spin her wool. Got upset on the plane.”

“Upset is understating it somewhat. Went into one of her
things
. Not listening. Chanting. Freaked the other passengers out. The cabin crew hovering, offering solutions but insisting on her being seated and supervised, all the same. She was told not to look. And it was fine at first. She was placed on an aisle seat, given an eye mask; held Edith’s hand. All going well. And then she decides she wants to see. Disaster.”

“I don’t understand why Gran thought she’d manage it.”

“Ursula said she was sure. And she never goes anywhere. It was supposed to be a treat, a 30th-birthday treat.”

“I see where this is going. Ursula thrown into a panic on the loch with Michael, not really responsible for her actions. Going into one of her ‘things’. Not really herself. Not really responsible. But tell me this, Mary Salter-Catto. Who’s responsible when nobody’s responsible?”

“Don’t start on the law speak.”

“I’m not starting on the law speak.”

“She won’t get in the bath, you know. Ah, you didn’t know that. I’m serious. Afraid of the bath. Even when it’s just the shower running. Afraid of the feel of it on her skin. You know that Gran has to wash her hair for her? You’ve no idea how bad it is. She has to go to the cottage, twice a week, get Ursula into the shower, play music to cover the water noise, and even then sometimes she gets upset, gets out with her hair full of soap, and it has to be finished in the sink, Ursula sitting with her back to it, eyes tight shut and Gran singing.”

“I don’t think he’s dead, Mog.”

“But Ursula always tells the truth. Always.”

“Yes, but don’t you see? That applies just as earnestly to mistakes. Misapprehensions. Doesn’t it? You’re not lying if you believe utterly in what you say, and it proves untrue; you’re just wrong. I think she welded two disasters together when she gave her account. The front half of it was Michael, the back half Sebastian, seeing Sebastian fall into the loch and disappear. Barely a ripple and then gone. That’s the death of Sebastian. Mother says she used exactly the same words.”

“So Ursula is mistaken. And Alan?”

“Is a liar.”

“But why would she get the two events mixed up?”

“Perhaps she was encouraged to, by a ‘friend’ who talked to her as he rowed her back to shore.”

“Oh, come off it.”

“I’m not joking. I think he’s capable of anything. I think he’s a very dangerous man.”

“On what evidence?”

“Well, I know this much for certain: Ursula would parrot whatever he told her. I’ve tried it, experimentally. I know this for sure. She’ll repeat any old rubbish to Edith that you tell her, and insist that it’s true.”

“What did you say to her?”

“It was about aliens. It doesn’t matter.”

“Oh, Pip.”

“It was important. It proved something.”

“I suppose.”

“Alan told his lie, this big lie, to somebody who takes absolutely everything at face value.”

Mog put one hand to her breastbone and closed her eyes. Her fingers and her eyelids fluttered and her breathing pattern grew fast.

“What’s the matter?”

“It’s nothing. Just having a moment. Imagining it. All that going on while I was . . . while I was having the hard-hearted nerve to feel bored, half a mile away and not knowing. You in a car on the motorway listening to music. None of us even aware. His lungs filling with water. Don’t you believe in the curse, sometimes, even when you’re awake?”

“Mog, small children who can’t swim die in pools and ponds every day.”

“Yes.”

“Sebastian. That was an ordinary event, I’m afraid to say. Shockingly ordinary and meaningless.”

“Yes.”

“And Michael. Ursula was his curse, Mog.”

“That’s horrible. You don’t really think it was that callous. God and Moses.”

“No way of knowing.”

“That’s the problem. What we’ll never know and what’s crucial to know is what she meant. It matters so much, what it was that she meant. How much malice there was, how much planning, how much understanding. That’s what makes the difference, that judgment.”

“Okay,” Pip said, sliding sideways onto one hip, and then onto his knees, holding onto the edge and looking over. “Murder in the boat. We need to try this out. You can be Ursula.”

Even before her name was out of his mouth, Pip had gone quietly over, was over the edge and gone, with an economical gymnastic ease. His head disappeared for a moment, but reappeared just as Mog lunged towards him. His hands came over the side first, clutching on, his fingers flattened and whitened. “Bloody freezing. Hurry up.”

“Hurry up and what?”

“Oar. Take oar out of oarlock.” His breath came in gasps. He waited while she fumbled with it. “More towards the middle; spread your hands. Like ice in here. Never swum this far out. Michael, holding on and looking up at you. Now, go to—no! Slowly! Jesus Christ.”

“Only kidding.” She had mimed rage, but Pip had time to duck the oar as it came at him. Mog had slowed its pace, and when it landed on the edge of the boat, rocked it only gently side to side. She looked nervously at the place where it struck as if waiting for water to spurt up or for the thing to break decisively in two and sink, pointing its ends upward, leaving the two of them looking as surprised as cartoon animals.

He had clambered back in. Mog was already looking under the tarpaulin. “Is there a rug in there? Thanks.” Water streamed off him and his teeth were chattering.

“You’re an idiot. We’d better get back. Are you sane enough to row?”

They hurried back to the house, Pip still wrapped in the grimy old boat blanket, purple rings around his eyes and his lips dark blue.

11

The morning of the day before I vanished I went out early with my surfboard, but there was no swell at all, and the sea, unusually tropically blue, was an unprecedented flat calm. Day on day the heat had built and intensified until it was near sinister, the sky so faultlessly blue that it appeared two dimensional, a painted canvas heaven. There would be no surfing today. It seemed as if there would never be surfing again, as if there would never be rain; like weather had come to an end and in the sky there were only ever to be these vast open blue fields.

There being nothing remotely like a wave, I threw down my board and settled for swimming, ploughing up and down in the water. I took a lot of exercise at that time, exercising alone. It was important to be physically tired. If I was tired I could settle to work, to reading and thinking and writing. The sentence-making, paragraph-forming impulse was becoming systematic and diseased and I wrote and wrote compulsively in notebooks. I exercised alone and I worked alone, and each was in its own way a strategy. It broke my obsession into manageable parts. When I was swimming I thought about the father, and my mother’s attitude to him and to me. When I was working I didn’t have to. That was the respite. I knew that when exercising and work were done for the day, Mog would telephone at her usual time. We were close again, my friendship with Ursula having taken a bizarre turn. Often our phone calls started arbitrarily and ended the same way, taking up a point from earlier or from an earlier day without need of much of a preamble. I thought Mog was immensely generous, the kindest person I’d ever met. I didn’t really cotton on that there was more to it than that, though Pip tried to warn me, jokingly, just how attached to me she had become.