The White Lie (22 page)

My mother came out and sat on the bench, which sits sand-embedded in front of the studio’s big rear window, only 20 feet or so from the edge of the cliff, among the marram grasses. The word cliff gives the wrong impression, as it’s only a short scramble onto the beach. Footholds worked into the slope lead down to a bank of rough pink pebbles that in turn gives way to orange sand, a wide hard slick of it that resists footprints unless the tide’s newly out. Ottilie was wearing a long, thin greyish-green dress; she brought a notebook and a cup of coffee and watched me. She was drawing me. She has hundreds of drawings of me that nobody has seen. I swam, and then I sat in the shallows a while, and swam again, and my mother watched me and drew. After a while she went back in and made us both a sandwich. She signalled to me that lunch was ready, holding up a plate with one hand and pointing at it with the other. I raised my arm in acknowledgment and came to her slowly up the shoreline, feeling the sun already burning off the sea water and hot on my head. I can feel that bench beneath me, even now, how rough and hard it was, the hot wood slats and the marram grass tickling; I can taste the warm curds of egg, the grain of the bread and the cold butter. There were dolphins out in the bay and we watched them sewing through the water, up and down. It was growing misty out there: a sea fret was building, the bane of hot weather on this part of the coast.

While we were eating, Ottilie asked me whether I’d thought any more about going back to the college and doing the exams. Disappointment flooded through me. This, then, was the real point of the sandwich. I told her that all I knew for certain was that going to university would be a waste of time, that it was a different kind of education I craved: a line of argument that had already prompted Henry to find me ungrateful. Escalating, the row moved sideways into the usual territory, broadening and then narrowing into the one usual thing, our own predictable imploding star.

This day, this memory of a day, was made again, conjured up with words. Mog had been telling Rebecca about it. Rebecca had been probing more on the question of my disappearance, and Mog was beginning to suffer the onset of a slow and deadly social panic, the effect of which was to make her voluble; certain of the things she swore she wouldn’t say, she heard herself saying, rolling through the prohibition noisily as coins.

“Ottilie said once, during one of her low periods, that his conception was
a mistake
” she told Rebecca. "His being a mistake was an idea—the idea—that Michael was drawn to more and more.”

“A mistake—that’s horrible.”

“But Ottilie persisted in thinking that it could be talked about rationally between them. Trying to be honest and precise, she said that yes, a mistake, but a mistake only in so far as few people would want to get pregnant at 18 after a one-night stand. As you can imagine this wasn’t the affirmation Michael was hoping for. So Ottilie told him that in retrospect it was serendipity, the happiest of accidents. It was too late to erase the word, though, and qualifying it was a disaster.”

“So you don’t know who the father was?”

“Everyone has their own theory. She got very drunk, apparently, and it’s hard to believe but she’d never drunk alcohol before my parents’ wedding. Different world, then. Got drunk on punch and was found at 2am more or less unconscious on a sofa.”

When it became obvious that she was pregnant, Henry went across the country banging on doors late at night, bellowing his need for admission and for answers. Some of these families haven’t spoken to the Salters since. Subsequently, Henry and Edith came up with what’s referred to as the Family Version, which can be summed up as “Young girl introduced by some bounder to drink and seduced”. The village story was and is slightly different: “Little slut was sleeping around.”

We had a row, my mother and I, on the bench, under the interrogatory white light of the overhead sun. I said I’d had enough of it all, I couldn’t go on, feeling disgust at the use of this language even as I was speaking, the cliché-ridden language of not being able to go on. I said it was time to think about a life of my own. This didn’t alarm her unduly: it wasn’t the first or third or 13 th time that she’d heard it. The monologue deteriorated into wounding generalisations, as these things do, to all of which my mother gave her usual stoical responses. I stormed off into the house, slamming the door, and I watched her from the window as she returned to her sketchbook. There was an extraordinary light effect, out there in the bay. The sea fret was building and rolling, like some physical arrival, like an armada of ghost ships, the strong sunshine illuminating and piercing it. It was too individual an encounter to give up. She had reached already for the box of pastels.

I went to my room and dressed. Dark jeans, a thick brown belt, the one with the cowboy buckle, the favourite blue shirt, brown leather boat shoes. Forgive me if I fetishise a little. I like these words, the cotton feel of them, cool on my skin, the buttons. I packed a bag, took my wallet and passport and diary, and drove down to Peattie. As I left the cottage I had one last view of my mother. She stood up, upsetting cold coffee onto the sketch, got up onto the seating planks of the bench and waved after the car with one extended arm. My parting view of her was in a wing mirror.

***

Mog brought the conversation to a halt by asking if Rebecca had seen the painting of the great aunts, and having been assured that she hadn’t, led the way down the stairs to the study. On the wall above Henry’s desk, three painted women gazed serenely out of a dark brown frame. Three brown-haired heads, three ivory-skinned faces, sultana brown eyes, pomegranate-tinted mouths, their facial shadows judged skilfully in mauve and blue.

“Is that them?”

“Great Aunt Ursa and sisters. It was done in 1930. One of the few pictures that survived the round-up. The painter’s quite well known now. They took a photograph of it for a book.”

“Like you and me. Only better.”

“He made the noses longer and their mouths wider. But they were all incredibly skinny; that’s accurate.”

Great Aunt Ursa is pictured in a mid-green suit with darker satin lapels. The neckline descends into a broad V, no cleavage discernible. Skinny is right. They were bony, tall, too tall to be matched easily at dances with men, and were famously undeferential to male opinion, but wore clothes well. Clothes hung unimpeded from their shoulders. Great Aunt Jo’s in a dark-red dress, and Great Aunt Tilly’s in aubergine purple. All three have collar-length bobbed hair waved tight across the top of the head from severe side partings. It’s like three views of one woman.

“My mother and Ottilie were born on Tilly’s birthday, on her 50th, and Tilly and Jo were both childless. It was a way of honouring them. Perpetuating them, I suppose. They couldn’t leave Ursa out, so Ursula turned up nine years later pre-named.”

“Long gap. What if she’d been a boy?”

“Miscarriages. She’d have been Henry. Or should have been. Henry the fifth. But there was a boy. A year after her. Sebastian. You must know about Sebastian.”

“Why wasn’t he a Henry?”

“I’m told it was time for a change. It got shunted to a middle name. He died, though, Sebastian, aged four, in the loch.”

“Dad told me . . . How on earth? He fell in? He was on his own?”

“His sisters were with him, and also a German au pair.”

“Did anyone see what happened?”

“Yes, Mum and Ottilie saw. And Ursula. Ursula’s never been the same. It was the au pair’s fault. The au pair had got distracted. She was flirting with Alan Dixon.”

“So what happened to him—to Sebastian?”

“He was throwing stones into the loch, off the end of the jetty, lobbing them in to see how far he could get them. He lost his balance. It was that simple and trivial. Lost his balance, toppled in. My mother went in after him and couldn’t find him. Alan and the au pair were too busy arguing to notice; flirting had turned into a row. By the time Alan got there it was too late.”

“It can’t be deep there, surely.”

“It’s surprisingly deep, and dark, and very weedy. We don’t swim anywhere near the jetty.”

“How horrible. How truly dreadful.”

“Ursula was completely traumatised. She didn’t speak for years after.”

“She didn’t speak?”

“She didn’t say a word.”

They went together to Rebecca’s room, which was Ursa’s old bedroom, a forget-me-not blue room with dark furniture. When Edith lived here she maintained these family rooms, had them cleaned and the sheets refreshed as if perpetually we were expected for the weekend, and let us leave our things lying around undisturbed. When family members died, their rooms took on a sort of double identity, half shrine and half guest room; they were never decorated again or improved. Ursa’s room had retained her chosen décor, its framed sewn things from her youth and childish accumulations. Silk scarves that were hers hung from the vanity mirror and jewellery of hers was clustered on the top of the chest of drawers as if it had just been put there. Some of her clothes remained in the wardrobe, pushed tightly to one side to allow Rebecca space to hang her own things. There were also towels and blankets put out, and a water jug by the bed, and books and a tin of biscuits, ready for the visitations of the living.

“I love this, being surrounded by my grandmother’s things,” Rebecca said. “It feels as if the past isn’t really over.”

***

Ursa’s room was the scene of some drama one afternoon, during the winter before this. It was during the time that Edith was ill; it was her having been so very ill that prompted Joan to announce there’d be a party in the summer. The crisis had arrived unannounced one evening with back pain and breathlessness and had turned out to be an embolism, a clot that had travelled from a vein in her calf to her lung. Edith was in the hospital on a clot-busting drug. It was almost the end of January. After a mild, damp December, an un-christmassy Christmas, truly wintry weather had arrived with the new year; earth had stood hard as iron, water like a stone. But then in the third week, the thaw had come. Grey snow lay piled up and dirty at the sides of the roads. The trees dripped. Sleet fell soft and wet against the windows and sills, clogging the last glimmer of afternoon light, clogging the windscreen wipers as the family returned in the car from visiting. It had been a cheerful hour at Edith’s bedside, despite the seriousness of her condition, but there was a price for false confidence: Joan and Ottilie had argued in the car afterwards and bad feeling followed them into the house. It was almost as cold inside as out, and so when Ottilie came into Ursa’s room she was still wearing her military-looking overcoat and fake-fur hat, and the woolly green socks that had lined her wellingtons. She sat on the bed with a thump, her hands clasped firmly. One foot drummed against the carpet.

Mog and Pip came in, wearing the Norwegian patterned sweaters that Edith had given them for Christmas, Mog in her matching hat and Pip in his matching scarf. Pip turned on the bedside lamp and the twilight of the room became blue. Mog shut the door behind her with exaggerated care so that its catch barely clicked at all, and went and sat beside Ottilie.

“She’ll be alright. They caught it in time. She’ll be out in a few days. Gran’s tough as old boots, you know that. Don’t worry.”

Joan came down the corridor outside, calling Ottilie’s name, opening and closing other doors. Ottilie pulled her fur hat down further over her ears. Joan was stalled for a few minutes by finding Henry in my old room. They heard the door opening and her exclamation.

“Dad? What on earth are you doing in here?”

The door was closed on the two of them and things went quiet again. One of Ursa’s scarves had fallen to the floor and for some reason Mog put it not on the chest but on the radiator, where Ursa’s scent wafted stalely out of it.

“You won’t really go to the police?” she asked Ottilie.

My mother got up and went to the window. She began to draw five-pointed stars in the condensation on the glass. “All I meant was that I’d tell them my theory that he committed suicide and that he’s in there.”

“That’s not what you meant,” Pip said.

“I want him found, Pip.”

“Gran’s going to be fine. She’s on the drug and getting better.”

“I want him,” Ottilie said. “I want him back. I want to bury him. I want to visit his grave, his proper grave, and talk to him. I can’t bear another year of him there in the loch, unloved and unretrieved.”

“Not unloved, never that,” Pip said, his voice wavering.

The door opened, making Mog jump. Joan came in and closed it behind her. “What are you doing in here?”

No one answered her.

Joan stayed by the door, leaning against it with her hands behind her back. Ottilie didn’t acknowledge her. She had her eyes fixed on Pip.

“I’ve realised lately that I expected to lose him; I’d expected it for a long time.”

“Ottilie,” Joan said. “There’s a reason why this is the thing we don’t talk about. A good reason. It doesn’t help. It just upsets people. It doesn’t go anywhere new.”

“Ottilie’s talking,” Pip said quietly.

“Well, I’m talking now,” Joan told him. “And what I want to say, Ottilie, is that I hope you go in to Dad and apologise for that outburst. There wasn’t any excuse.”

“Shut up, Mother,” Pip said.

“He’s worried sick,” Joan continued, “and the last thing he needs is you making threats about Ursula.”

“I knew deep down there was a disaster coming,” Ottilie said, sitting on the window seat. The condensation ran in drips from the star points. “I knew about his unhappiness. I should have done something. Stubborn
fucking
pride.” I hadn’t ever heard my mother use this word before. It was drawn out and emphasised, quietly and almost menacingly, as if she’d just discovered its full weight and power. “I’d been visited by premonitions all that week. I woke in the middle of the night, three, four days before he died. Visited by premonitions. Waking with a start. Terrible engulfing dread. An awful doomy feeling, like the phone was going to ring and somebody was already dead.”

“Oh, for pity’s sake,” Joan said.