The White Lie (24 page)

“I was out with Rebecca at the loch earlier and it felt like it might snow.” Mog smoothed back and forth with her palm against the bedspread as she spoke.

The bedspread was one of Tilly’s, made the year before she died. I can see her now, her bobbed hair snow white, painstakingly piecing triangles of fabric together, looking over the top of her glasses at the paper plan. When she cupped my chin in her hand, there was calloused skin on the sides of her sewing fingers.

Izzy had washed the quilt in tea to age it further, blunting and softening its colours. Her room is the most interesting of any, full of the stuff she’s brought back from London and from her travels. Indian silk’s been hung over the four-poster frame (all the principal rooms have these carved-oak beds), African faces are lined up grimacing, and there are framed photographs everywhere: family shots rubbing shoulders with famous friends. She doesn’t ever talk about them, these friends, just puts their photos on the wall. They chart ordinary-looking days, snapshots taken in a crowd, laughing in a restaurant or larking in a garden, and it’s only later that it twigs that it’s Jack Nicholson doing the barbecue.

One wall is dedicated to the great aunts. Dresses that were theirs hang from the picture rail on scented hangers: tea dresses in floral silks, thinning under the arms, the lace trims coming adrift. Shoes that were theirs are lined up along a bookshelf: shell-pink satin dance shoes, cream leather day shoes and tan-coloured buttoned boots that are creased with wear across the front. Fashion magazines are piled beneath the bed, a casual and dusty archive, all of them featuring Izzy on their covers: her wide-spaced grey cat’s eyes, wide cheekbones tapering into a small chin, her waterfall of hair and extravagant mouth.

“Rebecca asked me something interesting earlier.” Izzy was curling one of Mog’s frizzy locks round her finger.

“Do tell,” Mog said, mimicking Vita.

“She wanted to know if I thought Michael was dead in the loch.”

“Christ. What did you say?”

“I said that I was one of the ones content to leave it as a mystery.”

“This wasn’t in Ottilie’s earshot, I trust.”

“I didn’t know what she knew.”

“Nothing. Village version. I was supposed to tell you that.”

“And then, she wanted to know what he was like. She’d heard from Edith that he liked to cook, that he liked to knit. She’s been going around with a questionnaire or something, I swear. Perhaps she’s about to write his biography.”

“I mentioned the knitting, too.”

“I told her, we all have his long scarves. Long scarves every Christmas. I told her that Ursula taught him. And then I stopped myself, but only just in time, from adding
and that’s probably how it started.”

12

Edith went into town to see her friend Thomas Osborne, under the guise of finding something to wear to the party. Henry didn’t approve of the friendship and so her meetings with Thomas, while not exactly secret, were always described thus: as going out to do some shopping. Thomas, the previous minister of St Ninian’s, had been a confidant of Edith’s for over 40 years, albeit a confidant who didn’t know certain key facts. Despite this, he’s good at asking the right questions, and continues uncredited for preventing Edith’s suicide after Sebastian died.

Thomas said he’d be mother, and poured the tea. “So how’s Henry?”

“Why do you always ask first about Henry?” Edith’s irritation was something she could indulge in here, but only here, in the safety of his dismal second-floor flat. Thomas, too, enjoyed what he called their banter. “We fight like an old married couple,” he’d said.

“You I know about,” he said to her now. “I can see how the land lies with you in two seconds, just by the look on your face. Henry, however, is a continuing mystery. I confess myself fascinated by Henry.”

“Henry’s just the same.”

“How’s the plan going to get him off the estate, to do other things and see people?”

“I get the children to make suggestions.” She shrugged. “But everything he wants is inside the wall.”

Everything he wants and everything he dreads.

“Is he talking?” Thomas had found in a cupboard and now put in place a great knitted chicken that served as a tea cosy. Ursula had made it for him to mark the occasion of his retirement.

“Not really. And I’m resigned to that. I don’t expect it to get better. If he talks, it’s dogs he talks to.”

“He’s a man in pain.”

“I can’t explain to you why it is, but there’s something about that remark that wounds me.”

“I’m sorry, Edith. I didn’t intend to imply that his pain is worse.”

“I do sometimes feel that it’s a competition and that he disdains my efforts to be cheerful as if they’re vulgar. A failure of heart, really.”

“The two of you have kept the unsaid thing between you for so long.”

“That’s it exactly. It’s almost as if he’s been waiting, and so have I, for the thing to be said, but it never will be, and in the meantime this solemn sort of waiting is all that’s been—what’s the word—honourable.”

“He’s come round to Saturday’s event, though, I take it. He’s going to be there, at least.”

“He’s going to be there. I trust you are.”

“I wouldn’t miss it for anything.”

“Henry’s not happy but he wouldn’t not come.”

“Did you have an argument about it?”

“Good god, no.” She winced. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be. ‘Good god’ has never offended me.”

“Joan has no idea what she’s doing, blundering on, bless her, and I know she means well, but the idea of a party, of music and dancing: it’s too hard. Henry’s miserable about it, and I’m nervous that he’ll be antisocial, perhaps even frank—saying that we shouldn’t be doing it, that it dishonours Sebastian. But you know, I think it’s time. We’ve had so very many sad Christmases.”

When she pulled out of the apartment car park, slowly in the old Rover and onto the main road home, she said, “I’m so sorry Michael; I’m so very sorry.” She looked into the car mirror as she was speaking and my nerves prickled. I was in the back seat, there with her.

***

Joan was hanging photographs at Peattie in the hall. Today, it was the turn of some of the annual staff line-ups from the old days. A picture was taken late every summer, up until the First World War, of the staff standing grouped on the terrace: showing the maids in their black dresses and stout boots; the butler, cook and housekeeper, their finer clothes marking them out; the garden and ground staff standing at the sides of the group, leather-skinned in caps and kilts, not sure how to behave and caught by the camera in the act of wondering. Joan took the 1912 photograph out of a card-backed envelope and slotted it back in its frame. The local newspaper had borrowed the print to scan in for a feature and had returned it that morning by courier. The 1912 line-up is special as there are two versions: the official and the rehearsal shots. The lent photograph was the rehearsal, taken a minute or two before the stiff composure of the official photo, and by far the most compelling, showing the cook squinting down at her apron as if assessing its whiteness; showing one of the maids cradling a Labrador pup and being told to put him on the grass by the cook, her brows beetling; showing the main group of housemaids, their faces lit up by laughter they’re attempting not to give rein to, as if one of them’s just told a joke. The butler’s talking to the gardeners, his creased and open hands gesturing towards the hothouses. His hands and their creases have survived everything.

The local paper did a photo story every summer to coincide with the beginning of Peattie gardens’ seasonal run of open days, in aid of one of Edith’s charities, though the fact was that by now most visitors came only to see how much worse things had grown, in the borders and lawns and in general estate upkeep, since the summer before. The voyeuristic crowds had grown larger of late. This year, for the first time, the newspaper had run a special pull-out feature on the house itself. They’d taken pictures of Edith and Henry surrounded by dogs, on a sofa with a backdrop of antique tapestry and a silver tea set laid out on the table. Edith had loved it until the minister’s wife had been snide and then she saw that it was all wrong, and wished desperately that she hadn’t had her hair done and dug out that old frock and jewels as the photographer had urged her, thinking it all a lark, a thing done with half a nod at least to irony. No irony was evident on the page. Though many of the shots were lovely: the main photograph showed the fine old stone of the house bathed pink in afternoon light, the dark hill rising behind.
Glen of Peattie: an outstanding relic from a vanished social order, a vanished world
, the caption read. There was a picture of the coach house in the yard, showing the horse stalls, the faded names on the whitewashed brick, Belle and Bridget, Diana and Harriet, Fern and Emily, the editorial noting that Henry’s grandfather would have only mares because he considered gelding a cruelty. Joan had supplied many such anecdotes. There were photos of the folly encircled by dead daffodils; of the ice house, a cross between a cave and a dungeon with a fine vaulted ceiling; of the dairy, its marble benches, the handle-driven ice-cream-makers; of the original kitchen with its enormous old range, the wall-mounted copper pots, the jelly moulds, the fish kettles. There was a picture of the game larder, and another of the glasshouses, describing the figs and grapes and pineapples that were grown in the house’s heyday. Henry loved it all. He bought several copies, cutting the photographs out in careful sections and pasting them into an album.

Edith slowed as she drove into the village; there was no traffic behind her and she could dawdle through. Past the cul-de-sac turned in on itself, busy with children on bikes and with long skipping ropes. Past the 1930s houses, on plots that look huge to modern eyes, each quarter-acre domain with its own high hedge and long cinder path. The verges had been trimmed and the air was full of cut-grass smells. Past the large brown sign, put there by the council, directing visitors down the road that leads to
Peattie Heritage Village
. The bus shelter had been decked out with hanging baskets, garish with red and yellow annuals and proud claims about Scotland in Bloom. Next, the low stone-built bungalows, estate-built, that run along the main road. The garden wall runs along the opposite side, a dry-stone dyke built of horizontal storeys of blue-green granite topped with thinner vertical slices stacked spine-up like books, the mosses and alpines creeping between them. There is a post box, a startling tomato red, set into the wall, and a tomato-red phone box beside what was once the tradesman’s entrance to the house, now identified officially as a public right of way.
Peattie Loch: Private Property: Strictly No Vehicles
, Henry’s own secondary labelling states. Edith slowed the car, straining her eyes towards the cottages. Someone was coming down the lane towards the road, someone in a pale mackintosh, outlined against a backdrop of lavish wild greenery. A wet summer had made the vegetation soar, high and vigorous, turning the verges into rank and atmospheric jungle that was dominated by saucer-sized heads of Queen Anne’s lace. They nodded as if sagely in the breeze, a parliament of weeds. Edith slowed the car hummingly to a pause and rolled down her window. Her friend Susan Marriott was already striding towards her.

“You’re just the person I want to talk to,” Edith called out. Susan joined her in the car and it trundled on further, turning in through the main gate, slowly along the drive and past the gatehouse, the gravel crunching like glass in the absolute quiet, passing between high rhododendron hedges, dark and glossy, their purple flower trumpets just coming into bloom.

Gordon and Susan, the Marriotts, are a reclusive pair, around 60 in age, I’d guess, who live in the village but are assumed by many to be holiday-house owners, so seldom are they seen around the place. They’d been invited to the party, but Edith didn’t know this. The guest list was one of the token mysteries left surrounding the event and Edith had been incurious, though if she’d seen it in advance she might have noticed that some of the men were coming quite some distance, names familiar from the deep past; she might quite reasonably have asked if Ottilie had approved these additions. Ottilie hadn’t had the chance. Joan had taken control of things and people had let her. She was aware that Susan was “Edith’s new friend”, in fact, had referred to her in just these terms, a peculiar tone in her voice that was also in evidence when she described her as “God Squad”, using paired fingers as quotation marks. It had been Susan’s habitual wearing of an almost ostentatiously large crucifix that had prompted her and Edith’s first conversation, a few weeks before, standing outside the village shop, each of them holding a carton of milk.

“I hope you don’t think me rude, but I’m interested,” Edith told her over their first cup of coffee. “I’ve always wanted to attend a service at St Stephen’s. Would that be allowed, despite being a member of the Protestant communion?”

“Allowed or not, I’d love it,” Susan had said. Thus had their friendship begun.

***

Back at Peattie, Ursula and Rebecca had been making shortbread under Joan’s tutelage. Edith took a small plateful into the drawing room, where she’d planted Susan while she made a pot of coffee; she liked to keep Susan separate from the family and pre-empt their interactions. Ursula wanted to sit with them, attempting to follow them into the room and admitting quite frankly that she wanted to hear what they talked about, and Edith had to be firm. She barred her way in with an arm placed like a No Entry rope. “The dogs need brushing,” she said to her. “Please, Ursula. Just a half-hour. Thirty minutes. Is that going to be possible?”

“It’s perfectly possible,” Ursula said, turning away as the door was closed between them. As Edith returned to sit with Susan in the relative warmth of the window space, she could hear Ursula singing in the corridor.

“You know, I suppose, that both Gordon and I have been married before,” Susan said, biting into an over-browned Christmas tree-shaped biscuit, one made with Ursula’s favourite cutter, and dampening it in her cup. Edith shook her head, trying not to look too eager.