The White Lie (37 page)

I’d taken it home, the dossier, and hidden it under the bed in a suitcase that had a lock, and over the weeks that followed I’d worn it out with handling. I made notes. I looked people up in address books. I intended to act but then on the point of taking action I seemed to lose the will. Sitting in bed, wakeful in the dark, leaning on the window sill and watching my mother’s silhouette in her studio, her black shape against the yellow light, I began to see Henry’s gift quite differently. How perfect this dossier was as a false trail, a self-perpetuating and bottomless mystery, tantalising and ineffable. In this dossier was my father—that was the family position: the implication that I should be reassured by this. All of them were well-bred, well-mannered young men, well born and at a safe distance. One collective daddy who’d never be distilled into an individual identity.

If I’d been surprised to be handed the dossier I’d been even more stunned to be offered the money. What was I to make of the offer of £2000 in cash, the information that Henry had put it aside for me in the bureau in the secret drawer? It was no secret, the drawer. Henry had shown it to us all when we were young. It looked like a piece of moulding separating the desktop from the drawer beneath, but at a push was released on its spring, revealing itself blue velvet lined.

***

Henry took his hat off and waved it ineffectively towards his face. “I’ve never known heat like this,” he said.

“Why did you offer me the money, why really?” I asked him.

“To get you started,” Henry said.

“Started on what?”

“On whatever you do when you get there.”

“How do you—what makes you think I’m going anywhere?”

“Well you are, aren’t you? Leaving us.”

That was the last time I spoke to Henry.

18

Thomas said he would be there by 11am but his taxi was delayed by a jack-knifed fuel lorry that had blocked the road, so by the time he arrived at Peattie it was lunchtime and Edith had been through a lengthy journey of her own, one that had its physical counterpart in walking the corridors of the house.

I could tell by her face, as she went down the steps to the drive, that the words and the tears were backed up in her, that a kind word could prove the enemy of selfcontrol. It wasn’t clear, as Thomas paid his fare, emerged onto the gravel, closed the car door, whether she could risk even eye contact in full view of so many windows, so much accidental evidence at hand; even the rear-view mirror had the potential for betrayal, and so as Thomas’s arm was raised to her shoulder she stepped decisively away, her eyes lowered to his shoes—serious shoes, as architectural and coal black as a policeman’s—and said tersely to him that they must wait until they were inside. They went to the kitchen, Edith not talking, not looking at him, standing with the kettle beside the sink.

“Are you sure it’s coffee you want?” Thomas asked her.

“You’re right, it isn’t,” she said, setting the kettle back on its stand and leaving the room.

They went to the study—Edith going first, seeing the door left ajar—and took a bottle of whisky and two stubby glasses from Henry’s drinks cupboard, and then she led the way down to Ottilie’s studio on the ground floor, a big space lit by two tall windows, its interior all hard surfaces. Two wooden chairs (as it happens, bought from the church during a refit) had been positioned next to the heater. It was a two-bar electric fire that Ottilie used when she was working, and it buzzed and hummed into life as Thomas poured the Scotch. A faint aroma of burning dust emanated.

They sat down together. “So. Tell me everything.” Thomas laid his glass by his feet and Edith did the same.

Still she didn’t look at him. She had mastered her impulse and so she began just as she had with Susan on the phone. She’d telephoned Susan while Thomas was en route. “I’m sorry, I’ve been an idiot,” she’d said. He inched his chair closer and reached out to her and she reciprocated warmly, firmly, to his grasp of her two hands, a gesture perfected at the church door. It was a gesture that was granted to parishioners in times of trouble, transmitting through its brief skin contact all the power of collective and authoritative empathy. She withdrew again after a moment because kindness continued to threaten her resolve.

Susan had affected as much careful sympathy for Edith’s explanatory bumbling—nerves were cited, nerves and stress—as she had for the initial confession, which Edith knew was a bad sign. Possibly Susan thought that both equally were evidence of a burgeoning madness and that a calm acceptance of each was for the best. Edith was beginning to see that Susan’s authenticity as a soul-mate was at least partly performance, and that what lay behind it could just as easily be condemnation as approval. So many people she knew at the church were similar. The carapace of acceptance was like the frozen surface of a pond. Beneath it, there were unseen energies; the real life teemed obscurely underneath. Thomas was a different fish entirely. To Thomas she could say anything, no matter how dreadful. His understanding was a deep well, apparently bottomless: she could throw any size or variety of stone into it, her faithless sin, and he would take it into himself like a communion wafer and become only ever more hers: a knack, perhaps, or a genetic trick, or something that had been trained and learned.

“You can tell me, you know,” he said. He’d watched her and he’d read her thoughts.

“The trouble is . . .” She looked into his face now, as if beginning to compose the announcement. The trouble is, Thomas, that you are Jesus, you are the god of the black shoes, the double handclasp at the door. She looked steadily into his eyes with an odd expression, and even if he couldn’t read that language, it was obvious to me that she knew that though his forgiveness would be as little a fabricated thing as possible, it would also mean the end of their friendship.

“I wouldn’t normally do this,” Thomas said, lifting the glass and swigging from it—and Edith smiled at first, thinking he was talking about the whisky, “because my policy is always that people say what they’re ready to say and I don’t push it.”

“No.”

“I’ve heard the rumours you know,” he said. “There are many informants hereabouts, all of them possessed of telephones, and I don’t have to tell you that bad news about the Salters isn’t bad news for everyone. Salter schadenfreude is a whole sub-category of its own.”

“Yes.”

“So let me help you out a bit. Michael. You said that it’s about Michael. One of your burdens at least. You said there were two and I have no idea about the other. I just wanted to point that out. If there were other whispers and hints on the bush telegraph, I’d tell you.”

Edith stared at her lap.

Eventually Thomas spoke. “I’ve just had a trivial revelation. I don’t like whisky. I’m not going to drink it any more.” He got up and went to the sink and poured his drink down it. “And this is a terrible room for talking in. Let’s go outside and walk. I’ve always found walking good for secret-sharing. Let’s go out on the hill, shall we?”

“Henry,” Edith said. “Henry’s probably there.”

“Somewhere else then. We’ll go off the other way, across the road and onto the bridletrack.”

“We’ll be seen.”

“Does that matter? Seems it does. Better stay here then.” He went across to one of Ottilie’s painted screens, done in her teenage years in Bloomsbury style in chalky colours, a three-part screen, five feet high and decorated with a trio of muscular angels. Thomas half pulled and half carried it across the floor, before opening it into a false wall, cupping the two of them into their corner. Now, they inhabited an antechamber sealed off from the rest of the room, from easels and boards and mess, one that protected them from observers pausing at the door, the upper part of which was a glass panel.

“Let me get this thing started with a robust opening statement,” Thomas said. “There’s gossip, that Michael died. The gossip says that Michael died here, that he never left, that he killed himself by drowning in the loch and that the whole family knows as much, that you’ve known it all along, because he left a note saying that’s what he was going to do.”

“We don’t know what happened to him, not for sure,” Edith said immediately. “They might be right. We think that might have been it but we don’t know for sure. The note you’re wrong about—it didn’t mention suicide; it was about leaving and that’s all.”

“I see.”

“I was idiotic. To phone you in such a state. I’m sorry. I have days when possible things seem as if they must be true. I have days when I’m sure Michael is dead and that it was my fault.”

“How could it have been your fault?”

“Because I neglected him. Kept clear of him, put off by his teenage sulking. He spent a lot of time here and we left him alone. He was lonely. He read and he wrote and we barely spoke to him. He read and wrote constantly and was on his own most of the time; these are things children do when they’re lonely. I didn’t take his unhappiness seriously. None of us did.”

“So. That’s one thing. One down, and one to go. Moving on, now. What’s the other secret?”

“What?”

“Tell me the other thing, and then we can go and have lunch. I’m hungry.”

“Why are you talking in that strange way?”

“Because, Edith, it’s obvious you’re not telling the truth.”

“I’m not ready. Not yet.”

“That’s fine. I’m here when you are. Or rather, I’m
there.”
He got up and put his jacket on.

“Thomas.”

“You’ve got to trust me, Edith. I’m offended by lack of trust.”

“Sit down, please; I’m sorry. Would you pour me another drink, first? I’ll have to drink alone. There’s water in the tap over there for you.”

He smiled at her and half filled her glass, and moved his chair so it was directly opposite hers.

“This is the bare bones of it,” she said to him, tipping and angling the whisky so the light caught it, amber and gold. She concentrated on its patterns. “We know that Michael killed himself. Ursula told us; she was there. She’d been talking to him. He was very unhappy, in despair. He went down into the loch and he didn’t come up again. She came running to us and we rushed down there and of course it was too late. He wasn’t anywhere to be found, though we looked and looked, for hours and hours.”

“You didn’t alert anyone, the police?” Thomas couldn’t quite hide his disapproval.

“No. He couldn’t be found. And then we began to have doubts about what Ursula had told us. Her account was so like what she’d told us after Joan’s wedding.”

“About Sebastian, you mean.”

“Yes. We looked for Michael, but it was obvious he wouldn’t be found easily. And then we decided against telling.”

“I see.”

“That’s our family secret. I know you said to me that nothing I told you would ever go further, but you need to confirm that with me now, because I’ve frightened myself, telling you all this.”

“Nothing you say to me will ever go further. I’m very sorry to hear this news, and to imagine how it’s burdened you for all of these years.”

Edith drank and Thomas watched her. She realised she had sipped at the whisky too quickly. Its darkness pressed at the back of her head and she put her hand to the place and said she must stop, but then finished it anyway, a quarter-glass in a long gulp.

“You’re taking this very well,” she said. “Michael, the news about him.”

“You’re not even sure of the facts.”

“The truth is I am sure. I’m sure.”

Thomas crossed his legs and leaned towards her. He had surprisingly small hands. “I like to have time to consider things. I’ll think about it and then I might have observations. I learned in my old trade not to give in to immediate reactions.”

“The second thing is about Ursula,” Edith said immediately.

Thomas waited.

“She did something. A long time ago, something very wrong. I’m not going to go into details, not today. I need to work up to it. I may have to write to you about it first.”

Thomas’s face was attentive and neutral. “Go on.”

“She came to me and told me, afterwards, after the event, what it was that she’d done, about this wrong thing. It doesn’t matter what it was, does it. It doesn’t matter. The point is that I didn’t get a chance to think. It’s interesting what you say about that. I was upset. She was hysterical. She was so sorry, you see. So sorry. I said to her things I shouldn’t have.”

“You mean you were censorious, cruel?”

“No.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It was the opposite. I told her it was alright. She was hysterical and I needed her to be calm. I’ve always needed her to be calm and happy. If she’d stayed so upset . . .”

“Yes?”

“I didn’t know what would happen next. I could see things spiralling. A really and truly horrendous spiralling. It could have broken the whole family. We all had our own versions, you see, of what had happened. It was vital we kept all having our own versions. I told her that it’s what you intend that matters. If things go badly, it isn’t always your fault. It might seem an obvious point, to you and me, but it wasn’t to Ursula. Not then. Not at that time. She was very clear about cause and effect. She was very clear that she was to blame, she wanted to take it all on, she wanted to be punished. And I found myself convincing her that there was nothing to be punished for, that it was a sort of accident. When she did the bad thing, she didn’t intend to happen what happened next, you see. If things get out of hand sometimes, that’s just bad luck. This was radical. This was absolutely new thinking for her.”

“It all sounds perfectly reasonable.”

“You wouldn’t say that if you knew.”

“Tell me then.”

“She’s literal. Ursula’s literal about things. They’re black and white. They’re A and B, or rather they’re A
or
B”—Edith sliced at her knee with the side of her hand three times in saying so—“and so Ursula went from one extreme to another, one dogma to another.”

“So you’re saying she stopped thinking it was her fault.”

“She stopped thinking that anything was her fault. As long as she was sorry, genuinely truly sorry, all fault was expunged.”