The White Lie (38 page)

“It’s a viewpoint I have some sympathy with.”

“It’s Roman Catholic though, isn’t it, as a doctrine? I’ve been looking into it. It interests me, this whole question of forgiveness. It’s begun to preoccupy me very much.”

“Well, they don’t have to be wrong about everything,” Thomas said wryly. “And you know, it isn’t quite that simple.”

Edith was chewing her fingernails.

“For what it’s worth, and from what I’ve heard, I don’t think you have anything to reproach yourself for,” Thomas told her.

“Thank you, but that wasn’t really it.”

“What was it then, Edith?” He leaned forward further in his chair.

“The reason I was so reassuring to Ursula, so overly reassuring, was that I couldn’t bear for Henry to know. I told her that Henry didn’t have to be told. I told her he wouldn’t understand, that it would be a bad thing to make him so unhappy. There were so many lies about it, about the day, you see. I knew that Ottilie and Joan had lied and I knew why. Ursula told me about their lying: she doesn’t have any inhibitions about informing on people; she’s always been my faithful little reporter. I’ve known all this time that the girls lied to me. But I couldn’t tell them that I knew; I
still
haven’t told them that I know. The lie and my believing the lie were imperative to us carrying on, to our surviving. That’s how it seemed but it was wrong. Henry doesn’t know but I have got to tell him.”

“Why have you got to tell him?”

“The truth’s important. It has to become important. I think that’s the only way we’ll be saved. We need to say everything to one another about it, so that it will close.”

“We’ll talk about that again. Promise me you won’t say anything to anyone else until we talk again. I’ll phone you in the morning. You should come to the flat and have lunch with me.”

“Everything I did was for Henry.”

“Here, have my handkerchief. Don’t talk any more. You’re making yourself ill. You’re shaking. Your hands are icy cold. Come, come with me and we’ll get you into a soft chair and find a blanket. You should rest now, Edith.”

***

Edith went to her bedroom, having said a perfunctory goodbye in the hall to Thomas, leaving him to go out onto the terrace and wait for his taxi home. She got into her bed fully clothed, forgetting even to remove her shoes, and slept for a while. When she woke she had a pressure headache, as if the whisky had collected at the base of her skull, and so she went down to the kitchen to find aspirin and make a pot of tea, praying she wouldn’t encounter anyone. Mog was there, eating cheese on toast, and so Edith found herself discussing the party and what she might wear as if the conversation with Thomas had never happened, though she was dog-tired and the careless words had to be dug deeply out of her, out of some emergency neurological fund.

Then Ursula arrived with news. She burst in, coming into the new kitchen at a rush, and went immediately to Edith for a private conference. They used to bother me, these conversations, but actually, having eavesdropped, I’ve realised that usually they concern quotidian things: meals, health, washing, work, money; remarks delivered, all of them, whatever their gravity, in the same urgent confiding way. Ursula was wearing a green pinafore dress in sprigged cotton, low-waisted and faded, with sagging pockets. It stretched almost to the ankle and would have been girlish were it not for the fact that she wasn’t wearing anything underneath. The dress was generously cut but the outer curves of small white breasts showed at the sides of the bib.

“There’s someone to see you, Mog,” she said, and when she turned on her heel to go, her narrow back was strikingly smooth and pale, the pinafore straps criss-crossing it.

“Someone? Who is it?” Mog called after her, pursuing.

“Johnnie,” Ursula said over her shoulder.

Pip told Izzy that Mog had dumped Johnnie by text message but that wasn’t true. She’d written him a letter and put it through his door very early in the morning, just as it was getting light. It was only then that she’d sent him the text message. Luckily security at the paper is tight these days, and Johnnie was rebuffed at the front desk, first by girlish receptionists, superficially friendly but hard as nails, and then by security guards with a hundred pounds apiece of metabolic advantage. Fortunately Pip’s flat was also good for repelling boarders: it was on the second floor, with a clear view of the street through wall-high windows. The buzzer was at the main door downstairs, and an indomitable wheezy old fossil, resident of ground floor 1/a, acted as a kind of organic repellent, shuffling out imperiously to demand to know what callers wanted. Johnnie wasn’t to find Mog at home again, but there wasn’t really any way of preventing his leaving messages on the answerphone.

“Please do get back to me today, Mog; this is the fifth time I’ve had to do this, and I have to tell you that my patience is being severely tested.”

He’d come at breakfast and in the early evening, and hang about looking at his watch, standing on the cobbles, the high black railings and evergreen foliage of the residents’ garden behind him; staring up expressionless, hands in pockets, jawline shifting as if chewing on imaginary gum, bulky in his banker’s overcoat.

When Mog brought Johnnie to the house back in the spring, she chose a day when she knew Edith would be out. Edith and also Joan: they’d gone to Inverness to look at curtains. Henry was easy to avoid, and if he couldn’t be avoided would greet friends of the grandchildren in friendly terms and think no more about them and never mention them again. It was best, though, not to run into Edith, and vital not to run into Joan. Vita and Mrs Hammill, if left to themselves, rose only shortly before lunch, so a morning visit was likely to be safe. They went to Peattie early and unannounced, she and Johnnie, having stayed in a B&B in the town the night before, capitalising on a run of fine cold weather, to see the snowdrops, thousands of them in thickets; to see the sun rise over the loch; to see the first rays hit David’s tomb in the way that his brother planned. Mog told Johnnie what Henry had said about the wolf, that malign fate is a wolf at the door just waiting for its chance to enter, pressing on though Johnnie had begun to be sceptical and finally grew openly disparaging.

“Not Michael again, please, for god’s sake,” he had said.

“He went out to the wolf,” she told him. “I think he chose the wolf. Everybody was always angry with him, for being bolshy about the father, the trouble at school, for his sarcasm, for being work-shy, for not wanting to go to university, for not appreciating his opportunities: that’s how Henry put it,
not appreciating his opportunities
. Henry’s never spoken to any of the rest of us like that. As if Michael were a foundling child who needed to keep being grateful.”

“You don’t get it, do you? I don’t want to hear any more of this garbage.”

They’d had an argument, she and Johnnie, and had cut their visit short, returning to Edinburgh in the hire car in silence.

***

Johnnie was standing at the end of the corridor, a big man, not unusually tall but heavy-set, a player of weekend sport. He was ordinary-looking, his brown hair sharply receded, leaving a pointed hairline; ordinary-looking aside from around the eyes. His eyes were hard to look into: everybody found this. They looked at you as if they knew you, as if deciding what to do about you. Even if you were meeting for the first time, his eyes suggested that you shared something, as if great intimacy had been experienced and might be offered again; an intimacy that might, should you misstep, be taken as abruptly away. You might be about to be admitted to the club, the club of Johnnie: but at what cost? It was hard to explain this to people, though Mog had tried: what it was that Johnnie offered, what turned out to be the cost, the need to sign up for the cult of Johnnie and live in it, but all her explanations foundered.

“You’re just going to have to take it from me,” she’d said to Joan, having been called upon to explain herself. “He’s not trustworthy, he’s not truthful.” Her mother had raised one eyebrow and said nothing; it was clear to her that this was Mog’s depression talking and a policy of not engaging with it had proven best.

Evidently Johnnie hadn’t only dropped by: a new overnight bag was sitting at his feet. He was wearing an expensive-looking suit in fine wool, tan with subtle green and gold stripes, new clothes bought for the occasion, and this, the cunningly plotted curve of this special effort, was what made it impossible to banish him outright and unheard. His understanding of her weaknesses: that had been information he’d accepted with particular gratitude.

Johnnie stepped back into the shadow that falls at the side of the stairway, and she joined him there and they looked at each other.

Finally he said, “It’s good to see you.”

His eyes didn’t say that, though. His eyes said “so what’s your next move?”

“You’re not thinking you’ll stay,” Mog warned him, trying not to be lobby-briefed by the newness of the tweed, and the luggage.

“But you invited me,” he said. Like all scoundrels, Johnnie Brandt believes in the truth. He half removed the invitation from his pocket, the one that Joan argued with the printers about because the typeface was wrong, lifting it illustratively into view and letting it drop back.

It’s funny how people behave in a crisis, how often they opt for good manners when something more instinctive would be justified, more limbic-propelled, dialled in from a red phone in the prehistoric nub of the brain. This is how people are killed by psychopaths, I imagine, in the gap that falls between trying to think the best of people and shrinking from the embarrassment of misidentifying danger; jumping to conclusions can be a humiliating business. Not that this was that kind of emergency, nothing like, but it had crossed her mind that Johnnie might do this. Mog said merely and redundantly, “You let the taxi go.” She could hear it crunching out of gravel onto tarmac, accelerating from one surface to the other as it turned onto the road and made its way back towards the town. “I’ll call you another.”

But Johnnie was looking over her shoulder and smiling. Edith had followed Mog from the kitchen. Johnnie’s hand was thrust towards her, Edith’s responding with impeccably polite limpness.

“I’ve heard so much about you, Edith,” he said. Mog winced at the informality. “And you’ve heard so much about me.” Edith’s expression was unchanged. “Mog invited me for the weekend.” He and Edith looked down at the bag.

“If there’s no room here I can stay at the inn, of course,” he said.

“There’s no room here, I’m afraid,” Edith answered levelly.

They followed him out onto the terrace. Ursula was standing at the gate to the tennis court. Johnnie left his bag and went down the steps and over to her and Mog followed him, though keeping her distance. Anticipating and disapproving this, Edith caught hold of her shirt at the hem, before having to let go again, the shirt straining and threatening to rip.

Johnnie went over and spoke to Ursula, keeping his back to them. Mog stood at the foot of the steps, her hands clenched in her pockets. Now she went forward, arms folded across her midriff.

“To the inn, then,” Johnnie said, turning on his heel. “Ursula here says she’ll show me the way.”

“I can take you as far as the main gate,” Ursula said.

Johnnie smiled at Edith. “Hang on. I almost forgot.”

Running past Mog at an elegant trot, Johnnie ascended the stairs, two at a time on surprisingly light feet. As he came towards her Edith took a step back, placing her right hand diagonally across her chest and onto her left shoulder. Johnnie bent and unzipped the overnight bag, saying, “I’d better give you this now.”

A lavishly wrapped gift came out of the bag, a necklacesized box in embossed silver paper, trailing great curls of silver ribbon. “Birthday present.”

“Many thanks,” Edith murmured, not opening it, standing with the gift in her hand. “I’ll save it for the day.” Johnnie turned away and trotted back down the stairs. On Monday Edith would return the gift to him unopened.

Over on the tennis court Izzy was playing Terry, with shrieking and twirling and playful brandishing of racquets. The ball was flying upward, mostly, though Izzy can play well if she tries. Today she had elected not to. She’s good at the net but today she was standing on the baseline, smoking.

“Hey Izzy!” Johnnie shouted. Izzy offered a careless wave, not looking, pretending to focus on the next shot, her cigarette in her mouth so she could use both hands. She was wearing a short halter-neck tennis dress, hair piled on her head. Now Johnnie turned to Mog.

“Any chance of a cup of tea before I go?”

“Absolutely not.” She walked away, bent forward a little over her folded arms and looking at the ground, up the steps to the terrace, looking like someone who wanted to run but wasn’t going to. Briefly she linked hands with Edith, who’d been standing watching, worrying at her beads with one hand. After a moment’s consultation, Mog disappeared into the house. The vast floor-standing mirror on the end of the corridor wall, framed in gilded and intertwining ivy, revealed an anxious-looking woman in city clothes, remnants of a uniform, black and white.

Mog went into the drawing room, crouching as she closed in on the window, peeping above the sill. She could see the entrance to the tennis court and movement showing in flashes from within: momentary views of Terry, who was standing at the near end, just glimpsed through the wire enclosure and through the greenery that had grown up around it. Mog moved across to the far left pane, rolling her forehead across the glass, trying to angle the sightline, just in time to catch sight of Ursula and Johnnie as they passed round the side of the house. It was possible she was bringing him in via the back stairs.

Howls of protest rose from the tennis court. Izzy’s voice.

“Terry, if you keep serving like Federer I’m not going to play with you again.”

“If I served like him you wouldn’t even see it coming.”

“Do you understand what serve means?
Serve
it to me.”

Mog went out into the corridor, listening, holding her breath. There was no hint of an approach across the hard-tiled surfaces of the entrances, no human murmuring, no noise. She went forward at a jog on tiptoe, pausing in the picture gallery, steadying herself against a Japanese cabinet, one too damaged to be worth selling on. Nothing to be heard, not a peep. She turned the corner into the hall, her heart surging with adrenaline and, although there was nobody there, ran up the stairs as fast as she could and into her room, and dragged her dressing table in front of the door.