The White Lie (4 page)

“Don’t assume too much, don’t rush to judgment,” she’ll say to them, her eyes showing their green ice under the grey, fierce but meaning, always, to be kinder; set on her path of inculcating into people the value of
making
. The fierceness comes from meeting resistance. “That may look like a nothing to you,” she said to a man overheard at an exhibition, “but a barnacle-covered shell was the starting point and what happened in between was art, no matter what you think of it. Art is doing.”

So, Joan went off in a huff, and Ottilie returned to the wood alone. She had one of Joan’s clipboards, a brown clipboard with a bulldog clip, a pink sheet of paper fixed to it, and she threw it down hard on the great uncle’s tomb. She took her hair down and put it up again, something she does when she needs to think or to delay her reactions, something self-calming. Drawing closer, I could smell her chamomile shampoo, her violet scent, face cream, the scent of inhabited fabrics. The handwriting on the pink sheet was Joan’s, a list written in her usual jagged calligraphy:
Fairy lights, but only the white ones, 50 strings. 20 of the large-bulb strings (children’s, the coloured ones). Storm lanterns furnished with pillar candles. Jam jars and tea-lights and wire
. Underneath, added in pencil and underlined, it said
Linen napkins
. Napkins were the start of the day’s controversy. Paper ones made more sense to my mother.

Ottilie pursed up her mouth in a way that I remember from childhood, in the same way that Edith does, and it twitched with words she couldn’t or wouldn’t articulate, her hands smoothing and re-smoothing her skirt. Ordinarily my mother wears Victorian colours, deep green and inky velvets and toffee and claret shades of brocade; these, or men’s blue overalls, bought at the chandlery and stiff with paint. But on this particular day she was head to toe in stone-coloured linen with a matching thin coat of the same shin length, its pockets bulbous with finds, and creased up at the waist and around the back from sitting. Perhaps the forecast had been for sunshine.

It’s good to have something to think about, to see this cinema of the past, and better still when it overlays the night. It’s lonely in the wood in the dark; it can be hard to be alone. Great Uncle David, who died in the First World War and whose body lies just a few feet away from me here, he would be company at least. He’s not my great uncle, strictly speaking, but my mother’s, though everybody calls him “great uncle”, all the same. He seems to be another kind of ghost, the kind that’s an apparition, appearing in scenes from his life and not really present in the present. He’s seen muttering nonsense to himself, his uniform thick with mud and dried blood and the smell terrible. Sometimes people say that he looks so three-dimensional that they have gone to him, thinking him the survivor of a car crash or air accident or suchlike, but trying to get closer is like approaching a rainbow, with predictable results. The children from the village school reported seeing him sitting crying on a tree stump, his hat in his hands, no boots on and his feet grey. The great uncle, dead at 20, is the one that inspired the planting of the wood, his corpse having been moved at the direction of the family under special licence from his Flanders field. Ursula sees him, or so Ursula says, but I’m dead and I don’t, which is part irritating and part relief. There have been no reunions. I’m not sure I’d want community, anyway. All that small talk. All that means-of-death oneupmanship.

Though I don’t see David Salter myself, I see people seeing him; I see them getting spooked and running. The last episode was only a few days ago: an academic, the wrong side of 50, his stomach convex over the belt of his jeans, who spent a methodical, peaceful afternoon here, noting down in more than one of his colour-coded notebooks, drinking coffee from his flask, slow and thoughtful in drinking it, practising an absent-minded style of eating his sandwich. He was taking a photograph when it happened. He jumped backwards like he’d been shot, dropping his camera bag and recovering it, not taking his eyes off the tomb, feeling for the strap at a snatch. He could turn on some speed for a guy with a pot belly.

A sudden intimate noise, feet heard crunching over last autumn’s remnant leaves and tinder twigs, announced that Joan had returned.

“You’re wrong about my being a control freak,” she said without preamble, rolling up the sleeves of her sweater. She’s fair-skinned and bony; she still has the stretched-drum stomach of her teenage self, still boyishly flat as if she’d never been pregnant. Her jeans were tight and her boots high and pointed; she isn’t shy about promoting the distinction from her soft and rounded sister. Approval rests on the side of the visible clavicle. Great rows of worked gilt bangles clattered on her wrist.

Ottilie stared at her. “Is that all you came back for?”

“It’s not fair. You know it isn’t. Somebody—somebody—for god’s sake, just one person, has to be the one who gets things done.”

“Fine,” Ottilie told her. “Linen napkins it is. Linen napkins and a champagne toast. You win.” She could have left it at that, and looked for a few moments as if she would. But no. “You’ve got everything screwed down so tight, Joan. The last detail. It’ll all be perfect in the details, perfect and lifeless. Nothing control-freakish there. Now go, will you. You’re interrupting.”

Joan looked around theatrically, left to right and then behind her. “Interrupting what?”

“Sanctuary Wood. Sanctuary. From your prattling, among other things.”

“You have been a liar your whole life,” Joan said, as if it were a known fact, a word like “overweight”. Ottilie remained expressionless. It wasn’t the first time she’d heard it. “Just admit it. You come here to talk to Michael.”

“Michael’s not here, Joan.”

“I know that,” Joan said, “but I don’t believe you do.”

“Don’t do this. Don’t. You know you’ll hate yourself later.”

“Why do you want him to be dead?”

“Because he is dead. We all know that he’s dead and why.” Ottilie closed her eyes. “Tell me why you want him not to be. Is it because that’s worse for me?”

Joan took a step backwards, felt the tomb cold and heavy behind her, and reached her hands back to rest against its decorated marble lip. Great Uncle David lay there, not once but twice: once within the marble box and a second time in the carved marble effigy.

The wood was planted and titled for the place where David fell. I don’t know what it was called before, that wartime wood. Something Flemish, no doubt; something else: the south wood maybe, the squirrel wood, the wood with no name. It became known as Sanctuary Wood in 1914 (to English-speaking soldiers, anyway), when it was a safety zone, a place of unlikely peace, where it was possible to step out of the war as if off the stage, to be out of character there for a spell and rest. Men who’d been separated from their units gathered within its boundaries, safe beneath its canopy, until they could be reunited with them, well behind the lines. But by 1915 the wood had moved into the dead centre of the war and there were terrible losses. Where once there was sanctuary now there was carnage. Huge numbers of his battalion were killed there, and David too, among splintered trees and scorched and blood-stained earth.

“The worst of it is that he was killed by his own men,” Henry said to me once. Henry was forthcoming if you happened to touch on something that interested him, something at one remove from autobiography. “David and the men he was with had got beyond their own lines,” he told me. “They had stormed and taken three German trenches, but the rear gunners didn’t know this and continued firing on them. Anyone in those trenches was a sitting duck, because the Germans had abandoned their posts further up and other allies had taken this higher ground. The German trenches were only designed to be defended towards the Allied positions. They were open at the back and defenceless.”

“This was in France.”

“Belgium, actually. The cemetery is just a few miles from Ypres, in the north-western corner. It was also called Hill 62. Hardly a hill, but they called all the ridges Hill something. The number was the height above sea level.”

“Have you been there?”

“I have.”

“What’s it like?”

“It’s a wood. Quite ordinary. Green and mature again, other than for the occasional relic dead tree. Woods regenerate, you know. That’s the thing; it all grows back and you’d never know. The day I was there it was very quiet, other than for the birds. It was a spring morning and very bright. The birdsong was intense; it was almost unseemly. But it has all these great vast craters in it where the bombs fell. There are tunnels, and a labyrinth of trenches, and lots of corrugated iron. It isn’t very big, no bigger than our wood here. There’s farmland all around, more woods across the fields, though it’s only a couple of miles out of the town.”

I couldn’t help thinking how young Henry looked, when you succeeded in enthusing him. Though he always looked much younger than his age. Even at 79, last year when he died, he was possessed of the same good proportions of his prime. He had the classic Salter features, the faintly Asiatic eyes and the narrow mouth, the lower lip deeper than the upper and with a determined set to it. His military-short, pink-blonde hair, faded but not greyed, retained its youthful crinkle, lying obediently cropped to his head and radically side-parted. A fondness for khakis and zips and many-pocketed utility clothes added to the military effect. Henry was never tweedy. Towards the end of his life he developed a passion for expensive, supposedly technologically advanced trainers.

I get visitors—non-family visitors—coming here to the wood, especially in the summer. Of course they’re really David’s visitors. Whole coachloads of foreigners wander in and out—the path to the loch is a public right of way—dressed as foreigners on coach holidays in Scotland do, in many precautionary layers. Then there are the tomb hunters, the war nerds and art historians, who come ready for the north in hi-tech fabrics, in jackets made up of goose-down duvet layers and boots bought for the occasion, as if they’d have to scrabble up a crag and wade through knee-high heather to get here, instead of, anti-climactically, walking a few minutes along a signposted and only mildly rutted lane. I enjoy the moment when first they catch sight of the tomb through the trees: that first glimpse, the intake of breath, the exclamation, the efficient Anglo-Saxon curse. The great uncle’s grave is celebrated, almost a cult. It’s said to emanate its own supernatural glow, and it’s true that there’s a moment at dusk after a sunny day when it seems like the marble holds onto the light a little longer than ought to be possible. They sell postcards of the phenomenon at the village post office and stores.

Joan levered herself up to sit on the tomb, and sat there, looking sharper-featured than ever and lighter-haired: a conventional blonde.

“I was thinking about giving Mum her presents during the party. Get the cake piped in, raise our glasses to her.”

“Don’t ever mention Michael’s name to me again,” Ottilie told her.

It’s a big, solid thing, the great uncle’s tomb. It sits on a complicated plinth, on bands of faux-gothic ornamentation, and David’s effigy lies on top, like the 1916 equivalent of the cathedral resting place of a medieval knight, the willows rising around him in slim columns, their poles knitting together into a roof. David was interred here on a freezing autumn morning, with pomp and ceremony, with a quartet rented for the day, with roses and poetry and sombre family dogs assembled seated in black collars. I had nothing like that. My ceremony in the wood here—for there was a ceremony of sorts, at my mother’s insistence, despite the lack of a body to bury—was characterised by a kind of bewilderment. Nobody knew quite what to say or how to achieve the right tone, and so an atmosphere that could have been pious was, instead, marked by an absence of clarity. Ottilie had provided memorials: a round marble disc was set into the floor of the wood, and a marble standing stone, about two and a half feet high and carved with an angel on one side, was installed beside it. The angel looks down on the disc, its face downcast and even its wings worn at a defeated angle. Seeking anonymity, the status of garden statuary, the stones are assumed to be a secondary testament to a hero’s passing, a modern honouring of the family soldier, an assumption that suits everyone. The mourners spent much of the time bickering about the siting of these objects, before wrestling the angel into place, ineptly from a rusting green wheelbarrow.

***

“Do you really think he’s here?” Joan asked my mother, her tone seeking to make amends.

“I’m warning you,” Ottilie said. “Go back to your lists. Things you have a hope of understanding.”

Joan took her Filofax diary out of her bag in a way that suggested great offence. She took a pen and began to write, flicking between pages and frowning with a concentration that might have been faked. Ottilie walked away, deeper into the wood, and got her sketchbook out.

The comparison with the medieval knight goes only so far. David’s effigy isn’t remotely heraldic. He isn’t portrayed as if sleeping in stone-carved chain mail, as if he might at any moment open his eyes and raise himself onto his elbows, blinking heavy-lidded, looking down his long marble nose. Instead of all that, the great uncle is dead, plainly dead and broken, and he emerges from the lid of the tomb only at points. His forehead and cap are clear of the stone, and his face with its unseeing stare, his eyes featureless white rounds. The tips of his shoulders are shown, the top of his breastbone, his lower arms. Veins in the marble feed down into dead hands. His belly, groin and thighs are engulfed, though the boyish rounds of his knees, his lower legs, his ankles and feet are visible. His brother was determined about this: that David should be shown to be a dead man, shown killed in the Flemish mud.

The family intended that people should want to be here to socialise with him. There’s a table of teak slats—dulled now to a flat mouse grey—where tourist picnics take place, and seats fashioned from the stumpy remains of felled trees. There’s a particular tree stump I used to lean against when I was a teenager, a lanky black-eyed boy, long-limbed and olive-skinned, solemn-looking and sitting for hours, the earth hard underneath me—you can still see the imprint left by my sitting there—with French and Russian novels and creased battered notebooks. They were nothing like as real to me, the people I lived with, as the people in those books.