The White Lie (43 page)

Joan was in the hall, her smile looking fixed. A number of guests had failed to be funnelled along the passage and had clotted there, ignoring Joan’s brightly bossy invocations, urging them to move further on, further in, and carried on regardless, chatting and clogging. When Joan turned defeated to leave, her muttered “for god’s own sake” wasn’t quite as discreet as she’d hoped.

Izzy and friends had lit a fire. They had been supplied with skewers and marshmallows by her mother, and potatoes for baking ready-wrapped in foil. There were tupperware boxes of potato fillings and salad, and butter wrapped up with a freezer block, and a basket with paper plates and napkins and cutlery. Shrink-wrapped tubes of interlocking plastic waited to be assembled into wine glasses, and instructions had been penned on a pink file card, detailing which of the fridges they were to go to for the allotted white wine and beer. A music system had been rigged up to work from a battery pack, and in the broadleaf trees surrounding, Ottilie and Mog had installed many little glass jars bearing tea-light candles, wired into the branches. The summeriness of all this was somewhat at odds with the poor light levels and chill. There was worry about the weather. A persistent lead-grey hat of cloud, ragged already in the distance with its delivery of rain, had settled over the valley in the late afternoon.

***

By eight o’clock the rain began to fall, first with a wet sudden spotting like paint flicked from a brush, and then in a sky-opening, sheeting bucketing roar, a slow roll of thunder accompanying it. Children fled the garden in groups under picnic rugs held up by their corners, a system put in place under the nanny’s orders. Izzy and friends retreated under the trees, impromptu cocktails in hand. The bottles of white wine and beer, lying post-it-note-adorned on their shelves, languished unopened, thanks to friends from the surrounding villages who had turned up in numbers with off-licence bags of spirits and mixers.

Sandy the fiddler had embarked on a programme of dance tunes in the main part of the picture gallery, which had been cleared of its bigger furnishings; they’d been pushed and dragged into the narrower section towards the hall, and the smaller pieces of furniture had been removed altogether. Now, with its rugs rolled up, this broad space with its springy wood floor was as good a place to have a ceilidh as any in the world. The dancing had begun, and four sets of eight weaved around each other in practised serpentine tracks, turning and turning again.

Joan came to stand beside Edith. “Your friend called. Susan. To say she isn’t coming because she doesn’t feel very well.”

“Thanks for letting me know.”

In the drawing room two uniformed waiters, elegant in black and white with red cummerbunds and rosebud buttonholes that had been provided by Joan, were restocking the drinks tables and circulating with trays of finger food, portions of delicious things in miniature and tiny filo-pastry parcels. The tables were laid with blue plaid cloths, and garlands of the same fabric had been strung festively across the ceiling and along the cornices, bunched and clasped with bouquets of gilded leaves. The plaid was the same fabric that had been used for Edith’s going-away outfit after her wedding, 52 years ago on this day. Credit must be given to Joan for Edith’s being moved, genuinely so, by this, her heart touched by the scale of the effort and its kindness. The tapers in the great silver candelabra had been lit, and twinkle lights delineated the edges of windows and doors. Everything glowed more diffusely in the watery grey light the rainstorm had brought.

Edith saw that Thomas had arrived, looking very slight in his old suit. He raised a hand to her across the room, his expression indeterminate.

The drawing room looked very different that night: not only in styling but in shape. Its size had been doubled by opening up the false wall, one made up of quadruple wallpapered doors that folded back into an adjoining, secondary drawing room that was used only rarely because it was draughty and its fireplace smoked. Joan had papered its dowdy walls, which had been oil-painted a pale yellow at some point in the past and had acquired a hospital look. The paper revealed itself as the same blue plaid, which had been stretched tight and fixed with studs. It was decorated with many old mirrors from other rooms, their glass panels draped with more fairy lights and garlands of dried white hydrangea. The food had been laid out there on a row of white-clothed tables. Big pans of kedgeree (being cooked up even now by Mrs Welsh, under Euan’s instruction) were to be served there at midnight—hours earlier than the dawn breakfasts of old—as a soaker-up of alcohol and a signal that the party was over.

The new arrivals, having circled and admired the double drawing room, having tasted the miniature tarts laid out appetisingly on their platters, the prawn toast triangles, the quail eggs, the buttery mouthfuls of shortbread (that Joan had stayed up till the early hours making, having ditched Ursula’s singed, Christmassy efforts), now made their way, drinks in hand, back to the picture gallery. The dance had been lit by a succession of warmly tinted bulbs, which made the faces of the participants glow as rosy as a pink dusk.

Thomas came across, extricating himself from ex-parishioners, to wish Edith a happy birthday. He produced a box about six inches square, wrapped in newsprint and tied up with string. He and Edith went into the hall together, away from the noise, and Edith opened the box. Inside there was a snow globe, a very old-looking one of heavy glass. The house inside the dome might almost have been Peattie, surrounded by idealised hills. When she upended and then returned the globe to the upright, the snow drifted down around the house in slow, twirling flakes. Edith found she had tears in her eyes. She said that she was feeling overheated, and went out onto the terrace, saying to Thomas that she’d come and find him in a little while. The rain had turned into a sort of tepid wet mist. Out on the terrace, she mimed her overheatedness, flapping at the top hem of her dress to allow the air to pass in. Her dress, she said to Euan, who was looking at her doing this, was a lovely thing but rather too warm; it was a thick velvet, and a lovely sea green, and it had been Henry’s favourite, a long time ago. She’d worn it hoping it would take them back to an old day, reuniting them for a moment in remembering a happy evening they’d spent once: she’d worn the dress, and Sebastian had been safely tucked up in bed at home. But Henry had seemed to be put out by her wearing it. He’d seemed annoyed.

***

The terrace was lined with ashtrays tonight along its balustrade, and wine tables had been placed along it at intervals, bearing drinks and snacks for those who, as Joan knew from experience, would come out here for a smoke earlyish in the proceedings, find congenial company among other exiles and fail to return indoors. Enamel buckets dressed with ivy and filled with crushed ice bore bottles of fizzy wine and water; whisky bottles and tumblers had been placed alongside. Among the likely members of the smoking sub-group were some of Henry’s oldest friends, and he was keen to provide for them. Some of these people he hadn’t seen since Sebastian died. They, the longest-lost, adjourned to the study with him when the rain came, promising themselves a private catch-up out of the fray, but finding, once installed there, that conversation proved elusive. When the past presents so much that’s forbidden, that’s non-traversable, the present becomes just as intangible. So little could be talked about that stayed clear of Sebastian and the years of social withdrawal that had followed. Which is how it came to pass that half a dozen septuagenarians who hadn’t come together for over 35 years were discussing land prices and local politics with slightly too much heartiness.

Once the rain shower had slowed to a drizzle, Izzy and some of the friends (the ones Joan had invited) emerged damply from tree shelter and came into the house, Izzy turning heads in a white column of a dress that draped from a halter-neck to her bare brown feet, her hair coiled in plaits around her head. She and her party brought an unforced jollity, brought the scent of outdoors and summer rain into the drawing room with them. They took bottles of wine from the trough beneath the table and, producing one of the plastic columns of glasses, went and occupied the window seat. Mog and Rebecca, each dressed in black, joined them there. Ottilie, wearing a grey silk patterned darker with leaves, could be seen moving among the older generation of guests who’d seated themselves in the newly renovated side of the drawing room, away from the worst of the crush and the noise. She had part-closed the folding doors to ensure greater quiet, ignoring Joan’s demand that she put them back as they were.

“This isn’t about the photograph,” Ottilie told her.

“What photograph? What are you talking about?”

“The one in your head. The one House and Garden would take.”

Joan stepped forward as if she’d push one of the doors back anyway, but Ottilie was there first and with a steely look took hold of the partition firmly in two hands. Joan wasn’t about to engage in a physical struggle. Once her sister had retreated Ottilie went to sit for a while beside Christian’s parents, chatting to them and fetching drinks for their neighbours.

Edith had been persuaded by Thomas to dance, albeit in a highly self-conscious way, moving stiffly and watching the door for sightings of Henry. Vita watched them, banging her stick to the rhythm, Sandy’s fiddle singing its mellifluous up-and-down song. His son Angus, arriving late from Inverness thanks to a delayed train, joined in mid-reel on his accordion. Mrs Hammill was circulating, in her gracious-hostess way, welcoming people to Peattie and looking even now a little the worse for wear. Joan was now hovering close by the waiters’ table, supervising and looking very thin in a silvery knee-length dress, one that looked as if made out of fish scales. Jet had appeared for five minutes to gather up other sons and loners and had borne them off with the promise of better music, though one of them had already returned with one of Jet’s t-shirts, opening it out on the food table and stacking its central area efficiently, before gathering it up and bearing it carefully away again.

When Pip and Angelica went into the kitchen for glasses of water, they found Ursula there. They made a striking-looking couple, standing together at the kitchen door: Pip immaculate in probable Armani, Angelica serene and trim in the dark green dress and heavy jet jewellery that had been Henry’s mother’s. Ursula had wedged herself into the corner between the stove and the door. She would say only that she hated Johnnie, that she’d sent Johnnie away.

“How did they end up anywhere together alone?” Pip asked rhetorically. “What about Mother’s blasted rota?”

“She’s been with Edith for most of the time,” Angelica said, “having refused to hold your mother’s hand, or sit with Vita. But then the minister came—”

“Thomas Osborne? He’s the ex-minister.”

“Yes—Thomas Osborne came and she went off with him, and so I took charge of Ursula. Then Edith came back and took her from me. But the next thing I saw, Edith was dancing. I assumed Ursula had been handed over to someone else. And we all thought Johnnie had gone.”

“Where is he now? Where’s Johnnie now?”

Ursula didn’t respond, but looked ill and clammy, her eyes pink. She looked cold.

Angelica put her hand on Pip’s shoulder. “Gently, gently. Drugs, do you think?”

“Dunno. Possibly. Get her something warmer to wear.” Ursula was clad in an ill-fitting black lace dress—too long, too broad on the shoulder—that came from Tilly’s wardrobe, that Tilly had worn to Ursa and Jo’s funeral. It swamped Ursula’s little frame and she’d hitched it up at the waist with a man’s white dinner scarf, a heavily fringed scarf that she’d knotted into a belt. Angelica offered her shawl, folding it around Ursula’s shoulders. Ursula gathered it tight in her small hands and dipped her chin into its folds.

“Something up, that’s for sure,” Pip said, taking her pulse and not meeting resistance. “I don’t know what to do for the best.”

Ursula had fixed her eyes on Angelica, and Pip, cottoning on, asked Ursula if she would like to talk to her privately. Ursula nodded and Pip went out of the room, saying that if things got worse he wouldn’t be far away, and winking as he said so. He went out and closed the door five-sixths shut, and stood behind it, listening.

He heard Angelica saying, “Come and sit down.” Ursula slid into a chair and Angelica pulled another closer to it.

“Tell me,” Angelica said.

“I’m sorry,” Ursula said. “I’ve said sorry to God. I didn’t mean to.”

“What have you done to be sorry for?”

“He tried—” Ursula faltered. Angelica waited. “He touched me.”

“Touched you . . .”

“Johnnie.”

Angelica lowered her head the better to hear. “Johnnie what?”

“We had sex together.”

“You had sex together.”

“And after that . . .”

“What happened?”

“He put . . . he tried to put his hands . . . inside.”

“Inside?”

“Inside my clothes.”

Angelica was flummoxed but, to her credit, tactful, merely asking what she could do to help, although she looked physically thwarted, her body language ripe with misfirings, going to hug Ursula and then desisting, and all at sixes and sevens. Ursula said that she’d like some hot chocolate and Angelica leapt up, glad to be directed.

Pip, outside the door, was having trouble deciding what to do next. It was going to be difficult to hunt down Johnnie and accuse him of anything. Ursula couldn’t be protected, not at 42, from such misunderstandings, after all, arising from her misconstruing the kind of relationship men wanted with her and being offended by them. An attempted skin contact, leading on from intimacy that might have appeared introductory—that attempt didn’t in itself amount to an assault. Not in Pip’s mind, at least. His thoughtfulness, poised between rage and bafflement as he leaned against the door jamb, was manifesting itself physically, in the loosening of limbs previously stiffened for retribution, and now, as Angelica heated the milk, in the attention paid to chewing down his thumbnail.

The telephone rang, and Pip went back into the kitchen to answer it. He lifted the receiver and said, “Peattie House.” A voice on the other end said, “Taxi for Brand.”