The White Lie (5 page)

Nothing explicit connects the marble disc and standing stone to me. Until recently, when the truth emerged, the family had kept the facts of my disappearance a secret for very nearly 14 years, and if that sounds preposterous, criminal, strange, I have to tell you that it wasn’t really, at the time. It was easy. All it required was that nothing further be done, and doing nothing, shelving decisionmaking, is always easiest. As the days pass and become weeks, doing nothing gets easier and easier. There was no case, in any case. There was no proof, there was no consensus, there was no body, and (most crucially of all) there was no witness, other than Alan, who was keen to be part of the circle of trust. What, you think it’s an unusual situation, a family manslaughter and then silence: the ease of doing nothing, the temptations of doing nothing, leading to nothing being done? It’s a lot more common than you think. Consider the many missing persons, never heard from or seen again. Some of those disappearances must have been family events, hushed and camouflaged. Consider the many dead babies that turn up mummified in tea towels, in suitcases in attics; those that make it to the newspapers must be a fraction of those lost. At the time that I disappeared, secrecy was perfectly rational and best for everyone, almost everyone, and I can see how the reasoning went. Things could only have been made worse by disclosure. So, the memorial stones are non-committal, but I’m there if you know where to look. The disc of marble that was set into the floor of the wood is a cameo, its decorated edging framing a man’s profile. The edging marks my passing in a code of Ottilie’s devising; my initials are hidden within it, and my dates, expressed in the arrangement of leaves, branches and berries. The profile within it could be that of a hundred men, the great uncle included, but in fact is mine, taken from a photograph.

***

Ottilie had been doing a drawing based on the contours of a raised bark pattern, twisted and raised as a skin disease. Now she left off her sketching and began to walk back towards her sister, stopping when she got within clear sight of her.

“I meant it when I said I wanted to be here alone.”

“Fine.” Joan dropped neatly off the tomb and lightly onto the grass. She didn’t look towards Ottilie. She put the top back on her pen with a firm click, and dropped the pen and the diary back into the bag.

“Linen,” she said. “Not paper. Details matter.”

“Not the wrong details. It’s always the wrong details.”

Joan left without replying, out of the wood and along the path.

Smelling strongly of violets and bathing and hair products and dry-cleaning and shoe leather and, now that she was closer, also of wine, Ottilie squatted low, balancing herself, bracing one arm against the angel, and put her other hand onto my profile, and spoke to me.

“I’m not sure I can stand another minute of that Joan,” she said
(that Joan
is an in-joke), “and I’m beginning to wish I’d killed her when I had the chance.”

She was referring back to an incident when the twins were 13 and a tandem hired at a seaside village very nearly went off a cliff. Ottilie wasn’t even steering, she says, but got the blame nonetheless, as did the quality of the machine, the integrity of the bike hire shack and the council decision to leave the precipice unfenced, a diatribe concluding that the whole village was second-rate. It’s the village where subsequently my mother bought a cottage. Would someone choose a house purely on the basis of its irritation value? In this case I’m afraid that they might.

In general black humour went unexercised at Peattie, when Henry was alive. Too many deaths had left the family afraid of irreverence. (More deaths than are quite right, than are quite explicable, they say in the village, where they tell eager tourists the details of the Salter curse). At Peattie, irony had been reclassified as bad taste, and Joan was its most enthusiastic sentry. This, of course, made it difficult for Ottilie to resist. Out of so many years of grieving, a dark sort of comedy had begun to emerge. Ottilie patted the stone angel softly as if she were behind me and it were my shoulder, and I was 12 years old again, being bullied at school, and she’d just told me that if it happened again I was to hit the bastards. “Punch them in the nose, Michael. And if I have to, I’ll come in and do it myself.”

She’d warned me often enough and so I knew the truth about people, that people were selfish, immoral, messed up, untrustworthy, and above all things, reliably stupid. That they’d exploit you, use and discard you; that all too often in life, even an apparently genuine friendship was introductory to this outcome. These are things I learned early: that we were
we
and they were otherwise. That we had to be vigilant. That we had to be aware. There were always going to be exceptions—she’d allow for exceptions—but it was important that I realised that I’d only ever be able to rely on myself. I don’t know if it was a deliberate thing, this positioning, ensuring our exclusivity to one another, but that was the effect for a long time. Not that this made us inseparable—it didn’t. We were each individually lonely and wary. We didn’t spend a lot of time together, and we didn’t talk all that much—there was one persistent barrier to that—but we were aware (I was aware) that the two of us were different from the rest, not least in having this characteristic, and in Ottilie’s case, hard-earned world view. It wasn’t even always spoken, but it was inculcated in me early, nonetheless, the real sense of our being a race apart, like the first two native Americans brought to the English court and misunderstood there. It adhered deeply, this idea. It took me a long time to make a proper friend, and that was with one of the cousins, and a girl.

***

Squatting had proven uncomfortable so Ottilie sat down, gathering up dried brown leaves beneath her to protect the linen from the earth.

“Will you make a special appearance and haunt her a little?” she asked me. “Just for a couple of days, and only if you have an opening, obviously.”

I could smell, now, in detail that separated out into its colours like a prism, the elements of the dark-red wine, its bruised fruit and spice and alcohol. I’m all faculties now, and my sense of smell is near canine. The loch is pungent as never in life. The beach has a personality, each pebble. Each of the trees in the wood is marked by its own bark-fibrous, leaf-sap, earth-and-root aroma, some floral and some herbal, some mushroomy and fungal, and each its own self. If I find myself in the formal gardens just after Euan’s been up and down with the push mower, the smell of cut grass is like an assault and I have to withdraw. Each room in the house produces its own raw odours: the cryptish smells of damp stone and the chemical whiff of old paint, the fusty sharpness of rot, the gluey wet of bubbling wallpapers, the dust scent of wood floors, the dyed-cotton smells of worn velvet and corduroy, the human traces unlaundered in cushions and rugs, and the animal imprint superimposed on it all. I have to turn nauseated away from Henry’s various dogs. It’s odd and on occasion disturbing, being among the living. Sometimes, the scent of flesh offends me and I feel an involuntary repugnance, but at other times only empathy on behalf of them all, for their being tubes and pumps and chemistry. If the family could hear me, I’d tell them that life continues when the machinery has failed. Perhaps it’s just as well they can’t hear me, then. I’m not sure I could be convincing about the benefits. Nor could I bear to tell Edith that in death there is no reunion. I haven’t seen Henry, Sebastian, the great aunts, Grandpa Andrew. There have been no touching scenes as we gather in the wood, greeting each other with wry smiles, finding ourselves sitting together on a wall like the ghosts in old films.

“Freak her out a little, would you?” Ottilie said. “Just enough for her to take to her bed with nervous fatigue a few days and let us have our shindig as casual as we like. A few supermarket bottles, the furniture pushed back, sausage rolls in the oven. Instead of being organised by clipboard woman. And in-vig-i-lated.” She gave the word slow and special emphasis. “But no. That won’t do. Instead it’s meetings and lists and phone calls and endless fussing.” She shook her head, her lips pressed together. “Where does it come from, this idea of things having to be correct, everything having to be
correct
all the time? It presses down on us, Michael. It must press down on her, mustn’t it? I almost feel sorry for her.”

Her hand was raised an inch or two above the cameo, now, and her fingers fluttered slightly, as if there were an energy coming off it, some static, some heat. She pushed gently through this forcefield every now and then, making momentary contact. I remembered, suddenly, being ill with the flu aged about 15, and these very hand movements, my mother approaching as I slept and her palm hovering over my hair.

3

The day that I disappeared I knew from very early in the morning that it was going to be a big day in the history of the family, but not how big a day. Looking back to the hours preceding the bringing of the news, seeing everybody else behaving as if it’s another mundane 24 hours in a heatwave, as if it’s heat that’s their enemy, is unfair to the others: their not knowing can make them look as if they are unimaginative, or worse, heartless.

I met my cousin Mog in the linen room at Peattie straight after breakfast, just as we’d arranged the day before. She was having trouble with her maths coursework. She was 16 and her mother still bought her clothes: that day, a brown cotton skirt that reached almost to her ankles, swishy with excess fabric panels, and flat brown sandals with bridle buckles. She was wearing a red t-shirt, straining across the softness of her belly, and had a brown cardigan tied looped around her neck. I sat beside her on the lowest shelf, and while I was looking at the textbook she untied the cardigan, fanning her face inefficiently with it, its empty arms flapping. Her brown hair, the Salter tight waves frizzing out over her shoulders, was tied back lightly in a red ribbon. She had spots on her chin, perspiration rings beneath her armpits. It was stultifyingly hot in there. When I’d come in I had opened the room’s one high window, pushing it out to its furthest hole, but the air coming in was just as torpid as the rest.

Mog stood up and went to the lower shelf opposite, where school books had been dumped untidily over a blanket, and sorted through them, keeping her eye on me: I was looking at her attempts to answer the maths questions, and not bothering to mask my incredulity at the mess she’d made of them. We’d had this conversation before: basic principles weren’t being applied. They smell so strongly in memory, these books, of old cupboards and the insides of satchels and remnants of lunch. They prompt a view of other pupils, previous users, their names listed and crossed out in black and blue on front pages in outmoded handwriting, and I have to concentrate on staying here and now. This is what happens: fresh narratives try to open, taking me off at tangents. I have to damp them down and resist; it takes effort.

Mog had an apple and a banana supplied by her mother, who’d forbidden non-fruit snacks. I ate the banana and fixed the peel as hair for the apple, balancing it over the top, using stickers from Mog’s pencil case to give it a face. The apple-faced banana-haired monstrosity grins at me now in recognition, like a Halloween pumpkin, its sparkly hearts arranged like teeth. I came here to say goodbye and then didn’t. “See you,” I said, not knowing when it would be, not knowing it wouldn’t be ever, aside from when she comes to the wood, only in that perverse one-sided manner. I said I had things to do, having shown Mog the method again and having satirised her muddle-headedness. I was unkind, sarcastic. I see that. It’s easy to see that from here. I left the room and barely five minutes later she was stuck fast. “But it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. Damn it all. I’ll have to go and find him.”

She packed up the books in the bag she always carried then, a maroon-coloured canvas bag that hooked across the body. Joan bought her these ugly things with a consistency that couldn’t have been accidental. Mog had said she’d have to find me, but she didn’t come and find me; she went home to the gatehouse and sprawled on her bed, returning to a pile of favourite childhood books that Joan had boxed ready for a jumble sale. Decluttering, Joan said, was the first step to serenity. Mog looked out from time to time at the parched garden, the sky, feeling the heat burning through the open window, telling herself she should be out there. She had lunch, alone, a crispbread with cheese and a tomato, and continued reading through the Malory Towers books, enjoying favourite old scenes; she must have had passages almost by heart. Finally the nagging idea that it was a waste to be in the shade when the sun was shining, a thought spoken in her mother’s voice, sent her out to lie on the grass. She lay flat out in shorts and a bikini top, scorching her shoulders and the backs of her knees, until her head was woozy. When she came in again she drank some water, went and curled up on a sofa with the book and fell promptly asleep. It was training that woke her at ten to four, knowing she’d be expected at tea. Heading up the drive, she saw her parents’ car parked in its usual spot: they must have arrived back late and gone straight in. Sure enough there was Pip, her 18-year-old brother, sitting on the steps that lead up to the terrace.

She waved at him, calling out her question as she went. “How was Glasgow?”

It was too hot to sit beside him on the stone tread in the full glare. Her head was still thumping its quiet background thump.

“Glasgowish. Mum and Dad bickered all the way home. I’m just coming in.”

She ruffled his hair as she passed by and he ducked and veered to escape it. “Gerroff.”

“Rarrr,” she said. “Grumpy.”

He followed her into the hall.

“How was it then?” she asked him.

“Alright.”

“Details please.”

“We talked all day. The motherator talked all day. I’m sick of talking about it.”

“But could you spend four years there? Did you see the student houses?”

“Yeah yeah yeah.”

“You don’t have to go, you know.”