The White Lie (6 page)

He opened the drawing-room door. “I know. I’m still thinking.”

Unusually, all the windows were open to their fullest extent. Earlier there had been a fuss about a starling, which blundered in and was scooped up and repatriated to the garden in a sheet. It wasn’t just hot, this June day, but the hottest of a week of hot days, each ascending in temperature. The grasses were bleached and dried and the earth, baked iron hard, lay cracked in the fields, the hot air sitting over it custard yellow; we seemed to walk through the world as if through some thicker kind of atmosphere, some cataclysmic meteorological thickening, the air hindering our progress. When Mog went to the sideboard, a cherry-wood beast of a thing with many legs, and poured lemon squash into a glass from a jug, the ice cubes clinking, a stripe of sweat appeared on her back. She untied her hair and put it up again, bunching it into a knot on the top of her head from which ends sprayed in all directions, and held the drink against her forehead, rolling it across her skin. She has the typical Salter face: the short, neat nose, long upper lip, small mouth, pointed chin, slightly Asiatic-looking eyes. She picked up a flapjack and went and sat on the window seat, adjusting the ankle-skimming skirt to sit folded just above her knees. The seat’s set within a squared-off bay, its three long cushions a dull turquoise that’s faded and flattened and piped in black. The shutters are carved with ivy and thistle motifs, done by the same workshop that produced the decorated front doors, and gleam with a dull waxed honey-glow.

Long minutes passed while Mog ate her flapjack and cast an eye over one of her mother’s décor magazines, pausing every now and then to fan herself with it, directing the warm fanned air towards closed eyes. The others were late in arriving, but then they came in all at once, bunched as if they’d just come out of the theatre, looking to each other and mid-conversation. Henry, Edith, Joan and Euan, Vita and her live-in companion Mrs Hammill. Pip arrived sluggishly in the rear.

“The financial sub-committee,” Vita said in Mog’s direction.

“But you’re quite wrong,” Joan was saying. “Hot drinks are the most cooling. That’s how tea drinking in India got started.”

“Have you seen Michael?” Mog said to nobody in particular. Nobody paid attention. “I’ll go and check his room.”

She got up to go, but on her way out noticed that Vita was struggling with the teapot—unable to free two hands at once from balancing herself at the table, unable to use the teapot one-handed. She saw too that Mrs Hammill hadn’t noticed this, as she was standing talking to Joan. Mog went to help, and poured her own tea, and helped Vita to her seat, and didn’t go to find me. If she had, the letter would have been discovered then, and not hours later. It was sitting in open view on the quilt.

The letter was addressed to my mother. News of its writing, its finding, spread quickly into and around the village, once I was gone. As far as the rest of the world knew I had run away to seek my fortune. That was the official story anyway, but small communities are rarely content to be told what to think. Certainly there was no lack of gossip in the shop. Jock, the village alcoholic (there are others, of course, but Jock’s status is iconic) was of the opinion that I was eaten by the Peattie Loch Monster. Because yes, amusing as it may seem, Peattie has its own monster legend, just as persist at Ness and Morar.

Jock lives next door to the shop and sits on his wall most days, a low front wall, in all weathers, a half-drunk bottle of whisky at his feet, addressing remarks to those going in and out. If you’re a Salter they’re likely to be remarks about the loch. The loch’s an obsession. His brother James drowned here in the 1970s, from a boat launched at the hotel pier a mile upwater. People assume a lake’s a calm entity, a giant puddle, but only a few miles of land separate loch from ocean and this is a region of abruptly stormy weather. The day James was lost it was more abrupt than most, and storm-force winds funnelled down between the hills created high loch waves. Deaths on the lochs aren’t that unusual in Scotland, and Peattie is fairly typical in its once-every-three-or-four-yearly cull of canoeists, fishermen and swimmers. The villagers describe the loch as
hungry
if there’s been a long period without fatalities. A sighting of the monster, shown in old drawings as resembling a wider, fat-nosed crocodile, is said to be a harbinger of doom and death for the Salters, though this must be nonsense as they’re drawings that precede our arrival in 1846. It’s one of the myths the village likes to torture us with. Ursula claims to have seen the creature once when she was small and can’t be persuaded that it was one of the seals or occasional whales that are said to stray this far inland, through underground tunnel access from the sea.

***

Nothing much was said at teatime usually, other than for desultory conversation, trivial, vital and tribal: the quiet clinking of teaspoons on china, plans for the day, remarks about how the garden was looking, shopping needing doing and the well-being of the dogs. The dogs were very much Henry’s, and were replaced as they died, breed for breed. I missed them very much when Ottilie and I moved out of Peattie, mourning the loss of the deerhounds particularly, great long-legged things that floated around the corridors, moving with a gliding trot, their iron-grey coats tufting stiffly up around shiny black eyes. They had an otherworldly look to them, as if their thoughts were elsewhere. This is what attracted me to them, their detachment, their foreignness in a drawing room, their dignified tolerance of drawing-room behaviour. The Jack Russells came too, fat-bellied, hairy-faced terriers, dogs with a teatime agenda, sitting as politely as they knew how beside chairs, tracking the progress of biscuits and cake as they were transported from tea plates to human mouths. Generally the dogs announced Henry’s arrival, surging in first and finding their usual spots, but Crispin, favourite of the black Labradors, came in always at the rear, white-muzzled and stiffly. Today Crispin circled and then settled, exhaling hard, by Henry’s chair, trying to keep awake and waiting for orders. The dogs were useful distractions at teatime. If conversation failed they became the natural focus for everyone’s attention. Often Mog would go and sit at Henry’s feet, sitting by Crispin and picking at ticks and burrs, the old dog’s breathing thickening into purring.

Teatime was a calendar that marked the passing of days into years, and also a much more subtle device, making it obvious to all in a hundred incremental ways how it was that people stood with one another, picking up differences from one day to the next. For another five minutes, today would be no different. Mog sat on the window seat, by one of the open windows, her shoes shed and one knee up, looking out at the gardens, the view shimmering in the heat, tapping a rhythm on the sill to some internal music. Henry was opening his mail with a letter knife; he always brought something to do. Vita and her friend Mrs Hammill were drinking tea and talking about books. Vita was reading Tolstoy; Mrs Hammill was putting the case for Georgette Heyer. Joan was reading the décor magazine, retrieved from Mog, and was jotting down phone numbers in her diary. Edith was talking to Euan about the repointing he said was urgent to the north-west corner, and what it might cost; Henry watching and noting over the top of his correspondence. Ottilie, who’d arrived late, was reading a book about Japan—she was supposed to be going to Tokyo later that week. Pip had excused himself after a cursory visit; he’d eaten six biscuits in a hurry and swigged two glasses of the lemon squash, and had gone off on his bike to see a friend. His twin hadn’t turned up to tea, location unknown (smoking weed in his bedroom would be my guess). Their younger sister wasn’t there either, gone to another nine-year-old’s house with her collection of plastic horses in a pink zipped bag.

***

The disaster has occurred. We needn’t revisit its unfolding again. Ursula has come and delivered her news and Alan has intercepted the family in the yard, agreeing with her story, and we have been to the loch together. They were just as before, the progress of events and the things said. It’s reassuring when history doesn’t present variations; it feels as if memory is confirming itself as the facts, achieving a kind of objectivity. They have been to the loch and they have come back, on foot and on bike and in silence. Edith has provided her permission to abandon the vigil. They have given up on finding me. They have given up on hope. They have returned to the drawing room, encountering Mrs Welsh in the hall on the way in. She could see at once that something was amiss.

“Tell me all about it when I bring the tea,” she said. Mrs Welsh is of the school of thought that one must have fresh tea in a crisis.

She came into the room with the trolley to find that broken crockery from earlier was being gathered and piled, with careful fingers, onto a tablecloth that had been laid on the floor. Exclaiming, she went off to get a dustpan and brush. She returned to find the whole family sitting looking as stunned as fish.

“I can see that there’s something wrong, and I don’t want to intrude, but if I can be of any assistance, you’re only to say, you know that,” she said. “I’ll make more toast, will I?”

Nobody took on the question of toast directly.

“There’s something we need to tell you,” Joan said to her, just as Mog burst into the room with the letter.

This is when the explanation first was aired that I had left, had run away, had left a note, was gone and nobody knew where. Mrs Welsh tutted her response, half sympathetic and half unsurprised. (We’d never really got along. Mrs Welsh had been blunt about my needing to spend more time at home and less at Peattie; I’d been blunt in telling her she didn’t know anything about it.) Toast was provided, toast that nobody ate and which Mog fed, when it had cooled and was pliable, folded in smaller triangles to waiting terriers. Nobody seemed to want to leave the drawing room, not even after my mother had been put to bed and the phone call had been made to the village surgery. Edith went upstairs with Ottilie and stayed with her.

When Mrs Welsh came back into the room to say she was going now and was there anything she could do for anyone first, she found the rest of them drinking whisky, three of Henry’s bottles on the table and none of them particularly full. Vita was asleep in her chair in the window, still with a glass in her hand. They heard the bell, the Edwardian tinkle of bells at the door, a chord of high and low notes, one full of antique certainty. Mog at the window said that she could see the doctor’s car. Dr Nixon had been called to deal with Ottilie’s panic, her medical levels of panic, her not being able to breathe. The doctor’s visit: that was my mother’s chance to tell someone what and who, to raise the alarm, but she didn’t take that chance, falling into line with Edith’s explanation that Michael had left them, and a sedative was administered. Edith stayed at the bedside until Ottilie was sleeping. The rest huddled in chairs, not able to talk but finding comfort, or at least a sort of membership, in having gone through this big thing together.

At just after eight o’clock, when Mrs Welsh was safely out of the house and the doctor had gone, after they’d heard the final definitive closing of the double doors, and the car engine starting up: that was the signal, and everybody recognised it. A new sort of attentiveness arrived with Edith’s return to the room, mutually and simultaneously among the slouched forms of whisky drinkers; people getting up and stretching, people looking to Henry in recognition that it was down to Henry to begin. Henry, too, recognised that it was time. He began to talk to Ursula about what had happened.

Ursula had been sitting, for all of this time, on the floor with her back to the window seat, her face giving nothing away. She’d moved exhausted out of distress and contrition and into recovery, all cried out, wiping her face with a white hand, turning and turning the hem of the blue dress in her fingers, and finally into quietness, sitting still, her face remote and her fidgeting having ceased.

“Ursula, I need to talk to you now, about what happened today,” Henry said, going to the window seat and sitting on it. “Could you come and sit by me?” Ursula complied, all eyes in the room upon her.

Edith left her chair and went and sat on the floor beside the fireplace, resting her back against the wall. Unusually, Sirius, one of the deerhounds, shuffled towards her on his stomach and rested his big hairy head on her lap. Edith leaned forward with her head in her hands, as if she wanted to hear but not see Ursula as she spoke, Sirius looking up at her with a look that was unmistakably of concern.

“What happened? Tell me exactly what happened,” Henry repeated.

“I hit him,” Ursula said.

“You hit him. How did you hit him?”

“We were fighting. He was being annoying. I was annoyed. I didn’t hate him. I loved him. But I lost my temper.”

“You were sitting together in the boat, you say. Tell us exactly what happened next.”

“No. We were on the jetty.”

“You were on the jetty at first, but then you got into the boat, with Michael. You and Michael. In the boat together.”

“He didn’t love me. I realised that I hated him.”

Edith looked at Ursula for a moment and returned her head into the cradle of her palms.

Henry said, “But I thought you were friends.”

“Friends. No.”

“Yes. You were good friends, you and Michael. We saw you often in the wood together, and in the garden. You had long talks. Of course you were friends.”

“We had sex together,” Ursula told him.

There was a silence. Then Joan said, “Oh sweet Jesus.” Mrs Hammill rose and left the room without a word. Henry’s cheeks were filling with a stinging red. Edith’s fingertips were pushed tight against her eyebrows. Her breathing had quickened.

“Ursula. You slept with Michael?” Euan’s voice. “But you are his aunt. He’s 19, a boy.”

Everybody else was looking at Mog. “I didn’t know; he didn’t tell me,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

They wouldn’t blame her for this until later.

“And so he told you that your . . . that it was finished?” Henry’s voice was unsteady. “You hit him because he told you that?”