The White Lie (9 page)

“I’d love that. What made you give it up and come back here? What are you going to do here? There’s nothing here. Nothing.”

“I’m going to work at the hotel for a while. I needed a change. The city is very busy and crowded; too many cars, too many people.”

“Was it because you didn’t want to live with Pip any more, now Angelica’s there?”

“Not really, no. It was nice, living with them.”

Ursula stared at her. She dropped the brush. “Why do you talk to me like that?”

“Like what?”

“
It was nice, living with them
.” She impersonated Mog’s low and steady voice, identical to Edith’s. “
The city is very busy and crowded
. Like I’m stupid and backward.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t think that at all.”

“I have a high IQ, you know. It was tested and I’m a member of MENSA. Do you know what that means? It means I’m cleverer than all of you.”

***

Edith and Henry were waiting for Mog in the drawing room. It’s a large room and was lovely once, when its blue and gilt wallpaper, its composite tropical birds chirping silently from their paper bower, set the tone for beautiful imported furnishings, their gleaming wood surfaces and lavish silks. The best of these were sold off in the winter that the plumbing failed, and the ensuing vacuum drew replacements seemingly arbitrarily from other rooms, so that now it’s a cheerful mish-mash in which garnet red and linden green and powder blue upholsteries clash free-spiritedly with Turkish rugs. Things are heavily worn, their wear and sag serving to unite them beneath a suspended fine dust that seems never to land, and through which the light pumps gauzily. This time last year, before the renovations began, the pitch pine window surrounds were beginning to ridge and split with water ingress. In the corner furthest from the fire, a ragged brown ring on the ceiling and drooping plaster malformations marked the site of the worst of that old winter leakage.

“There’s something we need to speak to you about,” Henry said. His brow wrinkled up in the way that it did—corrugating softly—when he was about to deliver a prepared statement. Though it looked now as if the announcement had died in his mouth.

“It’s about the visitors,” Edith said. “Your grandfather felt—”

“Don’t speak for what I feel,” Henry said, quietly. “We haven’t spoken of this for a long time,” he continued, glancing towards Mog, “so I thought I should have a word with you. I’ve been having the same word with everyone concerned.” He came to a halt.

“Yes?” Mog said. “A word about?”

Henry clasped his hands together. “Edith. Please.”

Edith’s face was shadowed visibly with pity. She’d inched forward on her chair and was straining herself towards Henry, her hands open. “Shall I?” she asked him.

“Go ahead.”

Edith turned to face Mog. Edith’s square-jawed, with wide pronounced cheekbones and chin-length iron-grey hair parted in the middle, hair that sits firm in its shape as a sort of thatch. She has her father’s mildly roman nose, its pronounced nostrils, and deep-set eyes that are an unusual grey-green. Today she was dressed in her usual uniform: baggy cotton trousers, white plimsolls, an artist’s-style long canvas smock and long open cardigan (blue today; it’s only the colours that change), and multiple ropes of pebble necklaces in amber and red.

“It’s a small thing, really,” she began.

“How can you call it a small thing?” Henry interjected.

“I’ve never been good with words,” Edith said. “Your grandfather reads far too much into them.”

“Precision’s important: say what you mean,” Henry told her.

“We simply—we need to remind you of something, and that’s all it is. It’s nothing terrible.” She closed her eyes and turned to Henry. “Yes, Henry. I know. It’s terrible. It
is
terrible. I’m sorry.”

“What on earth is going on?” Mog went and sat on the arm of Edith’s chair.

“It’s about the visitors,” Henry said. “We need to remind you that they don’t know that Michael is . . . that is, they don’t know that we and they might have different ideas about what happened to Michael.”

“I see,” Mog said. “I do see.”

“I’d appreciate it very much if you could talk to your brothers and sister, before the weekend.”

“Of course I will,” Mog told him.

***

Walking to the shop the following morning on an errand for Edith, it was evident that Mog was thinking ahead to what Mrs Pym might ask and how she might reply, rehearsing under her breath as she went. Mrs Pym didn’t like Mog but that wouldn’t stop her probing; rather the reverse. Even the rhetorical question was dangerous.

How are you, Miss Salter?

Bloody but unbowed, Mrs Pym, thanks.

Well, obviously anything but that would do. She mustn’t say that. The village is an entity, a cooperatively multi-celled creature, with ears and a mouth and a brain of sorts. Every appearance, every statement, is added by the bee mind to the hive. Bloody, she says. Unbowed. What’s she going on about now?

“Miss Salter,” Mrs Pym said. “And how are you?” As if Mog were an unpleasant item found at the back of the fridge. That kind of tone.

“Fine, thanks. Well, not really. Generally okay. Fine. Fine-ish.”

Mrs Pym let her eyes linger a meaningful extra few seconds before responding.

“Righto then.” Frank lack of interest on her face. Worse than that, a hint of something satirical. Fiddling with the buttons on her housecoat.

Alfred Pym came out from the storeroom when Mog had gone. He’s a small man, a grey man, a man pared back to the eye, to the place where he’s still living, a dark-pooled intelligence. He said, apparently sincerely, “I expect she was bringing our invitation to the ball.”

Mog had told Johnnie all about the Pyms, on the way north for his first visit in the spring. She was unhappy then, already, but her unhappiness was taking the form—a last, humiliating phase—of trying at length and in vain to please him; worse, offering Peattie as a kind of collateral, reminding him of all she brings with her. She introduced Alf to Johnnie when they went in to get a newspaper, earning a nod but no spoken response. The morning queue for papers and milk and flat, floury rolls proceeds in silence if Alf’s manning the till. Regulars might get a nod; favourites get their change put into their hand with a monotonous “cheerio”. Mog’s is put on the counter for her to pick up, under a flattened hand. He’s already serving the person behind as she struggles to pick up the coins.

Joan isn’t popular in the village either, though her mother is. When Edith lived here she made an effort to ask the right questions, and remembered the answers for next time. It all went onto Edith’s mental roladex, where it settled into complex but seemingly effortless cross-referencing: birthdays, doctors, anniversaries, pregnancies, who’s at university and who’s in Iraq. It turned out that this news management was vital.

“Mrs Salter’s a real lady,” Mrs Pym has been heard to comment, emphasising the “real” as if it were known that there are different sorts. “Not like that Joan.”

Mog had been sent to the village to get ham. Henry and Edith ate ham daily, in sandwiches for winter lunch and at suppertime in summer, with fresh-cut salad and garden potatoes buttered with mint. Henry was a traditional eater. His eyes boggled when he described the seafood pasta Euan presented to him when Edith was in hospital. Garlic. Things with tentacles and suckers. Edith would live happily on toast and soup and pieces of cheese eaten standing up at the kitchen worktop, trying to minimise eating, collapsing it into something merely necessary. She’s beginning to learn to cook, now she lives with Ottilie, but in the old days her efforts were famously terrible. Blackened sausages pink in the middle (or worse, proving still to be frozen), chicken reduced to the texture of a woven textile. Guests were prompted to take to the kitchen themselves, or would ask, as innocently as possible, if Edith could make her famous broth. The broth was placed furthest west on the edible-inedible axis.

Mog came back in the afternoon to the wood, and sat on the tomb for almost two hours, her face blank, intent seemingly on some hidden blankness, busy with it behind an impregnable door, before moving herself to the stump, realigning herself with the faint grooves that day after day of sitting there, my sitting there, had established. She didn’t say anything to me, nor read, nor write, and when the tea bell rang I went with her to the house. Going into the drawing room, I braced myself for the sensory onslaught. There was a lot to stay neutral about: 160 years of Salters and their dogs, their whiskies and fires, their teatimes and all the hidden residues of things talked about. It was another chilly, breezy summer’s day, and the fireplace had logs laid across its vast slatted grate, the biggest of these a substantial chunk of tree, a piece of aromatic chestnut, black and charred with a soft lick of blue and orange stroking across it. The mantelpiece is a grand and beautifully carved thing, despite being chipped and cracked; Ursula, the year that Sebastian died, went through a period of throwing the hearth tools at it. Even on warm days it can be cold indoors: Peattie has that knack that some big houses do of insulating itself somehow against the natural warming of sunlight, and most summers the hearth is never left to go cold.

Henry, characteristically, was handling the teapot as if it were his first experience of tea pouring, making vaguely exploratory noises, sniffing at the milk in the jug. His whole life, he affected a tactical continuous ignorance of how domestic life manifested itself in the detail of things. Edith sat beside Vita on a worn velvet sofa, one that was beginning to show patches of its hessian backing. Ordinarily Vita sat in her own chair, an ugly but vital piece of kit with a tilting mechanism that allows for easier mounting and dismounting. It’s one of the collection of seats that inhabit the rectangular bay of the window. She doesn’t live at Peattie now, but the chair remains. Vita liked to sit as close to the window as she could and look out, like a dog waiting for its people to get home. When it was sunny the glass-magnified warmth was soporific, and Vita’s snoring, done at a full chair-tilt, her little feet pointed up and mouth fallen open, was often a part of the teatime experience.

Ursula wasn’t at tea that day, because Ottilie was there. Ottilie and Ursula hadn’t spoken to one another since my disappearance.
Disappearance
continues to be the word used. The word
murder
has never been spoken in Edith’s presence, not the word murder nor the word manslaughter. Edith is the wellspring of all family vocabulary, its dictionary, its thesaurus, its well-fount of abstract nouns. The 13 years between my disappearance and Edith’s party were years of accommodation of the unthinkable, of acclimatisation to an emergency form of morality among the Salters, though it hadn’t to be the morality of proximity. Ursula lived here, in one of the cottages in the grounds, and Ottilie lived at the coast, so the two of them came into each other’s orbit only rarely and accidentally. Officially there was a policy—Ottilie’s policy—of no contact. No gifts or cards change hands on birthdays or at Christmas, which was organised as a day of two halves, each mirroring the other, with two roasted geese, two puddings; these were occasions that involved a chair left empty. No one remarked on this. It was normal. It was their normality. In case of inadvertently coming within range of one another, Ursula had a facility for melting away. She’s light-footed and fast, small and narrow: at 43, the size and build of a pubertal child.

***

Afterwards, Vita and Mog found themselves together in the drawing room. In old age, Edith’s mother has shrunk to about four feet and ten inches high, straining to be upright despite the curve of her upper spine. With her round black eyes, a habit she has of cocking her head while listening, her bony nose thrust forward by time and her once elegant hands curled with arthritis, there’s something truly birdlike about Vita. She’s almost bald now, with a few dead wisps of hair, yellowish white: something she likes to illustrate by whisking off her wig in company, dewigging with a flourish and showing all eleven remaining teeth. She looks like a mummy in the British Museum. Though usually she’s presentable in the immaculate black bob, a copy of the hairstyle of her youth. Her mother was Italian and she was the instigator of the olive complexion and near-black hair in the Salters, which skipped two generations and popped up again in Mog, and in me.

Edith brought fresh coffee in and then withdrew, as if withdrawing had been pre-arranged: instant coffee in old mugs that Joan grew exercised about and Edith wouldn’t throw away.

“There are lovely porcelain ones at the back of the cupboard, Mother,” Joan said, “which you never use because you only use and then wash and reuse the horrible ones at the front. I’m switching them around for you.” Edith’s reaction to this kind of thing was always puzzlement. “But it doesn’t matter, does it, Joan? Why does it matter?”

Vita had gestured with her cane that she wanted to talk, directing Mog towards the easy chairs positioned by the fire. Various dogs wandered in and helped themselves to the sofas, rising up on front legs and heaving themselves into position, settling with blissful sighs and grunts. Nobody bothered to move them off when Edith wasn’t there.

“Now, about this Johnnie fellow,” Vita began. “You are free of him?”

“Yes.”

“Free so that he regards you as free.”

“I’m free, but I can’t speak for him, Vita.”

“Why would you want to entertain even the notion of such a person?”

“It’s hard to say.”

Vita looked thoughtful.

“What is it that you are looking for in a husband?”

“A husband!”

“You’re almost 30 years old.”

“Yes, but—”

“Husband. So. What are you looking for?”

“Love; friendship,” Mog offered uncertainly.

“Friendship’s far more important. Marry your very best available friend. Someone plain-looking and grateful.” She pondered a moment. “We’ll need to search in our own circle. Not that we have much of a circle now. Don’t you meet any young men here? I suppose not. It’s not like it was. There doesn’t seem to be any society now.”