The White Lie

by Andrea Gillies

  “It’s just that today is about Ottilie,” Edith said to her softly. “Ottilie is in the house, in bed, still on the pills to calm her down, and sleeping. We can’t go having any picnics.”

  Ursula handed the basket to her mother. “Here. I’ll go home. I’ll stay at home today. You can telephone me when Ottilie has gone. Though I have to talk to her first. I need to talk to her; will you tell her?”

  “She doesn’t want to see you, I’m afraid.”

  “But I have something very important to say.”

  “I’m sorry. But you’re not going to be able to do that. Not for a while. Not until Ottilie is ready.”

  “She won’t see me.”

  “No. Not yet. She may change her mind, though. I’ll tell you when it comes.”

  “She thinks it’s my fault.”

  “Ursula—”

  “It wasn’t my fault. He would have killed me. He was trying to kill me, pulling me into the water.”

  “I know.”

  “And the fact that it was the oar. I’ve thought about this, the last two days, over it and over it. And this is the truth: the fact that it was the oar—that’s irrelevant. That was nothing to do with me. If it had been a book in my hand, I would have hit him with the book. It was what was there. You must see that. You must see.”

  “Yes. But Michael is dead.”

  “That was what killed him, getting hold of my leg. You do understand that. Does everybody understand? I need to talk to them. All of them. Ottilie needs to be there. Tell her. Tell her.”

  “Ottilie won’t come.”

  “All the rest of them, then. That was what killed him, getting hold of my leg and pulling. Wanting me to go into the water. Wanting me to die.”

  “I’m sure he didn’t.”

  “Wanting me to die.”

  “I realise that it seemed that way.”

  “It was suicide. They realise that, don’t they? You realise that, don’t you?”

  “Ursula.”

  “No. I mean it. I mean it. It isn’t a lie. It isn’t even a stretch from the true thing.”

  “It wasn’t suicide, sweetheart. It wasn’t.”

  “It was. I swear to you and promise on my life. He did it to get me to hit him. He wanted me to hit him. He said to me. He wanted to die.”

  “He said—why would he say that?”

  “When I told him. He said that he wanted to die. He said it was too much. He said his life was over. He said that he was going somewhere but now he’d have to go somewhere else. I thought at first that he meant that he wasn’t going to Yorkshire, that he was going to Somerset.”

  “Somerset?”

  “Yes. He was going to Yorkshire, to work in the forest there. But then he said that he needed a new family. He was trying to hurt my feelings. He was going to Alastair and Robert.”

  “I can’t bear it.”

  “But I was wrong. It wasn’t about Yorkshire and Somerset.”

  “I can’t bear it.”

  “He meant that he wanted to die, that he was going to kill himself.”

  “But that doesn’t mean—”

  “For ever he said. Never ever to return ever.”

  “You’re interpreting. Don’t interpret.”

  “I’m not interpreting. I’m remembering.”

  “Sometimes it’s the same thing.”

  “I’m not adding. I’m not elaborating.”

  “It’s facts that we need. Interpretation isn’t going to get us anywhere.”

  “He grabbed me, and he pulled. He wanted me to do it. He knew I wouldn’t have a choice. I was standing with the oar, and I was angry. Why would Michael come and pull my leg and try to pull me into the loch? When I had the big wooden oar in my hands?”

  Edith said nothing, though she looked as if her mind was busy.

  “You see. You do see. He came back to the boat. He could have swum away. Alan was on the shore. He could have swum to Alan and talked to him about me and they would have decided what to do. He didn’t. He swam to the boat and he pulled himself up and he took hold of my leg so tight—so tightly—look.”

  She hitched up her nightdress slightly and offered her right leg, Edith gasping at the sight of it, the yellow and purple hand-print faintly visible just below the knee, wrapped there like marbled paper. Ursula has always bruised easily.

  “Why didn’t you tell us this?”

  “It’s fine, it’s just sore. It’s okay.” Ursula let her nightdress return to full length. “But you see. That’s what Michael decided. And I didn’t hit him hard enough to kill him. Nothing like. He raised his hand at the last second and his arm was bashed more than his head.”

  “Why haven’t you said this before, about the arm? Why hasn’t Alan?”

  “Alan saw. It was Alan who saw. Michael was thrown off the boat, let go of the boat and sank. There was pain on his face. I’m sorry about his wrist. It might be broken and I’m sorry. He made a decision. He was knocked underneath and it was him who decided not to come up again.”

  Edith sank down onto the grass.

  “I find it hard to believe,” she said, though not in an accusing way.

  “I can see that,” Ursula said.

  “That Michael would want that. That he would choose. Why a 19-year-old boy, so vigorous, so beautiful; I don’t see. Not even that. Not even the secret, the father. It’s not enough. It makes no sense to me.” She glanced at Ursula. “It was about the father, wasn’t it?”

  Ursula joined her seated on the grass and said nothing. Edith looked up and saw Henry watching from the bedroom window. She raised her hand to him but he didn’t react, just stared down as before.

  “Michael’s happy now, in heaven,” Ursula said, putting her hand over her mother’s.

  “I wish I believed in heaven like you do,” Edith told her.

  “Don’t say that. Don’t. God is listening to you,” Ursula said. “It’s too dangerous to lie. It’s the truth that matters. Being sorry is the main thing.”

  “Tell me about the secret,” Edith said, and then, seeing Ursula’s face, “I know, I know you shouldn’t but this is an emergency and I need to know. An emergency’s different.”

  Ursula looked blankly back.

  “Not the secret itself. But I need some clue. You can give me a clue. I need that, Ursula. It’s about his father, isn’t it?”

  Ursula closed her eyes. Something she still does when she wants the situation to go away.

  “Can’t you just. Ursula, please. I’m so. So.” Edith began to cry, quite suddenly, and Ursula crawled to her on all fours and nestled, her head resting on her mother’s leg, a signal that she wanted her hair played with. Edith patted her head softly as she sobbed.

  “I’m so sorry, I’m so so sorry,” Ursula told her, and then, “Don’t cry, Mummy. Don’t cry. It’s too lovely a day. Look at the day. It’s all over. It’s over. Michael chose and he’s gone and it’s over. Michael’s in heaven with God and he doesn’t want to see you crying over him.”

  “I wish I was so sure.”

  “If we know there is heaven, how can we be sad about death?” Ursula asked her. “After a little while of being sad—that’s normal. But then, think about it: heaven! Remember? That’s what you said to me, after Sebastian died.”

  “Yes.”

  “I remember it, every word.”

  “I know you do.”

  Something about Edith’s tone made Ursula stare at her. “You weren’t lying to me, were you?”

  “Of course not,” Edith said. “I told you. I will never lie to you.”

  “Yes.”

  “I told you when Sebastian died. We will always tell the truth to one another, no matter what.”

  Ursula raised herself and crawled away, and, remaining on all fours, splayed her fingers supportively on the grass, looking intently down at it. “So detailed a little world,” she said. “How far do you think the suffering goes?”

  Edith put her hands over her eyes.

  “Can�
�t we all just decide to be happy?” Ursula picked a daisy and lay down flat on her back and twirled it in her fingers, looking at the sun shining through and around it. “Those of us who can choose.”

  “Michael’s dead,” Edith said. “You have to allow for people to be sad. And for people to be angry. They’re going to be angry.”

  “They’re going to be angry with the wrong person, though. The time to cry about Michael was before he died.”

  “Ursula, really.”

  “I mean it. Ottilie had the power in the question. It wasn’t me that had the power. I told him something she should have told him a long time ago, when asking and asking was making him so unhappy and ill. Ottilie: she’s the one you need to talk to. It’s her secret and I have no right to share it.”

  “You shared it with Michael.”

  “I shouldn’t have. But otherwise, he would never have known. Nobody ever thought he should know and that was a worse wrong thing.”

  “You told him about Alan. Alan, wasn’t it? The secret. Alan Dixon.” Edith spoke the name with care, watching for a reaction. None was evident. Ursula began making a daisy chain.

  “It was wrong but I was angry,” she said to the chain, bringing her face close and squinting as she tried to get one small hairy stalk into a slit in another. “It was right but at the wrong time. I thought he’d be glad. I thought he’d rush off and find him and it would all be alright in the end. What I thought was that it was only the lie that was stopping it being alright.”

  She looked at Edith, then returned to the chain. “I can see what’s going to happen now.”

  “What’s going to happen?”

  “Me, I’ll be the one blamed. Ottilie, she’ll be the one sanctified. Me, I’ll be the one demonised. Ottilie will be St Ottilie of the Cross.”

  “Ursula, that’s cruel of you. Resist the urge to be cruel.”

  “It’s what happens when people are beautiful.”

  “Nonsense.”

  “I can see what’s going to happen now,” she said again, and then, scarcely letting a beat fall, “Are you really going to leave him down there?”

  They were interrupted by Henry, who was striding towards them out of the yellow glare and across the sun-faded grass, past sun-faded shrubs, the greenish-grey stone of the flower garden wall rendered near colourless. Henry’s feet remained unshod and unsocked. They were surprisingly youthful feet, almost shockingly youthful, as if from a different generation from his hands.

  “Are you? Are you really going to leave him down there?” Ursula asked him, raising her hand to shield her eyes from the light. “Michael. In the loch. Isn’t that a crime?”

  Henry said, “Ursula, go to the cottage and dress, and then come back and see me in the study, please. Directly to the study.” Then he turned and walked away.

  ***

  The study is a lovely old room, positioned at the back of the hall. More or less untouched for over a hundred years, it retains its original tartan wallpaper and clashing plaid chairs, its leather globe on a stand, its 19th-century photographs of other Salters, busy upholding the empire. It’s a big room, with sofas and seats, but dominated by the vast, heavy desk, which is made of thick oak, and the captain’s chair that sits behind it. When Ursula got to the study an hour or so later, having taken her time dressing, sitting on her bed between items, she found that it wasn’t just her father but a group of people that awaited her. They were looking towards Henry: Joan and Euan and Vita, turned away from her; Mog, red-eyed in a dowdy floral dress; Pip, shock-haired in torn jeans; Edith, in the same clothes as yesterday, but her usual clash of heavy beads missing.

  Henry had his back to them. He was standing on a chair trying to force the upper half of the window sash down, saying that he couldn’t recall ever opening it before and that it seemed to be painted shut, the words drying in his mouth as he spoke, making me think of something dead and dried to a husk on a beach. An ex-bird, eyeless. But it wasn’t that. When he turned to them, his face was almost too painful to look at, the courage overlaying it only transparently.

  Henry saw Ursula first. She was standing in the doorway: it was towards Ursula that Henry’s torment and courage were directed.

  “It’s like a greenhouse in here,” Ursula said. “Why don’t we go outside?”

  “Because we can’t risk Ottilie seeing us,” Joan told her, looking at Edith and widening her eyes.

  “You should know that I’ve told them what you said to me earlier,” Edith said to Ursula, her face and voice fervent, leaning forward and extending her hands. “I’ve just been telling them, so they know where you stand. And we all have sympathy for you.”

  There were murmurs that could have been dissent.

  “Edith—” Henry began.

  Edith raised her voice. “Anyone here who doesn’t have sympathy for Ursula, please speak up now.”

  No one said anything but the space between them all was bisected again and again by silent eye-to-eye exchanges.

  “Look,” Edith said, getting to her feet. “This is painful. This is painful and in a way absurd. But decisions have to be made and they have to be made now, before anything is said or done that will . . .” The sentence petered out. “This is how this is going to have to be. Henry and I have discussed it. Protecting Ursula is our priority. About the dead we can do nothing.”

  “Dad,” Joan said in a warning voice.

  “I don’t want to talk to you now, Joan,” Henry told her. “I’m too tired for arguments. There’s nothing to discuss.” She ignored him and began to speak. “Quiet!” he said. “I’ve told you already. Go away and think about it, and at three o’clock I want you back here, all of you, with your decision. And that’s absolutely all I have to say for now.”

  Joan lingered as the rest filed out. Henry pre-empted her.

  “I’ve told you. I’m not going to debate it individually with people. This has got to be a family decision. A family process of deciding.”

  “But you’ve already decided for us.”

  “That’s what we need to talk about. At three.”

  “Just one point. I have a point to make that I want you to think about between now and then.”

  Henry looked at his watch. “Which is?”

  “Murder will out.”

  “That’s a terrible thing to say. You shock me. You appal me.”

  “I appal you?”

  “I’m not going to discuss this now.”

  “But he’ll be found. What do you think—that he’ll stay neatly tucked away at the bottom of the loch, and we can all pretend he isn’t there and resume our lives? What kind of madness is this?”

  “I’m not going to discuss it with you. But you’re wrong about—if you think that the remains . . .” His voice began to break.

  “Dad. Please.”

  “I don’t think even the police divers would find him. Not if they spent days. What you have to understand is that the water is too cold. It takes people and it doesn’t give them back.” He saw that her face was sceptical. “It’s happened before, you know. Michael isn’t the first.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “In the loch. People have gone missing there.”

  “I know that, Dad. I’ve been here all my life.”

  “Not because of any moronic stories about monsters and evil spirits, but just because it’s dangerous. You must know about James.”

  “Jock’s brother.”

  Mog brought it up with Henry later, the story of Jock’s brother on the loch.

  “They never found him?”

  “They looked and they looked. And there have been others. Over the years. You know there have. People get out of their depth, get cramp, whatever it is. They ignore the sign.”

  There’s a danger sign planted in the beach.

  “We ignore the sign all the time,” Mog told him. “There was another one when you were younger. Similar case. All over the papers. Someone older than you at your school. Swimming at night. A dare. You mi
ght remember.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “I think you were quite young.”

  Henry said to me once that Peattie is like a ravine full of water. Imagine falling, falling off the edge of the boat down and down into that ravine, the water incidental to your fall, proving merely to be a cushioned form of slow and smothering gravity.

  ***

  At their three o’clock meeting in the study, the family had already arrived at a quiet, hopeless unanimity.

  “You see—if there was any chance at all of their finding him . . .” Henry didn’t finish the thought.

  “But that isn’t really the reason,” Edith clarified.

  “Each of us must come to our own position,” Henry said. “It’s too much to ask of us that we think all alike. But we can agree on what it is we must do, and that’s something different.” Everyone was sent away again until seven.

  “Hear me out,” Joan said at the evening meeting. “What if we were to pick up the phone right now, and tell the police. I’m just thinking aloud. But we have to discuss it at least.”

  Euan cut her off. “Not possible.”

  “They’d put her in prison,” Edith said.

  “No, they wouldn’t,” Joan asserted. “Of course they wouldn’t.”

  “You have a romantic idea of justice,” Euan snapped at her.

  “They’d put her in an institution.” Edith’s eyes swam with tears. “Is that what we want?”

  “This is what we will do,” Henry told them all. “We will consecrate the place where he was lost, in our own family way. We will regard it as a burial at sea. As if it were a burial at sea.”

  The idea of a ceremony was a lovely one, but nothing like it was put into action—not on the water, at least, because the practicalities came up against the problem of ensuring privacy, and the thing was dropped. The wood was a different matter. Memorial activities in Sanctuary Wood would always be assumed to be to do with the great uncle.

  “Dad,” Joan said. She looked around at the others. “Is it just me? Dad, this is all quite bizarre. You’re not thinking straight. You won’t be able to make this work.” Nobody else spoke. “How can we make them see?” she said, but nobody answered her. “What are we saying—that we’re prepared to keep this quiet for the rest of our lives? It’s too much, Dad. It’s insane.”