The White Lie

by Andrea Gillies

  “No, but I’ve been fine,” Joan told her, returning to the newspaper, feeling satisfied that she’d managed in some part to replicate Angelica’s don’t-fuss approach, her shrinking from elaboration, which Joan, quick to absorb and adapt, was fast making her own.

  When Pip came home, his shirt sleeves turned up, bringing in a photocopier scent and the smell of fabric conditioner mixed with sweat, and had been into the kitchen to see Angelica, he’d come and sat by his mother bearing two gins, and had mentioned, with studied casualness, Joan’s lack of initiative with the kettle.

  “I don’t like to poke about in other people’s cupboards,” Joan told him.

  “Other people? I’m hardly that.”

  Pip saw at once that his mother’s refusal to relax and treat the flat as a home from home was a punishment. She was punishing him for his being too busy to welcome her properly (though he had warned her of this on the phone beforehand), for not making more time to ensure she was happy.

  They’d taken her to a drinks party in a flat across the road. Joan stood at the window of this other flat and pointed out her son’s equally grand accommodation, just visible through the trees: there was a private garden, accessible only by key, in the centre of the square, which wasn’t a square at all, in fact, but rounded—two handsome, semi-circular stone terraces known collectively as a circus. She’d taken up position at the window, intercepting others there. Going into the kitchen for another drink, she’d found three women standing together, work colleagues, their briefcases piled on a chair. They were kind enough to welcome her and agreed good-humouredly to change the subject from that of the bank and banking’s travails. One of them was having an affair, it transpired. The lover and the husband were both there, in the other room.

  “How long has this been going on?” Joan asked, fascinated.

  “Two years.”

  “How do you manage it, keeping it secret?”

  “Actually it’s easy. I’m not having a problem with it.”

  “I have a secret,” Joan told her. “One I’ve had to keep for over a decade. I’m finding it almost impossible. It gets worse as time passes, not better: be warned.”

  “Thanks, but I’ll be fine,” the woman said.

  “You say that now.”

  “That’s right. I do.”

  “So what kind of secret?” one of the other women asked. “Well, you know, if I told you that . . .”

  “Give us a hint.”

  “It’s something that—how do I put this?—something that makes you sit up in bed in your sleep and open your eyes and fight to breathe.”

  “Bloody hell.”

  “You’re a callgirl,” the affair woman chipped in, gesturing with her drink and delighted. “No, wait, I’ve got it. You do those older woman sex chat lines.”

  Everybody had laughed, even Joan. Then she said, “Actually, that’s not the secret. The secret is that I dislike my husband.”

  Pip came into her field of vision from the left. She could tell by his face that he’d heard. Angelica took her elbow and steered her away. They’d gone out of the room and out of the front door, straight down the stairs without pause, and into the car. Nobody spoke on the way to the Private View, and immediately they got there Joan was forcibly seated, shoulders pressed gently down, into the soft deep welcome of an armchair, placed there by Angelica and told not to move, a soda water with lemon slices put into her hand, a black coffee placed on the side table. She’d fallen asleep and had woken with her head thrown back against the wall, mouth ajar and a crick in her neck. The crush had diminished into a last lingering half-dozen, Pip and Angelica among them, coats over their arms, the dark sculpted voids of the exhibit rising behind.

  On the final evening they went out to dinner, to a restaurant close to the castle, one in a sort of dungeon, with gothic accoutrements and many drippy candelabras. Another threesome awaited them there, and spotted them as they arrived. Hands waved from out of the gloom.

  “Welcome, Salter party—over here!” an American voice rang out from within the throng and the hum, the polished silver glinting, the tablecloths starched and white. There was a seductive smell of hot bread and shellfish and beef, and Joan realised that she was starving. She’d missed lunch, having insisted to Pip that she wasn’t hungry.

  Their friends Siobhan and Jerry had brought Jerry’s mother Amelia, a tall Boston widow with a severe short haircut and lipstick that was the darkest sort of red. Jerry and Pip worked together. Amelia was quite open about her dislike of Jerry’s corporate life.

  “I mean to say, a bank’s the last thing we’d have wished on them, isn’t it?” she’d said, turning confidentially towards Joan.

  Amelia seemed to be treated with affectionate respect by her son, and yet she was constantly picking fault with him.

  “God, you’re so full of horseshit,” she’d said, laughing roaringly.

  “I believe it’s genetic,” Jerry parried back. He’d stretched out his hand and placed it over his mother’s and she’d taken it in hers.

  In the car on the way home, Pip had hoped aloud that Joan had liked Amelia.

  “She’s very nice, but she’s one of those smothering mothers,” Joan told him.

  “I wouldn’t say that. They’re just very close since his father died.”

  “I found it creepy,” Joan said. “All that touchy stuff, the hand holding.”

  ***

  After dinner Mog went into the garden. The light was just beginning to fail. In summer, the long evenings bring with them an immensely gradual greying and softening. She went across the grass, the swallows dipping and swooping. The front lawn had grown long, the dandelions and buttercups shining their yellow lights, and the side lawn, cut more recently, was white with tiny daisies like stars. She went down the slope into the trees and, strolling, followed the inner perimeter of the wall, running her hand from time to time along its top surface, the stone rough with colonies of lichen and yellow fungus. She went past the back of the folly and over the stile, and stood leaning against the wall a little while. When she began to move again it was with a new purposefulness. She went to the end of the field, where the red cows under the cypresses stared and flicked their tails, over the second stile and into the garden, past the pond and onto the drive, crunching across the gravel, then up the steps to the terrace. Into the house, across the hall, down the back stairs and into the yard she went, past the greenhouses and onto the loch path.

  There was a paperback in her jacket pocket, one of my books, taken from my room, a Rilke Selected Letters that I’d written all over, whose margins were almost obliterated by jottings, rubbings-out, question marks, exclamations. There’s a lot of someone left residually in their annotations. The book had been rolled laterally and had to be rolled the other way to even it out. It was a cloudy evening and just beginning to get dark; it proved too dark to read, and so she stood looking out at the water.

  “I don’t seem to be able to stay away, Michael,” she said aloud. “I don’t know why I feel so compelled. It’s like checking your inbox when you’ve sent an important email, waiting for the answer, checking and checking.”

  “He isn’t ever going to reply, you know,” a voice said, Ursula’s voice, startling Mog, who dropped the book. She turned to see her aunt standing a few feet away. “Ursula, Jesus, where did you spring from?”

  “Don’t blaspheme. I’ve been here a while. I was sitting on the tomb when you got here. I was waiting to see if you’d notice me but it was obvious you weren’t going to and I got bored.”

  “How are you?”

  “I wish people wouldn’t ask that question. They never really want to know the answer.”

  “I’ll leave you to it.” It’s understood among the family that the person who gets to the wood first has precedence. Most of them prefer to be here alone.

  “I don’t subscribe to this idea, that Michael’s listening to us, the old Michael,” Ursula told her. “I think it’s safe to talk.”

&n
bsp; “It’s not that.”

  “There’s a part of Michael that’s here, but he’s no longer a person. Conversations amongst ourselves don’t have the same significance. Nor does being naked or weeing. I’ve asked about the toilet because it bothered me. Once people pass, these things look different to them.”

  “Pass?”

  “Die. Once they die. You would say die, I imagine, but it’s the wrong word. Dying means ending and people don’t end. There’s a part of Michael that’s still here but it isn’t the Michael you knew. It’s the same for David, Great Uncle David, and Sebastian also.”

  “Sebastian’s here?”

  “Of course. In a sense. But not the same one. The consciousness has gone to heaven, cleaned of its nostalgia and its ties to us.”

  No, Ursula. I am here with you. Time passes here just as anywhere, and I see the seasons come and go in the fields; I’m there when the heating’s turned off for summer and the rugs are hauled onto the lawn for beating; I see the Christmas trees being dragged in from the hill. I was only sorry that I couldn’t produce by a special effort all the leaves cascading out of the willow trees, falling like holy confetti around the two of them. Consciousness is everything that remains of me here, and I’m confident this isn’t heaven. If we can agree that death is what makes us human: the knowledge of it, the life that we live unaware of anticipating it—and I think that we must—then it follows that I continue to be human, because even now I’m afraid that it’s coming.

  7

  While Mog was talking to Ursula, Joan was sitting on her bed, the diary opened beside her, its pages full of ticks and question marks. She’d been engaged in refurbishing the house, again, and her bedroom had been the most recently decorated, done since Euan moved into the guest room. There was cream and grey painted furniture in here now, and the walls had been painted a pale coral pink, a colour she matched from silk underwear found in a trunk. The wall behind the bed was lined with old photographs, black-and-white images that she had hung in broad cream mounts and thin black frames. She’d begun doing similar groups on Peattie walls, selecting pictures from the shoeboxes stacked in the attics and hanging them in groups. When she had come across the box of pictures of me she had closed it again immediately, without burrowing beneath the top photograph, an instinctive rapid reclosing of the box as if it were disease-bearing. She’d gone off and found fresh sticky tape.

  Now Joan went and sat at the dressing table, looking into her Venetian mirror, a vast and elaborate thing about which she and Euan had exercised their last substantial row: one that dealt simultaneously with his purchase of a beanbag for the sitting room, a particularly large one, its colours particularly adamantly chemical. She had claimed he had no taste. He had countered that it was no doubt the case, that all evidence supported the idea, but that notwithstanding, the seating she’d installed was all unbearably uncomfortable.

  Euan put his head around the door and reminded her that they were due at the pub. When he was at home he spent most evenings with his public bar friends and Joan wasn’t ordinarily invited, but another wife was coming tonight and Euan had offered Joan as a companion.

  “So, are you coming or not?”

  Joan didn’t answer and Euan withdrew.

  He wasn’t often here during the week, but was showing willing in honour of Saturday’s event. The truth was that he’d been summoned and had complied. He was commuting daily to work, a situation he’d already let it be known that he regretted. When weekends turned out this way, in childishness as he put it, he’d likely as not go back to his flat in town early. A Saturday departure was a bad sign, though pressure of work, essay marking piling up unmarked, was the usual attribution. They had bought the flat in town when the children were small and it was difficult, Euan said, to find the peace and stillness to hear himself think. He can teach literature classes with one eye shut, he says. Poetry’s the real job, he says (he’s had two collections published), and it just wasn’t possible under those circumstances, with the pram in the hall. Joan asked what pram in the hall, and was chided for not picking up the reference.

  “The enemy of promise,” he’d said. And then again, with greater emphasis: “The enemy, of promise.”

  “Nice,” she’d said.

  “Why did I marry someone who doesn’t read?” he’d asked the wall. “I should have married somebody who reads.”

  “I agree heartily,” Joan told him. “I don’t heartily agree, though, as that splits the infinitive. There you go. I know that, and am thus a better person.”

  When Euan had gone Joan went into the kitchen, to the cupboard in the corner to which she’d made access purposely difficult with a full-size bin. She had to take the bin out to get the door open, and turn the carousel shelving within, and ignore the warnings she’d taped there. She made and drank a vodka tonic, standing with one hand braced on the worktop, then made another and took it with her into the den, past the sewing machine and the ironing board, past the cork noticeboard, which was covered still in bright-headed pins with shreds of old school schedules attached to them. She brushed past an unused exercise bike and a dismantled piano keyboard, and reached into a flowerpot that acted as a bookend. Euan was supposed to have given up years ago but he smoked when she’d gone to bed, out of the sitting room’s open window. She’d seen the ash there in the mornings and smelled it in the window creases.

  What I’ve always liked best is the idea of smoking, just the idea: the view of myself that others may have to adjust to, adjusting my own internal view of myself in turn. The experience of smoking could only ever be inferior to the idea. The idea is saturated with associations—associations that lend us some moments in an old world. The idea gets past the ludicrous fact of setting fire to paper tubes of dried plants and inhaling the smoke. And though it’s true that the Salter smoking and drinking to excess began in earnest about 14 years ago, it’s also true that our history as a family is full of cigs and booze. Cigs and booze have been there at every fork in the road. One of Joan’s recent framings, a picture she was staring at now, was a photograph taken at her and Ottilie’s 21st birthday. It was an unusual coming-of-age party. Joan had been married three years and had year-old twin boys. Ottilie had a boy aged two and no husband. It wasn’t the usual key-of-the-door event, by any means.

  In the photograph Joan is sitting in the corner of the party marquee, on the floor with her legs crossed, toes pointing from a slinky blue dress, hair up in a bun, and she is talking to a handsome dark-haired boy (name forgotten), in full flow, and there’s that same cigarette gesture, the one she’s looking for now, hand held to the side during debate, her palm facing up. In that upward palm, the confident angle of that shoulder, is a whole atlas of the Joan that didn’t quite come to pass.

  ***

  When she got back from the loch, Mog went into the new kitchen. It’s habit, calling it the new kitchen. It’s no longer new; in fact, it wasn’t new even when it was new. It’s a clunky, ugly cream-and-brown affair, reclaimed from the Grants across the valley 20 years ago, when they were renovating. It was installed on the first floor in what was Henry’s mother’s private sitting room, when stairs were becoming too difficult for Vita and when the size, scale and gloom of the Victorian original downstairs, formidably authentic, was acknowledged, finally, as oppressive. Mog found Ottilie there, sitting at the table and drawing a striped yellow jug with white roses in it, having produced a box of oil pastels from her pocket. The jug in the sketch had colours it didn’t really have, and light and shapes and shadows that were new. In this jug, she’d seen another.

  They talked about tensions at the gatehouse. Mog, needing something to do, whisked chocolate powder into a pan of hot milk at the stove.

  “Sorry to go on like this,” she said, whisking harder.

  “It’s fine,” Ottilie assured her. “Don’t apologise, for heaven’s sake.”

  “It’s hard for us. You know. Because it’s obvious they shouldn’t be together. And I think they only stay tog
ether for our sakes.” She paused. “And we wish that they wouldn’t. I’d rather they didn’t. But that’s an impossible thing to say to them.”

  Ottilie said nothing, taking the offered mug of chocolate and sipping at it.

  “They must have been happy once,” Mog said to her. They looked at each other over the top of the mugs. “It’s just that I don’t remember it.”

  Joan got the wedding she wanted, at least in the material details. She got a restaurant to supply the canapés and Chinese duck, the near-translucent brandy snaps and the plump Perthshire raspberries with gooey meringues, delivered in ribbon-tied boxes. She cancelled Euan’s surprise within ten minutes of its being revealed, the hire of a flower-bedecked horse and trap to take them away from the church, replacing it with a Daimler and uniformed driver.

  “Discord even then.”

  “Your mother had a real battle with Euan’s mother. Poor Joyce. Trying to chip in and being rebuffed. A lot of vetoing. No small cute nieces with silver horseshoes. No rice. It was all very tense for a while.”

  “A control freak even then.”

  “Joan did the flowers, too, you know. Found the grower, went there, gave her orders. They were terrified. Kept ringing us up, worried that the buds wouldn’t be small enough.”

  “You helped with the church.”

  “Yes. Me and Ursula. Press-ganged.”

  Ottilie’s face acquired that look that it gets when she finds herself unexpectedly having mentioned Ursula’s name: her mind unsure where to go next, and her face unsure how to follow.

  At Mog’s suggestion they went out onto the terrace. They sat on the stone balustrade, their legs hanging over a 15-foot drop, looking over the drive and into the night garden. Moths flitted about and a nightjar screamed.

  “She was only nine, you know,” Ottilie said. “Of course you know. You know that was when she started speaking again, at your mother’s wedding.”

  This was radical, as departures from the norm go. Ottilie never mentioned Seb’s death, had never before referred to the events of the evening of the wedding. Some sea change appeared to be in progress. It occurred to me suddenly, out of the blue, that Ottilie was squaring herself up to confession. Mog didn’t say, though she was dying to, “Yes, and we all know why she started speaking that night, don’t we: she had news to tell us all.” She didn’t say, though she was dying to, “Tell me, tell me now, about that night and about Alan: haven’t there been enough years of secrecy?” She didn’t, but her face said it all for her. Ottilie glanced over, recognising this, and if she was going to speak out, made a decision now to back down, her face signalling this and then her voice. “Poor Seb,” she said instead.