The White Lie

by Andrea Gillies

  “He’s alive then,” she conceded. “He went off with the picture and the cash and left his clothes and his wallet in the car. Odd behaviour, but okay. I’ll buy it. So where is he? Why hasn’t he been in touch?”

  “Ursula told him a secret. One so terrible that we can never be forgiven. But what could it be, this secret? Really? Other than the obvious, Alan’s the father, so what? So terrible that we can never be forgiven?”

  He spoke to the sky, which was low and uniformly cotton-woollish, the clouds having laid themselves out in regular soft pleats. He was rapping lightly, in repeating sequences; a steady, piano-like chord-making against the wood.

  “You’re saying that Ursula made it up. Ursula and Alan, both. That Michael survived: he left Ursula and swam across the loch and took Henry’s cash and the painting from the car, but left his clothes and his wallet and his books. And then left Peattie on foot in dripping wet clothes.” Pip began to answer but Mog’s voice drowned him out. “And it’s still not a good enough excuse for not phoning or writing. Not just an excuse; not a good enough reason. Michael wouldn’t do that to us. I knew Michael. He wouldn’t.”

  “But you didn’t know him, did you? As it turned out.”

  “I knew enough.”

  “Look,” Pip said. “It isn’t just me, you know. Henry doesn’t think he’s dead either.”

  “Why does Henry think he’s alive?”

  “It’s a trick he lets his brain play on him. I don’t know. Maybe he knows something he’s not telling. He grows—what’s the word?—sheepish. He turns a bit sheepish and coy when I mention it.”

  “You mention it?”

  “We don’t talk about it often. But sometimes. On the phone. He’s unexpectedly forthcoming and frank on the phone. He told me a story about a young man, old enough to have young children, who died in the mountains and wasn’t recovered. True story. He was encased in ice. His son grew up and went into the mountains looking for him, and came upon him unexpectedly. He was perfectly preserved. The two of them looked almost identical, and his father was younger than he was.”

  “Imagine if that were true of Michael, in the deeps. Michael, suspended in the water and still 19.”

  “I know. The night after Henry told me the glacier story, I dreamed we found Michael, you and me, a long way in the future, that we had him retrieved once everyone else had died.”

  “Everyone else had died?”

  “We were old and grey, and he was younger than your grandchildren.”

  “Mine? You didn’t have grandchildren?”

  “My son didn’t live long enough. Curse got him. Don’t you ever dream that the curse gets you? Course, I don’t believe in it when I’m awake.”

  “I can’t bear to think about it. Michael. Michael hit hard with the oar and drowning.”

  “Apparently I shout in my sleep. I see her face, Ursula’s. The look on her face. You don’t beat somebody about the head with a heavy wooden object by accident.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re sceptical. It’s not a small thing, you know, her fear. She was frightened and struck out and hit harder than she meant to.”

  “Or she’s a psycho. One we protect and are prepared to perjure ourselves for. Who might do it again.”

  Mog looked at him, eyebrows raised, and shook her head. “I don’t think you’ve ever taken it seriously enough. Her aquaphobia. If that’s the right word. Her water-terror.”

  “What do you mean ‘not seriously enough’? I know what you know. I know she’s terrified of water.”

  “I don’t think you do, Pip. Did you hear about Shetland?”

  “Gran told me. She flew up to Shetland to see the wool, to the farm where they spin her wool. Got upset on the plane.”

  “Upset is understating it somewhat. Went into one of her things. Not listening. Chanting. Freaked the other passengers out. The cabin crew hovering, offering solutions but insisting on her being seated and supervised, all the same. She was told not to look. And it was fine at first. She was placed on an aisle seat, given an eye mask; held Edith’s hand. All going well. And then she decides she wants to see. Disaster.”

  “I don’t understand why Gran thought she’d manage it.”

  “Ursula said she was sure. And she never goes anywhere. It was supposed to be a treat, a 30th-birthday treat.”

  “I see where this is going. Ursula thrown into a panic on the loch with Michael, not really responsible for her actions. Going into one of her ‘things’. Not really herself. Not really responsible. But tell me this, Mary Salter-Catto. Who’s responsible when nobody’s responsible?”

  “Don’t start on the law speak.”

  “I’m not starting on the law speak.”

  “She won’t get in the bath, you know. Ah, you didn’t know that. I’m serious. Afraid of the bath. Even when it’s just the shower running. Afraid of the feel of it on her skin. You know that Gran has to wash her hair for her? You’ve no idea how bad it is. She has to go to the cottage, twice a week, get Ursula into the shower, play music to cover the water noise, and even then sometimes she gets upset, gets out with her hair full of soap, and it has to be finished in the sink, Ursula sitting with her back to it, eyes tight shut and Gran singing.”

  “I don’t think he’s dead, Mog.”

  “But Ursula always tells the truth. Always.”

  “Yes, but don’t you see? That applies just as earnestly to mistakes. Misapprehensions. Doesn’t it? You’re not lying if you believe utterly in what you say, and it proves untrue; you’re just wrong. I think she welded two disasters together when she gave her account. The front half of it was Michael, the back half Sebastian, seeing Sebastian fall into the loch and disappear. Barely a ripple and then gone. That’s the death of Sebastian. Mother says she used exactly the same words.”

  “So Ursula is mistaken. And Alan?”

  “Is a liar.”

  “But why would she get the two events mixed up?”

  “Perhaps she was encouraged to, by a ‘friend’ who talked to her as he rowed her back to shore.”

  “Oh, come off it.”

  “I’m not joking. I think he’s capable of anything. I think he’s a very dangerous man.”

  “On what evidence?”

  “Well, I know this much for certain: Ursula would parrot whatever he told her. I’ve tried it, experimentally. I know this for sure. She’ll repeat any old rubbish to Edith that you tell her, and insist that it’s true.”

  “What did you say to her?”

  “It was about aliens. It doesn’t matter.”

  “Oh, Pip.”

  “It was important. It proved something.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Alan told his lie, this big lie, to somebody who takes absolutely everything at face value.”

  Mog put one hand to her breastbone and closed her eyes. Her fingers and her eyelids fluttered and her breathing pattern grew fast.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “It’s nothing. Just having a moment. Imagining it. All that going on while I was . . . while I was having the hard-hearted nerve to feel bored, half a mile away and not knowing. You in a car on the motorway listening to music. None of us even aware. His lungs filling with water. Don’t you believe in the curse, sometimes, even when you’re awake?”

  “Mog, small children who can’t swim die in pools and ponds every day.”

  “Yes.”

  “Sebastian. That was an ordinary event, I’m afraid to say. Shockingly ordinary and meaningless.”

  “Yes.”

  “And Michael. Ursula was his curse, Mog.”

  “That’s horrible. You don’t really think it was that callous. God and Moses.”

  “No way of knowing.”

  “That’s the problem. What we’ll never know and what’s crucial to know is what she meant. It matters so much, what it was that she meant. How much malice there was, how much planning, how much understanding. That’s what makes the difference, that judgment.”

  �
��Okay,” Pip said, sliding sideways onto one hip, and then onto his knees, holding onto the edge and looking over. “Murder in the boat. We need to try this out. You can be Ursula.”

  Even before her name was out of his mouth, Pip had gone quietly over, was over the edge and gone, with an economical gymnastic ease. His head disappeared for a moment, but reappeared just as Mog lunged towards him. His hands came over the side first, clutching on, his fingers flattened and whitened. “Bloody freezing. Hurry up.”

  “Hurry up and what?”

  “Oar. Take oar out of oarlock.” His breath came in gasps. He waited while she fumbled with it. “More towards the middle; spread your hands. Like ice in here. Never swum this far out. Michael, holding on and looking up at you. Now, go to—no! Slowly! Jesus Christ.”

  “Only kidding.” She had mimed rage, but Pip had time to duck the oar as it came at him. Mog had slowed its pace, and when it landed on the edge of the boat, rocked it only gently side to side. She looked nervously at the place where it struck as if waiting for water to spurt up or for the thing to break decisively in two and sink, pointing its ends upward, leaving the two of them looking as surprised as cartoon animals.

  He had clambered back in. Mog was already looking under the tarpaulin. “Is there a rug in there? Thanks.” Water streamed off him and his teeth were chattering.

  “You’re an idiot. We’d better get back. Are you sane enough to row?”

  They hurried back to the house, Pip still wrapped in the grimy old boat blanket, purple rings around his eyes and his lips dark blue.

  11

  The morning of the day before I vanished I went out early with my surfboard, but there was no swell at all, and the sea, unusually tropically blue, was an unprecedented flat calm. Day on day the heat had built and intensified until it was near sinister, the sky so faultlessly blue that it appeared two dimensional, a painted canvas heaven. There would be no surfing today. It seemed as if there would never be surfing again, as if there would never be rain; like weather had come to an end and in the sky there were only ever to be these vast open blue fields.

  There being nothing remotely like a wave, I threw down my board and settled for swimming, ploughing up and down in the water. I took a lot of exercise at that time, exercising alone. It was important to be physically tired. If I was tired I could settle to work, to reading and thinking and writing. The sentence-making, paragraph-forming impulse was becoming systematic and diseased and I wrote and wrote compulsively in notebooks. I exercised alone and I worked alone, and each was in its own way a strategy. It broke my obsession into manageable parts. When I was swimming I thought about the father, and my mother’s attitude to him and to me. When I was working I didn’t have to. That was the respite. I knew that when exercising and work were done for the day, Mog would telephone at her usual time. We were close again, my friendship with Ursula having taken a bizarre turn. Often our phone calls started arbitrarily and ended the same way, taking up a point from earlier or from an earlier day without need of much of a preamble. I thought Mog was immensely generous, the kindest person I’d ever met. I didn’t really cotton on that there was more to it than that, though Pip tried to warn me, jokingly, just how attached to me she had become.

  My mother came out and sat on the bench, which sits sand-embedded in front of the studio’s big rear window, only 20 feet or so from the edge of the cliff, among the marram grasses. The word cliff gives the wrong impression, as it’s only a short scramble onto the beach. Footholds worked into the slope lead down to a bank of rough pink pebbles that in turn gives way to orange sand, a wide hard slick of it that resists footprints unless the tide’s newly out. Ottilie was wearing a long, thin greyish-green dress; she brought a notebook and a cup of coffee and watched me. She was drawing me. She has hundreds of drawings of me that nobody has seen. I swam, and then I sat in the shallows a while, and swam again, and my mother watched me and drew. After a while she went back in and made us both a sandwich. She signalled to me that lunch was ready, holding up a plate with one hand and pointing at it with the other. I raised my arm in acknowledgment and came to her slowly up the shoreline, feeling the sun already burning off the sea water and hot on my head. I can feel that bench beneath me, even now, how rough and hard it was, the hot wood slats and the marram grass tickling; I can taste the warm curds of egg, the grain of the bread and the cold butter. There were dolphins out in the bay and we watched them sewing through the water, up and down. It was growing misty out there: a sea fret was building, the bane of hot weather on this part of the coast.

  While we were eating, Ottilie asked me whether I’d thought any more about going back to the college and doing the exams. Disappointment flooded through me. This, then, was the real point of the sandwich. I told her that all I knew for certain was that going to university would be a waste of time, that it was a different kind of education I craved: a line of argument that had already prompted Henry to find me ungrateful. Escalating, the row moved sideways into the usual territory, broadening and then narrowing into the one usual thing, our own predictable imploding star.

  This day, this memory of a day, was made again, conjured up with words. Mog had been telling Rebecca about it. Rebecca had been probing more on the question of my disappearance, and Mog was beginning to suffer the onset of a slow and deadly social panic, the effect of which was to make her voluble; certain of the things she swore she wouldn’t say, she heard herself saying, rolling through the prohibition noisily as coins.

  “Ottilie said once, during one of her low periods, that his conception was a mistake” she told Rebecca. "His being a mistake was an idea—the idea—that Michael was drawn to more and more.”

  “A mistake—that’s horrible.”

  “But Ottilie persisted in thinking that it could be talked about rationally between them. Trying to be honest and precise, she said that yes, a mistake, but a mistake only in so far as few people would want to get pregnant at 18 after a one-night stand. As you can imagine this wasn’t the affirmation Michael was hoping for. So Ottilie told him that in retrospect it was serendipity, the happiest of accidents. It was too late to erase the word, though, and qualifying it was a disaster.”

  “So you don’t know who the father was?”

  “Everyone has their own theory. She got very drunk, apparently, and it’s hard to believe but she’d never drunk alcohol before my parents’ wedding. Different world, then. Got drunk on punch and was found at 2am more or less unconscious on a sofa.”

  When it became obvious that she was pregnant, Henry went across the country banging on doors late at night, bellowing his need for admission and for answers. Some of these families haven’t spoken to the Salters since. Subsequently, Henry and Edith came up with what’s referred to as the Family Version, which can be summed up as “Young girl introduced by some bounder to drink and seduced”. The village story was and is slightly different: “Little slut was sleeping around.”

  We had a row, my mother and I, on the bench, under the interrogatory white light of the overhead sun. I said I’d had enough of it all, I couldn’t go on, feeling disgust at the use of this language even as I was speaking, the cliché-ridden language of not being able to go on. I said it was time to think about a life of my own. This didn’t alarm her unduly: it wasn’t the first or third or 13 th time that she’d heard it. The monologue deteriorated into wounding generalisations, as these things do, to all of which my mother gave her usual stoical responses. I stormed off into the house, slamming the door, and I watched her from the window as she returned to her sketchbook. There was an extraordinary light effect, out there in the bay. The sea fret was building and rolling, like some physical arrival, like an armada of ghost ships, the strong sunshine illuminating and piercing it. It was too individual an encounter to give up. She had reached already for the box of pastels.

  I went to my room and dressed. Dark jeans, a thick brown belt, the one with the cowboy buckle, the favourite blue shirt, brown leather boat shoes. Forgive me if
I fetishise a little. I like these words, the cotton feel of them, cool on my skin, the buttons. I packed a bag, took my wallet and passport and diary, and drove down to Peattie. As I left the cottage I had one last view of my mother. She stood up, upsetting cold coffee onto the sketch, got up onto the seating planks of the bench and waved after the car with one extended arm. My parting view of her was in a wing mirror.

  ***

  Mog brought the conversation to a halt by asking if Rebecca had seen the painting of the great aunts, and having been assured that she hadn’t, led the way down the stairs to the study. On the wall above Henry’s desk, three painted women gazed serenely out of a dark brown frame. Three brown-haired heads, three ivory-skinned faces, sultana brown eyes, pomegranate-tinted mouths, their facial shadows judged skilfully in mauve and blue.

  “Is that them?”

  “Great Aunt Ursa and sisters. It was done in 1930. One of the few pictures that survived the round-up. The painter’s quite well known now. They took a photograph of it for a book.”

  “Like you and me. Only better.”

  “He made the noses longer and their mouths wider. But they were all incredibly skinny; that’s accurate.”

  Great Aunt Ursa is pictured in a mid-green suit with darker satin lapels. The neckline descends into a broad V, no cleavage discernible. Skinny is right. They were bony, tall, too tall to be matched easily at dances with men, and were famously undeferential to male opinion, but wore clothes well. Clothes hung unimpeded from their shoulders. Great Aunt Jo’s in a dark-red dress, and Great Aunt Tilly’s in aubergine purple. All three have collar-length bobbed hair waved tight across the top of the head from severe side partings. It’s like three views of one woman.