The White Lie

by Andrea Gillies

  Back at Peattie, she returned to her bedroom, lifted the phone receiver and called Thomas.

  “I have to see you,” she said to him. “There’s something I need to tell you.”

  “Edith—what on earth’s the matter? Has something happened?”

  “Two things I need to tell you. One of them I told to a friend this afternoon, and now I feel terrible and exposed and I need your advice. The other I didn’t tell her; I’ll never tell her.”

  “You must come right over; have you eaten?” Thomas asked. “I’m about to have a lasagne. It’s shop-bought but not bad.”

  So many of our assumptions in life are based on the things people tell each other, but the things people tell each other can all too easily amount only to a line of mythology, misinterpreting itself successively through the generations uncontested. Sometimes people are only too glad to let misunderstandings rest unchallenged. The right kind of misunderstanding could become the foundation stone for a life. Edith and Henry, for instance, were each aware that the consensus in the family about their barely speaking to one another since Sebastian died, continuing apparently happily married—never a word in anger spoken—was evidence of a unity, one that had worked itself through as muteness; muted ways of speaking and thinking, muted sorts of expectations, emerging with a kind of grim beauty out of unspeakable grief. The fact that Sebastian’s loss affected them equally profoundly, with a measurable twinned deadening of the eye, was evidence of their being unified and one: two damaged flower bulbs flowering in the same heartbreakingly off-kilter, misshapen way. Despondency and suffering, ungovernable if given free rein, threatened for a time to overwhelm them both, and what could be done about it, what can ever be done other than to push the unspeakable back into the dark and carry on? There were three other children to bring up, and keeping going was all that was possible. It was only much later that Edith spoke to Thomas about her realisation, far too late, that Ursula interpreted her and Henry’s reaction, their cooling, their retreat, as a judgment upon her, as a punishment. The three surviving children all felt deeply that their brother’s death was their fault, but Ursula more than any of them, Henry said to me once. Ottilie has spoken of it often: how they were standing only a few feet away from Sebastian when he toppled in; how she still feels she could have prevented it, that she could have been quicker. His drowning under those circumstances, with his sisters right there but unable to save him, his proving impossible to find until it was too late: this is interpreted as sinister in the village, cited as something that could only have been invoked by dark forces.

  My mother has said to me that she thinks Edith and Henry’s retreat into silence after Seb was gone was at least in part influenced by Ursula’s own, for how could Ursula’s suffering be the more profound? At the time it seemed essential only that grief cut the old life cleanly at the base of the stem. Tilly concurred with this view. There was a kind of heroism to the relinquishment of the old ordinariness, Tilly said. A kind of nobility in it. The most important thing to recognise was that it was mutual. She’d paraphrase Wittgenstein to me: there are things that can’t be spoken about, that go too deep, beyond the reach of words, and about those things it is best to say nothing. Except that’s not how it was at all. I’ve seen them, Edith and Henry, the day after Sebastian died, her going onto the moor with him in the early morning, at five in the morning, two figures in long coats silhouetted against a white sky. I’ve seen her push hard at his shoulder and him pushing her in return; her slipping and falling back onto the grass. I’ve heard their shouted accusations. It was Henry who hired the au pair on the telephone, from the most rudimentary of phone conversations, saying he didn’t have time to interview her. It was Edith who let her take the children to the loch unsupervised. It was Henry who told Sebastian he was too busy to come and sail the boat that Andrew had made, threatened by Andrew’s bond with the boy. It was Edith who had the hair appointment.

  “I’m on my way,” Edith told Thomas. She realised that she was calmly in tears, surprise tears that itched wet on her cheeks and cooled ticklish at the corners of her mouth. “One of the things is—one of them is that I know where Michael is, I know Michael is dead. The other thing . . . I feel sick just thinking about telling you.”

  “Edith, stop, you’re making yourself ill. Don’t drive; I’ll come to you. Shall I come now?”

  “It’s something that Ursula told me, something not even Henry knows, that would break Henry’s heart.”

  “Stay there. I’ll get a taxi and I’ll be there in half an hour.”

  “No, not today. I can’t do this today. Tomorrow. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  13

  On the tenth day after I disappeared, Edith made her afternoon visit to Ottilie determined to be open about the past. As soon as Ottilie answered the door she could see it, something new in her mother’s face.

  “What is it? Has something happened?”

  “I need you to come with me, to come home with me, right now.”

  “I can’t do that. You know that I can’t.”

  “Please. This thing won’t close itself. I need to—we need to—say everything to one another about it, so we can say everything and feel everything and it will close.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “We can empty ourselves, say everything to one another, and then it will close.”

  “No. We can’t and it won’t.”

  “I can’t do this again. I need it to end.”

  “What are you talking about? What do you mean again?”

  “You know what I mean. You must know what I mean. We’ve never talked about it, but Ursula told me. She told me, you see. About the lie.”

  “About the lie,” Ottilie echoed.

  “Yes. Ursula told me. I haven’t breathed a word to anyone, all this time. Not even you girls. Not even Henry. We can’t talk about it now.”

  “Something about Michael?”

  “Not about Michael. We can’t talk about it now. But I’ve been coming out here and out here, every day, away from your father, so I could tell you that I knew. I wanted you to know that she told me.”

  “What did Ursula tell you?”

  “You were there. You were a child. You know what I mean.”

  “I was a child?” Ottilie’s puzzlement was obvious, but now light began to dawn. “Ursula told you. She told you when?”

  “After Joan’s wedding.”

  “Why haven’t you said anything to me? All this time. I can’t believe it.”

  “It was my fault,” Edith said, her expression stricken.

  “Of course it wasn’t your fault. How could it have been your fault?”

  “I’ve begun to think that it was the secret she told Michael, that Ursula told Michael in the boat. That that’s what they fought about.”

  “You’re not making any sense. How could that be the secret?”

  “I don’t know. We’ll never know probably.”

  “Well, you could beat it out of her.”

  “Ottilie.”

  “There’s too much consideration. I’m sorry but that’s how I see it. Way too much.”

  Edith took hold of her arm. “Please come home with me. Please.”

  “I can’t.”

  “If you would only speak to her.”

  “Listen to me. This is never going to change. I am never going to speak to her. I am never going to Peattie again.”

  Edith didn’t seem to have been prepared for the finality of this. She went home shocked to Henry and threw her arms around his neck, Henry patting her back in response. It was the first intended physical contact for very many years.

  Henry left things as they were a few days, knowing about Ottilie and her cooling periods. Left to her own devices, it was possible she’d talk herself out of it, out even of what might appear to be an entrenched position. Eventually he rang her.

  “I meant what I said. I won’t come to Peattie again,” Ottilie told him on the phone.

&nbs
p; “You must think of your mother,” he persisted. “She’s distraught and not sleeping and on blood pressure medication.”

  Silence. Henry waited.

  Finally Ottilie spoke. “I will come. But only if you can promise that I won’t see Ursula. I won’t talk to her, I won’t be in the same room as her, I don’t want to catch sight of her. Do you understand?”

  “I promise.”

  “If I find myself accidentally in a room with her I won’t be back.”

  “I understand.”

  “I mean it.”

  “I know you do.” He paused, then added, “Ottilie—about Michael.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it any more” Ottilie said. “I don’t want to hear his name mentioned.” Reporting this conversation to Edith, Henry said that he wasn’t entirely sure what she meant by that last remark. Edith had to agree. People have always struggled to understand what Ottilie means.

  ***

  At the heart of our relationship, the one between my mother and me, there lay a profound misunderstanding: this is the conclusion I’ve come to. I don’t know how different life would have been if she’d taken me to one side, at any point in our 19 years together, and said, “Look: here’s what you have to know: it isn’t you; it’s not about, never was about not wanting you.” She said these words and more to me in my imagination, in my sleep; I’d conjure her up when I felt most transient in her life. “You were wanted from the first moment,” she’d say to me, or so I imagined, late at night, stroking the side of my face. “From the moment I felt you kicking under my hand. And I love you more than my life. There wouldn’t be a moment’s hesitation, Michael.”

  She doesn’t say anything quite this explicit, even now. Instead she talks to me about the work.

  “If I didn’t put the work first, I’d be afraid of life, every day. How to put this to you. It’s difficult to explain. After Sebastian died the world seemed different. It wasn’t even about ambition. It was more like just getting through it. A technique. It’s almost like I managed to start to live each day as if it might be my last, as my father had said, but that proved to be an absolute curse. The day had to be about making.” She made a dissatisfied noise. “Put it this way: today, this moment—this might be the best drawing day I’ve ever had. This might be the day when the drawing starts to mean something, and begins to mean something to others, and life changes and the world’s remade.” She sat with her hand on my stone as if it were the conduit, the contact point between worlds. “I’m not always sure I really believe that any more, but it’s the only hope and I have to hang onto it.”

  She spent 19 years living in a paradox. Loving me more than her life; needing to spend a life alone. I know this about her, now. I know that she’s afraid every day of dying, that she’s been afraid every day since Sebastian fell into the loch, and I know from things that she’s told me that she’s frightened of ageing further from here, from the point she’s now reached, tracking the first subtle failures of skin and bone, recognising that organs are beginning to signal their age. They do that eventually; they turn on you, flaunting their finiteness as a gift and whispering the possibility that they’re about to become the enemy. People, sociability, anchor her too far, too evidently in her own mortality. Alone in the studio there is no death, only birth. Only creation, over and over.

  When I was 11, I didn’t understand the way we lived, the way my mother seemed to want to live. It baffled and angered me.

  “Why don’t we have houses that are like everyone else’s? Why don’t we have television?” I’d ask her, tediously often.

  “Because ordinary houses are a sign of ordinary souls,” she’d say. “And television makes people ordinary.”

  “It doesn’t have to. Why should it have to? That’s ridiculous.”

  “Life is so short, Michael,” she’d say to me. “So short. Don’t waste a minute on things that don’t add something to your experience of it.”

  “Television would add something to my experience of it,” I told her, not unreasonably. But in this as in other things she was intransigent.

  I found the transition from Peattie to the cottage very hard, perceiving it as an eviction, or at least as a demotion, and I was profoundly ashamed. I made myself unpopular at school by bragging about Peattie and how that was my real home. My mother had bought this other place to serve as a studio, I said, and we stayed over when she worked late. I managed to shut them all up for a while, but my triumph was short-lived. It came to a sorry end at 13 when the news got out that Michael Salter lived in the village all the time and it was a lie about living at Peattie, news that led to a fist-fight just outside the school gate and my tormentor punched accidentally unconscious. There was a permanent mark on my school record after that. Intelligent but volatile: that was me. Intelligent, volatile, a boy with a short fuse, a loner: that was their judgment. I didn’t make friends. But then another outcast (small, and late to puberty) started hanging out with me at break time, and after his mother had visited mine, there were many invitations to go and eat with them. Lawrie. I can’t remember his surname. We had nothing in common other than unpopularity and a talent for chess. He lived in the new development at the edge of the village. I liked it there. Plush beige carpets covered the whole floor, up and down and the stairs between, and it was always warm, and there were bright cheery paint colours, lime and lilac, the walls flat and perfect as coloured card. It was airy and very orderly, with modern furniture that looked as if it had all been delivered from one shop in a big truck. Lawrie’s mother was similarly a vision of bright cleanliness, smiling and chatty and available.

  The cottage was a very different order of beast. It had been sold as in need of modernisation, but Ottilie didn’t modernise. The plumbing and wiring needed renewing. There wasn’t a shower. We didn’t have central heating: all the warmth and the hot water were provided by an ungainly black stove. The cottage retains, even now, its original papers and tiles and flooring, its same ugly original light fittings. It’s crowded and dusty, piled high with things that Ottilie deemed essential: bits of old furniture she liked, things gifted from Peattie alongside random beachcombings, an absurdly large grandfather clock, towering stalagmites of books. Framed drawings and pastels are stacked against the skirting boards, and all available wall space is taken up with an ever-changing domestic exhibition, much of it work in progress that comes and goes. The kitchen is small and dark, its window looking out past the studio to the sea. There’s a butler sink with Victorian taps, open shelving instead of cupboards and flowered curtains serving as doors.

  Ottilie agreed to go to Lawrie’s house for coffee with his mother. She sat in their modern sitting room, embarrassing me with her freakish 19th-century look, dispensing with questions briskly and dismissively and going on to make stilted, misfiring remarks that puzzled Lawrie’s mother, who wasn’t the kind of woman who talks very much to people about the poignancy of old hands, or why it is that we think the sea mysterious. Lawrie, picking up on my discomfort, invited me to his room and taught me backgammon, but we left before the game was finished. When we got home Ottilie went into her bedroom, closing the door and putting the radio on at high volume. I went to the door and listened. There was another noise, one secondary to the Elgar and its violins swooping, another noise that played hard and staccato against the melody. We’d gone to visit right after the school day and so I stood outside her room in my uniform, already lanky, my wrists clear of my shirt cuffs, my trousers and blazer a little short. I tapped on the door and asked if everything was alright, and the secondary noise came to a halt. Nothing was said about it when she emerged.

  By 14 I’d taken on the housework, not because I was asked to but because I began to crave order. I preferred to live in undusty rooms, preferred newspapers piled and binned and coffee cups washed before they were needed. I took on the laundry—putting a load on before school and levering it up close to the ceiling on the pulley in the scullery when I got home. Ottilie never ironed clothe
s so I began to do my own; it was good to have a pressed shirt for school. People assumed that my mother had turned over a new leaf and were open in their approval. Inspired by this,

  I began to cook, teaching myself from library books. My first presentation was a roast chicken with baked potatoes and a bowl of coleslaw; Ottilie was so surprised and so delighted with it that I began to cook most nights and to wash up after, insisting that I didn’t mind. I’d stand at the kitchen sink working through the dishes, wearing yellow gloves, my eyes fixed on the studio window, where I could see the back of my mother’s head—her chair faced its other window, looking out to sea—watching her moving silently around, already locked in concentration and oblivious to my watching. Don’t get the impression that I felt put upon. It was all immensely gratifying—to provide for her and make her happy, to be her support staff, to be referred to as her support staff. I’d go out onto the beach while dinner was cooking and look for treasure: aesthetically wonky shells, stones with holes worn through them, things that had been washed up, bringing these objects home and arranging them in the middle of the table. She’d handle them, passing them gently from hand to hand as if each were a baby bird, and admire my taste, and sometimes things would reappear as art.

  Ottilie began to give me money for helping with the chores. I’d always had generous ad hoc donations, and squirrelled most of these away in an emptied biscuit tin labelled “adventures”. But now I had direct monthly payments made from my mother’s account.

  “For all your extraordinary help, for which I’ll always be so grateful,” she said, presenting the bank book, and I can see her now, saying it as if she were speaking right now, her grey-green eyes so beautiful. “Now that you have all this money, why don’t you go out at the weekends? Go to the cinema, up to town, do stuff with your friends.”