“I’d rather stay here.”
“You are almost 15, Michael. You ought to be out there socialising, meeting girls.”
I blushed deeply.
“Why don’t you go today? You’ve got plenty for Saturday trips; I know you’re jealous about guarding your travel money but there’s easily enough for the bus, the cinema, something to eat. I’ve put a clothes allowance in there. Your shirts are getting too small again.”
“Thank you.”
Was it okay, that “thank you”? I’m not sure, even now, whether it trod the line successfully between gratitude and a sickening disappointment. I began finding sleeping difficult, already too tall in my single bed, big feet hanging out of the end and my heart beating fast and hard.
After the first of my Saturdays out—I ran out of things to do early, and sat in a coffee shop with a book until the teatime bus was due—Ottilie was unusually relaxed and attentive, coming to me as I took my shoes off in the hall, beaming and glad, with a coffee pot in her hand and paint crusted on her knuckles. She was just beginning to do the seascapes that would be used as cover illustrations for a poetry series.
“Have you had a lovely time? I’ve had the best day’s painting in an age: the light was spectacular. What did you see? Have you eaten? I’m just about to have a sandwich.”
My being away had made her happy, it was an incontrovertible fact, and so there was nothing for it but to make Saturdays in town a habit. The trouble was that other village boys started tagging along, hanging about in teenage clouds by the bus stop, and shadowed me, and that was worse than loneliness. So I started going to Peattie instead, though I had to catch two buses to get there. It was Joan who told my mother. When Ottilie rang, Edith said that not only was I welcome, but I was an enormous help. Michael could come to Peattie on however many Saturdays he felt like it, she said. I was standing beside my grandmother as she spoke, trying to gauge reaction from the other end of the line, hoping for a hint of regret, of jealousy. Edith winked at me, talking to my mother on the phone and attempting to tousle my hair, which was difficult as I was already a good four inches taller than her. What would be lovely, she added as if it had just occurred to her (it hadn’t; we’d discussed it), was if he could come and stay the entire weekend sometimes. Could he be spared?
The truth is there wasn’t that much in the way of helping with the house and even less so as I got older. The women wouldn’t let me do much. Gratefully I realised that I could do at Peattie what I did at home, cocooned away with books and writing. I filled dozens of these notebooks, blue exercise books that Ottilie has filed away in suitcases and brings out at night when Edith’s asleep. Some of it was diary, some of it first attempts at journalism, and there were short stories later, in the year before I left. I liked the routine of a Peattie weekend. After the four o’clock tea I’d head to the kitchen; this was the part of the day I enjoyed most. It became a new tradition that I’d make dinner on a Saturday night and that all those in residence would sit around the kitchen table together and eat. If I’d hoped for a reaction to that, to my mother’s exclusion from family dinner and family conversations, I wasn’t to be granted one. It wouldn’t have occurred to her to mind.
Being back at Peattie was such a relief. Peattie was never going to change: it was Peattie that was the living organism, the entity, and succeeding generations of Salters lived its life in all the ways that Peattie demanded; there was security in that. Things at the cottage felt very different. Ever since I could remember I’d felt about my mother that she could make a decision for a different life, any minute and seemingly on a whim. It might be one that didn’t suit me. It might even be one that didn’t include me. She might come into the room on any day, at any moment, with a new look on her face, one that I’d recognise because I’d anticipated it for years. She’d explain to me that she had to go, that she was moving to Tokyo or to Patagonia. Braced against this probability, at 15 I hugged the idea of Peattie to myself. Mog and I started going to town together on Saturdays and so I began to go to Peattie on Friday nights, straight after school. Ottilie took it in her stride. Now that my weekends there were habitual, she adopted habits of her own and began to make trips away. I was boarded with Edith for a month every autumn while my mother went travelling.
Euan had done most of the weekend cooking at Peattie up to this point, and for a while he was enthusiastic about our doing it together. I hated this: he couldn’t help taking over and being dictatorial about technique. It doesn’t really matter how a carrot is cut but Euan is a man for there being only one way; he and Joan have this mindset in common. We argued and Edith intervened and the sessions were abandoned, in favour of taking turns. Even then, he’d come and sit in the kitchen with papers to mark while I was making dinner and try to strike up conversation, though his dislike for my mother was at the heart of most of it. He’d criticise her openly when Edith was around, if always on the basis of fighting my corner.
“Ottilie goes on holiday every year without her child; she never thinks to take her child,” he said to my grandmother in my presence once, Edith looking towards me in alarm.
“It’s not a holiday; it’s work,” I told him. “I’m invited to go too. I’m always invited. But it’s at a bad time for missing school. And I’d rather be here.”
I wished immediately that I hadn’t said that final thing.
It wasn’t true that I’d been invited, though it shut Euan up. And it occurred to me every October that perhaps this time she wouldn’t come back, or that she’d come back with a man in tow and present him to me as a stepfather and move him in. Perhaps he’d be somebody she couldn’t see through, someone who’d become determined to oust me. She’d be oblivious, unaware that her new and charming husband had, in her absence, eyes that glittered like a predator’s. It wasn’t a coincidence that I’d recommended that Mog read David Copperfield.
I understand more now about Ottilie’s positioning, the way she positions herself in relation to others. I was always convinced that it would have suited her better to be alone in the world, but the truth is that she values attachments, as long as they’re long, fine silver threads, very long, very fine, that look fragile, that might even appear invisible, but in truth are immutable and permanent, that provide her with a necessary distance. Her idea of happiness is to be alone but with people at hand. Her happiest days as a mother were days when I wasn’t there. I think that’s true and it’s said without self-pity: the crucial point is that they were also days in which I was coming back, I was expected; I’d frame her solitude and make it work. Her happiest times at Peattie, she’s said, have been spent working in the studio, knowing the family is only just outside her concentration, that she can emerge blue-overalled and preoccupied into the drawing room at teatime and will barely be called upon to speak. She takes it with her, she says, this time spent in physical proximity, back to the cottage and back into the work.
***
So this is how it went. Two weeks after I’d gone, Ottilie laid down to her father the conditions of her return to Peattie, and they were abided by. She’d come at set times so that care could be taken to keep Ursula out of the way, visiting once a week on average, except for those periods in which she wasn’t speaking to her parents—because although the agreement about not encountering Ursula held, it didn’t result in untroubled years of visiting. For years, Ottilie vacillated. She’d come to the house and seem almost normal, but beneath the surface of calm, its crust, there were tectonic stirrings and shiftings; the heat was garnering itself and rising. Generally there was precious little in the way of a warning. On the day precipitating her longest absence, Edith had been asking blamelessly about the weather at the coast, which was brighter, generally, than the hill-country micro-climate of Peattie. In answer, Ottilie stared. Then she got to her feet, setting her cup and cake plate carefully down.
“I’m sorry, I have to go.”
“But you’ve just got here,” Edith protested.
“Sometimes�
�I’m sorry—increasingly, I find I can’t bear to be in the same room as the two of you.”
“Oh, Ottilie.” Edith began to cry. Tears sprang from her eyes and rolled down each cheek.
“I can’t do this any more,” Ottilie said. “I’ll be back when I feel differently. Please, please don’t come to the cottage.”
She was away from Peattie for almost four years and nobody saw her or heard from her, other than in a weekly letter written only to Edith and which Edith answered, sometimes taking days over her responses, writing draft after draft and discarding them. Then one Saturday Edith could be heard squawking excitedly in the hall that there was tremendous news: Ottilie was coming to tea tomorrow. Nobody spoke to her unless to ask about the work, which was the main condition laid down; nor were Ursula’s or Michael’s names to be mentioned. Sometimes queries about the work carried evident metaphorical weight, though superficially that was all that was discussed.
Gradually, the time Ottilie spent at Peattie began to lengthen again into hours. She brought art materials in her car and began to use her studio at the house before tea, though if something inadvertently tactless was said to her she’d excuse herself and return to seclusion. It was assumed that a loch visit was out of the question and it was never mentioned, but in fact it was at this time that her visits to me began. She didn’t announce them to anyone, but she was spotted and the news got out. Ottilie had been seen sitting by my memorial stone, talking aloud as if to me. Nothing was said to her about it, or by her about it, and things achieved a kind of stability, the stable weekend pattern that was in place at the time of Edith’s party.
Only Pip has dared mention the long absence. The morning after the winter drama in Ursa’s room, Ottilie said at breakfast that she wanted to go to the hospital alone for the morning visiting: not because she had anything particular to say to Edith, but because she wanted to sit quietly with her. Pip followed her out onto the snowy, slushy terrace, on the pretext of having a smoke, and watched her looking for something to clear her windscreen. He went to help, was thanked for his kindness, and then, emboldened, said, “I’ve always wanted to know something.”
“Yes.”
“Can I ask you—just one small thing?”
“You can try.”
“What made you come back? So suddenly. After so many years away. Was it something that Edith wrote to you?”
“No. It wasn’t something Edith wrote. It was just time.”
“It can’t have been that simple.”
“Pip.”
“Sorry. I overstepped.”
“It was just that I was tired,” Ottilie said, getting into the car. “Tired of minding that they put Ursula first. I could live my life without them, but it was exhausting me. In the end it was a decision about myself: it was better for me to end it, to appear to be recovered from it.”
“But you’re not.”
Ottilie closed her door, started her engine and pulled slowly through the whitened gravel, waving briefly out of the open window, Pip acknowledging her with a sort of salute.
14
Feeling that she couldn’t bear any more cups of coffee and any more confidential chats, chats that could stretch into desperate hours, Mog took Rebecca for a walk around the estate. It was a chilly morning, misty, but the sun was there beyond the milkiness, burning stoically through its tissue paper layers. Nothing could be seen at the other side of the loch through the fog, and Peattie’s borders to other worlds could only be guessed at. They went first into the walled gardens, Mog walking slightly ahead so as to limit the conversational flow, then into the courtyard and round to the glasshouses, admiring the neat rows of salad crops, the tangle of greenery that rose ceiling-high, the pleasant warm stink of tomato plants. They followed the lane to where it divides, left to the loch, right to the village, and chose the right-hand fork. Approaching the cottages they saw Alan in his front garden, standing behind a trestle table, potting up seedlings from plastic trays. Alan stopped what he was doing.
“Ladies,” he said solicitously. “Nice day for it.”
The cottages are miniaturised toytown-sized houses, sitting together joined in a row. Each gate and window frame has been painted and repainted its pre-war black; each of the windows is shaped faux-medievally as an arch, with finely crafted curved and angled stone-cutting supporting them; each porch trimmed in fretwork that’s still painted in its same pre-war green. Small, densely planted gardens at the front are divided one from the other by waist-height hedges, and of these little plots only Jet’s was untended-looking, bearing the ruins of a sweetpea wigwam gifted by his mother, its former lawn knee-deep in bindweed. George’s own plot was dedicated almost entirely to roses, white and dark purple and apricot. George kept up the holiday let, a square of grass edged in herbs and blue geranium, though Alan said he shouldn’t bother. It was one of the things they disagreed about. Alan wouldn’t let his father do Jet’s garden, which was cut by Ursula when she remembered. Ursula’s own patch is a tiny meadow dominated by Michaelmas daisies (she doesn’t much approve of lawns), and it was as Rebecca was admiring the wildflowers in Ursula’s patch that their owner came rushing out of her cottage and past them at a hurried walk, holding a spade almost as big as she was. Then she came jogging back without it.
“Rebecca, you said you’d like to see inside my house. Come now. I’m here and you’re here.”
Mog and Rebecca followed Ursula inside.
The cottages are dark and prone to damp; the gothic-revival pointed windows are not so charming from within. Woodlice patrol the carpet edges and in terms of decorative efforts only limewashes survive the clamminess of the old stone. All wallpaper attempts have had to be abandoned, though little shreds remain by skirtings and light switches of old doomed campaigns.
“There are four rooms, two up and two down,” Ursula told Rebecca.
Downstairs there’s a kitchen and sitting room and, up a narrow wooden staircase, a bedroom and bathroom, squeezed in under the eaves and heavily coombed. Originally these were two bedrooms, when the cottages shared a communal bathhouse at the rear, but only its foundations remain, marked by a grassy hump and rim of stone. The family that lived in what’s now Ursula’s house in the 1880s had seven children, and Ursula told Rebecca what’s known about them. Three slept in a double bed, top to tail, one in a camp bed squeezed in by the wall, the youngest in the cot in the parents’ room and two downstairs in a curtained-off recess. She showed Rebecca the recess. “Look how small it is, but I bet it was the warmest, so close to the stove.”
Ursula moved into the cottage on the understanding that she would never go beyond the wall alone and that she would continue to come into Peattie House for meals. All this time later she continued to eat with her parents at least once a day, unless Ottilie was at the house, in which case someone was delegated to deliver, trotting down the lane with a covered dish on a tray, soup in a thermos, a bread roll on a plate. Before the companion arrived and the gas stove, Ursula lived out of a fridge and a microwave. She had a toaster and little non-combustible bags designed for making toasted sandwiches.
Ursula’s kitchen, unchanged in half a century, retains its sky-blue cupboards and formica surfaces, its poured blue-black flooring flecked with dots and dashes and its elderly rag-rugs; the rest of the cottage is bare boards. “Joan wants to do it but I won’t let her,” Ursula said. “That would ruin it but Joan doesn’t see that. She doesn’t see things.” She looked to Mog for a response but none came. “It was the same with Granny Vita, yesterday.”
Joan had come into Vita’s private sitting room, a small, scruffy room, the wallpaper tatty, the carpet going to holes, the only heating from a wood fire, to find Vita and Mrs Hammill having a late breakfast of papadums and mango chutney. Mrs Hammill makes frequent visits late at night to the Indian restaurant in the village. Vita was enrobed in thick satin, a dressing gown that was almost 80 years old, that had been bought for a young bride, a faded sea blue embroidered with kingfishers and pagodas, a
nd was holding, shakily, a tiny china cup with mud-thick espresso in it. She drinks a lot of coffee, joking that it’s all that’s keeping her heart beating. Joan had been bursting with the news that she’d planned a refurbishment, and was surprised when Vita declined.
“I’m sorry about your moodboard and I’m grateful to you, but it’s not for me. I’m old now. Wait till I’m gone.”
Joan protested that it was no trouble.
“That isn’t it, my dear,” Vita explained. “I like to be among things from my life, you see, and it’s comforting to outlive some of them.”
***
Ursula’s eyes were bright. “And now, come and see.” She took Rebecca’s hand and led her into the sitting room. “The sofa is new,” she said. “Well, not new but new to me.” It’s a firmly upholstered mustard-coloured affair, all flat planes, with buttoned seats and angled metal legs. She has utility cupboards, a mirror in the shape of a star and shelves heavy with old crockery, things mined at Peattie and at sales Joan takes her to. Generally that’s as far afield as Ursula gets. She’s never been off the estate unaccompanied. She’s never been to the cinema or into a supermarket or on a motorway, but she’s intimately acquainted with every church hall, junk emporium and bookshop in the county.
“I like three sorts of things,” Ursula said. “Well, four if you count plants. Well, five if you count animals, but we could just keep going, adding and adding. What do you like?”
“Oh, well, I don’t know, I suppose the usual things, nice food and films and travel; I like plants and animals too,” Rebecca said.
“You have to learn to be more whimsical,” Ursula told her. “You’re very serious all the time. It makes you boring. What I should have said is the three favourite things for collecting. It’s important to be specific, isn’t it? Two of them are here, and another one is up the stairs and you’ll see in a minute.”
The White Lie Page 22