I could see Alan talking to Ursula. The negotiation appeared lopsided: she didn’t appear to be responding. That’s the last I saw of Peattie as I turned away: Alan crouching to talk to the still immobile Ursula, the sunlight brilliant off his white torso. I turned and walked away, not even pausing for a final regretful glance towards the chimney pots that decorate the treeline.
There he goes, the boy, the tall boy that’s almost a man, loping away through the woods, binding the money tight in the brown-paper bag and trying to insert it entire into an inner jacket pocket one-handedly before finding the thing too bulky and discarding the bag on the ground. He has eaten painkillers taken from the car, too preoccupied to register their bitterness, and has disappeared from view, away overland towards the town, joining the road a few miles out of the village and getting a lift to the train station from a truck driver. A few hours after this, not realising what it was that she had, a walker would pick up the bag in the wood and bin it, thinking it picnickers’ litter.
Alan rowed Ursula back to the shore, Ursula staring at her feet beneath her hem, knees pulled up beneath her chin, and Alan seated opposite her, his wet fish body dried matt white.
“He’s gone,” Ursula said. “He’s gone, isn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“He’s dead. He’s dead, isn’t he?”
Alan didn’t answer. He was concentrating on rowing, on the rhythm. The sun was beginning to burn his shoulders and the back of his neck.
Henry interrupted again. “But why didn’t you say no? Why didn’t you just say no, no, he isn’t? I don’t understand. I’m never going to understand.”
“I didn’t say he was dead. I was thinking. That’s all I can tell you. I was thinking. I admit to that. Seeing what might happen.”
“I know that I killed him,” Ursula said. “But it wasn’t meant, I promise you.”
“How could you do that to her?” Henry interrupted again.
“I didn’t mean it,” Ursula said. “The thing I did and the thing that happened are not the same thing. They’re not always the same thing. That’s what Mummy said, when I told her. That’s the thing to hold on to, no matter what.”
Alan paused in the action with the oars. He looked unwell, grey beneath the eyes, lilac in his fingernails. He paused again to rub at his chest with one hand. He was making very slow progress.
“What do you mean you told her? How could you tell her?” he asked.
“She asked me and I told her.”
“She was confused; she was so confused,” Henry said, interrupting the account again.
“I could see she was confused,” Alan admitted. “I was going to put her right and then I didn’t.”
“We should have realised before this. We should have thought.”
“Shall I go on?”
“Yes. Go on.” Henry steadied himself against the wall.
“Are you alright, Mr Salter?”
“I feel strange, light-headed. Shock. Anger. Gratitude. And so bizarre.”
“I know it’s a shock. I’m truly sorry.”
***
What is the boy thinking about, now that he’s dismissed the idea of family from his mind? Where to go, where not to, who to be when he gets there, how to make his future unspool constructively out of his rage. At first only about the day ahead, the journey, and then, with a discipline that’s magnificent in its way, on the long train-borne hours, only about tomorrow and about how things might begin. The past he has already disinherited. It has seemed not to take a huge effort of mind. There are no constructions necessary, it turns out. The past has been allowed merely to fall, to drop out of consciousness, in a way that feels—for now at any rate—entirely like relief, like freedom. He sloughs all little nascent itches of responsibility off like a scab. It’s easy. His heart has evacuated itself and it has felt like a new beginning. It is a new beginning. This is what he tells himself, in the long train-borne hours.
16
“People are always trying to make this complicated, but actually it’s very simple.”
Izzy was painting her toenails, pushing the curtain of hair around her neck and onto the other shoulder. Her feet were misshapen, big toes pushed sharply inward, small toes curled and angled into the same unnatural, shoe-moulded point. “It’s very simple. Ursula killed Michael, in self-defence if we’re charitable, and Alan stole the picture and the money, pinning the burglary on him.”
“He said Michael gave him the picture as a token,” Mog told her. “To do with his mistreatment by all of us. Made me feel terrible.”
“I don’t believe it,” Izzy said. “Alan’s delusional.”
“About what?”
“About being Michael’s father. Ottilie and Alan? Come on. What for? Sorry but I’m just not convinced.”
Mog was rattled. “But why would he lie?”
Izzy had that look she gets when people are being dense. “Because he’s delusional.”
“What are you saying, then, that it was some random at a house party?”
“Not some random. One of the friends. I think we’re all set up for a whodunnit, only it’s a paternity case and not a doing-in. Most of the possible fathers will be here for the thing. Christian Grant for one.”
“You’re not serious.”
Izzy paused, caramel polish lengthening on the brush.
“What you haven’t considered, any of you, and what Michael never considered either, I bet you, is that she isn’t being obstructive. It isn’t about that. What if there isn’t a name to tell? It’s possible she doesn’t know.” Mog’s scepticism was obvious. “It’s perfectly possible,” Izzy insisted. “She doesn’t know who Michael’s father is and is too embarrassed to admit it. Couldn’t admit it to Michael. Hence all the stuff about him not being a good man, all that. She doesn’t know who it was. She was young, got shit-faced drunk, woke up pregnant. It happens. Have you been to one of those things?”
Mog considered, as if considering were needed, then shook her head.
“Well, I have.”
“I know. I remember the fuss.”
“General moral turpitude and buckets of booze. Drugs too, these days. Mrs Hostess comes round in her dressing gown at 2am to make sure everyone’s in the right beds and lights are out, and goes off thinking what a doddle it all is.”
“And?”
“It’s then that the fun starts.”
They were interrupted by Izzy’s mobile. Mog signalled that she’d go and fetch coffee.
When Mog went into the kitchen she found her mother reading a slim volume entitled Surviving Divorce. Just a little too late, Joan slotted it hurriedly in with the cookery books, books yellowed with age and spattered and torn. It sat there in company with the boeuf bourgignon and cauliflower soup, saying nothing but emitting a low and steady throb. Nobody looked at it directly.
Mog had been via the study and brought the newspaper with her. She opened it on the table.
Joan pounced. “What are you doing with that? You know the rules.”
“I’ll hide it if she comes in.”
“You’ll be unpopular.”
“It’ll be fine.”
“You’ll be unpopular.”
“What, you think Ursula’s going to grab it from me, read about a ferry disaster, run screaming down the corridor and throw herself off the roof?”
“Alastair’s already had his confiscated. That’s all I’m saying.”
Joan took it from her and put it in her briefcase. “I really must get on. I’m going to ring Robert, see if he’ll fly up tomorrow. Family reunion.”
“Robert who doesn’t speak to Alastair?”
“Perfect opportunity to mend fences.”
“Please don’t.”
“I met him once when I was a girl. He’s been here, you know. Came here after his mother was killed. Went to the place where they died. Fought with your grandfather and went home in a rage.”
“I know.”
“Didn’t stay for the funeral.�
�
“I know.”
“He said she’d been specific about not wanting ever to be laid to rest at Peattie. Interesting, isn’t it, because the way Henry paints it the three girls had this perfect idyllic childhood. You wonder what really went on, don’t you?”
“Why did something have to really go on?” Mog’s voice was purposefully flat.
“To not want to be buried here. Strikes me it must have been something. And Robert’s inherited it, whatever it was, as if she passed the allergy to Peattie on to him. He could barely conceal his dislike.”
“She died in water, too.”
Edith came into the room. “It’s not very intelligent, is it, darling, to believe in a curse? Just because it’s old doesn’t mean it’s worth anything. People will keep making that mistake.”
“In any case Aunt Jo was killed by the tree,” Joan said, distractedly, looking at her phone and leaving the room. This is true. The car hit the tree before it went into the reservoir.
Nobody would mention the lost boy. Mog had already gone too far, almost invoking the name of Sebastian, and knew it, the knowledge of it written on her face. All she could do was go to Edith, apologising into her hair, Edith replying by means of a forgiving hand rubbed briskly over her arm.
***
I remember vividly a day when I was 11 and about to move from Peattie out to the cottage. I was a sad boy, and my being reserved about my sadness, loyal to my mother’s needs for change (her need for a home further from Joan), had impressed the family enough to cause a loosening of reserve, in which things not talked about were unfettered briefly and aired. There was sympathy, and out of sympathy greater openness comes: open and shut in its camera lens way. That’s how it happened that Vita and I had a conversation about death by water.
“But why were we cursed?” I asked her.
“Your grandfather says he doesn’t know,” she told me. “But in the village they say that she wasn’t a witch at all.”
“She wasn’t a real witch?” I was disappointed.
“No.”
“But then what was she?”
“A mad person, an angry person. We don’t believe in witches and curses, surely.”
“Of course we do,” I said.
“Ah, Michael.” She ruffled my hair. “You are a silly billy and an intense little soul.”
I smiled at her, thinking this a compliment.
What do I know about the witch now? Only the truth: that she was Henry’s great-grandfather’s rejected lover. As to whether one person’s despair can curse another’s life, I had better reserve judgment.
At 11 years of age I was so thrilled and honoured that Vita was talking to me in this way, in this way that ordinarily only Tilly spoke to me, that I was driven over to the sceptical camp and even beyond its usual borders, determined to out-doubt Vita and impress her further. I told her that Henry’s father didn’t count. That, after all, was a heart attack.
“You know where he was when he had the heart attack?” she asked, her voice patient but preparing itself to triumph, the inflection rising. “He was salmon fishing, up to his thighs in icy water. He was 66 and had already had two attacks. He was warned not to go into the Spey.”
“Still a heart attack. Not death by water.”
“He was still alive when the river took him.”
“There’s no way of knowing that.”
“They can tell these things,” she said mysteriously.
Between the decision and the move to the coast I’d developed tonsillitis, a condition thought to be psychosomatic. Whatever the cause, I was confined to bed with a high fever. Henry, attentive and evidently also a little anxious, brought me a hot chocolate and a Jack Russell, the cup in one hand and the terrier under his arm. “A doggy hot-water bottle for you,” he said. “I’m told you have cold feet.” Vita having just left the bedroom after our chat, and wild themes coursing about in my head, I was bursting to ask him about his father and about the first Henry Salter and the curse, but too nervous of Henry, the way his brow would knit and his face darken when disappointed. Between the ages of 12 and 19 I was to hear frequently that I’d disappointed him. But never, in all that time, did I work up the nerve to ask him about Sebastian, the query that would have disappointed him the most. When you’re a child you love to hear about all the disasters in lurid detail. They have nothing to do with you and your own perfection, your own immutability, your life rolled up tight inside you like a new leaf. Vita seems to illustrate that this appetite for disaster returns in old age. It’s a kind of defiance, I suppose. A kind of courage, defiantly disrespectful, egging the grim reaper on.
***
Mog was thoughtful at the dinner table, sitting apart from Rebecca as they ate their soup and salad, the quiet threads of conversation picking their way around her. The rest of them were talking about the now inevitable land sale, Henry having told Alastair about it. Henry judged that Alastair had a right to know. Edith was doing her sad-but-necessary speech: “We’ve done our grieving and now we’re resigned.” Talk of the land sale takes us to the last night that Mog spent with Johnnie.
The evening before Mog broke up with Johnnie, they went to a Scottish dance in Edinburgh, a so-called ball in a hotel function room. Johnnie’s brother, his partner and another four of their circle made up the eight. The other girlfriends were part of that tribe of child-women, their twiggy brown legs finished with oil, long hair straightened and lip gloss like jam. Pip and Angelica were also there, that night, Angelica’s white-blonde bob newly angled to the chin. Tall Angelica and her tall friends were in tight sheaths of dresses, not intending to participate much other than in a minimalist way, walking through occasional dances. A pity. Reeling should have an abandoned pagan quality about it.
From Angelica Mog received a high, finger-waggling wave, dutiful and indifferent, delivered even as she was turning away and scanning the other tables. Pip kept his distance until the men in Mog’s party had gone off to the bar, a swagger of tuxedos, men with rugby club manners. Then he came and sat by Mog.
“About last night: Angelica didn’t mean it that way,” he said. “You upset her. Don’t punish her by being chilly with her, Mog.”
“That’s so perfect,” Mog told him. “That’s how it is exactly. Angelica’s rude but somehow it’s a worse rudeness to be offended by her. How does that work? It’s quite a trick, isn’t it?”
“You’re drunk.”
“I’ve had enough to say what I think. Get a grip, Pip. She’s the one who was insulting.”
“It was a joke. Half joking. She is offended, actually. She says she thought she was getting somewhere with you and that you were getting into a sisterly thing, one that allows for banter. But apparently not.”
“I am again found wanting.”
Pip sighed, smiling. “I love you and this is said in a loving way: lighten up. You need to lighten up.”
“Oh thanks. Bingo.”
“Sense of humour. A sense of humour’s important.”
“What’s funny about life?”
“She meant well. She was trying to warn you.”
“Because normally Johnnie goes for beauties so what could he want with me other than money. Or rather in this case, property. Imaginary money. Imaginary aristocracy.”
“That’s the gist of what his brother’s saying, yes. Angelica was just reporting.”
“Considerate of her.” Mog stood up. “I need some air.” Pip went after her, saying that he wanted a smoke. They went out onto the steps of the hotel. It was chilly and Mog wrapped her shawl closer around her dress, an old-fashioned looking affair with Grecian drapes and folds. Pip lit his cigarette and smoked it in silence, looking out over the grounds, the uplit statuary, a dark line of parked cars.
Mog said, “I think it’s all come to an end.”
“Johnnie?”
“All of it. This constant striving. Pretending everything’s fine. Doing the happy face that leads to happiness.”
“Mother’
s full of shit.”
“I’m so—I’m just so tired.”
Pip put his arms around her, one hand at her nape, his cheek against hers: the highest compliment of understanding. He seemed taller than usual, and down at the trouser hem there were unmistakably stacked heels.
“We need whisky,” he said.
“No. No more, thanks.” She sat down heavily onto the step.
He sat beside her. “I need to talk to you about Christian. He has a new partner.”
“Anyone we know?” Mog’s face betrayed a stab of disappointment. Even though she knew she would never want to see Christian naked, he’d had a special place in her mind lately as an ideal candidate for a passionless marriage, passionless but chummy, with not-unpleasant procurement of heirs.
“Business partner. Don’t know him. But it means he has the money.”
“So, all the rest of it. The pasture.”
“Necessary.”
“Makes sense. Still seems mad.”
Each of them contemplated this possibility.
“You’re out of touch,” Pip said. “Peattie’s heavily in demand. Prices are going through the roof.”
“Henry won’t agree to a housing estate, not there, right opposite the house.”
“Ah, but that’s where Christian’s clever. You should see the plans.”
“You’ve seen the plans?”
“It’s to be traditionally built, faced in stone, replicating the village style, but bigger houses, and then extra bits, big glassed-out kitchens hidden round the back. It’s got a pretty good chance in planning.”
“Sounds a bit Prince Charlesish.”
He made a face. “And what’s wrong with Prince Charles?”
“But we wouldn’t.”
“Wouldn’t we? What would you rather have? Christian’s Brigadoon, or Peattie sold to a hotel group? Because it will come to that.”
“I suppose.”
Pip took out another cigarette, from a tooled silver case that belonged to Henry’s father, and produced Henry’s old cigarette lighter. He lit the cigarette, clicked the lighter shut, pocketing it, and drew deeply before letting out a slow drift of smoke. “Course, Henry’s got ten years, at least ten; another 20 wouldn’t surprise me. But he says he thinks he’ll be ready earlier. And I think it might be coming soon.”
The White Lie Page 26