The White Lie

by Andrea Gillies

  It was Ursula who saw Ottilie slipping out of the gardens, the greyish cream of Ottilie’s bridesmaid dress and the satin matching shoes glowing. The clothing appeared almost to be autonomous, the body that was attached to it rendered near invisible, the satin dress and shoes looking as if they were picking their way independently across the grass, through the orchard and onto the lane. Ursula followed at a distance. Ottilie knew she was there, notwithstanding Ursula’s fleetness of foot, her fox-like trotting and darting. She had taken the trouble of chatting to Ursula just before leaving, walking along with Ursula towards the side garden door, saying that she had something to do but she wouldn’t be long. Despite this Ottilie didn’t give any impression of knowing that she was followed. She went purposefully to the wood, to the tomb where Alan was waiting, and Ursula saw her kiss him. A nearly full moon painted the loch in broad strokes. I don’t think it has ever occurred to Ursula that she was meant to see. It had been Ottilie’s intention to bring Alan back to the garden, to lead him back there hand in hand and dance with him in front of them all, but this turned out not to be necessary. Instead, having seen Ursula watching from the trees, having seen Ursula run off full pelt back towards the house impatiently bearing her news, she returned alone to face them.

  Alone among the Salters, Joan was unsurprised by the news of the kiss. The truth was that Ottilie had barely spoken to Alan since his return, but this hadn’t been Joan’s take on things. Joan’s happiness at being engaged at 17 and set to marry on her 18th birthday had taken an unfortunate shape. It made her recklessly and giddily insulting. She’d grown, as her mother told her, too big for her boots, even before the engagement was official. She’d teased Ottilie for five straight months about Alan’s return, had imagined trysts where there were none, had raised her eyebrows at every instance of Ottilie’s going for a walk or using the telephone. Joan had referred to Alan at dinner as the handsome under-gardener, as Alan the Bold, as the Princely Alan. And when she had the opportunity, seeing Alan cutting the grass, she’d marched right up to him and told him that he was out of his league.

  Joan was slightly out of control, but the truth was that she was genuinely, deeply rattled. In kissing Alan on the night of the wedding, Ottilie had done something she knew would bother her sister on honeymoon and nag at her—this sister who’d ruined their long-laid 18th-birthday plans apparently maliciously, debooking the band, discarding the menus, dismissing the planned guest list in favour of one over which she had sole charge; Joan who had revelled in it all.

  “I’ll need the birthday list and I’ll be inviting many of the same people, but not so many of Ottilie’s,” she’d said.

  In giving the impression that there really was a danger of her falling for Alan, Ottilie had come up with the perfect revenge. What could follow? Marriage?

  “She won’t. Please tell me she won’t. I can’t bear to think about it. I can’t bear it.” Joan said this and variants on this over and over in Florence to her new husband.

  “Of course she won’t; she’s only doing it to spite you,” Euan told her, as they walked around the Uffizi, barely registering the rooms full of pictures, the chattering school parties, the swooning English ladies fanning themselves with gallery floorplans. “Please, please stop going on about it. Please, Joan, try, at least try to put it out of your mind.”

  “That’s the thing you don’t understand,” Joan said. “Ottilie would marry someone just to spite me.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “I’m not being ridiculous. I asked her what she thought she was doing.”

  “You told me. You’ve told me this already.”

  “And all she would say was that life is mysterious. But I know that smile. That bloody Mona Lisa smile.”

  “It’s a passing thing. It’s bound to be. Ottilie isn’t going to end up with someone like Alan. There’s no way. You’re taking this far too seriously.”

  “You don’t know my sister like I do. She’s a very odd person. She blames me for Sebastian’s death for instance. No, I’m serious. In Ottilie’s mind it was all my fault.”

  “How could it have been your fault?”

  “She was running all over the estate looking for Alan to come and rescue him. Meanwhile I was left alone to try and find Sebastian under the water. And yet in her mind it was all my fault.”

  “Can we stop talking about Ottilie now? This has been the fourth day of talking about Ottilie and Alan and it’s getting really boring.”

  “I’m sorry. But I can’t stop thinking about it. Alan and Ottilie. I can’t bear it.”

  Months later, the news that Ottilie was pregnant, that she’d been “knocked up” (Joan’s phrase) at the Grants’ party, came as an undisguised relief to Joan. Now Ottilie was pregnant, Alan would no longer want her. Why would it matter so much? It mattered because Ottilie was the elder twin, older than Joan by seven minutes. This had become significant since Sebastian was lost. At that time Henry’s mind was fixed, apparently immovably, on the importance of their being one clear and individual heir to Peattie: one name, one heir, one line. Ottilie was being groomed for inheritance. She’d been plucked out of the high school and sent to the fee-paying establishment, one set in many green and manicured acres outside town, leaving Joan behind. She learned her art skills there, in their better facilities, in the perfect light of their purpose-built studios, with their one-to-one coaching in technique. The reason given was that Ottilie was to be an artist and would benefit, but in due course it began to be obvious that the move had been made for social reasons: Henry was concerned about Ottilie making the right choice of husband, a man happy to become a Salter in name as well as in spirit, with Salter children making their appearance later on. So here it was: the shocking thought, the shocking prospect. If Ottilie married Alan and they had children, Alan would be the inheritor of Peattie. Alan’s descendants would be the heirs of Peattie. To Joan, who cherished ideas of aristocracy as meaning something biological, who believes still in material nobility of blood, that was just about the worst prospect imaginable. And of course that was me, that worst prospect in Joan’s mind when the rumours began, rumours that it was Alan who was the father, rumours that the house party story was a convenient smokescreen.

  ***

  Vita had hinted to me for months before she told me, but I wasn’t listening properly and didn’t understand what she was trying to say when she talked about Alan and his taste for girls, Alan’s being sent away for four years when Ottilie and Joan were young. Finally, though, the hints solidified into an account. I heard about the tennis at Easter. I heard more about Seb’s death. She told me the story of the wedding party, the kiss: all of this was news to me. Finally I asked her straight out. Was Alan my father? Yes, she believed so, she said. What was I to do with this information? What would my mother’s reaction have been had I burst into the studio, hackles up and ready to fight? Even the thought of that encounter made me nauseous. She’d have been disastrously calm and elusive. It wasn’t the thought of that great and engulfing calm that made me ill, but the fear of my own reaction to it. There was a risk that I’d hit her, that I’d hurt her, that even if I managed to prevent myself from violence to Ottilie I’d go like a madman around the studio smashing it up and defacing the work. And what if her reaction to that, to my smashing up the studio, had itself been disastrously calm and elusive? There’d be no coming back from that.

  The fundamental point was that I didn’t believe, even now when presented with Vita’s certainty, with my own certainty, that my mother would confirm or deny. She’d be like a prisoner of war tortured by the enemy and holding stubbornly to silence. She’d said already, a hundred times, that she wasn’t going to discuss it. She resented the whole idea that I would find the father and form a relationship with him.

  “He showed no interest in you at all, in fact he counselled abortion. He’s a man who wanted you dead. What would you have to say to each other?”

  I didn’t have a ready answer. My mouth o
pened and closed.

  “Tell me the rest,” I’d implored her. “Just tell me. Tell me more about what he isn’t. You don’t have to give me a name.”

  “Michael, I’m never going to talk to you in any greater detail than this, about this,” she’d said, provokingly composed as ever. “Never. You have to understand that. But this much I will say. He’s not somebody I would want you to know. Nothing that makes you yourself has come down from him. He’s coarse and stupid and cruel, shallow and self-regarding. He’d make you unhappy. He’d make me unhappy. I’m not prepared to risk that. I’m sorry.”

  Instead of going to my mother, I went to Alan, the night before I disappeared. Alan agreed that he was my father but didn’t seem to feel that it was anything huge in our lives; not personally, not as humans, not on an emotional basis. No hidden impact, quietly accruing greater breadth and depth like interest in a secret bank account, was there waiting to be unleashed. His focus was political and sentimental. He was much more interested in telling me how he’d been abused by the Salters.

  “The family know, they all know, they’ve known all this time,” he said, spit gathering at the corners of his mouth. “And what do you think they did about it? I’ll tell you, Michael. They threatened us with eviction. Said they’d throw us out on our arses if I spoke up. Paid me off with a lifetime’s free rent of this crap little house. What could I do? My dad’s got nowhere to go, no money. I couldn’t do that to him. He’s lived here 55 years.”

  “That’s terrible,” I said, looking in disbelief at this man who was my father.

  I told him that I was going away the following day, a plan I could see he approved, and we made arrangements about meeting in the afternoon and about the money.

  After this I went and found Henry on the hill. Henry was in his usual spot, dogs panting around him. He was sitting under one of the birches that grow by the stream, pink-faced under his khaki fisherman’s hat.

  “I went to see Alan,” I told him, sitting down beside him and getting straight to the point. “I know from what he said that he’s—he’s him. My father.”

  Henry didn’t speak. He looked at the worked silver head of his walking stick, one Joan gave him for his 60th birthday, as if noticing its interlocking patterns for the first time.

  “Say something.”

  “There’s no evidence of that,” he said at once. “Speaking for myself I wouldn’t take Alan Dixon’s word for anything.”

  “I don’t know what else to think.”

  Henry worked at dividing and then flattening a patch of weed just below his feet, using the end of the stick. Then he said, “I think it might be time to contact the boys on the list.”

  The list. The list that I’d had for months. Henry had taken me into his study one afternoon, saying he had something for me. The second drawer of the Chinese cabinet was unlocked and a buff-paper file closed with an elastic band was handed to me.

  “What’s this?”

  “That is the dossier.”

  “The dossier. Really? You still have it.”

  “I did but now you do.”

  Here they are in my mind’s eye, the boys in the house party photographs. Nigel Wallis, Graham Barker-Howden, Hamish Masterton and the others, names I’ve learned and spoken and conversations I’ve rehearsed. The smoothie with the tan and the teeth and a copious Brylcreemed quiff, a photograph labelled William Bingham. Miles Martineau, the blond one, my height, and something about him around the eyes. Names marked on the back in pencil. Christian Grant, his horse face and tombstone smile. Some boys in shadow. Others in flash, with red metallic eyes, beers in their hands and hair dishevelled.

  I’d taken it home, the dossier, and hidden it under the bed in a suitcase that had a lock, and over the weeks that followed I’d worn it out with handling. I made notes. I looked people up in address books. I intended to act but then on the point of taking action I seemed to lose the will. Sitting in bed, wakeful in the dark, leaning on the window sill and watching my mother’s silhouette in her studio, her black shape against the yellow light, I began to see Henry’s gift quite differently. How perfect this dossier was as a false trail, a self-perpetuating and bottomless mystery, tantalising and ineffable. In this dossier was my father—that was the family position: the implication that I should be reassured by this. All of them were well-bred, well-mannered young men, well born and at a safe distance. One collective daddy who’d never be distilled into an individual identity.

  If I’d been surprised to be handed the dossier I’d been even more stunned to be offered the money. What was I to make of the offer of £2000 in cash, the information that Henry had put it aside for me in the bureau in the secret drawer? It was no secret, the drawer. Henry had shown it to us all when we were young. It looked like a piece of moulding separating the desktop from the drawer beneath, but at a push was released on its spring, revealing itself blue velvet lined.

  ***

  Henry took his hat off and waved it ineffectively towards his face. “I’ve never known heat like this,” he said.

  “Why did you offer me the money, why really?” I asked him.

  “To get you started,” Henry said.

  “Started on what?”

  “On whatever you do when you get there.”

  “How do you—what makes you think I’m going anywhere?”

  “Well you are, aren’t you? Leaving us.”

  That was the last time I spoke to Henry.

  18

  Thomas said he would be there by 11am but his taxi was delayed by a jack-knifed fuel lorry that had blocked the road, so by the time he arrived at Peattie it was lunchtime and Edith had been through a lengthy journey of her own, one that had its physical counterpart in walking the corridors of the house.

  I could tell by her face, as she went down the steps to the drive, that the words and the tears were backed up in her, that a kind word could prove the enemy of selfcontrol. It wasn’t clear, as Thomas paid his fare, emerged onto the gravel, closed the car door, whether she could risk even eye contact in full view of so many windows, so much accidental evidence at hand; even the rear-view mirror had the potential for betrayal, and so as Thomas’s arm was raised to her shoulder she stepped decisively away, her eyes lowered to his shoes—serious shoes, as architectural and coal black as a policeman’s—and said tersely to him that they must wait until they were inside. They went to the kitchen, Edith not talking, not looking at him, standing with the kettle beside the sink.

  “Are you sure it’s coffee you want?” Thomas asked her.

  “You’re right, it isn’t,” she said, setting the kettle back on its stand and leaving the room.

  They went to the study—Edith going first, seeing the door left ajar—and took a bottle of whisky and two stubby glasses from Henry’s drinks cupboard, and then she led the way down to Ottilie’s studio on the ground floor, a big space lit by two tall windows, its interior all hard surfaces. Two wooden chairs (as it happens, bought from the church during a refit) had been positioned next to the heater. It was a two-bar electric fire that Ottilie used when she was working, and it buzzed and hummed into life as Thomas poured the Scotch. A faint aroma of burning dust emanated.

  They sat down together. “So. Tell me everything.” Thomas laid his glass by his feet and Edith did the same.

  Still she didn’t look at him. She had mastered her impulse and so she began just as she had with Susan on the phone. She’d telephoned Susan while Thomas was en route. “I’m sorry, I’ve been an idiot,” she’d said. He inched his chair closer and reached out to her and she reciprocated warmly, firmly, to his grasp of her two hands, a gesture perfected at the church door. It was a gesture that was granted to parishioners in times of trouble, transmitting through its brief skin contact all the power of collective and authoritative empathy. She withdrew again after a moment because kindness continued to threaten her resolve.

  Susan had affected as much careful sympathy for Edith’s explanatory bumbling—nerves were cited,
nerves and stress—as she had for the initial confession, which Edith knew was a bad sign. Possibly Susan thought that both equally were evidence of a burgeoning madness and that a calm acceptance of each was for the best. Edith was beginning to see that Susan’s authenticity as a soul-mate was at least partly performance, and that what lay behind it could just as easily be condemnation as approval. So many people she knew at the church were similar. The carapace of acceptance was like the frozen surface of a pond. Beneath it, there were unseen energies; the real life teemed obscurely underneath. Thomas was a different fish entirely. To Thomas she could say anything, no matter how dreadful. His understanding was a deep well, apparently bottomless: she could throw any size or variety of stone into it, her faithless sin, and he would take it into himself like a communion wafer and become only ever more hers: a knack, perhaps, or a genetic trick, or something that had been trained and learned.

  “You can tell me, you know,” he said. He’d watched her and he’d read her thoughts.

  “The trouble is . . .” She looked into his face now, as if beginning to compose the announcement. The trouble is, Thomas, that you are Jesus, you are the god of the black shoes, the double handclasp at the door. She looked steadily into his eyes with an odd expression, and even if he couldn’t read that language, it was obvious to me that she knew that though his forgiveness would be as little a fabricated thing as possible, it would also mean the end of their friendship.