The White Lie

by Andrea Gillies

  “I wouldn’t normally do this,” Thomas said, lifting the glass and swigging from it—and Edith smiled at first, thinking he was talking about the whisky, “because my policy is always that people say what they’re ready to say and I don’t push it.”

  “No.”

  “I’ve heard the rumours you know,” he said. “There are many informants hereabouts, all of them possessed of telephones, and I don’t have to tell you that bad news about the Salters isn’t bad news for everyone. Salter schadenfreude is a whole sub-category of its own.”

  “Yes.”

  “So let me help you out a bit. Michael. You said that it’s about Michael. One of your burdens at least. You said there were two and I have no idea about the other. I just wanted to point that out. If there were other whispers and hints on the bush telegraph, I’d tell you.”

  Edith stared at her lap.

  Eventually Thomas spoke. “I’ve just had a trivial revelation. I don’t like whisky. I’m not going to drink it any more.” He got up and went to the sink and poured his drink down it. “And this is a terrible room for talking in. Let’s go outside and walk. I’ve always found walking good for secret-sharing. Let’s go out on the hill, shall we?”

  “Henry,” Edith said. “Henry’s probably there.”

  “Somewhere else then. We’ll go off the other way, across the road and onto the bridletrack.”

  “We’ll be seen.”

  “Does that matter? Seems it does. Better stay here then.” He went across to one of Ottilie’s painted screens, done in her teenage years in Bloomsbury style in chalky colours, a three-part screen, five feet high and decorated with a trio of muscular angels. Thomas half pulled and half carried it across the floor, before opening it into a false wall, cupping the two of them into their corner. Now, they inhabited an antechamber sealed off from the rest of the room, from easels and boards and mess, one that protected them from observers pausing at the door, the upper part of which was a glass panel.

  “Let me get this thing started with a robust opening statement,” Thomas said. “There’s gossip, that Michael died. The gossip says that Michael died here, that he never left, that he killed himself by drowning in the loch and that the whole family knows as much, that you’ve known it all along, because he left a note saying that’s what he was going to do.”

  “We don’t know what happened to him, not for sure,” Edith said immediately. “They might be right. We think that might have been it but we don’t know for sure. The note you’re wrong about—it didn’t mention suicide; it was about leaving and that’s all.”

  “I see.”

  “I was idiotic. To phone you in such a state. I’m sorry. I have days when possible things seem as if they must be true. I have days when I’m sure Michael is dead and that it was my fault.”

  “How could it have been your fault?”

  “Because I neglected him. Kept clear of him, put off by his teenage sulking. He spent a lot of time here and we left him alone. He was lonely. He read and he wrote and we barely spoke to him. He read and wrote constantly and was on his own most of the time; these are things children do when they’re lonely. I didn’t take his unhappiness seriously. None of us did.”

  “So. That’s one thing. One down, and one to go. Moving on, now. What’s the other secret?”

  “What?”

  “Tell me the other thing, and then we can go and have lunch. I’m hungry.”

  “Why are you talking in that strange way?”

  “Because, Edith, it’s obvious you’re not telling the truth.”

  “I’m not ready. Not yet.”

  “That’s fine. I’m here when you are. Or rather, I’m there.” He got up and put his jacket on.

  “Thomas.”

  “You’ve got to trust me, Edith. I’m offended by lack of trust.”

  “Sit down, please; I’m sorry. Would you pour me another drink, first? I’ll have to drink alone. There’s water in the tap over there for you.”

  He smiled at her and half filled her glass, and moved his chair so it was directly opposite hers.

  “This is the bare bones of it,” she said to him, tipping and angling the whisky so the light caught it, amber and gold. She concentrated on its patterns. “We know that Michael killed himself. Ursula told us; she was there. She’d been talking to him. He was very unhappy, in despair. He went down into the loch and he didn’t come up again. She came running to us and we rushed down there and of course it was too late. He wasn’t anywhere to be found, though we looked and looked, for hours and hours.”

  “You didn’t alert anyone, the police?” Thomas couldn’t quite hide his disapproval.

  “No. He couldn’t be found. And then we began to have doubts about what Ursula had told us. Her account was so like what she’d told us after Joan’s wedding.”

  “About Sebastian, you mean.”

  “Yes. We looked for Michael, but it was obvious he wouldn’t be found easily. And then we decided against telling.”

  “I see.”

  “That’s our family secret. I know you said to me that nothing I told you would ever go further, but you need to confirm that with me now, because I’ve frightened myself, telling you all this.”

  “Nothing you say to me will ever go further. I’m very sorry to hear this news, and to imagine how it’s burdened you for all of these years.”

  Edith drank and Thomas watched her. She realised she had sipped at the whisky too quickly. Its darkness pressed at the back of her head and she put her hand to the place and said she must stop, but then finished it anyway, a quarter-glass in a long gulp.

  “You’re taking this very well,” she said. “Michael, the news about him.”

  “You’re not even sure of the facts.”

  “The truth is I am sure. I’m sure.”

  Thomas crossed his legs and leaned towards her. He had surprisingly small hands. “I like to have time to consider things. I’ll think about it and then I might have observations. I learned in my old trade not to give in to immediate reactions.”

  “The second thing is about Ursula,” Edith said immediately.

  Thomas waited.

  “She did something. A long time ago, something very wrong. I’m not going to go into details, not today. I need to work up to it. I may have to write to you about it first.”

  Thomas’s face was attentive and neutral. “Go on.”

  “She came to me and told me, afterwards, after the event, what it was that she’d done, about this wrong thing. It doesn’t matter what it was, does it. It doesn’t matter. The point is that I didn’t get a chance to think. It’s interesting what you say about that. I was upset. She was hysterical. She was so sorry, you see. So sorry. I said to her things I shouldn’t have.”

  “You mean you were censorious, cruel?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “It was the opposite. I told her it was alright. She was hysterical and I needed her to be calm. I’ve always needed her to be calm and happy. If she’d stayed so upset . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “I didn’t know what would happen next. I could see things spiralling. A really and truly horrendous spiralling. It could have broken the whole family. We all had our own versions, you see, of what had happened. It was vital we kept all having our own versions. I told her that it’s what you intend that matters. If things go badly, it isn’t always your fault. It might seem an obvious point, to you and me, but it wasn’t to Ursula. Not then. Not at that time. She was very clear about cause and effect. She was very clear that she was to blame, she wanted to take it all on, she wanted to be punished. And I found myself convincing her that there was nothing to be punished for, that it was a sort of accident. When she did the bad thing, she didn’t intend to happen what happened next, you see. If things get out of hand sometimes, that’s just bad luck. This was radical. This was absolutely new thinking for her.”

  “It all sounds perfectly reasonable.”

&n
bsp; “You wouldn’t say that if you knew.”

  “Tell me then.”

  “She’s literal. Ursula’s literal about things. They’re black and white. They’re A and B, or rather they’re A or B”—Edith sliced at her knee with the side of her hand three times in saying so—“and so Ursula went from one extreme to another, one dogma to another.”

  “So you’re saying she stopped thinking it was her fault.”

  “She stopped thinking that anything was her fault. As long as she was sorry, genuinely truly sorry, all fault was expunged.”

  “It’s a viewpoint I have some sympathy with.”

  “It’s Roman Catholic though, isn’t it, as a doctrine? I’ve been looking into it. It interests me, this whole question of forgiveness. It’s begun to preoccupy me very much.”

  “Well, they don’t have to be wrong about everything,” Thomas said wryly. “And you know, it isn’t quite that simple.”

  Edith was chewing her fingernails.

  “For what it’s worth, and from what I’ve heard, I don’t think you have anything to reproach yourself for,” Thomas told her.

  “Thank you, but that wasn’t really it.”

  “What was it then, Edith?” He leaned forward further in his chair.

  “The reason I was so reassuring to Ursula, so overly reassuring, was that I couldn’t bear for Henry to know. I told her that Henry didn’t have to be told. I told her he wouldn’t understand, that it would be a bad thing to make him so unhappy. There were so many lies about it, about the day, you see. I knew that Ottilie and Joan had lied and I knew why. Ursula told me about their lying: she doesn’t have any inhibitions about informing on people; she’s always been my faithful little reporter. I’ve known all this time that the girls lied to me. But I couldn’t tell them that I knew; I still haven’t told them that I know. The lie and my believing the lie were imperative to us carrying on, to our surviving. That’s how it seemed but it was wrong. Henry doesn’t know but I have got to tell him.”

  “Why have you got to tell him?”

  “The truth’s important. It has to become important. I think that’s the only way we’ll be saved. We need to say everything to one another about it, so that it will close.”

  “We’ll talk about that again. Promise me you won’t say anything to anyone else until we talk again. I’ll phone you in the morning. You should come to the flat and have lunch with me.”

  “Everything I did was for Henry.”

  “Here, have my handkerchief. Don’t talk any more. You’re making yourself ill. You’re shaking. Your hands are icy cold. Come, come with me and we’ll get you into a soft chair and find a blanket. You should rest now, Edith.”

  ***

  Edith went to her bedroom, having said a perfunctory goodbye in the hall to Thomas, leaving him to go out onto the terrace and wait for his taxi home. She got into her bed fully clothed, forgetting even to remove her shoes, and slept for a while. When she woke she had a pressure headache, as if the whisky had collected at the base of her skull, and so she went down to the kitchen to find aspirin and make a pot of tea, praying she wouldn’t encounter anyone. Mog was there, eating cheese on toast, and so Edith found herself discussing the party and what she might wear as if the conversation with Thomas had never happened, though she was dog-tired and the careless words had to be dug deeply out of her, out of some emergency neurological fund.

  Then Ursula arrived with news. She burst in, coming into the new kitchen at a rush, and went immediately to Edith for a private conference. They used to bother me, these conversations, but actually, having eavesdropped, I’ve realised that usually they concern quotidian things: meals, health, washing, work, money; remarks delivered, all of them, whatever their gravity, in the same urgent confiding way. Ursula was wearing a green pinafore dress in sprigged cotton, low-waisted and faded, with sagging pockets. It stretched almost to the ankle and would have been girlish were it not for the fact that she wasn’t wearing anything underneath. The dress was generously cut but the outer curves of small white breasts showed at the sides of the bib.

  “There’s someone to see you, Mog,” she said, and when she turned on her heel to go, her narrow back was strikingly smooth and pale, the pinafore straps criss-crossing it.

  “Someone? Who is it?” Mog called after her, pursuing.

  “Johnnie,” Ursula said over her shoulder.

  Pip told Izzy that Mog had dumped Johnnie by text message but that wasn’t true. She’d written him a letter and put it through his door very early in the morning, just as it was getting light. It was only then that she’d sent him the text message. Luckily security at the paper is tight these days, and Johnnie was rebuffed at the front desk, first by girlish receptionists, superficially friendly but hard as nails, and then by security guards with a hundred pounds apiece of metabolic advantage. Fortunately Pip’s flat was also good for repelling boarders: it was on the second floor, with a clear view of the street through wall-high windows. The buzzer was at the main door downstairs, and an indomitable wheezy old fossil, resident of ground floor 1/a, acted as a kind of organic repellent, shuffling out imperiously to demand to know what callers wanted. Johnnie wasn’t to find Mog at home again, but there wasn’t really any way of preventing his leaving messages on the answerphone.

  “Please do get back to me today, Mog; this is the fifth time I’ve had to do this, and I have to tell you that my patience is being severely tested.”

  He’d come at breakfast and in the early evening, and hang about looking at his watch, standing on the cobbles, the high black railings and evergreen foliage of the residents’ garden behind him; staring up expressionless, hands in pockets, jawline shifting as if chewing on imaginary gum, bulky in his banker’s overcoat.

  When Mog brought Johnnie to the house back in the spring, she chose a day when she knew Edith would be out. Edith and also Joan: they’d gone to Inverness to look at curtains. Henry was easy to avoid, and if he couldn’t be avoided would greet friends of the grandchildren in friendly terms and think no more about them and never mention them again. It was best, though, not to run into Edith, and vital not to run into Joan. Vita and Mrs Hammill, if left to themselves, rose only shortly before lunch, so a morning visit was likely to be safe. They went to Peattie early and unannounced, she and Johnnie, having stayed in a B&B in the town the night before, capitalising on a run of fine cold weather, to see the snowdrops, thousands of them in thickets; to see the sun rise over the loch; to see the first rays hit David’s tomb in the way that his brother planned. Mog told Johnnie what Henry had said about the wolf, that malign fate is a wolf at the door just waiting for its chance to enter, pressing on though Johnnie had begun to be sceptical and finally grew openly disparaging.

  “Not Michael again, please, for god’s sake,” he had said.

  “He went out to the wolf,” she told him. “I think he chose the wolf. Everybody was always angry with him, for being bolshy about the father, the trouble at school, for his sarcasm, for being work-shy, for not wanting to go to university, for not appreciating his opportunities: that’s how Henry put it, not appreciating his opportunities. Henry’s never spoken to any of the rest of us like that. As if Michael were a foundling child who needed to keep being grateful.”

  “You don’t get it, do you? I don’t want to hear any more of this garbage.”

  They’d had an argument, she and Johnnie, and had cut their visit short, returning to Edinburgh in the hire car in silence.

  ***

  Johnnie was standing at the end of the corridor, a big man, not unusually tall but heavy-set, a player of weekend sport. He was ordinary-looking, his brown hair sharply receded, leaving a pointed hairline; ordinary-looking aside from around the eyes. His eyes were hard to look into: everybody found this. They looked at you as if they knew you, as if deciding what to do about you. Even if you were meeting for the first time, his eyes suggested that you shared something, as if great intimacy had been experienced and might be offered again; an inti
macy that might, should you misstep, be taken as abruptly away. You might be about to be admitted to the club, the club of Johnnie: but at what cost? It was hard to explain this to people, though Mog had tried: what it was that Johnnie offered, what turned out to be the cost, the need to sign up for the cult of Johnnie and live in it, but all her explanations foundered.

  “You’re just going to have to take it from me,” she’d said to Joan, having been called upon to explain herself. “He’s not trustworthy, he’s not truthful.” Her mother had raised one eyebrow and said nothing; it was clear to her that this was Mog’s depression talking and a policy of not engaging with it had proven best.

  Evidently Johnnie hadn’t only dropped by: a new overnight bag was sitting at his feet. He was wearing an expensive-looking suit in fine wool, tan with subtle green and gold stripes, new clothes bought for the occasion, and this, the cunningly plotted curve of this special effort, was what made it impossible to banish him outright and unheard. His understanding of her weaknesses: that had been information he’d accepted with particular gratitude.

  Johnnie stepped back into the shadow that falls at the side of the stairway, and she joined him there and they looked at each other.

  Finally he said, “It’s good to see you.”

  His eyes didn’t say that, though. His eyes said “so what’s your next move?”

  “You’re not thinking you’ll stay,” Mog warned him, trying not to be lobby-briefed by the newness of the tweed, and the luggage.

  “But you invited me,” he said. Like all scoundrels, Johnnie Brandt believes in the truth. He half removed the invitation from his pocket, the one that Joan argued with the printers about because the typeface was wrong, lifting it illustratively into view and letting it drop back.

  It’s funny how people behave in a crisis, how often they opt for good manners when something more instinctive would be justified, more limbic-propelled, dialled in from a red phone in the prehistoric nub of the brain. This is how people are killed by psychopaths, I imagine, in the gap that falls between trying to think the best of people and shrinking from the embarrassment of misidentifying danger; jumping to conclusions can be a humiliating business. Not that this was that kind of emergency, nothing like, but it had crossed her mind that Johnnie might do this. Mog said merely and redundantly, “You let the taxi go.” She could hear it crunching out of gravel onto tarmac, accelerating from one surface to the other as it turned onto the road and made its way back towards the town. “I’ll call you another.”