“Then the girls are tied up and have to walk the plank.” He was determined about this.
“That doesn’t seem kind,” Ottilie said, entertained.
“It’s bad luck to have a girl on board, you know.”
“I’m sure modern pirates don’t think so. They’d quite like to have their eyepatches laundered and eat something different from boiled fish, wouldn’t they?”
“They love fish, especially the guts. They hate girls, though.”
Now Petra came and stood shyly beside them, and Ottilie began speaking to her in school German. Joan, who hadn’t a word of German but who heard the word Alan spoken, was suspicious immediately, what it was that Petra and Ottilie could be talking about. She went down to the shore to interrupt them.
Ursula watched as Ottilie put Sebastian on her shoulders, watched as Ottilie jogged with him away along the shoreline, bouncing him gently up and down as if in a rising trot. Everybody was always trying to make Sebastian happy. Nobody suggested games that Ursula might like; Ursula was left to herself whether she felt like it or not. Distorted by the rocking, the up-and-down motion, Sebastian’s voice was heard asking if they could make some horse jumps in the wood. Returning to the jetty, and lifting Sebastian gently from her shoulders to set him down, Ottilie asked Petra to give her a hand with the making of them. Petra assented and Joan followed them into the trees.
The boat had been left sitting on the beach, and after some moments of indecision, advancing and retreating, Ursula darted forward and took it. She ran with it, holding it out in front of her with both hands, finding it heavy and stumbling as she went, running along the shingle, up onto the steps, the netting unwinding and trailing and almost tripping her; she had to stop and yank it free, leaving it there in a heap. She placed her first small foot on the jetty, poised there, one small foot forward, looking around her, knowing it was forbidden and dealing with prohibitory internal voices. Her mother’s voice. Her father’s. The jetty was strictly out of bounds unless they were accompanied by a grown-up or sister, something they’d had drummed into them a thousand times. She paused almost a moment too long. Joan had seen her, and ran towards her now, shouting that she mustn’t, that she wouldn’t dare, but Ursula must and would. She ran along the slatted planks, and had almost reached the end when she let the boat fall, and crouching beside it, snapped the slender masts and ripped the rigging and threw the cotton sails aside. Just as Joan reached her, she picked up the boat carcass and threw it into the loch. It disappeared into the tea-brown water and bobbed up again, not far away, though well out of reach. Joan said nothing, just took hold of Ursula and hoisted her into the air. She was a skinny little thing, undersized, underweight, hardly ate. Joan slotted her under one arm and marched her off the jetty, Ursula unresisting and limp as a doll. Then she put her down on the beach and hit her as hard as she could. Joan smacked her so hard on the behind that she jarred her wrist and had to shake the pain out, wincing and cursing. Ursula didn’t run or cower or protest or even flinch. With the other hand Joan slapped her on the thigh and the arm and then, provoked by her lack of reaction, by the stoical blankness of her staring, she hit her hard across the face, and all the time that she was hitting her she was shouting.
“You evil child! What the hell did you do that for? All that effort by Grandpa Andrew! Do you know how upset he’ll be? And he’s ill, Ursula, he has a bad heart. Look at Sebastian crying. You did that. You! How could you be so bloody wicked?” Ursula stared at Joan. She didn’t cry. She didn’t speak. The first flush of a red hand-print was blooming on her cheek.
Ottilie took no notice of all this, acting as if she hadn’t seen, which seemed to Ursula like a betrayal. Ottilie had always been the sister she could rely on, and if Ottilie had asked Ursula would have told her: she would have explained everything and would have found sympathy. But Ottilie didn’t ask. She was gathering up the broken boat pieces on the jetty with one hand and holding tight onto Sebastian’s arm with the other. Petra, who had remained in the wood, keeping out of the way, came forward now, shouting up, asking Ottilie if she could help. Meanwhile, Joan stood on the shore, looking out at the water and narrating her dissatisfaction, her self-justification, in a steady monologue loud enough for all to bear witness to.
“I shouldn’t have slapped her. I know that. You don’t have to tell me that. But honestly. Day after day. It’s continual provocation. Day after day the same. I know I shouldn’t have lost my temper. I do know that. It was a mistake but sometimes a person has just had enough.”
Petra was the first to see Alan. She heard the sound of the cigarette lighter, its click and flare and second click; the first greedy inhalation. There was movement in the wood, around the tomb, a flash of something pale, and her face was alarmed as she turned to look, having heard about the ghost. But it was only Alan. He was leaning against the tomb and lighting up, his other hand raised to Petra in silent greeting. She went to him, complaining in heavily accented English about the children’s behaviour.
Ottilie reached as far as she could with the stick, a slim and pliable willow stick that proved next to useless. She got down on all fours and held onto the edge of the jetty as she leaned, trying to get to the boat and redirect it back towards her or at the least towards the shore, but it remained stubbornly six inches out of reach. Sebastian was holding onto the hem of her sweater and whining. She tried again, batting at the water, but she couldn’t get the boat to nudge any closer and into reach. What she needed was something with a hook.
“I’m going to have to go in and get it for you,” she said eventually. Sebastian was interested enough in her plan for his whining to subside. “I know: shrimping net,” she told him. Shrimps were never caught here but Sebastian liked to scoop out assortments of small creatures and tiny fish and keep them in jam jars until they ran out of food and oxygen and floated, inevitably, to the surface. Ursula saved what she could. Many an aquatic life form had met its end on the path to the loch, gasping and broken, splashed out as Sebastian, racing after his sister, tried to wrest the jars and buckets back into his possession.
Joan, aware of Petra and Alan’s conversation, pretended to walk off down the shore before doubling back into the trees to watch them unobserved. Petra was looking at Alan and Alan was watching Ottilie, who had returned to the picnic rug and had lifted the shrimping net. She didn’t acknowledge Alan and Petra, but, taking the net back onto the beach and standing examining it, she was able to see them in peripheral vision. Alan, aware of this, smiled to himself, a reaction inappropriate to Petra’s intense Germanic protests about the failings of educational method. Ottilie, frowning and intent, was examining the point at which the bowl-shaped net was wired tight onto the bamboo stem. Alan smiled again as he saw her pretending to adjust it, tilting her head a little towards the wood so as to have a clearer view of him. Then she went and retrieved the boat, finding she could do so easily from the jetty, guiding the net surging through the brown water and hooking it onto the prow before pushing it back, walking it slowly back to the shore, where Sebastian waited excitedly.
“Let me have them,” he said, his little square palms outstretched and flat, and Ottilie sat him down in the shingle, putting her hand into his lap and releasing what looked like small sticks and handkerchiefs, but were bits of the boat, its shaped and whittled masts, the neatly stitched cotton triangles contributed by Tilly.
Ursula had gone off to the other end of the beach and was sitting with her back to a tree, arms around her raised knees. She saw that Sebastian had been set up with a task by Ottilie: the boat had been placed on its side, and he was to try and match the broken pieces and decide where they should go. She saw that her revenge had been counter-productive: it had brought Ottilie and Sebastian closer together.
“I’ll go and get my sketchbook,” Ottilie said to him, “and we can draw it all out and make a plan.”
She went to the rug and picked up her notebook and a pencil, and lingered a few moments, watching Joan watching. Wh
en Ottilie returned to her brother, Joan heard him saying, “I don’t want you, I want Petra.”
When Joan stepped forward, telling Petra that Sebastian was asking for her, the rebuke in her voice was evident to all. Petra jumped down from the tomb, handing her cigarette to Alan, and as she did so, Alan placed his free hand at her lower back. She went and lay down beside Sebastian, propped on her forearms, and Sebastian began to instruct her.
Ottilie had been lifted to sit on the tomb in Petra’s place. Seeing Alan standing between the seated Ottilie’s legs, seeing him loop Ottilie’s arms one after the other limply around his shoulders, seeing Alan kissing Ottilie reverently on the side of the neck, Petra dropped the rigging that she was untangling and came up from the beach. Alan took his hands out from the back of Ottilie’s shorts and said, “That’s my cue.” Ignoring Petra, he strode away through the wood. Petra followed, saying at first quietly and then again, “Alan, Alan can you stop, please. I need to talk to you.”
“I told you,” Joan said to her sister. “I did tell you but you wouldn’t listen.” Ottilie didn’t answer. She got down from the tomb and went slowly after Petra, and Joan brought up the rear.
Ursula had possession of the crew. They’d been well chosen, a group of similarly sized and weighted pebbles, elongated small ovals that had been washed smooth. She was already on the jetty with them, Sebastian following timidly. She’d suggested a game: they’d make the crew walk the plank. They weren’t the real crew, she said; in fact, they weren’t the crew at all, they were lady pirates. Sebastian’s interest couldn’t help but be piqued. They’d throw them into the loch, Ursula said. Sebastian agreed and she put them down next to her feet, tipping them out of her cupped hands with a clatter.
There were eight stones. They threw three each, and then Sebastian wouldn’t give the seventh to Ursula, even though it should have been her turn. He said he was going to throw the last two himself. “These are my stones,” he said. Ursula told him that they weren’t, that stones didn’t belong to anybody, but Sebastian insisted. “All the stones are mine and only mine,” he said. It was meaningless, this assertion, merely the stubbornness of a four-year-old used to getting his own way, but it was an unfortunate choice of words. He threw the seventh stone and wouldn’t give up the last. Ursula tried to get it off him and he resisted with all his little might. He had the stone held tight and had bent over at the waist, his hands pushed tight between his small thighs.
Joan and Ottilie were unaware. They were standing at the other side of Sanctuary Wood, watching Petra and Alan arguing. They were standing where the trees thin out and in plain view of one another, but Alan and Petra didn’t acknowledge the girls. They were too busy shouting at each other.
“Don’t say you didn’t,” Petra shouted, “because you did; I saw you; Alan, she’s 14 years old.”
“You’re imagining things, you silly bitch,” Alan shouted back.
What did he think he was doing? Petra asked him. Was that the kind of man he was? Apparently so. In which case, she didn’t want his friendship and their trip to the cinema was off. Petra was being completely ridiculous, Alan said. They were talking about someone he’d known all his life, someone like a sister to him, a girl he’d grown up with. It was only a joke. Petra was being a nag and a ranter, just like his mother. Petra was middle-aged before her time, he said: a 20-year-old hag and a dried-up old maid. He was walking briskly away as he said these last hurtful words.
Joan was walking back to the loch when she heard the splash. She hurried her pace, already composing the sentences in her mind, I’d bet: how she’d deal with the children, how she’d report them to the parents. Sebastian and Ursula had both behaved appallingly today. She could get Alan sent away; she could get Petra sacked. Petra had proved unreliable. “It’s not about what I think of her, but this is a serious matter, Dad,” she’d say. “She wasn’t watching Sebastian properly.” When the jetty came into view, Joan could see Ursula, standing almost at its end and in profile, looking down into the water. The children have gone onto the jetty; they have thrown something in. Ursula has thrown in the boat again, well that’s typical. No, the boat’s on the beach, still on the beach. Sebastian must be standing directly behind her. They’re going to be in so much trouble.
She was on the jetty before she realised. Her immediate reaction was that she must find Ottilie. She turned, half jumping down the steps, and as she landed, twisting her foot and crying out, saw Ottilie emerging from the trees.
“Ottilie, Ottilie, quick!” Joan shouted. “Ottilie, he’s in the water! He’s in the loch! Ottilie, Ottilie, Sebastian.”
Ottilie ran after her. “Sebastian! Sebastian!” The word was full of dread.
The two of them thundered along the slatted wooden walkway of the jetty, Joan limping, running towards Ursula, who hadn’t moved, who was standing very still looking down into the water. Sebastian was nowhere to be seen.
“Ursula, tell me quick,” Joan demanded. “Where’s Sebastian? Is he in there? URSULA.”
Ursula said nothing. Ursula didn’t move.
Joan turned to Ottilie. “Go and get help!” She threw off her Aran sweater and kicked off her tennis shoes. She jumped off the jetty and into the loch, holding her nostrils closed, a pale girl in yellow shorts and a tennis shirt with a button-down collar.
“Find Alan!” she yelled, surfacing again almost at once, her voice distorted by the cold. The t-shirt clung tight and wet to her small buds of breasts. “Find him! Now! Don’t stand there! Go and find Alan!”
Joan took charge, though she wasn’t the stronger swimmer. What could Ottilie do? Argue? Jump in beside her? She must get help, one of them must. Ottilie was by far the stronger swimmer, but Joan was already in the water and there wasn’t anything to do other than obey.
Joan has always blamed Ottilie for not finding Alan. But Alan was out of sight. Alan, unaware of the crisis, seemed to have vanished. It was Petra’s shouts that he’d hear, returning to the loch intending to say more to her. He had more he wanted to say. He heard Petra’s shouts and Joan’s reprimands and knew that something was wrong. It wasn’t Ottilie’s calls that he heard, her long and echoey calls. Alan wasn’t anywhere to be seen but Ottilie found Petra—Petra had paused in the wood to cry, and to mop her eyes—and sent her to the jetty, and then she ran onward, taking a diagonal route back onto the path further up, at the copse.
Petra hurried to the loch, and, summoned and abused by Joan—what the hell had she been doing?—waded at first hurriedly and then tentatively into the water, her white jeans staining tea-coloured with peat. She discovered that the bottom is uneven, full of small craters and bigger rocks, and then she tripped, going down chin-deep into the water, and was shouting out unintelligibly, panicking and forgetting her English, as Joan surfaced and dived again.
“Over here, over here,” Joan barked at her. “You’re no good there.” Joan didn’t stay long beneath the surface. She wasn’t getting deep enough and was bothered by the wet dark, the brown and suffocating dark, the pond smell and the wafting arms of lake vegetation. Petra waded as far as her waist and seemed unable to go further. The ground was tipping away from her and she took her first step back just as Ursula, peering down from the jetty, vomited her lunch noisily into the scene.
Poor, poor Petra, who’d lied on the agency form that she could swim. Swimming was essential, she’d been told, and it had been easy to tick the box, confident she could come up with good enough reasons to avoid swimming. She was driven to the station in the early evening in the old car: sitting in the back seat alone, Henry driving, his cap pulled tight over his head, his fingers whitened on the grip of the steering wheel. Her eyes so big. Her face so wet. She begged forgiveness all the way there. It was my fault. I’m sorry; forgive me, forgive me. “Es tut mir leid; verzeih mir, bitte verzeih mir.” No forgiveness was forthcoming. Nothing was said. He took her bags out of the boot and put them onto the kerb and drove away without uttering a word.
***
When Ottilie got onto the lane she had to make a decision. Which way? Perhaps Alan had gone home. She sprinted towards the Dixons’ cottage, but it turned out there was nobody there. Where the hell had Alan gone? She took off at a run towards the house, still calling his name, increasingly desperately, noting that the green-houses stood empty of human activity and that no one was in the yard. It was going to be too late. Joan and Petra wouldn’t save him. The dull certainty of this throbbed dully in her head. When she burst into the study looking for Henry, she found Grandpa Andrew there, sitting looking at a letter from the bank, frowning over the top of his specs. Andrew said at first that he must tell his wife where he was going, not understanding the gravity of the situation, and called out Vita’s name in the hall, before Ottilie made him see there wasn’t time for that. They ran all the way back to the loch, the two of them; Ottilie running ahead, Andrew alternately jogging and walking, speeding up and jogging for a few paces before having to return to a walk, huffing and puffing, a tall white-haired figure, Romannosed, his face turning red. Ottilie was out ahead and so it was Ottilie who saw the scene on the jetty first. Alan was there, giving Sebastian the kiss of life, Seb’s little head smeared green with weed, his face streaked brown with silt. Joan turned a grey face to Ottilie, saying, “Where the hell have you been?”
Anxious but methodical, Andrew began talking to Alan, making sensible, briefly-worded suggestions. Alan told him, between efforts made to breathe life in, to force water out, that Sebastian tried to swim underwater or was pushed there by the currents, was under the jetty, caught up in great ropes of weed, and if only it hadn’t been so bloody dark. He’d blundered into him only by chance. Sebastian’s limp little body, one perfect small foot bare, a foot that had barely begun to walk in the world, the other still in its red sandal, was turned over and his back thumped, but Sebastian was dead, irretrievably dead, a bundle of dead flesh like laundry, lying limp and in his small way heavy on the jetty, gravity having triumphed over life. Alan began to pump at his chest while Andrew took over the breathing.
The White Lie Page 41