The White Lie

by Andrea Gillies

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Family Tree

  Epigraph

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  About the Author

  First Mariner Books edition 2013

  Copyright © 2013 by Andrea Gillies

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhco.com

  First published in Great Britain by Short Books in 2012

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Gillies, Andrea.

  The White Lie / Andrea Gillies.—First Mariner Books edition.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-544-06103-3 (Paperback)

  1. Truthfulness and falsehood—Fiction. 2. Family secrets—Fiction. 3. Life change events—Fiction. 4. Highlands (Scotland)—Fiction. 5. Domestic fiction. I. Title.

  PR6107.I4665W45 2013

  823.92—dc23

  2013020210

  eISBN 978-0-547-52661-4

  v1.1213

  To my mother June Gillies

  with love

  white lie n.—a trivial and well-intentioned untruth, designed to spare someone’s feelings

  1

  2008

  My name is Michael Salter, and I am dead; dead, that much I know for sure. All the rest of it—all of that I can only speculate about. I’ve had a lot of time to wonder about it: what I’m doing here and what it means, though thinking takes me round in circles, like Pooh Bear hunting the heffalump in the snow and realising he’s been following his own footprints.

  My mother Ottilie was here earlier, in the wood, talking to me about misapprehensions and about guilt. She comes at least once a week and always on Sundays, from her cottage out at the coast, and she comes alone. Lately she’s been here almost every day and I’ve begun to act like somebody in hospital, alert at visiting hour for signs. I was watching as she came along the path this afternoon, a procession of one, slow-moving and stately in black. She came first to my memorial stone.

  “Michael.” She spoke as if I were close by. “Today’s the day. We think today will be the day.”

  I can’t remember seeing my mother ever wearing black before, but it’s the 14th anniversary of my disappearance here and . . . the truth is this hasn’t been any ordinary anniversary. She was unusually restless, walking along the beach, up and down, pausing at the furthest corners of the shore and struggling at moments with the depth of the grit.

  “It won’t be long now,” she said, looking out over the water which stretches almost to the horizon; a vast bowl of it, many fathoms deep. The domesticated green summits we see around us here are in reality only the tops of submerged mountains: that’s what my grandfather used to say to me, when I was a child. They say in the village that the loch has moods, that when the wind blows it isn’t only the waves that rise and surge; that when it’s a dark, dark brown it’s at its most dangerous; that when the surface becomes a mirror it will reflect your profoundest wants back at you. It’s been viscous as mercury today, resembling something poured and inert, as if a silver skin has cooled on it.

  Are you a ghost if nobody sees you, or are you something else? Ghost or not, I seem to have taken up residence in the grounds of the house where I was born, in the small wood planted here beside the loch in 1916. Not that I remember the moment exactly of arriving. Like the journey down the birth canal, some recollections are spared us. Too many, in fact. Memory reaches back, pausing at birthdays, Christmas mornings, the big conversations, key moments when we look into the eyes of our mother and know her in a new way; all the things that make impact on our little souls: the first bicycle, the first nightmarish week at the high school, the first proper kiss, the first cigarette and throwing up afterwards. I’m trying to get back to the earliest thing. I remember playing in the gardens at about the age of four, running along the sides of high topiary hedges. But for weeks and months that I know I was alive, there’s nothing, worse than nothing; indistinct traces left behind of something that’s gone.

  My mother sat herself down, sitting up straight-backed in her usual way, in a dress that reached almost to her ankle, a black scarf twisted into use as a hair-band, her fringe flattened over her eyebrows. She rubbed gently at her shins and said, “Arthritis, apparently. I’m beginning to be old.” Her thick and wavy hair, glorious once, a pinkish-gold colour, strawberry blonde, is filling with nylon-like grey. When she was young she wore it very long, flying behind her like a cape, but it’s shorter now, and worn up, fixed by what look like chopsticks. At 52 she’s beautiful still, or at least I think so, despite the creases around her eyes and the sad marionette lines around her mouth, but she’s aged visibly since this time last year, when a gathering to celebrate a birthday was interrupted by startling news, news of me that certain of them had kept to themselves. I’m going to tell you about that, about my grandmother Edith’s party and what happened afterwards. There have been sad consequences, introducing a new era. Not that catastrophe is anything new. The family has had more than an average share of disasters, of premature deaths, one generation after another, such that people refer quite routinely to the power of the Salter curse.

  We’ve been going through a phase in which my mother is angry with me, though her visits take a circular shape, starting and ending with kindness. “You were such an idiot,” she said to me today. “How could a clever person be so stupid? Why, Michael, why did you put yourself in that position?”

  Her left hand wiped long tears from her cheeks, the movement rapid, like someone hoping to keep their crying unnoticed. With her right hand she lifted and dropped handfuls of shingle, pausing to inspect each palmful as it fell, looking at crumbs of grey-green granite, white quartz and orange sandstone. She has a labourer’s hands, square with big flat nails on the ends of workmanlike fingers, residual paint lingering in the creases, her skin rough and red from cleaning and turpentine.

  The sky was low and lilac-brown this afternoon, the sunlight streaming in fat columns from gaps in the cloud cover, like street lamps, pulsing its energy down. When Ottilie turned to face my way it was as if she looked right at me, though really she was looking back towards the house. Only the uppermost part of it is visible from here, through the trees, above and beyond the lime walk—a glimpse of turret, of crenellation, of the complex slate geometries of a swooping roofline: some French influence got mixed in with the Scots Baronial. It reminds me of an illustration from a book of fairy tales that I had once, a book that had been my mother’s.

  Peattie doesn’t have that same Sleeping Beauty’s castle look of being enshrouded in vegetation, though the gardens are thick with weed, the rhododendrons feral, the trees untamed, and in every direction elderflower and thorn have woven their grid.

  ***

  The history of the Salters is coming to an end, and if it’s hard to be definite about the attributing of malaise, there isn’t any doubt that the beginnings reach back to 1970 and the loss of another boy, Ottilie’s little brother, my child-uncle Sebastian. I’ve seen it, the death of Sebastian, although it happened before I w
as born. I’ve grown used to them now, these cinematic visitations, but I’ll admit that they were deeply disconcerting at first. They started one day out of the blue: I began to have (to see) memories that are not mine, that couldn’t be, because they pre-date me; they’re seen from the vantage point of someone who wasn’t there, as if the estate has its own record, soaked in deep and only just beginning to show itself. Perhaps it’s merely a kind of evaporation, a process without a point, though it’s hard to make a case for that: these are particular things and out of date order.

  My aunt Ursula’s arrival in the drawing room on the day I disappeared: that’s an event I’ve seen more than once. Alan’s and Ursula’s account of my death, Alan’s original version. In Alan’s old passport he’d written under “occupation” handyman-gardener, and then he’d added entrepreneur. He doesn’t live at Peattie any more, but really Alan was only ever the handyman-gardener’s son, a man without official status, semi-permanently temporary.

  ***

  The first sign of trouble was a noise. It was the wrong noise—wrong, at least, for someone who had spent so many years using the same doors. It could only be to do with panic, that Ursula seemed to have forgotten how it was that they worked, the entrance doors leading in from the terrace, pulling rather than pushing, yanking at them, at their heavy double oak, their panels carved with flowers and with thistles. They’re hung doors, and she sent them rocking and echoing in their housing, before remembering to push.

  When Ursula went running into the drawing room that afternoon she had angry red marks at the top of each arm, marks I inflicted, already purpling into fingershaped bruises. So that helped with the defence, obviously, the private defence provided to the drawing-room court. They couldn’t have gone on all these years, as they have, protecting her with quite such conviction, had they not been so sure that she was provoked. She makes an unlikely murderer in any case, Ursula the gardener, the vegetarian, the knitter; Ursula who if she isn’t gardening or knitting is likely to spend the day in bed in marabou feathers, opera on the record player, engrossed in wholesome reading that’s selected and vetted on her behalf.

  She went charging in at quite a lick, across the hall and through the picture gallery. It wasn’t only her swift light footsteps that registered, the squeaking of the plimsolls she wears, white plimsolls child-sized on bare feet, but also a high-pitched disjointed noise, an interrupted murmuring wail that kept time with the footfalls and exaggerated them. Hearing her coming, the family looked mildly alarmed around the eyes and in a certain stiffening of limbs, though these reactions were manifested in the usual guarded way. It was instinctive with them all, not making too much of a grazed knee or a poacher seen on the hill or any of the other things that might and do upset Ursula. If people didn’t take their well-practised calming approach, upsets could swiftly become disproportionate. Her older sisters, the twins, of which my mother is one, were at this time 38 to Ursula’s 29, and had spent pretty much all of their lives being careful about Ursula, being loyal, being sensitive to her peculiarities, objecting to anyone else’s use of the word peculiarities, attesting good-humouredly to her being a one-off. Careful and loyal and tired.

  Ursula burst into the room, her long brown hair flying. Edith went immediately to her, grasped her, holding her tight to her chest, saying, “What an earth is it?” and Ursula cried harder, extricating herself, her body convulsing with sobs. Her dress was pale blue, sleeveless, with shiny floral embroidery at the neckline, a dress that had belonged to one of the great aunts. Ursula won’t wear new clothes. There was a tidemark at the thigh-line of the dress, and crinkling of the fabric reaching down to the hem.

  “She’s waded through water, she’s been in the loch!” Ottilie exclaimed, and everyone was equally amazed because nothing could have been more unlikely. A faint loch aroma emanated. Ursula’s skin was its customary nearwhite, though mild stripes of sunburn tracked the principal bones of her arms, and sweat had beaded pink along her hairline. The weather that June was almost freakish for the north, weather so hot that everything looked different, the landscape transformed, remade in new colours. Every window was open but it was just as stuffy in the room as before, a soup of thick and exhausted air.

  Edith continued asking her youngest daughter what was wrong. Sometimes what’s needed is that you repeat a question in different ways, trying out different intonations. Edith pushed her own head back on her neck, chin recessed into her throat, to look properly at Ursula’s face, to signal to her that she was being scrutinised and that things were expected to come of this, but Ursula distanced herself, stepping back and shaking her head. Now my mother’s twin came forward, Joan, looking (characteristically) as if she’d take charge, then thinking better of it and folding her arms against intervention. She moved back again, saying, “Oh for god’s sake, get a grip.”

  Edith looked towards her husband, face perplexed. Henry, preoccupied with financial problems and believing this still to be something trivial, took a few extra moments to put down his letter.

  “Michael!” Ursula shouted, and then again, and it was like an appeal, like she was calling after me still, and I was near at hand. She directed her calls towards the windows, as if I were waiting just outside and might hear. Now she went into distress mode, arms tight across her waist, grasping her own elbows as if holding tight to them mattered, stepping forward and sideways, back and sideways again, her eyes cast down. Henry got to his feet. Ottilie got onto her feet, her toast falling to the floor, its upturned buttered quarters pathetically domestic, out of place in any kind of crisis. She put one hand to her mouth, saying, “No, no, no, no,” beginning to grieve even before the news was told. Now Ursula was squatting, her dress ridden up, holding tight to her knees, her nails indenting fiercely into her skin. “I’ve killed him, I’ve killed him,” she said, and there was something about the tone that sounded vaguely surprised and as if pleading for contradiction.

  Ottilie half fell and half sat on the floor, going down hard, jarring her back, her face registering the pain of the landing. She bent forward and clasped her hands over the top of her skull, demanding that Ursula explain—“What do you mean, what do you mean you’ve killed him, what do you mean?”

  Henry went to Ursula, to the Chinese rug that has half the fringe missing, taking hold of her arms and pulling her gently up to stand. He had Ursula by both wrists and was saying, “Calm, calm; breathe, calm,” his quasimilitary authority to the fore. He opened her arms wide and closed them again as if they were bellows, a technique that had been used before with success. “Breathe” he said again, elongating the word. Ursula began to calm. “Look at me.” Henry took her face in his hands and insisted on eye contact. “Where is Michael? Where is he?”

  Ursula said that I was drowned, and that she hadn’t meant it: they had to understand, please, that it hadn’t been meant. She sagged again onto her haunches, and Henry was forced to let go of her. He took a step backwards. Those who hadn’t been on their feet were on their feet now. Cups and tea plates had fallen in slow motion onto upholstery and onto the floorboards, splintering china into shards, a general exodus already in progress even as the china fell. They gathered up Ottilie, who was staring wide-eyed and unblinking, who went passively along as if sleepwalking, steered from the door. They went along the picture gallery and into the hall, Ottilie reacting as if blindfolded and having to be directed, only just dodging pedestal tables, into the gloom of the rear passage and towards the back stairs. The servants’ entrance (as was) is the closest exit to the loch. Joan’s husband Euan was first out, emerging at speed into the yard and almost cannoning into Alan, who was coming in. Euan, immensely tall, lanky, cool-skinned and cool-eyed, couldn’t have presented a greater contrast to Alan, who was overheating and blowing hard. He’s plump, has a tendency to blush, has a tendency to sweat, and his blonde hair is almost white.

  “I’m sorry,” he panted. “Can’t run like she does.” Bending over and breathless, like an athlete after a sprint. “And
I was ill. I’m sorry.” When he lifted his head there was dried vomit crusted around his mouth. His nose and left cheek were bruised and swollen.

  “Alan,” Euan said, with a gesture that could have been solidarity, putting a hand on his shoulder, those long bony fingers, but in truth pushing him gently back and out of the way. Alan turned to watch as Euan ran across the yard and disappeared onto the lane. As Alan swivelled, his pink face screwed up against the glare, moisture gathering on his brow and upper lip, Joan appeared from the stairway, calling after Euan and ignored.

  “Alan,” Joan said, as if introductorily, before abridging the thought into two words. “A crisis.” She was businesslike in a trouser suit and silk shirt, trim and blonde and smartly dressed; she and Euan had just returned from Glasgow, from a university open day, and she’d wanted to be impressive among the other mothers.

  “Wait. Alan, what happened to your face?”

  “I was there; I saw it all.”

  “But what happened to your face?”

  “I swam into the boat.”

  “Come with us,” Joan told him, and then, “But hang on. Wait a moment for my father.”

  Alan put his hands one to each side of his head. “I was there; I saw it all.”

  Now Henry approached, guiding Ottilie from behind, and then coming around to stand in front of her. “Alan,” he said. “You saw Michael, Ursula and Michael. Alan, you’re injured.”

  “It’s okay. Looks worse than it is. I swam into the boat.”

  “Alan, tell us. Tell us if it is. What it was.”

  “Ursula has told you, then,” Alan said, his voice full of regret. He left it to others to say what it was that Ursula told: later, that would seem significant. And now there she was, stepping out into the yard with Edith, holding hands tightly, out from the stairs and through the door into the light. Despite being close to five o’clock the day remained dazzling and golden, thick with yellow dust.