***
Nothing much was said at teatime usually, other than for desultory conversation, trivial, vital and tribal: the quiet clinking of teaspoons on china, plans for the day, remarks about how the garden was looking, shopping needing doing and the well-being of the dogs. The dogs were very much Henry’s, and were replaced as they died, breed for breed. I missed them very much when Ottilie and I moved out of Peattie, mourning the loss of the deerhounds particularly, great long-legged things that floated around the corridors, moving with a gliding trot, their iron-grey coats tufting stiffly up around shiny black eyes. They had an otherworldly look to them, as if their thoughts were elsewhere. This is what attracted me to them, their detachment, their foreignness in a drawing room, their dignified tolerance of drawing-room behaviour. The Jack Russells came too, fat-bellied, hairy-faced terriers, dogs with a teatime agenda, sitting as politely as they knew how beside chairs, tracking the progress of biscuits and cake as they were transported from tea plates to human mouths. Generally the dogs announced Henry’s arrival, surging in first and finding their usual spots, but Crispin, favourite of the black Labradors, came in always at the rear, white-muzzled and stiffly. Today Crispin circled and then settled, exhaling hard, by Henry’s chair, trying to keep awake and waiting for orders. The dogs were useful distractions at teatime. If conversation failed they became the natural focus for everyone’s attention. Often Mog would go and sit at Henry’s feet, sitting by Crispin and picking at ticks and burrs, the old dog’s breathing thickening into purring.
Teatime was a calendar that marked the passing of days into years, and also a much more subtle device, making it obvious to all in a hundred incremental ways how it was that people stood with one another, picking up differences from one day to the next. For another five minutes, today would be no different. Mog sat on the window seat, by one of the open windows, her shoes shed and one knee up, looking out at the gardens, the view shimmering in the heat, tapping a rhythm on the sill to some internal music. Henry was opening his mail with a letter knife; he always brought something to do. Vita and her friend Mrs Hammill were drinking tea and talking about books. Vita was reading Tolstoy; Mrs Hammill was putting the case for Georgette Heyer. Joan was reading the décor magazine, retrieved from Mog, and was jotting down phone numbers in her diary. Edith was talking to Euan about the repointing he said was urgent to the north-west corner, and what it might cost; Henry watching and noting over the top of his correspondence. Ottilie, who’d arrived late, was reading a book about Japan—she was supposed to be going to Tokyo later that week. Pip had excused himself after a cursory visit; he’d eaten six biscuits in a hurry and swigged two glasses of the lemon squash, and had gone off on his bike to see a friend. His twin hadn’t turned up to tea, location unknown (smoking weed in his bedroom would be my guess). Their younger sister wasn’t there either, gone to another nine-year-old’s house with her collection of plastic horses in a pink zipped bag.
***
The disaster has occurred. We needn’t revisit its unfolding again. Ursula has come and delivered her news and Alan has intercepted the family in the yard, agreeing with her story, and we have been to the loch together. They were just as before, the progress of events and the things said. It’s reassuring when history doesn’t present variations; it feels as if memory is confirming itself as the facts, achieving a kind of objectivity. They have been to the loch and they have come back, on foot and on bike and in silence. Edith has provided her permission to abandon the vigil. They have given up on finding me. They have given up on hope. They have returned to the drawing room, encountering Mrs Welsh in the hall on the way in. She could see at once that something was amiss.
“Tell me all about it when I bring the tea,” she said. Mrs Welsh is of the school of thought that one must have fresh tea in a crisis.
She came into the room with the trolley to find that broken crockery from earlier was being gathered and piled, with careful fingers, onto a tablecloth that had been laid on the floor. Exclaiming, she went off to get a dustpan and brush. She returned to find the whole family sitting looking as stunned as fish.
“I can see that there’s something wrong, and I don’t want to intrude, but if I can be of any assistance, you’re only to say, you know that,” she said. “I’ll make more toast, will I?”
Nobody took on the question of toast directly.
“There’s something we need to tell you,” Joan said to her, just as Mog burst into the room with the letter.
This is when the explanation first was aired that I had left, had run away, had left a note, was gone and nobody knew where. Mrs Welsh tutted her response, half sympathetic and half unsurprised. (We’d never really got along. Mrs Welsh had been blunt about my needing to spend more time at home and less at Peattie; I’d been blunt in telling her she didn’t know anything about it.) Toast was provided, toast that nobody ate and which Mog fed, when it had cooled and was pliable, folded in smaller triangles to waiting terriers. Nobody seemed to want to leave the drawing room, not even after my mother had been put to bed and the phone call had been made to the village surgery. Edith went upstairs with Ottilie and stayed with her.
When Mrs Welsh came back into the room to say she was going now and was there anything she could do for anyone first, she found the rest of them drinking whisky, three of Henry’s bottles on the table and none of them particularly full. Vita was asleep in her chair in the window, still with a glass in her hand. They heard the bell, the Edwardian tinkle of bells at the door, a chord of high and low notes, one full of antique certainty. Mog at the window said that she could see the doctor’s car. Dr Nixon had been called to deal with Ottilie’s panic, her medical levels of panic, her not being able to breathe. The doctor’s visit: that was my mother’s chance to tell someone what and who, to raise the alarm, but she didn’t take that chance, falling into line with Edith’s explanation that Michael had left them, and a sedative was administered. Edith stayed at the bedside until Ottilie was sleeping. The rest huddled in chairs, not able to talk but finding comfort, or at least a sort of membership, in having gone through this big thing together.
At just after eight o’clock, when Mrs Welsh was safely out of the house and the doctor had gone, after they’d heard the final definitive closing of the double doors, and the car engine starting up: that was the signal, and everybody recognised it. A new sort of attentiveness arrived with Edith’s return to the room, mutually and simultaneously among the slouched forms of whisky drinkers; people getting up and stretching, people looking to Henry in recognition that it was down to Henry to begin. Henry, too, recognised that it was time. He began to talk to Ursula about what had happened.
Ursula had been sitting, for all of this time, on the floor with her back to the window seat, her face giving nothing away. She’d moved exhausted out of distress and contrition and into recovery, all cried out, wiping her face with a white hand, turning and turning the hem of the blue dress in her fingers, and finally into quietness, sitting still, her face remote and her fidgeting having ceased.
“Ursula, I need to talk to you now, about what happened today,” Henry said, going to the window seat and sitting on it. “Could you come and sit by me?” Ursula complied, all eyes in the room upon her.
Edith left her chair and went and sat on the floor beside the fireplace, resting her back against the wall. Unusually, Sirius, one of the deerhounds, shuffled towards her on his stomach and rested his big hairy head on her lap. Edith leaned forward with her head in her hands, as if she wanted to hear but not see Ursula as she spoke, Sirius looking up at her with a look that was unmistakably of concern.
“What happened? Tell me exactly what happened,” Henry repeated.
“I hit him,” Ursula said.
“You hit him. How did you hit him?”
“We were fighting. He was being annoying. I was annoyed. I didn’t hate him. I loved him. But I lost my temper.”
“You were sitting together in the boat, you say. Tell us exactly what
happened next.”
“No. We were on the jetty.”
“You were on the jetty at first, but then you got into the boat, with Michael. You and Michael. In the boat together.”
“He didn’t love me. I realised that I hated him.”
Edith looked at Ursula for a moment and returned her head into the cradle of her palms.
Henry said, “But I thought you were friends.”
“Friends. No.”
“Yes. You were good friends, you and Michael. We saw you often in the wood together, and in the garden. You had long talks. Of course you were friends.”
“We had sex together,” Ursula told him.
There was a silence. Then Joan said, “Oh sweet Jesus.” Mrs Hammill rose and left the room without a word. Henry’s cheeks were filling with a stinging red. Edith’s fingertips were pushed tight against her eyebrows. Her breathing had quickened.
“Ursula. You slept with Michael?” Euan’s voice. “But you are his aunt. He’s 19, a boy.”
Everybody else was looking at Mog. “I didn’t know; he didn’t tell me,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
They wouldn’t blame her for this until later.
“And so he told you that your . . . that it was finished?” Henry’s voice was unsteady. “You hit him because he told you that?”
“He was so angry,” Ursula said.
“He was angry?”
She crossed her hands and patted tentatively at her upper arms, her expression pained. Euan went to her, lifting her hair in order to see better. Ursula squirmed out of his attempted closer look, reacting noisily to his hand making contact on her shoulder. Euan said that there were marks, red fingerprints and scratches.
Everybody looked now towards Alan, who was perched on the edge of a nursing chair that sits by the door, one that might give out at any moment. His face was moist and pink and his eyes alarmed.
“You saw this, Alan?” Henry prompted him.
“The boat was quite far out, as I said. But there was one hell of a commotion.”
“You didn’t see Michael attacking her?”
“I was in the wood, as I told you. My lunch break. I’d had a tiff with my dad.”
“Yes, you said, about the tomatoes,” Euan stepped in curtly. “About who was supposed to water them. But what were you doing in the wood?”
“I told you. It was my lunch break. I often go down there. It’s hot. It’s cooler by the water, and there’s a breeze.”
“You were spying on Michael and Ursula,” Euan said, pointing.
Alan, I should tell you, had been cautioned by the police in the weeks preceding this for peeping through windows, through inadequately closed curtains, at night in the village. He would admit to being nosy, he’d said, but that was all.
“I was not,” Alan insisted. “I was in the wood. I was at the grave. I was there on my bike. I was bothered about the fight with my dad. I didn’t see them till I heard the commotion. I heard the carry-on. I went out there onto the beach. The glare’s bad but I see Ursula and Michael jostling each other in the boat and tipping it. They have the oar—”
“Both of them.” Joan’s voice.
“Both. They have it one at each end and it looks like they’re playing, but there’s shouting.”
“You could hear what was being said?”
“I can hear but the words aren’t right, it’s just noise, I can’t make it out.”
“I see,” Henry murmured. “I see.”
“Michael loses his balance and goes over. Ursula jabs him hard with the oar and he’s pushed back and over he goes.”
“And?”
“He’s swimming round the boat and she’s yelling at him. She’s got her back to me. He gets his arms onto the side of the boat and his head comes up over the edge; he looks up from the edge, holding onto the side, and he’s saying something to her. And that’s when it happens.”
“Go on.”
“She hits him hard across the head.”
“She hits him hard.”
“It’s like a golf swing, wham, into the temple.”
Edith cried out in grief.
“I’m sorry to be so graphic,” Alan said. “I apologise.”
“Go on,” Henry told him.
“Michael doesn’t make a sound. Nothing. His arms disappear off the boat and he’s gone under.” Alan opened his hands as if encompassing a ball. “And that’s it, that’s all.”
Henry didn’t speak at first. Nobody spoke. The clock on the mantlepiece was very noisy.
Henry was looking at Ursula, and Ursula was averting her eyes.
Finally he said “Why did you hit him?”
She didn’t answer.
“Why was he so angry?”
She twisted and untwisted her hem.
“Tell us what happened. In your words. What happened, Ursula?”
Nothing.
“Ursula.” More urgently now. “We need to understand.”
“I told him.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him the secret.”
“What secret?”
She looked at her father as if he must be stupid. “It’s a secret.”
“You need to tell us what the secret was,” Henry said, but Ursula was already shaking her head. “Ursula,” Henry insisted, his voice remaining patient. “We need to know. This is important.”
Ursula looked at Alan, and kept looking at him.
Alan said, “Would you rather I left the room, Mr Salter?”
“Stay, Alan. A little longer.”
“It’s just that my dad will be worried.”
“Oh goodness.” Edith spoke for the first time. “Of course you must go. Go and see him and then come straight back, would you?” She appeared composed but Edith is a coper, an apparent coper. Nobody was fooled.
Nothing was said until Alan had left the room and they heard the main door closing.
“He was going to push me in,” Ursula said then, her voice high-pitched. The words had been pent up in her.
“Alan?”
“Michael. Michael was trying to push me in.”
This I’m afraid is true. It was also the moment of forgiveness.
Edith beckoned to her, and she went and joined her mother on the floor, the vast fireplace looming over them, its brick interior dark as a mouth. Ursula put her head in the crook of Edith’s arm, her knees balled up tight. Edith put a discreet hand up to the rest of them, one that requested quiet.
“Was it something to do with Alan, the secret?” She spoke to the top of her daughter’s head.
“I can’t,” Ursula told her. Euan had given Edith another whisky and she gulped it now, wincing.
There’s no way out of a promise, they knew that much. A promise isn’t negotiable. Some things that Ursula was taught as a child have set fast in her character and this is one of those things.
“So you had an argument.”
Ursula’s words were muffled by Edith’s lap. “We were shouting. The fish were scared. The birds flew out of the wood. It was hot. There wasn’t enough air. Even the water was hot.”
Ursula sat up, extricating herself, putting her fingertips to each eyebrow and hooking her thumbs under her chin.
“Tell us more about Michael,” Edith said to her.
“He went down into the water so quietly, so quietly, just a ripple and—gone.” She spoke through a tent of fingers. “And then there was nobody there.” She sounded genuinely surprised. Her hands were lowered. “He was gone. He was already gone. I saw the bubbles coming up.” She paused, looking as if she were seeing it again, her eyes flickering side to side. “I leaned and I was saying his name. But he wasn’t there; I couldn’t see him. He was already gone.”
Euan interrupted her. “And what about Alan?”
“Alan.”
“Alan came out to the boat, swimming.”
“No,” Ursula said firmly. “Alan dived in and looked for him, off the jetty, looking and looking, and then
he brought him up.”
“What?”
“Sebastian was dead.”
“Ursula,” Henry said. “Concentrate. We’re not talking about that. This afternoon. Ursula. In the boat with Michael. He fell overboard and then he tried to climb back in.”
“He went in the water, and he just sank. Sank and gone.”
“He didn’t just sink,” Joan said. “He came back, and he tried to get into the boat, and you hit him with the oar.”
“He wasn’t going to climb back in.”
“What?”
“He had me by my ankle. He grabbed me hard on my leg and he was pulling. He was going to pull me in. You can’t breathe in the water. You can’t breathe. It will fill every space in you and stop your heart.”
She began violently to shiver. Mog took a blanket from the folded pile in the corner, set in readiness there for more ordinary days when the fire can’t seem to puncture the chill, and put it around her shoulders.
Ursula tucked her chin into the hem of the blanket, her nose and eyes all that was visible of her face.
“Tell us about Alan,” Joan said.
“Alan tried. Alan tried his hardest. But it was too late.”
“What happened then?”
“I ran home. But it was a long time after.”
“Why did it take so long?”
“The oar. The other oar was in the water.”
“You couldn’t reach it?”
“I wouldn’t reach. I don’t go towards the water. Water will kill me. Sebastian . . . you know about my brother Sebastian.”
The White Lie Page 5
