The White Lie

by Andrea Gillies

  “Indeed.”

  “The Salters are cursed. We were cursed by a witch in 1852.”

  Vita says she believes in the curse. Vita believes in evil as an entity, something conscious, something waiting for its moment. She says that really it was the witch who killed me, the supposedly “dark-skinned” woman who turned up in 1852, claiming the then Henry Salter was wicked and must pay. Many of ye shall die by water and meet the devil in hereafter. In the village they like to list the names of all those who’ve complied (with the first clause, at any rate), counting them off on their fingers.

  After they’d talked and talked, to Ursula and to Alan, and there seemed nothing new to discover, the family went away and individually they considered what had happened. They had their real reactions to events alone in bedrooms and bathrooms and in corners of the garden. Then, when feelings had subsided enough into words, they began to talk among themselves, at first in family groups, in family discussions. Later, the things they believed (and more importantly, didn’t believe) became controversial, contradictory, and the conversations shrank into twosomes, but for now there was talk among the group. The group established the words that could be said and the words that couldn’t. Each person tried out the role through step and misstep that they would assume later in the drama, and in so doing the language of the disaster was established. It felt dangerous to leave the safety of that new culture, and encounter those not anointed into it. How could the forbidden thing not rise to the surface of its own volition, like a splinter out of a finger, rising of its own accord and speaking itself? It threatened to, even in the safety of the family circle. Something so momentous: how could it go on being contained and private? A way of dealing with it was to introduce, even at this very early stage, the possibility of doubt. In doubting, the big thing was fractured, split, spread. In doing so, the big thing was diminished.

  ***

  It’s another day. People are a little older and in different clothes. Mog’s younger sister looks about 13, so it’s about four years later. Edith and the cousins are in the kitchen, buttering toast. It’s the only thing that makes me something like hungry; terrible yearning resides in that smell. Mog and Pip are back for the weekend from the city with their city news. It’s autumn, to judge by the scene outside; brown leaves are circling and heaping against the trees, and then unheaping, raked invisibly along the paths. Four years later and they were still talking about it. Will they ever stop talking about it?

  “Okay then, well let’s see it from Ursula’s viewpoint if we can for a moment,” Edith said, in her sweet and reasonable way. “Ursula fell violently in love with her 19-year-old nephew, and thought he was in love with her—no truly, please don’t smirk, Pip, that’s genuinely what she thought. She had an affair with him in secret, and—”

  “We don’t know that, Gran.”

  “We do, we do know that. Ursula doesn’t tell lies. She tells the truth always, too much of it sometimes.”

  “I know, I know, truth is her religion,” Pip said, with thinly veiled sarcasm.

  “Had an affair with him in secret,” Edith continued, “and no doubt she was intense about it, and it wouldn’t surprise me if that was the real reason Michael decided to go. On the day he was leaving he persuaded her to go out in the boat with him. We’ll never know how he managed it. Perhaps he dangled the possibility that she could go away with him.”

  “It’s possible,” Pip said, in a way that suggested it wasn’t at all likely.

  “Ursula, made very upset, said something to Michael that caused him to lose his temper, about which we can only speculate as she’s unlikely to tell us.”

  “That Alan is his father.”

  “Pip. We don’t know that.”

  “Of course we do. Everybody knows. Everybody but Michael.”

  “She told him a secret, and was attacked by him in the rowing boat and feared she would fall into the water. He threatened to push her in. When she pushed back, he lost his balance.”

  Pip made his sceptical noise.

  “He lost his balance,” Edith repeated. “And then, when he got his forearms back over the side of the boat, what did he do then? Was he content to climb back in? No. He grabbed her by the leg and tried to pull her into the water. Do you have any idea, do you have any idea, what that would have meant to Ursula?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well, I hope so. Michael used her fear against her. He used her terror and that was a deplorable thing to do. I’m not saying that injuring Michael was right—”

  “Injuring?”

  “It was the loch that did the rest, Pip. If it had happened on land, he would have been taken to casualty and that would have been that.”

  “We don’t know that.”

  “We do. He was hit by someone in a panic, terrified, who found themselves in a life-and-death struggle. You weren’t here Pip. You didn’t see her. Terror is the right word. He went under. It was an accident.”

  “It was not an accident.”

  “I don’t think Izzy should be here,” Edith said. Mog’s younger sister was staring open-mouthed.

  “Izzy is fine,” Pip told her. “Izzy is the blood-thirstiest of us all and has been entertaining us with her theories.”

  “Hitting him. That was wrong. But was Michael right? We all idolise Michael, beautiful Michael who’s dead, but let’s just remember what he did that day.”

  The one thing all acknowledge that Ursula could not do, under any circumstances, was follow me out of the boat. Nobody, not even Ottilie in her raging grief, could blame Ursula for her lifelong aquaphobia. Ursula, who has trouble with the idea of fiction, believes in the monster and has always feared it. She thought, when it looked as if I would push her into the water (knowing that she couldn’t swim), that drowning would be only the end of the ordeal. She thought that she would find the creature swimming beneath her, the rough shark skin of his nose skimming her kneebone, his pitiless liquid eye, his Triassic mouth opening onto a hundred knife-sharp teeth, her limbs torn off in front of her eyes.

  Jock must take some of the blame for this. He’d see the child Ursula cycling up and going in to buy sweets, her bike parked by the wall her great-great-grandfather built. At that time Ursula was his particular target.

  “Oh if it isn’t Miss Salter, and will you be seeing the monster today? Are you aware that I count that monster as my particular friend? He’s been speaking to me about you. Swimming silent in the dark and hungry. He’s waiting for you; it’s you he wants”

  Jock would be waiting for her when she came out again, with her sherbet fountain and bottle of dandelion and burdock. “Don’t go dipping a toe in the loch now, the beast is waiting for you.” Laughing after her as she ran with her bike jingling, too afraid to stop and get on it, the pedals catching at her legs.

  4

  In the evening Mog arrived from Edinburgh, summoned by Joan to help with the birthday party arrangements. Mog, too, had been the recipient of a pink sheet, some of its listed tasks marked with her initials. I don’t often find myself at the gates to Peattie, but I was there, beside one of the stone pillars carved with wildcats and eagles, when she arrived in a taxi from the station. The sun had dipped below the cloud cover a half-hour before twilight, as often it does here, sinking below its grey hat, and so the end to the day was glorious; Mog emerged from the cab into soft violet light, ultra-violet, the kind that illuminates tennis balls and teeth and plunges everything else into sepia. She walked right past me, a rucksack on her back, past ironwork gates pushed permanently open, their feet enmeshed in weed, and went immediately left, through a gap in the rhododendron hedge, out of sight from the gatehouse, following the inner side of the wall and trailing one hand at intervals along it, the other outstretched to make fleeting contact with specimen pines, the old holly, the monkey puzzle, the birches. The pines soaring, pungently antiseptic and their bark coarse. The holly stunted and corkscrew twisted. Birch bark silky, peeling in silvery ribbons. The monkey puzzle holdin
g its pairs of spiked arms up like an Indian god. When she emerged into the formal garden she chose the path that leads to a now-defunct fountain, a table of mossy lawn, and beyond that, the folly.

  The folly is an octagonal room, encircled by eight Doric columns and crowned by a cupola that’s been weathered into a streaky jade green. Inside, there’s a saggy brown sofa, a mouse-chewed desk and plastic garden chairs stacked high, streaked by muddy rain; last autumn’s brittle leaves still hugging the walls. Vita, at the drawing-room window with binoculars, spotted Mog sitting on the top step of the veranda. Vita had asked for the binoculars for her birthday; it would be a way of enlarging her society, she’d said, even if only in meeting new birds.

  Vita’s voice enunciated every slow syllable. “I’m standing at the window, Edith, and I can see Mog, sitting outside the folly.”

  “I thought she was coming tomorrow.”

  “Ah, she’s going to the gatehouse now.”

  “So we’ll see her tomorrow.” Edith was reading a book, an American title, its typefaces and syntax satisfyingly unfamiliar—Pip orders them for her, off the internet—about talking to God and getting God to reply.

  “Tomorrow? I think that’s unlikely. When did any of Joan’s children last spend a night at the gatehouse?”

  Sure enough, Mog was with them a few minutes later. “It’s good that you’re here,” Vita told her. “This afternoon it was napkins and tonight it was candles. Ottilie thinks your mother is going to set fire to the house.”

  “Can we get you something to eat, Mog?” Edith’s trying constantly to feed people.

  Mog said she’d had something on the train.

  I think about that train journey often, seeing it again in my mind’s eye. The sweeping views across forest and upland; yellow light on orange hills and deep purple shade; birds rising startled slow motion from the woods, and sudden glimpses of hamlets, the country roads surfacing and submerging. We would go sometimes to Inverness together, Mog and I, on the rumbly local service. We’d drink takeaway coffee down by the river, and stand shamelessly long in bookshops reading. We’d sit on benches with tins of coke and compete to produce the best short description of the lives of strangers walking by us, people unaware they were being photographed in words and their souls stolen. These were good days, but best of all I loved the journey, my notebook and pen on the train table, travelling free of time, feeling it stretch and contract, watching possible lives flash past the window, revelling in the luxury of not having to be definite.

  Henry came into the room. Henry was still with us, at the time of the party. Really, the story of the gathering and what precipitated out of it is Henry’s and not mine.

  “Good to see you,” he said in Mog’s direction, and then, not looking at Edith—in general he avoided looking at his wife—“I take it the rooms are ready.”

  “Of course.” Edith, her voice patient and gentle as always, folded her hands in her lap. “They’re always ready, Henry.”

  “So everything is organised for the weekend visitors?” he asked the window.

  “Of course. Have you had the talk with Ursula?” Edith picked dog hair from her trouser legs.

  “You don’t need to ask. I said that I would and I have.”

  Edith opened her mouth and closed it again.

  “It isn’t Ursula who’s the problem,” Henry said. “I think you’ll find. I’m afraid it’s Ottilie who needs the confidential chat.”

  “I’ve spoken to her: I spoke to her about it at the beginning.”

  “Very good.” Henry left the room.

  Edith looked to Mog, her expression sorrowful. “Henry seems to think that it’s my fault, somehow. We were standing together, both standing in the kitchen, equally ignorant of what was coming, when Joan sprang her surprise. And he agreed to it. We agreed in just the same way, for the same reasons; I’d swear to that. So quite how I’m implicated, I’m not sure. Perhaps secretly he’s convinced that I was in on it at the beginning with your mother, conniving with her to bring jollity into the house.”

  Mog clasped her arm momentarily around Edith’s shoulder and touched their heads gently together. Really, that was the only response possible.

  Vita got her cigarettes out and Edith began to protest.

  “I’m so old and decrepit,” Vita said. “And I’m tired today. Don’t make me leave the room.”

  “You shouldn’t, Mother. It’s so bad for you.”

  “Edith, I’m 97 years old.”

  “96.”

  “I’m almost 97 years old, and past caring.”

  It was widely suspected that Vita smoked only to get some respite from Mrs Hammill, who had declared herself allergic to the fumes, citing weakness of chest. Stout, manicured and imperious, a sailing ship under full sail, her copious blue-grey hair worn in a smooth dome above her head, Mrs Hammill had taken root at Peattie before I was born. Already widowed herself, she was invited to help Vita through the aftermath of bereavement, and never went home, as indeed didn’t Vita. A bedroom had been made out of the old music room, as Vita could no longer manage the stairs, and she shuffled along the corridor to the study each morning to have a cigarette and to look at the newspaper with Henry, the two of them dividing the pages up and then swapping. The daily paper was locked up in a drawer when Henry wasn’t there.

  Mog came down to the wood in the near-dark. It has a different atmosphere here at dusk. The loch looks like a hard grey jewel in green folds of moth-eaten velvet. First she went to the shore, bending and dipping one hand into the shallows, the water cold and silky, before raising and kissing her index finger: her eccentric way of saying hello to me. She came next to the tomb, running her other hand over the great uncle’s cap in a practised swift motion, something the children of the family have always done, a kind of superstition. The loch kiss, the cap: these are two of her three rituals. The third is to come to my stone, to sit with her back irreligiously against the angel, as if blocking the angel from the conversation. Like my mother, she acts as if the cameo is my grave-marker and as if I were beneath it, listening.

  “Hello, Michael,” she said, in her usual sad way, speaking to me as if commiserating, as if I was the one who’d had bad news, though I suppose that was accurate enough. The wood is plagued by flies in summer, tiny winged black flies that bite, and they were persistent around her eyes. She reached down into a trouser pocket, adjusting her stance, pulled out a soft crushed pouch of cigarettes and lit one up. The evening college of midges was fumigated by a semicircular exhalation of smoke.

  “Sometimes I think I can hear you talking to me, Michael,” she said in a hoarse whisper. As if she didn’t want David to hear.

  It’s probably my fault that Mog smokes. There were always cigarette papers and a tin of Old Holborn, pleasingly archaic, when I talked her through her maths work in the linen room at weekends. She’d roll her own, the thinnest possible, with barely five strands of tobacco, attempting smoke-aided slang expressions, a smoke-provoked shift in personality, one outside the scope of her mother’s approval.

  “When he was 19 we were close friends, as close as anyone, or so I thought,” she used to say to people curious to know whether anything was ever heard again of the cousin who vanished. She’s grieved over me in all the years since, I know that. I know how it’s got in the way, this grief, of other things she should have done and also felt, and if I could I would help her disengage from it. She’d said to me sometimes, on sporadic visits in the months preceding, that she hadn’t come to Peattie much, despite longing to, despite almost going to the station and almost catching a train every Friday after work, because she thought that weekends spent here weren’t helping her settle, that settling was the hardest thing she could imagine doing. But now she’d given up on that attempted life.

  “So, the plan is to stay on, live here for a year, help Edith and Henry manage things, work in the village. A year off and then we’ll see.” She paused. “There’s something else you need to know. Johnnie and I have
parted. That’s the other news. Don’t say I told you so. Though I can tell that you’re thinking it.” I was. “Edinburgh’s too small to live there being nervous always of seeing someone you dread seeing.” So he was the reason she was back. “I read somewhere that it’s normal to get over-attached to the first man you sleep with.”

  I’ve heard Mog described as plain, though plain is unfair. She has lovely eyes, long lashes, and her sweetness is obvious in her face, but she dresses like one of the great aunts, in twinsets, in tweed skirts tight over her rounded stomach, in dowdy warm stockings, in sensible and unlovely shoes. Lately she’d taken to wearing jeans and sturdy laced boots; they looked wrong, look forced, as if imposed on someone from the wrong generation for denim.

  She’d written in her notebook in the train. She has a daily journal habit, like I used to, rewriting the day into something that makes narrative sense and feeds back meaning into it. She’s said to me that her notebook’s the only way of saying what she’s thinking, that there’s nobody else who wants to hear it.

  If I’m to be permanent, and failure follows me there, failing might make me hate Peattie and I couldn’t bear that.

  There seemed to be a better than average chance of this. The mind clenches, braced against pessimism, but facts had to be faced and this was one of them. She’d learned things about herself lately. Edinburgh had become tainted with a thin film of defeatism. By the end she could see it everywhere: in the flat, in her job, coating the trees in the square, accompanying her on the route round the shops at lunchtime, visiting and revisiting the duffel coats at Marks & Spencer, her mood marked by a despairing sort of compulsive disinterest.

  “There’s so much I have to tell you,” she said, “but talking to thin air feels more idiotic than usual.” And then she was gone, walking and then running back up the path to the house.

  ***

  It’s Joan’s fault that the Salter-Catto children have names that proved ideal for school bullying. She it was who decided that white-skinned, dark-haired James should be Jet, that Peter, the fair-haired smaller twin, should be Pip, and that Mary, who at three referred to herself as Mary Salty-Cat, should be Mog. Only Elizabeth retitled herself, finding the pronunciation impossible. Nobody would ever think to tease the remarkably beautiful, straight-talking Izzy about anything: the combination of beauty and bluntness is always silencing of hecklers. Jet coped fine, though it helped that he was always tall. Mog and Pip did less well with the bullies, especially poor Pip, who’s smallest of the Salter men and as an adolescent had a punch like a sock puppet. Izzy from the first was happy with her name. The rest of them found resistance to be futile. Wherever they went, Joan had been there first, and had indoctrinated schools, friends, parents of friends, doctors. It was Euan who picked the christening names, thinking he was getting his own way, Joan agreeing before marriage that Catto traditions would take precedence in this one instance, as so little of Catto was to be otherwise on offer and in evidence at tradition-soaked Peattie, where Euan and Joan, when they lived at the gatehouse, were ostensible guardians of the whole Salter world.