“This isn’t a matter of debate,” Henry said, blowing his nose. “This—the way we have explained it to you—this is our decision. This is what we are going to do. And I’m afraid that anyone who can’t agree to honour our wishes had better find somewhere else to live.”
“I need to talk to you,” Joan persisted. “This isn’t the end of this discussion.”
“Yes Joan, it is” Henry told her.
6
After she’d written Vita’s six-point test for husbands in the journal, Mog came to the wood, her feet on the grit of the path making the only noise in the absolute stillness. She sat for a long time on the beach with a notebook in her lap, not writing anything but the date.
Finally she spoke. “Here’s the thing,” she said to me.
Then nothing. Then, “All I want is a light heart. When will it get light again? It’s been so long. Ten of those years I’ve spent living with Pip. A ridiculous length of time to be temporary.”
I waited. People talk differently to me than they do to anyone else. They speak to me with unfiltered sincerity, because really they think they’re just talking aloud to themselves. Sometimes I feel like a confessional priest, and sometimes like God.
“Everything is shrouded in the same heaviness now,” Mog went on. “I don’t know how I managed it, when I was young, when everything was so difficult at home; the bickering, trying to outdo each other with their meanness. But it seemed easy.”
She scuffed at the soil, the old leaves, with her shoe.
“Lately, so heavy, Michael. So heavy, so weighed down. Like I’m physically carrying something around. So weighed down I can feel it against my ribs, pushing against the top of my stomach. You’ll laugh at this: I thought I had a tumour. I went to the doctor. Had an ultrasound. Nothing there. Marked as a hysteric in the notes. Big red emphatic H.”
“Hypochondriac,” I said to her.
“I can’t get free of it. Can’t see how to get free of it. No longer believe it’s possible to get free of it. I was sent to a psychotherapist. She was repellently sympathetic. Said the heaviness was a reservoir of tears. I should have asked to see her qualifications at that point. I’m too polite. That, I blame my parents for. I sat there for another 45 minutes, trying to come up with the answers she wanted, aware I was failing the test. I couldn’t talk back to her in her own language. It turned out the session was almost all about her, reassuring herself of her own expertise.”
She took some chocolate out of her bag and snapped off a line and ate it. “My mother wonders why I don’t eat at the gatehouse. Simple: because chocolate has to be explained. Chocolate’s noted and logged.” She ate another line. “I don’t know how I feel about leaving Edinburgh. I don’t seem to feel anything. This is one of the problems, one of the other problems. Not feeling things. The psychotherapist said I had to start taking responsibility for making myself happy. I didn’t go back. But I tried the homework: making an effort with Angelica’s friends at the drinks party they had for her birthday. Impossible. Humiliating, actually. I was gregarious and rabbited on and asked questions and they couldn’t have cared less.”
Poor Mog.
“The problem is that I don’t really like people. Not really. Not beyond the people here. I don’t know why that is. But it means I’m on my own a lot. I spend a lot of time reading, now; you’d be amazed. Angelica wasn’t impressed. She thinks reading’s something you do on holiday; certainly not something you do when the dishwasher hasn’t been emptied. Turns out she’s pretty much my mother’s deputy and clone. My mother’s thrilled about Angelica, and you can see it crossing his mind sometimes, crossing Pip’s mind; dawning that this might not be a good sign.” She laughed, making that characteristic noise afterwards, the long “hmmm” that’s almost laughing, subsiding into a long note. “And I’ve realised something about people who read. People who read: it’s not quietness. It’s not passivity. They’re having conversations with the writer, with the characters, are part living in that other situation. It’s like a judgment on everyone they know, that they go there, into the quiet world looking for friendship. That’s how it’s been for me, at least. I said a lot more than that—to the therapist. Some of it was stuff of yours. I plagiarised a bit. Adolescent and simplistic, that’s what she thought. It’s the kind of thing we thought we knew when we were 19. Well, you were 19. I was younger. I’ve never found anybody else who talks to me the way we spoke to one another.”
Most of our interactions with other people are rehearsed and cowardly. That’s the kind of thing it says in the notebooks. It worries me, that Mog seems still to be living in the world of that thinking. I was very sure of myself then, reading philosophy and interested in the failings of language, the disconnect from thoughts, (I used the word disconnect a lot), the way we absorb the limitations of language into ourselves, tipping complex things into a crude vocabulary like pigs into sausages. It helped explain things to me, the life language delivers up to us. We’d stretch out together on the linen room shelf, Mog’s head in the crook of my arm and the rain beating down. We lie to ourselves, thinking the embryo life we’ve had frozen and stored will stay viable until we’re ready for it. It won’t, and in any case we’re never ready. It’s perhaps the most frustrating thing of all: not being able to tell Mog that there’s hope, that there’s every kind of compensation imaginable in love, in partnership in life. It would take some explaining, how it is that I know that; what my life has been since I left Peattie. Ironic, isn’t it, in the circumstances, that I’m the one who’s moved on.
“Johnnie left a message on Pip’s answerphone,” Mog said, “the day before I came home. He said he was worried for me. If Johnnie says he’s worried for you, you’re in trouble. His being worried is a reprimand. He said that I was something hollowed out: that was the phrase he used, hollowed out. Pip and Angelica heard it first. So humiliating. That I wasn’t really a person and that I needed help. The horrible thing was that I believed him. I did. It rang true to me. And then I had this weird thought. I thought, I’m like a piece of furniture that’s had dust cloths laid over it, more and more of them until the edges and outlines are blurred. I don’t know why I thought of that, of furniture and dustcloths. Peattie, I suppose, from way back, from when I was little. Seeing Edith closing up rooms. Johnnie said he wanted to have one conversation: just one last conversation, and that I owed him that much. I thought, Well damn you to hell, I don’t owe you anything. After that, the truth is that I hid. There was actual literal hiding. I barely went out. I’ll do almost anything to avoid confrontation. Even if I’m plainly in the right. Being in the right makes it worse. If I’m in the right I make sure to put myself in the wrong at the first opportunity. I tell you, Michael, it’s just an absolute disaster, my trying to have relationships with anyone outside this wall.”
***
I knew about the depression. I saw her living in Edinburgh, just occasionally in fleeting visits, the window opening and closing. I saw her napping on Pip’s sofa with a novel on her face. I saw Angelica come home from the office and rip the book away from her like a plaster from a scabby knee.
“Sleeping again; sleeping your life away,” she’d said, proceeding into the kitchen and tutting over the sub-pristine state of things. Angelica thought she needed a kick up the jacksie. Pip defended her; she’d been unwell.
“Feeling sorry for herself, you mean,” Angelica said. They were in the kitchen together while Mog dozed on. “You need to stop pandering to her. Stop going to the bookshop for her. Stop making her eggs on toast.”
Later, sitting with Angelica watching the news while Pip was cooking up pasta, whizzing up pesto in the mixer, the smell like the meadow when it’s just been cut, herbs mixed into the warm grass, Mog announced that she was leaving Edinburgh, that she’d decided against going back to the office on Monday after all. She said that she was going home. Angelica hadn’t said anything, just left the room, still holding the TV remote. A few minutes later Pip had come in and crouched beside
her.
“You’re sure about this? We’ll miss you.”
“I’m sure about it.” He got up to go. “Pip?”
“Yes?”
“How do you do it?”
“Do what?”
“This. All this. How do you keep going?”
“I don’t understand you.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
In fact she had been sure for months, since long before the break-up with Johnnie. The world—and Edinburgh was as little and as much the world as anywhere else—seemed opaque to her, seemed closed. At first she’d blamed it on youth, inexperience, newness: her mother had concurred with this. But nothing developed. Nothing changed. It was hard to get a job, she said, and then when you did it just went on and on: a life of working and then recovering from and anticipating work. Pip made work the centre not only of his life but also of his identity and seemed to be thriving. Was she missing something? A social life, Joan insisted, would make everything fall into place. Mog knew people, but knew, also, that she was never other than peripheral to these other people’s lives; this was unsentimentally just the fact of the matter. No social circle drew itself around her and embraced her into itself, breaking hands to link with hers and admit her, and nor did it seem likely to. She went to the pub on Fridays with workmates. On Saturdays she went shopping—even if only for socks or toiletries, it got her out of the flat—and then to the cinema. She went to the Botanic Gardens in all weathers on Sundays and sometimes met people she knew there (awkwardly swapping dull news, as she put it), but sometimes she didn’t, sitting alone on the café terrace, self-conscious among the chattering groups, watching small children frolic and shout on the lawn. That was her week. That, it seemed certain, would continue to be her week, until weeks ran unchecked into decades.
The irony was that Euan and Joan had encouraged her so much and so long to be a person of achievement, of substance - that was Euan’s word. It had started early. “This year, now that you’re 12, you need to be thinking hard about your future,” her father had said. “If it’s writing you want, you should be writing and not talking about being a writer. Talking’s nothing and nowhere. Write. Get submitting. There’s no reason why it shouldn’t be you. I have pretty good contacts.”
Joan had joined in, bright-eyed. “There’s a girl of 14 who’s just published a novel.”
The Christmas presents Joan bought for her offspring tended to the practical. For Mog there were books in French, to help with her language difficulty, and clothes a size too small as an incentive. I’m a project, Mog confided to her diary, and I’m not going terribly well.
***
When she went back to the house it was her mother she saw first.
“What on earth’s wrong with you?” Joan asked her.
“Nothing. Everything’s fine. Why?”
“You look like you’re about to burst into tears.”
“I’m fine. Just a bit of a headache.”
“Well, take some pills and get back down here. I need a hand.” She frowned at Mog as if reading faraway print on a sign. “Where have you been?”
“Just at the wood.”
“Ah.”
“Ah what?”
“Talking to Michael. Spilling out all your deeply underprivileged woes.”
“I’ve never said I’m under-privileged. Where do you get that from?”
“Emotionally so, I imagine. You fit with the coming generation. Expect their parents to be their staff and to behave only as permitted, for their own well-being. There was a piece on the radio. Modern children think parents who are also humans with human vices are guilty of abuse.”
“Right. That’s me exactly. Spot on again. What do you need a hand with?”
“He isn’t there, you know.”
“Come again?”
“Michael. He isn’t there.”
“Okay.”
“What is it with this family? Constantly wallowing. Terrible things happen to people. Boo hoo. Shocking and tragic. But there comes a point when grief becomes a sort of disorder.”
“Just tell me what you want a hand with.”
“You see. You see. Exactly. Exactly.”
“I’m not wallowing. I’m trying to get on with things. Isn’t that what you want? But you know, Mother, since you brought it up, you haven’t ever seemed overly dynamic to me.”
“My god, you have a lot to learn.” Joan opened her handbag and took out her Filofax. “Sit down.” She flicked through and sat opposite Mog at the kitchen table. “There’s a ridiculous amount to do. If only people had made an effort, the party could have been tremendous. It could have been important to us. You children might have been invited back to things. But it’s the same old problem. It’s not appropriate to be happy, or to make an effort or to have things look nice. It’s morally far preferable to have pony shit on the lawn and peacock droppings in the hall.”
“What?”
“There used to be. After Seb died. It was emblematic, you see. Being not clean. My sister turning all Bohemian, which as we know is just another word for dirty. The place is going to rack and ruin. Mrs Welsh is worse than useless.”
“That’s unfair.”
“She doesn’t get into the corners, and nobody cares. Slut’s lace under the tables.”
“Slut’s lace?”
“Dog hair and dust, gathered into hairy piles. Chairs on the point of collapse. Chipped paintwork. Nobody cares. Cobwebs on every window. The windows! What am I supposed to do about them, by Saturday? There are dead flies inside the glazing. I can’t do it all on my own. I can’t.”
“It doesn’t matter. It’s one evening. People will drink and talk and not notice any of it. They’re not going to be running their fingers along the mantelpieces.”
“You’re just as bad as Edith. The two of you. Don’t think I haven’t seen you. Having confidential chats.”
“You’re objecting to my talking to my grandmother.”
“It’s a discourtesy.”
“What? What?”
“You know exactly what I mean.”
“I’ve had enough of this.” Mog left the room, Joan calling after her, “Oh that’s right, that’s the thing you always do: just run away from things instead of facing up to them.”
***
Out of the frying pan and into the fire. Euan was in the drawing room, at the card table by the window, a pile of essays and a pen sitting in front of him. He was on the phone and had his back to her. She heard him say into his mobile, “I came over here to get away from her and lo and behold, she had done the same.” Mog stood stock-still. If he concentrated on the changed configuration of shapes and colours reflected back by old glass, her father would realise she was standing at the door. She backed out of the room and returned down the corridor.
Edith was in the hall going through the mail, which lay unopened for days sometimes, accruing in the clay rack Ottilie had made for her mother at school, its ochre-yellow glaze dotted with acorns and oak leaves. Mog came up behind Edith on stockinged feet, and saw that what she held in her hand was a brochure for a residential home. It was dense and fat and glossy, saturated with design and ink and money. Young adults smiled out of the cover illustrations. Edith turned to find Mog standing behind her.
“Mog! What are you doing creeping about?”
“I didn’t mean to intrude, sorry.”
Edith and Mog both looked at the brochure, still in Edith’s hand.
“It’s because I’m thinking about Ursula.”
“Ursula?”
“Henry and I are both getting old. We need to think about what happens to Ursula when we’re gone. We can’t expect any of you children to take on her care. She doesn’t need care. That’s not the word. Her supervision. It wouldn’t be fair.”
“I think you might have trouble convincing Ursula to move.”
“It’s more for you children’s sakes. I’ll leave it in the office drawer with the wills.”
“You are feeling a
lright?”
“Perfectly. But I’ve had a reminder lately, being so ill, that we’re none of us immortal.”
“I thought you believed we were.”
“It’s good to see you. It’s been so long. I was beginning to think something was amiss. Putting us off and off.”
“I wasn’t well. Just a virus that wouldn’t go away. And busy at work, and the weeks passed. I kept meaning to come and then it didn’t happen.”
Edith hugged her, lingering over it, running one hand over her hair and down her back, and rubbing at the place between her shoulder blades. “You don’t have to explain. Just very glad to see you.”
***
The last time Mog had been to Peattie was almost two months before. She’d volunteered to relinquish her bedroom at Pip’s flat for a long weekend so that Joan could have it. Joan had been hinting for over a year that she’d love a weekend visit, and finally Angelica had invited her.
Euan and Joan are pleased unanimously with Pip. Pip they agree about. Jet they agree partly about, united in seeing that he’s a disaster, though Euan considers him lost, has written him off and has told him so, flat calmly, without the opinion seeming to affect him at all, like dispensing with a car that hadn’t been worth much to start with. Joan still thinks that Jet will change, that his revelation and ambition are on their way to him. All four of her children, she says, will turn out to be exceptional in some way or other, though one or two of them might mature late and take their time.
Even Joan had to concede that the Edinburgh visit hadn’t been a great success. She didn’t know enough people in town and Pip worked long hours at the bank. Angelica seemed to expect her to have things to do, her own friends to see, arrangements of her own. She had been surprised to get home to the flat in the evening and find Joan there, watching television. Her surprise had seemed exaggerated. She’d given the unmistakable impression that she’d really rather be alone.
Joan had picked up on this, and then Angelica saw that she had, and became immediately more solicitous. “I hope you’ve helped yourself to coffee, cake, lunch.”
The White Lie Page 10
