The White Lie

by Andrea Gillies

  Not that I was neglected; people use that word and they’ve got it totally arse about face, but there’s no small talk with my mother, and even those who love her most would agree that she’s benignly self-absorbed. Shining a positive light on her behaviour would involve words like drive, focus, concentration. She has admirable levels of these. Her first thought when she wakes is how quickly she can get coffee and get into her studio. Sometimes eating is neglected. Foraging was the norm when I was young, and so I learned from an early age to help myself to something to eat. Often it was as if my mother forgot I was there, that I lived there. I’d interrupt her and she’d be surprised to see me, genuinely so, as if my being there was unexpected.

  Our confrontations were tediously repetitive, seemed often to repeat almost word for word.

  “You know I don’t talk about that, Michael.”

  “But why not?”

  “I don’t talk about it. It’s private. It’s a long time ago. It’s irrelevant.”

  “Not to me.”

  “Yes. To you. It was a one-night stand. I’ve told you and told you. He didn’t love you, Michael. He wasn’t interested.”

  “But he’s my father. Imagine not knowing Henry. Imagine Edith not believing you had a right to know who Henry was.”

  “A right! A right?”

  “Yes. A right.”

  “I’ve told you. A hundred times. You don’t have anything of his. He’s made no impact, negligible impact on you. You’re a Salter. You’re a Maclean. You’re Grandpa Andrew, you’re me, you’re Henry, you’re Vita. He doesn’t figure. He’s irrelevant to both of us.”

  “Have I met him?”

  “Michael!”

  “Is he dead?”

  “He might as well be.”

  When I was 17, 18, it was Mog I talked to about it. Later, at 19, there developed for a time an odd intimacy with Ursula, but at 17 and 18 Mog was the confidante. That was the period of barely ever speaking about it with my mother; two years that she thought were years of improvement, ceasefire, peace. She’d talk to me more about the work, thinking it was safe to talk because things wouldn’t escalate. She thought I was listening and that we were getting on better. Edith would say to me as much: “I’m glad you and Ottilie are getting on better.” So it was an unpleasant surprise to all when the question began to itch again. It itched and it wouldn’t stop. The spring and summer weeks before I disappeared: that was the time of my most concerted and organised digging. I would do anything, embarrass anyone, create a scene anywhere. I had no sense of propriety, as Henry reminded me, though he slipped up one evening, telling me angrily that bad genes on my father’s side were no doubt to blame for my being so lazy and feckless (both of which I admit to readily).

  Mog and Rebecca were walking back to the house. “It wasn’t just at home, either,” Mog said. “He was constantly in trouble. Fighting. Arguing with teachers about homework, grades, fairness, school policies, a real pain in the arse. Then when he’s 17 he decides he’s not going to go to university, he’s not going to sit his exams, he wants to work for the forestry commission, write, travel round the world—round countries that have forestry, anyway. Ottilie goes into a decline and Henry has caniptions. There’s a lot of arguing. Michael gets worse at school. They send him to an educational psychologist. Michael argues with her as well. Then he’s caught with drugs on him at school and expelled.”

  “Oh god.”

  “Quite. So he goes to the sixth-form college and lasts a week. Gets a series of low-paid jobs around here and doesn’t last long in any of them. Starts spending more and more time at Peattie. And then . . .”

  Now is the moment to tell her about Ursula. It would be a relief to confide. “Then one day he leaves home. Not even a big fight, Ottilie says. Just the same kind of conversation they’d been having for years. But something snaps. Evidently. We don’t know why. He packs a bag, drives away, leaves his car at the loch, goes off on foot. Leaves a note in his room here.”

  “In his room here?”

  “Yes. They took a while to find it.”

  “So he still had a room from when he was 11?”

  “We all have rooms here. It’s a big house. It makes my grandmother happy. We can come and go. Stay any time. We help out while we’re here. It’s a good system.”

  “What did the note say?”

  “Hardly anything. No real clues. The father. Unhappiness about Ottilie’s attitude. His wanting to make a new life. That kind of thing.”

  “Can I see it?”

  “I don’t have it.”

  “Why did he leave his car at the lake?”

  “Mystery. That’s the mystery. Don’t know. Decided he didn’t want it, maybe. It was a present from Henry for his 18th. He’d had a row with Henry, too.”

  “About his father?”

  “About his father, about his treatment by the family.”

  “What do you mean, treatment?”

  “He never felt Henry treated him the same. Because he was illegitimate.”

  “Surely that was wrong, he was wrong.”

  “And he thought Henry knew.”

  “Who his father was.”

  “Yes.”

  “And since that, nothing.”

  “And since that, nothing,” Mog agreed.

  8

  On the fourth day after I disappeared, Joan invited Alan to tea. She said she needed clarification on a few things. She said to the family that she was going to have a conversation with Alan, at teatime, and that she’d welcome their being there. They were, of course, going to be there anyway. She was warning them against interfering, signalling that she was going to be running the show. Alan got there expecting tea with Joan but found himself in a situation rather more like an interview by a board of directors, with Joan chairing.

  “It was good of you to come, Alan,” she said, handing him a teacup. “I wanted to ask you a last few things. I hope that’s alright.”

  “Of course,” Alan said, “I’m happy to help in any way I can.”

  Joan consulted her notes. “You said that you lost your shoes in the loch. The day Michael disappeared. New trainers I think it was.”

  “That’s right.”

  “That seems odd to me.”

  Joan was suspicious of Alan at this time, believing him more likely than her sister to be the killer. By the autumn she would come to a different conclusion, deciding that I was alive and Alan a liar and Ursula easily indoctrinated, though I think that most of the impetus of this change rested in exonerating her parents from their inaction: if there was no death then there was no need for guilt, after all, and licence was granted to concentrate on the liar and the person misled. For now, however, Joan was the suspicious inquisitor general. “Why still have your shoes on? You didn’t remove them to go into the loch? You’re saying you took your trousers off over your shoes and left your shoes on?”

  “I took them off, took off my trousers, then I put them back on.” Alan looked and sounded nervous.

  “But why would you do that?” Joan asked him.

  “I always swim in the loch in shoes. Don’t you? Everyone does. The pebbles are sharp. I’ve never swum there barefoot. Never. Nobody does.”

  “Did you lose your shoes every time you swam there? Seems an expensive way to go swimming.”

  “Not usually. But that day, I was in a panic. I didn’t tie them tight enough. That wasn’t even it. The point is, I didn’t untie and retie them. I shrugged them off, then forced my feet in again. I was in a hurry. You understand that. I’d seen Michael hit across the head, I’d seen him disappear into the loch. In fact, I was undressing even before she hit him. I didn’t tie them tight, like I would usually. They came off.”

  “Even before she hit him? How do you mean?”

  “I had a bad feeling. It came over me. A bad feeling.” He swam out there, he said, just in his underpants and his shoes and it was freezing cold. There was no sign of me. He dived and dived, and he couldn’t see anything. There
was no trace of me. Gone like a stone.

  Joan interrupted the flow of the narrative. “Forgive me, but I have trouble with this part of the story.”

  “It’s not a story.” Alan’s contempt was obvious. “It’s just as I told you. No matter how many times you ask me it will be the same. And this will be the last time. I should tell you that. I’m not going to talk about this again unless it’s to somebody in uniform.”

  “Are you threatening us?” Joan’s hostility was just as obvious.

  Euan got hold of her arm. “I’m sorry, Alan. Joan isn’t herself. This will be the last time we ask you, unless, as you say, we wish you to present your story to the police.”

  “My story?”

  Alan’s breathing had quickened into panting; the weather continued freakishly hot. He wiped his brow with one of his large white handkerchiefs, and folded it carefully up again. The implications of Euan’s words weren’t lost on him. Perhaps he was thinking, as I was, that Ursula’s credulity could swing two ways. Perhaps all it would take would be for someone to take her aside, and say they saw Alan kill Michael. Furthermore, that they saw that she saw Alan kill Michael.

  Joan was sceptical about his not being able to see me under the water. But I’ve been down there and I can tell you that there’s nothing at all to be seen, there’s nothing he could have seen, unless he went very deep into the dark and was lucky enough to blunder into me. It would have had to be that accidental. And it’s likely he didn’t go far down. You will have to take my word for this, but conditions beneath the surface, out there in the middle of the loch, are claustrophobic and also agoraphobic. A phobia paradox. There is a feeling of enclosure, visibility being so poor, and yet at the same time this fact whispers in your brain: that the water stretches underneath you for hundreds of feet, stretching dizzyingly away, first of tea-coloured brown like strong milkless tea (peaty, in fact), but then, but then blackness, the abyss deep and unknowable as a starless night. Though actually it’s worse than that, is more like something grasping, a void that wants to clasp itself about you. It will pull you down and down in its embrace. Beyond a certain point there is the illusion of a gentle and constant suction, an uncompromising suction that will not let you rise. It’s occurred to me that people who’ve survived near-drowning here have spoken only metaphorically about the creature.

  Alan went over the story again. Ursula was hysterical in the boat, Ursula was raving, not making sense, not letting him board, not letting him give her the oar back that he found floating. He’d propped one end for her against the boat hull, holding onto the other, an offering. She swung at it with the remaining oar, knocking it back into the loch and yelling like a banshee. This was the point at which he began to feel dreadfully unwell. He swam away, fearing he was going to pass out, and went and sat on the shore, hearing her yelling subside and end. He sat on the shore, feeling too ill to move, lying back on the gravel, his knees up, looking up at the blue sky, wet and hot and beginning already to be clammy, his heart thumping unevenly, his chest hurting him, spasms contracting his heart like a belt drawn repeatedly tight, and feeling at the same time that somehow it had bruised. He lay back and expected to die and must have slept—actually he thought he might have lost consciousness—because then, the next thing he knew, he’d come round with a jolt. He didn’t know how much later it was (his watch was waterlogged and useless), and Ursula was there, still sitting in the boat, sitting quietly and not moving. He felt very tired but otherwise normal. He swam back out to her, very slowly, anxious that the pains might return, and she let him board without a word, without a flicker of interest in him, and then he rowed her back to the beach.

  “So. You had chest pain and you passed out, you think, on the shore,” Euan said. “But then when you woke you felt well enough to swim, to climb into the rowing boat, to row Ursula back.”

  “I know it sounds unlikely, but it’s what happened. The pain had gone off and I had to do something.”

  “I see.”

  “It was the chest pain that stopped me keeping looking for him. You understand that?”

  “I understand that,” Euan said, closing and opening his eyes in acceptance.

  “I spent a good ten minutes diving and looking, even before I tried to board the boat. I want you to see that. And after ten minutes of looking . . .”

  “Yes,” Euan told him. “We do see.”

  “Please go on,” Henry said.

  He paints it well, the word picture. I see him, Alan on the shore, his arms to his chest, his groaning. I see him sleep. I see him waking, going out to Ursula again, swimming very slowly, barely more than floating, an assisted sort of floating, on his back for some of the time, a great pale starfish creature, blinking, just his arms moving and making slow progress. I see her letting him board, the oar that was floating going into the boat first, and then Alan landing like a big fish over the side, landing heavily like something thought extinct rising out of the deeps, over and onto the deck, and I see him seat himself opposite her.

  I see Alan rowing Ursula back to the shore. I see Ursula becoming upset, now that she has to step from the boat.

  “She was in a panic, you see, by the time we got back. She wanted to get here and get you. And there wasn’t any choice except to get out of the boat.”

  “Why didn’t you pull the boat onto the shore for her so that she wouldn’t have to get wet?”

  “I did. I did that. But I was very slow, I’m afraid. I felt unwell and shaky. I was worried I was going to have a heart attack. She couldn’t wait. She got out into the shallows and tripped, immediately, and went down on her knees. She was very frightened.”

  “Right,” Euan said. “And then.”

  “I watched her go. Coming up here. Crying, making a noise.”

  She looked like a little girl who’d hurt herself, running like a child does, her arms held out at her sides.

  “I wanted to go after her but I was afraid. The pain was coming back. My chest muscles felt stretched.”

  “That was probably to do with the swimming, the effort and the cold.”

  “And then I went home. I went home first.”

  “That part I don’t get,” Joan chipped in. Euan rolled his eyes at Alan and Alan showed that he was aware of the compliment. “Why go to the cottage first?”

  “I told you, I lost my shoes, I had to get new ones. I couldn’t come up here without shoes.”

  “But this was an emergency,” Joan persisted.

  “He was dead, Mrs Catto.” Alan swivelled to face her. “He was dead. That’s not an emergency. I went across the field to the cottage and came straight here after that. I was out of breath, remember, when Mr Catto and I met, almost ran into each other, off the back stairs. I still had chest pain. I did my best, Mrs Catto, you know. I did my very best for Michael.”

  “I’m sure you did,” Euan said, “and I know we don’t sound it, but we are genuinely immensely grateful to you, Alan. We will be. Very grateful. But at the moment I’m afraid none of us is ourselves. We’ve had a terrible shock.”

  Alan was nodding.

  ***

  I spent the night before I disappeared in my room at Peattie. I sat on the bed for a long time, trying to articulate the thing I was about to do, to justify it to myself, walking the arc of reasoning, hoping to find that when I made the thing definite in my head, rehearsing it already in the past tense, that there wasn’t any immediate recoil, no plunging loss of conviction. I wanted a practised justification, one I could repeat to myself at low moments, but it didn’t work: I failed to feel anything much at all. I failed utterly to have any real thoughts about it. It made no sense; I knew that. I knew even then that taking myself away was never going to satisfy me as a revenge, but I knew I’d do it anyway. I went to dinner and was monosyllabic, and looked as if I were deep in thought, when actually nothing was going on in my head whatsoever. I seemed preoccupied, Edith was to say later, though she’d been positive enough on the phone when Ottilie rang to check I wa
s there. My mother told Edith she’d be at Peattie for tea the next day and hoped to see me, but not to tell me she was coming.

  The morning of the day I disappeared I went out for an early loch swim, came back and ate a bacon sandwich and then retreated to my room. It was already so hot that my body had dried, my shorts had dried, on the walk back, shoeless over the gravel. Going into my room, everything looked and felt new; it was as if I’d already left and it had passed into history. My room at Peattie still bore the look, the deserted ossified look of a boy’s, as if the boy had died aged 11, when we moved away. It still does. Nothing changes, other than the linens and the few things, books mostly, that I added to it later as a weekend visitor. Airfix kit aeroplanes hang by strings, drifting gently in the draught. The ceiling has a zodiac painted on it, in blue and gold. Boys’ books and games, souvenirs, flags, are propped up on shelves. Great framed maps are lined up on the walls, antique maps that showed confidence in a partly charted and partly imagined world. These all are things Henry provided for me when I was a child.

  I opened the window and sat by it, shoving the screaming reluctant sash upward. I pulled the desk over, scraping and bouncing it across the parquet floor, to sit by the window and write the letter to my mother. I couldn’t find any paper at first. My pen proved low on ink. It all took longer than it should have, and so I got to the linen room ten minutes late, Mog frowning at me for my bad timekeeping. I didn’t stay long. I helped her with the maths, not really in the mood for explaining, and fixed the banana skin hair on the apple head, my mind swimming with the things I’d said and not said in the letter. I told Mog that I had things to do. I went back and read the letter over, my hand poised over it, and sat for a while looking out in case anything else should occur to me, but nothing did. It was shocking, how brief the farewell seemed to be. I left the letter sitting on the bed and went down early to lunch. I was first down and didn’t tarry. I packed a sandwich, folding it into a napkin, took a green apple from the blue glass bowl, and on my way out, shouted to Vita, who was making her way slowly to the drawing room with Mrs Hammill, that I was going now. That’s what I said to her. “Going now.” With, in retrospect, embarrassing fierceness. Not caring how she interpreted it. I didn’t answer her query, her answer; I don’t know what it was. Something was said and not acknowledged. Poor Vita I left staring after me, Mrs H saying something tart about manners and the young. Vita may have realised—though perhaps only later—that in a way it was her fault that I’d decided to go. Henry I didn’t see. Edith I avoided because she’s too intuitive about things like this. I didn’t want to have to look into Edith’s eyes. She’d have read me in an instant and all would have been revealed.