I took my car along the drive as if I were leaving, and then along the lane 200 yards, before turning back in along the loch road, past the cottages. George and Alan were in and around the greenhouses that lunchtime, seeing to tomato trusses and cucumbers and the competition flowers, and bickering. George had been made uncharacteristically short-tempered by the weather. Everything was overheating, the vegetables engorged with sunshine, the tomatoes drying and splitting on the plants. In gardening terms the heat wave was becoming a crisis. It didn’t help that George was unwell—with prostate trouble as well as a bad back—but had insisted that Henry forego his planned temporary replacement, fearing the relief gardener would become permanent and displace him. George had told Henry that Alan would help and didn’t want to be paid, that his son would be offended by money in this situation.
Alan said that he had an argument with his father, about the tomatoes. He didn’t add that it had developed from a dispute about technique, multiplying exponentially, from skill into responsibility, from duty to honour, and thence, devastatingly, into notions of self-respect. Money was at the heart of it; George’s having volunteered Alan to work unpaid. In any case, Alan’s trip down to the loch wasn’t really about the fight he’d had with his father. When he went down to the wood on his bike, Alan was intending to do a spot of fishing. When it’s hot, the trout gather in the deep shady pools beneath the jetty. Some of the older villagers fish here, with Henry’s blessing, but Alan’s a poacher, selling his catch in quantity at the back doors of local hotels. He’d sold some the previous evening to the holidaymakers: the cottage adjoining the Dixons’ place is let by the week in summer.
I sat on the jetty a long time. I sat at its end, my lower legs over the edge, leaning back hard on my hands, looking at the familiar view, the stretch of water enclosed in hills, a heat haze blurring the horizon. I see him now, this boy, this 19-year-old not-quite-man. His shirt’s rolled up at the sleeves, and he has tanned arms, his skin taking and burnishing the sunlight. His hair’s wavy, falling layered past the collar. His features—his nose too big, as Mog says—are set into contempt, and there’s something resigned there, also. It’s made a decision, that face. He’s looking thoughtfully out at the water, not moving. He has fine hands, large and with long fingers that are tanned darker than his forearms. His nails are well shaped, pinker than his hands, and set deep into his fingers. It was a good body. I didn’t appreciate that. His shoulders are wide and strong—a swimmer’s body. His legs are long in his jeans. Now he sits up straighter, bringing one leg up, resting his foot against the plank edge, which is worn gently away like a stone tread on a cathedral stair, leaning forward and grasping the shin, and his feet are bare in the boat shoes, a tanned and hairy ankle just visible.
I heard Ursula before I saw her, and only at the last minute. I heard only the last few pairs of footfalls as she ran barefoot up behind me and put her small white hands over my eyes. She asked me, sitting down beside me on the jetty, why the car was there, half on the beach, its doors and boot open. That last part was easy: it was because of the heat. I told her what I was about to do.
“Leaving? When are you coming home?”
“I’m not, Ursula. I’m not coming home.”
“For a while. Are you going to work somewhere? Do the forestry job somewhere?”
“Yes. The forestry job, I hope. But down in England somewhere. Maybe Yorkshire. It’s beautiful there.”
“You’ve never been to Yorkshire, liar.”
“Wrong. Twice with the climbing club.”
“Oh.” And then, “Can I come visit you on your hill, climb up to see you?”
“I’m afraid not; that won’t be possible.”
“When will you be home?”
“I’m not coming back. I’m going to make a home somewhere else and live there.”
She was quiet, digesting this, and then she said, “You don’t love me.”
“Of course I love you.” It was obvious even to me that this was a lie.
“You don’t love me. I knew you didn’t.”
“I do love you. You’re my friend.”
“I want to be your wife.”
“Don’t be an idiot.”
I’d offended her. “You’re young and your heart is very small and tight,” she told me.
I didn’t say anything.
“And green and unripe.”
I knew better than to take issue with her on any of this.
“Some things go rotten without ever ripening,” she added.
I murmured something that could have been construed as assent.
“You need to be tested to understand love,” she said, matter-of-factly. “You’re untested.”
I don’t know where she gets this stuff. From the novels, none of them post-1970, that Edith acquires on her behalf, I can only presume, believing them harmless. Edith has faith in the essential goodness of the pre-1970 world.
“My father,” I began, finding that I couldn’t complete the sentence.
“But that was a negative,” she said. “That wasn’t anything. The past is a nothing until you make it a something, and you did, you wanted to. Why did you want to? I think there’s something very destructive about you, Michael.” Her chin was on my shoulder and she turned it to kiss my neck.
“You may never have anybody love you like I do, never again,” she said.
“I hope I do,” I told her, as soulfully as I could manage.
Something new had occurred to her. “What does your mother think? She’s letting you go off to Yorkshire?”
“She hasn’t been asked.”
Ursula lay back on the jetty, her fingers laced across her eyes, and was quiet, and we sat in silence.
Ursula wasn’t really familiar with the idea of children growing up and moving away. It wasn’t something she’d had experience of, other than for Ottilie’s flight to the coast, though that only took place at about the same age that Ursula was at now, so wasn’t the usual sort of fledging. Perhaps she’d read something about it, that in the normal course of things children grow up and move away. It’s possible. Everything she knew came from the family and from permitted books, and also from music. I don’t know how it stands now, with the paid companion; Edith said that she’d leave this kind of thing to her judgment and didn’t need consulting. They could reinvent Ursula’s life between the two of them, she said. But certainly in the old days, although there were boxes and boxes of well-used LPs (and still are; Ursula’s devoted to vinyl), first the television was removed and then the radio, so as to avoid talk programmes, which might have caused confusion and upset. This wasn’t alarmist—they would, I’m afraid, have caused confusion and upset. Ursula thinks that every problem she hears of is a problem she’s being called upon to solve. A broadcast made in her presence, in her hearing, is a message to her, an appeal. She never learned to carry the world’s tragedies lightly and cast them off again, letting her own concerns obliterate them, as the rest of us do. She’d urge Edith and Henry to help, to go to the place of crisis, to sort out the problem, or to give all their things away, and then she’d worry about their absence and the ramifications of their needing to donate of themselves or their possessions, and the world’s problems would internalise into her own, the distress building and spreading. I know this because it’s what used to happen, before the radiogram was set to one safe music station and then removed, and the televisions at Peattie were given away, and the daily newspaper was locked up in the office. The televisions were lost when Ursula was eight, when she was taken out of school. In that year of heightened emotion the news upset her, drama upset her, and moving pictures were abandoned. Fiction and non-fiction were indistinguishable to her and each equally threatening. Even now she talks about the characters in the novels she reads as if they’re real, as if they have lives pre- and post-dating the narrative. She said to me once that she didn’t think the books always ended the same way, but that might have been a joke. It’s hard to tell what’s playfulness
and what’s something else in Ursula’s case.
“I’m going out in the boat,” I said to her. That was the only thing I could come up with in order to shed Ursula and her judgments.
Her response astonished me. “Can I come with you?”
“You don’t ever—I thought you didn’t . . .” I was taken aback.
“If I come out in the boat, I can change,” she told me, her face deadly earnest.
“No, no,” I said. “That’s such a bad idea.”
“Bad?”
“Well, look. Well, look, alright. If you’re sure.”
“I’m sure.”
“You can come out in the boat,” I told her. I had my own discreditable reasons for changing my mind. “Would you like to row?”
She shook her head, eyes shut. “I could never do that.”
She got into the boat where it stood, beached high on the shore. She was so slight that her weight made very little difference to the effort involved in the launch. She gasped as the water took hold, as her seat lifted and slid into buoyancy and the oars began their work. She was wearing Great Aunt Tilly’s pale blue dress, which had bluer embroidery, cornflowers, raised and silky on the bodice and around the scalloped hem. I would see her sitting there in the boat very many times in the days that followed: Ursula smiling at me from under her white hat, also one of Tilly’s, a hat woven out of a kind of knitted white nylon straw, broad-brimmed and opaque, throwing open-weave shadows over her face.
I had a plan now. One I’d had to improvise. I’d done a stupid, reckless thing telling her that I was leaving. Unless I took Ursula with me in the boat there was nothing I could do to delay her running back to the house and raising the alarm, shouting out her news and bringing them all running down here. Finding that I’d already left, they might have given chase in the old car: an absurd, Buster-Keatonish scenario but also one that was possible. Here was a way out of the problem. Here’s what I could do. I could get her out into the middle of the loch and I could leave her there. I could dive into the water, out of the boat, leaving her stranded there until Alan came for her. That way her news would be greatly delayed and I’d have plenty of time to make a head start. This would work. Alan was already on his way. I looked at my watch. We’d arranged to meet on the beach in 20 minutes and I needed to get on with this.
Had Ursula left the loch immediately, running off to tell my mother that I was leaving, she would in any case have found the drawing room deserted. It was too early yet for the afternoon assembly. Edith and Henry had been into town, each with their own mission; it had been so long since Henry had left the estate that he’d had first sight of the then eight-year-old one way road system. It was only blind luck that he didn’t blunder in on the scene at the loch when he got back. Ordinarily he’d bring the dogs down to the beach for a swim when they’d been penned in for any time, but he was tired and hot from driving and shops, and took them out the other way, a shorter greener way, through the planted arch that leads towards the folly and pond, over the stile and into the pasture, walking along in the tree shade at the edge of the field while the dogs ran about sniffing and peeing.
Edith, who was finding the heatwave exhausting, was having a nap. Mog was in her room at the gatehouse. Joan and Euan were on their way back from Glasgow with Pip and Izzy. Jet was in his cottage, which had been granted to him, at 17, on the same terms of domestic half-independence as Ursula’s; the minimum conditions he’d accept in order to stay in the vicinity of home. Jet was no longer speaking to his father, having, according to Euan, purposely sabotaged his future by doing zero work for his exams. Jet said he was asleep and didn’t hear or see anything useful.
Which leaves Vita and Mrs Hammill. They were in the drawing room together. Mrs Hammill was doing puzzles from her crossword book, using the tortoiseshell-rimmed glasses that hang around her neck on a chain, fingering the back of her hairline, saying to Vita that she must make an appointment for another permanent wave. Vita, who has poor circulation and feels cold almost all of the time, was dozing by the window, enjoying a warming patch of sunlight, which fell in window-blocked rectangles that flowed like draped cloths over the furnishings and onto the floor. Because she had her chair on a three-quarter tilt, Vita saw no one come up the steps, though she did hear footsteps above her, she said, running across the ceiling and running back a few minutes later. Of course, as she pointed out at the time, her not seeing an approach from the front wasn’t really significant anyway; it was just as possible Michael had come in the rear entrance. The doors weren’t locked during the day. She didn’t say anything to Mrs Hammill at the time, about the footsteps; Mrs Hammill was engrossed and didn’t appear to have noticed. Pity, as she would have known the time and Vita had no idea, couldn’t even guess at it. She didn’t think anything of it, the footsteps creaking on the stairs and on the floor above, the sounds of doors being opened and closed. Children were always running about, in and out: Izzy and her friends from the village, other children here to play tennis, she said. Mog and Michael had been playing almost every day.
***
Pressed for more details, Mog told Rebecca about the money and the picture: about my theft, on the day I disappeared, of two things, of £2000 from Henry, from a supposedly secret drawer in Henry’s bureau, and of a watercolour of Sanctuary Wood that used to hang above it. These things I am assumed by strangers to have taken with me when I left. The brown-paper parcel with the £2000 in it has prompted several interesting questions. What was it doing there?
“Isn’t it amazing how the opportunistic burglars of old folk are always finding great wads of cash in tea caddies and in sock drawers?” Christian Grant had said to Mog over their ill-starred dinner, having heard about the money and trying, unsuccessfully, to winkle more out of her. Christian, a widowed neighbour, was invited to ask Mog out by her mother, and Mog had only agreed because it was too embarrassing to refuse. It had been a stilted evening in a solemn restaurant, waiters outnumbering diners, cutlery noisy on china; there had been an inept kiss goodnight, Mog turning away and kissed on the ear. But he’s right, it is amazing that Burglar Bill has such luck with the old folk, when the rest of us—bank-trusting, ATM-savvy, plastic-trained—might only be able to offer him some loose change in a plant pot behind the kettle amounting to £4.55.
Here’s the family version: Michael ran up the stairs unseen. He went along the corridor to his room, where regularly he spent the night and where he kept some of his things. He may have taken some personal effects; the drawers were left askew, suggesting haste and upset, though as nobody knows what was there it’s hard to say what. He went into his grandparents’ bedroom and took the watercolour from the wall. He opened the secret drawer of Henry’s bureau, hidden inside what appears to be the moulding, and took a brown envelope containing £2000.
Except it wasn’t me. It was Alan Dixon.
9
When she arrived at the high school Ottilie was told to wait in the corridor outside the rector’s office. The rector: that’s what they call headteachers round here. It was a cold and blustery day, and having been summoned to see him, she was on a recognisably war footing; at her most disarmingly anachronistic, wearing a long fitted dress in a green that flattered her colouring and a dark blue velvet cloak, her hair elaborately up. The rector came round the corner holding a bulging buff-coloured file, and seeing Ottilie waiting, and her armouring, he was thrown off his stride for a moment; thrown sideways, but only for a moment. Tall, crop-haired, flat across the hips and shoulders, long legs an undefined presence in his trousers, Mr Dunstane looked like an ex-policeman and that’s what he was. He loped along with a swinging gait, big feet pointed slightly out, in his dark grey suit and school tie, his shoes and identity pin gleaming, and when he caught Ottilie’s eye he glanced quickly away again. The proffered hand was cool and dry.
Mr Dunstane spent a few moments arranging his jacket around his chair, easing his trousers free at the knees before sitting. His fingers flicked through the file. O
ne finger caressed his nose, up and down and along the line of the septum, up and down as he was reading. Then the file was closed. Now he was ready to look at Ottilie. He told my mother that I was to be asked to leave.
“What? Just like that? On what grounds?”
“I’m coming to that.”
“Because of the Coterie?”
“That and other things.”
“What harm does the Coterie do, can I ask?”
Mr Dunstane’s brow furrowed. His nostrils flared. “The Corrupt Coterie,” he said, by way of reply.
Ottilie couldn’t keep from tutting. “It’s just a reference,” she said impatiently. “For heaven’s sake.”
“A reference?”
“It wasn’t a name they dreamed up. Have you read the membership book? It was the name of a society at Oxford that a relative of his was involved in. It’s a sort of homage.”
“That’s what worries me.”
Anticipating this conversation, she had a copy of the book, skinny in its faded paper covers, really only a pamphlet, folded lengthwise in her hand, and she placed it on the table between them.
“You do know about the family connection?”
“David Salter. The soldier. Thank you, I have my own copy.” He took it out of the back of the file and opened it at centre pages that were heavily marked in yellow highlighter.
The White Lie Page 14
