The White Lie

by Andrea Gillies

  “It’s perfectly possible,” Ursula said, turning away as the door was closed between them. As Edith returned to sit with Susan in the relative warmth of the window space, she could hear Ursula singing in the corridor.

  “You know, I suppose, that both Gordon and I have been married before,” Susan said, biting into an over-browned Christmas tree-shaped biscuit, one made with Ursula’s favourite cutter, and dampening it in her cup. Edith shook her head, trying not to look too eager.

  “He has two grown-up sons in England. I had a daughter but she died in a car accident.”

  “Oh no. I’m so sorry.”

  “It was a long time ago.”

  “We lost a child,” Edith said. She put her coffee down hurriedly as it began to slop. “I’m sorry. It was an even longer time ago, I’m sure, than . . . I’m sorry.” She blew her nose on the handkerchief from her sleeve, one with Tilly’s initials embroidered on it. “But I’m sure you know. You will have been told all about it.”

  “I was told.”

  “About Michael also, I imagine. His leaving us.”

  “About Michael also. You don’t need to say anything more. Really.”

  “No, no, I want to talk about it. But everyone avoids the subject. They think I want to avoid the names being spoken. I have to honour that observance. The time hasn’t ever come, to downgrade the level of observance.”

  “It’s because you don’t talk about it.”

  “Sebastian’s name hasn’t been mentioned between Henry and me in private for more than 35 years.”

  “That’s a long time.”

  “Neither of us is ever going to go first.”

  “Sometimes it’s easier to be frank with strangers. I can recommend a group. In the town.”

  “Not possible, alas. Everybody knows us. Everybody knows about it.”

  “Even so.”

  “I’m still so angry with Henry,” Edith interrupted her. “I’m so angry with him.”

  “It’s normal to blame,” Susan said.

  “He wanted me to get pregnant again, you see. He wanted to have another child as quickly as possible. After Sebastian. He wouldn’t talk to me about Sebastian. All he was prepared to say to me, well, it was a question, over and over. Was I prepared to get pregnant again, hope to achieve it quickly, immediately, hoping for another boy? I didn’t, I wouldn’t, and once I’d convinced him that I wouldn’t he had nothing else to say to me. We didn’t have intercourse again after that.”

  They were interrupted by Ursula, who opened the door and put her head around it. “Is it time?”

  “No. You know it isn’t. Go and cut some flowers for in here, would you? The roses have died in their vase.”

  Ursula’s head withdrew and the door was closed decisively.

  Susan said, “Listen, if we’re going to be frank with one another, there’s something I’ve been wanting to tell you.”

  “Oh?”

  “I don’t know if you know. This is awkward.”

  “Best just to be straight, then.”

  “Gossip. In the village, that Michael is . . .”

  “I can save you the awkwardness. That he’s dead. Dead in the loch.”

  “You did know. I’m glad that you know. I’m relieved.”

  “The minister has already been round with the news. Could barely hide his excitement.”

  “You know, then, that someone in the village has been to the police, in the town.”

  “I know, yes. One reason I’m at such a low ebb.”

  “Henry knows?”

  “About the police? No. It was me the policeman found at home. When he telephoned. I said Henry was away and promised to discuss it with him. Then I went to the police station and said that I had discussed it with him—which was true, but not in the way they assumed. Then, today, I went to see Thomas—Thomas Osborne, you know him, I’m sure.”

  “I know him a little. Nice man.”

  “But when I got there I didn’t say anything about it. I don’t know why.”

  “What will happen?”

  “I went into the police station and showed them his letter. Michael’s letter. When he left us there was a letter.”

  “I’d heard that.”

  “And then I told them something that might be a lie.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said that he phoned us, two years ago.”

  “But he didn’t.”

  “Somebody called and didn’t speak, but I could hear them breathing on the other end.”

  “They didn’t speak?”

  “No. But I was sure it was Michael.”

  “Perhaps it was.”

  Edith didn’t respond but looked anxiously towards the door.

  “Will you tell Henry? You’ll have to tell him.” Susan looked very certain.

  “Can we talk about Sebastian? It’s Sebastian that’s on my mind today. I want to talk to Henry about him, but I can’t.”

  “What is it that’s stopping you?”

  “Thinking. Thoughts I’m thinking. They prevent me.”

  “What kind of thinking?”

  “Thinking that his quietness is something bottled up that I don’t want to unbottle. There’s a sort of restfulness in not talking. We don’t have to face it. We don’t have to get so stirred up, or have to recover again from that.”

  “It’s the opposite with us. Gordon thinks I oughtn’t to bottle and tries to discuss it, but you see words are the last thing I want to apply. It’s really only prayer that comes anywhere close to resolving something that otherwise is never ceasing, that doesn’t stop, round and round; how I might have prevented it, how it was really all my fault, how I’ll never get over it. Because you don’t, do you? Not really. The loss of Julia is just as fresh today in many ways as ever.”

  “Prayer doesn’t help me.”

  “No?”

  “I persist, but more out of superstition about stopping praying than anything.”

  “We all go through these phases,” Susan said blandly, patting Edith’s knee. “Do you have enough things that fill the days? I’m sure you must; Peattie’s such a big house and your family are all around. I find that a strict timetable works best. Mine is strict from 6am to the half-hour. If I have too much thinking time, I’m floored. I descend.”

  When Susan smiled she looked rather like a nun, an escaped 60-year-old nun who was unused to wearing ordinary clothes. Her pleated blue skirt and pale blue shirt might have been borrowed just for this occasion. Her scooped-back hair, pepper and salt, looked as if freshly released from the wimple, her cheeks pink from convent scrubbing.

  “Working at home helps,” Susan said. “I can do that all day and all evening if I have to. And cleaning. I love housework. It’s important not to brood.”

  “I didn’t know that you worked. What is it that you do?”

  “We all work, Edith, out in the world, you know,” Susan said, gently satirical. “We have an online marketing business. Marketing people’s holiday homes.”

  I can’t imagine that Edith knew what “online” means—there were no computers at Peattie—and I imagine her notion of “marketing” had to do with shopping and fruit stalls. But still. She was nodding intelligently. Then she said, “Do you know who it was?”

  “Who it was?”

  “Who went to the police.”

  “No, I’m afraid not.”

  “That’s a pity,” Edith said.

  Susan stood up. “I must press on, but it was good to see you.”

  Edith said, “Susan, there’s something I want to tell you. I want to tell you something. Something important. Do you have the time?”

  “Of course, Edith,” Susan said, sitting down again. “What is it?”

  When Susan had left, Edith walked down the drive and into the village. She’d meant to go and sit in the church for a while, but when she got through the door into its heavy, stone and polish-scented quietness, she felt repelled by the act of confession that she’d planned: a confession
that would have taken place under Protestant rites, whispering her fault in her head, in the Salter family pew. The deity slipped in and out of view. God was there in the stained-glass window, God’s son in action, extending his forgiving hand, sweeping it Jedi-like over the heads of the populace, but when she tried to focus on Him she found that He had dissipated into colours. She hurried out again into the churchyard. Tilly she could always talk to. Edith sat on the marble surround of the grave, its little fence marking out Tilly’s small territory, and spoke to her in a whisper.

  Edith asked me when I was young if I would sit with Great Aunt Tilly sometimes, because she was a lonely old lady. This was during the period in which Vita and Mrs Hammill did all their travelling. I complied, expecting to be itching to get away, expecting it to be a martyrdom, but we became great friends and I sat with her often after that, me with a book and Tilly with her sewing. She was the stillness at the centre of the Peattie world, everybody else rushing and busy around her. She liked to talk as she was making her quilts. In old age she was given to making oracular announcements, though in her youth she had been famously the opposite, someone keen on the facts and scathing about the transcendental. It was the death of her sisters in a car smash that brought about the change; that, and the burden of looking after her mother so diligently, giving up her shop and taking Jo’s place; she was Maud’s carer until the end of Maud’s life. I only ever knew that changed and oracular Tilly. She’d say to me, not looking at me, concentrating on her slow and careful stitching, her thoughts advancing at the same stitched pace, that the life of the house had come to an end, and that it was a natural death and though it was right to grieve, it wasn’t healthy to keep grieving. Really, she was talking about Edith and Henry, how they’d been since Sebastian died. She’d seen that I was puzzled by their not talking to one another, the abruptness of their interactions. It was Tilly who was responsible for sowing the seed of the idea in the family that Edith and Henry were united in their suffering. Tilly talked to me often about growing old, also. “You think age is about losing your youth, about loss; people make that mistake. The truth of it is different. It’s about constant additions, adding on. The child is still there, intact beneath them all, down at the heart of me; still here.” Her sinewy hand would go arched to her breast. “The trick is not to let it be obscured by everything that comes later. All that separates the two of us, Michael, is days.”

  She’d give me advice on managing the family, on fitting in. Good advice, most of it. She was dismayed by my tendency to argue with Edith about God, in whose non-existence I had a vocal and unshakable faith. “Just let her have her literal heaven,” she’d say, chiding softly. “Sebastian lives there, you see.”

  The years that followed Sebastian’s death were years of religious observance for Edith. She talked to God about her troubles. A big part of the estrangement, hers and Henry’s, was this continuing, escalating piety of Edith’s and the fact that a third party had been admitted to the marriage, albeit a celestial one. I don’t think Henry had ever taken it seriously before, Edith’s (then) complete and literal faith in God as a person, someone who could advise in a human crisis. Henry made it clear from the first that he didn’t want to talk about the accident with anyone and especially not with Him, not even on the therapeutic or Pascalian basis that it couldn’t hurt and might even help. Edith annoyed him once by telling us all in his presence that Henry’s church was the hillside and his solitude a kind of prayer. His strategy after Sebastian’s death was that he kept the world at arm’s length. You might imagine that it was difficult, maintaining this detachment over so many years, but in my own experience it isn’t. It becomes habitual. You start out owning the thing as a policy, one that you assume can be redrafted, and end up owned in turn. The flayed heart grows a new and tougher coating, and a membrane grows up that proves impermeable. Old ways of thinking and of loving die away. Days lengthen into years and no easy reversal is any longer possible.

  Tilly said to me that we are all disappointed but that the chief characteristic of being human is to know that and keep going. Trite, you might think, but I don’t think so and didn’t then. I was filled with admiration and awe. I must have been quite young; I was only 13 when she died (after a long last illness, bravely borne), from the cancer that pared her away. She barely left her chair in the final few weeks, a worn brown velvet one with a long seat that’s still in the drawing room; she was helped into it in the morning and out of it again at night. Her sewing became obsessive and continuous towards the end, almost as if so long as she was stitching, death couldn’t take her. I can see her now and smell her lily-of-the-valley scent, and also the fabrics—the squares of imported cotton that smelled of dye and brown paper—and the smell of her old clothes. She’d reverted by then to her teenage uniform of wool skirts and thin sweaters, not only in style but in fact, wearing the actual items retrieved from the attic. I overheard her more than once urging Henry to give up Peattie. “It mustn’t be the most important thing, Henry. How can you put it first? It’s just a house. Let it be flats or a nursing home; it doesn’t matter.” It mattered to my grandfather, though. In 1900 the estate still owned the whole village, but now there were only four houses left to sell—the terraced cottages on the loch road. Henry would never have parted with those while he still had a marketable kidney.

  ***

  When she got home from her churchyard visit, Edith went to her bedroom and lay on the bed for an hour and a half, staring at the ceiling. She went to the kitchen to make coffee and found Mog there, sitting at the table with her journal, pen in hand and not moving, looking dreamily towards the window.

  Edith sat opposite her and said, “Tell me how you are.”

  Mog’s eyes made their adjustment from internal to external attention. “I’m fine. I’m basically fine.”

  “Really and truly?”

  “It’s been hard. I admit that. But nothing worse than hard, than an ordinary sort of hard, and in the scheme of things immensely banal. Everything about my life, in fact, seems to me immensely banal, my successes and my problems equally.”

  “Hard—you mean to do with this man, this boyfriend?”

  “Not Johnnie. It’s all about what to do—oh dear, big cliché approaching—with my life.”

  “Right. Yes. Right.” Edith’s face was almost unbearably sympathetic. “Go on.”

  “Why Edinburgh was such a failure and what to do next. What it is, the thing that I should be doing.” Mog knocked the heel of her hand against her forehead.

  “I wouldn’t presume to advise,” Edith told her, “but could I just venture the suggestion, and suggestion is the wrong word; I’m not advocating anything. Could I just introduce the idea that perhaps marriage might be a way forward?”

  “Marriage to whom?”

  “There are lots of suitable men,” Edith said. “At least once you get over the idea of falling in love with one of them.”

  “You sound just like Vita.” Mog made a great show of rubbing the back of her neck. “Muscle tension,” she explained, before leaning forward onto the table and cupping her face in her hands, the skin over her cheekbones pulled gently back, a tic I know well, one that serves to mask emotion. “You can’t force these things,” she said.

  “No.” Edith wouldn’t take Joan’s usual tack, that effort is required, that clubs must be joined and that one must give off the right signals, show willing. There would be no acid remarks about presentation.

  “For now at least it’s all about work,” Mog said. “And some very basic skills of self-knowledge. Izzy has been a big help. It wasn’t a failure, in Edinburgh; it was just a bad fit. It didn’t suit me. I need to think about what suits me.”

  Edith said nothing but her eyes were fixed on Mog’s face.

  “At what point do people do their thinking?” Mog asked the used coffee cup, tracing her finger around its rim. “That’s what I find interesting. I must be slow. It never occurred to me until two weeks ago that I could have a dif
ferent sort of life.”

  “Well, you’re very welcome to stay here for as long as thinking takes,” Edith told her.

  Joan came into the room just as Edith was saying this. She didn’t look happy.

  “Mother, you forget sometimes that my children have a home. They’re not orphans. Their home is just down the road at the gatehouse. You remember the gatehouse?”

  “Of course, Joan, but we love to have them and they’re so helpful with everything.”

  “I blame you, Mother,” Joan said bitterly, standing with her arms crossed. “Mog should be at home. She should eat and sleep there. She should be asking me if it’s okay to have this gap year of hers. But no. She’d rather stay here. And who can blame her? Here where nobody challenges her.”

  “I’m not a child,” Mog pointed out.

  “Oh, Joan,” Edith said.

  “Jet doesn’t talk to me, you know, nor to his father. He doesn’t need to. You gave him a house of his own when he was 17 years old. You give them all this opt-out from me and from their father, always have.”

  In the evening, Edith went to the Bible group. Not knowing of Edith’s antipathy to the new minister, Joan had invited him and his wife to the party. Edith hadn’t spoken to anyone about this but she’d developed an almost immediate dislike of the new incumbents of the manse: the pompous red-bearded minister and his sarcastic Australian wife. Kind, bookish, bicycle-riding Thomas Osborne was much more to her taste. He’d call round at the house often, coming in with his cycle clips on and flat cap. He had wispy hair and uneven teeth, beaming at her, keen to chat, completely at home in that bracing priestly way with the raw material of life, frowning and wry over her expressions of failure. He’d come into the kitchen and take a packet of ginger biscuits out of his jacket pocket like a magician, saying “Ta daaaa!” every time as if it were a new joke, which made Edith smile. She found herself smiling, thinking of this flourishing of biscuits inappropriately in the middle of a discussion about St Paul’s ideas of love. The urge to talk again to Thomas rose in her and wouldn’t be silenced. Again and again it circled her mind, its quiet repetitive imperative. She couldn’t tell Susan and not Thomas: the idea was appalling, and carried with it an inarticulate pang of disloyalty. Thomas must know. Thomas must be told everything, not just about Michael, but about the other thing, the thing she hadn’t ever dared tell Henry, the thing she referred to as the lie. Edith left the group before the end, blaming her early departure on a just-remembered promise made to one of the grandchildren to be somewhere else.