The White Lie

by Andrea Gillies

  One sitting-room wall is composed entirely of old books, a vivid mosaic of purchases chosen for their bindings and illustrations, children’s books most of them. The shelving opposite has crowded line-ups of china, all of it oddments, spotted and floral: not only cups and jugs and plates but also kitsch souvenir pieces and what Joan calls granny china—porcelain dogs and shepherdesses. Ursula groups them into tableaux and tells stories about their encounters.

  “You mustn’t touch, though, so please don’t touch,” she said to Rebecca as Rebecca’s arm was outstretched. “If someone breaks something of mine I break something of theirs. It’s only fair.”

  Together they clomped up the steep wooden staircase in the gloom, through the stair door and into the bedroom. A cumbersome knitting machine sat at the centre of a small clearing, threatened at all sides by tightly packed racks of second-hand clothing, every cut and colour and type of thing, but with an evident favouritism for ball gowns, cocktail dresses and elaborate underwear.

  Izzy pops in sometimes to say hello and takes pieces of clothing on loan. In general Ursula doesn’t lend, so it’s remarkable that she lets Izzy borrow from the collection, though Pip thinks that it’s because she enjoys denying Izzy ownership of things. There may be an element of guilty conscience at play. Ursula disgraced herself at Izzy’s christening by remarking to a fellow guest and audibly to others that the ravishingly pretty baby swaddled in GreatGrandmother’s lace, blinking and cooing in her mother’s arms, would be unlucky and die young. Afterwards, in the drawing room at Peattie, Edith had at first tried the playfulness defence: Ursula hadn’t meant it; it was joke, though perhaps—she’d concede this—in poor taste for the occasion. That hadn’t convinced anyone, so then Edith said that Ursula hadn’t meant for Joan to overhear, and at least she’d had the good grace to look regretful about it.

  “You can try some of the things on, if you like, if you’re careful,” Ursula offered.

  “I don’t think we have time, but thank you,” Rebecca said.

  “Oh I see,” Ursula said flatly. “You should go, then. No point staying.”

  So much younger than her twin sisters, so much older than their children, Ursula has always seemed to me to be stuck between generations like a lift that’s got stuck between floors. In the old days Edith was assertive, should the subject arise, about her youngest daughter having been a normal happy girl, developing at the usual rate, until the witnessing of Sebastian’s death derailed her. Whatever the truth of that, it’s agreed that after his death she was an isolated child with pronounced aversions. Various other children came to play at intervals when she was young, attracted by the loch and the pony and the tennis court, but it never worked out. She and I found that we had this much in common. It’s one of the things we used to talk about. About that and about my mother. Looking back, it’s hard not to admire Ursula’s silence on the key question, throughout these conversations. It never occurred to me that Ursula would know who my father was, and so I didn’t press her on the topic. But she’s good at keeping quiet.

  It’s hard to know whether Ursula’s silence, which lasted for four years after Sebastian died, was a decision arrived at, made to step into line with her quiet parents, or whether it was, as Edith has always insisted, a physical manifestation of shock. What’s certain is that whether voluntary or not, Ursula outdid everyone in the quality and reach of her silence. If you spoke she’d just stare at you, her rosebud mouth pursed up with dislike. It was clear she was bright. It wasn’t that she didn’t know the answers. She’d respond in class by speaking through an interpreter, her desk-partner Sheena, a girl of bovine placidity who was happy to read out Ursula’s written responses. In any case, only three years of conventional schooling were managed and Ursula was taken out to be home-educated aged eight, when it was agreed by everybody concerned that she wasn’t coping, so she has never sat an exam, though Edith taught her the basics and reading taught her the rest. It’s reading tracked along the many dusty bookcases at Peattie—reading that has left her with what some might consider a lopsided knowledge of the world. Plants and butterflies, local geography, John Milton, the history of the English Civil War and of Malaysia: these are some of the things she knows a lot about. Later on it was Edith who bought her the knitting machine. It turned out to be an inspired gift. Ursula enjoys its laborious processes, its slowness and method, its steady productivity. She makes beautiful knitwear with complicated knots and patterns, sweaters and cardigan jackets made with feather-light wools spun finely, from chocolate-brown and buttermilk-coloured sheep, and sells them in the crafts shop in the town, the arts and crafts co-op that was once Tilly’s dress shop. Some of the items are left in their natural colours, but others she rinses in plant dyes; part of the garden at Peattie is planted with traditional dye-giving flowers, yellow and green, brick red and violet blue. She’s always found her knitwear-proceeds to be bountiful, despite the modesty of her income, because she spends almost nothing. She’s supplied with the day-to-day essentials and even some of these are rejected as unnecessary, a situation that has always made Edith happy, speaking deeply to her frugality.

  “And now I have to leave,” Ursula said, going to the stair door. “Come on, I need to go and so do you.” She was already down the stairs. “What did I do with my spade?”

  “You left it in the road,” Mog called down after her.

  Back on the lane, Mog lifted a hand in a wordless greeting to Alan, and she and Rebecca walked on. They were passing Jet’s cottage—noting the pizza boxes and the plastic bags spilling empty beer tins that were sitting by his bin, noting the faint thudding of bass—when George came out onto his doorstep holding a tea towel and called out his hello. There wasn’t any choice but to turn back, to be polite and make introductions.

  “You must be one of Henry’s sister’s family; you must be Ursa’s daughter.” George, beaming, thrust his warm pouchy hand into Rebecca’s.

  “She was my grandmother.”

  “Of course. I forget that I’m old. Come in, come in, won’t you, and have tea with us. I’ve just made a pot.” Alan had been staring at Rebecca’s heavy breasts throughout this exchange. “Alan,” his father said sharply. “Open the gate for the girls.”

  Henry always referred to Alan as the Dixon boy, though at this point the Dixon boy looked anything but boyish. Quite aside from the family’s doubts, the family’s entrenched disgust about his fathering of me, the family’s sometime belief that Alan had lied about my death and their simultaneous deep embarrassment about relying on his secrecy, the village was itself independently suspicious of the Dixon boy. Alan wasn’t liked or trusted, and concern about his continuing to live on the estate (sharing a bedroom still with his father, which wasn’t thought normal) had been mentioned more than once to Edith at the Bible group. Alan had been visited by the police earlier in the summer for an informal chat about socialising with minors, a visit viewed by a sizable local contingent as damning in itself. It was noted that the police came knocking at Edith’s door too. They had stood in her kitchen, looming tall and black-coated like angels of death while she fussed extraneously and mortal with kettle and teabags; they wanted to know if there was any truth in information they’d received that Alan had shown inappropriate interest in her daughters when they were under age, and that he’d fathered a child with one of them. It was a relief that it was only this: it was only to do with Alan and Ottilie, and Edith’s relief was obvious, at least to me. She assured the visitors, their dark presence in her light kitchen near-supernatural, that this was idle and unfounded gossip and that the village view wasn’t to be taken seriously. Here, there’s always a village view, one that’s achieved without apparent effort, and once this latest fuss had died down the view was that the allegations that had sparked it were probably bogus. One of the girls involved—described by Betty at the post office as a “well-known slut”—retracted her story pretty smartly. The second wasn’t even an allegation. A 14-year-old staying at the holiday cottage had writt
en a diary entry that her mother had read, that’d had her mother straight on the phone. Betty pointed out unprompted that the 14-year-old holiday visitor and the 13-year-old slut had been seen smoking together at the village playground, the Salter Memorial Playing Field.

  “Well now, there’s nowhere much to sit in here,” George said, passing through the kitchen, past the boxed-in staircase, beckoning the visitors to follow. “We’ll adjourn to the parlour and hope it’s fit to be seen.”

  George Dixon, local tennis champion in his youth and star turn at the long-defunct town dance hall, still wore the clothes of his prime, the same ancient brown suits. He wore this uniform even in the garden: a checked shirt and green tie could be glimpsed often under his overalls. He has a kind old face, weathered and tanned and bulbousnosed, and deep-set eyes, still that same sea blue. When I was a child I was fascinated by his bulky hands, their ingrained dirt, and by that scent he carried with him, like warm green apples in a paper bag. Green apple, mower fuel and hothouse smells seemed imprinted not only in George’s clothes but also in his skin.

  The parlour smelled of bacon and laundry. Remnants of sandwich remained on a plate. A clothes horse in the corner, freshly laden, emitted its laundry soap fug. There were magazines and newpapers in piles by the sofa, a black leather one too big for the room, an outsized television positioned opposite.

  “You’re here for the do, then,” George said. “Sit down, sit down.”

  “That’s right,” Rebecca told him. “I’ve never been up here before.”

  “Here with your dad.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well now, that’s nice. That’s very good. I’ll get the tea.”

  Alan looked as unkempt as ever. His formal black trousers had a dusty look about them, and were torn at the lower corners of the pockets, showing their white lining. Today he was wearing a grey sweatshirt with Basketball 1959 printed on it in yellow. His slippers were flattened at the back where his feet crushed them, his sock heels twisted over his feet. His comb-over had gone awry and was hanging longer at one side. Despite all this he retained his old attractive smile, his eyes identical to his father’s. The man that might have been looked out of them sometimes.

  Mog and Rebecca sat down together; the sofa was a soft enveloping thing and yielded to their weight, in fact kept yielding, tipping them back, something that gave Alan evident pleasure. He watched Mog’s face as she looked at the furnishings and personal effects in the room: it was a first visit and she was openly curious, or affected to be so, taking this opportunity for curiosity as a way of avoiding immediate conversation, hoping to wait for George to be intermediary before having to talk, and in the meantime adopting a sort of waiting-room demeanour. But it was Alan who was waiting, and his patience was rewarded. He saw her catch sight of the painting hanging on the wall opposite, above the TV. He saw her expression change. He heard the sharp intake of breath. He saw her fingers tauten on the sofa cushion. When she met his eyes, he was smiling.

  The drawing was done in charcoal and fleshed out in paint, its thin and sketchy watercolour skilful in suggesting light on the water and leaf patterns in the trees. The tomb was rendered in several expertly judged blocks, white and cream and grey, a darker grey lending shadow and substance; David’s effigy was implied but not stated. It was done from a viewpoint on the loch, showing the shoreline in the foreground, the willows grouped and weeping. Henry told me when I was still a child that I could have the picture when I was older. When I was very young I’d go and sit on his bed while he was dressing, and we’d talk about it and about the great uncle and his sacrifice. Henry said the sketches had been done from a photograph taken from the boat and that he had the original somewhere, that he’d look it out for me, although he never did.

  “I want something from them, son,” Alan said to me, during our conversation in the garden at night the evening before I disappeared, standing together in the soft hot dusk. We’d talked about his being my father, a stilted, disappointing exchange that humiliated us both. Then we’d moved onto safer territory, arranging for him to bring the money to the beach the following afternoon on the basis of a promised fee. “A small thing, a token thing; something symbolic to me,” Alan said, glowing with his fake sentimental piety. Perhaps he was thinking specifically of the painting then, as an additional symbol to the £200 I’d promised, though it’s unlikely he’d seen it before. More likely it was an opportunistic theft.

  George put his head round the door. “It’s got a bit stewed so I’m making a fresh one.” Then he was gone again, whistling. Alan picked up a fruit knife from a tea plate on the lamp table, cleaned it on the hem of his sweatshirt, then picked out an apple from a raffia bowl, a dark-red and shiny apple, slicing off a piece and eating it. A second slice was offered to Rebecca and declined. A small table was pushed against the wall, its extending leaf lowered and a chair at each side, and now Alan pulled out one of the chairs and sat on it, his chubby legs wide apart. They were old chairs, the kind that have vinyl seats dropped loose inside a wooden frame. Alan corrected his hair, smoothing it into position.

  “That picture,” he said, half turning and gesturing with the fruit knife, “has hung there for 13 years. You realise where it came from.”

  “It’s the one,” Mog told Rebecca discreetly.

  “She knows about it then,” Alan said, cutting himself another slice.

  “She knows about Michael leaving home, going missing, yes.”

  Would Rebecca pick up on this rather obvious warning? Apparently not. But Alan, in his sharp-eyed way, had received the hint and acknowledged it.

  “Does she now,” he said.

  “She knows Michael took the picture,” Mog clarified, with a look that pleaded with him for corroboration. “We thought he took it with him, when he left. But evidently not.”

  “I said to myself that we’d wait and see how long it would be,” Alan said, sorrowful and moral. “How long until somebody came to visit, to see how Dad was doing, to talk to Dad about the garden. It’s been too much for him for years and years. And nobody has come. Nobody.”

  He got up and opened the window, the knife still in his hand. The room was stale and airless. Mog’s hands were sweaty on the sofa cushion and she wiped them on the sides of her jeans.

  “My boy gave it to me. That and some of the money.” Alan returned to his chair. “There. I’ve surprised you, haven’t I? Bet you don’t know what I know.”

  “Alan, please.”

  “The money. You think Michael stole it. Not true. Henry offered it to him, paid him off, to get him to go away from Peattie.”

  “What do you mean, paid him off?”

  “Michael had found out that I’m his dad.”

  Rebecca’s eyes were like saucers.

  “Wait,” Mog said, putting her hands palm down on the coffee table and splaying her fingers. “You’re saying Michael was bribed to leave Peattie because he was going to tell people that you are his father.”

  “Course.”

  “That’s what you’re saying. That Henry’d do that.”

  “There’s lots about Henry you don’t know,” Alan said, shaking his head. Mog stood up. “Please sit,” Alan said to her. “At least do me the courtesy of hearing me out.” Mog sat down again. “My dad is ill, has been ill these 20 years. Heart, hips, and now his waterworks. But he keeps on doing the garden for your grandad, for the estate; the estate’s more important than he is! Nobody asks him to, you say. Supposed to be retired, isn’t he?”

  “Henry doesn’t realise,” Mog told him emphatically. “Honestly. Has no idea. He thinks he does it for the love of it.”

  “There’s no pension, you know. What do you get for a lifetime of service? Poverty, that’s what.”

  George was standing in the doorway with a tray.

  “This house in his lifetime and money at Christmas,” Alan said. “That’s right, isn’t it, Dad?”

  “Take the tray, would you, Miss Salter,” George said. “I’m
going back for biscuits. And when I come in again I want to hear there’s been a change of subject. That’s all I’m saying about it. I’ll talk to you about it later, Alan.”

  “Nobody comes to see him,” Alan continued, lowering his voice. “When Dad was so poorly last year, who came? We got a card at the hospital and that was it. Fruit and a card.”

  Mog didn’t respond as she could have done, that Alan’s presence at his father’s side might have been a deterrent.

  George was back, with Rich Tea fingers fanned out on a plate. “Right then. Cup of tea, Miss Salter?”

  “George, I wish you’d call me Mog,” Mog said.

  “He prefers Miss Salter,” Alan told her. “That being the case, where do you get off calling my father George?”

  “Alan,” George said. A warning shot.

  “I didn’t think. I’m sorry,” Mog exclaimed, flushing. “Oh, pet, doesn’t matter a bit,” George said. “We’re all modern now. How do you take it?”

  Small talk was made with George over tea about the party, and Rebecca supplied some well-intentioned Somerset colour, going into detail about her father’s illness, his treatments, his diagnosis. Alan didn’t say anything, but crunched on biscuits, one after another, running his eyes over various individual body parts of the visitors, his eyes lingering and returning. Then, cups drained and a second cup drunk down quickly, Mog rose from her seat, extending her hand towards George. “Lovely to see you, but we have to be going.”

  “Will you not stay?” George was disappointed.

  “We’d love to,” Mog said, “but we’re supposed to be helping. They’ll be wondering where we’ve got to.”

  “Dad’s invited but I’m not, of course,” Alan said bitterly.

  ***

  While Mog and Rebecca were sitting talking to the Dixons, Ursula was talking to Susan Marriott in the flower garden. Edith had taken Susan there in order to have a private conversation, one she’d been rehearsing in her head, backtracking on their last talk and blaming her nerves, blaming a vivid imagination put under stress, but this conversation was rendered impossible by Ursula’s arrival. Nor could she monitor what it was that Susan and Ursula were talking about, watching their body language, their facial expressions, their mouths, from her position at the hedge: Edith’s mobile had rung out just as Ursula arrived and it was Ottilie on the phone, wanting to talk about Saturday. Susan and Ursula were left standing together at the arched gateway, which frames a view of pasture land rising gently into low hills. At a loss for something to say, Susan commented blandly on the beauty of the scene, the loveliness of the cypresses in the middle of the field, the cows gathered beneath the lateral spread of branches, swishing their tails against the flies.