The White Lie

by Andrea Gillies

  “You think that it’s beauty, but actually it’s incredibly brutal,” Ursula told her, beginning to dig out a nettle patch.

  “Well, that’s a pity,” Susan replied, an artificial brightness obvious in her voice.

  Ursula, alert to the tone, stared hard at her. “All these animals, in all these fields, they’re all being fattened to be killed,” she said. “It’s Hansel and Gretel, really.”

  “That’s a rather dark point of view for such a beautiful day.” Again, that same dangerously hearty tone.

  Ursula, dressed in a Victorian shirt, baggy bloomers and black wellingtons, leaned on her spade, her long hair falling forward.

  “Baby lambs taken from their mothers and killed for eating. Have you seen them, the lambs, when the lorry comes to get them? Trying to get back to their mothers, bleating in panic?”

  Edith had appeared now, propelling Susan gently away, a guiding hand at her lower back.

  “It isn’t beauty, it’s obscenity!” Ursula called after them, bending and ripping out a clump of achillea and holding it up like a sword.

  ***

  Later, fixing up strings of coloured lights along the passage that connects the hall with the rear stairs, having talked and talked about Alan the father and Michael the son, Rebecca’s supportive stance became a little bruised.

  “You don’t see it from Alan’s point of view, though, do you?” she said suddenly. The change of tone took Mog by surprise. “It must have been terrible for Alan, keeping quiet about it for all these years. Poor Alan.”

  “Poor Alan?” Mog said, dismayed. “I don’t think so. Why do you think Ottilie wouldn’t ever talk about it?”

  “What—you don’t mean rape?”

  “It’s possible. Or something in a much greyer area, in between.”

  “Is there an in between?”

  “Of course. Acres of grey.”

  “What? What are you saying? Of course there aren’t.”

  “Calm down. And pass me the hammer and another hook. In fact, can you take the steps for a bit? They’re making me dizzy.”

  They changed positions and worked on in silence a while. Then Mog said, “But it was hardly a secret. We didn’t tell Michael; nobody told him, but it wasn’t a secret. It wasn’t like that. It was something we protected him from. Hardly the same thing, is it?”

  “Of course it is.”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  “I can’t believe you.” Rebecca got down off the stepladder. “I can’t believe any of you would do that. I’m not often lost for words, but . . . Jesus, Mog.”

  “What?”

  “‘Protected’ is the wrong word. That’s all.”

  “It didn’t feel that way.”

  “Are you really telling me that all of you knew about Alan, even then, 13 years ago?”

  “What’s clear is that Michael knew. That’s what Ursula told him. Now we know for sure.”

  “Ursula told him?”

  “Yes. Just before he disappeared. She hasn’t ever told us directly that that’s what it was. She said that she told him a secret, one she couldn’t tell the rest of us. But that’s what I was saying. It wasn’t some great secret. She knew that we knew. It doesn’t make sense. And the timings—the timings make no sense at all.”

  “I’m still not clear. When did you find out about Alan?”

  “My mother told me. When I was 16. More than half gleeful. Horrible. Swore me to secrecy.”

  “And you abided by that?”

  “Course not. Calm down. Not because I promised, but because it would have made everything worse.”

  “I don’t understand you. Really. How could it have been worse?”

  “Michael would have been a lot more unhappy, knowing it was Alan Dixon. That was our decision, mine and Pip’s. It wasn’t right but it felt right. Easy for you to judge, but it felt like the right thing, to us.”

  “And so what you’re saying is that you spent hours and hours with Michael, listening to him obsessing about his dad, who his dad was, and you didn’t tell him?”

  “I didn’t tell him.”

  “Well, I’m sorry, but that’s just despicable.”

  “I know! I know that, Rebecca. Do you think I don’t know that?”

  “Now you’re shouting.”

  “Ursula told him that we all knew, that we’d known all along. That was the secret. Our lying to him. That must’ve been it.”

  “No wonder he never came back.”

  “Just shut up! Shut up! You don’t know anything about this. It’s way more complicated than you think.”

  “Tell me.”

  Mog excused herself, saying they’d finish later, and went to find her sister. Izzy was in her room on the phone, but cut her call short, seeing the look on Mog’s face, and together they went to the linen room to talk, somewhere that Rebecca probably wouldn’t think to look.

  “I seem to have spent the day talking about Michael,” Mog said.

  “And?”

  “As I was talking I began to believe Ursula. That it was suicide.”

  “It’s possible, I suppose.”

  “It’s hard to imagine what it was that could have been so final. How on earth could a person give up on life at 19?”

  “Brain chemistry probably. A serious depression. A failure of imagination. Not being able to imagine the future as anything good.”

  “How could Michael’s imagination fail him? This is Michael we’re talking about. I don’t get it. I don’t. Even if life is boring and crap, even if it persists for ever in being boring and crap, the point is that even then, notwithstanding general crapness, I know that close to the moment of death I’ll be pleading for one more day. Another swim in the loch in summer.”

  “A last swim with Michael.”

  “What would you choose?”

  “I’m hoping the day hasn’t happened yet. I don’t have one I’d want to repeat, not yet.”

  “Really? That surprises me. You and your glamorous life.”

  “You don’t really buy into all that, I hope. Smoke and mirrors, my love. Hype and blisters. And fundamentally just cold, hard and merciless commerce.” She looked intently into her sister’s face.

  “You were in love with him, Mog.”

  “We were friends,” Mog told her. “But those are the days. Not just because of him. Because of childhood and summer. You know.”

  “I know. I think about it a lot.”

  Mog got up and rearranged the blanket on the shelf, and said, “I struggle, Izzy; I’m struggling.”

  “I know.”

  “How do you not? How do you—what’s the word?—I don’t know what the word is.”

  “We all struggle, you know. In our own way.”

  “You don’t seem to.”

  “With me it’s different. It’s like this: don’t trip me up, don’t turn my head, I have to keep going forward.”

  “Like Pip.”

  “Like Pip, I suppose. He says we’re like sharks. Got to keep moving or else we—or else we die.”

  “Drown, you were going to say.”

  “It happened when Pip and I talked about it too. It hits sometimes. It still has the power to hit.”

  ***

  I can see them, the two of them on their imaginary last day. A last fish and chip supper eaten out of the paper, salty and greasy, and beer drunk out of paper cups. The two of them sitting on the end of the jetty, water running down their hair and beading on their brown arms: Michael and Mog, their wet backs and shins, their same olive skin turning gold, their same teeth white in the pinkish dark in the evening of the hottest day of the year. Not saying much. Mog kicking her legs out in a slow and happy way. This was the plan for that last evening, the thing that should have happened, the thing that didn’t. Sometimes a thing that has been imagined this many times becomes a memory and is indivisible.

  15

  I must have died on the way to wherever I was going. I froze to death in a ditch on a warm summer’s night. I b
lundered off a cliff in a deserted part of the coast and lie in the undergrowth, undiscovered. I was run over by a car in some other part of the country and proved unidentifiable. I was abducted and murdered while hitch-hiking and lie in a shallow grave in some other woods. Over the years more and greater doubt established itself about the circumstances surrounding my death in the loch, the circumstances or just the plain fact of it. Something must have happened to me, it was decided, some ironical second death, and the circumstances of this have been a ripe source of imagining over the years, of speculation and counter-speculation. I survived to establish a life only to perish in an accident or of disease, and they never heard back. I contracted a rapid cancer and, denying having any surviving family, died before I could forgive, my rage proving tenacious, my rage having mutated, and was cremated friendless in some southern memory garden.

  Pip was the first to express the opinion in the group that I was still alive, and others followed, though nobody ever said so in front of Ottilie. Perhaps Michael’s alive, he said, and perhaps we need to forgive him for that. Perhaps Michael’s still living this new life, cut off from the past. He imagined it sometimes, Pip said. Alan and Henry imagined it better, over the weeks and months and years. Alan initiated. Once Alan had recanted, and produced—for Henry’s ears only—his alternative version of the day I’d drowned, supposedly drowned, he seemed to relish the dreaming-up of the possible details of my life. Michael achieved his ambitions, Alan said; he was sure of that, he felt it and was sure. He’d become the woodcutter—the forester, he meant—woodcutter was such an out-of-date word.

  “Living in the woods, making a small and perfect living—that’s how he described it to me once,” Henry said. “He wanted to see how little money he could live on, he said. He wanted to try and make a life that was about other things than things. That’s what he said to me.”

  “You’ve told me this already.”

  “It made me angry with him.”

  Perhaps there were children, Alan said, born to the woodcutter and the woodcutter’s wife. Yes, Henry said, children who ran wild and barefoot in the woods. The wife would be beautiful, Alan said; she was bound to be beautiful. It was Henry who came up with the name Elspeth, and Alan who added that she was green-eyed and auburn-haired. She wouldn’t be especially tall, Alan said, but with legs long for her height, and creamy skin. Henry said that they didn’t need to go into so much detail as that. He added that there would be two children, twin girls, who loved the woods like their father did. He named them Isla and Catriona, so Isla and Catriona they were. When Henry described our house, our little brick house with blue shutters, and the woods around our house, and the girls running down to the lake with the dog, it was as if he had been there with me. Alan and Henry gave me the seeds for the life of my survival, and I’ll always be grateful.

  The first of their conversations, the important conversation, took place four weeks after I disappeared. We’re not talking about something that took place recently, not remotely recently, but 13 years before Henry admitted to it.

  It began like an ordinary day: as ordinary as days could be expected to be, barely a month after I’d gone. Henry had engaged in a mammoth tidying of paperwork, filing and settling accounts, and so when Alan knocked at the office door he found Henry sitting behind his desk, papers and receipts spread around him, the unpaid bills on their customary spike. Ordinary summer weather conditions had reasserted themselves and it was a cool grey day; the woodburner gave off a low and flickering orange glow and the faint aroma of chestnut. Henry was wearing a black fleece zip sweater (he wore some item of mourning every day), a pen tucked behind his ear. Alan was enrobed in blue overalls, grass smears spread across the chest, and brought with him an acrid whiff of lawnmower repairs. Henry had no way of knowing how important the conversation was going to be and greeted Alan vaguely, distractedly, his finger placed on a line of typed figures, before looking up.

  Alan launched straight in.

  “I need to tell you something, Mr Salter. I have the painting. At the cottage. I have it.”

  Anybody but Henry would have said immediately, wouldn’t have been able to stop themselves asking the reflex question, “And the money?” But Henry didn’t. Alan felt the thing not said vacating its expected place, and felt he must fill it. “I don’t have the money,” he added.

  “You have the painting.”

  “Michael took the money with him. I didn’t know what to do about the picture. He gave it to me, you see. And it didn’t seem right to bring all that up at the time, if you see my meaning.”

  Henry’s face softened into sympathy. “You hang on to it then, Alan, if Michael gave it to you.”

  “That’s very kind.”

  “It doesn’t matter so much to me, having it I mean. Not as much as the idea that Michael might have wanted you to have it.”

  Alan began to look agitated.

  “Do you want to talk to me about Michael?” Henry asked him.

  Alan couldn’t keep his hands still. One foot began to judder off the floor. He jumped up from the chair and went to the door.

  “I told a lie,” he said. He had his back to Henry.

  “A lie?”

  “About Michael.”

  “What?”

  Alan half turned towards him and spoke to the wall. “About that day. Ursula was wrong. I don’t understand it. Why she thought Michael had died. I agreed with her because. Because.”

  “What do you mean? I don’t understand you.”

  “Michael—he didn’t die that day. He left. He left Peattie. Michael isn’t dead.”

  Henry didn’t speak. He stared at Alan, eyes bulging. Alan turned fully now and leaned back hard against the door, his hands tucked behind his back, his head dipped onto his chest. He didn’t meet Henry’s eyes.

  “I’m so embarrassed,” he said.

  “Michael isn’t dead,” Henry repeated.

  “I heard what Ursula said and I couldn’t stop myself. I wanted to punish her, you see. It hurt so bad. Nobody understands how bad.”

  “Punish Ursula?”

  “Punish Ottilie.”

  “I don’t understand you, Alan. You’re going to have to start again. Tell me again. You’re saying that Michael survived and—and—what you’re saying is that he came out of the loch and he left Peattie, and then you came back here and told us he was dead.”

  “It wasn’t me.”

  “But how could you do this? This terrible thing?”

  “All I had to do was agree with her. With Ursula. I just agreed with her. I’m used to agreeing; I do what I’m told. It was only afterwards that it hit me. Afterwards I was ill. You remember I was ill.”

  “You wanted to punish us. By telling us he was dead.”

  “I didn’t tell you he was dead. Ursula did. You’re not listening.”

  “I don’t understand how you could do this to us. How could you do this to us?”

  “I’m telling you now, aren’t I? I’m telling you now. It can all be put right.”

  “Tell me. Tell me what happened at the loch.”

  Alan began to tell him. Alan was in the wood from the beginning, and saw and heard everything. Some of what he said was even true.

  ***

  Ursula and I were out in the boat.

  It was a perfect summer day, cloudless and windless. The far end of the loch had dissolved into haze, migrainous and twitching, its greens and blues fluid and dancing. The hills had a parched and wheaty look, the greens subdued into grey, all colour bleached and faded. The heat was strong on my hands and head. I don’t burn but Ursula’s arms had a lobster-pink tinge, an indistinct pink stripe along the contour of the bone.

  Ursula and I were rowing towards the deeps. I was rowing and Ursula was fidgeting. She was rubbing her hands together, fingers poised over her knees. Her lower legs were drawn under the apron of the dress. She looked down into the floor of the boat, avoiding seeing the water, her head tilted away from me, barely visible beneath
the hat.

  “Henry knows that I’m going,” I said to her. “But only Henry.” I knew this would get back to Edith. I seemed to be intent on upsetting her, too. Getting Henry into trouble, certainly.

  “He gave me some money,” I said. Now all I could do was make things worse.

  Ursula’s studied calm was aggravating. “When did he give it?”

  “He didn’t physically give it. But he offered it to me, knowing I was leaving.”

  She didn’t ask how much. That’s not the sort of thing that interests her. She was quiet, chewing at her lower lip, picking at its dry skin with her teeth. The rhythm of the oars in the water was all I could hear. The turn and the sigh of air, the faint squeaking of oar in oarlock. The breaking-in; the idea of deep, deep water’s uppermost membrane being disturbed, its plastic meniscus, though all that lies beneath lay untroubled, and then the flick of the oar as it emerged, the brief contingent scattering, its brief wet gasp; the spray and then the reunion. This was the soothing background music to our conversation.

  “You and I belong together,” Ursula said. This couldn’t but irritate me.

  “You’re wrong,” I told her. “This has just been . . . it’s a passionate friendship.” The truth is, not even that.

  He was appallingly arrogant, that boy, but tactful enough to desist from putting her right on one or two things, technical things about adult human relations. I wonder whether she will ever understand what sex really means, whether she’ll move on from her belief that it’s the insertion of tongues into mouths when kissing. On this basis, kissing me was the first sex she’d ever had. Ursula has a sheltered child’s idea of things, having never been given the information by anyone. I’m not sure why that is. Was it Edith’s belief that Ursula was certain never to have sexual relationships, thinking it unlikely (or worse inappropriate) in someone she’s always considered, secretly, to be profoundly disabled? Or was it the fear that Ursula would take sexual pleasure whenever and wherever she could, uninhibitedly, applying her logical disdain to objections?