The White Lie

by Andrea Gillies

  I know: there’s no excuse. Kissing your aunt is bad enough. Does it help to know that it was Ursula who initiated kissing? All I can tell you in my own defence is that I was very drunk, and so was she. It wasn’t anything premeditated, when I brought a bottle of Henry’s cognac to the linen room that evening; I’d drunk there in secret for a while. Ursula was determined to join in and it didn’t occur to me to stop her. Having had little luck with girls (I sneered at them, entirely self-protectively), Ursula’s advance was an opportunity that I couldn’t quite talk myself out of taking up. There was no contact other than of lips.

  The boat itself was growing hot. Its fine metal rim, one that runs through its top edge, a thin metal-skinned frame indented into the wood, burned under the fingertips and caught searing at my forearms when they glanced against it. I had to change the subject, and so, in the casual manner that’s often the hallmark of the momentous, I did something that would change the trajectory of all of our lives for ever after. I said, “I owe it to you, Ursula, to tell you the real reason I’m going.”

  The truth is that I was peeved that she hadn’t been more curious. She accepts facts as facts, that’s how she is. And now she was quiet. But she was looking at me from under the hat, and she’d stopped the nervous hand-rubbing.

  “It’s because I know about Alan,” I said.

  She was surprised. “What’s Alan done?”

  She submerged her lower lip beneath her upper, her little nostrils flared, and she was frowning.

  “Alan Dixon’s my father,” I told her.

  ***

  Henry interrupted Alan’s story. “So he knew.”

  “He knew.”

  “But she told him, I thought. We all thought. She told him. That was the secret, surely. What was the secret, if it wasn’t that?”

  “He’d found out from somewhere else, but it was Ursula who told him that the rest of the family had known all the time, that his cousins knew and pretended not to.”

  “That was the secret?”

  “That was it.”

  Henry closed his eyes before continuing. “And then?”

  “Michael was screaming at her.”

  ***

  She opened her mouth and out it came, the information, in her usual deadpan way. Instantly I was on my feet, looming over her and making a lot of noise; I leapt to my feet accusing Ursula of lying. This was the worst possible idea. Her integrity is herself—her truth her integrity her self—all one and inseparable, and the loss of one is the loss of all irrevocably: something like that. To accuse Ursula of lying was to say the most hurtful thing imaginable. So Ursula was pretty aggrieved about my calling her a liar. I found that I had hold of her: I’d let the oars fall slack and had her tightly by the upper arms, her bones frail under my hands. Aware of their frailty, I let go of her abruptly, and she moved as far as was possible away from me.

  “Take it back and tell me it’s not true,” I said.

  “It is the truth, the truth,” she insisted, her little face thrust forward like a ship’s figurehead.

  “And you were told this, you but not me; my mother would never tell me but she told you? That’s fucking the fucking last straw.”

  “Nobody told me,” Ursula said, calmly. “Nobody told me; I saw them.”

  This pulled me up short.

  “I saw them,” she said again.

  I was aware that I was not breathing. The world had stopped. It was full of deceit and could no longer function. The world had become something that disproved its own existence, a schoolboy conundrum: the substance that burns through all surfaces and can’t be contained.

  “You saw them?”

  “I saw them talking about it. I heard him saying to her that she must get rid of it. I heard her say she might, but only by getting rid of herself at the same time.”

  Henry interrupted the account again.

  “Alan, you told Ottilie she must get rid of the baby?”

  “I’m sorry. It seemed like the best thing at the time. It was never going to work out between us, and she was so young.”

  “She was considering suicide? I’m so shocked by this, by all of this, I don’t know if I want to hear any more.”

  “You want to know what happened.”

  “Go on.”

  ***

  At first I was disdainful.

  “You saw them, you say. You were, what, nine years old and away with the fairies most of the time. You dreamed this, Ursula, you dreamed it.”

  I took one of the oars out of its housing, adjusting its weight in my hands.

  “What are you doing?” Ursula said, trying to move away a little further and finding she couldn’t.

  Attempting to shove her into the loch: this I admit to, though with saturating embarrassment. I am in no position to judge her. I, too, know the impulse that is dared by the self to the self, that comes from a dark cave in the mind unchallenged: the impulse acted upon and regretted even as it’s being done. The first prod was a warning, but then I prodded her a second time and harder. The look on her face as she lost her footing, as she grabbed onto the oar’s end only just in time to save herself—that’s a look I will never forget. Horror, and terror, but worse, much worse, a terrible disillusionment: seeing that I, knowing her aquaphobia, having known it all of my life and its cause, could threaten to tip her into the loch, here out in the deeps, Ursula who fears nothing like deep water and drowning, Ursula who cannot swim a stroke. It must have been fear that empowered the answering shove that she gave to the oar, the full weight of her body and something borrowed beyond it. The end I was holding slipped out of my grasp and pushed deep into my ribs, and I went over the side of the boat.

  I swam around her three or four times. I could see Alan on the shore, his outline shifting and reforming in the haze, light spangling bright on his pale head, a figure in black and white in a coloured landscape, waiting patiently to hand over the money, one hand poised rigid across his brow so as to see us better through the glare. I put my hands over the edge of the boat and pulled myself up a little. I reached in and got hold of Ursula’s leg, and she went at me with the oar and missed. I swam round to the other side and pulled myself up again, intending to board. And that’s when she hit me.

  “The oar was swung at him,” Alan said, “and at the very last possible second, seeing it coming, he ducked. He moved his head to one side and put a protective hand across it. It was the other hand that she hit, the one that was holding on. And that was how his wrist got broken. That was why he left without the car.”

  I went down as if pulled from beneath. I saw the light, its dusty brown slick on the surface of the water, from the wrong side, as if from a place through the looking glass, and the wavering silhouette of the boat, the mathematical beauty of its base, its perfect lines and symmetry, its corners and its roundedness. I saw Ursula bent over the side, the hat, her long hair, her girl-shape looking down at me, the outline rippling. I went down and down in slow motion, falling through brown and then into black, swallowing water, my eyes wide.

  I feel it as well as see it, when Alan tells his tale. I grow tired of sinking. Adrenaline kicks in and I twist off the vertical descent, invoking all the strength in my hips and in my legs. I turn out of the vertical with a merman’s shoulders and tail-kick, still grasping the wrist, arms withheld and feet together, with strong and sinuous kicks that flow taut through my body like a wave, away from Ursula and towards the shore. I am ready now for anything. I am reborn. I will go south on a train and find my life; I’ll disembark in an ugly town and go deeper into the forest. The ancient woodland is a thing of staggering beauty: every kind of tree shoulder to shoulder, deep planted and spread, a nation of trees of every colour and language. I take these into myself, imprint their imagery on the back of my eyelids, my idea of my eyelids, and am alive again. I see the spring sun through the branches and thick falls of orange leaves. I have been there, to a village among wooded hills, to a little brick house in the clearing. I go south to the
life I might have had. I meet Elspeth one day in the village shop, and we meet again at the library and walk together for hours, and seem to know one another well, which is an odd thing and bewitching. She tells me her own sad tale of family proving to be the enemy. Each bitterness goes on to sustain and feed the other, but then, when the twins are born, it begins finally to soften and fade. Their wavy auburn hair, the mischief in their green eyes, their big gap-toothed smiles, their sturdy girl feet: how I miss them. I imagine their growing up into sad-eyed beauties, now that I’m gone, now that I’ve come back to Peattie. I don’t know what happened, but it came to an end. I went to bed with Elspeth one summer night, the thin sheet cast aside, our four brown limbs criss-crossing, and I didn’t wake there again.

  The truth is that Alan is owed a great debt. Which is an odd way to think of Alan, but life is peculiar and death more so. It is Alan who brings me out of the loch, injured and angry but alive. I can feel my wrist aching, each time he tells it. Each time he tells it I hear him, even here in another country. I feel my wrist aching, the pain radiating through my shoulder and into my neck: I have lived it, and more than once. So I can tell you that it’s when I arrived, stumbling and ungainly onto my knees and awkwardly onto my feet, no-handed in the shallows, holding onto the throbbing wrist, and came up onto the beach that it began properly to hurt.

  Alan had the money in a bag, a brown-paper sack like a sandwich bag that had been folded down at the top many times, much used and wrinkled from previous excursions, the old folds shiny in the buff of the paper. His expression as he approached was all fatherly concern. “Son, has she hurt you? Let me look at it.” He stretched out his arm. I was cradling the damaged wrist in the palm of the other hand, my eyes half shut and my breathing slowed. I was aware that he was talking to me but the pain was still intense, though it had peaked and was beginning to ebb. I was breathing it out, as Tilly taught me when the migraines struck; she was a fellow sufferer. I felt him take hold of the forearm, his first touch gentle, seeking permission to proceed. I felt him take it and bind it tight in one of his big handkerchiefs, knotting the ends. The tenderness of his ministrations was all too much. I was aware that he stepped back and was saying something about needing an x-ray. He used the word son again. I opened my eyes. That’s when I brought back my good arm and hit him. He wasn’t expecting the blow, and so his face betrayed an immense and unguarded surprise, hit hard across the cheekbone by a misplaced punch, falling back on the grit on his arse. Falling, astonished, then looking up at me and bellowing, “What for?”

  I stood over Alan, blood pumping hard in my ears. “You’re getting off very lightly,” I told him. “You complete and utter .” The words failed to match the gravity of the thing. Instead there was a feast of emphasis. “You are not my father, Alan. You are not my father, Alan. You are not my father, Alan.”

  Every time I come here, I have him. I have him at last. After all these impotent years.

  “You are the king of the losers, Alan,” I tell him. “You are the king of the fucking losers.”

  These words never feature in Alan’s story, unsurprisingly. Not least because they’re my own elaboration.

  “So that’s how your cheek got bruised,” Henry said. “Not by the boat. By Michael on the shore.”

  “Michael on the shore,” Alan agreed.

  “But why?”

  “Angry with me for not telling him, for not speaking up. Angry that I’d agreed to do that.”

  “Agreed with whom?”

  “With Ottilie. Agreed with Ottilie.”

  Alan was knocked to the ground, and got to his feet, he said, doing it in such a way that he managed to keep one eye on me, afraid that I would hit him again. He stood rubbing at his cheekbone, which was red and purpling already. A little blood was trickling out of his nose and he searched his trouser pockets for the handkerchief, before having to resort to patting at his nostrils with his sleeve.

  “To hell with it,” I said, more to myself than anyone. I extended my good hand towards him, the better hand, though it was aching hard in the knuckles. At first he thought I wanted to shake, extending his own hand, embarrassed by my not reciprocating. “Give me the money,” I said to him.

  “He gave me £200 of the cash,” Alan said to Henry. “Do you want it back? I feel I ought to give it back.”

  “No, no,” Henry said. “You keep it, Alan.”

  Alan said that he was touched to discover that I’d only taken the painting so that I could present it to him. “Once he’d calmed down,” Alan said, “he gave it to me, symbolically, he said, and with regret that he was leaving, with the hopes that we would meet again.”

  “Odd,” Henry said.

  “He wasn’t an ordinary boy; he felt everything deeply. He had a strong sense of justice. Of injustice.” There were, Alan added, many expressions of regret about the way the family had behaved over the last 20 years to the father of the heir. Henry didn’t want to dwell on these sentiments and asked him to get on with the story.

  Michael lost a shoe in the loch, Alan said, in his struggle to live. I shrugged off the remaining shoe, prising it off with the other foot, and lobbed it as far as I could get it. This, Alan said, was the shoe that he came up with; he knew where to look. Now I was barefoot and I was dripping and my bare feet were pricked by the grit, and I needed to get away from there. Alan said he must go and rescue Ursula; Ursula who remained utterly still, a painting of a girl in a blue dress and a white hat, sitting forlornly in a rowing boat, dwarfed by loch and hill scenery, the outlines of the picture pulsing and jagged.

  He removed his shirt, a white shirt that had seen better, whiter days, its cuffs dotted with scarlet blood, and draped it over a rock, and I watched him, saying nothing. His stomach and chest were pale and soft, his flesh puckering around the navel where the belt of the trousers dug in. He removed his trainers, putting them neatly paired beside the shirt, by the rock, by the black day-sack. He slipped his trousers off and stood uncomfortably in old-fashioned Y-fronts, and went up onto the jetty and dived into the water.

  “You didn’t wear your shoes in the loch, you didn’t lose them there?”

  “No. Michael took them.”

  Once Alan was in the loch, I picked up his trainers and I took them to the car. I didn’t have spare shoes in the bag I’d packed. I left my wet clothes in a pile on the gravel.

  Henry interrupted again. “What happened to the clothes?”

  “I disposed of them. Stowed them in my wardrobe. Then took them in a bag to the dump.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “I was going to give them to you. But then Ursula said what she said, and I agreed with her.”

  “She didn’t see him. Why didn’t she see him on the beach with you?”

  “She was in a sort of trance. You know how she gets.”

  “Go on.”

  “I didn’t mean to, you know. I want you to understand that. It came out of my mouth and surprised even me.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You’ve treated me like shit. The heir’s father. All of you. Like shit.”

  “Even so. Even so. It’s unforgivable.”

  “No, Mr Salter. I’d say we’re about even.”

  “How can you say that? You can’t possibly believe it.”

  “I’ve said I’m sorry. There’s not a lot else I can do.”

  “But why, why did you do it, such a wicked thing?”

  “I’ve told you, it was Ursula. Once I’d let Ursula tell it the way she thought it happened, without contradicting her, it was impossible to put a stop to it. It had a life of its own.”

  ***

  I put on the newest things from the top of the bag, clothes Ottilie hadn’t registered as mine and wouldn’t miss: this wasn’t an intentional aspect but it’s how it turned out. She hadn’t noticed my newest purchases: new jeans, a new shirt, a brown leather jacket. The wrist made dressing very slow; every little contact and pressure hurt like an abscess bitten down
in a mouth. Alan was looking back towards me, and if he noticed that it was his shoes I slipped my feet into (tight, but they’d serve) he didn’t show that he’d noticed. This, he said to Henry, is when he got the chest pains: they’d begun just as he was climbing into the boat. He had to sit for a while. He sat with Ursula until the pain subsided and until I was long gone.

  Thanks to Alan and his lie, I had the things I needed to make the journey. Everything else I was leaving behind. I didn’t want any of it, any of them, none of it, and I said this aloud like a mantra, into the heat of the open car boot, the stifling plastic aroma. I took a carrier bag from the car that had a newspaper in it and a packet of cigarettes, and I emptied them out onto the back seat. I stuffed the wet clothes into it, the jeans, the t-shirt, the underwear, and left it by a tree. The family could think what they liked. Let them puzzle. Let them decide. Let them ponder. Let them debate. And let them wonder why the car was still here, the boot up, doors open, abandoned and inexplicable. Let them wonder why it was all still here, the carefully packed bag, the capsule life, the clothes, the books, the notebooks with their infantile musings—things written yesterday and on previous days, when the world and I had a different relationship to one another. All I needed for the afterlife, I had: Alan’s wretched shoes, the leather jacket I couldn’t bear to leave, the clothes I stood in, and crucially, most crucial of all, £1800 in a brown-paper bag. Briefly I entertained and then dismissed the idea that this was something else I should leave behind. It was Henry’s money, after all. My lip curled in disgust at the memory of Henry and his dossier of likely fathers.