The White Lie

by Andrea Gillies

  Edith had been persuaded by Thomas to dance, albeit in a highly self-conscious way, moving stiffly and watching the door for sightings of Henry. Vita watched them, banging her stick to the rhythm, Sandy’s fiddle singing its mellifluous up-and-down song. His son Angus, arriving late from Inverness thanks to a delayed train, joined in mid-reel on his accordion. Mrs Hammill was circulating, in her gracious-hostess way, welcoming people to Peattie and looking even now a little the worse for wear. Joan was now hovering close by the waiters’ table, supervising and looking very thin in a silvery knee-length dress, one that looked as if made out of fish scales. Jet had appeared for five minutes to gather up other sons and loners and had borne them off with the promise of better music, though one of them had already returned with one of Jet’s t-shirts, opening it out on the food table and stacking its central area efficiently, before gathering it up and bearing it carefully away again.

  When Pip and Angelica went into the kitchen for glasses of water, they found Ursula there. They made a striking-looking couple, standing together at the kitchen door: Pip immaculate in probable Armani, Angelica serene and trim in the dark green dress and heavy jet jewellery that had been Henry’s mother’s. Ursula had wedged herself into the corner between the stove and the door. She would say only that she hated Johnnie, that she’d sent Johnnie away.

  “How did they end up anywhere together alone?” Pip asked rhetorically. “What about Mother’s blasted rota?”

  “She’s been with Edith for most of the time,” Angelica said, “having refused to hold your mother’s hand, or sit with Vita. But then the minister came—”

  “Thomas Osborne? He’s the ex-minister.”

  “Yes—Thomas Osborne came and she went off with him, and so I took charge of Ursula. Then Edith came back and took her from me. But the next thing I saw, Edith was dancing. I assumed Ursula had been handed over to someone else. And we all thought Johnnie had gone.”

  “Where is he now? Where’s Johnnie now?”

  Ursula didn’t respond, but looked ill and clammy, her eyes pink. She looked cold.

  Angelica put her hand on Pip’s shoulder. “Gently, gently. Drugs, do you think?”

  “Dunno. Possibly. Get her something warmer to wear.” Ursula was clad in an ill-fitting black lace dress—too long, too broad on the shoulder—that came from Tilly’s wardrobe, that Tilly had worn to Ursa and Jo’s funeral. It swamped Ursula’s little frame and she’d hitched it up at the waist with a man’s white dinner scarf, a heavily fringed scarf that she’d knotted into a belt. Angelica offered her shawl, folding it around Ursula’s shoulders. Ursula gathered it tight in her small hands and dipped her chin into its folds.

  “Something up, that’s for sure,” Pip said, taking her pulse and not meeting resistance. “I don’t know what to do for the best.”

  Ursula had fixed her eyes on Angelica, and Pip, cottoning on, asked Ursula if she would like to talk to her privately. Ursula nodded and Pip went out of the room, saying that if things got worse he wouldn’t be far away, and winking as he said so. He went out and closed the door five-sixths shut, and stood behind it, listening.

  He heard Angelica saying, “Come and sit down.” Ursula slid into a chair and Angelica pulled another closer to it.

  “Tell me,” Angelica said.

  “I’m sorry,” Ursula said. “I’ve said sorry to God. I didn’t mean to.”

  “What have you done to be sorry for?”

  “He tried—” Ursula faltered. Angelica waited. “He touched me.”

  “Touched you . . .”

  “Johnnie.”

  Angelica lowered her head the better to hear. “Johnnie what?”

  “We had sex together.”

  “You had sex together.”

  “And after that . . .”

  “What happened?”

  “He put . . . he tried to put his hands . . . inside.”

  “Inside?”

  “Inside my clothes.”

  Angelica was flummoxed but, to her credit, tactful, merely asking what she could do to help, although she looked physically thwarted, her body language ripe with misfirings, going to hug Ursula and then desisting, and all at sixes and sevens. Ursula said that she’d like some hot chocolate and Angelica leapt up, glad to be directed.

  Pip, outside the door, was having trouble deciding what to do next. It was going to be difficult to hunt down Johnnie and accuse him of anything. Ursula couldn’t be protected, not at 42, from such misunderstandings, after all, arising from her misconstruing the kind of relationship men wanted with her and being offended by them. An attempted skin contact, leading on from intimacy that might have appeared introductory—that attempt didn’t in itself amount to an assault. Not in Pip’s mind, at least. His thoughtfulness, poised between rage and bafflement as he leaned against the door jamb, was manifesting itself physically, in the loosening of limbs previously stiffened for retribution, and now, as Angelica heated the milk, in the attention paid to chewing down his thumbnail.

  The telephone rang, and Pip went back into the kitchen to answer it. He lifted the receiver and said, “Peattie House.” A voice on the other end said, “Taxi for Brand.”

  “Brand?”

  “Mr John Brand, it says here. Been waiting ten minutes already—can you tell Brand to come down, mate?”

  Pip went to the window and saw the cab, its lights bright and refractive in the downpour—the rain had returned—and its windscreen wipers swishing. He saw Johnnie hurrying down the steps with his overnight bag, one hand pushed inside and up into the chest of his coat.

  Edith came into the room, pushing the door open with her hip and half-turned away, talking to other people, invisible people who presented only as disembodied voices. She continued talking to them, half in and half out of the door.

  “Ursula’s feeling unwell,” Pip told her.

  “I’ll just be a moment,” Edith said to the corridor. “Sorry. Just a moment.”

  She went to Ursula. “I told you not to drink it. It isn’t lemonade. Best go and have a lie-down next door in Granny’s room.”

  “Could you?” Pip asked of Angelica, and Angelica shepherded Ursula out, settling her under a blanket on Vita’s chaise longue.

  “What’s going on?” Edith asked Pip, as soon as the kitchen door had closed behind the two of them.

  “Johnnie trouble, we think.”

  “Johnnie’s just been and said goodbye to me. You won’t have heard the hoo-hah. Johnnie and one of the dogs. You’ve missed all the commotion, if you’ve been in here long.”

  “Johnnie and one of the dogs?”

  “Johnnie got bitten by one of the dogs; he’s gone off to the hospital to get it stitched, and then he’s going to stay in town overnight, he said, and go straight home from there. So he’s gone. Henry’s mortified. He and Mog are rounding the dogs up and shutting them in the study.”

  Not all of them were happy to comply. They’d spent a pleasant evening, wandering and petted and vacuuming up crumbs, fed by solicitous children on filo-pastry parcels.

  “He got bitten by a dog?”

  Angelica came into the room. “Who got bitten?”

  “Johnnie,” Edith told her. “All he would say about it was that it was one of the bitches.”

  Pip said nothing but directed a wide-eyed look at Angelica. Angelica looked back, her hand over her mouth.

  “He wouldn’t hear of having it cleaned up,” Edith’s said. “Wouldn’t even let me look at it. Poor Henry’s completely mortified.”

  Pip went and found Mog and then, because the rain had stopped, they went into the garden, over sodden grass and around puddles to stand together at the fountain, which hasn’t worked for well over a decade and has become almost a garden. Even when it was functioning, I always thought there was something actively unpleasant about it, about its giant concrete fish centrepiece, twisting its body like a leaping salmon, its mouth and conduit gaping.

  Mog didn’t think events as significant as Pip did. Pip w
as sure. “I’m telling you: Ursula’s a virgin. There’s no doubt about it.”

  “But she doesn’t lie.”

  “No you’re wrong.” Pip threw his hands up. “She does, you see. She’s always getting things wrong. I’m not in any doubt about this. She feels about sex like she feels about water.”

  “Well, maybe that’s the point—that they’ve become linked because of Michael, but only since Michael.”

  “We never talk about this,” Pip said, sitting on the fountain’s damp edge. “It’s the one thing, all these years, that we’ve never said. It’s the last taboo.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Michael and Ursula. How disgusted we all were. How secretly disgusted, despising him, thinking he was guilty of a kind of abuse. Gran saw it that way, certainly. It helped excuse Ursula’s hitting out, this idea that he’d been sexually abusing her.”

  “What? That’s ridiculous.”

  “It isn’t.”

  “Sexual abuse? Hardly that.”

  “That’s what they thought.”

  “Well, I never did. I didn’t. It didn’t even occur to me. Never has, to see it that way.”

  “But it didn’t happen, you see. She thinks she’s had sex with Johnnie.”

  “Well, maybe they did.”

  “No. I’m absolutely positive they didn’t.”

  “So?”

  “Michael. Leaving him down there, in the loch unretrieved. The fact has to be faced and admitted to. In part it was a kind of punishment.”

  Izzy and friends were oblivious to the crisis, having decamped to the ballroom with the CD player. They’d established a disco there and had thrown open the doors to the terrace, despite Euan’s protests that this was a quiet zone and they didn’t want to hear that godawful racket, thanks very much. Izzy, having replied with her tongue stuck out, a brief dismissive raspberry, went into the drawing room to gather support and get more wine. Beauty has natural authority. She walked into the room and she had their attention.

  “Everyone. Hello, by the way, if we haven’t hello’d already. Lovely to see you. I’m here to say that there’s boogying in the ballroom. Anyone who wants to shake their thing, and I can tell just by looking that that’s most of you, please follow me.”

  A steady trickle of the younger generation of guests followed, most of the children and most of the remaining single men, including Christian Grant. Soon he was dancing with elbows cocked, partnering Izzy and looking absurdly hopeful.

  21

  The impromptu bar in the drawing room had been worked over pretty thoroughly, and its trays had acquired a dishevelled look. Tops had detached from bottles and bottles had emptied and spilled: a lake of a sticky whisky-and-cream liqueur had slopped across the cloth. It had got to the stage of the evening in which it was important to hold onto your glass; the table presented no fresh goblets or tumblers, just other people’s empties. So when Alan arrived the first that most guests saw of him was a view of a man’s back, a man standing at the table working his way through the glasses, angling one after another patiently and equivalently into the light, trying to spot tell-tale signs of a residue or signs of a mouth having left its greasy print on a rim.

  Alan was wearing his father’s old dress shoes, which were creased decisively at the point where the foot bends at the toe, marking their original owner’s many hours of ceilidh dancing. His trousers were of their customary waiterly black, their customary slight shortness. His white shirt was big-collared, his black tie tied into a fat knot. His jacket, pale grey with a darker raised stitch, was way too large, falling well below his hip, stretching wider than the shoulder, its sleeves rolled up to the elbow.

  Behind him, a small group had gathered: Edith, Joan, Mrs Hammill, Mog. Alan seemed oblivious to their presence, as well he might be; the music and its accompanying stamp of feet masked all the talk going on around him. He continued working his way through the glasses and, finding none of them clean, took one and refreshed it on a handkerchief, one he brought from his trouser pocket, producing and unfolding it with a flick of the wrist.

  “There won’t be a fuss,” Joan said. “One of us will simply—will take him by the arm and steer him out.”

  Mog said, “What, like a bouncer?”

  “Don’t be glib,” Mrs Hammill cut in sharply. “What do you suggest?”

  “What I’d suggest is leaving him alone: he’s already pretty drunk.”

  Mog was right. All the signs were there. Alan’s posture, the self-control evident in the definiteness of his gestures, his steadying himself on the table edge: all of these were giveaways.

  “I’m not having him here. He’s not invited and he’s not staying,” Joan said, her voice petulant.

  Without waiting for a response from the group, she stepped forward to stand alongside Alan at the table, pretending to join him in searching through the glasses. It was clear from Alan’s turning to look at her, turning 45 degrees, the suddenness of it and his look of surprise, that she was saying something unexpectedly direct. Alan didn’t answer. He poured himself a glass of wine, emptying the dregs of three abandoned bottles before adding brandy to the mixture and downing his cocktail in one swallow. Then he put the glass back among the others and walked away, threading his way around people, out of the drawing room and into the picture gallery, ploughing through the middle of the dancers.

  Joan returned to the others. “I’ll see to it; you stay here. We don’t want a scene.”

  Alan went through the lower part of the gallery, down the double step, running his hand over table tops and chair backs and lightly over the topmost surfaces of chipped porcelain and tarnished bronze. Joan saw him go into the hall and out of the main door, onto the terrace and down onto the drive. She returned to the drawing room and told the waiting group that Alan had gone home and that it was best, at least for now, to leave things as they were. As she was saying this, Alan was going back into the house. There was nobody in the hall or at the reception table. Nobody was there to see him making his way up the stairs to the family bedrooms, silently and with moderate haste in his father’s old shoes.

  The corridors going off in both directions were badly and dimly lit, and the many dusty orange bulb-shades cast a sickly light. Alan paused, looking in each direction before deciding on left. He was about to move when he saw Rebecca come out of her room, pulling the door carefully shut and smoothing the back of her dress. She turned towards the stairs and saw Alan standing there. Her reaction was immediate: she opened her door and went back inside.

  Alan went to the door and spoke to her through it.

  “What was that? You’re going to hide in there until I’ve gone?”

  No answer. But at the other side Rebecca was leaning as heavily as she could, her back firm against its panelling and her legs angled so as to provide further buttressing. Her phone was in her hand.

  Alan turned the handle. “Are you leaning against the door? I know there’s no lock. There’s no lock on any of them.”

  “How do you know that?” a muffled voice asked.

  “What have they told you?” Alan asked the door. “It’s all lies, you know. Lies and then more lies to cover up the first lot of lies. Covering themselves. They’ll say anything.”

  Rebecca’s voice said, “I forgot something. I’ll be out in a moment.”

  The door made a subtle noise, sighing as the weight was removed from it. Alan went to lean on the wall opposite.

  After a while, Rebecca having failed to emerge, he went forward again and opened the door, putting his head around it. “Knock knock!”

  Rebecca was sitting on the edge of her bed, texting someone. She jumped to her feet.

  “Alan—what do you want?”

  “I just want to talk.”

  “Wait. I’ll be out in a minute. I told you.”

  “Righto.”

  “Alan. I’ll be out in a minute. I’m not going to talk to you in here.”

  “Sorry.” He backed away and clos
ed the door behind him.

  When she came out, saying, “What is it Alan? I have a headache”, the attempt at casualness commendable but her unease obvious, he directed her—“Please, just for a few minutes”—to the chairs that were grouped on the landing. They came from Sri Lanka when it was Ceylon and when Salters were interested in Ceylon tea. They are made of a fine gauge of cane, tightly woven and padded out with dense horsehair cushions. Alan sat and Rebecca seated herself opposite.

  “I have something to tell you,” he said. “A story, a true story; the truth about the Salters. When I’ve finished, all I ask is that you tell them that you know, you tell them what you know. We’ll see what happens after that.”

  ***

  When Alan came down the stairs again, alone, he had the misfortune to see Joan, catching sight of her just at the same moment that she saw him. She was standing in the hall saying goodbye to a group of people about to leave, handing out coats and umbrellas and complaining about hired help, about help being entirely the wrong word.

  “Alan, stop,” she said as he strode past. “Can you wait, please, I need to speak to you.”

  Ignoring her challenge, Alan went out of the door and down the steps and kept walking. Joan pursued him, standing on the terrace and shouting at him to come back, warning him that he would have to leave the estate, calling after him that things had gone too far, that they’d reached the end of the road. She couldn’t pursue him further than the terrace. There had to be a feigned appearance of a falling-away of concern, a putting back into proportion, while she assured the guests who’d followed her out that it was nothing, it was only trouble with the staff, and apologised for losing her temper. Once they’d left she went back into the house and up the stairs two at a time, saying aloud to herself, “I bet he’s been rifling. What has he been looking for? What has he taken?” and “Well this is it, this really is it, he has to go.”