The White Lie

by Andrea Gillies

  Feeling this way and this strongly, why would Ottilie go to Euan the night before he married Joan? Only because of Joan’s mistake, her grave mistake, cancelling the long-planned 18th-birthday party, insisting that the birthday had to be the date of the wedding. When Ottilie protested Joan told her that she didn’t care what Ottilie thought, that Ottilie was a spoilt cow who’d had everything her own way too long, that Ottilie was a vain prima donna, that she, Joan, was looking forward more to leaving Ottilie behind than to any other facet of her marriage (the plan, then, being that Euan would work at an English college or else overseas). It was only after this that Ottilie decided to exercise her power. And so it was, having said nothing in response to this outburst, having been accused, in Joan’s parting shot, of being an ice queen, a cold fish who cared for nothing and no one but her sketchbooks, that Ottilie contrived to be alone with Euan. She joined him in the bathroom at the end of the corridor, an unsolicited visit timed to coincide with Euan’s, preparing for his stag night in the village. Ottilie came into the bathroom uninvited, to find Euan dressed other than for his shirt, and shaving. She shut the door behind her and came to him, dressed only in a silk robe that once was Tilly’s.

  Sometimes a pact can be achieved without any obvious negotiations taking place, without a single word being spoken, and this was one of those times. The whole house party narrative thread: that was always wishful thinking on Henry’s part. He knew, or thought he knew, what the rest of the family imagined: that Alan was the probable father. Nothing could be said to Alan about this, of course. Not at the time. As Henry said, if Alan thought himself the father, Alan would in all likelihood assert his rights. It was vital to keep quiet, to focus on the house party. Meanwhile, Ottilie was subjected to a sequence of inquisitions. She wouldn’t tell, but nor would she deny Alan. Vita wrote an account of a conversation she had with Ottilie at the time, and when I went to her she had looked out the old notebook and had found the page, the book shaking in her shrivelled old hands, and handed it to me, pointing at the relevant paragraph.

  “Just tell me this one thing” I said to her. “And I promise you that it will never go further. It will never be spoken of outside this room”

  She looked at me, her beautiful sad eyes.

  “I’ll tell you what I think,” I said to her. “I feel disinclined to agree with Henry about this dossier of his. Tell me and I won’t say a word to him, or to anyone, ever so long as I live. It wasn’t at the house party, was it?”

  She shook her head and she left the room in tears, and that’s when it became clear to me that Alan Dixon was the father of the child.

  The rumour that Alan was the father got to the village. Ottilie has always assumed that Euan was the source, the original source way up river of the news, and that seems most likely. Alan, teased and congratulated at the pub, waited for his chance and eventually got his opportunity to speak, stopping to talk to Ottilie as she went by with the dogs one morning, heavily pregnant and lovelier than ever.

  “Apparently I’m the father,” he said.

  “Apparently,” she answered, her face giving no clue. “Why’d you tell them that?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Well, that’s what they think.”

  “I’m aware.”

  “But you and me, we didn’t do it.”

  “You have a short memory,” she said to him. “Don’t you remember our night of passion, the night of the wedding, under the white moon in the wood?”

  Alan looked as if he was having to reconsider. “But we didn’t do it,” he said again.

  Two days after this a lucky encounter brought some enlightenment. He’d gone down to the loch in his lunch break and as he approached through the field, heard raised voices and realised that it was the twins. It was an easy matter, standing at the edge of the wood and listening; they were too busy arguing to think to look for eavesdroppers. Alan saw what value his being the father had to Ottilie, how deeply the idea angered and disturbed her sister, how passively Ottilie let her sister become more greatly angered and disturbed. How by turns thunderstruck and furious Joan was, and vitally how very impotent. Joan’s impotence was crucial. Joan raged and demanded and Ottilie was impervious. By the time he returned to the cottage, Alan had convinced himself that it must be true, that whatever the facts it was going to be true. Mixed in with his apprehension there began to be sparks of euphoria. He envisioned a deal being done with Henry: a quiet marriage, a modest settlement. Later, reflecting more coolly on things, when it was obvious that Ottilie wouldn’t agree to the marriage, the settlement still seemed likely. If Ottilie had decided that he was the official father of the baby, there would be rights and responsibilities. And there would be status. Or so he thought.

  ***

  Pip never got the written explanation that Henry promised him. Instead, Henry wrote to Edith, a letter written during his period of seclusion, a letter that Edith has refused to show anyone else. In it, Henry expressed a wish that he be buried in the family mausoleum alongside Sebastian. My mother, in her many rather one-sided dialogues with me in the wood, has expressed the worry that what Henry wanted, what Henry specified, was that he be buried with Sebastian and that Edith should be interred elsewhere. Whatever the case, the letter had a huge effect on Edith. I’ve seen it, as a physical object, its seven or eight pale blue sheets twice folded, and have glimpsed Henry’s handwriting, characteristically small and perfect across the pages, as even as if typewritten in a handwriting font. I haven’t read it but I have seen it. Edith takes it out of its envelope and reads it almost daily. Information trickled out from its contents piecemeal.

  “Henry wants to be laid to rest in the mausoleum” was the first thing that was announced, the only thing that was said about the letter on the day it was opened. The mausoleum, of course, was full, the bodies stacked in a format rather like a sinister limestone chest of drawers, so one of the Victorians was removed to the village. The point was made that perhaps a second 19th-century Salter should be moved to make way for Edith to lie alongside Henry, but Edith didn’t want to discuss it. This is what made Ottilie suspicious.

  The second of his wishes Edith went directly to Ottilie about. She arrived unannounced at the cottage the day after Henry’s funeral, wearing black and grey versions of her usual clothes, the wide trousers, plimsolls, overshirt, beads. She knocked on the studio door and when Ottilie answered, paint-spattered in dungarees, Edith told her that she’d come to talk about Michael, that it was something important and they had to talk. The studio was in its usual cluttered state. Ottilie had to clear a pile of sketches and opened books, musty clothbound books of 19th-century engravings laid one upon the other, taking them up with care from the sofa cushions to make room for her mother to sit. She settled Edith there and opened the cupboard that proves to be a tiny kitchen of sorts, revealing sink, microwave and kettle. Nothing much was said while Ottilie made the coffee. Edith looked around her, at the mylar stencils pegged up on a line to dry, at the shelves of stones and shells, at the meths-scented jam jars, lids long gone, from which brushes poked of different gauges and at different angles, beechwood and oxblood; at the boxes and stacks of paints and charcoals. Every wall was shelved above the dado rail, and every shelf was fully laden. Beneath the work table and pushed hard to one side a large cardboard box contained folded-up bedclothes, used ones, decrisped and unsquared in their folding and flopping, a pillow placed on top and a glimpse of striped cotton pyjama.

  “You’re living here?”

  “Of course.”

  “No, I mean, you’re living in here in the studio, sleeping here?”

  “Sometimes I don’t like to be in the cottage.”

  “You sleep here on this sofa?”

  “It’s fine. The house can feel too . . . too housey. It makes housey demands on me. A housey life of things and doings. I don’t like it. It’s good to be surrounded by the work. Life’s here and ongoing. When I am awake in the middle of the night I can get on with it. It�
�s cosy. Like a child’s playhouse.”

  “When did you last sleep in your bedroom?”

  “It’s been a little while.”

  “But—”

  “Mother. Please don’t fuss. It’s all as I wish it. What did you want to say to me about Michael?”

  “Your father wrote me a letter.”

  “I know.”

  “He wants Michael to be found. No matter the consequences for Ursula.”

  “I know, about Dad wanting Michael retrieved. He told me. When I went to see him.”

  “He told you. When was this?”

  “When he was living in the bedroom. He telephoned me. He wanted to talk and I said I was in the middle of making a print and could I call back, and then I abandoned what I was doing and drove up to Peattie.”

  “He didn’t tell me.”

  “I told him I was happy for him to get his wish.”

  They looked at each other.

  “Is this all you’ve been waiting for?” Ottilie asked her mother. “Dad making a move? Someone to break the silence?”

  “There’s something sacred about last wishes.”

  Edith sipped repetitively at her coffee, her eyes vague.

  “How do you feel about it?” Ottilie asked her.

  “I need to get away from her,” Edith said, as if it were an answer.

  “From Ursula.”

  “Yes.”

  “But why, after all these years?”

  “I can’t talk about it.”

  Ottilie climbed her mahogany library steps, borrowed one weekend from Peattie and never returned, so as to reach the highest shelf, and brought down a box from among a stack of tupperware. The lid was removed and she offered her mother lemon cake. Edith broke a small piece from one of the sponge fingers and ate it, looking up enquiringly.

  “I cook, in the middle of the night,” Ottilie explained, “if I’m not in the right frame of mind for working. And there are biscuits. I throw most of them away because I don’t really like to eat them. I just enjoy making them.” She took a tin down from the bookshelf, adjusting the books that were leaning against it, repropping them so they didn’t fall. Within were cherry-topped pale rounds, rendered paler with white icing.

  “I’m teaching myself from Michael’s books. I’m cooking my way round them.” She saw that Edith was staring at her. “What?”

  “You’re not actually a curious person; not about people, anyway,” Edith said. “I’ve never seen that about you until today.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “You don’t seem curious about why it is that I say I can’t see Ursula.”

  “You said you couldn’t talk about it. Of course I’m curious. Just hampered by good manners, like all of us.”

  “I have to tell someone. I almost told Thomas but then I found I couldn’t.”

  “What is it?” Ottilie came to sit beside her mother, the two of them side by side, each holding a mug of coffee in just the same way, left hands threaded through the handles, right hands cradling the cup, their hands identical.

  “I told Henry something I shouldn’t have,” Edith said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Something about Ursula.”

  “When was this?”

  “The evening before he took root in the bedroom.”

  “What about it? Something about Michael?”

  “Not about Michael.”

  “Then what?”

  “You know what it was. We never talk about it but we allude to it. I think we should talk about it, Ottilie.”

  “You mean the lie, don’t you? The lie about Sebastian.”

  Edith gasped. “That’s what I call it. The lie.”

  “I was never going to tell you,” Ottilie said. “Never. I don’t know about Joan; we’ve never talked about it, not once. Have you spoken about it with Joan?”

  “No. And I’m not going to.”

  “How long have you known? You said it was after Joan’s wedding.”

  “Ursula came to me. You’d got her talking again.”

  “I’m sorry. It had all got out of hand. Joan and I—we were near deranged trying to outdo one another. It was a kind of mental illness, I think. She’d never have married Euan if it hadn’t been for Sebastian, you know. We have this one thing in common, Joan and I: neither one of us has ever been in love.”

  “That makes me very sad.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry about lying to you. Grandpa Andrew asked us to.”

  “I know. Ursula told me. Ursula told me everything.”

  “I don’t want to say any more about it. Do you?”

  “Your poor father. Such a shock. He was heartbroken, absolutely heartbroken.”

  “That we’d lied? I’m so sorry.”

  “Not that you’d lied. He understood that much. You were trying to protect us from the truth.”

  “I don’t get what you mean.”

  “Ursula was upset too, because she couldn’t make him understand. She’d waited all these years to tell him, asking me over and over if she should tell him or not tell him. But then she had this fateful conversation with Alan, the day he went off to France: you know about that.”

  “No. What happened? Fateful how?”

  “They had a conversation about the police. She’d suggested they’d see her side. He suggested they wouldn’t. He was talking about Michael. In any case, Ursula decided she had to talk to Henry. Henry would understand. When I told Henry, it turned out that Ursula had told him already, earlier that day. I went to see her and she was distraught, burning with the injustice of it. She told me she hated her father; she’d told him she hated him. She couldn’t make him see how it had happened. He wasn’t interested in her explanation, you see. He told her that it didn’t matter what she’d felt and what she’d intended. Which of course was the exact opposite of what I’d been saying to her.”

  “I think you were right. It must be the intention that matters. Nobody thinks she intended Michael to die. I’m hardest on her—I can’t forgive—but not even I think differently.”

  “About Sebastian . . .”

  “About lying, I’m so sorry. Grandpa Andrew insisted. We weren’t there, we didn’t see. We lied to you, saying we’d seen. It was too late when we got there, already too late. Not that it changes anything.” Ottilie paused, biting down on her lip. “The thing I’ve had to live with is that it could have changed everything. If we’d been there. If we’d only been there.”

  Edith looked carefully into her daughter’s face, and it was at this point, I think, that she realised that Ottilie didn’t know what she knew; that they’d been talking at cross-purposes. Only Edith had known the truth about Sebastian, all of these years. Edith and then Henry. Edith made a decision: she could have told all; she decided to say nothing.

  “Mother. What is it?”

  “I’m so cold suddenly. I’m cold, can you pass me the blanket?”

  Edith handed Ottilie the coffee cup and curled up against the sofa arm, closing her eyes. “I’m sorry but I need to sleep. It comes on, it comes over me like this.”

  “You’re ill,” Ottilie said. “I’ll get someone. Your hands are ice cold. I’ll go and telephone.”

  Edith was sleeping when Patricia Nixon called by, curled on her side and sleeping deeply, and had to be woken so that the doctor could reassure herself that vital signs were convincingly vital. Dr Nixon diagnosed nervous exhaustion and spoke of the need for proper rest. Henry’s funeral was, after all, less than 24 hours in the past, and these things take their physical toll. She presented Edith with pills, just to get over this little hump, she said, this little blip, and Ottilie said that she’d keep Edith with her for a day or two and keep an eye on her. Edith slept and woke to drink tea, and didn’t say much, her eyes unfocussed, and slept again under the blanket, and dozed throughout an evening which Ottilie spent with her, sitting in the chair by the window.

  Ottilie passed the time in silence, at first drawing and readi
ng and then, having abandoned both of these, looking out of the window, a woman in outline in the dusk. She took her hair down and put it up again several times, took her jewellery off and put it on again, her earrings, the silver bracelet of intertwining snakes she’d bought in South Africa. She looked at her hands, pressing them against the glass. Edith half opened her eyes from time to time and was aware of these things going on, and had a response to them, but couldn’t summon the words. She didn’t speak but she produced an account, her own account, a narrative record, letting feelings speak for her, thinking and not speaking her responses. I understand; I have felt the same. Occasionally, I’ve thought them so emphatically that it seemed almost as if they were spoken, as if they had entered the record and must be acknowledged by others; as if I’d be able to appeal to the others, should the subject arise, on the grounds of my own strong inner dialogue having been heard.

  On the second day Edith had a walk along the beach. She returned to the studio tired and spent the remainder of the daylight hours on the studio sofa under the blue rug, reading and napping and following the progress of the work. Ottilie was absorbed in preliminary sketches from black-and-white photographs she’d taken in the wood. At dusk they went into the cottage; they should move into the cottage properly, Ottilie said. She made up the bed in my old room and in the early morning, through the halfopen door, she saw Edith handling my things, watched her murmuring advance through one item, one drawer, one piece of clothing after another, holding old shirts of mine to her nose and inhaling. The phone had begun to ring, and it was Pip, wanting to speak to Edith, and Edith was called, and emerged holding a pair of my socks.