The White Lie

by Andrea Gillies

  It seemed a long time later that they gave up the effort, but it was only a matter of minutes, ten minutes perhaps of determined activity ending in failure. It was Andrew who recognised first that the situation had passed beyond hope. He didn’t say so but he stopped doing everything that up till then he had done with so much conviction and energy. He stopped quite suddenly, sitting down beside the body. Alan, watching him, continued for a few moments before Andrew placed a hand gently on his arm. It was quiet, other than for the breeze ruffling branches in the wood. After a while they heard the teatime bell going, for what must have been a second or third time. It had been brought down to the back door and rung again, sending its message and questioning their absence.

  Unanimously and without discussion, no one hurried away. Andrew said he had a pain in his back and should sit a while. It was fine, he said, nothing to fret about; it was just that he wasn’t supposed to run. Joan wrapped herself in the blanket that Ottilie brought from the house, one that had been intended for Sebastian, to keep him warm and carry him home. Petra’s teeth were chattering: she was sent back to the house by Andrew and instructed not to say anything until they got there. She was to go straight to her room and stay there. Petra had already been blamed, had been assigned blame even as she was dismissed from the scene, and everyone was aware that this was to be her role, including poor Petra herself, powerless to resist. When she set off down the path, turning and shouting out in German, declaring that she was only partially at fault, the silence at the jetty reasserted itself. Ottilie has told me that she was thinking of her parents during those quiet moments, wishing them a few minutes more of believing their world to be safe, of thinking the worst thing about today would be a demand from the bank, a day characterised otherwise by the usual small irritations, the children back late for tea and how they’d chastise them.

  It was then that Andrew said to Ottilie and Joan that he wanted to speak to them alone. Apologising to Alan, he asked them to follow him for a private word. He took them back along the jetty, down the steps and to the edge of the wood, and seeing that Alan was watching, turned his back to the shore. He had a very special favour to ask of the girls, Andrew said. He wanted to treat them like grown-ups. What they had to do was be very brave. They’d have to take a grown-up approach.

  “Promise me that you’ll tell your mother and father that you were here.”

  “We were here,” Joan asserted. Her grief was of the irritable kind.

  “I mean, tell her that you saw what happened. That you were here nearby when it happened. I know it’s not true. I know it was too late by the time you got here; Ottilie told me what happened. But sometimes a lie is necessary, and sometimes a lie is a kindness, and this is one of those times. It’s going to be so much worse for Edith if she knows that you weren’t watching. And worse for the two of you. And this was an accident after all. So it doesn’t matter if we adjust the order of events a little. Do you see? As a kindness. It’s important to be kind.”

  “More important than the truth?” Ottilie’s voice.

  “Sometimes, yes. It’s what we call a white lie.”

  “There are different colours?” Ottilie’s words were broken by hiccupping sobs.

  Andrew led the way back to the jetty and to Alan, who was standing beside Sebastian, a small boy lying on his side looking as if he were dreaming. Ursula continued staring into the water. Andrew said, “Who will carry him home?” and his voice fractured and he began to weep noisily, his forearm over his eyes. He picked Sebastian up and enacted an awful, sad, inexpressibly tender squeezing of him against his upper chest and throat, pressing his face into Sebastian’s belly. He said through his tears that he would take him. No one could dissuade him from this and they began their slow walk back to the house. All the way back, Ottilie and Joan, having distanced themselves from the procession, talked about what Andrew had asked of them and what they should say, though their conversation was of the shocked kind: bitty and abbreviated, and straight to the point. While they were deciding what to say to their mother, they took turns to ask the same question of each other.

  First, Ottilie. “You don’t think she did it on purpose?”

  “No,” Joan said. “Of course not.”

  It was agreed between the sisters—by the time the house came into view and Andrew had gone in through the back stairs, followed by Alan and Ursula—that they’d seen the children arguing, that they’d seen Sebastian running and hurling his last pebble, that they’d stood only feet away and had seen everything unfold.

  “It’s what happened, after all,” Ottilie said.

  “You don’t think she did it on purpose?” Joan asked. “No,” Ottilie said. “Of course not.”

  When they reached the door themselves, they could hear Henry, wailing like a wounded animal, bellowing, the sound echoing down from the hall.

  Ottilie barred Joan’s way in. “It isn’t possible, is it.” It wasn’t really a question but Joan answered anyway.

  “Not possible.”

  ***

  Andrew didn’t have the heart attack until three hours afterwards, tucked up in a rug by the fire with a nip of whisky on the table, an untouched mug of soup, some painkillers because it was thought that he’d wrenched his back. Joan and Ottilie were in their rooms, each sprawled on their beds, red-eyed with wet handkerchiefs, and Ursula was with Vita in the kitchen, being fed soft-boiled eggs and toast soldiers. Ursula hadn’t spoken and wouldn’t speak for years. Nobody could bear to blame her. They shouldn’t have been on the jetty, but who was to know whose fault it was? Sebastian lost his balance, and the loch was too dangerous and dark. Edith was insistent that the girls mustn’t claim the fault. It was an accident, and as such was sealed off from blame. Blame was an obscenity in such a case.

  But I saw her. I saw you, Ursula. The loch’s own memory has shown you to me. I saw you shove him and I saw him fall. It could be interpreted in a dozen ways, the shove, the paralysis ensuing in your reaction to his falling, the look partly of horror and partly of surprise. But I think I interpret you correctly. You had changed your mind, I see that, the moment it was done, even before the moment led to it being done, the change manifesting itself in your eyes in the niche of time between the two. You wanted the moment returned to you, the choice, the impulsive thing undone, even before your hand was off his back.

  25

  My mother was here this afternoon. Yesterday. Yesterday, now. It’s the early hours of the morning after and getting light again.

  “Michael,” she said to me, as if I were sitting next to her. “Today’s the day. We think today will be the day.”

  We sat on the beach together, her in her upright, straight-backed manner, in her black dress that stretched almost to the ankle, a black scarf flattening her fringe onto her eyebrows, her hair striped with white. We sat side by side looking out at the hills, at the water, the daylight streaming sodium yellow from gaps in the clouds. She turned her head from time to time to look towards the wood, towards the tomb; when she looked towards the house she looked right through me, her tears falling unannounced and in absolute silence. She wiped them from her cheeks with sudden rapid movements. With her other hand she lifted and then dropped handfuls of small stones. Paint was lodged under her fingernails. The skin of her wrist was puckered around her watch.

  Eventually, she rose from the beach and went into the wood. She took some photographs, looking upward, pictures of canopy and sky, a dark figure seen moving unhurriedly, deliberately among the trees. Then she returned to the water’s edge. She picked up a stone, a small oval, its surface weathered flat as skin, and turned it over in her hand, smoothing it with her thumb and turning it, smoothing and turning.

  “You,” she said, looking at it in her palm. “So apparently innocent.”

  She threw the pebble into the shallows, then brought her camera out of her pocket and took pictures of the beach, of stone groupings, rearranging them before photographing them again. From time to time she pointed her
camera towards the other end of the loch and looked through the viewfinder, using the zoom. Finally there was something new to see and she stepped forward. A tiny inverted triangle of red had appeared on the horizon, topped by a white quadrilateral. A boat was coming towards us, a red boat with a white cabin. Ottilie began taking pictures of it, first landscape and then portrait, successively as it made its slow approach.

  We saw the fishing boat before we heard it, but then we heard its soft chug. Its outboard motor chugged louder as it moved towards us, and then became exaggerated, its chugging amplified by the bowl of hills. Its red livery glowed orangeish in the stormy light, and so did the red buoy that had been positioned on the loch the day before, the marker. Two men in wetsuits were fussing with equipment at the back. I could smell the diesel, its odour overlaying the aromas of stone and wet and weed and pine and leaf litter.

  ***

  Joan and Edith were in town together while this was happening. Neither wanted to be present at the loch on this day, though they’d been briefed and had been invited. Edith refused to come to Peattie and Joan refused to go out to the cottage whether Ottilie was in residence or not, so Edith made the journey into town on the bus, having given up the car. They met on neutral ground in a coffee shop. Joan was the one drinking coffee, from one of those glass jugs with the press-down plunge filter. She was having trouble with the mechanism, and the whole thing threatened to tip over when she exerted even light pressure. She’d taken the jug to the counter to complain, leaving Edith stirring inside her teapot with a long-handled spoon. It was chamomile tea, and damp hay smells emanated from the lidless pot as she stirred. The coffee shop was small and straddled its own border between gentility and domestic squalor: it had lace cloths and waitresses in black dresses with crisp white aprons, but a lingering eye on sills and carpet and—worse still—into the kitchen, might have seen things that troubled it a little. No matter. The dozen tables were all occupied. Most of its clients were women of a certain age, good coats hooked over chair backs and carrier bags parked at their feet. Spoons clinked against china. Napkins were put into use. Above this Joan’s voice could be heard at the counter saying, “But it’s no good if it doesn’t work, is it? I’m sure you’ll find there isn’t a popular demand for that. It will spill hot coffee onto your tablecloth and at some point onto somebody’s lap.”

  “Well, we’ve had no complaints before,” the waitress who might be the owner said. She looked like a once-attractive person does when they’ve dedicated half a lifetime to smoking. The lines closed around her mouth like a string bag.

  “Perhaps, then, it’s just a question of its being faulty today,” Joan’s voice said. “Or it could be my incompetence. I’d welcome a lesson. Could you very sweetly press it down for me, so I can see how it’s done? My mother’s waiting over there. Edith Salter. And I’m Joan.”

  “I know who you are, Mrs Catto,” the waitress said.

  Joan took her seat with her decanted coffee, grains floating dismally on its surface.

  “Now,” Edith said. “Joan. I don’t want to pussyfoot around this issue. I want to have a frank discussion, all cards on the table. And that will be that. One frank discussion and we need never discuss it again. It doesn’t help anyone to keep going over things.”

  “No.”

  “Not things to which there are no solution.”

  “No.” Joan cut her meringue in half, shattering it into polystyrene shards.

  “I want you to talk to your sister about it.”

  “Mother. I’ve told you. I’m not going to.”

  “So you propose never to speak to her again.”

  “There may be a time for the conversation but it isn’t now. I just don’t feel like it. And that’s that.”

  “You’ve decided it was her fault. Without even talking.”

  “Of course it was her fault. He was my boyfriend. He was approached.” She leaned forward on her elbows and lowered her voice. “In the bathroom. The night before the wedding. We can’t discuss it here, Mother.”

  “What I don’t understand . . .” Edith said, frowning, “. . . is why he told you at all. Why tell you? It’s upset everybody.”

  “You think he should have kept it to himself? And you think I should have kept it to myself?”

  “It’s upset everybody,” Edith said again.

  “It was Ottilie’s decision to tell you and not mine,” Joan told her. “I’ve explained this. We’ve been over it. I wasn’t going to tell anyone. When I went to her it was only to tell her that I knew. It wasn’t a threat of exposure.”

  “I think it may have come across that way.”

  “Can we go for a walk? I’m not comfortable. This place is so second-rate.”

  “You don’t want your coffee?”

  “No. Drink up your tea. Come on.”

  They went to the riverside and sat together on a bench.

  “It’s going to rain,” Joan observed, looking up at the lilac-brown clouds. “The sky seems very low today.”

  “I think you should be wary of taking Euan’s word for things,” Edith said.

  Joan gave her a sharp look. “She’s said something to you.”

  “Not at all, not at all.”

  “Euan kept quiet for 33 years, Mother. For 19 of those he could have had a relationship with his son.”

  “I think you should talk to Ottilie, hear her side.”

  “Hear her side?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’ll never end, will it?”

  “What won’t?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Forget it. This isn’t the time.”

  “Just talk to her. Please.”

  “I’m not interested, I’m afraid.” She paused and then she said, “This is Ottilie’s side. She seduced my husband the night before we were married, specifically as a revenge, because she was jealous. She forced himself on him.”

  “Nobody was forced.”

  “She offered herself to him when he was nervous and a bit drunk. And then, and then, she led us all a merry dance afterwards, letting us all debate about Alan, letting us choose between Alan and the house party. I’m sorry but that was contemptible. And what interests me specifically is that my husband has been unhappy about it for 33 years and has been unable to speak up.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because she made it clear that she wanted him to keep quiet. Keeping quiet was his kindness. I’m not sure you see that. It was honourable, the honourable thing to do. So tell me, what other side is there than that?”

  Edith didn’t respond.

  “It’s caused so much unhappiness, Mother. So much unhappiness. I only understand now, knowing what I know now, how it was at the root of everything like a poison. The reason that Euan and I were so miserable.”

  ***

  Mog came down to the beach and sat beside Ottilie on the shore. They were watching the divers, who’d tied the boat up to the buoy. One of the men was in the water.

  Mog and Ottilie were discussing Edith.

  “She says she isn’t ready,” Ottilie said.

  “Not even for this? But I’m not surprised.”

  “I’m confident she’ll be along for the service.”

  “Did you speak to Vita?”

  “Yes. Dissuaded her from coming. George had told her he wanted to come too, bless him. I think the two of them were all set to get a taxi down here. You know that they’ve become close friends, that they play cards together.”

  “She’s settling in well.”

  “It’s more like a country club than a care home. Queen of all she surveys. And I think the shedding of Mrs H has been a big relief.”

  “I don’t know how George affords it.”

  “Your grandfather pays. It was one of the things in the letter. But keep that between ourselves.”

  “I’m glad to hear it. That makes me feel better about him.”

  “About George?”

  “About grandfather. And about George.”

 
“I felt bad about putting them off but I didn’t want people here today. Church is different. That’s Mother’s way. That’s her day. Everybody will be there and that’s fine.”

  Mog looked at her in profile. “You alright?”

  “No.”

  “Silly question.”

  “Boring answer. The truth is”—she paused, considering it—“I’m achieving something of what I want. Quietness about it. That’s all I want. Quietness. Working my way forwards. I will be so glad—not glad—but—you know.”

  “Me too. When it’s over with finally.”

  Both men were in the water now with breathing equipment, and one of them had disappeared under the surface.

  Ottilie stiffened. She averted her eyes.

  “Me too,” Mog said. “Come on. Let’s go back.”

  “I thought I wanted to see but now I don’t.”

  “Me neither. Come on.” Mog was already up, holding out a steadying hand to her aunt.

  They walked away from the beach in silence, back down the path. The cottages came into view, and the end of the house, its fine dressed corner stones, a pair of corner chimneys, the entrance to the walled gardens.

  “It’s going to be so hard saying goodbye to it,” Mog said.

  “You have an important lesson to learn,” Ottilie told her.

  “What’s that?”

  “To be as sentimental about the future as you are about the past.”

  They went in at the back door and up the back stairs to the hall, through the gothic arched door and past what’s now Pip’s office. Henry’s dogs were there in the hallway—all but one of the dogs—and they looked to Mog as she came in with a definite canine air of expectancy. Badger wasn’t there because Edith had moved Badger and Badger’s bed to Ottilie’s cottage. Edith has become a keen evangelist of salt-water therapy and joins the old dog often in his swim, going out there together in all weathers. She keeps busy. She’s learning to cook. She reads a lot, sitting with Ottilie in the studio in the afternoons, the books piled up beside her. She says she needs to get herself an education, and has been reading about Spanish history, Spanish art. She goes daily to church. She’s had no contact with Thomas Osborne or Susan Marriott since she moved away from Peattie. Susan has made no effort to keep in touch, for which Edith’s grateful. Thomas left a message on the answerphone that she hasn’t yet answered.