The White Lie (10 page)

Mog looked as if she was about to speak, but didn’t take it further. Vita knew as well as anyone that Peattie was as isolated from the world as it wished to be. Thickets of intangible social bramble and rose had surrounded the house for very many years.

“When Edith was young . . . and even in your mother’s day. Parties and boating and tennis and croquet. House parties all summer, which were of course entirely about sex.”

“Surely not.”

“Oh yes, oh my, yes. The late 20s. The early 30s. I’m not a Victorian, you know, despite appearing ancient. We post-war girls—post-Great War I mean—were highly progressive. We thought ourselves terribly daring and modern. Course, it was really only in the upper classes. The peasantry I’m not sure about; they’ve always been rather slyly liberated. But the middle class are a terribly conventional bunch.”

“You can’t say peasantry, Vita.”

“I will probably die tonight in my sleep, so I can say what I please.” Vita was enjoying herself now. “I hear there are some rather personable young men coming to this event. Sons and grandsons of friends and neighbours. People we haven’t seen for so very long. Young men, too, some of them. I trust you’ll make best use of the opportunity.”

Mog looked doubtful and Vita pressed on. “It’s such a pity that none of you children went to university. That’s the place to catch husbands now, I’m told.”

“Apparently.”

“Your sister could have gone to Oxford.”

“She didn’t want to. She just wanted them to offer. To prove something to Dad.”

“I do see that. But if she had gone, imagine all the delicious young men she would have brought home at the weekends, trailing after her unrequited. You could have had some of her cast-offs.”

Mog made an indeterminate noise.

“Christian Grant,” Vita said suddenly. “He’s coming, you know. With his father.”

Christian’s kind horse face loomed up. His bearded chin and tombstone smile.

“So I hear.”

“He’s more your mother’s age, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I believe you had dinner once.”

“We had dinner once. Not to be repeated.”

“Terrible thing, poor Henrietta. Terribly sad. But he can’t mourn for ever.” Was that a wink? “It’s vital not to choose too handsome a man,” Vita continued. “He must above all have reverence for you, his wife, and be attentive to your desires and preferences. In my younger day, I was rather renowned for my good sense in the guidance of marriageable young girls.”

“Yes. I’ve heard about that.”

“And I devised a six-point test that I feel moved to share with you now.”

“Thank you.”

“Point one. Temperature. He should be sensitive to your comfort. Such as at an evening party. Have your shawl in a convenient location that prompts him to offer it to you.”

“I expect this also applies to cardigans.”

“Point two. The morning test. Engineer an early meeting, for hiking or suchlike at your own suggestion. Is he tolerant about the effort required?”

“Right.”

“Point three.” Vita faltered and then rallied. “Point three. Illness. How he treats you when you are under the wardrobe.”

“The weather, you mean.”

“The weather. What did I say?”

“The wardrobe.”

“Good Lord. Under the wardrobe. Well. How he treats you when you are under the weather. The weak in body are highly attuned to a fake.”

“Okay.”

“All one can hope for is to hook up with a likely man. There are no certainties. If a potential husband satisfies on all six points, for the full period of the engagement, at least in my own experience I have found him to be sound.”

“What’s point four?”

“I don’t know. Oh. Yes. Point four: Is he charming to the plainer and duller among your friends and family? Can he resist the temptation to satirise them in private company?”

“That’s a good one.”

“Five. I’m astonished that I can remember this. Imaginative gift giving. Very important. A man with a good heart knows the taste of his wife and goes to lengths to show his love.”

“Right.”

Vita’s fingernails were pale blue and there were prominent blue veins in her hands, through which life pulsed hesitantly.

“Six. He must be a man of action and of the arts. A man who returns from the office and drinks and watches television may be a man to have for Christmas but is not a man to have for life.”

“All good advice.”

Vita reached into the faded carpet bag that she always carried with her and produced her notebook, which was leather covered, saddle brown, and finished with a leather tie.

“Would you be a darling and write them down for me? I rather fear that I have them in mind for the last time.”

Mog found a pen on the mantel and began to write, noticing that the book was almost full, had only a few blank pages remaining, and that the rest, as she flicked forward from the middle, was closely written in a tidy black script.

“What about your Johnnie? How would he fare?”

“In the test you mean? Badly. Let’s see. He’s never been interested in the whereabouts of my cardigan. He’s not a man who talks in the mornings unless he has to, and at any rate is at the office by eight. He’s violently allergic to other people’s illness and won’t go into a hospital. Johnnie considers illness a character flaw. He gets points for charm, not that that counts for much; self-interest, alas. He doesn’t give presents and hates to receive them.”

“He sounds utterly appalling.”

“Yes.”

“He must have been divine in bed.”

5

Peattie House, the morning after I disappeared, presumed dead, was a deathly quiet house. It had a fresh kind of quiet about it, some new kind. It wasn’t unlike a morning I remember when I was ten, my last winter resident at Peattie, when we woke to find that two feet of snow had fallen in the night and muffled the world of usual noises. The heat continued, the suffocating oven-like heat, falling in heat-blizzards into heat-drifts. People waded through the days. It was hot even at dawn, the pink sky giving way to deep and unblemished blueness, a promise that began to be ominous. The nights were brief, dipping into darkness, though Henry was to say later that this one, the one after I’d gone, passed with extraordinary slowness, each minute making its presence felt. He was at the loch to see the sun rise. Ottilie remained in my room all that day—my old Peattie room—where she had insisted on spending the night, insisting at just after 2am that Edith must leave, insisting on being alone, still woozy from the tranquiliser but insistent on this much. Edith returned to the drawing room to say that Ottilie wanted solitude, though it wasn’t solitude that she wanted but communion; the freedom to be with the dead unhindered.

Edith was afraid, at 2am, that first night. She feared that Ottilie would kill herself, that that’s what she meant by saying that she wanted to be with Michael. Edith had said to her through the closed door that God would forgive her whatever she was about to do; that God had physical experience of despair and of loss, that His experience of seeing Jesus die had made him human . . . and then she had apologised. She said that God would forgive, but she didn’t think that she, Edith, would be able to. And she had apologised again.

“Is it my suicide you’re talking about, Mother, or is it Michael’s?” Ottilie had said, equally quietly, each of their faces pressed to the wood. “I’m going to bed now. I’m not going to kill myself. I’m going to take a pill and go to sleep and in the morning it isn’t going to be true.”

“Ottilie. Please.”

“I’m not joking. It isn’t going to be true. I’m not even exaggerating. I want you all to prepare for it and abide by it. No one is ever to say to me that my son is dead. He’s missing and that is all.”

She said this, though it was precisely the opposite of what she believed.

***

At 2.15 Edith returned to the drawing room and spoke to Mog and to Pip, to Vita and to Euan, none of whom knew where Henry had gone. She went to the bedroom and found that Henry wasn’t there, or in his study, or anywhere in the house that she could think to look. Eventually she found him in the garden, standing in a glasshouse holding a bottle of malt close to his chest with both hands. He wouldn’t go back inside with her. Henry’s way of being drunk is unlike other people’s. Some grow voluble, recklessly so. In alcohol, Edith says, Henry finds a more profound silence. In excess of alcohol she says that he finds something that’s akin to prayer. What Edith calls prayer, that’s a therapeutic sort of self-hosted conversation, I think: one held in a deeper place in the brain than is usual, giving hidden parts of the self permission to speak.

Henry didn’t respond to Edith’s urgings to come inside, or to Euan’s when Euan was sent to fetch him. Instead Henry went back to the loch and spent the night on the jetty, first of all sitting at its end with his legs hanging over the side, and then curled dozing in a foetal huddle, having hurled the empty bottle into the water. Henry had warned that nobody must follow him to the wood, that he would take it badly if he was pursued. He’d said this quite matter-of-factly to Euan as he left the glasshouse, and Euan had passed the message on. There didn’t seem to be anything further that could be done, other than checking covertly on him, approaching at intervals out of sight from over the field. Euan and Edith took turns to do this in the night. The Salter-Cattos returned to the gatehouse, and Joan gathered her children around her on the sofa and hugged them untidily and spoke in a way in which nobody had heard her speak before, nor has encountered since, about the overriding importance of love.

“It was sincerely meant, I suppose,” Pip conceded, talking recently to Mog about that evening, “but it occurred to me even then that really it was just another opportunity for dissing Ottilie.”

Nobody got to bed until it was light, and Henry not at all. He woke on the jetty chilled and stiff-limbed and went into the house to get something to eat, scavenging for biscuits and finding a slice of pork pie left over from lunch the day before. The sight of the pie made him sob. It was pre-disaster, an innocent pie, a pie ignorant of the immediate future. An untidy, hastily cut mark had been left in it by another man, another Henry, and he had begun already to grieve for him. When he’d recovered his composure sufficiently he returned to the loch with another bottle. He was severely drunk and blundering along half blinded. It came to him that he could walk off the end of the jetty and die in a blur of uncaring, finding drowning a detached kind of end to things, fitting and in a perverse way almost funny. He could imagine laughing and gurgling his way into the deeps; he could feel the first tickle of hysteria even as he considered it. But when it came to it he didn’t have the courage.

Nobody appeared for breakfast. Mrs Welsh, down in the village buying the morning groceries, told the Pyms and interested eavesdroppers that Michael had run away and that it was being taken very hard. People came together in the late afternoon, when hunger pangs could no longer be dismissed. Even then, the moral scruple that eating and drinking were too banal to admit to and failures of tact had to be overcome.

“I’m sorry but I have to eat something,” Pip had said at last, apologies seeming necessary, opening the sliced bread packet and plugging in the toaster. He’d toasted the whole loaf, others’ hunger being awakened by the smell. Then the freezer had been consulted for a second loaf, and they had begun to relish the group activity, to feel bolstered by it, by this joint experience of grief mediated by buttered bread. A second loaf was found and toasted, four pieces at a time, each slice eased away frozen from its neighbour, stiff and icy, before being inserted into the slot. The buttered toast was cut and plated and passed along the table where the family were gathered knee to knee. All but Ottilie and Ursula were there. Ottilie was sleeping, the doctor having been called out a second time, and Ursula was back at the cottage, at work on her knitting machine. Edith had been to her and found her quiet and calm and coping, insisting she was fine and needed to be left to think. The rest of the family sat together around the kitchen table, not discussing the situation. Toast was eaten and nothing relevant was said. It didn’t need to be said. Toast said it for them. They didn’t meet again that day.

The following morning, shock thawed and poured forth like meltwater. Many of the subsequent responses were raw and misdirected. Joan was angry with Alan, and Euan was peevish with Joan, and Pip was angry with everybody. Edith was angry with herself, and Mog was angry with me. Henry wasn’t much seen. Henry chose absence. It was on the second day that Ottilie appeared, in a long dress with deep pockets, her hands thrust into them, her feet bare, her face bloodless, hair loose and breath terrible. She was given coffee with sugar, and professed not to be hungry, her hand shaking on the handle of the cup. It was ensured that somebody remained with her at all times, shadowing her as she wandered from hall to drawing room, from library to kitchen, in and out of Vita’s sitting room, taking Vita’s offered hand each time in passing, and up and down the stairs to my bedroom. She didn’t want to make eye contact or to talk, but ate all the food delivered to her, and drank all the wine that Euan offered. Eventually, having attempted communication many times through the course of the day, the family left her alone and let her wander. After eating a bowl of Edith’s broth, at just after seven in the evening, she retreated into my room and locked the door, saying that she was taking another pill and that she needed to sleep. That’s when the discussions in the drawing room began in earnest.

Ursula was brought from the cottage, but it didn’t do any good. She had come into the house in the afternoon, it turned out, and had stood in the hall, stock-still, watching Ottilie as she ascended the stairs, making slow progress and supporting herself on the bannister. Ottilie had sensed her there and had turned, and their eyes had met. Ursula stepped forward, urging her to stop and listen, but Ottilie had behaved as if she couldn’t hear. She’d turned away and continued upward.

Ursula was brought and was silent. She ignored requests to go over things and pleas made no difference. The door had closed. Those around her saw this occur as a physical event: the closing of Ursula’s mind against disaster. It resembled the lion face of dementia, the mask that she adopted, or which adopted her. It wasn’t just that she didn’t speak when spoken to, but that her eyes and mouth ceased to be indicators, the wiring disconnected to the place in her brain where the catastrophe had been walled in. All they could do was wait until she was ready.