The White Lie (26 page)

“No.” Edith wouldn’t take Joan’s usual tack, that effort is required, that clubs must be joined and that one must give off the right signals, show willing. There would be no acid remarks about presentation.

“For now at least it’s all about work,” Mog said. “And some very basic skills of self-knowledge. Izzy has been a big help. It wasn’t a failure, in Edinburgh; it was just a bad fit. It didn’t suit me. I need to think about what suits me.”

Edith said nothing but her eyes were fixed on Mog’s face.

“At what point do people do their thinking?” Mog asked the used coffee cup, tracing her finger around its rim. “That’s what I find interesting. I must be slow. It never occurred to me until two weeks ago that I could have a different sort of life.”

“Well, you’re very welcome to stay here for as long as thinking takes,” Edith told her.

Joan came into the room just as Edith was saying this. She didn’t look happy.

“Mother, you forget sometimes that my children have a home. They’re not orphans. Their home is just down the road at the gatehouse. You remember the gatehouse?”

“Of course, Joan, but we love to have them and they’re so helpful with everything.”

“I blame you, Mother,” Joan said bitterly, standing with her arms crossed. “Mog should be at home. She should eat and sleep there. She should be asking me if it’s okay to have this gap year of hers. But no. She’d rather stay here. And who can blame her? Here where nobody challenges her.”

“I’m not a child,” Mog pointed out.

“Oh, Joan,” Edith said.

“Jet doesn’t talk to me, you know, nor to his father. He doesn’t need to. You gave him a house of his own when he was 17 years old. You give them all this opt-out from me and from their father, always have.”

In the evening, Edith went to the Bible group. Not knowing of Edith’s antipathy to the new minister, Joan had invited him and his wife to the party. Edith hadn’t spoken to anyone about this but she’d developed an almost immediate dislike of the new incumbents of the manse: the pompous red-bearded minister and his sarcastic Australian wife. Kind, bookish, bicycle-riding Thomas Osborne was much more to her taste. He’d call round at the house often, coming in with his cycle clips on and flat cap. He had wispy hair and uneven teeth, beaming at her, keen to chat, completely at home in that bracing priestly way with the raw material of life, frowning and wry over her expressions of failure. He’d come into the kitchen and take a packet of ginger biscuits out of his jacket pocket like a magician, saying “Ta daaaa!” every time as if it were a new joke, which made Edith smile. She found herself smiling, thinking of this flourishing of biscuits inappropriately in the middle of a discussion about St Paul’s ideas of love. The urge to talk again to Thomas rose in her and wouldn’t be silenced. Again and again it circled her mind, its quiet repetitive imperative. She couldn’t tell Susan and not Thomas: the idea was appalling, and carried with it an inarticulate pang of disloyalty. Thomas must know. Thomas must be told everything, not just about Michael, but about the other thing, the thing she hadn’t ever dared tell Henry, the thing she referred to as
the lie
. Edith left the group before the end, blaming her early departure on a just-remembered promise made to one of the grandchildren to be somewhere else.

Back at Peattie, she returned to her bedroom, lifted the phone receiver and called Thomas.

“I have to see you,” she said to him. “There’s something I need to tell you.”

“Edith—what on earth’s the matter? Has something happened?”

“Two things I need to tell you. One of them I told to a friend this afternoon, and now I feel terrible and exposed and I need your advice. The other I didn’t tell her; I’ll never tell her.”

“You must come right over; have you eaten?” Thomas asked. “I’m about to have a lasagne. It’s shop-bought but not bad.”

So many of our assumptions in life are based on the things people tell each other, but the things people tell each other can all too easily amount only to a line of mythology, misinterpreting itself successively through the generations uncontested. Sometimes people are only too glad to let misunderstandings rest unchallenged. The right kind of misunderstanding could become the foundation stone for a life. Edith and Henry, for instance, were each aware that the consensus in the family about their barely speaking to one another since Sebastian died, continuing apparently happily married—never a word in anger spoken—was evidence of a unity, one that had worked itself through as muteness; muted ways of speaking and thinking, muted sorts of expectations, emerging with a kind of grim beauty out of unspeakable grief. The fact that Sebastian’s loss affected them equally profoundly, with a measurable twinned deadening of the eye, was evidence of their being unified and one: two damaged flower bulbs flowering in the same heartbreakingly off-kilter, misshapen way. Despondency and suffering, ungovernable if given free rein, threatened for a time to overwhelm them both, and what could be done about it, what can ever be done other than to push the unspeakable back into the dark and carry on? There were three other children to bring up, and keeping going was all that was possible. It was only much later that Edith spoke to Thomas about her realisation, far too late, that Ursula interpreted her and Henry’s reaction, their cooling, their retreat, as a judgment upon her, as a punishment. The three surviving children all felt deeply that their brother’s death was their fault, but Ursula more than any of them, Henry said to me once. Ottilie has spoken of it often: how they were standing only a few feet away from Sebastian when he toppled in; how she still feels she could have prevented it, that she could have been quicker. His drowning under those circumstances, with his sisters right there but unable to save him, his proving impossible to find until it was too late: this is interpreted as sinister in the village, cited as something that could only have been invoked by dark forces.

My mother has said to me that she thinks Edith and Henry’s retreat into silence after Seb was gone was at least in part influenced by Ursula’s own, for how could Ursula’s suffering be the more profound? At the time it seemed essential only that grief cut the old life cleanly at the base of the stem. Tilly concurred with this view. There was a kind of heroism to the relinquishment of the old ordinariness, Tilly said. A kind of nobility in it. The most important thing to recognise was that it
was
mutual. She’d paraphrase Wittgenstein to me: there are things that can’t be spoken about, that go too deep, beyond the reach of words, and about those things it is best to say nothing. Except that’s not how it was at all. I’ve seen them, Edith and Henry, the day after Sebastian died, her going onto the moor with him in the early morning, at five in the morning, two figures in long coats silhouetted against a white sky. I’ve seen her push hard at his shoulder and him pushing her in return; her slipping and falling back onto the grass. I’ve heard their shouted accusations. It was Henry who hired the au pair on the telephone, from the most rudimentary of phone conversations, saying he didn’t have time to interview her. It was Edith who let her take the children to the loch unsupervised. It was Henry who told Sebastian he was too busy to come and sail the boat that Andrew had made, threatened by Andrew’s bond with the boy. It was Edith who had the hair appointment.

“I’m on my way,” Edith told Thomas. She realised that she was calmly in tears, surprise tears that itched wet on her cheeks and cooled ticklish at the corners of her mouth. “One of the things is—one of them is that I know where Michael is, I know Michael is dead. The other thing . . . I feel sick just thinking about telling you.”

“Edith, stop, you’re making yourself ill. Don’t drive; I’ll come to you. Shall I come now?”

“It’s something that Ursula told me, something not even Henry knows, that would break Henry’s heart.”

“Stay there. I’ll get a taxi and I’ll be there in half an hour.”

“No, not today. I can’t do this today. Tomorrow. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

13

On the tenth day after I disappeared, Edith made her afternoon visit to Ottilie determined to be open about the past. As soon as Ottilie answered the door she could see it, something new in her mother’s face.

“What is it? Has something happened?”

“I need you to come with me, to come home with me, right now.”

“I can’t do that. You know that I can’t.”

“Please. This thing won’t close itself. I need to—we need to—say everything to one another about it, so we can say everything and feel everything and it will close.”

“What are you talking about?”

“We can empty ourselves, say everything to one another, and then it will close.”

“No. We can’t and it won’t.”

“I can’t do this again. I need it to end.”

“What are you talking about? What do you mean
again
?”

“You know what I mean. You must know what I mean. We’ve never talked about it, but Ursula told me. She told me, you see. About the lie.”

“About the lie,” Ottilie echoed.

“Yes. Ursula told me. I haven’t breathed a word to anyone, all this time. Not even you girls. Not even Henry. We can’t talk about it now.”

“Something about Michael?”

“Not about Michael. We can’t talk about it now. But I’ve been coming out here and out here, every day, away from your father, so I could tell you that I knew. I wanted you to know that she told me.”

“What did Ursula tell you?”

“You were there. You were a child. You know what I mean.”

“I was a
child?”
Ottilie’s puzzlement was obvious, but now light began to dawn. “Ursula told you. She told you when?”

“After Joan’s wedding.”

“Why haven’t you said anything to me? All this time. I can’t believe it.”

“It was my fault,” Edith said, her expression stricken.

“Of course it wasn’t your fault. How could it have been your fault?”

“I’ve begun to think that it was the secret she told Michael, that Ursula told Michael in the boat. That that’s what they fought about.”

“You’re not making any sense. How could that be the secret?”

“I don’t know. We’ll never know probably.”

“Well, you could beat it out of her.”

“Ottilie.”

“There’s too much consideration. I’m sorry but that’s how I see it. Way too much.”

Edith took hold of her arm. “Please come home with me. Please.”

“I can’t.”

“If you would only speak to her.”

“Listen to me. This is never going to change. I am never going to speak to her. I am never going to Peattie again.”

Edith didn’t seem to have been prepared for the finality of this. She went home shocked to Henry and threw her arms around his neck, Henry patting her back in response. It was the first intended physical contact for very many years.

Henry left things as they were a few days, knowing about Ottilie and her cooling periods. Left to her own devices, it was possible she’d talk herself out of it, out even of what might appear to be an entrenched position. Eventually he rang her.

“I meant what I said. I won’t come to Peattie again,” Ottilie told him on the phone.

“You must think of your mother,” he persisted. “She’s distraught and not sleeping and on blood pressure medication.”

Silence. Henry waited.

Finally Ottilie spoke. “I will come. But only if you can promise that I won’t see Ursula. I won’t talk to her, I won’t be in the same room as her, I don’t want to catch sight of her. Do you understand?”

“I promise.”

“If I find myself accidentally in a room with her I won’t be back.”

“I understand.”

“I mean it.”

“I know you do.” He paused, then added, “Ottilie—about Michael.”

“I don’t want to talk about it any more” Ottilie said. “I don’t want to hear his name mentioned.” Reporting this conversation to Edith, Henry said that he wasn’t entirely sure what she meant by that last remark. Edith had to agree. People have always struggled to understand what Ottilie means.

***

At the heart of our relationship, the one between my mother and me, there lay a profound misunderstanding: this is the conclusion I’ve come to. I don’t know how different life would have been if she’d taken me to one side, at any point in our 19 years together, and said, “Look: here’s what you have to know: it isn’t you; it’s not about, never was about not wanting you.” She said these words and more to me in my imagination, in my sleep; I’d conjure her up when I felt most transient in her life. “You were wanted from the first moment,” she’d say to me, or so I imagined, late at night, stroking the side of my face. “From the moment I felt you kicking under my hand. And I love you more than my life. There wouldn’t be a moment’s hesitation, Michael.”

She doesn’t say anything quite this explicit, even now. Instead she talks to me about the work.

“If I didn’t put the work first, I’d be afraid of life, every day. How to put this to you. It’s difficult to explain. After Sebastian died the world seemed different. It wasn’t even about ambition. It was more like just getting through it. A technique. It’s almost like I managed to start to live each day as if it might be my last, as my father had said, but that proved to be an absolute curse. The day had to be about making.” She made a dissatisfied noise. “Put it this way: today, this moment—this might be the best drawing day I’ve ever had. This might be the day when the drawing starts to mean something, and begins to mean something to others, and life changes and the world’s remade.” She sat with her hand on my stone as if it were the conduit, the contact point between worlds. “I’m not always sure I really believe that any more, but it’s the only hope and I have to hang onto it.”

She spent 19 years living in a paradox. Loving me more than her life; needing to spend a life alone. I know this about her, now. I know that she’s afraid every day of dying, that she’s been afraid every day since Sebastian fell into the loch, and I know from things that she’s told me that she’s frightened of ageing further from here, from the point she’s now reached, tracking the first subtle failures of skin and bone, recognising that organs are beginning to signal their age. They do that eventually; they turn on you, flaunting their finiteness as a gift and whispering the possibility that they’re about to become the enemy. People, sociability, anchor her too far, too evidently in her own mortality. Alone in the studio there is no death, only birth. Only creation, over and over.