The White Lie (27 page)

When I was 11, I didn’t understand the way we lived, the way my mother seemed to want to live. It baffled and angered me.

“Why don’t we have houses that are like everyone else’s? Why don’t we have television?” I’d ask her, tediously often.

“Because ordinary houses are a sign of ordinary souls,” she’d say. “And television makes people ordinary.”

“It doesn’t have to. Why should it have to? That’s ridiculous.”

“Life is so short, Michael,” she’d say to me. “So short. Don’t waste a minute on things that don’t add something to your experience of it.”

“Television
would
add something to my experience of it,” I told her, not unreasonably. But in this as in other things she was intransigent.

I found the transition from Peattie to the cottage very hard, perceiving it as an eviction, or at least as a demotion, and I was profoundly ashamed. I made myself unpopular at school by bragging about Peattie and how that was my real home. My mother had bought this other place to serve as a studio, I said, and we stayed over when she worked late. I managed to shut them all up for a while, but my triumph was short-lived. It came to a sorry end at 13 when the news got out that Michael Salter lived in the village all the time and it was a lie about living at Peattie, news that led to a fist-fight just outside the school gate and my tormentor punched accidentally unconscious. There was a permanent mark on my school record after that. Intelligent but volatile: that was me. Intelligent, volatile, a boy with a short fuse, a loner: that was their judgment. I didn’t make friends. But then another outcast (small, and late to puberty) started hanging out with me at break time, and after his mother had visited mine, there were many invitations to go and eat with them. Lawrie. I can’t remember his surname. We had nothing in common other than unpopularity and a talent for chess. He lived in the new development at the edge of the village. I liked it there. Plush beige carpets covered the whole floor, up and down and the stairs between, and it was always warm, and there were bright cheery paint colours, lime and lilac, the walls flat and perfect as coloured card. It was airy and very orderly, with modern furniture that looked as if it had all been delivered from one shop in a big truck. Lawrie’s mother was similarly a vision of bright cleanliness, smiling and chatty and available.

The cottage was a very different order of beast. It had been sold as in need of modernisation, but Ottilie didn’t modernise. The plumbing and wiring needed renewing. There wasn’t a shower. We didn’t have central heating: all the warmth and the hot water were provided by an ungainly black stove. The cottage retains, even now, its original papers and tiles and flooring, its same ugly original light fittings. It’s crowded and dusty, piled high with things that Ottilie deemed essential: bits of old furniture she liked, things gifted from Peattie alongside random beachcombings, an absurdly large grandfather clock, towering stalagmites of books. Framed drawings and pastels are stacked against the skirting boards, and all available wall space is taken up with an ever-changing domestic exhibition, much of it work in progress that comes and goes. The kitchen is small and dark, its window looking out past the studio to the sea. There’s a butler sink with Victorian taps, open shelving instead of cupboards and flowered curtains serving as doors.

Ottilie agreed to go to Lawrie’s house for coffee with his mother. She sat in their modern sitting room, embarrassing me with her freakish 19th-century look, dispensing with questions briskly and dismissively and going on to make stilted, misfiring remarks that puzzled Lawrie’s mother, who wasn’t the kind of woman who talks very much to people about the poignancy of old hands, or why it is that we think the sea mysterious. Lawrie, picking up on my discomfort, invited me to his room and taught me backgammon, but we left before the game was finished. When we got home Ottilie went into her bedroom, closing the door and putting the radio on at high volume. I went to the door and listened. There was another noise, one secondary to the Elgar and its violins swooping, another noise that played hard and staccato against the melody. We’d gone to visit right after the school day and so I stood outside her room in my uniform, already lanky, my wrists clear of my shirt cuffs, my trousers and blazer a little short. I tapped on the door and asked if everything was alright, and the secondary noise came to a halt. Nothing was said about it when she emerged.

By 14 I’d taken on the housework, not because I was asked to but because I began to crave order. I preferred to live in undusty rooms, preferred newspapers piled and binned and coffee cups washed before they were needed. I took on the laundry—putting a load on before school and levering it up close to the ceiling on the pulley in the scullery when I got home. Ottilie never ironed clothes so I began to do my own; it was good to have a pressed shirt for school. People assumed that my mother had turned over a new leaf and were open in their approval. Inspired by this,

I began to cook, teaching myself from library books. My first presentation was a roast chicken with baked potatoes and a bowl of coleslaw; Ottilie was so surprised and so delighted with it that I began to cook most nights and to wash up after, insisting that I didn’t mind. I’d stand at the kitchen sink working through the dishes, wearing yellow gloves, my eyes fixed on the studio window, where I could see the back of my mother’s head—her chair faced its other window, looking out to sea—watching her moving silently around, already locked in concentration and oblivious to my watching. Don’t get the impression that I felt put upon. It was all immensely gratifying—to provide for her and make her happy, to be her support staff, to be referred to as her support staff. I’d go out onto the beach while dinner was cooking and look for treasure: aesthetically wonky shells, stones with holes worn through them, things that had been washed up, bringing these objects home and arranging them in the middle of the table. She’d handle them, passing them gently from hand to hand as if each were a baby bird, and admire my taste, and sometimes things would reappear as art.

Ottilie began to give me money for helping with the chores. I’d always had generous ad hoc donations, and squirrelled most of these away in an emptied biscuit tin labelled “adventures”. But now I had direct monthly payments made from my mother’s account.

“For all your extraordinary help, for which I’ll always be so grateful,” she said, presenting the bank book, and I can see her now, saying it as if she were speaking right now, her grey-green eyes so beautiful. “Now that you have all this money, why don’t you go out at the weekends? Go to the cinema, up to town, do stuff with your friends.”

“I’d rather stay here.”

“You are almost 15, Michael. You ought to be out there socialising, meeting girls.”

I blushed deeply.

“Why don’t you go today? You’ve got plenty for Saturday trips; I know you’re jealous about guarding your travel money but there’s easily enough for the bus, the cinema, something to eat. I’ve put a clothes allowance in there. Your shirts are getting too small again.”

“Thank you.”

Was it okay, that “thank you”? I’m not sure, even now, whether it trod the line successfully between gratitude and a sickening disappointment. I began finding sleeping difficult, already too tall in my single bed, big feet hanging out of the end and my heart beating fast and hard.

After the first of my Saturdays out—I ran out of things to do early, and sat in a coffee shop with a book until the teatime bus was due—Ottilie was unusually relaxed and attentive, coming to me as I took my shoes off in the hall, beaming and glad, with a coffee pot in her hand and paint crusted on her knuckles. She was just beginning to do the seascapes that would be used as cover illustrations for a poetry series.

“Have you had a lovely time? I’ve had the best day’s painting in an age: the light was spectacular. What did you see? Have you eaten? I’m just about to have a sandwich.”

My being away had made her happy, it was an incontrovertible fact, and so there was nothing for it but to make Saturdays in town a habit. The trouble was that other village boys started tagging along, hanging about in teenage clouds by the bus stop, and shadowed me, and that was worse than loneliness. So I started going to Peattie instead, though I had to catch two buses to get there. It was Joan who told my mother. When Ottilie rang, Edith said that not only was I welcome, but I was an enormous help. Michael could come to Peattie on however many Saturdays he felt like it, she said. I was standing beside my grandmother as she spoke, trying to gauge reaction from the other end of the line, hoping for a hint of regret, of jealousy. Edith winked at me, talking to my mother on the phone and attempting to tousle my hair, which was difficult as I was already a good four inches taller than her. What would be lovely, she added as if it had just occurred to her (it hadn’t; we’d discussed it), was if he could come and stay the entire weekend sometimes. Could he be spared?

The truth is there wasn’t that much in the way of helping with the house and even less so as I got older. The women wouldn’t let me do much. Gratefully I realised that I could do at Peattie what I did at home, cocooned away with books and writing. I filled dozens of these notebooks, blue exercise books that Ottilie has filed away in suitcases and brings out at night when Edith’s asleep. Some of it was diary, some of it first attempts at journalism, and there were short stories later, in the year before I left. I liked the routine of a Peattie weekend. After the four o’clock tea I’d head to the kitchen; this was the part of the day I enjoyed most. It became a new tradition that I’d make dinner on a Saturday night and that all those in residence would sit around the kitchen table together and eat. If I’d hoped for a reaction to that, to my mother’s exclusion from family dinner and family conversations, I wasn’t to be granted one. It wouldn’t have occurred to her to mind.

Being back at Peattie was such a relief. Peattie was never going to change: it was Peattie that was the living organism, the entity, and succeeding generations of Salters lived its life in all the ways that Peattie demanded; there was security in that. Things at the cottage felt very different. Ever since I could remember I’d felt about my mother that she could make a decision for a different life, any minute and seemingly on a whim. It might be one that didn’t suit me. It might even be one that didn’t include me. She might come into the room on any day, at any moment, with a new look on her face, one that I’d recognise because I’d anticipated it for years. She’d explain to me that she had to go, that she was moving to Tokyo or to Patagonia. Braced against this probability, at 15 I hugged the idea of Peattie to myself. Mog and I started going to town together on Saturdays and so I began to go to Peattie on Friday nights, straight after school. Ottilie took it in her stride. Now that my weekends there were habitual, she adopted habits of her own and began to make trips away. I was boarded with Edith for a month every autumn while my mother went travelling.

Euan had done most of the weekend cooking at Peattie up to this point, and for a while he was enthusiastic about our doing it together. I hated this: he couldn’t help taking over and being dictatorial about technique. It doesn’t really matter how a carrot is cut but Euan is a man for there being only one way; he and Joan have this mindset in common. We argued and Edith intervened and the sessions were abandoned, in favour of taking turns. Even then, he’d come and sit in the kitchen with papers to mark while I was making dinner and try to strike up conversation, though his dislike for my mother was at the heart of most of it. He’d criticise her openly when Edith was around, if always on the basis of fighting my corner.

“Ottilie goes on holiday every year without her child; she never thinks to take her child,” he said to my grandmother in my presence once, Edith looking towards me in alarm.

“It’s not a holiday; it’s work,” I told him. “I’m invited to go too. I’m always invited. But it’s at a bad time for missing school. And I’d rather be here.”

I wished immediately that I hadn’t said that final thing.

It wasn’t true that I’d been invited, though it shut Euan up. And it occurred to me every October that perhaps this time she wouldn’t come back, or that she’d come back with a man in tow and present him to me as a stepfather and move him in. Perhaps he’d be somebody she couldn’t see through, someone who’d become determined to oust me. She’d be oblivious, unaware that her new and charming husband had, in her absence, eyes that glittered like a predator’s. It wasn’t a coincidence that I’d recommended that Mog read
David Copperfield
.

I understand more now about Ottilie’s positioning, the way she positions herself in relation to others. I was always convinced that it would have suited her better to be alone in the world, but the truth is that she values attachments, as long as they’re long, fine silver threads, very long, very fine, that look fragile, that might even appear invisible, but in truth are immutable and permanent, that provide her with a necessary distance. Her idea of happiness is to be alone but with people at hand. Her happiest days as a mother were days when I wasn’t there. I think that’s true and it’s said without self-pity: the crucial point is that they were also days in which I was coming back, I was expected; I’d frame her solitude and make it work. Her happiest times at Peattie, she’s said, have been spent working in the studio, knowing the family is only just outside her concentration, that she can emerge blue-overalled and preoccupied into the drawing room at teatime and will barely be called upon to speak. She takes it with her, she says, this time spent in physical proximity, back to the cottage and back into the work.

***

So this is how it went. Two weeks after I’d gone, Ottilie laid down to her father the conditions of her return to Peattie, and they were abided by. She’d come at set times so that care could be taken to keep Ursula out of the way, visiting once a week on average, except for those periods in which she wasn’t speaking to her parents—because although the agreement about not encountering Ursula held, it didn’t result in untroubled years of visiting. For years, Ottilie vacillated. She’d come to the house and seem almost normal, but beneath the surface of calm, its crust, there were tectonic stirrings and shiftings; the heat was garnering itself and rising. Generally there was precious little in the way of a warning. On the day precipitating her longest absence, Edith had been asking blamelessly about the weather at the coast, which was brighter, generally, than the hill-country micro-climate of Peattie. In answer, Ottilie stared. Then she got to her feet, setting her cup and cake plate carefully down.