The White Lie (28 page)

“I’m sorry, I have to go.”

“But you’ve just got here,” Edith protested.

“Sometimes—I’m sorry—increasingly, I find I can’t bear to be in the same room as the two of you.”

“Oh, Ottilie.” Edith began to cry. Tears sprang from her eyes and rolled down each cheek.

“I can’t do this any more,” Ottilie said. “I’ll be back when I feel differently. Please, please don’t come to the cottage.”

She was away from Peattie for almost four years and nobody saw her or heard from her, other than in a weekly letter written only to Edith and which Edith answered, sometimes taking days over her responses, writing draft after draft and discarding them. Then one Saturday Edith could be heard squawking excitedly in the hall that there was tremendous news: Ottilie was coming to tea tomorrow. Nobody spoke to her unless to ask about the work, which was the main condition laid down; nor were Ursula’s or Michael’s names to be mentioned. Sometimes queries about the work carried evident metaphorical weight, though superficially that was all that was discussed.

Gradually, the time Ottilie spent at Peattie began to lengthen again into hours. She brought art materials in her car and began to use her studio at the house before tea, though if something inadvertently tactless was said to her she’d excuse herself and return to seclusion. It was assumed that a loch visit was out of the question and it was never mentioned, but in fact it was at this time that her visits to me began. She didn’t announce them to anyone, but she was spotted and the news got out. Ottilie had been seen sitting by my memorial stone, talking aloud as if to me. Nothing was said to her about it, or by her about it, and things achieved a kind of stability, the stable weekend pattern that was in place at the time of Edith’s party.

Only Pip has dared mention the long absence. The morning after the winter drama in Ursa’s room, Ottilie said at breakfast that she wanted to go to the hospital alone for the morning visiting: not because she had anything particular to say to Edith, but because she wanted to sit quietly with her. Pip followed her out onto the snowy, slushy terrace, on the pretext of having a smoke, and watched her looking for something to clear her windscreen. He went to help, was thanked for his kindness, and then, emboldened, said, “I’ve always wanted to know something.”

“Yes.”

“Can I ask you—just one small thing?”

“You can try.”

“What made you come back? So suddenly. After so many years away. Was it something that Edith wrote to you?”

“No. It wasn’t something Edith wrote. It was just time.”

“It can’t have been that simple.”

“Pip.”

“Sorry. I overstepped.”

“It was just that I was tired,” Ottilie said, getting into the car. “Tired of minding that they put Ursula first. I could live my life without them, but it was exhausting me. In the end it was a decision about myself: it was better for me to end it, to appear to be recovered from it.”

“But you’re not.”

Ottilie closed her door, started her engine and pulled slowly through the whitened gravel, waving briefly out of the open window, Pip acknowledging her with a sort of salute.

14

Feeling that she couldn’t bear any more cups of coffee and any more confidential chats, chats that could stretch into desperate hours, Mog took Rebecca for a walk around the estate. It was a chilly morning, misty, but the sun was there beyond the milkiness, burning stoically through its tissue paper layers. Nothing could be seen at the other side of the loch through the fog, and Peattie’s borders to other worlds could only be guessed at. They went first into the walled gardens, Mog walking slightly ahead so as to limit the conversational flow, then into the courtyard and round to the glasshouses, admiring the neat rows of salad crops, the tangle of greenery that rose ceiling-high, the pleasant warm stink of tomato plants. They followed the lane to where it divides, left to the loch, right to the village, and chose the right-hand fork. Approaching the cottages they saw Alan in his front garden, standing behind a trestle table, potting up seedlings from plastic trays. Alan stopped what he was doing.

“Ladies,” he said solicitously. “Nice day for it.”

The cottages are miniaturised toytown-sized houses, sitting together joined in a row. Each gate and window frame has been painted and repainted its pre-war black; each of the windows is shaped faux-medievally as an arch, with finely crafted curved and angled stone-cutting supporting them; each porch trimmed in fretwork that’s still painted in its same pre-war green. Small, densely planted gardens at the front are divided one from the other by waist-height hedges, and of these little plots only Jet’s was untended-looking, bearing the ruins of a sweetpea wigwam gifted by his mother, its former lawn knee-deep in bindweed. George’s own plot was dedicated almost entirely to roses, white and dark purple and apricot. George kept up the holiday let, a square of grass edged in herbs and blue geranium, though Alan said he shouldn’t bother. It was one of the things they disagreed about. Alan wouldn’t let his father do Jet’s garden, which was cut by Ursula when she remembered. Ursula’s own patch is a tiny meadow dominated by Michaelmas daisies (she doesn’t much approve of lawns), and it was as Rebecca was admiring the wildflowers in Ursula’s patch that their owner came rushing out of her cottage and past them at a hurried walk, holding a spade almost as big as she was. Then she came jogging back without it.

“Rebecca, you said you’d like to see inside my house. Come now. I’m here and you’re here.”

Mog and Rebecca followed Ursula inside.

The cottages are dark and prone to damp; the gothic-revival pointed windows are not so charming from within. Woodlice patrol the carpet edges and in terms of decorative efforts only limewashes survive the clamminess of the old stone. All wallpaper attempts have had to be abandoned, though little shreds remain by skirtings and light switches of old doomed campaigns.

“There are four rooms, two up and two down,” Ursula told Rebecca.

Downstairs there’s a kitchen and sitting room and, up a narrow wooden staircase, a bedroom and bathroom, squeezed in under the eaves and heavily coombed. Originally these were two bedrooms, when the cottages shared a communal bathhouse at the rear, but only its foundations remain, marked by a grassy hump and rim of stone. The family that lived in what’s now Ursula’s house in the 1880s had seven children, and Ursula told Rebecca what’s known about them. Three slept in a double bed, top to tail, one in a camp bed squeezed in by the wall, the youngest in the cot in the parents’ room and two downstairs in a curtained-off recess. She showed Rebecca the recess. “Look how small it is, but I bet it was the warmest, so close to the stove.”

Ursula moved into the cottage on the understanding that she would never go beyond the wall alone and that she would continue to come into Peattie House for meals. All this time later she continued to eat with her parents at least once a day, unless Ottilie was at the house, in which case someone was delegated to deliver, trotting down the lane with a covered dish on a tray, soup in a thermos, a bread roll on a plate. Before the companion arrived and the gas stove, Ursula lived out of a fridge and a microwave. She had a toaster and little non-combustible bags designed for making toasted sandwiches.

Ursula’s kitchen, unchanged in half a century, retains its sky-blue cupboards and formica surfaces, its poured blue-black flooring flecked with dots and dashes and its elderly rag-rugs; the rest of the cottage is bare boards. “Joan wants to do it but I won’t let her,” Ursula said. “That would ruin it but Joan doesn’t see that. She doesn’t see things.” She looked to Mog for a response but none came. “It was the same with Granny Vita, yesterday.”

Joan had come into Vita’s private sitting room, a small, scruffy room, the wallpaper tatty, the carpet going to holes, the only heating from a wood fire, to find Vita and Mrs Hammill having a late breakfast of papadums and mango chutney. Mrs Hammill makes frequent visits late at night to the Indian restaurant in the village. Vita was enrobed in thick satin, a dressing gown that was almost 80 years old, that had been bought for a young bride, a faded sea blue embroidered with kingfishers and pagodas, and was holding, shakily, a tiny china cup with mud-thick espresso in it. She drinks a lot of coffee, joking that it’s all that’s keeping her heart beating. Joan had been bursting with the news that she’d planned a refurbishment, and was surprised when Vita declined.

“I’m sorry about your moodboard and I’m grateful to you, but it’s not for me. I’m old now. Wait till I’m gone.”

Joan protested that it was no trouble.

“That isn’t it, my dear,” Vita explained. “I like to be among things from my life, you see, and it’s comforting to outlive some of them.”

***

Ursula’s eyes were bright. “And now, come and see.” She took Rebecca’s hand and led her into the sitting room. “The sofa is new,” she said. “Well, not new but new to me.” It’s a firmly upholstered mustard-coloured affair, all flat planes, with buttoned seats and angled metal legs. She has utility cupboards, a mirror in the shape of a star and shelves heavy with old crockery, things mined at Peattie and at sales Joan takes her to. Generally that’s as far afield as Ursula gets. She’s never been off the estate unaccompanied. She’s never been to the cinema or into a supermarket or on a motorway, but she’s intimately acquainted with every church hall, junk emporium and bookshop in the county.

“I like three sorts of things,” Ursula said. “Well, four if you count plants. Well, five if you count animals, but we could just keep going, adding and adding. What do you like?”

“Oh, well, I don’t know, I suppose the usual things, nice food and films and travel; I like plants and animals too,” Rebecca said.

“You have to learn to be more whimsical,” Ursula told her. “You’re very serious all the time. It makes you boring. What I should have said is the three favourite things for collecting. It’s important to be specific, isn’t it? Two of them are here, and another one is up the stairs and you’ll see in a minute.”

One sitting-room wall is composed entirely of old books, a vivid mosaic of purchases chosen for their bindings and illustrations, children’s books most of them. The shelving opposite has crowded line-ups of china, all of it oddments, spotted and floral: not only cups and jugs and plates but also kitsch souvenir pieces and what Joan calls granny china—porcelain dogs and shepherdesses. Ursula groups them into tableaux and tells stories about their encounters.

“You mustn’t touch, though, so please don’t touch,” she said to Rebecca as Rebecca’s arm was outstretched. “If someone breaks something of mine I break something of theirs. It’s only fair.”

Together they clomped up the steep wooden staircase in the gloom, through the stair door and into the bedroom. A cumbersome knitting machine sat at the centre of a small clearing, threatened at all sides by tightly packed racks of second-hand clothing, every cut and colour and type of thing, but with an evident favouritism for ball gowns, cocktail dresses and elaborate underwear.

Izzy pops in sometimes to say hello and takes pieces of clothing on loan. In general Ursula doesn’t lend, so it’s remarkable that she lets Izzy borrow from the collection, though Pip thinks that it’s because she enjoys denying Izzy ownership of things. There may be an element of guilty conscience at play. Ursula disgraced herself at Izzy’s christening by remarking to a fellow guest and audibly to others that the ravishingly pretty baby swaddled in GreatGrandmother’s lace, blinking and cooing in her mother’s arms, would be unlucky and die young. Afterwards, in the drawing room at Peattie, Edith had at first tried the playfulness defence: Ursula hadn’t meant it; it was joke, though perhaps—she’d concede this—in poor taste for the occasion. That hadn’t convinced anyone, so then Edith said that Ursula hadn’t meant for Joan to overhear, and at least she’d had the good grace to look regretful about it.

“You can try some of the things on, if you like, if you’re careful,” Ursula offered.

“I don’t think we have time, but thank you,” Rebecca said.

“Oh I see,” Ursula said flatly. “You should go, then. No point staying.”

So much younger than her twin sisters, so much older than their children, Ursula has always seemed to me to be stuck between generations like a lift that’s got stuck between floors. In the old days Edith was assertive, should the subject arise, about her youngest daughter having been a normal happy girl, developing at the usual rate, until the witnessing of Sebastian’s death derailed her. Whatever the truth of that, it’s agreed that after his death she was an isolated child with pronounced aversions. Various other children came to play at intervals when she was young, attracted by the loch and the pony and the tennis court, but it never worked out. She and I found that we had this much in common. It’s one of the things we used to talk about. About that and about my mother. Looking back, it’s hard not to admire Ursula’s silence on the key question, throughout these conversations. It never occurred to me that Ursula would know who my father was, and so I didn’t press her on the topic. But she’s good at keeping quiet.

It’s hard to know whether Ursula’s silence, which lasted for four years after Sebastian died, was a decision arrived at, made to step into line with her quiet parents, or whether it was, as Edith has always insisted, a physical manifestation of shock. What’s certain is that whether voluntary or not, Ursula outdid everyone in the quality and reach of her silence. If you spoke she’d just stare at you, her rosebud mouth pursed up with dislike. It was clear she was bright. It wasn’t that she didn’t know the answers. She’d respond in class by speaking through an interpreter, her desk-partner Sheena, a girl of bovine placidity who was happy to read out Ursula’s written responses. In any case, only three years of conventional schooling were managed and Ursula was taken out to be home-educated aged eight, when it was agreed by everybody concerned that she wasn’t coping, so she has never sat an exam, though Edith taught her the basics and reading taught her the rest. It’s reading tracked along the many dusty bookcases at Peattie—reading that has left her with what some might consider a lopsided knowledge of the world. Plants and butterflies, local geography, John Milton, the history of the English Civil War and of Malaysia: these are some of the things she knows a lot about. Later on it was Edith who bought her the knitting machine. It turned out to be an inspired gift. Ursula enjoys its laborious processes, its slowness and method, its steady productivity. She makes beautiful knitwear with complicated knots and patterns, sweaters and cardigan jackets made with feather-light wools spun finely, from chocolate-brown and buttermilk-coloured sheep, and sells them in the crafts shop in the town, the arts and crafts co-op that was once Tilly’s dress shop. Some of the items are left in their natural colours, but others she rinses in plant dyes; part of the garden at Peattie is planted with traditional dye-giving flowers, yellow and green, brick red and violet blue. She’s always found her knitwear-proceeds to be bountiful, despite the modesty of her income, because she spends almost nothing. She’s supplied with the day-to-day essentials and even some of these are rejected as unnecessary, a situation that has always made Edith happy, speaking deeply to her frugality.