The White Lie (3 page)

Joan took the opportunity of their being alone to say to Edith that when he saw what was happening, Alan should have come straight to the house. “Half an hour, he wasted half an hour trying to do it all himself and be the hero. The hero all over again.”

Edith was brusque. “He did the right thing, Joan. He might have saved him.” Sebastian’s name was in the air unspoken.

***

Later, a week or so after this, Alan surprised them all by going into the loch and coming up with one of my shoes, a brown leather boat shoe soaked almost black. He had found it on a rocky outcrop under the surface and this had sparked a new search much closer to shore. The fact that Alan found it would be thought to be important later, when the questions began in earnest. Later, you see, there wouldn’t be certainty, but only deeper and greater doubt. Certainty has only come recently. At the time there was nothing systematic about the thing; it was and remained essentially amateurish. This might shock you, but the fact is that the police weren’t involved in the aftermath of my disappearance, and not just not then, at the beginning, on the day. Not at all; not ever. The family could always have played the suicide card they held up their sleeves in readiness, if the authorities had come sniffing round, but it wasn’t something they felt complacent about, not with the risk of a head wound revealing itself. Dragging the lake, in any case unfeasible, was quite impossible in these circumstances. This is something Henry had to be blunt about when dealing with my mother.

Alan surprised them all with his tact. There was no way of assuming him locked into the secret, but nonetheless Alan was meticulous in supporting the Salter version of events in the village. Henry tried to have a conversation with him at the beginning, a conversation about consistency, but Alan interrupted him in his full euphemistic flow, lifting his hand up as if it were a pledge and saying that if anyone asked, he would tell them—
of course -
that Michael left home, left a note, and that his current whereabouts remained unknown. All these assertions were, after all, true.

“The rumours are a disgrace.” He said this almost as an afterthought, half out of the door.

“Rumours? What rumours are there?”

“That his car was left on the beach because Michael never left the loch. That Michael killed himself.”

“Nothing about . . . anyone else?”

“No. No, no. There’s no implication—”

“I see. Well, thank you, Alan.”

Some people have an aura about them, an unfortunate editorial addition to the facts of their physical selves, and Alan was one of these people: probably still is. At the time I disappeared he’d already taken on the doughy, shadowedeyed look of a man who has lost faith in the idea of life, who senses that life has no great plan for him and finds consolations where he can. He’d adopted a daily uniform of formal black trousers, just a little too short, showing white socks in the gap between hem and shoe, and loudly patterned zipped sweaters that were stiff with acrylic. When he left here last year in disgrace, by then mostly bald, he’d grown out his monkish tonsure of hair so that it could be brushed across from one ear. At the time I was born things were different. At that time he was handsome in his sturdy soldier-boy way, unfashionable but well presented, a lover of well-pressed slacks and short-sleeved shirts finished with a knife crease down the upper arm, strong-chinned and even-featured, if rather hard-looking, his face usually closed on its outward side, with who knows what doors and windows on the inward-facing wall, but in middle age he’d become desperately unkempt.

“Well, what do you expect?” Henry would say, when the subject arose. “Two men living in that small house together.”

***

Henry went along the shoreline, past Mog, who was walking briskly up and down, her hands held in front of her, massaging one with the other in turn. He went along to see Ursula, who was sitting at the edge of the wood, at the base of a tree, knees clasped tightly, but she wouldn’t speak, wouldn’t look at him. He knew these silences and knew that they end only when Ursula is ready, so he abandoned the attempt and returned to Ottilie on the jetty. They stood watching as the rescue effort became openly disheartened.

“No, no chance,” I heard Henry say.

“But he’d float, wouldn’t he?” Ottilie asked him. “He’d float if he were drowned, wouldn’t he? He wouldn’t sink, would he? Or he wouldn’t sink far, would he?”

Henry believed in honesty, always said so. It’s what he was known for, his straight talking, that is if you could get him to talk at all. Ordinarily he was a man who didn’t say much unless there was a practical need, and it had been like that since Sebastian died. Edith has always maintained that Henry was optimistic once, a happy, uncomplicated soul who found contentment in ordinary daily busyness and recuperated in good spirits afterwards, glad to spend time with his family. When I was born Sebastian had been dead five years, which was longer than he’d lived, and it wasn’t any longer easy to engage Henry, but if you could engage him, he was disarmingly straight. Disasters did this to people, he said. He never pretended to a child that there’s a Santa or a Tooth Fairy or (out of Edith’s earshot, at least) that there was anything special about the Baby Jesus beyond being a man with a good heart, about whom many myths sprang up in his lifetime and then even more so afterwards, as is the way with celebrity. He wouldn’t lie to Ottilie. She knew that. That’s why she was asking.

“He might be . . . suspended at a certain depth,” he said to her, apparently unemotively, looking out at the two men, who were diving and surfacing and yelling at each other to move along a bit. Alan said that judging by the view of the wood they were 50 feet out, maybe, but it was so hard to say; it was almost impossible to say.

“It isn’t just about the distance from the beach,” Euan told him. “The location needs plotting in three dimensions.”

“Whatever you say, professor,” Alan sniped.

Ignoring this, Euan said Ursula should be with the women in the boat, shouting this ineffectually towards the shore. Then he was gone again, getting into his dive by surging firstly up, his breath held, his ribs obvious and wet, his boxers soaked against his hips, before plunging down, his long pale legs beating at the water as he tried to get more vertical and deeper.

“It depends on how long,” Henry was saying.

“But people are found floating in rivers, in the sea,” Ottilie countered.

“They have air trapped in their clothes. Or are carried along by the current, the tide. Or if not, if they sink, they tend to . . . they tend to bob up again, at a certain point, at the point when . . .” He stopped mid-sentence. Not even Henry could bear to tell my mother that my body would have to rot a little, made buoyant by decompositional gas.

“Carried along,” she said.

“But in a loch this cold he might never resurface,” he told her.

“What do you mean?”

“In water this cold, it’s extremely cold: you understand that, don’t you? It’s ice cold down there in the deeps. The truth is that he won’t be found.”

“What do you mean? No. No, Dad. No, Dad. What are you saying?”

“I’m sorry. But you want to know. You want to know, don’t you? The unvarnished truth of it?”

“No. I want to know something different. Take me back to the start of this and I would give anyone’s life. Yours, Dad. Even yours.”

“I’m so very sorry.”

“Nobody’s sorry enough.”

Nothing further was said for a while. What Henry was thinking, I’d bet, is that this would be a good thing, a saving grace, my non-reappearance. Ghastly, tragic, terrible, too terrible to comprehend fully, a terrible day it had turned out to be, but at least I wouldn’t reappear. That would be the arrived-at family perspective, the grown-on family orthodoxy. They didn’t want me resurfacing, found bloated on the surface by a fisherman: the only thing that lay on the other side of that eventuality was a more concrete disaster, a living human disaster, one that was unnavigable. Henry was reassured that I was unlikely to be found, and was too ashamed to admit it. Ashamed the whole rest of his life.

They spent another hour and ten minutes at the loch. Everyone knew it was hopeless and that there was little point, but nobody could bear to leave, to turn their backs on me, until Edith said that she must go and see Vita and that they should go back to the house, perhaps returning later. That
perhaps
was the mechanism for permission. Once they’d gone, they weren’t going to return—other than for the private visits, three, four times daily at first, and then less and less often as the weeks passed, their resolve leaking into duty, duty turning into resignation. They came often at first, scanning the water, something nobody talked about but everybody did, individually and without mentioning it, waiting for the possibility of my showing as an object limp and buffeted, something foul and changed. Once human, now a repellent human debris.

What is it we learn as we grow older in the world? Nothing, it seems to me, besides what it is that love means. My mother loved me, but in a language I didn’t understand. Things were obvious to her that I couldn’t even guess at. My grandparents loved me in a way that was sincere and useless. Mog loved me in a way that left me anxious for her: her love was like another way of being lost. Everybody else loved me only after I’d gone.

2

It’s time to begin to tell you about the events of 12 months ago. We’re going there now. The lilac-brown clouds and the sodium yellow light are gone. It’s tepid and overcast weather, but with a brighter sky promised, a classic Scottish summer day. This isn’t how it began but it will serve as a place to begin, with a conversation here in the wood between Ottilie and Joan, about the appropriateness of grandeur and its cost. This could have been an argument arising from one of many points of conflict that had dogged their lives together, but in this case was pegged specifically to Edith’s 70th birthday and the arrangements for the coming weekend.

They had come here for privacy, far from Edith’s ears; the finer details of the celebration had been kept from her. Joan had elected herself head of the event committee, and had delegated widely. She had demanded Ottilie come to the wood to look at the list. Each of the sisters was leaning on a different tree, each with her arms folded. Negotiations weren’t going well.

“Why is it that you ascribe value only to things that are expensive?” Ottilie asked Joan.

The reply was obvious. “Why is it you’re so determined to be cheap?”

“It’s not about you,” Ottilie told her sister.

Joan batted straight back. “It isn’t about you, either.”

Ottilie served a new ball. “What they want is simplicity. Simplicity and their old friends.”

“They’ll love every minute of it,” Joan volleyed.

“You don’t understand,” Ottilie said, her tone changing. “This is about grief. Grief that’s still fresh. Celebrations are in bad taste. It ought to be low key. It has to be low key.”

“It’s you who doesn’t understand,” Joan said. “What we need, what they need more than anything, is to draw a line. A party is symbolic. Enough time has elapsed.”

“That’s not for you to say.” Ottilie’s voice was shaking, and so were her hands.

“We need to get on and look at the list,” Joan said without looking at her sister. They began perfunctorily to go through it, agreeing and disagreeing, each of them embarrassed by the way things had almost developed, the conversation they’d very nearly had.

Joan said she’d taken note of objections and would consider, but now she must get on because there were a hundred things to see to. They walked towards the house together, side by side and as far apart as possible, continuing the debate. Their voices grew louder. Abruptly, Ottilie turned away from Joan—who in so very many ways is her unidentical twin—and came back, gesticulating and far from pleased.

I know her even at great distances by her outline, by the way her arms swing through the step as her body moves forward, by the determined way she holds her head. She stopped to look at the verge, picking one seedhead and then another, storing her treasures away in her pockets. She’s constantly on the lookout for things to take back to the studio, is madly prolific; her canvasses and boards are six deep at the cottage, an overflow of things she’s not ready to sell. Many more are stored at Peattie, in dusty and unloved rooms.

She stands in front of things, looking at them as if they’re already drawn, as if her eyes are scanning and drawing and the thing’s already on the etching plate. Etchings are her preference, at the moment, though her first success was a series of vast smudgy boardroom oils, cream on white, pictures that paid for a home of her own. The gallery owners come to her there, surprised, or (very occasionally) charmed by the state of the place, and girding their loins. She’s not going to do more work in the old style if she doesn’t feel like it. She’s not going to let work go that isn’t right or isn’t finished. Sometimes things sent to Peattie are retrieved and reworked, and sometimes they go back again afterwards: the process can take years.

In repose and in walking alone, her face sets into something that could be misinterpreted as sternness. She can be intimidating, my mother. She does classroom visits and frightens children; she’s had a long-term association with the primary school in the village, and she was here with the graduating class the year they saw the great uncle. I’m not the ghost of Sanctuary Wood, you see. It isn’t me that people see here, or say they have seen, but Great Uncle David. He’s a famous ghost, mentioned in the guide books. Ottilie brought boards and a roll of lining paper to the school trip, unfolding a wooden ruler with brass hinges, marking and creasing the paper roll before tearing it efficiently into sections. She gave the pupils pieces of charcoal and asked them to draw trees. She can’t talk to children as if they’re children, never has been able to, and this has been a fertile source of family reproach. She wanted them to stop thinking they knew a tree and really look at it, she said. Some of the school children saw too much, more than they were bargaining for, though it was Ottilie’s opinion that the ghost-seers were deluded, were wanting to see something, had willed themselves to, had undergone a domesticated sort of group hysteria. She’s better with older children, teenagers, who go to her by invitation to work on their portfolios for applying to art college.