The White Lie (31 page)

Ursula and I were rowing towards the deeps. I was rowing and Ursula was fidgeting. She was rubbing her hands together, fingers poised over her knees. Her lower legs were drawn under the apron of the dress. She looked down into the floor of the boat, avoiding seeing the water, her head tilted away from me, barely visible beneath the hat.

“Henry knows that I’m going,” I said to her. “But only Henry.” I knew this would get back to Edith. I seemed to be intent on upsetting her, too. Getting Henry into trouble, certainly.

“He gave me some money,” I said. Now all I could do was make things worse.

Ursula’s studied calm was aggravating. “When did he give it?”

“He didn’t physically give it. But he offered it to me, knowing I was leaving.”

She didn’t ask how much. That’s not the sort of thing that interests her. She was quiet, chewing at her lower lip, picking at its dry skin with her teeth. The rhythm of the oars in the water was all I could hear. The turn and the sigh of air, the faint squeaking of oar in oarlock. The breaking-in; the idea of deep, deep water’s uppermost membrane being disturbed, its plastic meniscus, though all that lies beneath lay untroubled, and then the flick of the oar as it emerged, the brief contingent scattering, its brief wet gasp; the spray and then the reunion. This was the soothing background music to our conversation.

“You and I belong together,” Ursula said. This couldn’t but irritate me.

“You’re wrong,” I told her. “This has just been . . . it’s a passionate friendship.” The truth is, not even that.

He was appallingly arrogant, that boy, but tactful enough to desist from putting her right on one or two things, technical things about adult human relations. I wonder whether she will ever understand what sex really means, whether she’ll move on from her belief that it’s the insertion of tongues into mouths when kissing. On this basis, kissing me was the first sex she’d ever had. Ursula has a sheltered child’s idea of things, having never been given the information by anyone. I’m not sure why that is. Was it Edith’s belief that Ursula was certain never to have sexual relationships, thinking it unlikely (or worse inappropriate) in someone she’s always considered, secretly, to be profoundly disabled? Or was it the fear that Ursula would take sexual pleasure whenever and wherever she could, uninhibitedly, applying her logical disdain to objections?

I know: there’s no excuse. Kissing your aunt is bad enough. Does it help to know that it was Ursula who initiated kissing? All I can tell you in my own defence is that I was very drunk, and so was she. It wasn’t anything premeditated, when I brought a bottle of Henry’s cognac to the linen room that evening; I’d drunk there in secret for a while. Ursula was determined to join in and it didn’t occur to me to stop her. Having had little luck with girls (I sneered at them, entirely self-protectively), Ursula’s advance was an opportunity that I couldn’t quite talk myself out of taking up. There was no contact other than of lips.

The boat itself was growing hot. Its fine metal rim, one that runs through its top edge, a thin metal-skinned frame indented into the wood, burned under the fingertips and caught searing at my forearms when they glanced against it. I had to change the subject, and so, in the casual manner that’s often the hallmark of the momentous, I did something that would change the trajectory of all of our lives for ever after. I said, “I owe it to you, Ursula, to tell you the real reason I’m going.”

The truth is that I was peeved that she hadn’t been more curious. She accepts facts as facts, that’s how she is. And now she was quiet. But she was looking at me from under the hat, and she’d stopped the nervous hand-rubbing.

“It’s because I know about Alan,” I said.

She was surprised. “What’s Alan done?”

She submerged her lower lip beneath her upper, her little nostrils flared, and she was frowning.

“Alan Dixon’s my father,” I told her.

***

Henry interrupted Alan’s story. “So he knew.”

“He knew.”

“But she told him, I thought. We all thought. She told him. That was the secret, surely. What was the secret, if it wasn’t that?”

“He’d found out from somewhere else, but it was Ursula who told him that the rest of the family had known all the time, that his cousins knew and pretended not to.”

“That was the secret?”

“That was it.”

Henry closed his eyes before continuing. “And then?”

“Michael was screaming at her.”

***

She opened her mouth and out it came, the information, in her usual deadpan way. Instantly I was on my feet, looming over her and making a lot of noise; I leapt to my feet accusing Ursula of lying. This was the worst possible idea. Her integrity is herself—her truth her integrity her self—all one and inseparable, and the loss of one is the loss of all irrevocably: something like that. To accuse Ursula of lying was to say the most hurtful thing imaginable. So Ursula was pretty aggrieved about my calling her a liar. I found that I had hold of her: I’d let the oars fall slack and had her tightly by the upper arms, her bones frail under my hands. Aware of their frailty, I let go of her abruptly, and she moved as far as was possible away from me.

“Take it back and tell me it’s not true,” I said.

“It is the truth, the truth,” she insisted, her little face thrust forward like a ship’s figurehead.

“And you were told this, you but not me; my mother would never tell me but she told you? That’s fucking the fucking last straw.”

“Nobody told me,” Ursula said, calmly. “Nobody told me; I saw them.”

This pulled me up short.

“I saw them,” she said again.

I was aware that I was not breathing. The world had stopped. It was full of deceit and could no longer function. The world had become something that disproved its own existence, a schoolboy conundrum: the substance that burns through all surfaces and can’t be contained.

“You saw them?”

“I saw them talking about it. I heard him saying to her that she must get rid of it. I heard her say she might, but only by getting rid of herself at the same time.”

Henry interrupted the account again.

“Alan, you told Ottilie she must get rid of the baby?”

“I’m sorry. It seemed like the best thing at the time. It was never going to work out between us, and she was so young.”

“She was considering suicide? I’m so shocked by this, by all of this, I don’t know if I want to hear any more.”

“You want to know what happened.”

“Go on.”

***

At first I was disdainful.

“You saw them, you say. You were, what, nine years old and away with the fairies most of the time. You dreamed this, Ursula, you dreamed it.”

I took one of the oars out of its housing, adjusting its weight in my hands.

“What are you doing?” Ursula said, trying to move away a little further and finding she couldn’t.

Attempting to shove her into the loch: this I admit to, though with saturating embarrassment. I am in no position to judge her. I, too, know the impulse that is dared by the self to the self, that comes from a dark cave in the mind unchallenged: the impulse acted upon and regretted even as it’s being done. The first prod was a warning, but then I prodded her a second time and harder. The look on her face as she lost her footing, as she grabbed onto the oar’s end only just in time to save herself—that’s a look I will never forget. Horror, and terror, but worse, much worse, a terrible disillusionment: seeing that I, knowing her aquaphobia, having known it all of my life and its cause, could threaten to tip her into the loch, here out in the deeps, Ursula who fears nothing like deep water and drowning, Ursula who cannot swim a stroke. It must have been fear that empowered the answering shove that she gave to the oar, the full weight of her body and something borrowed beyond it. The end I was holding slipped out of my grasp and pushed deep into my ribs, and I went over the side of the boat.

I swam around her three or four times. I could see Alan on the shore, his outline shifting and reforming in the haze, light spangling bright on his pale head, a figure in black and white in a coloured landscape, waiting patiently to hand over the money, one hand poised rigid across his brow so as to see us better through the glare. I put my hands over the edge of the boat and pulled myself up a little. I reached in and got hold of Ursula’s leg, and she went at me with the oar and missed. I swam round to the other side and pulled myself up again, intending to board. And that’s when she hit me.

“The oar was swung at him,” Alan said, “and at the very last possible second, seeing it coming, he ducked. He moved his head to one side and put a protective hand across it. It was the other hand that she hit, the one that was holding on. And that was how his wrist got broken. That was why he left without the car.”

I went down as if pulled from beneath. I saw the light, its dusty brown slick on the surface of the water, from the wrong side, as if from a place through the looking glass, and the wavering silhouette of the boat, the mathematical beauty of its base, its perfect lines and symmetry, its corners and its roundedness. I saw Ursula bent over the side, the hat, her long hair, her girl-shape looking down at me, the outline rippling. I went down and down in slow motion, falling through brown and then into black, swallowing water, my eyes wide.

I feel it as well as see it, when Alan tells his tale. I grow tired of sinking. Adrenaline kicks in and I twist off the vertical descent, invoking all the strength in my hips and in my legs. I turn out of the vertical with a merman’s shoulders and tail-kick, still grasping the wrist, arms withheld and feet together, with strong and sinuous kicks that flow taut through my body like a wave, away from Ursula and towards the shore. I am ready now for anything. I am reborn. I will go south on a train and find my life; I’ll disembark in an ugly town and go deeper into the forest. The ancient woodland is a thing of staggering beauty: every kind of tree shoulder to shoulder, deep planted and spread, a nation of trees of every colour and language. I take these into myself, imprint their imagery on the back of my eyelids, my idea of my eyelids, and am alive again. I see the spring sun through the branches and thick falls of orange leaves. I have been there, to a village among wooded hills, to a little brick house in the clearing. I go south to the life I might have had. I meet Elspeth one day in the village shop, and we meet again at the library and walk together for hours, and seem to know one another well, which is an odd thing and bewitching. She tells me her own sad tale of family proving to be the enemy. Each bitterness goes on to sustain and feed the other, but then, when the twins are born, it begins finally to soften and fade. Their wavy auburn hair, the mischief in their green eyes, their big gap-toothed smiles, their sturdy girl feet: how I miss them. I imagine their growing up into sad-eyed beauties, now that I’m gone, now that I’ve come back to Peattie. I don’t know what happened, but it came to an end. I went to bed with Elspeth one summer night, the thin sheet cast aside, our four brown limbs criss-crossing, and I didn’t wake there again.

The truth is that Alan is owed a great debt. Which is an odd way to think of Alan, but life is peculiar and death more so. It is Alan who brings me out of the loch, injured and angry but alive. I can feel my wrist aching, each time he tells it. Each time he tells it I hear him, even here in another country. I feel my wrist aching, the pain radiating through my shoulder and into my neck: I have lived it, and more than once. So I can tell you that it’s when I arrived, stumbling and ungainly onto my knees and awkwardly onto my feet, no-handed in the shallows, holding onto the throbbing wrist, and came up onto the beach that it began properly to hurt.

Alan had the money in a bag, a brown-paper sack like a sandwich bag that had been folded down at the top many times, much used and wrinkled from previous excursions, the old folds shiny in the buff of the paper. His expression as he approached was all fatherly concern. “Son, has she hurt you? Let me look at it.” He stretched out his arm. I was cradling the damaged wrist in the palm of the other hand, my eyes half shut and my breathing slowed. I was aware that he was talking to me but the pain was still intense, though it had peaked and was beginning to ebb. I was breathing it out, as Tilly taught me when the migraines struck; she was a fellow sufferer. I felt him take hold of the forearm, his first touch gentle, seeking permission to proceed. I felt him take it and bind it tight in one of his big handkerchiefs, knotting the ends. The tenderness of his ministrations was all too much. I was aware that he stepped back and was saying something about needing an x-ray. He used the word
son
again. I opened my eyes. That’s when I brought back my good arm and hit him. He wasn’t expecting the blow, and so his face betrayed an immense and unguarded surprise, hit hard across the cheekbone by a misplaced punch, falling back on the grit on his arse. Falling, astonished, then looking up at me and bellowing, “What
for?”

I stood over Alan, blood pumping hard in my ears. “You’re getting off very lightly,” I told him. “You complete and utter .” The words failed to match the gravity of the thing. Instead there was a feast of emphasis. “
You
are not my father, Alan. You are
not
my father, Alan. You are not my
father
, Alan.”

Every time I come here, I have him. I have him at last. After all these impotent years.

“You are the king of the losers, Alan,” I tell him. “You are the king of the fucking losers.”

These words never feature in Alan’s story, unsurprisingly. Not least because they’re my own elaboration.

“So that’s how your cheek got bruised,” Henry said. “Not by the boat. By Michael on the shore.”

“Michael on the shore,” Alan agreed.

“But why?”

“Angry with me for not telling him, for not speaking up. Angry that I’d agreed to do that.”

“Agreed with whom?”

“With Ottilie. Agreed with Ottilie.”

Alan was knocked to the ground, and got to his feet, he said, doing it in such a way that he managed to keep one eye on me, afraid that I would hit him again. He stood rubbing at his cheekbone, which was red and purpling already. A little blood was trickling out of his nose and he searched his trouser pockets for the handkerchief, before having to resort to patting at his nostrils with his sleeve.