The White Lie (32 page)

“To hell with it,” I said, more to myself than anyone. I extended my good hand towards him, the better hand, though it was aching hard in the knuckles. At first he thought I wanted to shake, extending his own hand, embarrassed by my not reciprocating. “Give me the money,” I said to him.

“He gave me £200 of the cash,” Alan said to Henry. “Do you want it back? I feel I ought to give it back.”

“No, no,” Henry said. “You keep it, Alan.”

Alan said that he was touched to discover that I’d only taken the painting so that I could present it to him. “Once he’d calmed down,” Alan said, “he gave it to me, symbolically, he said, and with regret that he was leaving, with the hopes that we would meet again.”

“Odd,” Henry said.

“He wasn’t an ordinary boy; he felt everything deeply. He had a strong sense of justice. Of injustice.” There were, Alan added, many expressions of regret about the way the family had behaved over the last 20 years to the father of the heir. Henry didn’t want to dwell on these sentiments and asked him to get on with the story.

Michael lost a shoe in the loch, Alan said, in his struggle to live. I shrugged off the remaining shoe, prising it off with the other foot, and lobbed it as far as I could get it. This, Alan said, was the shoe that he came up with; he knew where to look. Now I was barefoot and I was dripping and my bare feet were pricked by the grit, and I needed to get away from there. Alan said he must go and rescue Ursula; Ursula who remained utterly still, a painting of a girl in a blue dress and a white hat, sitting forlornly in a rowing boat, dwarfed by loch and hill scenery, the outlines of the picture pulsing and jagged.

He removed his shirt, a white shirt that had seen better, whiter days, its cuffs dotted with scarlet blood, and draped it over a rock, and I watched him, saying nothing. His stomach and chest were pale and soft, his flesh puckering around the navel where the belt of the trousers dug in. He removed his trainers, putting them neatly paired beside the shirt, by the rock, by the black day-sack. He slipped his trousers off and stood uncomfortably in old-fashioned Y-fronts, and went up onto the jetty and dived into the water.

“You didn’t wear your shoes in the loch, you didn’t lose them there?”

“No. Michael took them.”

Once Alan was in the loch, I picked up his trainers and I took them to the car. I didn’t have spare shoes in the bag I’d packed. I left my wet clothes in a pile on the gravel.

Henry interrupted again. “What happened to the clothes?”

“I disposed of them. Stowed them in my wardrobe. Then took them in a bag to the dump.”

“Why would you do that?”

“I was going to give them to you. But then Ursula said what she said, and I agreed with her.”

“She didn’t see him. Why didn’t she see him on the beach with you?”

“She was in a sort of trance. You know how she gets.”

“Go on.”

“I didn’t mean to, you know. I want you to understand that. It came out of my mouth and surprised even me.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You’ve treated me like shit. The heir’s father. All of you. Like shit.”

“Even so. Even so. It’s unforgivable.”

“No, Mr Salter. I’d say we’re about even.”

“How can you say that? You can’t possibly believe it.”

“I’ve said I’m sorry. There’s not a lot else I can do.”

“But why, why did you do it, such a wicked thing?”

“I’ve told you, it was Ursula. Once I’d let Ursula tell it the way she thought it happened, without contradicting her, it was impossible to put a stop to it. It had a life of its own.”

***

I put on the newest things from the top of the bag, clothes Ottilie hadn’t registered as mine and wouldn’t miss: this wasn’t an intentional aspect but it’s how it turned out. She hadn’t noticed my newest purchases: new jeans, a new shirt, a brown leather jacket. The wrist made dressing very slow; every little contact and pressure hurt like an abscess bitten down in a mouth. Alan was looking back towards me, and if he noticed that it was his shoes I slipped my feet into (tight, but they’d serve) he didn’t show that he’d noticed. This, he said to Henry, is when he got the chest pains: they’d begun just as he was climbing into the boat. He had to sit for a while. He sat with Ursula until the pain subsided and until I was long gone.

Thanks to Alan and his lie, I had the things I needed to make the journey. Everything else I was leaving behind. I didn’t want any of it, any of them, none of it, and I said this aloud like a mantra, into the heat of the open car boot, the stifling plastic aroma. I took a carrier bag from the car that had a newspaper in it and a packet of cigarettes, and I emptied them out onto the back seat. I stuffed the wet clothes into it, the jeans, the t-shirt, the underwear, and left it by a tree. The family could think what they liked. Let them puzzle. Let them decide. Let them ponder. Let them debate. And let them wonder why the car was still here, the boot up, doors open, abandoned and inexplicable. Let them wonder why it was all still here, the carefully packed bag, the capsule life, the clothes, the books, the notebooks with their infantile musings—things written yesterday and on previous days, when the world and I had a different relationship to one another. All I needed for the afterlife, I had: Alan’s wretched shoes, the leather jacket I couldn’t bear to leave, the clothes I stood in, and crucially, most crucial of all, £1800 in a brown-paper bag. Briefly I entertained and then dismissed the idea that this was something else I should leave behind. It was Henry’s money, after all. My lip curled in disgust at the memory of Henry and his dossier of likely fathers.

I could see Alan talking to Ursula. The negotiation appeared lopsided: she didn’t appear to be responding. That’s the last I saw of Peattie as I turned away: Alan crouching to talk to the still immobile Ursula, the sunlight brilliant off his white torso. I turned and walked away, not even pausing for a final regretful glance towards the chimney pots that decorate the treeline.

There he goes, the boy, the tall boy that’s almost a man, loping away through the woods, binding the money tight in the brown-paper bag and trying to insert it entire into an inner jacket pocket one-handedly before finding the thing too bulky and discarding the bag on the ground. He has eaten painkillers taken from the car, too preoccupied to register their bitterness, and has disappeared from view, away overland towards the town, joining the road a few miles out of the village and getting a lift to the train station from a truck driver. A few hours after this, not realising what it was that she had, a walker would pick up the bag in the wood and bin it, thinking it picnickers’ litter.

Alan rowed Ursula back to the shore, Ursula staring at her feet beneath her hem, knees pulled up beneath her chin, and Alan seated opposite her, his wet fish body dried matt white.

“He’s gone,” Ursula said. “He’s gone, isn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“He’s dead. He’s dead, isn’t he?”

Alan didn’t answer. He was concentrating on rowing, on the rhythm. The sun was beginning to burn his shoulders and the back of his neck.

Henry interrupted again. “But why didn’t you say no? Why didn’t you just say no, no, he isn’t? I don’t understand. I’m never going to understand.”

“I didn’t say he was dead. I was thinking. That’s all I can tell you. I was thinking. I admit to that. Seeing what might happen.”

“I know that I killed him,” Ursula said. “But it wasn’t meant, I promise you.”

“How could you do that to her?” Henry interrupted again.

“I didn’t mean it,” Ursula said. “The thing I did and the thing that happened are not the same thing. They’re not always the same thing. That’s what Mummy said, when I told her. That’s the thing to hold on to, no matter what.”

Alan paused in the action with the oars. He looked unwell, grey beneath the eyes, lilac in his fingernails. He paused again to rub at his chest with one hand. He was making very slow progress.

“What do you mean you told her? How could you tell her?” he asked.

“She asked me and I told her.”

“She was confused; she was so confused,” Henry said, interrupting the account again.

“I could see she was confused,” Alan admitted. “I was going to put her right and then I didn’t.”

“We should have realised before this. We should have thought.”

“Shall I go on?”

“Yes. Go on.” Henry steadied himself against the wall.

“Are you alright, Mr Salter?”

“I feel strange, light-headed. Shock. Anger. Gratitude. And so bizarre.”

“I know it’s a shock. I’m truly sorry.”

***

What is the boy thinking about, now that he’s dismissed the idea of family from his mind? Where to go, where not to, who to be when he gets there, how to make his future unspool constructively out of his rage. At first only about the day ahead, the journey, and then, with a discipline that’s magnificent in its way, on the long train-borne hours, only about tomorrow and about how things might begin. The past he has already disinherited. It has seemed not to take a huge effort of mind. There are no constructions necessary, it turns out. The past has been allowed merely to fall, to drop out of consciousness, in a way that feels—for now at any rate—entirely like relief, like freedom. He sloughs all little nascent itches of responsibility off like a scab. It’s easy. His heart has evacuated itself and it has felt like a new beginning. It is a new beginning. This is what he tells himself, in the long train-borne hours.

16

“People are always trying to make this complicated, but actually it’s very simple.”

Izzy was painting her toenails, pushing the curtain of hair around her neck and onto the other shoulder. Her feet were misshapen, big toes pushed sharply inward, small toes curled and angled into the same unnatural, shoe-moulded point. “It’s very simple. Ursula killed Michael, in self-defence if we’re charitable, and Alan stole the picture and the money, pinning the burglary on him.”

“He said Michael gave him the picture as a token,” Mog told her. “To do with his mistreatment by all of us. Made me feel terrible.”

“I don’t believe it,” Izzy said. “Alan’s delusional.”

“About what?”

“About being Michael’s father. Ottilie and Alan? Come on. What for? Sorry but I’m just not convinced.”

Mog was rattled. “But why would he lie?”

Izzy had that look she gets when people are being dense. “Because he’s delusional.”

“What are you saying, then, that it was some random at a house party?”

“Not some random. One of the friends. I think we’re all set up for a whodunnit, only it’s a paternity case and not a doing-in. Most of the possible fathers will be here for the thing. Christian Grant for one.”

“You’re not serious.”

Izzy paused, caramel polish lengthening on the brush.

“What you haven’t considered, any of you, and what Michael never considered either, I bet you, is that she isn’t being obstructive. It isn’t about that. What if there isn’t a name to tell? It’s possible she doesn’t know.” Mog’s scepticism was obvious. “It’s perfectly possible,” Izzy insisted. “She doesn’t know who Michael’s father is and is too embarrassed to admit it. Couldn’t admit it to Michael. Hence all the stuff about him not being a good man, all that. She doesn’t know who it was. She was young, got shit-faced drunk, woke up pregnant. It happens. Have you been to one of those things?”

Mog considered, as if considering were needed, then shook her head.

“Well, I have.”

“I know. I remember the fuss.”

“General moral turpitude and buckets of booze. Drugs too, these days. Mrs Hostess comes round in her dressing gown at 2am to make sure everyone’s in the right beds and lights are out, and goes off thinking what a doddle it all is.”

“And?”

“It’s then that the fun starts.”

They were interrupted by Izzy’s mobile. Mog signalled that she’d go and fetch coffee.

When Mog went into the kitchen she found her mother reading a slim volume entitled Surviving Divorce. Just a little too late, Joan slotted it hurriedly in with the cookery books, books yellowed with age and spattered and torn. It sat there in company with the boeuf bourgignon and cauliflower soup, saying nothing but emitting a low and steady throb. Nobody looked at it directly.

Mog had been via the study and brought the newspaper with her. She opened it on the table.

Joan pounced. “What are you doing with that? You know the rules.”

“I’ll hide it if she comes in.”

“You’ll be unpopular.”

“It’ll be fine.”

“You’ll be unpopular.”

“What, you think Ursula’s going to grab it from me, read about a ferry disaster, run screaming down the corridor and throw herself off the roof?”

“Alastair’s already had his confiscated. That’s all I’m saying.”

Joan took it from her and put it in her briefcase. “I really must get on. I’m going to ring Robert, see if he’ll fly up tomorrow. Family reunion.”

“Robert who doesn’t speak to Alastair?”

“Perfect opportunity to mend fences.”

“Please don’t.”

“I met him once when I was a girl. He’s been here, you know. Came here after his mother was killed. Went to the place where they died. Fought with your grandfather and went home in a rage.”

“I know.”

“Didn’t stay for the funeral.”

“I know.”

“He said she’d been specific about not wanting ever to be laid to rest at Peattie. Interesting, isn’t it, because the way Henry paints it the three girls had this perfect idyllic childhood. You wonder what really went on, don’t you?”

“Why did something have to really go on?” Mog’s voice was purposefully flat.

“To not want to be buried here. Strikes me it must have been something. And Robert’s inherited it, whatever it was, as if she passed the allergy to Peattie on to him. He could barely conceal his dislike.”

“She died in water, too.”

Edith came into the room. “It’s not very intelligent, is it, darling, to believe in a curse? Just because it’s old doesn’t mean it’s worth anything. People will keep making that mistake.”

“In any case Aunt Jo was killed by the tree,” Joan said, distractedly, looking at her phone and leaving the room. This is true. The car hit the tree before it went into the reservoir.