The White Lie (34 page)

“But will Uncle Sebastian still be little when I meet him there?” Mog had asked. “Smaller than me? Still four?” It seemed all wrong for an uncle.

“I don’t know.” Edith sounded as if she had given it thought and really didn’t. “I hope sometimes that he’ll be older, that he’s done some growing up in heaven, has had a kind of life. Imagine that, growing up in heaven.”

“Sitting on a cloud and eating marshmallows,” the ten-year-old Mog had said. Edith had managed to smile.

Mog drew her wrap tighter around herself.

“We should go back in; we’ll be missed,” Pip said.

They went into the porch of the hotel, but didn’t go further, not immediately.

“Easy to idealise Sebastian, when you think of him like that,” Mog said. “Forever four years old, the golden boy. He never got the chance to disappoint anyone.”

“Henry,” Pip began. He began again. “Henry’s tormented. Unable to walk away. Someone should have done something sooner.”

“Like what?”

“No idea at all.”

“And Michael too,” Mog said. “Another stain. Another watermark.”

“Michael? No. He’s angry with Michael. Still angry.”

“Angry?”

Pip looked at her as if appraisingly. “He doesn’t think Michael is dead.”

“Still?”

“Something else I’m not supposed to talk about. Convinced of it. Michael’s alive. Hard-hearted, living his life somewhere without giving us all another thought. He thinks Michael doesn’t understand good manners—no, I’m serious, this is what he said—because he didn’t see that the money was a promise.”

“What kind of promise?”

“To keep in touch, I suppose. To feel an obligation.”

“But that’s nuts. Really. It’s just Henry’s way of dealing with it.”

“He said that he realised it a few weeks after. He had a revelation. And then he waited. Giving him time to get in touch. Giving him the chance to be alive. That’s how he put it. But then the year turned and he knew Michael wanted to be dead. So he let him be dead.”

“Henry’s way of not having two deaths on his conscience.”

“Why on his conscience?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know why I said that. I’ve had too much wine.”

“It’s good to tell somebody about the phone calls.”

“I’m glad you told me.”

“Something else,” he said, putting his hand softly to her wrist. “Alan. Henry’s admitted that Alan is the father. That he’s always known it. Despite everything he said to Michael, casting doubts. That the time is coming to acknowledge him. Despite everything. Despite Alan’s fondness for little girls.”

“Is Alan, is he . . .”

“A paedophile? I don’t think so. Henry doesn’t think so. But like so many things it comes down to line-drawing. How would you classify what seems to be a compulsion to entertain young girls in your bedroom, listening to music and playing cards, and encouraging them to strip to their underwear?”

“Alan’s been . . . what?”

“Henry told me. Apparently it was in the diary, the one written by that girl staying in the cottage. But look. I need to talk to you. About the money. The plan. You and Izzy. Jet, if we can get him. We need to know that we’re in agreement. I’ll arrange for Christian to come and talk to you when you’re home for the party.”

Mog looked downhearted and my bet is that it wasn’t the money at the root of it, but clear indications that Pip was taking charge of Peattie’s future, and that despite this being a benign enough dictatorship, nobody was going to be able to resist his vision. That and the prospect, now apparently confirmed, of some permanence to Angelica. What had Mog thought, that the four of them, the surviving heirs, would live here together in unmarried sibling eccentricity, like the great aunts once planned? Their scheme hadn’t gone far, after all. Henry had made a belated arrival in the world and Henry had asserted his rights.

Pip was talking about school fees. “They couldn’t go to the local.”

“What’s wrong with it? We managed fine.”

“Ask Angelica. There’s no way.”

“I see.”

“And about the development. Christian’s calling it Salter’s Field.”

“Well, that’s . . . descriptive of him.”

***

The sale had been on Henry’s mind at dinner, because the day in question had come, the day Christian Grant was coming to set things officially in train. Christian was waiting, even now, to deliver his pitch to the grandchildren, and so when Mog went into the drawing room she found him there already, looking through folded drawings and paperwork in a sugar-paper file. He rose to greet her, bushy-bearded, lantern-jawed, his mousy hair close-cropped around large ears. There was noticeable grey in the beard now, and at the sideburns, as he leapt to his feet to shake Mog’s hand, to kiss her cheek. Something puppyish remains in Christian, and Mog was experiencing the familiar cycle: prefixing their meeting sure that he’d make a good husband, but faced with the man himself, feeling her resolve to give him more of a chance withering away. Edith came in on Mog’s heels, bringing tea, and small talk was exchanged until Izzy arrived. Jet was supposed to be there too but had excused himself, which surprised Christian but nobody else. An hour was spent listening to the laying-out of reasonable plans, entirely reasonable and sound but delivered with tactless enthusiasm, such that after an hour, glancing at her watch, Edith brought things almost rudely to a halt, saying they had a lot to think about and thank you. She’d talk again to Henry, she said; she believed that Christian was going to the study now, to meet with him. Christian confirmed that he was.

Once he’d left, loping out with his folder under his arm, unaware of having given or received offence, Edith and Izzy followed him out, leaving Mog in the drawing room alone. She saw that Vita had left one of her photograph albums sitting on the table—one that was unmistakably Vita’s, that was cobalt blue with gold ribboning (she has a whole shelf full of them, all identical). Mog moved close to the fire—it was late by now and the chill had deepened—and began to leaf through the pages, the old photos lifting stiffly out of their glued corners. She hadn’t got very far when Vita came into the room.

“Ah, there it is,” she said. “I was wondering where I’d left it.”

Mog lifted the album up, directing it towards Vita using both hands to present two open pages, and tapped at one of the prints with her finger. “Who’s this? I don’t recognise him.”

“That’s Sebastian Lilley.”

“Sebastian. Another Sebastian. Did Edith name our Sebastian for him?”

“Well now. Your mother hasn’t told you about that.” Vita came unsteadily towards her and sat in the closest chair.

“Never. Why?”

Vita looked at her. “Did it ever occur to you to wonder why I had only one child?”

“I’ve heard the family story.”

“Which is . . . oh come, come. I’ve heard it too.”

“You got the certificate from the doctor. The letter to say that having any more would be dangerous.”

“I was married at 19, you know,” Vita told her. “It’s a family tradition, marrying early. Your mother is keen on tradition. Sometimes it works out and sometimes it really doesn’t. Well now. Your grandmother Edith turned up only after seven years. I thought I’d have five children by then. Every month after the honeymoon had a disappointment in it.”

She paused and Mog said, “I see.”

“We had a different attitude, in my set. Different from today. Which was this: get children born while you’re very young yourself, get them off to school, have your 30s without pregnancies, semi at liberty at least, and your 40s to yourself. Live your life a little.”

Mog waited.

“Andrew and I had problems with conceiving. He blamed himself. A childhood illness. Some reproductive deficiency. He said that a specialist had confirmed this. I don’t know if he even saw a specialist. I have to say I rather doubt it.” She ran her fingers through the wig, correcting the line of the bob. “So. At 26 I had Edith. And then I organised a letter from the doctor to say we should stop trying for another child. But you see it was for Andrew, the letter. People do insist on misinterpreting things. I’m perfectly well aware of how it has been painted. My waving a doctor’s letter under the nose of my mother-in-law, under my husband’s nose, because I was too vain to be pregnant again. And then people found out the real reason and that didn’t help matters.”

“How did people find out?”

“Andrew. Was so very open, always. He didn’t really see that other people weren’t as open. He thought everyone . . . well, he hadn’t encountered any real
malice
, you see.”

“No.”

“He was 11 when the First World War ended, 32 when the second one started. He had the heart condition by then. So he carried on being a country solicitor.”

Mog could see that they were beginning to stray from the point.

“So. Sebastian.”

“Sebastian Lilley. He was a friend of mine. A good friend. And you see, it was Andrew’s fault in a way. He had been so very open about his being at fault.”

Mog began to see.

“Andrew had said he was infertile. But then we had a child. And there had been gossip, unfortunate gossip, started by Mary.”

“Mary?”

“Andrew’s sister.”

“I’m named for her. Am I?”

“You’re a Catto Mary, I think.”

“So Mary was a gossip.”

“Mary started the rumours. I believe so at least. I had been seeing a lot of Sebastian. He loved to play tennis and ride and hill-walk, you see. Things poor Andrew couldn’t do.”

“They thought he was Edith’s father.”

“They did.”

“What happened to him?”

“He died in the war.”

Both knew what Mog wanted to ask, and they smiled at each other in recognition of this.

“So,” Mog said. “Edith named Sebastian in honour of your . . . friend.”

“No, dear. Well, yes. But it wasn’t quite like that.”

“Why not?”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

“What?”

“Edith named him because she was convinced that Sebastian Lilley was her father.”

“No!”

“She still is.”

“No!”

“Yes.”

“But why?”

“Because Andrew was also sure, and felt that Edith should know.”

17

It was Vita who told me that Alan was my father. It was Vita who let me know, without intending to, that everyone around us had known all along, and that I was the only one in the dark. She wasn’t prepared to comment on the ethics.

If I had mentioned Alan in the letter, told them what Vita had said, told them that I’d spoken to Alan the night before, they would have known right at the beginning that it wasn’t news broken to me by Ursula in the boat. The letter was more concerned with the failings of mothers and grandparents, and with the inadequacy, the treachery, of noble silence. Intoxicated by this credo, by the dogma of confession and disclosure that Ursula had spoken up for, and then informed of the facts of life—of my life—by Vita, I felt quite suddenly depleted by Peattie and by what I began to think of as a clinging on tight to tragedy, a fidelity to tragedy, the whole architecture of the family built upon it.

Vita’s news, that my father had been so close for so many years; someone we’d seen in the gardens, someone rarely spoken to, rarely spoken of, other than to disdain . . . it was almost overwhelming. It was hard to act upon it. It was hard to think how. I explained away the family’s unanimous contempt for Alan as fear, fear of him and his information, though this was no more than an adopted view and couldn’t really survive any kind of thinking about what Alan was and is. For the moment, though, I wasn’t doing that thinking. I was beyond rage; I entered a calm white zone of hatred. Its credo was rejection, spontaneous and absolute. Love died. It had died: that’s what I told myself. Something took its place, the ripening of a decision to which, loyally, the heart consented. I told myself that hatred was the wrong word; it had to be because it was too emotive an idea, and the truth had done a much more neutral and effective job, a slim knife expertly placed, and that I felt nothing. Ideas about punishment began to suggest themselves, ideas forming spontaneously out of this mud of rage.

Where did it start, the train of events that brings us here? Further back than I’d imagined. We follow it upstream as far as we can and find ourselves in the summer school holidays the year the twins were 14. In fact it goes back further, to the Easter of that year. When the summer holidays arrived, Ottilie and Joan were still talking about Easter and Easter’s momentous events.

Let me take you, as I have been taken, to that cool grey summer day of long ago. It seems sometimes that the past is still there, lurking under the painted surfaces of the present, and that it would take only the scratch of a thumbnail to reveal it all still going on. Perhaps we’re back at the frontiers only of science here, and there’s nothing supernatural about it—just the emergence, through a thinning divide, of physical space shared with all that’s thought dead and lost.

We are walking along the track towards the loch, you and I, in veiled summer sunlight, the sky luminously pearly and the wind gusting cold. Neither of us makes a sound on the grit surface of the path. We have taken our places in a procession, following my mother and her siblings as children, and have been overtaken by a fifth person as we walk: Petra, the children’s German au pair, who came for two months and lasted less than a week.

They were dressed the same, the teenage Joan and Ottilie, in yellow shorts (because it was summer) and Aran sweaters that Tilly knitted (because it didn’t feel like it), though at 14 twinning must have been growing tedious. They looked almost identical from the back, their similar-length hair reaching to the shoulder blade—Ottilie’s was of a pinker sort of blonde and wavier—but when they turned to see if Ursula and Petra were following it was clear immediately that one was pretty and one not. The pretty one had a green batik scarf across the top of her fringe, disappearing under her hairline at the ears, and beautiful skin. The other was wearing hoop earrings and pale lipstick, and had applied a thick coat of beige-coloured make-up in an effort to conceal an angry-looking acne. Sometimes the genetic fairy is merciless in the distribution of gifts.