The White Lie (39 page)

Then she lay on the bed, very still and very quiet.

Then she got up and walked around.

Then she sat on her bed, chewing her lip, picking at her cuticles, and took her socks off and attended to the dry skin around her toes.

When Izzy came, still in her tennis whites and holding her racquet, Mog was in the bathroom, the only room which had a lock. She had the water running, though it would be a shallow kind of soak, dispiritingly shallow, limbs protruding and chilly, because there’s never enough hot water. Peattie baths are big enough to sleep in and have been slept in on occasion, padded out with cushions, notably at parties Henry and Edith gave when they were newly married. Izzy tapped on the door and a rapid conversation was held through it. Johnnie had gone to the village with Ursula, Izzy assured her, Mog calling out her thanks in a protracted sing-song way, faking unconcern over the noise of water rushing.

An hour or so later there was a knock at Mog’s door. She’d heard someone approaching and was standing right behind it.

“Izzy?”

“It’s only me.”

Mog emerged, wearing different clothes. Pink and orange. Izzy was still in the tennis dress.

“So he’s gone, definitely gone,” Mog said.

“Definitely. Saw them go.” A skinny arm was looped around Mog’s shoulder.

“He’s going to come to the party.”

“Would he be that thick-skinned? What for?”

“To punish me.”

“That looks good on you, by the way,” Izzy told her.

Mog looked down at herself. “It’s a bit like the monkeys and the typewriters. Eventually something works, but it’s always an accident.”

“Well. It isn’t quite Shakespeare. But that skirt shape really works for you. It skims over the lumps. And just below the knee is your length. Your calves are curvy. Wrap tops are great for people with a tummy, cutting across the bulge.” She was rearranging it. “But you need to stand up straighter. When you slouch along you look even heavier.”

Sometimes it’s a disheartening business when Izzy Salter pays a compliment.

***

Afternoon tea featured things left over from lunch, preserved under foil: sandwiches laid out on a tray, apples in a bowl and packets of crisps arranged on a platter. Only Henry and Vita and Mog were in attendance. Izzy and Terry were off in the hills, Ottilie was at home, Alastair and Rebecca had gone with Joan to tea at the Grants’ house and Mrs Hammill was resting. Euan had declared himself too busy in the kitchen to attend. He was making preparations for the party.

“Where’s Gran?” Mog poured herself tea through a silver strainer provided by her mother. Light penetrated the walls of the thin floral china. Joan had hidden the mugs somewhere.

“Gone to town. Optician.” Henry was reading a magazine that had arrived in the post, that emitted its pungent solvent aroma.

Edith had lied about the optician. She wanted to see Thomas and talk to him again. They sat in his sitting room eating fruit cake and reprised their conversation, the second part of it, almost word for word. Edith made the same partial and inaccurate confession and received the same unsatisfying provisional forgiveness. Once that was done, Edith realised she wanted urgently to be at the church in the village. She excused herself, pleading arrangements that were out of her hands, drove at 25 miles an hour back down the country roads home—taking corners at 15—and stopped at the florist’s on the way. Tilly had loved roses: ordinarily Edith brought her flowers from the garden but she didn’t want to go back to the house yet, so these perfect and soulless, aroma-less blooms would have to do. She took them to Tilly in the churchyard and sat with her a while, having stood first for a few minutes in the porch, by the open door, apparently unable to enter.

Tilly was the only Salter buried outside of the estate wall. After Sebastian’s death the mausoleum in the grounds had been closed a final time. It’s presumed sometimes that this was an act with emotional significance but the truth is that there was no room for more residents, so Tilly went to the churchyard alone. Henry kept the mausoleum locked and was the gatekeeper, its big iron key hanging on the wall in his study. After Tilly’s death he took us into the mausoleum, the cousins and me, through the arched and decorated metal door, the key noisy in the lock. He lit the candles that had remained unlit since Seb’s funeral, each silver candlestick bearing long wax drips, their solidified wax tears. This gesture of his, relighting them, made it seem as if we had come in at the end of the ceremony and as if time had been collapsed. There they were, the family dead, encased and rotted away, or perhaps just dried up, shrunken and papery (if you thought about it like that, and at 13 you did): the remains of Henry’s father, of Ursa and Jo, and Sebastian himself, stacked together in limestone magnificence, along with the remoter, more anonymous Salter dead, in undisturbed dimness and silence.

Henry, eating a sandwich, looked at Mog over the top of his glasses.

“I hear you have a visitor.”

“Had. He’s gone now.”

“No. He’s here. Ursula’s bringing him to tea.”

No sooner had he said this than Mog could hear them: two sets of footsteps, a pair of squeaky plimsolls and a pair of brogues coming through the picture gallery. Mog reached for a magazine and sat beside Henry, pulling Tilly’s chair adjacent to his.

Ursula’s hair had been brushed and she’d changed into a swirly-patterned dress with billowing sleeves, a frock that was once Edith’s. Johnnie followed her into the room, undaunted at the sight of Mog and ignoring her, introducing himself to the others, his suit gleaming with cashmere and his tie bearing the coat of arms of a school: its design had been printed in gold, denoting charitable generosity to the Old Boys’ League. He wasn’t ever a pupil there, but no matter. When Johnnie introduced himself to Vita she lifted her wrist; Johnnie kissed the back of it and she murmured her approval.

“Johnnie Brandt. Delighted to meet you at last.”

“Mr Brandt.” She smiled up at him; perhaps she hadn’t realised that this was Mog’s ex-boyfriend. Or perhaps she had. You never know. “Is that of German origin, your name? Won’t you have tea with us? A drink? Henry, can we get some sherry? We’re dull and spiritless left to ourselves so much.”

“My father was Austrian,” Johnnie said, sitting in the chair closest to her and bending forward sociably. He rested his elbows on his knees, linking his fingers lightly together as if he were to be interviewed on a television show: that same practised readiness. “He came over in the war, fleeing Hitler, and was interned in England. Our estates were sequestered in his absence and we lost everything we had.”

“How fascinating.”

Ursula handed Johnnie a teacup. Mog kept her eyes on the magazine but made a dismissive noise.

“You are a friend of my granddaughter.” Vita glanced at Ursula.

“Mog’s friend, until recently. Her boyfriend. But she decided—”

He was interrupted by Vita. “Mog’s boyfriend you say. But aren’t you a good deal older than her?”

“Yes, I’m pushing 50, alas.”

“Do get something to eat. Railway food today, I’m afraid, though the ham is rather delicious.”

Mog sank diagonally into the long chair, hoisting one leg over its arm and closing her eyes.

“We should go,” Henry’s voice said. “We need to go and look at the new saplings, take the dogs out. Come on.”

“After another cup,” she told him, getting up to go to the tea table. A cool sun was streaming into the drawing room and Vita and Johnnie and the attendant, silent Ursula were seen through a fog of sunshine, in velvet chairs by the windows, gathered around a card table.

“I work in finance,” Johnnie was telling Vita. “In Edinburgh.”

“How splendid. And so you must be friends with our Peter: Pip Salter-Catto.”

“I know Pip, yes, of course. Pip’s a tremendous fellow.”

Ursula was staring at Mog and unblinking. She was resting her head into a wing of the chair, her legs tucked up into the seat. When Mog met her eyes, Ursula smiled at her. One hand stroked her thigh idly, and with the other she twiddled a strand of hair around one finger.

“I’m ready now,” Mog said.

19

Ursa’s room has a lovely view, in one direction looking across the vegetable gardens and over the topiary hedges that have been cut abstractly into swooping curves by Ursula, and in the other direction across the pasture fields where cattle—another family’s cattle, now—stand under broadly spread trees, under crabbed and lateral branches, looking as if they’ve been painted in oils. Henry found the arrival of other people’s livestock difficult: if the land was put to crops that wasn’t so hard—there had been hired tractors in the fields for decades, but livestock was a different matter. The world was advancing and encroaching; it had them surrounded. Recently a bull had leaned against the wall and bowed it and parts of it had fallen. Mog was watching the stonemason at work, making his complicated jigsaw, picking up and discarding, picking up and fitting. She was sitting on the window seat, along its length with her feet up, leaning back against the shutter. Gazing out of the window had proved successful in slowing down the rate of questioning, but she was beginning to feel bad about this failure of hospitality, so she turned her attention back into the room. Rebecca had lifted and was admiring a picture of her grandmother from the chest of drawers, one of Ursa on her bike, hitching a ride down the drive, holding onto an umbrella hooked onto the back of her father’s antique car, her face delighted, showing her small teeth and a pink rim of gum. She rode her bike everywhere, even into town 12 miles away, and sometimes there was a dog in the front basket.

“Do you think the laws of physics were different then, that kept dogs in bicycle baskets?” Mog asked, earning a quizzical look from Rebecca. The world
was
different then, I said to Mog once, when we were looking at the photograph together, and people seemed happy in a way they just don’t any more. I used to say that kind of thing, but now I see that nostalgia is just a kind of cowardice.

Rebecca came and leaned over Mog and looked down into the garden, where George was standing with a hoe and mopping his brow.

“You look so disapproving,” Mog said.

“Do I? I’m sorry. But it’s obvious he’s struggling.”

“As far as George is concerned this is his garden. Don’t listen to Alan. George refuses to retire, point blank. He said to me once that he wants to die on the lawn in high summer, just after mowing it into stripes. He doesn’t do it all on his own, you know. Alan does most of the heavy work and my father helps with the grass. He says it’s good for inexpressible rage.”

Rebecca was straight onto this. “Why would he be in a rage?”

“He doesn’t need a reason,” Mog told her. “It’s innate. Plus, Ursula helps with the borders. George says she has a gift for pruning. She even gets to do his roses.”

“But it’s obvious he’s struggling. Can’t anything be done?”

They heard a car coming down the drive; Pip had arrived. Rebecca said she had things she needed to do, so Mog went out alone to meet him. Pip was sorting through things in the boot.

“The painting’s turned up,” Mog said to his back. “And also Johnnie.”

Pip lifted out the bags, slammed the lid shut, and walked away from her and up the steps.

“Beastly journey, thanks,” Angelica said, following him. She appeared to be wearing jodhpurs. “Caravans nose to nose on the A9. Accident at Drumnadrochit.”

“Nose to tail you mean.”

“No, these were nose to nose, which is worse.”

They followed Pip into the hall. He’d come straight from the office and was still in the chalk pinstripe, the pink shirt. His shoulders and upper arms were bulky in the jacket, but infant blond curls whisped onto his jacket collar at the back. He put the bags down.

“Johnnie’s here,” Mog said.

He paused, mid-hang of jacket on hook. “Johnnie?”

“My ears are burning,” Johnnie’s voice said, and then he was there, emerging from the picture gallery hand in hand with Ursula. Both of them had a bright-eyed unfocussed look. Now that she had come to a halt, Ursula seemed to be having trouble keeping upright, adjusting her feet as if she were sailing in a gale. She’d changed out of the dress into a white shirt, black tux trousers with a satin cuff and Johnnie’s old school tie.

“You’ve met my brother, I see,” Pip said, straight-faced. “And how is he?”

“He’s fine but his stuff’s too expensive,” Johnnie told him, equally deadpan.

“Will we be seeing Jet this weekend?” Pip took Angelica’s coat.

“Why are you asking me?” Johnnie said sourly. “I’m just a customer.”

The two of them eyed each other up like dogs kept apart only by leashes, their hackles up.

“So you’ll be leaving now,” Pip told him. “You must know you’re not welcome.”

“Oh, but I am. I’m installed at the inn and I’m Ursula’s invited guest. Her date”—he paused, enjoying the foreignness of the word—“Her
date
at the party.” Ursula was nodding.

“Have you given her something?”

“What do you mean?”

“One of Jet’s special cigarettes.”

“No, I haven’t. I suspect she’s always like this.” Ursula did a little twirl and curtsied low to the ground. “Actually I think she did have a small one.”

Ursula was laughing. She went out onto the terrace and Johnnie followed her out, saying, “Pleasure, as always.”

“Ursula high,” Angelica said. “Doesn’t sound good to me.”

Mog was looking at Pip. “What will happen?”

“Happen?”

“Will she be alright? Isn’t she likely to . . .” Her eyes flickered towards Angelica. “Never mind.”

“I’ll talk to you about it later,” Pip said.

Angelica sighed noisily, half-sigh and half-growl. “You two. School playground mode again. Secrets, secrets. It does get tedious.”

“Somebody has to go after her,” Pip said. “Sorry, Mog.”

“That’s fine, I’m used to it,” Mog said, only mildly resentfully. She went out onto the terrace and spoke out towards the garden—the two of them had gone off in the direction of the folly together—her voice projecting: “Ursula, you need to come in, your mother’s looking for you, she needs your help.” These words were always effective and Ursula returned.