The White Lie (40 page)

“Stay away from her,” Mog instructed Johnnie, who continued standing as if awaiting his own orders. “As you wish,” he said. “I’ll be at the inn, but I’m coming for supper as Ursula’s guest. She asked your mother. Sorry.” He didn’t sound remotely sorry.

Mog had been asked by Angelica if she could leave them to unpack and to rest, so Mog retreated to my room, something she does at moments of anxiety. She was reading poetry that I’d left there in the bookcase, reading my own margin notes first, speaking some of them aloud, lying on her side with the book propped up. She fell asleep, and when she woke jumped straight up, leaving the Elizabeth Bishop crushed spine-flat on the bed—
the art of losing isn’t hard to master
—and went along to Pip’s room, but there was no answer to her knock. Pip’s phone went straight to message. Nor were they in Angelica’s room up in the garrets; ordinarily Angelica would be housed in a bedroom on the family floor, but she’d been asked by Joan if she would mind, just this once, giving way to elderly guests who’d been offered a billet for after the party, and had been gracious in agreeing; she wasn’t intending to sleep there anyway. Her official room was empty, empty even of her belongings, and the bed still crisply made. Mog returned down the kitchen stairs—spooky stairs, they’ve always seemed to me, haunted by a particular hopelessness—along the corridor, up to the main hall and up again to Pip’s room. The door opened onto bags and belongings deserted half-handled: Angelica’s suitcase was open on the bed. Mog went to the door and peered out, then returned to the case and rifled through it, lifting out hold-up stockings with lace tops and tiny, translucent slivers of underwear, balanced weightless in her fingers. She looked in the wardrobe and found two dresses, and tried them against herself in the mirror: one of them a dark silky green and the other sheer and black with deep bands of velvet sewn into it. She examined the pills on the night table and read the backs of the books stacked beside them before leaving the room.

When the dinner bell rang Mog had been back and forth to the mirror on the landing a dozen times. Izzy came to her aid, providing a stretchy red dress and scarlet lipstick and heavily outlining her eyes. “We’ll show him,” Izzy said, pushing up her kimono sleeves and pulling a vast trunk of clothes out from under her bed. “This was meant to be worn loose but it’s going to look good on you, I think.” Mog’s sandals were vetoed. “What did you do,” Izzy asked, casting them aside, “buy these out of the back pages of a colour supplement?”

***

In the drawing room everyone else was assembled and drinks were being dispensed. As Mog opened the door she heard Joan saying, “Don’t fuss, Euan, we can easily set an extra place.” Euan muttered something inaudible and there came a crisp reply: “On the other hand it might teach her a useful lesson about life.”

Ursula was there and also Ottilie. Ursula was there and also in the
same room
there was Ottilie. This was a first, the first time they’d coincided purposely in 13 years, though Ottilie was sitting with her back to her sister. Perhaps the concession was made on the basis that the situation was too tricky to explain to visitors. Johnnie was there, too, in one of the threadbare velvet chairs, looking meditatively out with a glass of sherry in his hand. Joan had demanded formality and he, Pip and Henry were wearing dinner jackets. Euan, a tuxedo refusenik, was dressed in his usual putty-coloured suit, the usual brown shoes, his neck rough and pink from hurried shaving. Vita, widowish in black and weighed down by many long ropes of fake pearls, was told by Rebecca that she looked like Coco Chanel and was unamused. Once Vita had observed that it was good to dress for dinner as they used to always, and Mrs Hammill had chipped in with her usual remark about slipping standards at home being emblematic; once these rituals had been observed, a silence descended—one of those mutually disempowered silences that feel as if they might obliterate the occasion. It settled and deepened as they drank their drinks. Vita saved the situation by speaking to Johnnie. “I see you have been admiring that picture.”

“It’s very fine. And I think it might be of you, done when you were young. Am I right?”

“Quite right, quite right.” Vita was delighted. “The artist was a family friend. I sat for him on Saturdays. It was terribly dull. He kept coming over to reorganise me and had the most dreadfully bad breath. And wandering hands. Tell me, because I’ve never understood about tits; what
is
it exactly about them—”

Edith fired a warning shot. “Mother.”

“He also did the sketch above the fireplace,” Johnnie said. He’d been in here earlier with Ursula asking questions, and was well informed.

“You have quite the eye. Ruskin, you know, said drawing was as important to the development of the soul of a child as writing. Imagine if that were true. What a shameful negligence in the schools.”

“I don’t like that one much” Johnnie said, gesturing with his glass towards a landscape on the opposing wall. “It’s almost photographic, and what’s the point in that? Take the photograph.”

“I do so agree,” Vita said, showing all of her remaining teeth.

“When I look at a painting”—Johnnie leaned forward, his expression earnest—“what I’m looking for is proof of life. Do you know what I mean? Of individual life, an individual soul.”

“Unbelievable.” Mog had spoken and all eyes turned to her but she was looking at the carpet. “First internment and now this.”

Johnnie continued unabashed. “Proof that people were once that alive, were passionate with colour, had doubts, were in love, feared death. People long dead. They’re still alive in the picture. The brushstrokes are just done and drying. I like to think of them and their painting day, the arrangements, the travel, the easel. It’s . . .” He looked for the word.

“Completely thrilling,” Vita offered. “A kind of time travel.”

Johnnie offered her something in return, one of his special and exclusive smiles.

“Mog and I were in the National often, in Edinburgh,” he said. “Many, many happy hours.” He took a handful of peanuts and tossed them into his mouth one at a time.

Henry handed Mog another drink. Gin and tonic. No bubbles remained in the tonic. Henry kept it in the bookcase.

“He’d pin postcards up on a board, ones I chose, and get me to talk him through them,” Mog said, continuing to talk to the carpet.

“But that reflects well on both of you,” Euan said. “Surely.”

“You sound so unhappy,” Johnnie told her, his voice without emotion. “I’m sorry if I’m the cause of that.”

“Don’t flatter yourself.”

“As I recall they were happy times, mutually enthusiastic. But forgive me if I haven’t given the tutorial aspects better credit.”

Mog looked at him. “What are you
doing
here?”

“I came to see you,” Johnnie said. “But you refuse to hear me out.”

“I’m not interested in anything you have to say,” Mog told him.

Johnnie smiled towards Euan and Joan. “Do you know that I proposed marriage? I proposed and I was refused by text message. By
text message
. Mog’s refused to talk to me since.”

“I’m so very sorry to hear that,” Euan said.

“Oh no,” Joan said, putting her hand to her forehead.

Mrs Welsh came in and said that the supper was laid out ready and that they should come through. They seated themselves in the dining room. Joan had provided name cards, and Ottilie found that she had been placed at the other end of the table to Ursula. They’d been seated on the same side so that they didn’t have to see or hear each other: an arrangement that Joan described as
enemy positions
.

Mrs Hammill, glorious in a vast blue taffeta tent, had a hip flask secreted away in her evening bag. She wasn’t always discreet about dipping into it.

“Well, this is terribly nice,” she said.

“Yes, isn’t it; no Jet, though.” Pip was helping himself to soup. He looked around. “And no Izzy either.”

Euan had made the gazpacho with too much garlic, and not chopped up enough for Vita, who chewed each spoonful gamely. Henry confined himself to toast, which he tore off a mouthful at a time, spreading each slice thickly with cold butter.

“I called in on Jet earlier,” Edith said. “But he wasn’t feeling at all well. He’s terribly pale. I worry about him, keeping so much to himself.”

It was a sombre sort of table. Mrs Hammill slurping her soup, adding more sherry to it. Vita lost in her own thoughts. Edith talking to Pip about the bank.

“Pip and I have been decorating,” Angelica said to Joan. “You must come down and see.”

“I can’t imagine that,” Edith said. “Pip with a wallpaper brush.”

“You misunderstand, Mother,” Joan said, sharing a half-smile with Angelica. “They got the decorators in.”

Vita was looking flustered. “At my flat, she means,” Pip said to her, leaning into her ear. “At my apartment in Edinburgh.”

“But when are you to marry, Peter?” If it was “Peter” it must be serious.

“It’s our apartment, it’s to be ours when we do, so I’ve been helping choose the furnishings,” Angelica explained. Vita was protected from the scandalous fact of their having lived together for over a year. Her libertarianism was largely theoretical, set aside for the past.

“Well, hurry up and choose a date. I want a great-great-grandchild before I go.”

“You’ll outlive all of us,” Pip soothed.

“It’s awful, not knowing when,” she said to him. “Every morning has a question mark in it. I’m not afraid of death itself, because that’s nothingness, like the time before birth, but pain, yes. I’m afraid very much of pain. I don’t want to be frightened. I’m frightened of being frightened.”

“Oh, Mother, you don’t give it a moment’s thought,” Edith said. “Please don’t drink any more wine.”

“So this is where you’re all hiding.” Izzy came into the room, Terry trailing a little shyly. “Hello everyone, hello, hello. Oh, we’re seated formally, lovely. I won’t have to exchange any more stiff pleasantries with Terry: what a relief.”

Terry cuffed her gently around the head.

“I’m not kidding, that time it really hurt,” she said, rubbing the place. She cast her eye around the company as she took her seat. “Goodness. Did anybody else die? No? Good. I hate to miss things.”

She turned to Henry. “Sorry about being late. Traffic. Masses of traffic. Terry shook his fist at it but it didn’t seem to help.”

“You’re forgiven,” Henry said.

“So tell me, somebody, do. What’ve I missed? Scandals? News? No? That’s very boring of you all. Does anyone know a really filthy joke?”

“Izzy,” Euan said in his admonitory voice.

“Euan,” she returned in the same tone. She scanned the table again. “We’re all looking very overdressed and uncomfortable, that’s good, that’s very good, bodes well. And Johnnie’s still here, I see. We haven’t set the dogs on him yet.”

“He’s Ursula’s guest,” Edith told her quietly.

Johnnie succeeded in catching Euan’s eye. “I bought a copy of Membrane.”

Euan was surprised. “Where on earth did you find it?”

“I ordered it from your publisher online. I liked the poem ‘Meniscus’ very much.
The unseen line, the unseen door, the happy blindness of the day; processing sightless the imagined road
.”

Euan tried and failed to prevent himself from looking pleased. “I’ve just finished the new collection. Auto-Didact.”

“Ursula’s been reciting bits of Paradise Lost to me,” Johnnie said. “It’s staggeringly beautiful.”

An uncertainty crossed Euan’s face. “You are staying at the inn, though?”

“I’m staying at the inn. Three nights. I’ve booked a table at L’Assiette for Sunday. I’m hoping Mog will consent to dinner. Dinner at the least.”

“I’m not going to have dinner with you,” Mog said. “That’s stupid,” Joan piped up.

“At least hear him out,” Euan said.

“Look, I brought the ring with me,” Johnnie said, producing a black velvet box from his pocket.

“He’s lying to you, he didn’t propose,” Mog said. “He just likes to play games with people.”

“Oh honestly, Mog,” Joan said.

“He didn’t propose; I challenged him about something and he hit me with a chair.”

“Hit you with a chair?” Joan couldn’t help giggling.

“For crying out loud,” Euan said.

“It was an accident,” Johnnie said. “Of course, though technically she’s absolutely right. We’d been to a dance and went back to mine, and I was trying to pass a chair over the kitchen table, avoiding the candles, and it hit the light fitting and broke it, and cack-handedly I dropped the chair and it hit Mog on the head. I’ve said sorry a hundred times. The thing she challenged me about, by the way, was that I was only after her money.”

Joan clapped her hand to her mouth. “Oh no. That’s the funniest thing.”

“We had a row. About my being a gold-digger.” He rotated his expensive watch on his wrist. “Well, I don’t have to tell all of you, it’s not exactly the likeliest scenario. She’s been unwell. We won’t dwell on that now: you know about her unwellness. I was just trying to move a kitchen chair across the table, and broke the light fitting, and got a jolt, and the chair flew out of my hand and knocked her flying. I’ve apologised and apologised and I don’t know what else I can do.”

“Well, quite,” Euan said. “It’s hard to know.”

“The thing is, that I love her, heart and soul,” Johnnie said. “I love her and I want to spend the rest of my life with her.” He looked imploringly towards Mog. “My proposal still stands. I think that it will always stand, whatever happens.”

“Oh that’s lovely, isn’t that lovely?” Joan said.

Johnnie opened the box and a vast shiny ring sparkled out of the dark plush interior. There were general gasps of appreciation.

“Do I have to go down on one knee?” Johnnie said. “I’ve come all this way to do this. I want to get it right.” He slid off his chair and into position.

Mog looked at the open box, at the vast and sparkling rock. “I recognise it: it’s his brother’s girlfriend’s ring” she said.

“It may be similar,” Johnnie said, looking at it more closely. He closed the box. “Well, that’s put me in my place.” He got up onto his feet again. “Goodness. This is embarrassing.”