The White Lie (41 page)

“Oh, Mog;
Mog,”
Joan said, sounding ashamed.

Euan put his cutlery down with a clatter.

Johnnie stood up. “I’m sorry, I think I should leave.”

“Please don’t,” Euan urged him. “I’m so sorry about this scene. It’s very unfortunate.”

“Yes, isn’t it,” Izzy said.

Now Ottilie was on her feet, and was pointing with her wine glass at Euan. “Why would you do that, why? Side with someone so dubious against your own child? You’re such an irredeemable arsehole.”

Johnnie excused himself and swept out. Pip followed him, saying he was no longer hungry. He went down the back stairs to the yard and found Johnnie waiting for him there.

“Come to challenge me to a duel?”

Pip took his cigarettes out. “Come to smoke,” he said. “Pistols or swords?”

Pip looked closely at the packet. “Filter-tipped, I think.”

“Wanker,” Johnnie said, curling his lip and turning away, then turning back again. “It was true, by the way, about the chair. I don’t know what story she told you. But that’s how it was. Sorry to disillusion.”

“Mog’s not a liar.”

“Depressed, though. And attention seeking. Good story I’m sure. Unstable boyfriend with a violent streak.”

“Your words, not mine. Why did you come here?”

“I was invited.”

“Oh, come off it.”

“Mog wrote a letter and I wanted right of reply. But she won’t hear me out. I’m going away to write it instead. It will be long and forlorn.”

“But you’re already hooked up with someone else, aren’t you. That’s the truth of the matter. You’re already sleeping with someone else. Why play these weird games?”

“A person has to find his entertainment where he can,” Johnnie said, as if sincerely.

“I think you’re the one who’s a trifle unwell, mate,” Pip responded.

Johnnie looked disgusted. “Oh, fuck off. You’re so arse-numbingly
boring.”

“Okay then,” Pip said, turning away, then swivelling back to say, “Mog tells me you spent your childhood in foster homes and I’m sorry for you.”

Johnnie was shaking his head. “Just part of her myth of me, I’m afraid to say. My mother’s still alive and she’s a doctor. Sorry.”

“I particularly liked the term spent being unimpressed by Harvard, and the charity walk in Nepal.”

“The charity walk’s for real. Don’t diss that. Don’t you dare. Those children in the hospice. Wanker.” Johnnie was already walking away, his middle finger raised above his head.

***

Izzy found Mog in the linen room after dinner.

“Everybody’s worried about you down there,” she said.

“Are they? That’s nice.”

“What now?”

“Now, nothing. Now, hiding. Tomorrow, keeping a low profile. The day after, skulking about the house. The day after that, forced jollity. That’s the usual pattern, isn’t it? I wouldn’t want to let anybody down.”

“It wasn’t that bad.”

“Huh.”

“You shout, they shout back. It’s how it goes.”

“I always feel like I’m in the wrong. Especially when I’m right.”

“It’s because you get emotional. That gives them ammunition.” She got up. “Come on.”

“Where are we going?”

“To see Ursula. She insisted on going back to the cottage, had the screaming abdabs. Dad was all for locking her in, or rather locking out He Who Shall Not Be Named, but Gran wasn’t having it. She called the inn about an hour ago and spoke to Johnnie, apologising for the ruckus. Really, it was her way of checking he’d gone back to the village.”

“So why are we going to see her?”

“Just checking. Said I’d check.”

The grass was saturated and cold, their feet damp and the world tranquil. The stable block, greenhouses and garden walls: all looked foreign in the dusk, the grey sky streaked with flashes of gold. They ran through the orchard, where fallen early apples like small round rocks were bruising under their soles, and where they disturbed an owl that in its haste flew right at them, almost colliding with Izzy, before emerging onto the lane. One of the cottages was brightly lit but it wasn’t Ursula’s. The Dixons’ house, too, was all in darkness. It was the holidaymakers who were up and uncurtained, their harshly lit sitting room revealing a man in an armchair reading a book, and a woman standing talking to him holding a map. Jet’s curtains were closed but illuminated by the unsteady blue light of a bedroom television. All was quiet at Ursula’s cottage. The shadows at the side of the sitting-room curtains were uneven, and then the unevenness was revealed as a person, and the person was revealed as Johnnie. Mog hung back and let Izzy go forward. Mog went and crouched behind the hedge, listening.

The door opened before Izzy could knock.

“Hello there; want a drink?” Johnnie’s voice.

“No,” Izzy said. “What I want, what all of us want is for you to go back to the inn right now. You shouldn’t be here. Go back to the inn and go home in the morning. You’re not welcome here.”

“This is disappointingly dreary.”

“Where’s Ursula?” Izzy pushed past him into the kitchen. “Ursula?”

“What?” a bad-tempered voice responded from upstairs. “Are you alright?”

“That’s a stupid question. What do you want? Go away.”

“I’m taking Johnnie with me,” Izzy shouted back.

Silence.

“It’s all about not making a fuss,” Izzy told Johnnie, speaking more quietly. She could hear Ursula coming down the stairs, a step at a time. “You’re the latest thing not to make a fuss about. But everyone will be relieved when Sunday comes and you’re gone. You are going on Sunday, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“You haven’t booked a table at L’Assiette, then.”

“I haven’t,” he conceded.

There was a noise from within, a human noise, a small explosion of dissent, and Ursula appeared, striding past Johnnie and ignoring Izzy and making off towards the house.

“Though that may be an unpopular decision,” Johnnie said, and then brightly, “Can I interest you in a nightcap?”

Izzy produced a key from her pocket. “I’m going to close the door now and lock it, so if you have anything of yours here you had better get it now.”

“Fine, fine,” Johnnie said, putting up his hands and stepping out into the garden, onto the lane and towards the village.

***

Izzy went to play cards with Ursula in the kitchen and make bacon sandwiches, and Mog went to the drawing room, hearing Rebecca’s voice coming from that direction. She stopped outside the half-open door, listening. Pip was talking now.

“They never got along. Ottilie disapproved of him as a husband for Mum, and Mum thought she was jealous. It was much worse when Michael went.”

“How’s that?”

“He won’t ever be forgiven, for things he said to Ottilie on the day.”

“What things?”

“That it was Ottilie’s fault that he’d gone,” Pip said. “That she wasn’t a good enough mother, not attentive enough.”

Mog went into the room. She told Pip that she needed to talk to him, and Rebecca absented herself immediately. “About Johnnie,” Pip began, but Mog cut him off.

“It’s not about Johnnie. I want to talk to you some more about the picture, and about Alan.” As she was speaking she was closing the door, returning to sit by him at the fireside.

“What do you want to do?”

“I think we should tell Henry.”

“I could tell him on the phone. In person he’ll be shocked and will probably shut down. Might be better on the phone.”

“On the phone? For heaven’s sake.”

“That’s how it is. There are things that Henry can say to me, in the early hours.”

“How early?”

“This insomnia of his is a real problem. Sometimes it’s five in the morning when he rings and often he hasn’t yet slept. I tell him that I’m awake then, in the summer when it’s light, that I like getting to the office early. It’s worth it. I don’t mind.”

“I didn’t know he had trouble sleeping.”

“He hides it well, even from Edith.”

“In the same room.”

“It’s been a problem for a long time. He barely sleeps at night.”

“I didn’t know.”

“You know where Henry is, the afternoons we think he’s out on the hill? Asleep, usually. Can only sleep in the daylight. Curls up on the sofa in the study, locks the door.”

“I thought the locked door meant he was out.”

“Everybody does. But that’s the point. When he comes in at teatime looking so tired with stories from the hill, sometimes they’re true but generally they’re invented. Henry, I’ve discovered, can tell a story. He’s tired because he’s just waking up. Sets his phone alarm for a quarter to four.”

“And Edith doesn’t know this? How could she not know?”

“He doesn’t think she does, but let’s be real, what are the odds?”

Joan came into the room holding a glass of red wine. “I need to speak to you, to the two of you.” She shut the door behind her.

“What is it?” Pip asked wearily.

“Your father went to the pub, after the scene at dinner. He was upset.” Her eyes rested momentarily on Mog. “He’s just phoned me. Alan was there. Alan said he’d met Johnnie at the loch this afternoon. Johnnie and Ursula together.”

“What about it?”

“Alan was thrilled to pass on the news to your father that Johnnie was asking Ursula about Michael. Mog, did you confide in Johnnie? I need honesty and a straight answer.”

“No, of course not.”

“Not even a hint?”

“No.”

“That’s odd, because Johnnie said to Ursula that you thought he was dead.”

“I brought him here. I brought Johnnie here in the spring. We talked a bit about Michael going missing, possible solutions to the mystery. We all talk that like to people.”

“I don’t.”

“No, Mother,” Pip interjected. “We know.”

“You brought Johnnie here? Why didn’t you say? Why didn’t I get to meet him?”

“You weren’t here,” Mog told her. “You were off shopping. And all I said to him was that we thought Michael had gone out to the wolf.”

“For god’s sake, not that again.”

“It’s the kind of thing we say all the time to people,” Pip said, raising his voice. “That we suspect it may have been suicide. It would be odder not to talk about it, in my opinion.”

Joan said, “But you see, my darlings, Johnnie asked Ursula what
she
thought.”

“What did she say?”

“She said she wasn’t able to talk about it, that she’d promised not to. Which is tantamount to a confession.”

“What are you going to do?”

“We need to keep them apart. Johnnie and Ursula. There’ll be a rota for tomorrow and for tomorrow evening, and she’ll sleep here until he’s gone.”

20

The first person to be up and about on Saturday morning was Edith. She’d been into the village and back by the time the others emerged in pyjamas and bathrobes, foraging for breakfast. She’d gone to church early to be there alone, walking like a ghost through the village before anyone else was around, creaking the door of St Ninian’s open, its small usual noises amplified by the silence of the street so early in the day.

“I don’t know what I’m hoping for,” she told the altar. “It’s hard even to know what the question is.”

St Ninian’s was built and endowed by the first Henry Salter, and the family has always held a proprietorial key. Ninian was the first missionary to come to Scotland, well before the publicity-grabbing Columba, and Henry One, as he’s known, went down to Whithorn to the site of the saint’s first church, joining the pilgrims at Ninian’s cave, a journey that he made after the visit to Peattie of the so-called witch. Edith had always enjoyed the family association with the church, its walls full of plaques and markers, but of late she’d begun to feel nervous about being there for services: so much anti-Salter feeling seemed to be erupting out of nowhere, and her continuing attendance, sitting alone in the family pew like some kind of representative of all that was wrong with the past, like some unfortunate and freakish survival, was becoming a matter of dread at Sunday breakfast. It wasn’t only that. Recent events, conversations that had turned into events, were making it impossible to conjure up that old Edith, that old Edith/church relationship that had been the basis of her life, the rock on which she’d built an achieved state almost of contentment, putting herself dizzyingly into the perspective of centuries, leading through paragraphs of other lives in other generations to her own. Edith was beginning to see that a period of grieving was upon her—she recognised its heaviness in her stomach. It didn’t any longer seem obvious that she and St Ninian’s, even if stripped back of its politics, its political spin, would always love and understand one another.

She walked back to Peattie with a troubled heart, made more troubled by the fact that it was her birthday, that there was to be a party, that she was to be the centre of attention and subject to close scrutiny. The day required an adoption of false jollity: there was no choice. She came into the kitchen exclaiming her good mornings to all and was greeted by a chorus of happy birthday wishes. She carried the scent of church with her into the room, its spray polish and damp stone and the foetid sweetness of holiness. She’d been exchanging the flower arrangements for blooms cut fresh from Peattie’s garden.

Once presents had been given and opened, Mog said that she’d go into the village and get the shopping. She put the rucksack on her back—a tattered old thing, dark green and worn and frayed, that was in use for this purpose even when I was a child—and took Edith’s list and went off on the bike. Her father turned up at the shop just after her, buying groceries for the gatehouse. “You left before I could give you my list,” he complained. He put his basket on the freezer counter and stood to face her. “Mary. We need to have a talk.”

“What is it? Is something wrong?”

“Your mother has just told me that you’ve resigned, that you’re moving in with Edith and Henry and having some kind of a career break.”

“She’s only just told you?”

“I think you’ll find that’s not the point. But since you bring it up, you should have told me. You know how your mother is. You should have realised she’d tell me only when she was ready to.”

“I’m sorry; I didn’t think.”