The White Lie (48 page)

“You can’t hide from her for ever.”

“Yes. I can do that.”

“Look. You’re the ones, you and Gran, all these years, who’ve reassured her, over and over and over, that it was self-defence. That her lashing out wasn’t something wicked, but understandable. A reflex. And that’s still true.”

“I can’t speak to her ever again. I can’t see her even in the garden.”

“I’m going to call Dr Nixon.”

“You’re wasting your time. I don’t want to be medicated out of this—this clarity—and to have it taken away. This is the true world and I need to live in it now. But away from here. We should have left here after Sebastian.”

“I know that you—”

Henry interrupted him. “You don’t know. You don’t know anything. We told the truth to each other before Sebastian. But after Sebastian everything was a lie.”

“I don’t understand, I’m sorry.”

“It wasn’t possible to carry on. But we carried on. That was the lie.”

“I’m coming up to see you.”

“I won’t see you. I won’t see anyone. Only Edith with the tray. I need to be left alone for now.”

“I’ll come up on Sunday. It’s Thursday today. By Sunday you’ll be ready to dress and go out on the hill.”

“I can’t see her.”

“Tell Gran that I’m coming and to keep Ursula away. And I’ll see you on Sunday afternoon.”

***

It wasn’t unusual for Pip to have to go into the office on a Saturday, not the way things were going at the bank, the papers full of alarmist rumours. That’s why he hadn’t promised Saturday. But having to give up the whole weekend to 14-hour days: that was unprecedented. Pip had to ring and speak to Edith on Sunday morning and tell her that he couldn’t come.

“There’s a crisis—a real one,” he told her. “I wouldn’t cancel if it were something I could get out of. But this is serious. This is survival.”

“I heard about it on the radio,” Edith said. “I understand. Henry will understand. Don’t worry about it. He’s better, I think, getting better. He’s eating now, and sleep seems to be helping. He’s been outside for a little while today. His colour’s much better.”

Pip was all set to come up the following Friday evening, but on Thursday he got the call from Joan to say that Henry had been found on the hill, looking as if he were sleeping, pale and certain in the moss.

23

Why did Euan marry Joan, when it was Ottilie that he wanted? It’s a good question, to which there are multiple possible answers. In other words, I don’t know. I’m not likely ever to know. Joan’s own enthusiasm for marriage may have been a key point. Joan, the second sister, the less pretty one, the one said to be the clever one but overlooked, all eyes on the beauty—Joan was determined, after Sebastian died and Ottilie became the heir of Peattie, that she would marry first. She would marry before Ottilie and on her 18th birthday as their mother had done. Gaining the attention and approval of their mother had become tacitly a competition by then. Everybody talks about Ursula’s closing down after Sebastian died, but nobody much discusses Edith doing the same. In the four years that passed between Seb’s death and Joan’s marriage, Edith suffered seriously from depression, although if necessary—on birthdays, at Christmas, presented by a child with good news—she would up her game, snapping out of her withdrawn, monosyllabic normality, returning to the present with unconvincing words that all was well.

What you have to understand, my mother has said to me since I died, sitting with me in the wood, is that everybody was always trying to make Edith smile. Ottilie and Joan, specifically, were always trying to make their mother smile. The bringing of temporary sorts of lightness into her life: that was a project on the footing of a constant unofficial campaign. So, at 17 Joan came up with what seemed like the ultimate good news: she announced there would be a wedding, a small, white, perfect family wedding. Joan feigned her passion for Euan, her belief in their future together so skilfully that her mother was entranced by it. The house was full of love, of plans, of possibility again; Edith was caught up in the spirit of the thing and seemed almost like her old self, Henry said, his gratitude obvious. For a time Joan was the heroine of the dynasty.

But why did Euan consent? There might have been an element of wanting to be close to the beloved, though that seems particularly wet, even for him. I suppose that it was his only chance to stay in the Peattie circle, but I struggle to make sense even of that. My mother’s theory is that Euan cooled off and Joan threatened to tell. What she had to tell was that she’d been under age when they began having sex, only just 15, a situation that was illegal and actionable. Joyce and Richard Catto, unaware of this development in their courtship, brought Euan to Peattie three times a year, not only for the summer holiday but during the Easter and October school breaks. Even so, why would Euan care enough about the threat of scandal to marry someone he didn’t much like? Certainly he fooled them all. Everyone regarded the boy Alan, the winking, wandering-eyed, innuendo-making, cheeky and lascivious boy Alan, as the likely source of trouble with daughters, and went to lengths to protect them from him. Meanwhile, the attention of parents and friends successfully diverted, it was studious, lanky, rather saturnine, ambitious and well-mannered Euan who harvested the virginity first of Joan and then of her sister. Not that either was unwilling.

Ottilie was puzzled by the engagement. It had been obvious from the beginning, to Ottilie anyway: Joan’s being second choice. Even at 14 she’d been aware of it, during the Easter that Euan first visited. She’d been aware of Euan looking at her, his calm observant absorption of her, his trying repeatedly to meet her eyes with his. It became seriously awkward. He wasn’t deterred when Ottilie let it be known that Alan had kissed her. She’d let Alan kiss her, for heaven’s sake, better to get the message across, to suggest that there was another pairing, that she was unavailable. It didn’t seem to help. Even when he became engaged officially to Joan, Euan had engineered their being alone together. In the outhouses, getting the tennis racquets, backing Ottilie against the wall and placing his hands either side of her, closing in, a look of pathetic sincerity on his face as he bent to kiss, Ottilie ducking under his arms and away. He sought her out repeatedly, in outhouses, over the net, at the loch, in the wood, in the linen room: Euan Catto made his declarations and Euan Catto was rebuffed.

“It wasn’t as if he knew me, even. He never got the chance to know me.” Ottilie said this to me, recently. “I never gave him anything of myself, no encouragement. It was all in his head. In his eyes. That was all it was. It wasn’t about me. I don’t think we ever had a proper conversation. Joan kept him on a tight leash, but he’d devise excuses to slip the leash and come looking. When he made his declarations they were always abstract: how he loved and worshipped me, how he was yearning. He didn’t know what I liked, what I felt, what I wanted, what I didn’t want, what I thought about anything. He wasn’t interested. He wanted to screw me—sorry Michael, but there you are. He wanted to screw me: that’s all it was, and I don’t know even now whether he dressed it up purposely—my eyes like the sea in winter—all that stuff, purely to try and get me to have sex with him . . . the cynicism of that! It takes my breath away. Or whether he thought that he meant it, whether he had bought into it himself and meant every word. I felt it later, like a cold wind, Michael, the cost, the implications of looking as I did. You didn’t see me then but at 16 I was ridiculously lovely, I say that without vanity; well, without much vanity. I couldn’t help it, and I hated it. My body was the enemy. It seemed like it was intent on betraying me, whoring without permission, advertising itself to men, my arse so pert in the bloody shorts, my little waist curving in. I let my hair grow long thinking it was unvain and unworldly to have this long little-girl hair, but looking back, looking at the photographs, it was down to my waist and wavy and did yet more advertising. The irony was that I didn’t want it, this power I had over men, over Euan, over Alan, over Christian. I’d go into the village and be stared at and wolf-whistled at and it was just
horrible
. But it seemed to me that it was all about a woman as a receptacle, a cup and a vice, a woman as a commodity. That’s an appalling way to look at a person, isn’t it? I was so afraid you’d become one of them. I admit it, I was afraid. Because what’s the outcome of that world view? It has a hundred devastating outcomes, I promise you. And what happens later, when the bloom of youth has gone? The man who sees a woman that way, as something of use, as a service, he’s going to move on. So that’s what happened, and that’s why I never hooked up with anyone, I suppose. It was the terms of Euan’s desire; they were educational. I realised I didn’t want to be part of it. I didn’t want to be any part of it.”

Feeling this way and this strongly, why would Ottilie go to Euan the night before he married Joan? Only because of Joan’s mistake, her grave mistake, cancelling the long-planned 18th-birthday party, insisting that the birthday had to be the date of the wedding. When Ottilie protested Joan told her that she didn’t care what Ottilie thought, that Ottilie was a spoilt cow who’d had everything her own way too long, that Ottilie was a vain prima donna, that she, Joan, was looking forward more to leaving Ottilie behind than to any other facet of her marriage (the plan, then, being that Euan would work at an English college or else overseas). It was only after this that Ottilie decided to exercise her power. And so it was, having said nothing in response to this outburst, having been accused, in Joan’s parting shot, of being an ice queen, a cold fish who cared for nothing and no one but her sketchbooks, that Ottilie contrived to be alone with Euan. She joined him in the bathroom at the end of the corridor, an unsolicited visit timed to coincide with Euan’s, preparing for his stag night in the village. Ottilie came into the bathroom uninvited, to find Euan dressed other than for his shirt, and shaving. She shut the door behind her and came to him, dressed only in a silk robe that once was Tilly’s.

Sometimes a pact can be achieved without any obvious negotiations taking place, without a single word being spoken, and this was one of those times. The whole house party narrative thread: that was always wishful thinking on Henry’s part. He knew, or thought he knew, what the rest of the family imagined: that Alan was the probable father. Nothing could be said to Alan about this, of course. Not at the time. As Henry said, if Alan thought himself the father, Alan would in all likelihood assert his rights. It was vital to keep quiet, to focus on the house party. Meanwhile, Ottilie was subjected to a sequence of inquisitions. She wouldn’t tell, but nor would she deny Alan. Vita wrote an account of a conversation she had with Ottilie at the time, and when I went to her she had looked out the old notebook and had found the page, the book shaking in her shrivelled old hands, and handed it to me, pointing at the relevant paragraph.

“
Just tell me this one thing” I said to her. “And I promise you that it will never go further. It will never be spoken of outside this room
”

She looked at me, her beautiful sad eyes
.

“I’ll tell you what I think,” I said to her. “I feel disinclined to agree with Henry about this dossier of his. Tell me and I won’t say a word to him, or to anyone, ever so long as I live. It wasn’t at the house party, was it?”

She shook her head and she left the room in tears, and that’s when it became clear to me that Alan Dixon was the father of the child
.

The rumour that Alan was the father got to the village. Ottilie has always assumed that Euan was the source, the original source way up river of the news, and that seems most likely. Alan, teased and congratulated at the pub, waited for his chance and eventually got his opportunity to speak, stopping to talk to Ottilie as she went by with the dogs one morning, heavily pregnant and lovelier than ever.

“Apparently I’m the father,” he said.

“Apparently,” she answered, her face giving no clue. “Why’d you tell them that?”

“I didn’t.”

“Well, that’s what they think.”

“I’m aware.”

“But you and me, we didn’t do it.”

“You have a short memory,” she said to him. “Don’t you remember our night of passion, the night of the wedding, under the white moon in the wood?”

Alan looked as if he was having to reconsider. “But we didn’t do it,” he said again.

Two days after this a lucky encounter brought some enlightenment. He’d gone down to the loch in his lunch break and as he approached through the field, heard raised voices and realised that it was the twins. It was an easy matter, standing at the edge of the wood and listening; they were too busy arguing to think to look for eavesdroppers. Alan saw what value his being the father had to Ottilie, how deeply the idea angered and disturbed her sister, how passively Ottilie let her sister become more greatly angered and disturbed. How by turns thunderstruck and furious Joan was, and vitally how very impotent. Joan’s impotence was crucial. Joan raged and demanded and Ottilie was impervious. By the time he returned to the cottage, Alan had convinced himself that it must be true, that whatever the facts it was going to be true. Mixed in with his apprehension there began to be sparks of euphoria. He envisioned a deal being done with Henry: a quiet marriage, a modest settlement. Later, reflecting more coolly on things, when it was obvious that Ottilie wouldn’t agree to the marriage, the settlement still seemed likely. If Ottilie had decided that he was the official father of the baby, there would be rights and responsibilities. And there would be status. Or so he thought.

***

Pip never got the written explanation that Henry promised him. Instead, Henry wrote to Edith, a letter written during his period of seclusion, a letter that Edith has refused to show anyone else. In it, Henry expressed a wish that he be buried in the family mausoleum alongside Sebastian. My mother, in her many rather one-sided dialogues with me in the wood, has expressed the worry that what Henry wanted, what Henry specified, was that he be buried with Sebastian and that Edith should be interred elsewhere. Whatever the case, the letter had a huge effect on Edith. I’ve seen it, as a physical object, its seven or eight pale blue sheets twice folded, and have glimpsed Henry’s handwriting, characteristically small and perfect across the pages, as even as if typewritten in a handwriting font. I haven’t read it but I have seen it. Edith takes it out of its envelope and reads it almost daily. Information trickled out from its contents piecemeal.