The White Lie (52 page)

“Find Alan!” she yelled, surfacing again almost at once, her voice distorted by the cold. The t-shirt clung tight and wet to her small buds of breasts. “Find him! Now! Don’t stand there! Go and find Alan!”

Joan took charge, though she wasn’t the stronger swimmer. What could Ottilie do? Argue? Jump in beside her? She must get help, one of them must. Ottilie was by far the stronger swimmer, but Joan was already in the water and there wasn’t anything to do other than obey.

Joan has always blamed Ottilie for not finding Alan. But Alan was out of sight. Alan, unaware of the crisis, seemed to have vanished. It was Petra’s shouts that he’d hear, returning to the loch intending to say more to her. He had more he wanted to say. He heard Petra’s shouts and Joan’s reprimands and knew that something was wrong. It wasn’t Ottilie’s calls that he heard, her long and echoey calls. Alan wasn’t anywhere to be seen but Ottilie found Petra—Petra had paused in the wood to cry, and to mop her eyes—and sent her to the jetty, and then she ran onward, taking a diagonal route back onto the path further up, at the copse.

Petra hurried to the loch, and, summoned and abused by Joan—what the hell had she been doing?—waded at first hurriedly and then tentatively into the water, her white jeans staining tea-coloured with peat. She discovered that the bottom is uneven, full of small craters and bigger rocks, and then she tripped, going down chin-deep into the water, and was shouting out unintelligibly, panicking and forgetting her English, as Joan surfaced and dived again.

“Over here, over here,” Joan barked at her. “You’re no good there.” Joan didn’t stay long beneath the surface. She wasn’t getting deep enough and was bothered by the wet dark, the brown and suffocating dark, the pond smell and the wafting arms of lake vegetation. Petra waded as far as her waist and seemed unable to go further. The ground was tipping away from her and she took her first step back just as Ursula, peering down from the jetty, vomited her lunch noisily into the scene.

Poor, poor Petra, who’d lied on the agency form that she could swim. Swimming was essential, she’d been told, and it had been easy to tick the box, confident she could come up with good enough reasons to avoid swimming. She was driven to the station in the early evening in the old car: sitting in the back seat alone, Henry driving, his cap pulled tight over his head, his fingers whitened on the grip of the steering wheel. Her eyes so big. Her face so wet. She begged forgiveness all the way there. It was my fault. I’m sorry; forgive me, forgive me. “Es tut mir leid; verzeih mir, bitte verzeih mir.” No forgiveness was forthcoming. Nothing was said. He took her bags out of the boot and put them onto the kerb and drove away without uttering a word.

***

When Ottilie got onto the lane she had to make a decision. Which way? Perhaps Alan had gone home. She sprinted towards the Dixons’ cottage, but it turned out there was nobody there. Where the hell had Alan gone? She took off at a run towards the house, still calling his name, increasingly desperately, noting that the green-houses stood empty of human activity and that no one was in the yard. It was going to be too late. Joan and Petra wouldn’t save him. The dull certainty of this throbbed dully in her head. When she burst into the study looking for Henry, she found Grandpa Andrew there, sitting looking at a letter from the bank, frowning over the top of his specs. Andrew said at first that he must tell his wife where he was going, not understanding the gravity of the situation, and called out Vita’s name in the hall, before Ottilie made him see there wasn’t time for that. They ran all the way back to the loch, the two of them; Ottilie running ahead, Andrew alternately jogging and walking, speeding up and jogging for a few paces before having to return to a walk, huffing and puffing, a tall white-haired figure, Romannosed, his face turning red. Ottilie was out ahead and so it was Ottilie who saw the scene on the jetty first. Alan was there, giving Sebastian the kiss of life, Seb’s little head smeared green with weed, his face streaked brown with silt. Joan turned a grey face to Ottilie, saying, “Where the hell have you
been
?”

Anxious but methodical, Andrew began talking to Alan, making sensible, briefly-worded suggestions. Alan told him, between efforts made to breathe life in, to force water out, that Sebastian tried to swim underwater or was pushed there by the currents, was under the jetty, caught up in great ropes of weed, and if only it hadn’t been so bloody dark. He’d blundered into him only by chance. Sebastian’s limp little body, one perfect small foot bare, a foot that had barely begun to walk in the world, the other still in its red sandal, was turned over and his back thumped, but Sebastian was dead, irretrievably dead, a bundle of dead flesh like laundry, lying limp and in his small way heavy on the jetty, gravity having triumphed over life. Alan began to pump at his chest while Andrew took over the breathing.

It seemed a long time later that they gave up the effort, but it was only a matter of minutes, ten minutes perhaps of determined activity ending in failure. It was Andrew who recognised first that the situation had passed beyond hope. He didn’t say so but he stopped doing everything that up till then he had done with so much conviction and energy. He stopped quite suddenly, sitting down beside the body. Alan, watching him, continued for a few moments before Andrew placed a hand gently on his arm. It was quiet, other than for the breeze ruffling branches in the wood. After a while they heard the teatime bell going, for what must have been a second or third time. It had been brought down to the back door and rung again, sending its message and questioning their absence.

Unanimously and without discussion, no one hurried away. Andrew said he had a pain in his back and should sit a while. It was fine, he said, nothing to fret about; it was just that he wasn’t supposed to run. Joan wrapped herself in the blanket that Ottilie brought from the house, one that had been intended for Sebastian, to keep him warm and carry him home. Petra’s teeth were chattering: she was sent back to the house by Andrew and instructed not to say anything until they got there. She was to go straight to her room and stay there. Petra had already been blamed, had been assigned blame even as she was dismissed from the scene, and everyone was aware that this was to be her role, including poor Petra herself, powerless to resist. When she set off down the path, turning and shouting out in German, declaring that she was only partially at fault, the silence at the jetty reasserted itself. Ottilie has told me that she was thinking of her parents during those quiet moments, wishing them a few minutes more of believing their world to be safe, of thinking the worst thing about today would be a demand from the bank, a day characterised otherwise by the usual small irritations, the children back late for tea and how they’d chastise them.

It was then that Andrew said to Ottilie and Joan that he wanted to speak to them alone. Apologising to Alan, he asked them to follow him for a private word. He took them back along the jetty, down the steps and to the edge of the wood, and seeing that Alan was watching, turned his back to the shore. He had a very special favour to ask of the girls, Andrew said. He wanted to treat them like grown-ups. What they had to do was be very brave. They’d have to take a grown-up approach.

“Promise me that you’ll tell your mother and father that you were here.”

“We
were
here,” Joan asserted. Her grief was of the irritable kind.

“I mean, tell her that you saw what happened. That you were here nearby when it happened. I know it’s not true. I know it was too late by the time you got here; Ottilie told me what happened. But sometimes a lie is necessary, and sometimes a lie is a kindness, and this is one of those times. It’s going to be so much worse for Edith if she knows that you weren’t watching. And worse for the two of you. And this was an accident after all. So it doesn’t matter if we adjust the order of events a little. Do you see? As a kindness. It’s important to be kind.”

“More important than the truth?” Ottilie’s voice.

“Sometimes, yes. It’s what we call a white lie.”

“There are different colours?” Ottilie’s words were broken by hiccupping sobs.

Andrew led the way back to the jetty and to Alan, who was standing beside Sebastian, a small boy lying on his side looking as if he were dreaming. Ursula continued staring into the water. Andrew said, “Who will carry him home?” and his voice fractured and he began to weep noisily, his forearm over his eyes. He picked Sebastian up and enacted an awful, sad, inexpressibly tender squeezing of him against his upper chest and throat, pressing his face into Sebastian’s belly. He said through his tears that he would take him. No one could dissuade him from this and they began their slow walk back to the house. All the way back, Ottilie and Joan, having distanced themselves from the procession, talked about what Andrew had asked of them and what they should say, though their conversation was of the shocked kind: bitty and abbreviated, and straight to the point. While they were deciding what to say to their mother, they took turns to ask the same question of each other.

First, Ottilie. “You don’t think she did it on purpose?”

“No,” Joan said. “Of course not.”

It was agreed between the sisters—by the time the house came into view and Andrew had gone in through the back stairs, followed by Alan and Ursula—that they’d seen the children arguing, that they’d seen Sebastian running and hurling his last pebble, that they’d stood only feet away and had seen everything unfold.

“It’s what happened, after all,” Ottilie said.

“You don’t think she did it on purpose?” Joan asked. “No,” Ottilie said. “Of course not.”

When they reached the door themselves, they could hear Henry, wailing like a wounded animal, bellowing, the sound echoing down from the hall.

Ottilie barred Joan’s way in. “It isn’t possible, is it.” It wasn’t really a question but Joan answered anyway.

“Not possible.”

***

Andrew didn’t have the heart attack until three hours afterwards, tucked up in a rug by the fire with a nip of whisky on the table, an untouched mug of soup, some painkillers because it was thought that he’d wrenched his back. Joan and Ottilie were in their rooms, each sprawled on their beds, red-eyed with wet handkerchiefs, and Ursula was with Vita in the kitchen, being fed soft-boiled eggs and toast soldiers. Ursula hadn’t spoken and wouldn’t speak for years. Nobody could bear to blame her. They shouldn’t have been on the jetty, but who was to know whose fault it was? Sebastian lost his balance, and the loch was too dangerous and dark. Edith was insistent that the girls mustn’t claim the fault. It was an accident, and as such was sealed off from blame. Blame was an obscenity in such a case.

But I saw her. I saw you, Ursula. The loch’s own memory has shown you to me. I saw you shove him and I saw him fall. It could be interpreted in a dozen ways, the shove, the paralysis ensuing in your reaction to his falling, the look partly of horror and partly of surprise. But I think I interpret you correctly. You had changed your mind, I see that, the moment it was done, even before the moment led to it being done, the change manifesting itself in your eyes in the niche of time between the two. You wanted the moment returned to you, the choice, the impulsive thing undone, even before your hand was off his back.

25

My mother was here this afternoon. Yesterday. Yesterday, now. It’s the early hours of the morning after and getting light again.

“Michael,” she said to me, as if I were sitting next to her. “Today’s the day. We think today will be the day.”

We sat on the beach together, her in her upright, straight-backed manner, in her black dress that stretched almost to the ankle, a black scarf flattening her fringe onto her eyebrows, her hair striped with white. We sat side by side looking out at the hills, at the water, the daylight streaming sodium yellow from gaps in the clouds. She turned her head from time to time to look towards the wood, towards the tomb; when she looked towards the house she looked right through me, her tears falling unannounced and in absolute silence. She wiped them from her cheeks with sudden rapid movements. With her other hand she lifted and then dropped handfuls of small stones. Paint was lodged under her fingernails. The skin of her wrist was puckered around her watch.

Eventually, she rose from the beach and went into the wood. She took some photographs, looking upward, pictures of canopy and sky, a dark figure seen moving unhurriedly, deliberately among the trees. Then she returned to the water’s edge. She picked up a stone, a small oval, its surface weathered flat as skin, and turned it over in her hand, smoothing it with her thumb and turning it, smoothing and turning.

“You,” she said, looking at it in her palm. “So apparently innocent.”

She threw the pebble into the shallows, then brought her camera out of her pocket and took pictures of the beach, of stone groupings, rearranging them before photographing them again. From time to time she pointed her camera towards the other end of the loch and looked through the viewfinder, using the zoom. Finally there was something new to see and she stepped forward. A tiny inverted triangle of red had appeared on the horizon, topped by a white quadrilateral. A boat was coming towards us, a red boat with a white cabin. Ottilie began taking pictures of it, first landscape and then portrait, successively as it made its slow approach.

We saw the fishing boat before we heard it, but then we heard its soft chug. Its outboard motor chugged louder as it moved towards us, and then became exaggerated, its chugging amplified by the bowl of hills. Its red livery glowed orangeish in the stormy light, and so did the red buoy that had been positioned on the loch the day before, the marker. Two men in wetsuits were fussing with equipment at the back. I could smell the diesel, its odour overlaying the aromas of stone and wet and weed and pine and leaf litter.

***

Joan and Edith were in town together while this was happening. Neither wanted to be present at the loch on this day, though they’d been briefed and had been invited. Edith refused to come to Peattie and Joan refused to go out to the cottage whether Ottilie was in residence or not, so Edith made the journey into town on the bus, having given up the car. They met on neutral ground in a coffee shop. Joan was the one drinking coffee, from one of those glass jugs with the press-down plunge filter. She was having trouble with the mechanism, and the whole thing threatened to tip over when she exerted even light pressure. She’d taken the jug to the counter to complain, leaving Edith stirring inside her teapot with a long-handled spoon. It was chamomile tea, and damp hay smells emanated from the lidless pot as she stirred. The coffee shop was small and straddled its own border between gentility and domestic squalor: it had lace cloths and waitresses in black dresses with crisp white aprons, but a lingering eye on sills and carpet and—worse still—into the kitchen, might have seen things that troubled it a little. No matter. The dozen tables were all occupied. Most of its clients were women of a certain age, good coats hooked over chair backs and carrier bags parked at their feet. Spoons clinked against china. Napkins were put into use. Above this Joan’s voice could be heard at the counter saying, “But it’s no good if it doesn’t work, is it? I’m sure you’ll find there isn’t a popular demand for that. It will spill hot coffee onto your tablecloth and at some point onto somebody’s lap.”