The White Lie (7 page)

“He was so angry,” Ursula said.

“
He
was angry?”

She crossed her hands and patted tentatively at her upper arms, her expression pained. Euan went to her, lifting her hair in order to see better. Ursula squirmed out of his attempted closer look, reacting noisily to his hand making contact on her shoulder. Euan said that there were marks, red fingerprints and scratches.

Everybody looked now towards Alan, who was perched on the edge of a nursing chair that sits by the door, one that might give out at any moment. His face was moist and pink and his eyes alarmed.

“You saw this, Alan?” Henry prompted him.

“The boat was quite far out, as I said. But there was one hell of a commotion.”

“You didn’t see Michael attacking her?”

“I was in the wood, as I told you. My lunch break. I’d had a tiff with my dad.”

“Yes, you said, about the tomatoes,” Euan stepped in curtly. “About who was supposed to water them. But what were you doing in the wood?”

“I told you. It was my lunch break. I often go down there. It’s hot. It’s cooler by the water, and there’s a breeze.”

“You were spying on Michael and Ursula,” Euan said, pointing.

Alan, I should tell you, had been cautioned by the police in the weeks preceding this for peeping through windows, through inadequately closed curtains, at night in the village. He would admit to being nosy, he’d said, but that was all.

“I was not,” Alan insisted. “I was in the wood. I was at the grave. I was there on my bike. I was bothered about the fight with my dad. I didn’t see them till I heard the commotion. I heard the carry-on. I went out there onto the beach. The glare’s bad but I see Ursula and Michael jostling each other in the boat and tipping it. They have the oar—”

“Both of them.” Joan’s voice.

“Both. They have it one at each end and it looks like they’re playing, but there’s shouting.”

“You could hear what was being said?”

“I can hear but the words aren’t right, it’s just noise, I can’t make it out.”

“I see,” Henry murmured. “I see.”

“Michael loses his balance and goes over. Ursula jabs him hard with the oar and he’s pushed back and over he goes.”

“And?”

“He’s swimming round the boat and she’s yelling at him. She’s got her back to me. He gets his arms onto the side of the boat and his head comes up over the edge; he looks up from the edge, holding onto the side, and he’s saying something to her. And that’s when it happens.”

“Go on.”

“She hits him hard across the head.”

“She hits him hard.”

“It’s like a golf swing, wham, into the temple.”

Edith cried out in grief.

“I’m sorry to be so graphic,” Alan said. “I apologise.”

“Go on,” Henry told him.

“Michael doesn’t make a sound. Nothing. His arms disappear off the boat and he’s gone under.” Alan opened his hands as if encompassing a ball. “And that’s it, that’s all.”

Henry didn’t speak at first. Nobody spoke. The clock on the mantlepiece was very noisy.

Henry was looking at Ursula, and Ursula was averting her eyes.

Finally he said “Why did you hit him?”

She didn’t answer.

“Why was he so angry?”

She twisted and untwisted her hem.

“Tell us what happened. In your words. What happened, Ursula?”

Nothing.

“Ursula.” More urgently now. “We need to understand.”

“I told him.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I told him the secret.”

“What secret?”

She looked at her father as if he must be stupid. “It’s a secret.”

“You need to tell us what the secret was,” Henry said, but Ursula was already shaking her head. “Ursula,” Henry insisted, his voice remaining patient. “We need to know. This is important.”

Ursula looked at Alan, and kept looking at him.

Alan said, “Would you rather I left the room, Mr Salter?”

“Stay, Alan. A little longer.”

“It’s just that my dad will be worried.”

“Oh goodness.” Edith spoke for the first time. “Of course you must go. Go and see him and then come straight back, would you?” She appeared composed but Edith is a coper, an apparent coper. Nobody was fooled.

Nothing was said until Alan had left the room and they heard the main door closing.

“He was going to push me in,” Ursula said then, her voice high-pitched. The words had been pent up in her.

“Alan?”

“Michael. Michael was trying to push me in.”

This I’m afraid is true. It was also the moment of forgiveness.

Edith beckoned to her, and she went and joined her mother on the floor, the vast fireplace looming over them, its brick interior dark as a mouth. Ursula put her head in the crook of Edith’s arm, her knees balled up tight. Edith put a discreet hand up to the rest of them, one that requested quiet.

“Was it something to do with Alan, the secret?” She spoke to the top of her daughter’s head.

“I can’t,” Ursula told her. Euan had given Edith another whisky and she gulped it now, wincing.

There’s no way out of a promise, they knew that much. A promise isn’t negotiable. Some things that Ursula was taught as a child have set fast in her character and this is one of those things.

“So you had an argument.”

Ursula’s words were muffled by Edith’s lap. “We were shouting. The fish were scared. The birds flew out of the wood. It was hot. There wasn’t enough air. Even the water was hot.”

Ursula sat up, extricating herself, putting her fingertips to each eyebrow and hooking her thumbs under her chin.

“Tell us more about Michael,” Edith said to her.

“He went down into the water so quietly, so quietly, just a ripple and—gone.” She spoke through a tent of fingers. “And then there was nobody there.” She sounded genuinely surprised. Her hands were lowered. “He was gone. He was already gone. I saw the bubbles coming up.” She paused, looking as if she were seeing it again, her eyes flickering side to side. “I leaned and I was saying his name. But he wasn’t there; I couldn’t see him. He was already gone.”

Euan interrupted her. “And what about Alan?”

“Alan.”

“Alan came out to the boat, swimming.”

“No,” Ursula said firmly. “Alan dived in and looked for him, off the jetty, looking and looking, and then he brought him up.”

“What?”

“Sebastian was dead.”

“Ursula,” Henry said. “Concentrate. We’re not talking about that. This afternoon. Ursula. In the boat with Michael. He fell overboard and then he tried to climb back in.”

“He went in the water, and he just
sank
. Sank and gone.”

“He didn’t just sink,” Joan said. “He came back, and he tried to get into the boat, and you hit him with the oar.”

“He wasn’t going to climb back in.”

“What?”

“He had me by my ankle. He grabbed me hard on my leg and he was pulling. He was going to pull me in. You can’t breathe in the water. You can’t breathe. It will fill every space in you and stop your heart.”

She began violently to shiver. Mog took a blanket from the folded pile in the corner, set in readiness there for more ordinary days when the fire can’t seem to puncture the chill, and put it around her shoulders.

Ursula tucked her chin into the hem of the blanket, her nose and eyes all that was visible of her face.

“Tell us about Alan,” Joan said.

“Alan tried. Alan tried his hardest. But it was too late.”

“What happened then?”

“I ran home. But it was a long time after.”

“Why did it take so long?”

“The oar. The other oar was in the water.”

“You couldn’t reach it?”

“I wouldn’t reach. I don’t go towards the water. Water will kill me. Sebastian . . . you know about my brother Sebastian.”

“Indeed.”

“The Salters are cursed. We were cursed by a witch in 1852.”

Vita says she believes in the curse. Vita believes in evil as an entity, something conscious, something waiting for its moment. She says that really it was the witch who killed me, the supposedly “dark-skinned” woman who turned up in 1852, claiming the then Henry Salter was wicked and must pay.
Many of ye shall die by water and meet the devil in hereafter
. In the village they like to list the names of all those who’ve complied (with the first clause, at any rate), counting them off on their fingers.

After they’d talked and talked, to Ursula and to Alan, and there seemed nothing new to discover, the family went away and individually they considered what had happened. They had their real reactions to events alone in bedrooms and bathrooms and in corners of the garden. Then, when feelings had subsided enough into words, they began to talk among themselves, at first in family groups, in family discussions. Later, the things they believed (and more importantly, didn’t believe) became controversial, contradictory, and the conversations shrank into twosomes, but for now there was talk among the group. The group established the words that could be said and the words that couldn’t. Each person tried out the role through step and misstep that they would assume later in the drama, and in so doing the language of the disaster was established. It felt dangerous to leave the safety of that new culture, and encounter those not anointed into it. How could the forbidden thing not rise to the surface of its own volition, like a splinter out of a finger, rising of its own accord and speaking itself? It threatened to, even in the safety of the family circle. Something so momentous: how could it go on being contained and private? A way of dealing with it was to introduce, even at this very early stage, the possibility of doubt. In doubting, the big thing was fractured, split, spread. In doing so, the big thing was diminished.

***

It’s another day. People are a little older and in different clothes. Mog’s younger sister looks about 13, so it’s about four years later. Edith and the cousins are in the kitchen, buttering toast. It’s the only thing that makes me something like hungry; terrible yearning resides in that smell. Mog and Pip are back for the weekend from the city with their city news. It’s autumn, to judge by the scene outside; brown leaves are circling and heaping against the trees, and then unheaping, raked invisibly along the paths. Four years later and they were still talking about it. Will they ever stop talking about it?

“Okay then, well let’s see it from Ursula’s viewpoint if we can for a moment,” Edith said, in her sweet and reasonable way. “Ursula fell
violently
in love with her 19-year-old nephew, and thought he was in love with her—no truly, please don’t smirk, Pip, that’s genuinely what she thought. She had an affair with him in secret, and—”

“We don’t know that, Gran.”

“We do, we do know that. Ursula doesn’t tell lies. She tells the truth always, too much of it sometimes.”

“I know, I know, truth is her religion,” Pip said, with thinly veiled sarcasm.

“Had an affair with him in secret,” Edith continued, “and no doubt she was intense about it, and it wouldn’t surprise me if that was the real reason Michael decided to go. On the day he was leaving he persuaded her to go out in the boat with him. We’ll never know how he managed it. Perhaps he dangled the possibility that she could go away with him.”

“It’s possible,” Pip said, in a way that suggested it wasn’t at all likely.

“Ursula, made very upset, said something to Michael that caused him to lose his temper, about which we can only speculate as she’s unlikely to tell us.”

“That Alan is his father.”

“Pip. We don’t know that.”

“Of course we do. Everybody knows. Everybody but Michael.”

“She told him a secret, and was attacked by him in the rowing boat and feared she would fall into the water. He threatened to push her in. When she pushed back, he lost his balance.”

Pip made his sceptical noise.

“He lost his balance,” Edith repeated. “And then, when he got his forearms back over the side of the boat, what did he do then? Was he content to climb back in? No. He grabbed her by the leg and tried to pull her into the water. Do you have any idea, do you have
any idea
, what that would have meant to Ursula?”

“Of course.”

“Well, I hope so. Michael used her fear against her. He used her terror and that was a deplorable thing to do. I’m not saying that injuring Michael was right—”

“Injuring?”

“It was the loch that did the rest, Pip. If it had happened on land, he would have been taken to casualty and that would have been that.”

“We don’t know that.”

“We do. He was hit by someone in a panic, terrified, who found themselves in a life-and-death struggle. You weren’t here Pip. You didn’t see her. Terror is the right word. He went under. It was an accident.”

“It was not an accident.”

“I don’t think Izzy should be here,” Edith said. Mog’s younger sister was staring open-mouthed.

“Izzy is fine,” Pip told her. “Izzy is the blood-thirstiest of us all and has been entertaining us with her theories.”

“Hitting him. That was wrong. But was Michael right? We all idolise Michael, beautiful Michael who’s dead, but let’s just remember what he did that day.”

The one thing all acknowledge that Ursula could not do, under any circumstances, was follow me out of the boat. Nobody, not even Ottilie in her raging grief, could blame Ursula for her lifelong aquaphobia. Ursula, who has trouble with the idea of fiction, believes in the monster and has always feared it. She thought, when it looked as if I would push her into the water (knowing that she couldn’t swim), that drowning would be only the end of the ordeal. She thought that she would find the creature swimming beneath her, the rough shark skin of his nose skimming her kneebone, his pitiless liquid eye, his Triassic mouth opening onto a hundred knife-sharp teeth, her limbs torn off in front of her eyes.

Jock must take some of the blame for this. He’d see the child Ursula cycling up and going in to buy sweets, her bike parked by the wall her great-great-grandfather built. At that time Ursula was his particular target.

“Oh if it isn’t Miss Salter, and will you be seeing the monster today? Are you aware that I count that monster as my particular friend? He’s been speaking to me about you. Swimming silent in the dark and hungry. He’s waiting for you; it’s you he wants”