Authors: Andrea Gillies
The White Lie
Table of Contents
First Mariner Books edition 2013
Copyright © 2013 by Andrea Gillies
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
First published in Great Britain by Short Books in 2012
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Gillies, Andrea.
The White Lie / Andrea Gillies.—First Mariner Books edition.
pages cm
ISBN
978-0-544-06103-3 (Paperback)
1. Truthfulness and falsehood—Fiction. 2. Family secrets—Fiction. 3. Life change events—Fiction. 4. Highlands (Scotland)—Fiction. 5. Domestic fiction. I. Title.
PR
6107.
I
4665
W
45 2013
823.92—dc23
2013020210
e
ISBN
978-0-547-52661-4
v1.1213
To my mother June Gillies
with love
white lie
n
.—a trivial and well-intentioned untruth, designed to spare someone’s feelings
1
2008
My name is Michael Salter, and I am dead; dead, that much I know for sure. All the rest of it—all of that I can only speculate about. I’ve had a lot of time to wonder about it: what I’m doing here and what it means, though thinking takes me round in circles, like Pooh Bear hunting the heffalump in the snow and realising he’s been following his own footprints.
My mother Ottilie was here earlier, in the wood, talking to me about misapprehensions and about guilt. She comes at least once a week and always on Sundays, from her cottage out at the coast, and she comes alone. Lately she’s been here almost every day and I’ve begun to act like somebody in hospital, alert at visiting hour for signs. I was watching as she came along the path this afternoon, a procession of one, slow-moving and stately in black. She came first to my memorial stone.
“Michael.” She spoke as if I were close by. “Today’s the day. We think today will be the day.”
I can’t remember seeing my mother ever wearing black before, but it’s the 14th anniversary of my disappearance here and . . . the truth is this hasn’t been any ordinary anniversary. She was unusually restless, walking along the beach, up and down, pausing at the furthest corners of the shore and struggling at moments with the depth of the grit.
“It won’t be long now,” she said, looking out over the water which stretches almost to the horizon; a vast bowl of it, many fathoms deep. The domesticated green summits we see around us here are in reality only the tops of submerged mountains: that’s what my grandfather used to say to me, when I was a child. They say in the village that the loch has moods, that when the wind blows it isn’t only the waves that rise and surge; that when it’s a dark, dark brown it’s at its most dangerous; that when the surface becomes a mirror it will reflect your profoundest wants back at you. It’s been viscous as mercury today, resembling something poured and inert, as if a silver skin has cooled on it.
Are you a ghost if nobody sees you, or are you something else? Ghost or not, I seem to have taken up residence in the grounds of the house where I was born, in the small wood planted here beside the loch in 1916. Not that I remember the moment exactly of arriving. Like the journey down the birth canal, some recollections are spared us. Too many, in fact. Memory reaches back, pausing at birthdays, Christmas mornings, the big conversations, key moments when we look into the eyes of our mother and know her in a new way; all the things that make impact on our little souls: the first bicycle, the first nightmarish week at the high school, the first proper kiss, the first cigarette and throwing up afterwards. I’m trying to get back to the earliest thing. I remember playing in the gardens at about the age of four, running along the sides of high topiary hedges. But for weeks and months that I know I was alive, there’s nothing, worse than nothing; indistinct traces left behind of something that’s gone.
My mother sat herself down, sitting up straight-backed in her usual way, in a dress that reached almost to her ankle, a black scarf twisted into use as a hair-band, her fringe flattened over her eyebrows. She rubbed gently at her shins and said, “Arthritis, apparently. I’m beginning to be old.” Her thick and wavy hair, glorious once, a pinkish-gold colour, strawberry blonde, is filling with nylon-like grey. When she was young she wore it very long, flying behind her like a cape, but it’s shorter now, and worn up, fixed by what look like chopsticks. At 52 she’s beautiful still, or at least I think so, despite the creases around her eyes and the sad marionette lines around her mouth, but she’s aged visibly since this time last year, when a gathering to celebrate a birthday was interrupted by startling news, news of me that certain of them had kept to themselves. I’m going to tell you about that, about my grandmother Edith’s party and what happened afterwards. There have been sad consequences, introducing a new era. Not that catastrophe is anything new. The family has had more than an average share of disasters, of premature deaths, one generation after another, such that people refer quite routinely to the power of the Salter curse.
We’ve been going through a phase in which my mother is angry with me, though her visits take a circular shape, starting and ending with kindness. “You were such an idiot,” she said to me today. “How could a clever person be so stupid? Why, Michael,
why
did you put yourself in that position?”
Her left hand wiped long tears from her cheeks, the movement rapid, like someone hoping to keep their crying unnoticed. With her right hand she lifted and dropped handfuls of shingle, pausing to inspect each palmful as it fell, looking at crumbs of grey-green granite, white quartz and orange sandstone. She has a labourer’s hands, square with big flat nails on the ends of workmanlike fingers, residual paint lingering in the creases, her skin rough and red from cleaning and turpentine.
The sky was low and lilac-brown this afternoon, the sunlight streaming in fat columns from gaps in the cloud cover, like street lamps, pulsing its energy down. When Ottilie turned to face my way it was as if she looked right at me, though really she was looking back towards the house. Only the uppermost part of it is visible from here, through the trees, above and beyond the lime walk—a glimpse of turret, of crenellation, of the complex slate geometries of a swooping roofline: some French influence got mixed in with the Scots Baronial. It reminds me of an illustration from a book of fairy tales that I had once, a book that had been my mother’s.
Peattie doesn’t have that same Sleeping Beauty’s castle look of being enshrouded in vegetation, though the gardens are thick with weed, the rhododendrons feral, the trees untamed, and in every direction elderflower and thorn have woven their grid.
***
The history of the Salters is coming to an end, and if it’s hard to be definite about the attributing of malaise, there isn’t any doubt that the beginnings reach back to 1970 and the loss of another boy, Ottilie’s little brother, my child-uncle Sebastian. I’ve seen it, the death of Sebastian, although it happened before I was born. I’ve grown used to them now, these cinematic visitations, but I’ll admit that they were deeply disconcerting at first. They started one day out of the blue: I began to have (to see) memories that are not mine, that couldn’t be, because they pre-date me; they’re seen from the vantage point of someone who wasn’t there, as if the estate has its own record, soaked in deep and only just beginning to show itself. Perhaps it’s merely a kind of evaporation, a process without a point, though it’s hard to make a case for that: these are particular things and out of date order.
My aunt Ursula’s arrival in the drawing room on the day I disappeared: that’s an event I’ve seen more than once. Alan’s and Ursula’s account of my death, Alan’s original version. In Alan’s old passport he’d written under “occupation” handyman-gardener, and then he’d added
entrepreneur
. He doesn’t live at Peattie any more, but really Alan was only ever the handyman-gardener’s son, a man without official status, semi-permanently temporary.
***
The first sign of trouble was a noise. It was the wrong noise—wrong, at least, for someone who had spent so many years using the same doors. It could only be to do with panic, that Ursula seemed to have forgotten how it was that they worked, the entrance doors leading in from the terrace, pulling rather than pushing, yanking at them, at their heavy double oak, their panels carved with flowers and with thistles. They’re hung doors, and she sent them rocking and echoing in their housing, before remembering to push.
When Ursula went running into the drawing room that afternoon she had angry red marks at the top of each arm, marks I inflicted, already purpling into fingershaped bruises. So that helped with the defence, obviously, the private defence provided to the drawing-room court. They couldn’t have gone on all these years, as they have, protecting her with quite such conviction, had they not been so sure that she was provoked. She makes an unlikely murderer in any case, Ursula the gardener, the vegetarian, the knitter; Ursula who if she isn’t gardening or knitting is likely to spend the day in bed in marabou feathers, opera on the record player, engrossed in wholesome reading that’s selected and vetted on her behalf.
She went charging in at quite a lick, across the hall and through the picture gallery. It wasn’t only her swift light footsteps that registered, the squeaking of the plimsolls she wears, white plimsolls child-sized on bare feet, but also a high-pitched disjointed noise, an interrupted murmuring wail that kept time with the footfalls and exaggerated them. Hearing her coming, the family looked mildly alarmed around the eyes and in a certain stiffening of limbs, though these reactions were manifested in the usual guarded way. It was instinctive with them all, not making too much of a grazed knee or a poacher seen on the hill or any of the other things that might and do upset Ursula. If people didn’t take their well-practised calming approach, upsets could swiftly become disproportionate. Her older sisters, the twins, of which my mother is one, were at this time 38 to Ursula’s 29, and had spent pretty much all of their lives being careful about Ursula, being loyal, being sensitive to her
peculiarities
, objecting to anyone else’s use of the word peculiarities, attesting good-humouredly to her being a one-off. Careful and loyal and tired.