The White Lie Read Online Free

showing white socks in the gap between hem and shoe, and loudly patterned zipped sweaters that were stiff with acrylic. When he left here last year in disgrace, by then mostly bald, he’d grown out his monkish tonsure of hair so that it could be brushed across from one ear. At the time I was born things were different. At that time he was handsome in his sturdy soldier-boy way, unfashionable but well presented, a lover of well-pressed slacks and short-sleeved shirts finished with a knife crease down the upper arm, strong-chinned and even-featured, if rather hard-looking, his face usually closed on its outward side, with who knows what doors and windows on the inward-facing wall, but in middle age he’d become desperately unkempt.
    “Well, what do you expect?” Henry would say, when the subject arose. “Two men living in that small house together.”
    ***
    Henry went along the shoreline, past Mog, who was walking briskly up and down, her hands held in front of her, massaging one with the other in turn. He went along to see Ursula, who was sitting at the edge of the wood, at the base of a tree, knees clasped tightly, but she wouldn’t speak, wouldn’t look at him. He knew these silences and knew that they end only when Ursula is ready, so he abandoned the attempt and returned to Ottilie on the jetty. They stood watching as the rescue effort became openly disheartened.
    “No, no chance,” I heard Henry say.
    “But he’d float, wouldn’t he?” Ottilie asked him. “He’d float if he were drowned, wouldn’t he? He wouldn’t sink, would he? Or he wouldn’t sink far, would he?”
    Henry believed in honesty, always said so. It’s what he was known for, his straight talking, that is if you could get him to talk at all. Ordinarily he was a man who didn’t say much unless there was a practical need, and it had been like that since Sebastian died. Edith has always maintained that Henry was optimistic once, a happy, uncomplicated soul who found contentment in ordinary daily busyness and recuperated in good spirits afterwards, glad to spend time with his family. When I was born Sebastian had been dead five years, which was longer than he’d lived, and it wasn’t any longer easy to engage Henry, but if you could engage him, he was disarmingly straight. Disasters did this to people, he said. He never pretended to a child that there’s a Santa or a Tooth Fairy or (out of Edith’s earshot, at least) that there was anything special about the Baby Jesus beyond being a man with a good heart, about whom many myths sprang up in his lifetime and then even more so afterwards, as is the way with celebrity. He wouldn’t lie to Ottilie. She knew that. That’s why she was asking.
    “He might be . . . suspended at a certain depth,” he said to her, apparently unemotively, looking out at the two men, who were diving and surfacing and yelling at each other to move along a bit. Alan said that judging by the view of the wood they were 50 feet out, maybe, but it was so hard to say; it was almost impossible to say.
    “It isn’t just about the distance from the beach,” Euan told him. “The location needs plotting in three dimensions.”
    “Whatever you say, professor,” Alan sniped.
    Ignoring this, Euan said Ursula should be with the women in the boat, shouting this ineffectually towards the shore. Then he was gone again, getting into his dive by surging firstly up, his breath held, his ribs obvious and wet, his boxers soaked against his hips, before plunging down, his long pale legs beating at the water as he tried to get more vertical and deeper.
    “It depends on how long,” Henry was saying.
    “But people are found floating in rivers, in the sea,” Ottilie countered.
    “They have air trapped in their clothes. Or are carried along by the current, the tide. Or if not, if they sink, they tend to . . . they tend to bob up again, at a certain point, at the point when . . .” He stopped mid-sentence. Not even Henry could