The White Lie Read Online Free Page A

bear to tell my mother that my body would have to rot a little, made buoyant by decompositional gas.
    “Carried along,” she said.
    “But in a loch this cold he might never resurface,” he told her.
    “What do you mean?”
    “In water this cold, it’s extremely cold: you understand that, don’t you? It’s ice cold down there in the deeps. The truth is that he won’t be found.”
    “What do you mean? No. No, Dad. No, Dad. What are you saying?”
    “I’m sorry. But you want to know. You want to know, don’t you? The unvarnished truth of it?”
    “No. I want to know something different. Take me back to the start of this and I would give anyone’s life. Yours, Dad. Even yours.”
    “I’m so very sorry.”
    “Nobody’s sorry enough.”
    Nothing further was said for a while. What Henry was thinking, I’d bet, is that this would be a good thing, a saving grace, my non-reappearance. Ghastly, tragic, terrible, too terrible to comprehend fully, a terrible day it had turned out to be, but at least I wouldn’t reappear. That would be the arrived-at family perspective, the grown-on family orthodoxy. They didn’t want me resurfacing, found bloated on the surface by a fisherman: the only thing that lay on the other side of that eventuality was a more concrete disaster, a living human disaster, one that was unnavigable. Henry was reassured that I was unlikely to be found, and was too ashamed to admit it. Ashamed the whole rest of his life.
    They spent another hour and ten minutes at the loch. Everyone knew it was hopeless and that there was little point, but nobody could bear to leave, to turn their backs on me, until Edith said that she must go and see Vita and that they should go back to the house, perhaps returning later. That perhaps was the mechanism for permission. Once they’d gone, they weren’t going to return—other than for the private visits, three, four times daily at first, and then less and less often as the weeks passed, their resolve leaking into duty, duty turning into resignation. They came often at first, scanning the water, something nobody talked about but everybody did, individually and without mentioning it, waiting for the possibility of my showing as an object limp and buffeted, something foul and changed. Once human, now a repellent human debris.
    What is it we learn as we grow older in the world? Nothing, it seems to me, besides what it is that love means. My mother loved me, but in a language I didn’t understand. Things were obvious to her that I couldn’t even guess at. My grandparents loved me in a way that was sincere and useless. Mog loved me in a way that left me anxious for her: her love was like another way of being lost. Everybody else loved me only after I’d gone.

2
     
    It’s time to begin to tell you about the events of 12 months ago. We’re going there now. The lilac-brown clouds and the sodium yellow light are gone. It’s tepid and overcast weather, but with a brighter sky promised, a classic Scottish summer day. This isn’t how it began but it will serve as a place to begin, with a conversation here in the wood between Ottilie and Joan, about the appropriateness of grandeur and its cost. This could have been an argument arising from one of many points of conflict that had dogged their lives together, but in this case was pegged specifically to Edith’s 70th birthday and the arrangements for the coming weekend.
    They had come here for privacy, far from Edith’s ears; the finer details of the celebration had been kept from her. Joan had elected herself head of the event committee, and had delegated widely. She had demanded Ottilie come to the wood to look at the list. Each of the sisters was leaning on a different tree, each with her arms folded. Negotiations weren’t going well.
    “Why is it that you ascribe value only to things that are expensive?” Ottilie asked Joan.
    The reply was obvious. “Why is it you’re so determined to be cheap?”
    “It’s not