The White Lie Read Online Free Page B

about you,” Ottilie told her sister.
    Joan batted straight back. “It isn’t about you, either.”
    Ottilie served a new ball. “What they want is simplicity. Simplicity and their old friends.”
    “They’ll love every minute of it,” Joan volleyed.
    “You don’t understand,” Ottilie said, her tone changing. “This is about grief. Grief that’s still fresh. Celebrations are in bad taste. It ought to be low key. It has to be low key.”
    “It’s you who doesn’t understand,” Joan said. “What we need, what they need more than anything, is to draw a line. A party is symbolic. Enough time has elapsed.”
    “That’s not for you to say.” Ottilie’s voice was shaking, and so were her hands.
    “We need to get on and look at the list,” Joan said without looking at her sister. They began perfunctorily to go through it, agreeing and disagreeing, each of them embarrassed by the way things had almost developed, the conversation they’d very nearly had.
    Joan said she’d taken note of objections and would consider, but now she must get on because there were a hundred things to see to. They walked towards the house together, side by side and as far apart as possible, continuing the debate. Their voices grew louder. Abruptly, Ottilie turned away from Joan—who in so very many ways is her unidentical twin—and came back, gesticulating and far from pleased.
    I know her even at great distances by her outline, by the way her arms swing through the step as her body moves forward, by the determined way she holds her head. She stopped to look at the verge, picking one seedhead and then another, storing her treasures away in her pockets. She’s constantly on the lookout for things to take back to the studio, is madly prolific; her canvasses and boards are six deep at the cottage, an overflow of things she’s not ready to sell. Many more are stored at Peattie, in dusty and unloved rooms.
    She stands in front of things, looking at them as if they’re already drawn, as if her eyes are scanning and drawing and the thing’s already on the etching plate. Etchings are her preference, at the moment, though her first success was a series of vast smudgy boardroom oils, cream on white, pictures that paid for a home of her own. The gallery owners come to her there, surprised, or (very occasionally) charmed by the state of the place, and girding their loins. She’s not going to do more work in the old style if she doesn’t feel like it. She’s not going to let work go that isn’t right or isn’t finished. Sometimes things sent to Peattie are retrieved and reworked, and sometimes they go back again afterwards: the process can take years.
    In repose and in walking alone, her face sets into something that could be misinterpreted as sternness. She can be intimidating, my mother. She does classroom visits and frightens children; she’s had a long-term association with the primary school in the village, and she was here with the graduating class the year they saw the great uncle. I’m not the ghost of Sanctuary Wood, you see. It isn’t me that people see here, or say they have seen, but Great Uncle David. He’s a famous ghost, mentioned in the guide books. Ottilie brought boards and a roll of lining paper to the school trip, unfolding a wooden ruler with brass hinges, marking and creasing the paper roll before tearing it efficiently into sections. She gave the pupils pieces of charcoal and asked them to draw trees. She can’t talk to children as if they’re children, never has been able to, and this has been a fertile source of family reproach. She wanted them to stop thinking they knew a tree and really look at it, she said. Some of the school children saw too much, more than they were bargaining for, though it was Ottilie’s opinion that the ghost-seers were deluded, were wanting to see something, had willed themselves to, had undergone a domesticated sort of group hysteria. She’s better with older children,