Free The White Lie by Andrea Gillies

Mog, too, had been the recipient of a pink sheet, some of its listed tasks marked with her initials. I don’t often find myself at the gates to Peattie, but I was there, beside one of the stone pillars carved with wildcats and eagles, when she arrived in a taxi from the station. The sun had dipped below the cloud cover a half-hour before twilight, as often it does here, sinking below its grey hat, and so the end to the day was glorious; Mog emerged from the cab into soft violet light, ultra-violet, the kind that illuminates tennis balls and teeth and plunges everything else into sepia. She walked right past me, a rucksack on her back, past ironwork gates pushed permanently open, their feet enmeshed in weed, and went immediately left, through a gap in the rhododendron hedge, out of sight from the gatehouse, following the inner side of the wall and trailing one hand at intervals along it, the other outstretched to make fleeting contact with specimen pines, the old holly, the monkey puzzle, the birches. The pines soaring, pungently antiseptic and their bark coarse. The holly stunted and corkscrew twisted. Birch bark silky, peeling in silvery ribbons. The monkey puzzle holding its pairs of spiked arms up like an Indian god. When she emerged into the formal garden she chose the path that leads to a now-defunct fountain, a table of mossy lawn, and beyond that, the folly.
    The folly is an octagonal room, encircled by eight Doric columns and crowned by a cupola that’s been weathered into a streaky jade green. Inside, there’s a saggy brown sofa, a mouse-chewed desk and plastic garden chairs stacked high, streaked by muddy rain; last autumn’s brittle leaves still hugging the walls. Vita, at the drawing-room window with binoculars, spotted Mog sitting on the top step of the veranda. Vita had asked for the binoculars for her birthday; it would be a way of enlarging her society, she’d said, even if only in meeting new birds.
    Vita’s voice enunciated every slow syllable. “I’m standing at the window, Edith, and I can see Mog, sitting outside the folly.”
    “I thought she was coming tomorrow.”
    “Ah, she’s going to the gatehouse now.”
    “So we’ll see her tomorrow.” Edith was reading a book, an American title, its typefaces and syntax satisfyingly unfamiliar—Pip orders them for her, off the internet—about talking to God and getting God to reply.
    “Tomorrow? I think that’s unlikely. When did any of Joan’s children last spend a night at the gatehouse?”
    Sure enough, Mog was with them a few minutes later. “It’s good that you’re here,” Vita told her. “This afternoon it was napkins and tonight it was candles. Ottilie thinks your mother is going to set fire to the house.”
    “Can we get you something to eat, Mog?” Edith’s trying constantly to feed people.
    Mog said she’d had something on the train.
    I think about that train journey often, seeing it again in my mind’s eye. The sweeping views across forest and upland; yellow light on orange hills and deep purple shade; birds rising startled slow motion from the woods, and sudden glimpses of hamlets, the country roads surfacing and submerging. We would go sometimes to Inverness together, Mog and I, on the rumbly local service. We’d drink takeaway coffee down by the river, and stand shamelessly long in bookshops reading. We’d sit on benches with tins of coke and compete to produce the best short description of the lives of strangers walking by us, people unaware they were being photographed in words and their souls stolen. These were good days, but best of all I loved the journey, my notebook and pen on the train table, travelling free of time, feeling it stretch and contract, watching possible lives flash past the window, revelling in the luxury of not having to be definite.
    Henry came into the room. Henry was still with us, at the time of the party. Really, the story of the gathering and what precipitated out of it is Henry’s and not