Free The White Lie by Andrea Gillies Page A

mine.
    “Good to see you,” he said in Mog’s direction, and then, not looking at Edith—in general he avoided looking at his wife—“I take it the rooms are ready.”
    “Of course.” Edith, her voice patient and gentle as always, folded her hands in her lap. “They’re always ready, Henry.”
    “So everything is organised for the weekend visitors?” he asked the window.
    “Of course. Have you had the talk with Ursula?” Edith picked dog hair from her trouser legs.
    “You don’t need to ask. I said that I would and I have.”
    Edith opened her mouth and closed it again.
    “It isn’t Ursula who’s the problem,” Henry said. “I think you’ll find. I’m afraid it’s Ottilie who needs the confidential chat.”
    “I’ve spoken to her: I spoke to her about it at the beginning.”
    “Very good.” Henry left the room.
    Edith looked to Mog, her expression sorrowful. “Henry seems to think that it’s my fault, somehow. We were standing together, both standing in the kitchen, equally ignorant of what was coming, when Joan sprang her surprise. And he agreed to it. We agreed in just the same way, for the same reasons; I’d swear to that. So quite how I’m implicated, I’m not sure. Perhaps secretly he’s convinced that I was in on it at the beginning with your mother, conniving with her to bring jollity into the house.”
    Mog clasped her arm momentarily around Edith’s shoulder and touched their heads gently together. Really, that was the only response possible.
    Vita got her cigarettes out and Edith began to protest.
    “I’m so old and decrepit,” Vita said. “And I’m tired today. Don’t make me leave the room.”
    “You shouldn’t, Mother. It’s so bad for you.”
    “Edith, I’m 97 years old.”
    “96.”
    “I’m almost 97 years old, and past caring.”
    It was widely suspected that Vita smoked only to get some respite from Mrs Hammill, who had declared herself allergic to the fumes, citing weakness of chest. Stout, manicured and imperious, a sailing ship under full sail, her copious blue-grey hair worn in a smooth dome above her head, Mrs Hammill had taken root at Peattie before I was born. Already widowed herself, she was invited to help Vita through the aftermath of bereavement, and never went home, as indeed didn’t Vita. A bedroom had been made out of the old music room, as Vita could no longer manage the stairs, and she shuffled along the corridor to the study each morning to have a cigarette and to look at the newspaper with Henry, the two of them dividing the pages up and then swapping. The daily paper was locked up in a drawer when Henry wasn’t there.
     
    Mog came down to the wood in the near-dark. It has a different atmosphere here at dusk. The loch looks like a hard grey jewel in green folds of moth-eaten velvet. First she went to the shore, bending and dipping one hand into the shallows, the water cold and silky, before raising and kissing her index finger: her eccentric way of saying hello to me. She came next to the tomb, running her other hand over the great uncle’s cap in a practised swift motion, something the children of the family have always done, a kind of superstition. The loch kiss, the cap: these are two of her three rituals. The third is to come to my stone, to sit with her back irreligiously against the angel, as if blocking the angel from the conversation. Like my mother, she acts as if the cameo is my grave-marker and as if I were beneath it, listening.
    “Hello, Michael,” she said, in her usual sad way, speaking to me as if commiserating, as if I was the one who’d had bad news, though I suppose that was accurate enough. The wood is plagued by flies in summer, tiny winged black flies that bite, and they were persistent around her eyes. She reached down into a trouser pocket, adjusting her stance, pulled out a soft crushed pouch of cigarettes and lit one up. The evening college of midges was fumigated by a semicircular exhalation of