Free The White Lie by Andrea Gillies Page B

smoke.
    “Sometimes I think I can hear you talking to me, Michael,” she said in a hoarse whisper. As if she didn’t want David to hear.
    It’s probably my fault that Mog smokes. There were always cigarette papers and a tin of Old Holborn, pleasingly archaic, when I talked her through her maths work in the linen room at weekends. She’d roll her own, the thinnest possible, with barely five strands of tobacco, attempting smoke-aided slang expressions, a smoke-provoked shift in personality, one outside the scope of her mother’s approval.
    “When he was 19 we were close friends, as close as anyone, or so I thought,” she used to say to people curious to know whether anything was ever heard again of the cousin who vanished. She’s grieved over me in all the years since, I know that. I know how it’s got in the way, this grief, of other things she should have done and also felt, and if I could I would help her disengage from it. She’d said to me sometimes, on sporadic visits in the months preceding, that she hadn’t come to Peattie much, despite longing to, despite almost going to the station and almost catching a train every Friday after work, because she thought that weekends spent here weren’t helping her settle, that settling was the hardest thing she could imagine doing. But now she’d given up on that attempted life.
    “So, the plan is to stay on, live here for a year, help Edith and Henry manage things, work in the village. A year off and then we’ll see.” She paused. “There’s something else you need to know. Johnnie and I have parted. That’s the other news. Don’t say I told you so. Though I can tell that you’re thinking it.” I was. “Edinburgh’s too small to live there being nervous always of seeing someone you dread seeing.” So he was the reason she was back. “I read somewhere that it’s normal to get over-attached to the first man you sleep with.”
    I’ve heard Mog described as plain, though plain is unfair. She has lovely eyes, long lashes, and her sweetness is obvious in her face, but she dresses like one of the great aunts, in twinsets, in tweed skirts tight over her rounded stomach, in dowdy warm stockings, in sensible and unlovely shoes. Lately she’d taken to wearing jeans and sturdy laced boots; they looked wrong, look forced, as if imposed on someone from the wrong generation for denim.
    She’d written in her notebook in the train. She has a daily journal habit, like I used to, rewriting the day into something that makes narrative sense and feeds back meaning into it. She’s said to me that her notebook’s the only way of saying what she’s thinking, that there’s nobody else who wants to hear it.
    If I’m to be permanent, and failure follows me there, failing might make me hate Peattie and I couldn’t bear that .
    There seemed to be a better than average chance of this. The mind clenches, braced against pessimism, but facts had to be faced and this was one of them. She’d learned things about herself lately. Edinburgh had become tainted with a thin film of defeatism. By the end she could see it everywhere: in the flat, in her job, coating the trees in the square, accompanying her on the route round the shops at lunchtime, visiting and revisiting the duffel coats at Marks & Spencer, her mood marked by a despairing sort of compulsive disinterest.
    “There’s so much I have to tell you,” she said, “but talking to thin air feels more idiotic than usual.” And then she was gone, walking and then running back up the path to the house.
    ***
    It’s Joan’s fault that the Salter-Catto children have names that proved ideal for school bullying. She it was who decided that white-skinned, dark-haired James should be Jet, that Peter, the fair-haired smaller twin, should be Pip, and that Mary, who at three referred to herself as Mary Salty-Cat, should be Mog. Only Elizabeth retitled herself, finding the pronunciation impossible. Nobody would ever think to tease the