While Mog was talking to Ursula, Joan was sitting on her bed, the diary opened beside her, its pages full of ticks and question marks. She’d been engaged in refurbishing the house, again, and her bedroom had been the most recently decorated, done since Euan moved into the guest room. There was cream and grey painted furniture in here now, and the walls had been painted a pale coral pink, a colour she matched from silk underwear found in a trunk. The wall behind the bed was lined with old photographs, black-and-white images that she had hung in broad cream mounts and thin black frames. She’d begun doing similar groups on Peattie walls, selecting pictures from the shoeboxes stacked in the attics and hanging them in groups. When she had come across the box of pictures of me she had closed it again immediately, without burrowing beneath the top photograph, an instinctive rapid reclosing of the box as if it were disease-bearing. She’d gone off and found fresh sticky tape.
Now Joan went and sat at the dressing table, looking into her Venetian mirror, a vast and elaborate thing about which she and Euan had exercised their last substantial row: one that dealt simultaneously with his purchase of a beanbag for the sitting room, a particularly large one, its colours particularly adamantly chemical. She had claimed he had no taste. He had countered that it was no doubt the case, that all evidence supported the idea, but that notwithstanding, the seating she’d installed was all unbearably uncomfortable.
Euan put his head around the door and reminded her that they were due at the pub. When he was at home he spent most evenings with his public bar friends and Joan wasn’t ordinarily invited, but another wife was coming tonight and Euan had offered Joan as a companion.
“So, are you coming or not?”
Joan didn’t answer and Euan withdrew.
He wasn’t often here during the week, but was showing willing in honour of Saturday’s event. The truth was that he’d been summoned and had complied. He was commuting daily to work, a situation he’d already let it be known that he regretted. When weekends turned out this way, in childishness as he put it, he’d likely as not go back to his flat in town early. A Saturday departure was a bad sign, though pressure of work, essay marking piling up unmarked, was the usual attribution. They had bought the flat in town when the children were small and it was difficult, Euan said, to find the peace and stillness to hear himself think. He can teach literature classes with one eye shut, he says. Poetry’s the real job, he says (he’s had two collections published), and it just wasn’t possible under those circumstances, with the pram in the hall. Joan asked what pram in the hall, and was chided for not picking up the reference.
“The enemy of promise,” he’d said. And then again, with greater emphasis: “The enemy, of promise.”
“Nice,” she’d said.
“Why did I marry someone who doesn’t read?” he’d asked the wall. “I should have married somebody who reads.”
“I agree heartily,” Joan told him. “I don’t heartily agree, though, as that splits the infinitive. There you go. I know that, and am thus a better person.”
When Euan had gone Joan went into the kitchen, to the cupboard in the corner to which she’d made access purposely difficult with a full-size bin. She had to take the bin out to get the door open, and turn the carousel shelving within, and ignore the warnings she’d taped there. She made and drank a vodka tonic, standing with one hand braced on the worktop, then made another and took it with her into the den, past the sewing machine and the ironing board, past the cork noticeboard, which was covered still in bright-headed pins with shreds of old school schedules attached to them. She brushed past an unused exercise bike and a dismantled piano keyboard, and reached into a flowerpot that acted as a bookend. Euan was supposed to have given up years ago but he smoked when she’d gone to bed, out of the sitting room’s open window. She’d seen the ash there in the mornings and smelled it in the window creases.
What I’ve always liked best is the idea of smoking, just the idea: the view of myself that others may have to adjust to, adjusting my own internal view of myself in turn. The experience of smoking could only ever be inferior to the idea. The idea is saturated with associations—associations that lend us some moments in an old world. The idea gets past the ludicrous fact of setting fire to paper tubes of dried plants and inhaling the smoke. And though it’s true that the Salter smoking and drinking to excess began in earnest about 14 years ago, it’s also true that our history as a family is full of cigs and booze. Cigs and booze have been there at every fork in the road. One of Joan’s recent framings, a picture she was staring at now, was a photograph taken at her and Ottilie’s 21st birthday. It was an unusual coming-of-age party. Joan had been married three years and had year-old twin boys. Ottilie had a boy aged two and no husband. It wasn’t the usual key-of-the-door event, by any means.
In the photograph Joan is sitting in the corner of the party marquee, on the floor with her legs crossed, toes pointing from a slinky blue dress, hair up in a bun, and she is talking to a handsome dark-haired boy (name forgotten), in full flow, and there’s that same cigarette gesture, the one she’s looking for now, hand held to the side during debate, her palm facing up. In that upward palm, the confident angle of that shoulder, is a whole atlas of the Joan that didn’t quite come to pass.
***
When she got back from the loch, Mog went into the new kitchen. It’s habit, calling it the new kitchen. It’s no longer new; in fact, it wasn’t new even when it was new. It’s a clunky, ugly cream-and-brown affair, reclaimed from the Grants across the valley 20 years ago, when they were renovating. It was installed on the first floor in what was Henry’s mother’s private sitting room, when stairs were becoming too difficult for Vita and when the size, scale and gloom of the Victorian original downstairs, formidably authentic, was acknowledged, finally, as oppressive. Mog found Ottilie there, sitting at the table and drawing a striped yellow jug with white roses in it, having produced a box of oil pastels from her pocket. The jug in the sketch had colours it didn’t really have, and light and shapes and shadows that were new. In this jug, she’d seen another.
They talked about tensions at the gatehouse. Mog, needing something to do, whisked chocolate powder into a pan of hot milk at the stove.
“Sorry to go on like this,” she said, whisking harder.
“It’s fine,” Ottilie assured her. “Don’t apologise, for heaven’s sake.”
“It’s hard for us. You know. Because it’s obvious they shouldn’t be together. And I think they only stay together for our sakes.” She paused. “And we wish that they wouldn’t. I’d rather they didn’t. But that’s an impossible thing to say to them.”
Ottilie said nothing, taking the offered mug of chocolate and sipping at it.
“They must have been happy once,” Mog said to her. They looked at each other over the top of the mugs. “It’s just that I don’t remember it.”
Joan got the wedding she wanted, at least in the material details. She got a restaurant to supply the canapés and Chinese duck, the near-translucent brandy snaps and the plump Perthshire raspberries with gooey meringues, delivered in ribbon-tied boxes. She cancelled Euan’s surprise within ten minutes of its being revealed, the hire of a flower-bedecked horse and trap to take them away from the church, replacing it with a Daimler and uniformed driver.
“Discord even then.”
“Your mother had a real battle with Euan’s mother. Poor Joyce. Trying to chip in and being rebuffed. A lot of vetoing. No small cute nieces with silver horseshoes. No rice. It was all very tense for a while.”
“A control freak even then.”
“Joan did the flowers, too, you know. Found the grower, went there, gave her orders. They were terrified. Kept ringing us up, worried that the buds wouldn’t be small enough.”
“You helped with the church.”
“Yes. Me and Ursula. Press-ganged.”
Ottilie’s face acquired that look that it gets when she finds herself unexpectedly having mentioned Ursula’s name: her mind unsure where to go next, and her face unsure how to follow.
At Mog’s suggestion they went out onto the terrace. They sat on the stone balustrade, their legs hanging over a 15-foot drop, looking over the drive and into the night garden. Moths flitted about and a nightjar screamed.
“She was only nine, you know,” Ottilie said. “Of course you know. You know that was when she started speaking again, at your mother’s wedding.”
This was radical, as departures from the norm go. Ottilie never mentioned Seb’s death, had never before referred to the events of the evening of the wedding. Some sea change appeared to be in progress. It occurred to me suddenly, out of the blue, that Ottilie was squaring herself up to confession. Mog didn’t say, though she was dying to, “Yes, and we all know why she started speaking that night, don’t we: she had news to tell us all.” She didn’t say, though she was dying to, “Tell me, tell me now, about that night and about Alan: haven’t there been enough years of secrecy?” She didn’t, but her face said it all for her. Ottilie glanced over, recognising this, and if she was going to speak out, made a decision now to back down, her face signalling this and then her voice. “Poor Seb,” she said instead.
“Poor Seb indeed,” Mog agreed, faintly ridiculously.
He was never called Seb while alive. He’s usually called Seb now he’s dead. In a way it keeps the two separate. Perhaps abbreviation has helped denature the horror of it. It must be exhausting having to feel so much and so often. Shorthand must help. The word Sebastian is invested so completely with grief.
“You should have seen Ursula,” Ottilie continued. “She was brilliant with the flowers. We’d turn round from fussing at the altar and see her, her nimble white fingers busy and totally absorbed, lacing cream roses into the pew ends, trailing ivy down with cream ribbons. It looked gorgeous. Joan was amazed. Hugged Ursula, even made her smile.”
“Lovely.” Poor Mog was now deep in confusion about the way this conversation was going.
“You know that your mother insisted on a preview of what everybody was to wear?” Ottilie said. “Joyce’s floral two-piece was declared impossible. Joan took her shopping and got her into a bronze-coloured coat dress and matching feather-trimmed hat.”
“You seem well,” Mog said. “You look really well.”
“I’m going to Madrid with the new work at the end of the summer,” Ottilie told her. “There’s excitement about the exhibition and I’m feeling quite . . . purposeful. Still can’t sleep, though.” She made a self-deprecating face. “And the party should be fun. Strangely enough, I find myself looking forward to it.” She let down and put up her hair. “I hear you’re joining me on the lighting sub-committee. Shall we meet tomorrow after breakfast, at nine thirty? Here for coffee and the list, then do the tour?”
***
The next morning was cold and damp, as it had rained all night. Mog and Ottilie met and allocated the buying and the putting-up of lights, as Joan demanded. Joan had gone to Edinburgh shopping and would be away all day, and so, daringly, in her absence, they made adjustments and additions to the list. When they’d finished, Mog retreated to the warmth of the linen room. Finally, belatedly, she was working her way through the piles of books I’d left in my room at Peattie, starting with the stuff I’d said was mandatory. I’d ranged them for her in a row along the length of the window sill, and they sat there still. When Alastair and Rebecca arrived, their airport hire car crunching slowly across the gravel, Mog was lying on the usual broad shelf, one padded out with old blankets, reading David Copperfield, an ancient edition bound in a tea-stained blue cloth. It’s warm in the linen room when the heating is on, pumping ineffectually away; it has one of the few radiators that work properly and houses the boiler in a corner cupboard.
Mog wasn’t really reading properly, and recognising this, kept turning back to the beginning of the chapter, trying and failing to make the sentences adhere. She’d confided in Ottilie that she was nervous about Rebecca’s arrival, having to entertain Rebecca. She was hoping and praying that her second cousin wouldn’t turn out to be one of those guests that’s like a hungry baby bird on a branch, constantly wanting attention and unable to fend for itself. But here they were: the moment had come. Rebecca and Alastair had arrived and there wasn’t any escaping this. She closed the book and went along the corridor, dawdling. Down the stairs one at a time, hearing Edith calling Henry’s name. Into the hall, and out onto the terrace, where wide stone steps flare elegantly onto the drive.
Edith was standing by the car talking to the visitors, when Mog went down to be introduced. Henry arrived from the yard and he and Alastair greeted each other with a handshake, one that Alastair prolonged, placing his free hand on Henry’s upper arm. Alastair was paunchy, had a veiny nose, was kind-faced, his white hair swept back. He had a close cropped pepper-and-salt beard that might have been unshaven stubble. The ice that had formed over more than 40 years of not talking had broken now between Henry and his nephew Alastair, in exclaiming how very alike Rebecca and Mog looked, except for their colouring. Rebecca’s nut-brown hair and creamy skin were gifted by Alastair’s mother.
***
They’d only been in the new kitchen a few minutes when Ursula came in. Edith had tried to steer the group towards the drawing room, but Alastair expressed a liking for sitting around a kitchen table, so here they were staying. Vita and Mrs Hammill had come in to join them, Vita warmly welcoming and Mrs H stand-offish. Ottilie was out at the cottage, in her studio, no doubt, with Mozart and Bach, and wouldn’t return until tonight. Ursula, knowing this, was in the house to meet the visitors.
She came into the kitchen quietly, tiptoeing, wanting to surprise: creeping up on them as they were standing at the window having the view explained. It had a long history, this idea of fun, and it was usual in the family to indulge her, to pretend not to have noticed, to pretend to be caught out. Ursula’s smile is slightly crooked and one side of her face is mildly less mobile than the other. She had a minor stroke a few years ago and the doctors wanted to probe further, but Ursula wouldn’t allow it and Edith wouldn’t intervene. Edith has always been adamant about not wanting anything purely diagnostic said or done. The shock of Sebastian’s death, when he was four and she was five, a death she and her 14-year-old sisters were helpless witnesses to: that’s considered sufficient to explain Ursula’s oddness. The idea that it might be a condition, a matter merely of health, and might always have been, is one that Edith repelled, and people respected her wishes.
Alastair and Rebecca didn’t know much about Ursula, when they arrived. They didn’t know much about any of us, which is what made conversation so stilted. After so long a time there were big themes in the offing, but they seemed too big to embark on over marmite toast. The questions suggesting themselves were too heavy with significance. They seemed all to lead back to the rift, one that had prevented any but the stiffest and briefest of annual exchanges, hurried summings-up of the year added at the bottom of Christmas cards, summaries that in Alastair’s case were scrawled in barely legible handwriting (illegibility, Edith had sometimes thought, that was making a point).
It was Edith who sent the cards at Christmas, the same card every year, showing the house sparkling in frost, thick snow over the gardens, trees starkly and two-dimensionally white. The cards didn’t give much away, not until 1970, at least. There was news in the December of 1970 that Sebastian had died. I’ve seen Alastair at the moment of opening that card: the announcement falling out and onto the floor, its heavy linen weave denoting importance, its ominous black embossed edge. He was eating a mince pie at the time of its arrival, opening the mail while listening to carols, chiding the cat for patting at the tree decorations. He was distracted from all those things, came to a halt, mince pie in hand, reading and rereading the news that a four-year-old boy, his cousin Sebastian, had drowned in the loch in the summer. There was news but no scene setting, no real explanation. His first reaction was shouted—“No! No! For pity’s sake, no!”—and his second reaction another sort of sorrow, one that took on the truth that his uncle had waited four months and left it to Edith to tell him about the disaster. Alastair had heard of my “running away” in just the same manner, and felt, I’m sure, that it’d be tactless to bring it up, that it shouldn’t be mentioned unless the family mentioned it first. Over the years my status had morphed from runaway to lost; in every subsequent Christmas card, Edith had written “Michael’s still missing” at the bottom of her message. Missing presumed dead, Alastair thought, after so long a period of silence; missing presumed heartless, Rebecca’s side of the argument went. They’d talked about little else on the way up here, causing airline rows of a two-back and two-front radius to fall silent and listen, engrossed.
Alastair and Rebecca didn’t know that Ursula is “eccentric”, nor any of the other possible synonyms attaching to that, though they might have been guessing as much, right now, as Ursula stepped forward. She had her child’s white hand outstretched, and was moving it smoothly up and down, saying, “Shake, please; be polite.” She was wearing a pink cocktail dress that was layers of frills from the waist down, with a tiara, a yellow cardigan that had once been Henry’s, and green wellingtons.
“That’s quite an outfit. Amateur dramatics?” Alastair asked her.
“And you look very boring,” Ursula told him, in her clipped, flat-toned way. She speaks very fast in general, but with longish pauses between pronouncements. Alastair, robustly conversational in his practised, businesslike manner, proceeded over tea and packet cake to quiz Ursula about her life, whether she married, where she lived now, what she did for a living, and was bemused by the style and content of her replies. It was Ursula who brought up the rift.
“Why haven’t I met you before? We’re cousins. We should know each other.”
Alastair glanced at Henry. “Your father and I had a falling out. A long time ago, before you were born.”
“But you didn’t fall out with me.”
“No, you’re quite right. But we live hundreds of miles apart and I’m terrible at letter writing. And I’m a lot older than you. And you’re a girl. That’s also a factor obviously. I don’t often talk to girls. Ask my daughter here.”
All of this completely deadpan.
Ursula smiled crookedly. “Why did you drive off in the middle of the night?”
“Ursula, no,” Henry said sharply.
“It’s fine, Henry,” Alastair said. “Ursula’s right, we need to talk about it. We can’t go on acting like it didn’t happen. I owe you an apology.”
“Not at all,” Henry said. “Or rather, I owe you one equally.”
Alastair turned to Ursula. “My brother Robert, he’s a sensitive soul. A bit like you, I imagine.”
“Oh dear: sensitive is nearly always a euphemism.”
“Euphemism’s a good word.”
Ursula’s mouth turned scornful. “I read a lot. I have a good vocabulary. I’m not backward.”
“Of course not. And nor is Robert. He’s the brightest man I’ve ever met. But he’s sensitive too. He got very upset, Robert, about our mother being buried here with her sister, and not at home with us. He decided he couldn’t come up for the funeral. I didn’t explain him to your father very well. It turned into an argument and it got out of hand. We were all upset. The truth is that though I was defending him so hotly, I was angry with my brother too.”
“I’m named after her, after your mother.”
“Yes. That was a lovely gesture.”
“Not really: I was always going to be Ursula. There was already a Joan and an Ottilie.”
Alastair smiled. “Quite right. Did you know that we called my mother Ursa rather than Ursula, and that Joan was always called Jo, and Ottilie always Tilly?”
“Tilly lived here, after her sisters died. I knew her. Didn’t you know that about her?”
“Of course, of course she did.”
“She was everybody’s favourite. I loved her. I’m sure I would have loved Ursa and Jo too, if I’d known them.”
“That’s kind of you to say.”
“I can be kind sometimes. Do you believe in the curse?”
“Ursula, no,” Henry said again.
“I don’t know what I think about the curse,” Alastair said. “Life’s full of mystery, isn’t it? It might be a mistake to be dismissive of mystery.” He turned to Henry. “I’ve been sitting all day and I’d love a walk in the gardens, if you’ve time to show me around.”
Henry said he’d be delighted. They went off to do the tour, and Mog brought Rebecca to the loch.
They sat on the bench together at the edge of the wood. The bench has feet that are sunk deeply in shingle, and sits with its back to the great uncle. One of the willows planted around the great uncle’s grave had colonised it a little, had extended one of its many sad long branches, supple and slender, with its many feathery leaves, over this bench, so Mog had to take it in hand and bend it behind the seat before they could use it. It had more determination and exerted more force than she was expecting.
“It isn’t particularly warm for mid-June, I grant you,” she said to Rebecca, seeing her wrap her thin jacket tighter around herself.
“I was warned. I have a sweater with me. Should have thought.”
“We must be acclimatised. We used to go swimming in there on colder days than this and play on the beach soaked through afterwards. Me and Michael. But that was a long time ago.”
“I’d like to know more about Michael, the mysterious Michael,” Rebecca said.
Mog took her to the great uncle’s tomb and answered the usual questions. Even the great uncle’s effigy looked bored.
“And what’s this, more commemorations for David?” Rebecca was standing beside the angel.
“For Michael,” Mog told her. “For his being missing. Ottilie thought it would help.”
“Did he look like Ottilie? I haven’t seen a photograph.”
“He was a real mixture. Very tall like Grandpa Andrew. That was Vita’s husband’s name. Olive-skinned like Vita.”
“And like you.”
“Ottilie’s hands and mouth, and her way of walking. Tall, dark, clever, the works. Big nose. Lovely eyes, very brown. Long lashes. Deep voice. Funny when not being neurotic.” I may have blushed, though neurotic smarted a bit.
“You’ll have to show me a photograph.”
“I don’t have any. I didn’t have a camera until after he’d gone. You’d have to ask Ottilie. She took hundreds. You won’t see any at Peattie, though. You won’t see pictures of Michael here.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because Henry had them taken down and put away.”
“Angry with him.”
“Grieving.”
“So what was the trouble, what was it that made him go off?”
“You know how they say everybody has a story,” Mog said to her. “Sometimes a trivial thing. Mine is not finding what Dad calls my vocation, so far, anyway, or even a job I can bear to do. Well, anyway. That’s very dull news. Michael’s story was his being fatherless. He was obsessed. Even from ten years old.”
“How do you mean, obsessed?”
“With not knowing who he was.”
“Who he was?”
“Michael. Didn’t know who his father was. Ottilie wouldn’t tell him.”
“Oh god. That’s horrible.”
“You don’t know about Ottilie getting pregnant, the whole scandal, then.”
“No. I think I might have been protected from something so shocking.”
“Well. Ottilie, my mother’s twin, goes to a house party the weekend after my parents are married, while they’re off in Italy on honeymoon, and sleeps with some boy. Some random boy she met there. She’s 18 and one week old at the time. Exactly 18 and a week. I know that because my parents got married on my mother’s 18th birthday.”
“Also Ottilie’s birthday, surely.”
“Also Ottilie’s birthday. But because my mother declared she wanted to marry on her 18th, that only her 18th would do, the party that Gran was planning had to be cancelled, and the family across the valley, the Grants, offered to host it there instead, feeling sorry for poor Ottilie, done out of her 18th birthday.”
“I’m getting the feeling that Joan and Ottilie didn’t get on.”
“Rivalry. Bitter rivalry. Always.”
“That was kind of mean of your mother, hogging the limelight.”
“You’re right. Mean is the right word. Well, anyway. Ottilie goes off to this party, sleeps with some boy, won’t tell anybody who it was.”
“But surely. Process of elimination.”
“Fourteen boys. But don’t think Henry didn’t try. He went all over the county eliminating.”
“Ouch.”
“They didn’t know she was pregnant until ages later. Four months gone, when she started to show. Was never sick or anything. Too scared to speak up.”
“Blimey. And she never married?”
“No. No partners, boyfriends that we know of. Though Pip has a theory that she has lovers abroad, that that’s what all the trips overseas are really about.”
“Poor Ottilie.”
“Michael was always fighting with his mother. Like they say, it’s never about what it’s about. It was always really about his father, not knowing. He was angry a lot of the time. Everybody was irritated. But now I think, well, why didn’t you just tell him, Ottilie? If you’d just told him the name of the boy, the man. He could have tracked him down, confronted him, upset his wife, freaked out his halfsiblings. Lots of upset, maybe, but then over. Over. The boil lanced. She wouldn’t talk, though. He couldn’t get her to talk about it.”
Even in my very earliest memories it’s clear that my mother didn’t want to talk much about anything. Not unless it was about the work. She didn’t mean just her own work, by that, but any kind of creativity. She was absolutely clear that a life without it—the work—was a waste. That was a cultural divide with other people; a cliff, a wall, quite often a hole. She had very few friends, few I knew about, anyway. But this was the point, I suppose, and it’s something I’ve had time to think about, that the real romance of my mother’s life is with herself, her experience of being alive, her journey: this ongoing dialogue she has with her own consciousness. It made the rest of us pretty much redundant. She approved of me, as a teenager, in so far as I was a voracious reader, always reading, would walk down the street with a book open, walking into things. And writing. I was always writing something. So I passed muster, as far as it went. We had something to talk about, but it wasn’t a frequent conversation and of course it wasn’t what I wanted to talk about.
Not that I was neglected; people use that word and they’ve got it totally arse about face, but there’s no small talk with my mother, and even those who love her most would agree that she’s benignly self-absorbed. Shining a positive light on her behaviour would involve words like drive, focus, concentration. She has admirable levels of these. Her first thought when she wakes is how quickly she can get coffee and get into her studio. Sometimes eating is neglected. Foraging was the norm when I was young, and so I learned from an early age to help myself to something to eat. Often it was as if my mother forgot I was there, that I lived there. I’d interrupt her and she’d be surprised to see me, genuinely so, as if my being there was unexpected.
Our confrontations were tediously repetitive, seemed often to repeat almost word for word.
“You know I don’t talk about that, Michael.”
“But why not?”
“I don’t talk about it. It’s private. It’s a long time ago. It’s irrelevant.”
“Not to me.”
“Yes. To you. It was a one-night stand. I’ve told you and told you. He didn’t love you, Michael. He wasn’t interested.”
“But he’s my father. Imagine not knowing Henry. Imagine Edith not believing you had a right to know who Henry was.”
“A right! A right?”
“Yes. A right.”
“I’ve told you. A hundred times. You don’t have anything of his. He’s made no impact, negligible impact on you. You’re a Salter. You’re a Maclean. You’re Grandpa Andrew, you’re me, you’re Henry, you’re Vita. He doesn’t figure. He’s irrelevant to both of us.”
“Have I met him?”
“Michael!”
“Is he dead?”
“He might as well be.”
When I was 17, 18, it was Mog I talked to about it. Later, at 19, there developed for a time an odd intimacy with Ursula, but at 17 and 18 Mog was the confidante. That was the period of barely ever speaking about it with my mother; two years that she thought were years of improvement, ceasefire, peace. She’d talk to me more about the work, thinking it was safe to talk because things wouldn’t escalate. She thought I was listening and that we were getting on better. Edith would say to me as much: “I’m glad you and Ottilie are getting on better.” So it was an unpleasant surprise to all when the question began to itch again. It itched and it wouldn’t stop. The spring and summer weeks before I disappeared: that was the time of my most concerted and organised digging. I would do anything, embarrass anyone, create a scene anywhere. I had no sense of propriety, as Henry reminded me, though he slipped up one evening, telling me angrily that bad genes on my father’s side were no doubt to blame for my being so lazy and feckless (both of which I admit to readily).
Mog and Rebecca were walking back to the house. “It wasn’t just at home, either,” Mog said. “He was constantly in trouble. Fighting. Arguing with teachers about homework, grades, fairness, school policies, a real pain in the arse. Then when he’s 17 he decides he’s not going to go to university, he’s not going to sit his exams, he wants to work for the forestry commission, write, travel round the world—round countries that have forestry, anyway. Ottilie goes into a decline and Henry has caniptions. There’s a lot of arguing. Michael gets worse at school. They send him to an educational psychologist. Michael argues with her as well. Then he’s caught with drugs on him at school and expelled.”
“Oh god.”
“Quite. So he goes to the sixth-form college and lasts a week. Gets a series of low-paid jobs around here and doesn’t last long in any of them. Starts spending more and more time at Peattie. And then . . .”
Now is the moment to tell her about Ursula. It would be a relief to confide. “Then one day he leaves home. Not even a big fight, Ottilie says. Just the same kind of conversation they’d been having for years. But something snaps. Evidently. We don’t know why. He packs a bag, drives away, leaves his car at the loch, goes off on foot. Leaves a note in his room here.”
“In his room here?”
“Yes. They took a while to find it.”
“So he still had a room from when he was 11?”
“We all have rooms here. It’s a big house. It makes my grandmother happy. We can come and go. Stay any time. We help out while we’re here. It’s a good system.”
“What did the note say?”
“Hardly anything. No real clues. The father. Unhappiness about Ottilie’s attitude. His wanting to make a new life. That kind of thing.”
“Can I see it?”
“Why did he leave his car at the lake?”
“Mystery. That’s the mystery. Don’t know. Decided he didn’t want it, maybe. It was a present from Henry for his 18th. He’d had a row with Henry, too.”
“About his father?”
“About his father, about his treatment by the family.”
“What do you mean, treatment?”
“He never felt Henry treated him the same. Because he was illegitimate.”
“Surely that was wrong, he was wrong.”
“And he thought Henry knew.”
“Who his father was.”
“Yes.”
“And since that, nothing.”
“And since that, nothing,” Mog agreed.