The White Lie by Andrea Gillies

Author:Andrea Gillies [Gillies, Andrea]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

14

Feeling that she couldn’t bear any more cups of coffee and any more confidential chats, chats that could stretch into desperate hours, Mog took Rebecca for a walk around the estate. It was a chilly morning, misty, but the sun was there beyond the milkiness, burning stoically through its tissue paper layers. Nothing could be seen at the other side of the loch through the fog, and Peattie’s borders to other worlds could only be guessed at. They went first into the walled gardens, Mog walking slightly ahead so as to limit the conversational flow, then into the courtyard and round to the glasshouses, admiring the neat rows of salad crops, the tangle of greenery that rose ceiling-high, the pleasant warm stink of tomato plants. They followed the lane to where it divides, left to the loch, right to the village, and chose the right-hand fork. Approaching the cottages they saw Alan in his front garden, standing behind a trestle table, potting up seedlings from plastic trays. Alan stopped what he was doing.

“Ladies,” he said solicitously. “Nice day for it.”

The cottages are miniaturised toytown-sized houses, sitting together joined in a row. Each gate and window frame has been painted and repainted its pre-war black; each of the windows is shaped faux-medievally as an arch, with finely crafted curved and angled stone-cutting supporting them; each porch trimmed in fretwork that’s still painted in its same pre-war green. Small, densely planted gardens at the front are divided one from the other by waist-height hedges, and of these little plots only Jet’s was untended-looking, bearing the ruins of a sweetpea wigwam gifted by his mother, its former lawn knee-deep in bindweed. George’s own plot was dedicated almost entirely to roses, white and dark purple and apricot. George kept up the holiday let, a square of grass edged in herbs and blue geranium, though Alan said he shouldn’t bother. It was one of the things they disagreed about. Alan wouldn’t let his father do Jet’s garden, which was cut by Ursula when she remembered. Ursula’s own patch is a tiny meadow dominated by Michaelmas daisies (she doesn’t much approve of lawns), and it was as Rebecca was admiring the wildflowers in Ursula’s patch that their owner came rushing out of her cottage and past them at a hurried walk, holding a spade almost as big as she was. Then she came jogging back without it.

“Rebecca, you said you’d like to see inside my house. Come now. I’m here and you’re here.”

Mog and Rebecca followed Ursula inside.

The cottages are dark and prone to damp; the gothic-revival pointed windows are not so charming from within. Woodlice patrol the carpet edges and in terms of decorative efforts only limewashes survive the clamminess of the old stone. All wallpaper attempts have had to be abandoned, though little shreds remain by skirtings and light switches of old doomed campaigns.

“There are four rooms, two up and two down,” Ursula told Rebecca.

Downstairs there’s a kitchen and sitting room and, up a narrow wooden staircase, a bedroom and bathroom, squeezed in under the eaves and heavily coombed.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.