Truth to Tell Read online

  ‘Or it was once,’ Brando said. He indicated to the sommelier that another bottle of wine was required.

  ‘And probably will be again. Bankers and cockroaches. The two species that will survive Armageddon.’

  I looked around the restaurant. Hard to tell that the world was in the grip of a new kind of all-out slump. Not everyone was suffering, or would one day. This place was much as it always was. A cool place – cool art on the walls, minimal decor, black-and-white-checked floor. Almost like a Dutch interior so posed did it appear. You could easily imagine a blue silk frock sitting with golden ringlets dangling over the virginals and not be very surprised. The customers, too, looked posed, with besuited young men, eager, earnest, watchful, conducting business with other besuited young men, and young women in slightly sexier suits, with the de rigueur white shirt and neat little earrings beneath well-ordered hair, looking groomed and poised and doing the same as the young men in a slightly less obvious way. The men in grey or black, the women in navy blue. I remembered my mother’s favourite piece of fashion advice: ‘Get yourself a nice navy two-piece and it’ll never go out of fashion.’ To which I’d said that as far as I was concerned, nice and navy was an oxymoron, and she looked despairing. Brando and I were probably the only non-business types eating there. We were certainly the only true splashes of colour. It’s a wonder they let Brando in at all with his tomato-coloured jeans and pink bow tie.

  ‘How are you going to manage with your investments?’

  He waved his hand and looked contemptuous, and said, ‘Oh, I shall manage perfectly well with even the most reduced of incomes – as it is I make far more than I can spend and much goes to the taxman – and I rather regret that it then goes back to the banks. I don’t mind all this at all. In fact, I quite like the way it’s shaking everyone up … stopping their profligate ways.’ The wine arrived. Brando waved the waiter away without bothering to taste it.

  ‘You’re a fine one to talk.’

  ‘Oh, I shall never cease but it seems to have curtailed our company brethren.’

  ‘But not enough,’ I said gloomily. ‘I’m still going to Florida.’

  He leaned back, wiping his mouth. ‘Don’t go then,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Just say No.’

  ‘What – and invent a lie – my granny’s dying or something?’

  ‘No – tell the truth.’

  ‘What?!’

  His smile was quite as evil as it was when he was politely declining his publisher’s various offers about Catchy Words Mk II. Quite as evil. He was in control, his favourite position. ‘You heard,’ he said, with a Mephistophelean leer. ‘Just say No. If you want to Get Truth – then get it. Put up or shut up, darling. Now, my dear Nina, more wine?’

  Usually I drank only one glass at lunchtime. The days of the two-bottles-and-still-standing lunches had long gone, along with my innocence regarding abused liver function. Though I did find those fools who go out to lunch and then drink water, saying to the waiter, ‘Yup – a drop of sparkling Perrier, or Ashbourne, or even a jug of tap, would just hit the spot,’ made me want to reach for a passing sommelier. But this particular lunchtime it was different. Given the effect that Brando’s words had on me – producing a kind of quivering excitement hitherto only found in Victorian heroines – I held out my glass and his eyes gleamed as he refilled it. I gazed at the glowing wine. I sipped. I sipped again. I could, I thought. I could do it. I could just say to Robert – I’m not going – I hate going – that’s it – going is not on the map – I am not going ever, ever again. Rather than lie. I could. I could. I drank deep of the wine. It was certainly a thought.

  ‘Now,’ said Brando, ‘while you chew that over we have a book to get on with. What about those lions’ mouths? The secret denunciation boxes? How many still exist?’

  ‘A few,’ I said. ‘They’re called Bocca del Leone but they’re not all lions. The one in the Doge’s Palace is a human grotesque.’

  ‘But they don’t use them any more?’ He looked hopeful.

  ‘Might be a good idea if they did. They’ve started to use pastiches of them here in motorway service stations. Fun for all the family. The Venetian version of truth, dare, love or promise.’

  ‘Proles.’

  ‘Snob.’

  ‘I may be a snob but I am not a liar.’

  He gave me another of those triumphant looks. ‘I’ll go and take a look. Book me into the Gritti for a couple of weeks and I shall seek them out and ruminate upon them. You can mark up a map for me. And we’ll do a bit on Casanova and the Bridge of Sighs.’ He picked up the menu and ordered himself a tiramisu and then continued. ‘Something on all the tortures, the ways to get at the truth.’ He raised an amused eyebrow. ‘There must be a few blood-chilling instruments lying in a dank cellar somewhere there. And some bordellos – there must be some outrageous bordellos, or stories about them. That sort of thing.’ He smiled again, knowing he wasn’t helping. ‘Truth. Ah, that wriggly little item. I wonder how much of that came out of those dungeons? Or lay in those iniquitous beds. The embrace of that seductive Iron Maiden … the turn of the screw … They’ll have museums, archives, that sort of thing, won’t they?’

  Sometimes I wondered if I were supporting a psychopath, though Brando insisted that it was all to do with Schadenfreude, which was why he thought the book would be such a great success.

  ‘It’s quite likely those canny Venetians threw all the evidence of their evil ways into the Grand Canal when life there moved on. Not many civilisations want to leave the proof of their corruption behind. Especially if it was its iniquities that made them rich.’

  ‘But surely, if they did it with God on their side,’ he said, tucking into the pudding, ‘they’ll have taken pride in it.’

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘Well – do your best. Speculation will do. Find a learned Venetian professor to do some speculating. A little more about all that, please, the darker the better. That’s if you have time, given all your other pressing pursuits.’

  He leaned forward in his chair, dropping the poseur, and looked earnest. ‘Don’t go to Florida, Nina. Stay and uphold the glory of truth and the teeth-rattling charm of Schadenfreude. There’s plenty of lovely dark stuff for you to be getting your nose into back here. Why not just tell Robert to shove it? You’ve been the good wife for far too long.’

  ‘Just about as long as he’s been the good husband, actually,’ I said hotly.

  Brando raised an unconvinced eyebrow.

  Why is it so many gay men friends want to see your life unravel? Perhaps it is their innately unhappy state. I looked at Brando. He didn’t look innately unhappy. Indeed, he looked positively delighted with life and with himself. He was eyeing everything male and under seventy with cheerful gusto while relishing the food and wine.

  ‘Did you ever want to settle down?’ I asked.

  ‘Never,’ he said. ‘Particularly if it would mean I’d end up as hypocritical and smug as you and Robert.’

  ‘Those who come to mock, Brando, sometimes stay to pray.’ I had a sudden rush of sentimentality. Of course I had to go with Robert. Of course I did. ‘My marriage is very nice, thank you. And I don’t want to mess it up. Florida mon amour.’ I was absolutely resigned to it. Absolutely. ‘To Florida I shall go.’

  And out came my hand again with its – surprisingly – empty glass.

  Three

  Spleenful: angry, peevish, fretful, melancholy.

  Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary, 1755

  ROBERT DID NOT speak to me all the way to the airport. To drive him there seemed the least I could do. Stony silence was not his usual way and I apologised whenever we stopped at a set of lights. As we came closer to the car park I turned to him and said, again, ‘I’m sorry, Robert, but I just – well – I’ve got to do it. If I don’t take a stand now I shall end up as one of those people who lives their life the way others want them to live it. I can’t justify pointing the finger at others for disho
nesty if I’m dishonest myself.’ Somewhere in the ether I heard Brando’s sardonic tones saying smug, smug, smug. Robert merely set his jaw.

  It crept up on me, beginning after the lunch with Brando and my rather well-oiled attempt to buy the kind of clothes I needed for the Home of Disney. It seemed shockingly wasteful, especially in the light of global fiscal suffering, to buy flame-coloured floaty things that I would never wear again and little silver sandals with false jewels sprinkled all over them. That wasn’t me. In my be-Soaved state I thought that it couldn’t, really, be anybody – they were gross, in design, colour and price – and disgracefully perfect for what was required. I left them where they were and walked out into the day feeling a huge sense of moral certainty.

  And so it began. Despite the huge sense of moral certainty collapsing, that night I said as much to Robert. ‘Robert,’ I said, ‘it’s just too decadent.’ He, with irritating absent-mindedness as he turned the pages of Big Computers or some such, said, ‘Oh, well … Never mind. Just grit your teeth and get on with it like I do.’ But as the days wore on I did mind, I minded more and more – indeed, I kept hearing Brando mocking me as a sham little Lady Fauntleroy and seeing Robert’s unruffled inattention. Of course she will go, this latter seemed to say, of course she will, she’s a good supportive wife who knows which side her bread is buttered on. She’ll go, she’ll lie, and she’ll wear a flame-coloured floaty thing and agonisingly silly sandals.

  Which was when the Bomb of Truth on the Road to Damascus, detonated. So I just said No. And once I had said No, I stuck to it. Robert scarcely noticed at first. So I said it louder. ‘I am not going,’ I said. ‘It does not feel right.’

  Robert looked up. He looked puzzled. ‘Not going where?’

  ‘Florida.’

  ‘Don’t be daft,’ he said, with irritating good humour, ‘I can’t go on my own.’

  ‘Well, I’m not coming. Definitely.’ And I meant it.

  The days went by. I remained determined. I began to feel quite pleased with my resilience. Robert said I was behaving like a prat. I said he was behaving like a prat. Robert said I’d be foot-stamping next. I said he’d be throwing his toys out of the pram. He asked if I was on something. I said I was stone-cold sober. And so it went on. I dug my heels in and he was furious. Instead of convincing my radical, idealistic husband that we should unite in our fight for truth, I merely appeared to be selfish and silly. I could read his mind then, as I could read his mind now. Ungrateful. That is what he said before clamping up entirely. ‘This may be the last one. Why can’t you suspend your bloody epiphanies for a few more weeks? Most of the wives in the world would give their eye teeth for a freebie with their husbands to somewhere warm and glamorous. If they understood what love and loyalty were all about.’ He eyed me coldly. ‘You could show a bit of gratitude.’

  It was such a patronising statement that I ignored it. Nor would I rise at the obvious gibe of ‘If you loved me you would …’ Bringing up two children gives you insight into the vagaries of manipulation. Instead I rose to the other, more absurd idea.

  ‘Warm and glamorous? You are joking?’ It was the last straw so far as Robert was concerned.

  Once upon a time he would have seen the humour of it, and laughed, but not now. I knew he was worried about the future but I just couldn’t stop, we had the possibility to make a stand, to speak the truth. Too much was at stake.

  ‘Perhaps you’ve gone off me?’

  ‘Well, I can’t say you’re my favourite person at the moment.’

  ‘Or maybe you’ve had it too easy, Nina. Perhaps you’ve been spoiled.’

  ‘By whom?’

  He said nothing but his irritating little shrug suggested the phrase, If the cap fits.

  ‘By you? How disgustingly unliberated. If ever I might have been persuaded to go to bloody Florida I shall certainly not go now.’ That night I slept in Tassie’s room and words, apart from the odd practical request or comment, had not been exchanged since. Been spoiled, indeed. ‘That is unworthy,’ I said. And that was that.

  Eventually, as we pulled into the car park he turned to me and said, ‘I suppose that’s what you think of me? As someone who will continue to live at other people’s beck and call?’ He looked angrier than I had seen him for years. In fact, he had never looked that angrily at me before. I’d wounded him somewhere very deep. I had a fleeting thought that this was the prelude to a midlife crisis – and I had caused it – before thinking, righteously, that all I was doing was telling the truth and already my marriage was under threat.

  ‘No, I don’t think of you like that at all,’ I said. ‘It’s different for you – it’s your job, your workplace –’

  ‘Our mortgage, our lifestyle, our heating, our lighting, our telephone and our bloody polenta –’

  ‘All that,’ I said. This was no moment to remind him that I did, actually, contribute some funds to the family pot. ‘It feeds into what you want to be. But I’m your wife. It hardly matters if I fit into the world of corporate IT or not – it’s your job. And anyway, I don’t jump up and down and demand absolute truth from politicians while telling lies myself –’

  ‘You lie all the time. We all do. It’s how we survive.’

  ‘How you survive, maybe. But no, not any more. Just for once I’m going to do things right.’

  Then he got really angry. He brought the flat of both hands down on the dashboard like a demented driving instructor heralding an emergency stop – and I jumped. ‘Do you really think I wanted to spend my life doing stuff with computers for other people? Do you? No. I spend vast chunks of my life doing the job I do so that I can spend the rest of my life the way I want to spend it with you. And the children.’

  ‘Oh, Robert,’ I said. ‘Then don’t go either.’

  We stared into each other’s eyes. And I knew that he was lying. He was feeling sorry for himself, he had nearly convinced himself, but he was lying. He really did want to spend lots of his life doing what he was proud to be good at. He liked it. Only fools are dismissive of their skills. Big Computers was his pornography. He was a happy man, as much as anyone can be happy in this mortal coil, and I had belittled him so he lied. ‘I have to go,’ he said, and got out of the car before I had the chance to tell him that I knew he loved what he did and I thought it was great, fine, wonderful – I loved him for loving it even if to me it was as interesting as yesterday’s gravy. Before he closed the car door he looked at me very hard, as if he were a schoolteacher and I was his wayward pupil. ‘Think about what you’ve done,’ he said, ‘while I’m away.’

  ‘Will you ring me?’

  ‘And say what? I’ll only be gone a week. You’ll survive without hearing from me. After all, it’s Florida and not your sort of place.’ And then he slammed the door.

  While he dragged his case out of the boot I sat there and stared glumly ahead. Stop now, I thought. Be the silly wife. Say it’s a hot flush. Anything. But I just couldn’t. I got out of the car. Robert was walking away with that huffy stride that I’d seen occasionally but never, quite, so pronounced. I hurried after him and pulled on his arm.

  ‘I love you,’ I said.

  ‘Do you?’ His eyes were flinty. Then soft. Then flinty again.

  ‘Yes.’

  We squared up to each other. I waited. Nothing.

  ‘You’ve got a very funny way of showing it.’

  ‘Do you love me?’

  His eyes remained flinty. In a minute, I thought, he’ll be the old Robert and say that of course he loves me and –

  And then a very familiar voice rang out, bathetically cheerful, and it was all too late.

  It was Hugo. ‘Nina? What are you doing here? Are you coming after all?’

  And then it was Lorna’s turn. ‘Oh, Nina. Thank goodness for that. We’d be miserable without you.’

  We both turned. There were the two of them, crisp and bright as a pair of new fivers, with matching luggage and perfectly folded Burberrys (linings turned outwards) over their ar
ms, coming towards us at a keen pace.

  ‘Nina,’ said Lorna again, reaching out to touch my arm, ‘you do look very pale. Shouldn’t you be in bed?’

  ‘I should?’

  ‘Or at least in the warm.’

  From beside me my husband let out a long groan.

  ‘Robert?’ said Hugo anxiously. ‘Don’t tell me you’re going down with it, too.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be so silly, Hugo,’ said Lorna. ‘It’s an ear infection. Ear infections are not contagious. That’s why the poor thing can’t fly. Or are you better now?’

  She gave me a look of deep and rare and beautiful sympathy. I could no longer look her in the eye. So I looked at Robert instead. Robert was staring at me with such ghastly horror on his face – such a message of Oh Please Keep Your Mouth Shut – that I could not do it. I backed away looking sad (nothing in this Truth idea about facial expressions, after all) and said, ‘I’m going straight to the doctor’s now. I just wanted to see Robert off properly …’

  They nodded, sweetly friendly in their agreement. Robert gave me a glassy smile, quite horrible to behold, and raised his eyebrow enough to say ‘Gotcha’. As far as he was concerned I had just told a lie for him, and against my will, and he was delighted. So now my husband, my dear, familiar partner of so many years, whose mixture of strength and weakness reflected my own – all that – was behaving like an alien. How could something that meant so much to me have caused such a change in him? I had never seen him this cold, or confrontational. Nor had I remained so impassive. Maybe, in all these years, we had never been tested. For all I knew we could be on our way to divorce over this. When he got back from Florida – or perhaps, I thought crazily, he never would come back. Despite his current flinty grimace, he was a good-looking man and certainly desirable. The more so to me now as I thought of letting him go. Robert Redford without quite so many lines and freckles, I fondly thought. Well, nearly.

  ‘Ahhh,’ said Lorna. ‘But we’ll take him under our wing from here. Poor Robert. Now, off you go and see that doctor.’