Published in trade paperback in Great Britain in 2016 by Allen & Unwin
Copyright © Anna Schaffner, 2016
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This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.
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Printed in Great Britain
For Shane and Helena
‘In the beginning was the Word.’
The Gospel According to St John
‘In the beginning was the deed.’
Goethe, Faust, Part One
CONTENTS
PREFACE
EDITORIAL NOTE
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
XVIII
XIX
XX
POSTSCRIPT
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PREFACE
London, 21 November 2014
Dear George,
I’m afraid this letter contains bad news: I failed. I’m sorry. I let you down. There is no manuscript. My advance (why not confess it all at once) is used up, too – it ran through my fingers like sand. Right now, I’m not in a position to return the sum to you, and it’s likely to be some time before I will be able to do so.
You will have heard by now where I am. The story was all over the news. This place is the natural home of the fog that has taken dominion in my mind and that casts everything in grey. Here it has company and a name and no longer hovers in solitude. It’s as though this place has been summoning me all along. It’s strangely liberating that I can now finally succumb to the thoughts that have been weighing on me like a mud-soaked cloak for months; that I can stop pretending, and finally face the fact that I can no longer tell right from wrong.
Let me address the professional dimension of the situation first (I need to start somewhere). You know that what happened is utterly out of character and unprecedented in the long history of our working relationship. I always deliver; I always meet my deadlines; you could always count on me. Until catastrophe struck. The first one, I mean. I haven’t been myself for years – you knew that, of course, and in spite of everything I am immensely grateful for the fact that you never lost faith in me.
It is so strange, being here, George – I wonder what you would make of this place. I still catch myself thinking this is a bad dream from which I will awake any minute now, back at home, cuddled up in my bed, with Aisha purring on the duvet beside me. But I know that this, here, is real. The sharp white lights and the sulphurous walls that look like they have been rubbed in rancid butter; the muffled groans emerging from neighbouring rooms; the helpless despondency in my sister’s eyes; her agitated conversations with the doctors in the corridors which she thinks I can’t hear, but the meaning of which I understand all too well.
I have never let you down before, and I owe you not only an apology but also a full explanation. You are not just my editor but my dearest, oldest friend. I need you to understand what happened to me, and to tell me why. I hold you in the highest regard, and I know that this feeling is not entirely unreciprocated – regardless of everything that has happened between us. Our minds work in similar ways, we see eye to eye on so many things. I need your sharp, clear intellect; I need you to tell me who the villains are in this drama, and who the heroes. I need you to help me differentiate between right and wrong. I’m so lost, George, tormented by doubt and guilt. And the image of those eyes – those big, clear, innocent eyes that haunt me so.
I cannot trust Amanda with this task. She’s a wonderful sister, and I love her, and she takes such good care of me, but she simply cannot help me with this. I keep returning to the scene that brought me here, and to the fateful events that preceded it, and to all these loose ends in my and Julia’s narratives that wriggle and slide and glisten maliciously in garish colours, like snake tails, and which I simply cannot master.
It is 2.41 in the morning. I managed to convince the cleaner to supply me with a pen and paper – my sister and the doctors wouldn’t hear of letting me write. She is a big woman with a big smile and a deep velvet chuckle. In spite of her size, she moves as gracefully as a dancer when she swings her mop through the corridors. We struck a deal: in return for her help I gave her the latest boxes of chocolates I received. Why does everyone send me chocolates? I never liked sweet things.
All is quiet on the ward, except for the soft hum of the lights and the periodic sound of the night nurse’s tired feet flapping across the green linoleum floors. I so desperately want to talk to you – I cannot bear the company of my thoughts. As I write to you, I keep imagining your responses, your smile and the way you nod your head when you are listening intently. I imagine you folding me into your arms, pressing my head against your chest. I imagine your cinnamon scent, and the feel of your warm hand on the back of my head, stroking my hair.
I need to begin, but where? How far back do I have to go so that all of this makes sense? I don’t have much time – the daily programme here starts so brutally early. The nurses wake and wash us at 5.30 – can you believe it? As though the days in a place like this were not endless enough as it is – time here is like treacle. So anywhere will have to do, anywhere I can think of now.
Was there a definitive turning point? Probably not. I always felt that epiphanies are the stuff of fiction. Real life doesn’t work that way; in reality, we change gradually, sliding ever deeper into the muddy waters of our psyches, little by little, until we go under. The timing of my fateful encounter with Julia was certainly not lacking in tragic irony. The day before, I had just returned from a seven-day spell in the cottage, to which I had fled, and I was ready to face the consequences of my failure to produce the manuscript. I was – I had steeled myself to face your wrath, and had switched my phone back on with the firm intention of calling you right there and then, to confess it all, but then I found Julia’s lawyer’s message instead, urging me to call her back at once.
Have I ever told you about the cottage? I can’t remember – it used to belong to my parents and is situated in an isolated spot in the Kentish countryside. Its bulbou
s walls look like a sunken cake with dirty icing. Its thatched roof hangs so low that it almost touches the ground. Amanda and I were born there, and although neither of us ever visits the cottage we could never bring ourselves to sell it or even to rent it out. It’s a place filled with memories, and with countless cobwebs, and an intricate network of fine fissures and cracks. I hadn’t been there for years.
It was there that I must have suffered something like a nervous breakdown. After my meeting with Grace, and my argument with Laura, I asked my neighbour to take care of Aisha for a while, packed my bags and drove out of London, away from my computer and all my files, away from my email, away from everything. And it was at my parents’ cottage that I ended up. It wasn’t planned. It must have been a primal instinct that directed me there, like those frogs that always return to the ponds that smell of their childhood to spawn and to die, regardless of how long the journey takes them. The road map is hardwired into their brains – you could take them all the way up Ben Nevis and they would still know how to get back to the waters in which they were born.
I didn’t have the energy to clean the place when I arrived, and besides, I felt quite at home amidst the dirt, the dust and the debris. On the first day, I drove to a superstore about an hour away and bought provisions (tinned soup and whisky), firewood, a large supply of candles and a small gas cooker (there’s neither gas nor electricity there, and no hot water). On the second day, I tried to have lunch in a pub in the nearby village, but I couldn’t swallow my food and felt uneasy, sitting on my own among the regular guests who all seemed troubled by the business of this strange woman in their midst. That was my last outing. In the days that followed, I didn’t see a soul.
On the third day, I switched off my phone. I couldn’t bear its angry vibrations – I knew you and Amanda were trying to reach me, both of you furious, and I couldn’t face talking to either of you. Eventually my anxiety lessened, giving way to apathy and weariness. I grew weaker by the day. I felt a terrible tiredness, as though my very soul had become a thing of lead. I thought I had lost everything – my career, you, even Laura and Amanda. My old familiar sadness about the paths not taken returned with such force that it almost strangled me from the inside. Late on the sixth day, however, something changed. As always, I was sitting in my pyjamas in a brown armchair by the fireplace, a large drink in my hand, wrapped in a threadbare dressing gown and a coarse woollen blanket, both of which used to belong to my father (I could no longer muster the energy to get dressed). My hair was unwashed and my skin felt like ancient papyrus, parched and cracked. You would barely have recognized me, George. Although I was sitting so close to the flames that I feared my skin might catch fire, their warmth didn’t reach me. I was so cold. I had been unable to stop shivering for weeks, and it was getting worse each day. No matter how high I put the thermostat in my flat in London, no matter how big a fire I built in the cottage – no amount of blankets, drinks and cups of tea could thaw the frozen sea inside me.
Then something compelled me to detach my gaze from the flames, and I looked up. I saw the pictures of my family on the mantelpiece; three faded sepia portraits of my parents and grandparents – upright, proud people, good people, anchored and strong. Did I ever tell you that my maternal grandmother walked to this country all the way from Germany? My mother was just four years old when, one evening, while the family was having supper, my grandfather was arrested. Five men in slick black uniforms kicked in the front door, dragged him from his chair and into the street. Nobody spoke a word; nobody made a sound. The incident lasted less than a minute. When the men had left, my grandmother found she was still clutching her spoon. On the very same evening, she decided to escape – she had no intention of acquiescing to a similarly sinister fate. First, she dyed her and my mother’s hair light blonde. Then she ripped the yellow stars from their overcoats and gathered together all the valuables she could carry. She also took a small revolver, which my mother later bequeathed to me in her will and which has been lying in my closet in a box containing jewellery and other family heirlooms ever since.
They left in the dark of a starless night. The two of them travelled on foot, through woods, moors and marshland, for twenty-four days. They sheltered in sheds and stables and hunters’ huts. The year was 1943, and their old coats were no match for the furious November winds. My grandmother never lost the cough she picked up on that journey. They walked all the way from Luneburg in Lower Saxony to Denmark, and then managed to trade their portable family heirlooms for two much-coveted stowaway places on a boat that stopped in Norway before heading towards the safe shores of Grimsby.
It was my grandmother’s picture that caught my eye that night. After her arrival in England, she cut off her long blonde hair, burned it and henceforth wore it dark and clipped like a man. At that moment, I felt as though she was staring down at me, judging me for my weakness and my cowardice. I could hear her harsh cough, impeaching and accusatory; her hazel eyes burned holes into my paper skin. I knew then that I had to make a choice. I had grown so very weak during my time in the cottage. I had been unable to eat; my stock of tinned soup remained almost untouched. I could have faded away peacefully there. How I wish I had. I could have spared so many people so much suffering. But instead I decided to face the consequences of my failure to complete the manuscript, and all the other conflicts from which I had been hiding – your wrath, Amanda’s reproaches, Laura’s disappointment. I forced myself to eat some soup. The next morning – it was 6 November – I drove back to London. At home, I immediately switched my phone on to call you and confess, ready to do penance. But then I found Julia’s lawyer’s message, offering a glimmer of hope. The following morning, I visited Julia, and later that day... well, you know the rest of the story, although I will tell you my own version of it in due course.
Yesterday evening, while Amanda was talking to the doctors, I asked Laura to go into my flat to find my diary and all the materials and documents I had gathered on Julia’s case, and to bring them here: the folder with the interview transcriptions, my notebooks, my laptop, paper and my favourite fountain pen, the black one. She knows where it all is. Unlike my sister, I can always rely on Laura. Even now, in spite of everything, she still has faith in my judgement. How I regret the hurt I must have caused her.
I owe you an explanation, George – and, in due course, Laura and Amanda, too. I can’t bear the thought that you should think ill of me. And I need to make sense of it all, to find some way of holding at bay the dreadful guilt that is tearing me apart. I will write it down. Everything. How it all happened. How it got to this.
I have to stop now, as day is breaking and my back hurts and the nurses will be here soon. Please don’t be angry with me, George. I really did try my best – it simply wasn’t good enough.
Don’t visit or contact me until I get in touch. I need to commit my story to paper before I am ready to see you in person. There is so much you need to know first. I will send you the document when my tale is told. I don’t know how long it will take. In any case, I will have a lot of time on my hands while awaiting the trial – and who knows how much time thereafter. Years? Decades? I don’t think they will keep me here for that much longer. I will no doubt soon be moved to lodgings patrolled by guards rather than nurses. But that suits me fine, since I will be able to write my story better in a cell than in a bed.
With much love,
Clare
EDITORIAL NOTE
Clare Hardenberg is the most talented non-fiction writer I know, and we have been working together for more than sixteen years. She first caught my attention when she was writing for the Guardian; I much admired her clear, strong voice, her wit, her verbal precision, and her courage. I liked one of her articles so much that I contacted her to ask whether she would be interested in writing a book on the topic. She was, and her first as well as all her subsequent books proved to be so successful that, ten years ago, she was able to give up her day job and work as a freelance writer. Clare has pu
blished thirteen books, four under her own name, the others ghost-written; five have been bestsellers and three have been honoured with awards. Why Your Sneakers Kill (2006) won the Samuel Johnson Prize.
Yet Clare’s life was marked by two tragedies, and I am convinced that the second wouldn’t have taken place without the first. I feel responsible for both, as they resulted directly from the books I commissioned her to write. The reader will no doubt recall the scandalous revelations concerning the investment banker Adrian Temple, whose reckless actions brought ruin and misery to legions of small-time investors. It was Clare who meticulously collected the distasteful evidence, which was published in what is arguably her most important book, The Deal (2009). Alas, in spite of what seemed to be a clear-cut case, Temple was never convicted of his crimes. Instead it was Clare who was tried and charged with libel, for a trivial detail that had nothing to do with the main thrust of the case. We couldn’t protect her, as the charges related to statements she made in interviews that followed the publication of her book. After the trial, Clare was ordered to pay damages and the court costs. She kept her head above water by ghosting biographies, but I knew that she was bitterly disillusioned.
Over the past four years, I didn’t see her very much; she had become ever more reclusive. I thought of her often, and I felt guilty. Once in a blue moon I managed to convince her to let me take her out for dinner, and it hurt me to see her so dejected, her sharp wit dulled, her spirit broken. I owed her. When she approached me to ask if she could write Julia White’s biography I thought it a brilliant idea. It was the first time since the Temple trial that she had expressed a desire to work on a serious topic again. And Clare, I felt, was just the right person to tackle this important and complex task. I strongly believed that the biography would give her the opportunity to demonstrate her true worth as a writer. Yet, sadly, the project morphed into a poison much more dangerous than the wound it was supposed to heal.
The Truth About Julia: A Chillingly Timely Psychological Novel Page 1