The Truth About Julia: A Chillingly Timely Psychological Novel

by Schaffner Anna

  Optimistic as always, Amanda had booked a table in our favourite restaurant in Mayfair that day – our parents used to take us there whenever one of us had something to celebrate. Like everyone else she thought we would be raising our glasses to toast victory that evening. Instead, the meal was the most sombre of affairs. I think we were all shell-shocked, and nothing could lessen the horror of the catastrophic facts with which I found myself confronted. I had no idea where to find the £150,000 I had been ordered to pay Temple in damages. In addition, I’d been sentenced to pay a proportion of the court costs, which my lawyer estimated would amount to another £150,000. In total I owed £318,894.32.

  That night, Amanda suggested we sell our parents’ cottage, which I refused to do. The two of us had decided to pass it on to Laura a long time ago, and there was no way I would allow my mistakes to eat into my niece’s inheritance. It was so kind of you to offer me £50,000 from your daughter’s education fund – your generosity made me cry, but I obviously couldn’t accept that sum, either. Even Lailah offered to ask one of her wealthy relatives for an interest-free loan. It was a truly noble gesture on her part, considering she knew what had happened between us, both before and after your marriage. But that evening, I wasn’t in a position to appreciate these demonstrations of kindness. It wasn’t so much the prospect of financial misery that depressed me most. It was that my belief in institutional justice had been injured, possibly destroyed for ever. Until that day, I’d been a passionate believer in the theoretical and practical fairness of our legal system. I used to believe in the power of the word, and in the power of the truth: my work, my books, my journalism – I used to think of all of these things as forms of political engagement that could change the world for the better. But after the verdict, I was no longer so sure.

  What is more – and I haven’t told this to anyone yet, George, not even to Laura – I had a run-in with Temple following the pronouncement of the verdict. After the judge dismissed us, we must both independently have headed to the loos to prepare ourselves to face the media who were waiting outside the Old Bailey. When I left the ladies’, Temple came out of the gents’.

  ‘Clare,’ he said and grinned. ‘Trying to repair your tear-smudged make-up before your long walk of shame?’

  ‘You wish,’ I said. ‘People like you don’t make me cry, they just make me angry. And sick.’

  ‘Of course. You’re not the crying kind, are you?’ And then Temple shoved me against the wall and whispered in my ear: ‘Frigid, bitter old bitches like you – you’re dead inside, too dried up even for tears. I bet you live alone, don’t you, Clare? Single and childless? Tell me I’m wrong. I bet your cunt is just as dry and cold and bitter as your prose. I’m right, aren’t I? I mean, where’s all that venom coming from, if not from sexual frustration?’ And then he laughed. ‘You pathetic old cow. Did you really think you could mess with me?’

  I moved away from him. I could feel the impact of his words reverberating through my body; I could feel myself blushing against my will. I tried to steady my voice before I responded, but I fear it sounded squeaky when I said: ‘My private life is none of your business, Temple. And I’d also ask you to go and share your highly original thoughts on the private parts of older women with the media outside, if you dare.’

  I got drunk that night, very drunk. You all just continued to fill my glass. It was the kindest thing you could do. The only thing you could do, really. I remember trying to articulate my despair at some point.

  ‘Why work, why write, why care? What use are any of the things we do? What’s left, now?’ I slurred.

  You all chipped in with answers.

  ‘Relationships,’ Amanda said. ‘Meaningful interpersonal relationships. That’s all there is. And that’s all there ever was in any case. Working on your own happiness and the happiness of those you can reach around you. Move from the macro to the micro level, Clare. It’s the only one over which you can have any control. Don’t try to change the world. Focus on the small things. Everything else is an illusion.’

  ‘Pleasure and passion,’ Laura said. ‘And fun. Why’s that concept so taboo these days, almost as though it’s a dirty word or something? As long as you enjoy what you do, and it gives you pleasure and purpose, go for it. Have more humble aims – do what you love, and do it as well as you can. This desire for exceptionality, fame, impact – I think that’s just immodest. I know I’ll never be Nigella Lawson, or Jamie Oliver, or Michel Roux, but I don’t care. I adore what I do, and I aim to do it to the very best of my ability. I can put a smile on people’s faces when they eat my food, and you know what? That’s enough for me. Joyful moments, as many of them as possible, is all we can hope for.’

  ‘Faith.’ That was Lailah’s short, sharp answer, on which she didn’t elaborate. She didn’t have to. We all knew she’d lost hers (and not just theologically speaking), and that she mourned for it as one mourns for a dead child.

  ‘Thought.’ That was yours. ‘Art. Literature. Truth. Beauty. They don’t have to serve a purpose, or cause a revolution, or impact on our socio-economic environment in any measurable way. They have every reason to exist in their own right. They can reach people’s hearts and souls. They’re what gives our lives meaning and makes us feel less frightened and alone. They allow us to step into another’s shoes, and open up worlds that would otherwise remain for ever hidden. That’s enough.’

  ‘But,’ I began, ‘but... ’ I was too drunk to finish my sentence, and I poured the final drops of wine into my glass instead. What I’d wanted to say was that all these solutions struck me as profoundly apolitical and ultimately as defeatist. This unambitious retreat into the pursuit of personal pleasure and insight, it really jarred with me. I’d always wanted so much more than that.

  Ultimately, Temple’s legal team was quite simply cleverer than mine. Nobody queried the accuracy of the facts pertaining to his business practices as I had presented them in my book. Nobody questioned the gross immorality of his financial transactions and the callously premeditated greed that drove them. The judge even admitted that Temple’s ‘utterly shameless’ scheme constituted an ‘abuse of trust on an unprecedented scale’ and had wreaked ‘incalculable devastation’ on his victims. But unfortunately nothing he had done was technically illegal.

  I, in contrast, had made two mistakes – small but significant ones. Although Temple sued me for libel and for ‘damaging his reputation’, ironically he wasn’t referring to my exposure of his cynical investment scam. Instead, his team homed in on the fact that I’d described him as an adulterer and a class A drug-user. I hadn’t even done so in my book, but in some of the interviews I gave to promote it. It was a very clever strategy. I had no hard evidence to prove his cocaine habit, and none for his affairs, either. I had considered these points to be trivial asides; private matters, really, and not even interesting ones, given that they are so common. I (for reasons you know well) would never sit in judgement on people for marital infidelity, and I have always considered the division of stimulants into legal and illegal as an arbitrary and hypocritical exercise. I see no qualitative difference at all between getting drunk and getting high; our soul-aches are unique and we should all be allowed to medicate them with whatever substances work best for us.

  But I do think that the kinds of highs we seek can say something about our personality, just like the cars we drive, the clothes we wear, the interiors of our homes and the books and music we are drawn to. I dropped Temple’s cocaine use into the conversation only to draw a fuller picture of his character, in the same spirit in which I commented on some of his other habits and predilections (his penchant for wearing primrose-yellow and lime-green cashmere pullovers, for example; his collection of showy watches; his habit of flipping his hair from his forehead with a brisk jerk of his head; and the fact that, to my great astonishment, he didn’t play golf, but instead practised archery and was actually rather good at it, too). At best you could accuse me of having opted for a lazy shortcut –
but then again so much about Temple did seem to be utterly clichéd. Although in some respects he did surprise me, above all in the way he expressed his love for his daughter: he didn’t shower her with white ponies and pink Chanel tutus, but instead actually spent time with her. They visited museums; they went swimming and fencing; and – most remarkably – they did regular voluntary work in a bird sanctuary in the Bretton Woods.

  Knowing how the whole publicity circus works, I’d also quite consciously decided to feed it some morsels of the kind I knew would help me promote my book. I didn’t really suspect that these little details would cause such a stir – optimistically, or maybe rather naively, I’d assumed that the public would focus on what really mattered, on all the other things I uncovered and which I did document meticulously and conscientiously. But I was wrong. And really, I should have known better. Almost every interviewer I met after the publication of my book wanted to talk about Temple’s private life and his character. It was the gossipy, frivolous elements that interested people most. They wanted to hear more about Temple’s Chinese mistress (a twenty-three-year-old escort of bamboo-stalk suppleness and legs that went on for ever); they wanted sordid details on the themed orgies in secluded mansions in the Cotswolds which the two of them appeared to have frequented. They kept asking questions about his cocaine use, while I desperately tried to move on to his actual crimes.

  I grew so upset that I refused to continue with the promotion activities. Do you remember, George, how you convinced me to carry on by excusing, even ennobling, all this personal prying with the pull of the human-interest factor and our innate desire for stories? How you told me that I had to allow people to imagine the monster in more concrete terms? It was on a rainy summer evening, we were drinking a glass of wine in the BFI bar after having seen Nosferatu, and it was the evening on which our second liaison officially ended – I still think ‘affair’ is not the right word. We were lovers, plain and simple. We loved each other. But you were wracked with guilt; you kept talking about your daughter and Lailah, and how you didn’t have it in you to leave her, in spite of the fact that she’d by then succumbed completely to her severe depressive disorder and was refusing treatment, and that her unbridled hostility towards you had destroyed all that was left of the love you once felt for her. But you cared for her enormously (and you still do). It was a cruel reversal of roles – the second time round, I wanted you more than you wanted me. I would have taken you for good, George, I was ready then. I would have committed to you, properly this time. But you didn’t trust me anymore; you said I only wanted what I couldn’t have, and that I would grow bored and restless and get cold feet just like last time. You said that there was simply too much at stake for you, and that you knew my patterns. When I asked you what patterns, ‘Ach, Clare’ was all you said, your voice heavy with sadness, and then you took my hand.

  But enough of that – that was all a long time ago, and we were both terribly grown up about the whole thing and we managed to remain close and caring and continued to work together. Except that I coped slightly less well with it all than it might have seemed on the outside. You, by contrast, really did seem fine. Most of the time, at least.

  But I need to return to Julia’s story. In September last year, having spent an entire week more or less permanently drunk and feeling very bitter about the state of our rotten age, I decided to pull myself together. I didn’t want to let Temple defeat me a second time. The submission deadline was drawing closer (seven of my precious fourteen weeks had already passed, and I had so much work to do; I realized I was nowhere near where I should be with my research).

  And perhaps there was some benign force watching out for me after all, one that didn’t wish me to go under in this sea of bile – at least not quite yet. On the morning of 23 September, having just returned from a long walk in Regent’s Park to calm my mind in preparation for the day’s work, and during which I even caught a glimpse of the golden autumn sun, I found an email in my inbox. The subject line simply read ‘Julia’, and the sender was someone called Alison Fisher.

  The email didn’t come entirely out of the blue. About two weeks earlier, I’d sent a message to a range of people who had studied with Julia in Scotland. Having got a First in PPE at Oxford, Julia had studied for an MSc in Political Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, from October 2009 to January 2010. I found the names of her twelve fellow students on the university’s alumni website, and was able to track down the email addresses of eight. Once again I explained who I was, as well as the exact nature of the project, and asked whether they would be able to get in touch with me to share some of their impressions of Julia while she was in Edinburgh. Alison’s was the only response I received from the Edinburgh cohort.

  Alison wrote that Julia and she had been friends for a few months, and that she’d be very happy to talk to me. She now lived in Canterbury and suggested I meet her there the next day for an after-work drink. Immensely grateful for this opportunity, I responded at once to confirm the time and place of our meeting. The next day, I left London a few hours too early. I had decided to wander through Canterbury for a while, as I hadn’t seen this quaint little cathedral town for many years. In fact I had last visited with my parents more than a decade ago, and I longed to see the cathedral gardens and the cloister again. I was too restless to read on the train, and instead stared out of the window for the entire journey. The sky was cement grey and the clouds were hanging low. We drove past the enormous King’s Cross development site, where new, scrawny-looking buildings were climbing weed-like towards the heavens; we passed the desolate swampland that starts just where the city ends, and then numerous orchards and bright green hills speckled with sheep and other cattle, which reminded me of the lost days of my childhood in the countryside.

  When I arrived in Canterbury I immediately saw the building near the station that Alison had suggested for our meeting, a large, shed-like structure that must once have sheltered train carriages and hay wagons, and that now housed a farmers’ market and restaurant. But I was three hours early, and so I walked on, through the narrow opening of Westgate Towers into the city centre, down the cobblestoned high street and past numerous low red-brick buildings and timbered medieval cottages, with their rose- and camellia-studded front gardens. I crossed a shallow, overgrown canal, and then turned left into a square teeming with tourists and field-tripping students from France who were admiring the grand entrance to the cathedral precincts.

  I found that I still remembered the layout of the place, and headed straight to the cloister. I have always found cloisters calming – there is something soothing about the splendid symmetry of their criss-crossing Gothic arches and the overgrown gravestones. For a moment, I rested my forehead against a cold, smooth stone pillar and closed my eyes. Then I explored the herb garden, and, having walked around the precincts, I returned to the west-facing facade to examine the impressive collection of grinning gargoyles that protruded from the surface like demonic pustules.

  Then I ordered a Leffe in a café-bar around the corner and watched the swarming tourists. I was still about half an hour early when I returned to the venue by the station, and I found a table for two on the upper deck where the restaurant was located. I watched the market people below covering their stalls and wares with hessian sackcloth, until the entire place conveyed a sense of absence and loss, like the home of someone who has recently passed away. When the hustle and bustle of the market had died down, early diners began to flock in. I read through my notes and ordered another beer while I waited for Alison to arrive.

  Alison was twenty minutes late, for which she apologized profusely. She was wearing black jeans, black, flicked-up eyeliner and a lumberjack shirt, and was carrying a selection of heavy-looking old leather bags. I was immediately struck by her warm smile, her big azure-blue eyes, her tiny nose splattered with pale freckles, and her poker-straight raven hair, which shone like molasses. Her voice was deep and husky, and she spoke so quickly that her words tum
bled over each other in their excitement. Hers was a bubbly, infectious, monkey-liveliness – she was the kind of person you couldn’t imagine sitting still for very long. She asked me whether I’d eaten, and when I shook my head she cried out: ‘Oh good! I’m so glad. I hate eating alone and I’m starving. I haven’t even had time for a sandwich today. You wouldn’t believe how crazily busy things were at work.’ I liked her immediately.

  Then she emphatically urged me to choose the vegetable platter, swearing it was ‘by far the best thing on the menu’. I didn’t dare to ignore her recommendation, and luckily she was right – our meal was superb. Alison, too, ordered a beer, and when we’d both finished our aperitifs we decided to have a bottle of red with our main course. She chattered away in her throaty, hurried way as though we’d known each other for decades, and in the space of less than half an hour I learned that she was working for the council as a social services adviser, that her partner, Carlos, was a fitness instructor who was deeply disappointed by her complete lack of interest in all things sport-related and in her refusal to further enhance the firmness of her thigh muscles. She jumped up and turned on her axis, asking me what I thought of them, and I laughed and said I thought they looked just perfect. Luckily, she and Carlos did share a passion for dancing, and had recently bought a flat together, close to the city walls right by the canal. They were thinking of getting married and having kids – but not too soon, she hastened to emphasize. Alison also told me that there were some pretty deprived places in and around Canterbury, very different from what the tourists saw, and recounted some harrowing tales of cases she’d recently had to deal with, including that of a gang of chain-smoking, vodka-drinking pregnant teenagers. We only started to talk about Julia once we’d finished our meal, and most of the wine.