Justifying to ourselves that a lie is necessary, or in the recipient’s favour, is something we do every day. That dress is lovely; I’m very happy for him; it was absolutely fine; your child was no trouble; honestly it won’t be so bad. These are the currency of every day. A whole story crouches behind each one.
These kinds of lies are standard amongst medics. They know from experience that we’re easily deceived. Yellow pills make depressed people feel better, and sleeping pills need to be blue. Large pills seem more effacious than medium-sized ones and the very tiniest pills work best of all. Ninety-three per cent of UK doctors admit to conducting non-essential examinations on patients, and 97 per cent report that they have prescribed placebos at least once in their career. They do it because feeling cared for works. In one experiment two hundred patients suffering from irritable bowel syndrome were put into three groups. The first were told they were on a waiting list, the second given perfunctory sham acupuncture, and the third ‘very schmaltzy’ sham acupuncture. Of the three groups the over-schmaltzed did best.
Children learn quickly that white lies are necessary. When seven-year-olds were asked to take a photograph of someone sporting lipstick on her nose, most lied when asked: ‘Do I look okay for the photo?’
In a later study a similar cohort, when given a bar of soap as a present, pretended, quite spontaneously, that they liked the gift. White lying knits us together with those around us. When we empathise with one another we find it easier to know what it is that the people we care about need to hear. Who wants to know and does it matter that the new dress is hideous, or it wasn’t a lovely evening at all? To always tell the truth shows a disregard for other people’s feelings that can leave us without friends.
In fact the closest relationships we have are the ones in which we lie the most. We tell our lovers that they are the best and the biggest and that the number of other men before them is at most one or two. We tell our children that they’re brilliant, that they do fantastic drawings of dinosaurs, and that when the nurse presses a needle into their arm it really won’t hurt. We tell ourselves that these lies have an altruistic motivation, though dinosaur admiration prevents another boring request for biscuits and the true figure of previous sexual partners is, for my own part at least, too difficult to admit.
Lie 56: We’re spending quality time together
One year I gave Dad, for his birthday, a copy of Blake Morrison’s memoir And When Did You Last See Your Father? I wanted him to read the narrative that came closest of any I had found to capturing his character. Morrison reveals a duplicitous and unfaithful parent whose personality is as much camouflage as distraction.
Although I didn’t realise it then, Dad must have recognised himself and panicked. It had happened before. A few years earlier the book had been J. R. Ackerley’s My Father and Myself. On the inside cover, in black ink, Dad has written: ‘Ed said you wanted this one. I hope there’s no parallel with us. I haven’t got a second family hidden away. Honest!!’ (But only because Mum had insisted on a vasectomy in 1971.)
However, in both cases he needn’t have worried; with Morrison’s father it was the personality I recognised rather than the crime.
I had found a copy of the book in Dillons on Gower Street; I spent many of my lunch hours there escaping from the architectural practice where I worked. The book was a present I innocently gave many people that year, as though I’d found a key to my father, a secret that everyone needed to hear.
I sent the book to Dad in Scotland with the inscription: ‘to forgiving the past’, (meaning maybe he should forgive that big lie of his mother’s) but he must have wondered if I was onto something else. Presuming himself rumbled he threw out an invitation. Through Mum he made the request that before Matthias and I were married he and I ‘needed’ to have one last weekend together.
By the time I agreed to go it must have been about May or June. The days were long and dry. Dad had booked the two of us into the sort of hotel where you dump a mother-in-law for Christmas. It was situated within coughing distance of Junction 2 on the M6. We were the only guests.
I drove up on the Friday evening. At best I was an extremely nervous driver. It had taken five tests for me to pass, and that evening I was barely able to turn out onto Archway Road without breaking into a sweat. I could kill people. When I drove I had to wind all the windows down and put the stereo on full blast. I held the steering wheel so tightly my knuckles went white.
Exhausted, I must have arrived about eight o’clock.
‘Great hotel,’ Dad shouted from the door, as I lumbered towards him, dragging a bag. ‘And we’ve got it all to ourselves.’
I had always been wary of being in his company. Things had grown better but they were not fundamentally changed. For instance, a year or so before this dreaded weekend in Warwickshire, he had picked me up from Glasgow Central train station. One minute he was boring the pants off me about a situation at work, and the next he was out of the car. Leaving his door wide open, he strode round to the vehicle in front. It was a Vauxhall Corsa filled with teenage boys. As he shouted they peered up at him through the bleary condensation-covered windows. Their passivity must have infuriated him. Soon he was striding round to the bonnet to hammer the windscreen with his fists.
I imagined, from my sightline, over the lip of the dash, that someone would inevitably get out and belt him, but maybe they realised he was dangerous, because as soon as he took a step back, the Corsa squealed away, all the windows tightly closed.
When he returned to the car he said nothing, a cacophony of horns blaring behind us. The lights had long turned green.
More often, though, my anxiety was just about not knowing what to say. The black silences he had inflicted on us over the years had choked all memory of a relaxed conversation. I would dread finding myself alone with him – that he would not ‘be speaking’, as my mother termed it, and that I might be the cause. But this anxiety tells you much more about my personality than his. Dad was as much a talker as he was a sulker. Perhaps it was down to his deteriorating hearing. Unable to distinguish what other people were saying it felt safer to control the conversation himself.
That Friday evening, before I was married, I found him in a buoyant mood, which gave me enough latitude to wonder why on earth I had ended up in a dingy hotel on the M6. Slinging my bag onto the nylon bedspread I was dubious.
I joined him for a safe supper of meat and potatoes in a deserted dining room. He talked as though he needed to fill in every crevice of silence, with the fervour of someone who had a fear of it. At one point there must have been a pause, long enough that I was able to retreat to bed. As we headed upstairs I thought that by remaining in bed most of the morning I could safely kill half a day, but as we reached our adjacent doors he reminded me that breakfast would be served between eight and nine.
‘I’ll see you downstairs about half past.’
I lay in bed wondering what I was there for. What did he want?
The rest of the weekend was spent walking in circles through humdrum fields, the distant roar of the M6 to our backs. Dad talked and talked, skirting whatever it was he might have wanted to say, his anxieties opaque. Perhaps like a poem his intention needed the care and patience I was too distracted to give. Or perhaps he was kicking around the Warwickshire dust wanting only to reassure himself that I had not yet found him out. Or perhaps, with the stink of his panic so bad, he had woken up to the fact that marriage wasn’t a suitable ambition for anyone, especially when there is the risk of winding up hostage to a man like himself. But none of this translated. He had given himself the opportunity to tell the truth. A whole weekend of opportunity and though he had talked without pause he said nothing.
Lie 57: Marriage is all I want
It was 1996. My mother and I had spent a long day trying to choose me a wedding dress. It was a day that had started with hope. Shopping and marriage were a great combination. To everyone’s relief a husband had been found.
By lat
e afternoon we were in the bridal department at Liberty, which was then situated on the top floor. The last dress I’d had on was a Jasper Conran, with a £2,500 price tag. It was the dress Mum wanted – huge amounts of tulle, and extremely white. Maybe I’d had too many cups of coffee, maybe I had PMT, or maybe I just wanted her to back off. This was her dream, I was beginning to realise. Not mine.
Whatever the reason, I felt an overwhelming urge to kill her. To nudge her over the atrium banister in Liberty and watch her tumble head first into the accessories department, and those endless bins of peacock-printed scarves.
Throughout my childhood, marriage, even ironically for my mother, was The Panacea. In our home, it had always been clear that a woman’s place was on her back. On one occasion I rang Dad to ask his advice on pensions, and he told me to ‘marry one’. There seemed to be no Plan B. Yet when I produced Matthias at a family weekend, he stared over Matt’s shoulder, as if by not acknowledging him, he could make his replacement disappear.
Clearly, none of the women on either side of the family had made good decisions with regard to marriage. And given that it was the only career decision that they were in a position to make, these were choices that became difficult to live with.
Granny, having ended up as Mrs Ian Paterson, complained copiously about everyone else’s choices, often with good cause. The bad decision-making had continued with my mother. I have a letter from Dad dated June 1985, which reads: ‘Mum and I had a terrible lunch yesterday with your Gran! The lunch was okay but she was awful – reminding me in particular that in her opinion, and her late husband’s, I was not a fit person to marry their daughter.’
As the only girl, it was made clear to me that someone finally needed to get it right. Granny wrote in 1987, the year before I left school: ‘Here goes wishing you all the best in the world and a tall handsome and wealthy husband (later).’ In another letter Granny told my mother not to worry. She’d been ‘man daft’ too.
I see now that rather than being ‘man daft’, I was focused. Everyone had given me a clear career path. I needed a husband, and I needed one fast.
That afternoon at Liberty’s, I don’t think my mother’s own tricky marriage was the reason I wanted to tip her over the banister. Maybe I had smelt her overwhelming levels of desperation and self-deceit and couldn’t quite imagine how she thought it a good idea to sell me down the same river. Was that all I was good for – dresses and divorce?
Or perhaps what enraged me was simply the enormous price tag. Not that I remember being particularly moral in that regard. If it had suited me to wear a huge dress costing the equivalent of a lifetime of antiretroviral therapy for two children, then I’m sure I would have gone for the dress.
I didn’t. I went with a dressmaker who designed something simple. The material wasn’t as white as Jasper Conran’s, but a gunmetal organza, and to my mother’s eye, when she received the material sample, grey.
Twelve weeks before the wedding, and after a good many prayers, she rang and asked me if I’d had a look at the organza.
‘No. Why?’
‘Go get it and have a look.’
‘Why?’
‘Just go and get it out the bag.’ She sounded excited. ‘My bit’s discoloured.’
‘Discoloured?’
‘It’s rusty. Maybe?’
‘Maybe because you’ve been keeping it on the bathroom windowsill?’
‘No. Actually, Miranda, I kept it in my sewing box. Well, are you going to go get it?’
‘No. I can’t,’ I lied. ‘It’s already with the dressmaker.’
‘Well, if I were you, I’d ring her up ASAP. Make sure it’s not happened to your bit too.’
I reassured her that while her sample had come from a shop on Berwick Street, the material for the dress was purchased from her faithful and favourite John Lewis.
‘It’ll be fine,’ I said.
But it wasn’t. When I dragged the bag out from beneath the bed, the organza looked as though a cat had pissed all over it, the stain leaking through its folded layers in a huge round rusted mark. The lady at John Lewis said she’d never seen anything like it.
In the end, like Mum wanted, I wore white.
Lie 58: We parent together
I’m pregnant. It’s a mistake. Matthias wows about the new brand of non-latex condom – ‘for that natural feeling’. He is right. Natural, but only because it’s split.
Without the courage to take a test, I drink loads in the lead-up to Christmas, hysterical. And smoke industrial quantities, as if either of these things might make the still fictive ‘it’ go away. At some point in that dead time between Christmas and New Year’s Day I pee on a stick, and find myself secretly gratified by how the blue line hardens.
It is one of those seminal moments of womanhood. The pregnant moment. We have watched it on screen; we have read about it countless times, but when it becomes our own moment it’s a fresh tale all of its own.
I quit smoking and settle to cooking with ear plugs up my nose. The smell of onions is unmanageable. Though I do not vomit it feels as though I’m rolling on a boat all day, the kind of rolling that makes people wish they would die.
Someone suggests that I have a state-of-the-art nuchal scan at a private clinic in Marylebone, an early diagnostic scan for Down’s Syndrome. It is advice that I follow with the same acquiescence as the suggestion to apply oil in order to avoid stretch marks and drink ginger beer to avoid sickness. It is something I thoughtlessly do because another mother prescribes it. The test will put my mind at rest, she tells me.
I book it. Nothing has been at rest since the blue line.
When we make the trip to London we find the waiting room on Wimpole Street is like a boutique hotel lobby. Reassuringly every other woman waiting is a good deal older than myself. One ashen-faced mother-to-be is slumped over in her chair.
Bloods are taken and we are called for a scan. I like scans. Coming face to face with the evidence of why I’m so sick is like having a recuperative sit-down on a long, unforgiving march. However, the upbeat conversation we are having with the sonographer about heartbeats and toe counting is beginning to dry up. When she takes the measurement of the foetus’s neck a second time I hear her swallow. She measures again. Then she departs from the room and returns with someone more senior. Together they measure the neck a fourth time. No one says a word.
We are returned to the waiting room. The ashen-faced woman is still there.
Eventually we are called into a side room. Calculations have been made, a nurse tells us, using hormonal levels in the blood and nuchal translucency measurements, and the odds of a healthy baby have plummeted. The nurse gestures at her graph, pointing out that our foetus has fallen well outside the normal level. She looks me in the eye and says:
‘We would recommend further tests.’
But this isn’t what we paid for, I want to tell her. It really isn’t.
Rather than eating a meal in Bloomsbury, as planned, we head straight for the train station. Our silence stretches the long way back into Cambridgeshire so that by the time we get home the blight is a good deal worse.
As night falls we receive more advice. It is from my father-in-law. He tells us we would be wasting our time with further tests. With these odds, as a doctor, he recommends that we immediately abort.
In film and in the novel, pregnancy and abortion are inextricably intertwined. Perhaps then it is inevitable that I find myself here, in a room that has the word ‘counsellor’ picked out on the door.
Boxed on the coffee table are tissues in salmon pink. Matthias, the consultant and the counsellor are talking of termination, without saying the word. The consultant wears a white coat, the counsellor a cardigan, and they pretend to include me in their ‘we’, but I am fixated with the tissues, and with the wrong.
Matt sits beside me, but I have never felt farther from him. The consultant and the counsellor kick around the edge of my silence. Though we have ignored my father-in-law, and thi
s is not an abortion, it feels as though that is what will take place.
The risks of taking a sample of placenta tissue are high. Before the doctors can proceed they need to nail me down. The consultant hints that he won’t go through with the invasive procedure unless we can reassure him that a negative result will precipitate a decision to terminate. It is not because he has a similar world view to Matthias’s father, but because the procedure is so risky. If I want this baby, whatever the consequence, I am not sitting in the right place.
The counsellor breaks in, pulling her cardy hard over her bosom, hurrying to soften the statistics with more humane sums.
‘It’s a new test. We don’t have enough experience to give you numbers.’ The numbers she means are of how many babies have miscarried as a result of the procedure. ‘In fact,’ she pauses, ‘in this hospital we have conducted this sampling technique only once.’
Matt reassures them. He has discussed it with his father. The test will not be wasted. If the foetus is unhealthy the right decision will be made.
In this moment I know there can be no right. No wrong. Only the responsibility for the decision being made. It is here, at my most lonely, that the mother in me unfurls, waking up to the silent story going on inside. The decision for how this tale ends can be no one else’s but my own.
Lie 59: You’ll be fine
Mum and Dad have told me to go back to sleep.
We, that is me and the newborn, have just escaped one of those first-world crises that deserves no sympathy at all – a loft conversion, the ceiling vomiting down the stairs. The plan is to stay with my parents in Ayr for the duration.
A Book of Untruths Page 15