A Set of Lies

by Carolyn McCrae

  Sir Arthur felt confident that he would run rings around such a lightweight and inexperienced interviewer as Jilly Bouldnor whose hand, he noticed, was shaking slightly as she leafed through the pages of her notes on the iPad on her knee.

  “You say it is your family home but weren’t you born in London?” Jilly asked, knowing the answer.

  “Indeed I was. My parents lived in town and I had to be born where my mother was at the time.” He turned towards the camera and smiled, hoping that his small, if unoriginal, joke would charm his audience.

  “So your parents didn’t live in their house on the Isle of Wight?”

  “My uncle and aunt lived there. My Uncle Henry had been horribly injured in the First World War so the very least my parents could do for him was to give him, his wife and his daughter a home.” Sir Arthur knew that would win him the sympathy of the more traditional viewers and it was something he had played to his advantage many times.

  “But you say this was your family home?”

  “In some circles one’s family home is sometimes occasionally occupied by junior members of one’s family. It makes the property no less one’s home.”

  Jilly Bouldnor glanced meaningfully at her camera. Sir Arthur did not realise that he had scored an own goal with his answer. Not many people in his audience would recognise a family that had properties to spare so that a sizeable house, pictures of which were being displayed on the monitors in the studio and on every screen around the country, could be lent to a member of the family. Even less would that audience recognise that a close relative could be referred to as a ‘junior member’ of the family.

  Jilly looked over her rimless glasses at Sir Arthur and then down at her notes. She knew she had no need to say anything for a few seconds as the sheer arrogance of her interviewee sank in with her viewers. She just repeated, as if making notes for herself, but just loud enough to be picked up by her microphone, “Occupied by junior family member.”

  She looked up and spoke clearly and directly, as if changing the subject. “You inherited the property from your father on his death in 1961?”

  “That is correct.”

  “And you have lived there since then?”

  Sir Arthur recognised a trick question when he saw one.

  “I have lived in London.”

  “Yes, we have found that your residence on the electoral roll has always been in Chelsea.”

  “The Lodge is my second home.”

  “Ah yes, your second home, although it is further from your constituency than Westminster is. Anyway, we can come back to that. Could you just clarify for our audience whether your uncle and aunt still live in your house on the Isle of Wight?” Both interviewer and interviewee knew the answer to that question.

  “I’m afraid my aunt died many years ago and my uncle also.”

  “Your sister then? I understand your sister lived with her uncle, caring for him after his wife died.”

  “Yes, my sister Audrey lived there until her death last year. She kept the place going for me as I have had to spend so much of my life in London fulfilling my parliamentary responsibilities.”

  “Your sister acted as your housekeeper then?”

  “No, no, I wouldn’t go as far as to say that.”

  “Then it was her home and you stayed there when you had to?”

  “It is, and always has been, my home,” Sir Arthur said, again looking at the camera, as if Jilly was an inconvenient participant in his conversation with the viewers.

  “But your wife has never lived there. In fact she is on record as saying she has visited the house only once and that was the day after your sister’s funeral.”

  “Well, yes, no. My wife… No. Well, yes…” Sir Arthur came close to bluster. Perhaps, he was thinking, this slip of a girl knows how little time I have actually spent there. “I cannot see why you are focussing our conversation, limited as we are for time, on the peripheral issue of my second home when we should be discussing the future of government in this country, a topic of real interest to the electorate as the campaigns for the General Election and the subsequent European referendum gather pace.” Again he looked directly into the camera lens, rather than at Jilly.

  “Oh, I think the issue of The Lodge and your expenses claims are of very real interest to our viewers,” Jilly persisted. “You have claimed expenses despite the house being nowhere near your constituency and your never having lived there—”

  “I have no intention of discussing my personal finances with you on national television,” Sir Arthur interrupted.

  “But will you be discussing them further with the Standards Authority?”

  “Look, Jilly,” Sir Arthur changed his tone to one of weary condescension, “I think your viewers will be bored with this topic and, quite understandably, will be waiting for you to concentrate your questions on the serious issues before them in the election and the referendum.”

  Sir Arthur looked directly into the camera. He had been in politics for over forty years and had long ago learnt how to twist conversations to his own advantage. “My last word on the matter is that The Lodge is my home. I moved into that beautiful house when I was evacuated as a very young boy in the early days of the war. I spent all my early years there. It is, quite simply, my family home.”

  “Unfortunately it cannot be your last word on the matter, Sir Arthur. You say you grew up there?” Jilly asked innocently, though Sir Arthur expected her to know that from the age of eleven he had spent most of his time at his respectable, if second-tier, public school.

  “I went away to school, as many of my class do, therefore my time at the house was necessarily limited.”

  Jilly smiled at his unthinking snobbery before continuing, in a more forceful voice than she had so far used, “I suggest, Sir Arthur, that you have never lived at The Lodge and that you have spent next to no time there since you left in September 1946 at the age of eleven.”

  Sir Arthur said nothing, shrugging wearily towards a camera as Jilly continued.

  “You have never spent any time there yet you have regularly made substantial claims relating to the property.” She looked very deliberately at her notes. “Including, just in the past ten years, over seventy-two thousand pounds for maintenance and upkeep, at least sixty-five thousand pounds for remodelling improvements and a further fifteen thousand pounds for security cameras.” Jilly offered up a small prayer of thanks to Fergal who had been so very helpful, even to the point of providing her with the un-redacted photocopies of Sir Arthur’s expenses claims which were being displayed to the studio audience and to viewers.

  “How did you get hold of those?” Sir Arthur barked before he realised that dignified silence would have been more helpful to his cause. “Where did you get those?” he asked again. “They were redacted.”

  “Where I got them is immaterial, the fact is I have them.”

  The microphones picked up the murmur of surprise and disapproval that spread through the studio audience.

  “What I do with my own property is none of your business,” he added, looking past the cameras towards the audience.

  “I must beg to differ, Sir Arthur. I think the electorate has every right to be interested in your property, indeed, over the years we have probably paid enough through your expenses claims to own it.”

  Sir Arthur wondered how much research had really been done by this apparently inconsequential young woman.

  “And who might have informed you on such issues?” Sir Arthur counterattacked.

  “You accept that they are true?”

  “Of course I don’t. I want to know who has told you this pack of lies. You cannot have obtained those bills from legitimate sources.”

  “As a journalist—”

  “Journalist?” Sir Arthur interrupted. “You aren’t a journalist, you are someone who has recently graduated, no doubt from some ex-polytechnic that now thinks to call itself a university, with a third class degree in some worthless subject such as me
dia studies. You got this job just because you look presentable in front of a camera and can read an autocue.”

  Jilly looked down at her iPad and smiled. She knew that when Sir Arthur resorted to personal insult he was beaten, or at least if not beaten then on the defensive.

  The voice in her earpiece that had been giving her encouragement throughout the interview told her to glance at her camera for a short second, then look down again. As she did the voice in her earpiece continued calmly, “That’s good, good girl, you’ve got him by the fucking balls, don’t fucking let him go now.”

  She was beginning to enjoy herself.

  “I have done nothing wrong,” Sir Arthur repeated. “It is not my main home, I have never said it was. My wife and I have a flat in Chelsea, and have had for many years, but I only live there because I have to. My heart lives in that house on the Isle of Wight.”

  “So you keep saying, Sir Arthur. We are, as you say, limited on time so let us move on. But rather than leave the subject of The Lodge completely I would like to pick up on something that you said at the beginning of this interview. You said, and I quote, ‘My home, on the Isle of Wight, has been in the Lacey family since before the Civil War.’ What makes you say that when it cannot possibly be true?”

  “Of course it’s true.”

  “I don’t think so, Sir Arthur.” Jilly looked down at her notes before continuing. “The ownership of The Lodge was first transferred to a member of the Lacey family, your great-great-grandfather Sir Bernard Lacey, in the year 1815. Eleven years prior to that the property had been purchased from a family by the name of Caul who had owned it since Tudor times. There is no connection whatsoever between the Cauls and the Laceys and I’m sure we haven’t had a Civil War since the early nineteenth century.” She looked up at her guest, smiling innocently as she waited for an answer. When none came she persisted. “Sir Arthur, may I ask why you claim your family has lived in that house since the Civil War? I believe that ended in 1651, some hundred and fifty years before the first Lacey was in residence. Sir Arthur?”

  Jilly again prompted her guest for an answer but Sir Arthur had frozen. The moment had passed when he could tear off his microphone and storm out of the studio, as he had watched others do in the past. He was staring past Jilly and the cameras to a group of people who were waiting in the wings, all of whom he recognised. What, he wondered to himself, is Skye doing talking to that infernal woman Gayle Shepherd? And what the fuck is that boy doing with them? He began to realise that he had been wrong-footed and that the interview was about to head into territory for which he was unprepared.

  “Sir Arthur? Can you explain why you claim the house has been in your family since the Civil War?”

  “It was what I was told; what I have always been led to understand.” It was all he could say.

  “I have an interesting story to tell. Would you like to hear it?” Jilly asked innocently.

  “Do I have an option?” her guest responded coldly.

  “So far so good,” the producer whispered, giving a tentative thumbs up to his team. Everything was going according to the plan carefully worked through in rehearsals that morning. He knew that now things were going to start to get interesting. The expenses scandal had gone on for so long and no longer made headlines. But an extramarital affair of a government minister, albeit twenty-two years in the past, would get the tabloid editors’ juices flowing, especially when that illegitimate daughter was as attractive as Skye. An assistant producer picked up her phone and wrote a short tweet. @TruthonSunday about to get even more interesting. If you’re not watching switch on now! #embarrassment

  Jilly turned to the camera to address the viewers, reading from the autocue the introduction that had been approved by the lawyers. “Many of you may not be aware of the fact that Sir Arthur Lacey has a daughter. She was born in 1993 following a hushed-up affair with his then personal assistant. Some of you will recognise that, at that time, Sir Arthur was a government minister. The daughter’s name is Skye and, following the death of her mother when she was little more than one year old, she lived with her Aunt Audrey at The Lodge, the house Sir Arthur has been claiming all those years as his second home. Would you like to join me Skye?”

  Showing none of the nerves she felt, Skye walked towards the vacant chair next to Jilly, opposite her father who made no acknowledgement of her entrance. She turned to Jilly with an expression of calm concentration.

  “Skye, thank you for coming in today. I know that you don’t want to talk about the home you have lived in all your life,” Jilly made the contrast with Skye’s fact and Sir Arthur’s fiction very obvious, “but would you like to tell us why you believe your father is not being entirely honest?”

  Skye looked steadily at Jilly as the producer angled cameras to show her in the best light.

  “I would just like to tell everyone that in the twenty years I have lived at The Lodge my father has not spent one night there. I find it rather tragic that he feels he has to lie about it.”

  “Tragic? That’s a very powerful word, Skye.”

  “It seems to me to be very sad that there is so much that my father says that is simply not the truth. And I’m not just referring to his expenses claims and his never having lived at The Lodge. So much of everything he says about himself is a lie.” Skye continued to speak with an aura of calm confidence.

  “That is a very serious accusation. Can you tell us what you mean? We will then give your father the right to reply.”

  Skye took a deep breath before continuing. “It is well known that my father portrays himself as English through and through.”

  She paused as the monitors and screens around the country cut to the prepared videotape and watched three separate clips of occasions when Sir Arthur had used that exact phrase.

  As soon as the clips finished Skye continued. “But that is a total misrepresentation. My father has more foreign blood than British and is, on my calculation, only one eighth an Englishman.”

  “This girl is talking nonsense!” Sir Arthur blustered.

  Jilly nodded and carefully looked down at her notes. “Sir Arthur, is it true that your mother, Skye’s grandmother, was American?”

  “And so was Sir Winston Churchill’s mother, a fact that made him no less an Englishman,” he replied defiantly.

  “But I think you have to agree that many generations of Churchill’s father’s family were English, whereas I understand from Skye, who has researched this very thoroughly, yours is most definitely not.

  Her statement remained unanswered, though Sir Arthur did not move from his seat. He had been making a quick calculation that if he left in the middle of the programme he would only be hounded further by the press and he knew that they would be less civilised than Jilly Bouldnor would have to be in a live broadcast.

  Skye caught Jilly’s eye and began the speech she had practised many times. “As you say, I have been looking into the history of the Lacey family.”

  Sir Arthur immediately thought of Fergal Shepherd. He should never have trusted the young man. He should never have allowed his team to employ the Shepherd woman’s son, however good his qualifications might have been and he should, most definitely, never have trusted him to visit The Lodge. And, he thought angrily, it was undoubtedly that bloody boy who had stolen the expenses claims.

  The camera trained on his face showed his rising colour as Skye continued her explanation.

  “We’re mongrels really, we Laceys. My father, this ‘Englishman through and through’, has an American mother, a Welsh grandmother, an Anglo-Indian great-great-grandmother, one great-great-grandfather who was American and another who was from Corsica.”

  “As you say, a bit of a mongrel,” Jilly commented. “Not that there is anything wrong with that, I expect there are very few people who can call themselves ‘English through and through’, Sir Arthur?” After allowing a few seconds of silence to further embarrass her interviewee Jilly prompted Sir Arthur again for an answer. “You h
ave portrayed yourself as being a member of a family whose pedigree goes back to the Conqueror have you not?”

  Within seconds the screens cut to clips of three instances where he had said just that. When the clips had finished Skye looked again towards Jilly and on her nod continued. There was no maliciousness in her voice, simply a quiet contradiction of everything her father had stood for.

  “You say our family goes back a thousand years and that, for some reason, that makes your opinion worth more than everyone else’s. But everyone’s family goes back a thousand years doesn’t it?” She paused while a brief murmur of laughter from the studio audience died down. “You say that the Lacey family is one born to lead but that is simply not the case. Your claims that the Lacey family has been one of substance for a thousand years are as dishonest as your expenses claims.”

  There was a murmur of approval and some applause from the audience, and the producer, in his soundproof box, gave a firm thumbs up sign as his assistant tweeted Arthur Lacey’s illegitimate daughter puts the boot in on @TruthonSunday more to come.

  “There is, however, one man in our family tree who was a ruler,” Skye continued in a more serious voice, “though even he had not been born to rule. He was a soldier. He was a very good soldier, but just a soldier.”

  Jilly got a message in her earpiece and turned towards Gayle Shepherd who was waiting out of camera shot.

  “Before we follow up on that interesting thought may I now introduce my next guest. Gayle Shepherd is the leading light of the pro-Europeans and an outspoken critic of Sir Arthur’s and, some say, a future leader of her party. Welcome Gayle.”

  The audience clapped generously as Gayle walked up to the chair next to Sir Arthur. The contrast between Sir Arthur’s increasing discomfort and Gayle Shepherd’s assured confidence was picked up clearly by the cameras.

  “Welcome Gayle,” Jilly repeated, flipping her tablet to reveal the page of notes Fergal had given her. “I understand you have an interest in Sir Arthur’s story, apart, that is, from being on opposite sides of the European fence?”