by Mavis Cheek
As usual, I heard Robert say in his best breezy tone, ‘Hugo. All set?’ and obviously Hugo said that he was, so Robert added with absolute conviction and toe-curling bonhomie, ‘Yup – really looking forward to it too. No, no, never been to Florida – strange to say – fantastic, absolutely fantastic. Oh, absolutely. Home of our fathers. It’ll be good to see where the whole operation began. Really good.’ I thought, squirming, that he did not have to be quite so apparently thrilled. And then Hugo must have said that he had been to Florida and that it was fabulous because Robert said again, ‘Well – we’re both really looking forward to the trip. Really.’ Then he listened, making little grunting noises of agreement, and I could picture him nodding before saying, in a much more serious tone now, ‘Oh sure, sure – given the present climate – it probably does seem a bit profligate. But on the other hand it does what it’s supposed to do and we get a lot of mileage out of it –’ He listened again. Grunted again. And then finished with great good cheer. ‘How’s Lorna? Good, good. Yes – Nina is fine. She can’t wait either. Loves it. Just loves it.’ And then he put down the phone and groaned.
‘Liar, liar, pants on fire,’ I said quietly. But Robert did not so much as laugh, dammit, which goes to show just how queasy the whole situation really was.
‘What was Hugo saying?’
‘We may have to tone it all down in future. Given the state of things generally. He thinks it looks a bit self-indulgent for the company.’
‘Well, at least that’s something,’ I said. ‘Florida! Jesus H Christ. I don’t know how you stopped yourself laughing. Liar, liar.’
He did not look at all amused. He merely picked up his newspaper and finished his glass of wine.
At least for the rest of the evening and during the ten o’clock news, Robert remained subdued and somewhat under rather than atop his high horse. He was obviously irritated by what I had said, but aware of the truth of it. This is a confounding position to put your partner in. On the one hand you have dealt out personal criticism, on the other you have allowed them no room for manoeuvre. Similarly, although I understood, I was irritated myself. I couldn’t quite get the contradiction out of my mind. The problem was, it seemed, that like nicking the office pencils and not calling it theft, truth was a matter of degree. I was just as guilty of this application of truthfulness as Robert, as most people, really. And how could you expect a politician, journalist or banker to be truthful, when you were just as much a liar in your day-to-day life? Not much of a journey from there to a grey-haired political grandee assuring the House that his expenses were all in order and that to continue his awfully important political work he needed the rest and relaxation of a visit to a lap-dancing club from time to time.
I went to bed that night with the seed of a pea even more increased in size and I pondered upon this ambiguity, little thinking how the radical Nina of yesteryear would surface as a result of the experience. I saw the innocence of my youth in which I could firmly adhere to all that agitprop because I didn’t actually have to do anything about it. Elbert Hubbard’s ‘Live truth instead of professing it’ recurred and recurred during the night. Beside me Robert slept, easy breathing, still and at peace. I so wanted to be like him but at three o’clock I was still churning. Elbert Hubbard is better known for his other, more famous apophthegm: ‘Life is just one damn thing after another.’ A slick saying which I just added to the pile as I searched for the comfort of sleep. Sometimes you can know too many such quotes. I have a very good memory for them. My employer and friend, Brian Donnolly, inappropriately nicknamed Brando, once asked me to find where the latter quotation came from and I’d waded through quite a number of Elbert’s sayings to get to it. The one about truth lodged and stayed. And kept me thinking, even in my fitful dreams, for most of that night.
Two
Fletcherise: to chew thoroughly.
Mitford Mathew’s Dictionary of Americanisms, 1956
NOT A GREAT deal has changed over the centuries, alas. One of the great benefits of the secure middle-class life is that it is still, usually, though not always, the husband who brings home the bacon, which leaves the secure middle-class wife free to work at what she chooses. She might be a barrister, she might be a teacher – or she might – as in my case – be a researcher. Middle-class wives tend not to work as cleaners or food packers or shop assistants (unless it’s in a friend’s boutique) and when governments urge wives and mothers to get off benefits and go back to work even though they have small children, generally speaking they are not offering them jobs like mine but jobs like – well – cleaners, food packers and shop assistants. Bad enough that one cleans the lavatory in one’s own home but tipping up for work every day and cleaning someone else’s? Who, given the choice, would select that as a job option? I pinched myself nearly every day that I was blessed with both the good life and a friend who wrote books and was lazy and was prepared to pay me. And if you think this is about to be a story concerning the loss of my comfort zone and a denouement in which I end up cleaning toilets and Robert lies around drinking himself into an unemployed stupor and watching daytime TV, forget it. This did not happen. It seldom, in the real world, does. In the real world all that happens is that those very far down the pit get pushed down further, while those of us who are up somewhere near the daylight merely have to switch allegiance from Waitrose to Netto and possibly get rid of the second BMW.
Brando had made a fortune out of a book on quirky words and their origins. It was one of those Christmas loo books that sold phenomenally well and got taken up by America, then the rest of the world. Generally it was thought that many people owned it and few had read it. Brando did not mind in the least. Millions of copies were sold worldwide and the fortune he made was well invested. If the credit crunch affected him, it too was likely to be uncomfortable rather than devastating. As a man who had been to a minor public school, become a minor actor and starred in a minor television soap, he could not have been more delighted to live out his days in a major self-indulgent pastime. He was lucky. The book came about while he idled and jotted away time on the set of the soap. He produced, with my help, one or two follow-ups, which did quite well, and cheerfully dilettanted his way through life. And although he was approached by the publisher of Catchy Words and Quirky Phrases to produce another gold-spinner, he never did. He wanted to indulge himself in something altogether darker and more adult. He chose to devote his entire working life (something of a misnomer considering plumbers and farmers and firepersons) to a series of gazetteers on the seamier side of tourisms’ most revered shrines. We were currently working on a really good one, which was, of course, Venice.
One of the joys about Robert’s job was that it left me enough free time to do what I liked best, which was to poke my nose into anything, anything at all – I just loved rushing about and looking things up and hunting things down and cracking it. I worked as a parliamentary researcher before the children and that is a real challenge – when someone stands up in the House and declares that black is most definitely black, you then have to speed off and find something that proves – conclusively – that it is – largely – white. And if it does give you a slightly cynical view of the veracity of facts, it is a great way to earn a living. Already my radicalism must have been on the wane, for politics then were more a matter of expediency than truth and I rose to the challenge of finding a way. My mother, on hearing of my appointment, just said that I was bound to be good at it as I always was a nosy parker in need of winning an argument.
After marriage and during children, Brando had used me occasionally and it was nice to get out and about. Now, with more free time and less to do, Brando’s gazetteer scheme was perfect. We did a bit of preliminary selection – I mean, there was no point, really, in looking for horrible things to write about in Zurich or Bonn, whereas Istanbul or Berlin were rich in all those lovely things that make you shudder and be so glad that you live now … Once the preliminary stuff was complete, we began. There was no payroll
exactly – I gave him a list of my expenses once in a while, an approximate number of hours I thought I’d spent, and he would settle it more or less accurately. I can say, quite truthfully, that I never fiddled anything. I’d always supposed that this was because I had more than enough to live on – but since our own dear political expenses scandal, I realised that it was because I was not greedy. I was many things that I would rather not be but that made up for some of them. To know that you are not greedy is a very wonderful thing. In my moments of bleakness, when I sit in a heap and think how horrible I am, that is what I cling to. Pathetic, I know, but we all need a spar on the water. The sporadic nature of Brando’s payments to me meant that it was never going to be a full-time job, which was perfect. Robert was rather impressed with the amount I was paid per hour, and mighty impressed with the efficient look of my office upstairs. Apart from that he never asked any questions. Just as I never asked him any questions about IT. With the obvious difference that I know nothing of it and could frame not one.
Brando’s plan was that I would do a bit of research, find out something interesting – the seamier or more grisly the better – and then he would go off to discover more about it. There was nothing new under the sun about any of these places – Rome to Lisbon, Athens to Paris – such dirt as existed had been dished times aplenty – but putting it all together was a good idea and would probably do well. It kept Brando busy and on the move and we liked each other’s company. And if I occasionally wished that it was me who caught the plane and flew off to see the results of my research for myself, I never gave it more than a fleeting thought. Brando took a few photographs, wrote notes about what he saw, indulged in a bit of high life, before coming back to his overstuffed house in Kensington and handing it all over to me to turn into reasonable prose. After setting up each place we agreed that Venice was by far the most rewarding of all the seamy sites we’d chosen. There never was such a city, historically, for laying clean satin sheeting over mouldering filth.
The day after the Hugo phone call Brando and I were in our favourite restaurant for lunch. Had I so wished I could have had lunch in style most days and called it work, but you soon learn that a long and large midday meal leads to crying when stepping onto the bathroom scales. A very good lesson about the value of riches – one which Venetians, certainly, never learned despite all their sumptuary laws and bracelet burning – is that everything does, indeed, pall. If there was a downside to Brando’s way of life it was that he could have anything – well, nearly – that his heart desired, which took away that delicious condiment of life – delayed gratification. True, Robert and I had a life that was a little dulled by comfort – but not enough to make us want to do anything about it.
So, to keep its sparkle I agreed to lunch with Brando rarely and any other meetings happened at my home. After these meetings I brought forth the occasional piece of order out of chaos, but I think we both knew that the travel series would probably never be finished. It was all far too cosy, far too much fun for either of us to wish it. And just in case you might misconstrue any of this, Brando is indefatigably gay. And I do mean indefatigably. And when I say gay I do not mean cheery. Most gay men like to have one close female friend and I was his. We had been in each other’s lives for a long time and we knew each other very well. We met when I was waitressing and at university. He was ten years my senior, resting and able to keep one cup of coffee going for an entire afternoon. He liked to look out of the window at the passing possibilities, as he put it, and he made me laugh a lot. He was beautiful then but something of a picture in the attic now. Robert tolerated him and Brando tolerated Robert, they seldom met, and that kept everything smooth.
Brando poured me a glass of very pale greenish wine, the scent of which was instant and betokened a very nice bottle of whatever it was. Some kind of Soave, I guessed, but I didn’t embark on that conversation – which would have been a long one – as there were other things I wanted to talk about. As we sipped and waited for our food I told him about the anomaly of truth in our household and how it was like a bit of grit working away inside me. What had begun fairly flippantly was becoming much more serious. ‘You see, I’ve started to think about truth and how we all lie – and once you start thinking about anything in a compulsive manner, it just gets worse.’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I do know what you mean.’ He looked around searchingly.
‘I do not mean sex, Brando, I mean little things that go circling in your head and buzz away like a needy wasp until you do something to settle them.’
‘Isn’t life hard enough?’ he said. He held up his glass and squinted through it. ‘Why make problems for yourself? Truth? What’s that? I taste this wine as one thing, you taste it as another. Truth, as dear Byron said as he sat on the banks of the Grand Canal, truth is stranger than fiction.’ He sipped and winked through the glass again. ‘And anyway – as you say – none of us is wholly truthful.’ He looked over the rim of his glass now, wide-eyed with pretended innocence. ‘Not even me with you. And I have absolutely nothing to lose.’
‘Yes you do.’
‘What?’
‘People finding out that you wear a toupee …’
The surprise on his face was, for once, genuine. ‘You know that?’
‘Of course.’
‘And you never said you knew. How very dishonest of you. And anyway, it’s called a hairpiece.’
‘Brando! I was being discreet. That’s unfair.’
‘No it isn’t. Anyway – I thank you for your – discretion. We’ll call it that. Which, I opine, is even more dishonest.’
‘Sensitive, actually. But – since we’re on the subject – I’ve always wanted to know how you manage when – you know –’
‘No,’ he said, even more guilelessly, ‘I do not know – and neither – ever – given our predilections – will you.’ He leaned forward and chinked his glass to mine. Our calves’ liver, pink and juicy with blood, arrived and we began to eat.
‘Why aren’t we having it à la veneziana?’ I asked.
‘Onions,’ he said, smiling at someone over my shoulder, ‘are not pleasant accompaniments to the finer things in life. Those Venetians were – are – an unrefined lot – quite prepared to get down and dirty in the cause of their city – including smelling of cooked onions in an embrace. Oh, what a feast we will find when we dig even deeper. Theirs is probably the least truthful and the most grubbily interesting of all those city states. Wonderfully dreadful.’ He went on smiling over my shoulder.
‘You hope,’ I said. ‘I’ve always loved the place and never thought of it as grubby before. Splendidly seamy, perhaps. Gorgeously gross. But not plain grubby. Robert and I had some very nice times there before the children –’
‘Nice?’
‘Well, maybe a little bit more than nice. She’s sexy, she’s the serenely, satinate Serenissima – the grand deceiver.’
‘Absolutely. So, my dear Nina Fauntleroy, immersing ourselves in Venice is rather like living within one big lie, yes? And you’ll enjoy that in your new-found revelatory mode. She lies, she cheats, she enchants – the perfect courtesan. Can you take her on if you’re feeling so pious?’
‘I wish you’d stop addressing me as if I were a nun.’ I poured more wine into my glass. ‘I suppose there are deep and dark bits – of course there are – but I’ve always thought of her mostly as a beautiful place, absolutely romantic. But sexy, too.’
‘Hmm,’ he said, giving the passing waiter – a young man with a square jaw and stubble – the eye. ‘Exactly. The Great Seducer. We shall have some fun with her.’ He smiled over my shoulder. ‘As you should with all the best whores.’ The waiter turned, Brando smiled, the waiter smiled back nervously. Brando raised his voice a little. ‘She is so divinely spellbinding that you’d forgive her anything.’ Impossible to say of whom this was addressed – La Serenissima or the rapidly retreating young man. Brando turned back to me a little reluctantly.
‘Not for you,’ I said
.
‘What do you know,’ he said, in mock contempt, ‘about putting yourself about?’
‘One day I might shock you and have a go myself.’
‘You? Mrs Purity? Don’t make me laugh …’
Fauntleroy? Purity? He certainly knew how to make cosy goodness seem a barb of inadequacy.
‘Florida,’ I said later, gazing mournfully at the empty wine bottle. ‘Florida … I just can’t bear the thought of it.’ I ate the last piece of cheese with a flourish of disdain.
‘You must do your wifely duty, Mrs Porter.’
‘But Florida, Brando. And Robert just lied to Hugo down the phone, smooth as butter, and said how much we – we – were looking forward to it. One minute he was jumping up and down at the iniquity of our beloved ex-prime minister and the next he was telling Hugo we actually wanted to go to the bloody place.’
‘Ever been?’
‘Well – no.’
‘Well then.’
‘I’ve never been hit over the head with a mallet but I know it would hurt. And now, with all this financial meltdown and cheating banking liars and whatnot –’
‘What a delicate way you have with your description of the complete collapse of capitalism and its most nourishing hotbed.’
‘Well, I can’t think that anywhere in the States is going to be very jolly at the moment. Anyway, it’s not the place, or the people necessarily. It’s the silliness, the falseness of the whole set-up. Robert and Hugo and all that lot acting like a boyhood of Peter Pans. If that’s business then you can keep it. Business is buying and selling and making a profit on goods, not selling yourself with the deal.’