by Mavis Cheek
Gloria Steinem, still beautiful, still speaking out at seventy-five, famously said that the Truth will set you free – but it will piss you off first. Truth-telling, truth embracing, not only pissed me off, it apparently pissed everyone else in the room off, too. Gloria Steinem had a wonderful wit. And honesty. When she was asked if being a stunning woman helped her career she said that it certainly did at first, but later – when she wanted to be taken seriously – she was still thought of as just a chick. Oh, how I missed those glory days of women’s liberation when, despite the current souring of its history, we did have a lot of laughs and we did discover that women’s humour was just as funny as men’s – only different. We knew we were held back by the glass ceiling and sticky floor and we were honourably set to change it. Nobody got depressed, there was no time to reflect, we were in the thick of the war. Now it’s the uneasy peace and the glass ceiling is still in place and the sticky floor is less a sign of women’s desire to rise than women’s inability to manage everything they have to do and keep the kitchen floor clean too. Robert, along with the shirts and milk bottles, had always been good at cleaning the floor. I’d watch him do it with that extraordinary focus and dedication that is one hundred per cent male and enviable and not a little infuriating. But when he’d finished it was shining. And he never went down on his knees to do it, he always stood. A good lesson. He was also – still is – good at cleaning windows – with the same ferocious dedication – and always did it looking up.
I turned the corner and there were those very windows now. Gleaming in the April sun. Opening onto silent rooms and empty chairs. The mental muscle from the journey diminished rapidly as I walked up the path, opened the door, entered my totally silent house and felt totally empty myself. But there was hope. Two messages winked at me from our ancient answerphone. I pressed the button and listened eagerly, like a girl who’s just been on a date and hopes he’ll ring. (Where’s the emancipation in that? Who cares? It’s what happens.) Neither message was from Robert. The first was from Brando asking me to ring him back. The second was from my best friend Toni. Now there was a can of worms to be opened if ever there was one. I took the coward’s way out and rang Brando first. The thought of speaking to Toni, with my new undertaking for truth, did nothing for my blood pressure. It also brought out the very possible latent alcoholic in me. In ‘The Fall’ – aptly named given my present predicament – Camus said that sincerity could hardly be considered a condition of friendship because truth was a destructive passion. The wisdom of the thinking French. If I was going to call Toni back, it could only be done with a large glass of wine to hand, and it was too soon for that.
I thought Brando’s call had been made remarkably early until I realised that Italy was an hour ahead of us. He, most certainly, would have a large glass of something to hand as he sat on the Gritti terrace, raised his glass to the health of Salute (or she to him more appropriately, given that she is its embodiment) and gazed on La Serenissima. How very much I wanted to be there with him, or anywhere, really, that did not involve returning a call to my oldest friend. Toni and I had met at university and our friendship largely survived because of lack of truthfulness. As most friendships survive. And now I must include her in my pledge. If I had never been truthful with Toni on a regular basis – as, I was sure, she had never been with me – I had been particularly untruthful in the last four years. Since she began her affair with the horrible Bob. Nearly thirty years of good, solid, looking-the-other-way friendship between us and all likely to wash straight down the plughole once I made that call. It just didn’t seem fair. Piss you off, indeed, Gloria. Piss you off, indeed.
I made myself a cup of coffee, settled down at the kitchen table and tapped in Brando’s number. He answered immediately and I could hear the sounds of Venice bustling all about him. If I couldn’t quite detect the slap of water on stone, I felt that I could.
‘How’s the truth drug going?’ he asked affably.
‘Predictably,’ I said.
‘Still convinced?’
‘Pass.’
He laughed.
‘Is that why you rang? To see how little Lady Fauntleroy was doing?’
‘Don’t be peevish. I rang because those letter boxes – the lions’ mouths, or gargoyles, or whatever they were –’
‘Mostly lions’ heads but sometimes human grotesques. Not gargoyles, Brando – gargoyles have the added attraction of spouting water. They went under the collective name of Bocca del Leone, and were dotted about the place in the name of public vigilance. You just slipped in your written secret denunciation and let the rest take its course. Think of them as truth boxes, if you like.’
‘Or untruth boxes?’
‘Indeed. It got so corrupt at one point that the authorities banned them unless you put your name to the accusation. After that they became more meticulous.’
‘Well, we need some case histories or something. A touch of the spine-chilling. Otherwise they’re hardly news.’
‘I told you that.’
‘My, you are snappish today. So find out some dirty deeds to dish. They were sometimes used to check on adultery, weren’t they? There must be records of real women who were tested – and failed.’
‘Or real men?’
‘Unlikely they’d do a truth test on a man, surely? But anyone will do. What happened to the women who failed? There must be something appalling recorded somewhere.’
‘Maybe. I’m not sure if the meticulousness of process stretched to accused women. Unlikely.’
‘And some are still there?’
‘There are a few. There’s a good one on the riva degli Schiavoni, hidden but intact. And one in the Doge’s Palace. So you won’t be sending the punters off to look at a blank space – even if we don’t have a record of a particular punishment. I’ll see what I can find out,’ I said wearily.
‘You can make something up if you like.’ He laughed, not very nicely, and then added with relish, ‘Oh, no. You don’t do that any more, do you?’
‘Not very funny, Brando.’
‘You do sound fed up.’
‘The score is,’ I said, ‘that you have only been there for a day and a half and already you are twitching and poking at me and I have just seen my husband off to Florida – where he may well decide to take up with a nubile young Disney enthusiast on the grounds that his wife has deserted him for some old singleton called Truth and it’s all too much.’
‘Male or female?’
‘Truth is always female.’
‘I didn’t mean that. I meant the nubile young thing in Florida.’
‘I’ll ring you back this afternoon,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to ring Toni now.’
‘And speak truth?’
‘And speak truth.’
‘Now that is a conversation I wish I could listen in on. Are you going to stick to your principles?’
‘Of course.’
‘And you’ll call me back?’
‘Once I’ve found out what you want.’
‘Juicy now. I want them to be juicy. And –’
‘Yes?’ I snapped.
‘Is Robert really going to Disney?’
‘Unlikely, but you never know.’
‘Good Lord,’ he said. ‘Thank God I’m not corporate.’
*
I went upstairs to make our bed – just to delay things a little. I tried to remind myself that women who worried that their husbands would stray were insecure. I quite liked it if I saw Robert across a crowded room and he was chatting to a woman or two. Mine, I used to think comfortably, all mine. Now it felt wrong pulling up the duvet on that empty expanse. You don’t think about the marital bed and all that it symbolises until you think you might lose it. If I remembered rightly the beds in America were huge. Robert would feel lost. He always needed to cuddle right up. Or maybe he really would find someone to cuddle up to? I tugged the duvet back sharply. That was quite enough wallowing. To hell with coffee – I’d take the burgundy. And then I’d
ring Toni. Perhaps conscience, like truth, doth make cowards of us all. I certainly did not feel brave.
Our room. The bed was smooth. The dressing table was empty of his things and he had not taken his robe. Of course he hadn’t – hardly because he planned to frolic naked – they supplied them in hotels, didn’t they? There were a couple of empty hangers on the floor, which I picked up and hung back on his side of the wardrobe. They looked empty and accusing as they swung there along with the other empty hangers. He had even taken his black jeans, and his black leather jacket. The children laughed at him when he bought it and he wore it rarely. I never laughed at him in it and I wasn’t laughing now. Those black jeans and that leather jacket meeting up with a gorgeous woman of a certain age on the prowl certainly wouldn’t make her laugh either. I slammed the wardrobe door shut. And went to the telephone to try Robert’s mobile. Nothing. I didn’t know whether it was better or worse to make the call to Toni in this frame of mind. But at least I could now overcome my worries about having a drink. It was noon at last.
Antonia and Georgina. We sounded like heroines out of a Barbara Pym novel and – in our contrasts – we were not far off. At university we were known, with cheerful affection, as chalk and cheese. How to explain the yawning physical gap between us? With deep envy, is how. Toni was very small – only about five foot one – and very dark – hair almost blue it was so black and eyes so large and lustrous in their perfect, pale, oval face that they were two seductive inky pools. And seduce they did. Should I go on? Should I explain how it felt to be five foot seven and feel like a giantess? How in the summer Toni’s skin turned a gleaming café crème while mine looked like someone had been flicking marmalade at a canvas? How she had a way of moving that was the slide of a cat to my castanet knees? And how – for all this – we were mates? You have to like someone very much to overcome such terrible barriers as size four shoes and Degas hands. I was brainier. That was the only – very small – compensation. Then it scarcely mattered to me. But now – now – if I were being truthful and not quasi-mature – it also did not seem a great compensation.
Fortunately we did not share the same taste in men. I wanted someone tall and solid who would make me feel dainty, and who had a radical view of the world and a Pythonesque sense of humour. Toni said that anyone over five foot eight gave her a crick in the neck, that anyone with a strong political bias was boring, and that what she really liked so far as humour was concerned were the two Ronnies. Perfect. She married Arturo, a wonderfully romantic Italian, five feet eight inches tall, mama’s pasta around his girth, a strong footballing bias, no politics except the usual Italian view of the world that whoever was in power needed removing, and who laughed at nearly everything. Arturo was adorable, if a bit diddy, and wrote a European sports column for his Rome-based newspaper. Toni was a legal secretary. She intended to become a solicitor but got pregnant while training and that – plus ça change – was that. She did not mind. They were both delighted at the time and married straight away – and they were happy.
And then, years later, two children on, somewhere along the way, she met Bob. Bob was six foot two, had been a Tory candidate of the hang ’em and flog ’em school, was unreconstructed and seemed to find no-one very funny except himself. Bob was very fond of his own opinions and the starry-eyed Toni was fond of his own opinions, too. Robert couldn’t stand him and I couldn’t stand him and, it seemed, even his own wife couldn’t stand him. He had never had children – out of choice – which was not surprising – they would take too much attention – and Toni would sit and gaze at him as he spoke as if he were Socrates to her Aristotle. I bore it – as most of us do with our friends’ totally appalling choices – because I was Toni’s best pal – and because I was a coward and because I could lie through my teeth. When she said to me tearfully that she could not imagine living without him, I did not say what I wanted to which was: well, bloody well try.
Dear husband Robert – who told Bob pretty sharply that he was never, ever called Bob himself – said that someone should tell Arturo what was going on. I suggested he volunteer. No one told Arturo. Robert blinked at the situation and we all just sat in a heap and watched in stupefaction as Bob and Toni became more and more intertwined and Arturo became more and more unsettled but unsuspecting. One thing about being brought up by an adoring mama with pasta, it seemed it made him immune to ideas of rejection. When he became really anxious and confided his anxieties to his sister she told him it was probably to do with Toni’s age – women started to act strangely after their fortieth birthday – and Arturo decided this must be so. We all breathed a sigh of relief. With luck the ill-matched adulterers would fizzle away and Arturo need never know. Some hope.
The affair became more and more magnetic for Toni as well as more and more painful. Bob did logistics. He went to the Middle East and did them. He went to Romania and did them. He went anywhere and everywhere to logistics people’s troubles away. And while he was doing so, Toni stayed at home and mourned. About the only piece of truth I ever dished out to her was that I was certain, absolutely certain, that Bob never had foreign affairs. He was far too unadventurous for that. I never quite understood how the two of them became an item except that they met when Toni’s practice was dealing with some matter of international law and she fell off a chair into his arms. I imagine the sight of my lovely friend standing on a chair fixing the light or something and then tumbling like a featherweight into his manly chest was too much even for Bob’s cold blood. I never asked. Nor did I ever ask why they did not run off together. I did not have to. Right from the world go he told Toni that it was out of the question. The wife. Bob’s wife was the money behind the business. Divorce her, divorce his beloved trucks. Clever. At a stroke he made himself desirably unavailable. Toni was completely hooked.
*
Truth was not an option. It was perfectly and crazily dreadful and I was Toni’s listening ear. Not once, in all this time, had I told her what I really thought of Bob. Somehow I’d managed to fudge it when she went all dewy-eyed and showed me the roses that he had sent from Perth or Peru, or told me touching tales of his loving kindnesses as performed in a motorway Travelodge. Arturo continued to be sweetly baffled by his wife’s changing moods and absences but accepted them. It made me wince and it broke my heart. But up until now it was Mates United – I could not, would not, say anything that might break our bond. Well, it was no good avoiding the issue any longer. Toni had rung, Toni had left a message, at some point I must ring her back. That point was now. Maybe the god of little truths would take pity and show me a way. Maybe Toni just wanted to see me for my own sake and not for my listening ear. And maybe pre-bacon material was suddenly available in an airborne position.
I rang. While it was ringing I looked longingly at the glass of wine. I resisted. Not yet. I had to be very, very clearheaded for as long as I could. The nearest I had ever got to telling Toni what I really felt about the whole situation, and what I really felt about logistical Bobby, was to buy her a copy of Sylvia Plath’s Ariel poems – they seemed appropriate – and, predictably, she loved them, moons and yew trees and all. Now the words ‘A ring of gold with the sun in it? / Lies. Lies and a grief. Lies and a grief …’ floated round in my head, and the forlorn anthem ‘Love, love, my season’ was about right. ‘Love is a shadow. / How you lie and cry after it …’ I mouthed, as I waited for her to answer. Would it be the glooms or would it be the joys? I prepared myself for either and was therefore shocked into confusion by her opening question.
‘Georgina, have you and Robert had a row? A serious one?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Then what have you been getting up to?’
‘What?’ What had I been getting up to?
‘I know all about it.’
‘All about what? And hello, Toni – Antonia – and just how are you?’
She ignored this. ‘Well, I heard from Sally that you’ve refused to go away with Robert. So …?’ Sally was one of our mutual f
riends. Local to me, she was a hearty woman with several dogs and bright red walker’s cheeks. I couldn’t imagine how she knew – and then I remembered that Alec her husband and Robert sometimes shared the Tube to work. If that were so then things were even worse than I thought – Robert, in that masculine tradition, was not usually one to divulge the personal unless someone was threatening to pull out his fingernails.
‘Toni, I can’t talk now –’
‘Why – is there someone there? Someone, perhaps, who shouldn’t be there?’
This beggared belief.
‘No, it’s just that I’ve got to go out to the British Library and get some stuff that Brando wants. He’s in Venice at the moment. Are you OK? Just give me the headlines.’
‘I’m OK. I’m more worried about you.’
‘Don’t be.’
‘Is it – ?’
‘What?’ I said sharply.
‘Well – can you have lunch tomorrow?’
‘Difficult.’
‘Why?’
Well, what could I say? Difficult had been perfectly truthful but that was as far as it went. She knew Robert was away and she knew Brando was away and she knew Tassie and Johnno were away. She also knew that my mother was hale as a horse so I couldn’t even summon up a ministering visit to her. Anyway, lying – even in the name of a friendship – was, of course, out.
‘Yes, then,’ I said. ‘But late.’
We agreed to meet at a busy pasta place. Somehow I thought it might help to be somewhere bustling and noisy and slightly rushed. Toni had wanted to go to Anya’s which was discreet and perfect for conversation. This boded ill.
‘Ask,’ I said.
‘Ask what?’
‘I mean, let’s meet at Ask. Two o’clock. Got to go now. Bye.’
I set off for the British Library feeling very low. This truth thing was supposed to make me feel better, wasn’t it? And while on the subject of truth there were those utterly fallible Bocca del Leone to consider. It wasn’t hard once I started researching them to find juicy ones. They were all juicy. In fact, it seemed that right up until the end of the eighteenth century popping a little note into that ever-open mouth, and denouncing your fellow Venetian with the biggest lie you could get away with, was the favoured sport of the tribe. Annoyingly, but unsurprisingly, Brando was right. Men were never called on to take the lie-detector test in matters of infidelity. Only women. Predictable. The lady was required to put her hand into the mouth of the lion and if it was hurt or damaged on retrieval, or couldn’t be freed, the lady was guilty. Imagine a nervous young woman, innocent or not, knowing her life depended on an unsullied hand. You’d shake, wouldn’t you? And the thin opening of the rough stone would scrape away at your delicate, white flesh. Oh, it didn’t bear thinking about. Mind you, in matters of politics, men did not escape the mouth test. Notes of denunciation were almost always used against men in matters of trade and state. ’Twas ever thus. The domestic, trivial stuff stays down among the women, the world stage belongs to men.