The Truth About Julia: A Chillingly Timely Psychological Novel

by Schaffner Anna

  Then, to my surprise, Rose giggled. After their painfully acrimonious sparring match, I hadn’t expected this at all. Timothy clearly didn’t, either. His features softened instantly. He, too, smiled, and then looked at his wife so tenderly, and so full of sadness, that it made my heart melt.

  ‘Yes, that’s true,’ Rose said. ‘Julia’s friends in that shop really did treat us with such ridiculous disdain that it was almost funny. After a few visits, we stopped going there, though. It was just too awkward. Besides, their vegetables were dreadful – ugly as sin, sour and small, either unripe or rotten, often worm-infested, and really completely unfit for human consumption. I mean, who on earth grows that stuff? Do you remember the so-called “pumpkin” we bought there, Tim? That foul little ball of mush, for which they charged us eight pounds or something ridiculous like that?’

  Timothy nodded, and smiled at Rose. She smiled back at him. But then his face became serious again, and he continued: ‘Julia also went to a lot of anti-globalization events and got very engaged with the Occupy movement. She travelled across the UK to take part in various campaigns, and even went to Europe a few times, to protest wherever representatives of the World Bank, the WTO, the IMF, the G8, and so on were meeting. She’d always tell me about these gatherings in quite some detail when we met.

  ‘She didn’t come to see us at home very often at all. Mainly for family celebrations and things like that, and very reluctantly. Once, she brought along her friend from the shop whom she was living with, a sullen, pale girl who didn’t say a single word to us, and refused even to accept a cup of tea – presumably because it wasn’t organic or something like that.’

  ‘Yes,’ Rose added. ‘That girl just stared at us in silence, as though we were the scum of the earth. It beggared belief. Utterly discourteous!’

  ‘Well, and then there was my birthday this January, which Rose has already mentioned. After that I only saw her a few more times before the attack. And obviously, we haven’t seen her since. She won’t let us visit. Rose felt pretty sore about the birthday dinner incident, and had finally given up trying to convince Julia to come and see us. For quite a while, it had been a rather one-sided pursuit, the attempt to stay in contact. We got the impression that she didn’t care very much whether she saw us or not... But I just couldn’t stand the idea of losing touch completely. I insisted on our monthly dinners, even though they had become rather tense affairs. She’d completely ceased to be dialogical. Whenever I posed a question or an objection to her, she just broke into long, angry monologues. But still… I mean, I would never, in a million years, have imagined that… ’

  One last time, Timothy and Rose fell silent. Then Rose checked her watch. ‘Gosh,’ she said, ‘look at the time, Tim. No wonder I feel so awfully tired. We’ve kept Clare here for far too long. Let’s go home now. It’s been a very tiring day.’

  Then we all got up to leave. Timothy helped Rose into her coat, and then the three of us went down the stairs to the lobby in silence. Having said our goodbyes, I watched them walk down the street to their car. Timothy put his arm around Rose, and she let her head sink on his shoulder.

  X

  I felt strangely disappointed after the interview. I had expected something else – some definitive pointers, or at least some clues, and I couldn’t help but feel that there was something important they hadn’t told me. I had hoped to meet more extreme characters – narcissists or psychopaths; authoritarian right-wingers or religious fanatics; passive-aggressive manipulators or irascible tyrants. Instead, I encountered two likeable people with a few completely ordinary human flaws, who were utterly heartbroken by what had happened. I had no doubt that Rose and Timothy were caring, well-intentioned and, by and large, good parents. Yes, Timothy was probably too enamoured with his daughter, while Rose might be on the colder side of the motherly spectrum, but that didn’t explain anything. On the contrary, I thought, those tendencies actually balanced each other out rather neatly.

  I felt for them, George. It was painful to watch them turn on each other so viciously, like characters in a late Bergman film. It was my impression that the scene was out of character, but then again, we simply can’t ever know how couples interact with each other behind closed doors – whether they are loving and gentle, bored and indifferent or cruel and constantly at each other’s throats. Public coupledom is always a performance, a way of presenting a specific image to others that may or may not correspond to authentic feelings. We only ever catch theatrical glimpses of the lives of others. For a long time, I had assumed that your marriage was a haven of bliss, before you confessed to me one day what was happening behind the scenes.

  It’s possible that Rose and Timothy’s dark blame game was just an expression of raw grief and helplessness. But then again, some of the things they said to each other seemed to refer to older grudges. Some of the reproaches attacked the very core of their characters: cold Rose and Timothy the liberal weakling. The achievement-obsessed mother and the blindly adoring, all-too-forgiving father: I have seen this constellation in many a family, and the gender roles are flexible.

  I have always felt uneasy when forced to witness the poisonous afterlives of disappointed expectations. They disturb me, these ugly acts of mutual recrimination, the bitter fruit of years of repressed resentment. I have seen what it can do to people. I have seen how Amanda battled so hard (twice) against her husbands’ gradual falling out of love with her; how she desperately attempted to change in order to please them and thereby halt the process. The first disliked her timidity in public, and eventually left her for an actress. The second wanted her to be thinner and more glamorous and didn’t hide the fact. He always struck me as shallow and as a woman-hater who didn’t even bother to pretend he felt otherwise.

  But the corrosiveness works both ways, not only when you’re at the receiving end, but also when you’re the one who is easily irritated by trifles. I felt like an ogre every time I realized that I simply wouldn’t be able to stay in a relationship any longer with the men I’ve dated, and I usually kept my reasons secret, since they worried me. I am sure they were only symptoms in any case: it’s more than likely that I didn’t just break up with Alan because I disliked the way he constantly swallowed consonants that I deemed important, and that there was more to my refusal of Oscar’s proposal than the fact that I could no longer bear the sight of his pink comedy socks. I found the way in which Theo cluttered up my apartment with his many pointless gadgets insufferable; I couldn’t bear the way in which Sean kept scratching his left knee whenever he got excited about something. Even one of your habits, George, irritated me during our two happy years, but I won’t tell you what it was, as the fault doubtless was in the eye of the beholder.

  Deep down, I often feared that there was something wrong with me – why else would I have let these banal things get in the way of relationships that were genuinely important to me? The only person with whom I ever talked about this was Laura.

  ‘Do you think I’m mad, or just sad?’ I asked her two days after my interview with Rose and Timothy, over tea in the Blue Nile. I’d just confessed to her the story about Sean and his irritating knee-scratching habit, and how I’d told him the night before that it was over between us, after just two months.

  Laura laughed out loud. I think she always enjoyed hearing about my rather teenage love life. ‘No, neither. You’re just a totally classic workaholic commitment-phobe, whose excuses for dumping people are becoming increasingly desperate. Why don’t you just admit it? I’m sure Mum can sort you out. Just embrace the diagnosis and stop pretending, Clare.’

  I know Laura didn’t mean to upset me, but her comment struck a nerve. Obviously there was some truth to it – after all, my only long-term relationship was with my cat. Besides, I was still reeling from the fact that I appeared to have lost any chance of a future with you, that I’d realized far too late how much I cared for you. But Laura’s remark also reminded me of another, much less kind assessment of my character, one that
had wounded me very deeply at the time.

  And then, on 12 September, at four o’clock in the afternoon, the news broke. I was working on the transcription of Rose and Timothy’s interview and had just scanned the Guardian headlines online, and there it was. I tried to stay calm but failed miserably. My hands started shaking, and then my entire body followed suit. I got up and poured myself a large drink, and then another. Then the phone rang – Amanda checks the news as compulsively as I do. She told me she’d come over as soon as she was free. She still had to see one more patient that day.

  Having downed a third glass of whisky, I returned to my computer and read the rest of the article. Adrian Temple, it announced, was to receive a silver trophy industry award from the British Banking Association for ‘outstanding achievements’ in the sector. The prize, endowed with £500,000, would be awarded at a lavish do at the Institute of Directors on 7 November. Prominent guests were rumoured to include the governor of the Bank of England and various high-ranking City figures. The article mentioned that before his meteoric rise, Temple had worked as a humble clerk in a small Royal Bank of Scotland branch in Sheffield in the 1990s. In 2001, he had become one of RBS’s most successful traders. A spokesperson from the British Banking Association claimed that the profits he secured between 2001 and 2006 for his employer amounted to £800 million. They also briefly mentioned a ‘not entirely successful but well-intentioned attempt’ to ‘open up the exclusive world of trading to ordinary citizens’, before moving on to praise Temple’s most recent achievements as a CEO at HSBC, where he was now in charge of their overall investment strategy.

  I couldn’t believe what I was reading. It simply didn’t feel real. After all, it was public knowledge that only four years ago Temple had knowingly defrauded 512,459 eager British investors of the eye-watering sum of £15 billion. Most of them lost their entire life savings; 24 per cent had to declare bankruptcy; one in ten lost their homes; and at least six people committed suicide. Had the world already forgotten the sordid details of this case? The scandal had been discussed on the front page of every national newspaper. Had everyone forgotten how Temple launched his treacherous SmartInvestmentVenture campaign that loudly promised dream returns for every investment over £20,000 (of course, nobody bothered to read the small print)? Had everyone forgotten how the trader Temple, slick as a sea snake, popped up again and again on our television screens in an aggressive ad campaign, how he made it all sound so simple and safe? How he bragged about his ability to turn ten into a hundred pounds, very deliberately appealing to vulnerable people’s dreams of quick and easy money? How he talked the insider talk, mentioning margins, maturities, return rates, redemptions, securities, yields, and so on – enough to intimidate the uninitiated and to give the impression of secret knowledge that only he possessed? How he then promised to guide you through the trading jungle, if only you would trust him with your money?

  He presented himself as part magician, part businessman and part prophet, as a self-made rags-to-riches man who could make everyone’s wildest financial dreams come true. He promised nothing less than the democratization of investment banking: Temple would be the people’s broker, their spiritual guide in the world of glitzy deals and lucrative trades (if only you would trust him with your money). As of now, his message went, the highly profitable world of hedge funds, bonds and portfolios was no longer the exclusive territory of the privileged few who were trained to trade – no, you, too, the viewer, could partake in this bonanza! If enough people participated, he, Adrian Temple, would create a super-national portfolio and turn everyone into a millionaire.

  He seemed to be the ultimate clichéd representative of the much-maligned banker figure (he even wore shrill ties with knots as thick as fists, and slicked his hair back with so much gel that he looked like a wet rat). He was a poor man’s version of Gordon Gekko, but without the charisma and the wit. I thought this guy couldn’t be for real. But he was, and unfortunately not everybody was as appalled by his persona as I was. His scheme instantly proved to be a massive success. Can you see nothing? I wanted to shout. Do you understand nothing? Can you not see that this man is a Mephistophelian Pied Piper of the first order, just another poisonous spawn of the Charles Ponzi, Nick Leeson and Jordan Belfort tribe?

  But I, like everybody else, underestimated him. As I later found out, everything about his campaign was meticulously calculated. He had created the persona he embodied in these ads (in real life, he wore his hair slightly ruffled, floppy and entirely gel-free); he knew which keywords to drop in and when; he knew when to look into the camera and when to look away; he knew exactly who his target group was, and how to manipulate it. He had designed his campaign scrupulously, with the best market researchers and smartest advertising psychologists available. He wasn’t an idiot at all. And, as I would find out, although he knew that his investors would sooner or later lose all their money, the whole thing was also legally watertight.

  Yet the number of people who fell for this ‘dream’ scheme and who were prepared to hand over their savings probably surprised even him. It rose further when, in the first year, Temple’s ‘super-portfolio’ yielded a modest profit to its investors. But then, of course, things started to go wrong. A first loss here, another one there; a badly judged trade here and a crazy gamble there; a junk bond that dragged others down and a dead-cert insider trade that went belly up; problems in the Eurozone; a minor disturbance on the Asian markets; and puff – it all melted into air. After only eighteen months, Adrian Temple had gambled away the entire £15 billion that had been put into his care by the hopeful and the destitute. Just like that. His own fortune, however, amassed through a flat-rate trading fee of 5 per cent, which he conscientiously deducted from every payment into the SmartInvestmentVenture fund, was safely stowed away in his personal offshore account. It turned out that he never invested a single penny of his own money in his so-called ‘super-portfolio’. He knew all too well how risky it all was.

  My favourite part is still that he never even apologized to the people whom he defrauded. ‘Shit happens,’ he said in a now notorious interview, in which he came across as so callously unrepentant that his attitude shocked even Jeremy Paxman. ‘Trading is a high-risk enterprise – sometimes it goes well, and sometimes it doesn’t. C’est la vie. The people who are moaning now should have read the small print.’

  There were many out there who were keen to get him after that. The basic architecture of his scheme as such wasn’t illegal, but various lawyers and activists and I were hoping to find other, smaller, procedural errors on which to build a case against him. Anything, really. What I did uncover during my research – that everything was meticulously planned from start to finish, and that Temple never expected his super-portfolio to last for more than twelve months, and was only ever interested in his commission – did of course surpass all expectations. And everybody knew it was the truth. And yet, as I learned the painful way, even intentionally gambling away the money entrusted to him appears not to have been illegal. And now he would receive an award for outstanding achievements in the finance sector. It just beggared belief. What would be next? A knighthood? Thank God, not too much later, the doorbell rang and Amanda arrived. I could see the relief in her eyes when I opened the door. She was out of breath and must have feared the worst. She hugged me so hard that I thought she would break my back, and then, probably repelled by the smell of the not inconsiderable amount of whisky I had consumed in the meantime, she took my chin in her hands to look me in the eye. It was only at that point that I noticed I had difficulty keeping my balance.

  ‘You’re drunk,’ Amanda said. And then she added, much more gently: ‘Have you taken anything?’

  I hadn’t. Amanda guided me to the kitchen table and made some coffee. And then – and I still feel bad about it – I subjected my poor, patient sister to a rant of epic proportions, an angry, slurred diatribe, until, in the early hours, when I had run out of steam, she gently guided me to my bed, helped me out of my
clothes and tucked me in.

  XI

  All of a sudden I found myself in a dark place again. I really believed I had come to terms with my defeat. But I simply wasn’t prepared for this blow. After all the slow and difficult healing, just when I felt I’d reconnected with my old writing self, the plaster that I’d mistaken for new skin had been brutally ripped off, exposing a wound that was still as raw as when it was inflicted. The small, narrow row of too-neat and too-white teeth exposed by Adrian Temple’s victory grin in court once again haunted my dreams.

  In the days following the announcement, I slept badly and drank too much. Amanda came round to check on me every evening, and every evening I repeated my frenzied ranting. I think she seriously feared I might snap, this time. I couldn’t stop talking about the cynical sickness of it all. But after a week or so, I calmed down a little. I had to. I had work to do, a deadline to meet, a promise to keep. I could see Amanda was beginning to lose patience with my seething sermons, and she implored me not to let Temple destroy my career a second time. Some of the other things she kept saying to me must have helped, too. In crises, Amanda’s instincts really are amazing.

  I also thought of you, George, and that I simply couldn’t let you down. When you called me right after you heard the news, we both knew that I was lying when I told you I was fine. You listened patiently to my performance, and you didn’t interrupt my monologue on the degeneracy and shameless cynicism of our apolitical age and its perversely twisted values, where vulnerable so-called benefit ‘scroungers’ attract unprecedented degrees of hostility and stigmatization, but tax-dodging multimillionaires and fraudulent investors do not just walk free but are applauded. And so on. I continued in that vein. I made some tired jokes, at which you laughed politely. But after a while you gently interrupted me and said, ‘Call me any time you need me, Clare. I mean it. And next time, let me know how you really are.’ It was only after you’d hung up that I started to cry, no longer able to control my overwhelming sense of impotence and self-pity. But I kept up the pretence, even the next time you called. I didn’t want you to see me so weak. Although, had you not been there in court when the verdict was read out, right behind me in the gallery (even Lailah had left her bedroom that day to support me), and had your gaze not held mine when I turned around to look at you, who knows what I would have done.