by Lynn Barber
I took the train to Waterloo, and walked all the way to Bedford Square. Helen was in, and guessed as soon as she saw me – ‘You've found out?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It's not just that he's married – he lives with her. And there's a child.’
‘Two, actually.’
‘Why didn't you tell me?’
‘I'm sorry. I wanted to. The other night when you said were engaged, I told Danny we must tell you, but he said Simon would never forgive us.’
This was – what? – my third, fourth, fifth betrayal by adults? And I had really thought Helen was my friend.
‘What was Simon planning to do?’ I asked her. ‘Commit bigamy?’
‘Yes,’ she said soberly. ‘That's exactly what he intended to do. He felt he'd lose you if he didn't. He loves you very much, you know.’
I went home and raged at my parents – ‘You did this. You made me go out with him, you made me get engaged.’ My parents were white with shock – unlike me, they had no inkling before that Simon was dishonest. My mother cried. When Simon came that evening, my father went to the door and tried to punch him. I heard him shouting, ‘You've ruined her life!’ From my bedroom window, I saw Simon sitting in the Bristol outside with his shoulders shaking. Then my father strode down the front path and kicked the car as hard as he could, and Simon drove away. I found the sight of my father kicking the car hilarious and wanted to shout out of the window, ‘Scratch it, Dad! Scratch the bodywork – that'll really upset him!’
It was a strange summer. My parents were grieving and still in deep shock. I, the less deceived, was faking far more sorrow than I felt. After all, I never loved him whereas I think perhaps they did. I stayed in my room playing César Franck's Symphony in D Minor very loudly day after day. My main emotion was rage, followed by puzzlement about what to do next. I had no plans for the summer or – now – for the rest of my life. When my A-level results came, I not only got the top marks I fully expected in English and French, but also – mirabile dictu – top marks in Latin. I slapped the letter on the breakfast table and said, ‘You see? I could have gone to Oxford.’
My father took the day off work, probably for the first time in his life, and went to see Miss R. Garwood Scott. God knows what humble pie he had to eat – and he hated humble pie – but he came back with a grim face and a huge concession. She had agreed I could be entered for the Oxford exams as a Lady Eleanor Holles pupil, and I could sit the exams at school. But she was adamant that I could not attend the school – it was up to him to arrange private tutorials. Mum and Dad talked far into the night about how they would find a tutor, and how they would pay. A day or two later – presumably at Miss R. Garwood Scott's instigation – one of my English teachers rang and volunteered to be my tutor. She even offered to teach me for free, though I think my father insisted on paying. So I spent that autumn writing essays and going to tutorials, working hard and feeling lonely. My parents were in such deep grief that mealtimes were silent. Once or twice I saw the Bristol parked at the end of the street, but I was never remotely tempted to go to it.
One day that winter, sitting at my bedroom table writing an essay, I saw a woman walking slowly along the street looking at our house. I guessed immediately that she was Simon's wife. She was prettier than I'd imagined her, but of course mumsy and old. A few minutes later she walked back again and came up the path. My mother must have been watching from the downstairs window because she shouted to me, ‘Stay in your room’, and then fetched the woman in. They talked for about half an hour. My mother wouldn't tell me afterwards what Mrs Goldman had said – with her typical beta-brain logic she said it was none of my business. But she couldn't resist saying, with strange malice, ‘You weren't the first, you know. He had other girlfriends before you. Anyway,’ she went on, ‘he's in prison now – best place for him.’ For a moment, I thought she meant he was in prison for having girlfriends, but Mum said no – he'd been caught bouncing cheques. He was charged with three offences, asked for 190 others to be taken into account, and was sentenced to six months.
I sat the Oxford exams, I went for interviews, I was accepted at St Anne's. In my second term at Oxford, one of the nuns who ran my hall of residence handed me a note which she said a man had brought. It said, ‘Bubl respectfully requests the pleasure of the company of Minn for dinner at the Randolph Hotel tonight at 8.’ I tore it up in front of the nun. ‘Don't ever let that man in,’ I told her. ‘He's a con man.’ I went round to Merton to tell my boyfriend Dick and he said, ‘Well, I'd like to meet him – let's go to the Randolph.’ So we did. Simon was sitting in the lobby – on time, for once in his life – looking older, tireder, seedier than I remembered. His face lit up when he saw me and fell when I said, ‘This is my boyfriend, Dick.’ Simon said politely, ‘Won't you please both stay to dinner as my guests?’ ‘How are you going to pay for it?’ I snapped and Dick looked at me with horror – he had never heard me use that tone before. Simon silently withdrew a large roll of banknotes from his pocket and I nodded, okay.
Dick was enchanted by Simon. He loved his Israeli kibbutz stories, his fishing-with-dynamite stories, his Molotov cocktail stories. I had heard them all before, except his new prison stories, and sulked throughout the meal. Simon said that when he got out of prison, he headed immediately for Sark – and here he cast me such a doe-eyed soppy look I almost spat – but he was rearrested as soon as he got off the plane in Jersey, because he had passed some dud cheques in the Channel Islands which were not ‘taken into account’. As Dick walked me back to my convent, he said, ‘I see why you were taken in by him – he is quite a charmer, isn't he?’ ‘No,’ I said furiously, ‘he's a disgusting criminal con man and don't you dare say you like him!’
Was Simon a con man? Well, he was a liar and a thief who used charm as his jemmy to break into my parents' house and steal their most treasured possession, which was me. Of course Oxford, and time, would have stolen me away eventually, but Simon made it happen almost overnight. Until our ‘engagement’, I'd thought my parents were ignorant about many things (fashion, for instance, and Existentialism, and why Jane Austen was better than Georgette Heyer) but I accepted their moral authority unquestioningly. So when they casually dropped the educational evangelism they'd sold me for eighteen years and told me I should skip Oxford to marry Simon, I thought, ‘I'm never going to take your advice about anything ever again.’ And when he turned out to be married, it was as if, tacitly, they concurred. From then on, whenever I told them my plans, their only response was a penitent ‘You know best.’
What did I get from Simon? An education – the thing my parents always wanted me to have. I learned a lot in my two years with Simon. I learned about expensive restaurants and luxury hotels and foreign travel, I learned about antiques and Bergman films and classical music. All this was useful when I went to Oxford – I could read a menu, I could recognise a finger bowl, I could follow an opera, I was not a complete hick. But actually there was a much bigger bonus than that. My experience with Simon entirely cured my craving for sophistication. By the time I got to Oxford I wanted nothing more than to meet kind, decent, conventional boys my own age, no matter if they were gauche or virgins. I would marry one eventually and stay married all my life and for that, I suppose, I have Simon to thank.
But there were other lessons Simon taught me that I regret learning. I learned not to trust people; I learned not to believe what they say but to watch what they do; I learned to suspect that anyone and everyone is capable of ‘living a lie’. I came to believe that other people – even when you think you know them well – are ultimately unknowable. Learning all this was a good basis for my subsequent career as an interviewer, but not, I think, for life. It made me too wary, too cautious, too ungiving. I was damaged by my education.
Oxford
I did the hardest intellectual work of my life at Oxford, but not studying Eng Lit – it was all to do with trying to become a completely different person to the one I grew up as. The Simon debacle had
dealt a huge blow to my confidence. I had felt I knew everything and now realised I knew nothing. More importantly, everything I had learned or assimilated from my parents I now regarded as unreliable, and needing to be rethought from scratch. In fact, I probably went further – I felt that everything my parents believed was by definition wrong, and that if I ever found myself in agreement with my parents I should immediately recant. Everything from my father's ‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be’ to my mother's ‘Blue and green should never be seen’ needed to be jettisoned. But in a way what they said wasn't the problem: what I was more worried about was the attitudes, prejudices, beliefs I might have picked up from them subconsciously or before I was old enough even to know what I was learning. Effectively, I had to question everything I believed, and never accept my own instincts. It required constant vigilance; it was intellectually exhausting.
My parents never explicitly articulated their belief systems (and my mother's was not quite the same as my father's) but common to both and therefore the view I grew up with was that work was good, pleasure was bad; self-denial was good, self-indulgence was bad; saving money was good, spending it was bad; gambling was unthinkable; fecklessness spelled ruin. People who ignored these rules came to sticky ends. Briefly, I suppose, it was a typical English lower-middle-class puritanism with a strong emphasis on caution, isolationism, ‘not interfering’, thrift, prudery, moral condemnation and deep fear of the unknown, which included everything from foreigners to unfamiliar vegetables.
On top of this, my mother gave me the weird advice, drummed into me for years, that I must never make friends with ‘obvious’ people, which meant anyone pretty or popular or even likable; that I must seek out girls with acne or dandruff, with horrible whiney voices and miserable attitudes, because only among them, she said, could I find ‘real friends’. The others, the popular and pretty ones, she told me, would betray me. And although I had never particularly – thank God – acted on this advice, it was always somehow there in the back of my mind, making me distrustful of attractive or popular people. And yet if I'd thought about it, even for a minute, I would have seen that my mother was a poor teacher of friendship because she had so few friends herself.
Anyway, it meant that I arrived at Oxford absolutely determined to learn – not Eng Lit, obviously, but how to have fun. The rule from now on would be that I would go to every party I was invited to, flirt with every man I ever met, drink every drink, smoke every joint, never sacrifice a lunch for a lecture, or a party for a tutorial. The gift for fierce concentration that had got me top marks in A-levels would take me through Oxford and out into the world as a fully qualified hedonist and femme fatale. I would study the beautiful people and join their ranks, or at least hang on their coat-tails. Give me public-school captains of cricket, give me dazzling daughters of duchesses, not acne'd cleverclogs from northern grammar schools. I was going to be a goodtime-girl, dammit. I was going to work really hard at this pleasure lark. And I would study men, men, men, because I knew I was woefully ignorant in this field. The only two men I'd known so far were Simon and my father and they were both, in their different ways, hopelessly wrong.
And Oxford was the ideal place to study men because in those days there were seven male undergraduates for every one female, and if you were reasonably pretty, as I was, you really had to beat them off like flies. Moreover, most of them were rich or at least had daddies rich enough to send them to public schools – shocking in retrospect, I know, but at the time I was simply happy that there were so many men eager to buy me dinner. I particularly liked the ones with sports cars who could whisk me off to country restaurants like the Rose Revived, or the ones who brought champagne and Fortnum's hampers to take me punting. There was never any question of going Dutch. Presumably there were some poor grammar school boys skulking around the pubs somewhere but I never met them.
I was lucky in that on my very first day at St Anne's I was befriended by a fellow fresher called Maria Aitken, the tall, witty, beautiful daughter of an MP who lived in a moated grange in Suffolk. She was a good mentor for my new life of hedonism. No sooner had I met her than I received an invitation from her brother, Jonathan Aitken, to a meeting of ‘The James Bond Society’ at the Union. I asked Maria what this meant and she laughed and said, ‘Just one of Jonathan's bright ideas’ – what it actually meant was Jonathan Aitken in a dinner jacket and about a dozen pretty freshwomen in their best frocks, with waiters serving vodka martinis shaken not stirred. Wotta pillock, I thought. But there were plenty of other invitations from non-pillocks – every day there would be a satisfying little stack of envelopes in my pigeonhole, inviting me to tea, to drinks, to punting picnics, fêtes champêtres, cocktail parties. At first I found some of them puzzling – I remember asking Maria why does it say ‘At home’ when the party is at Magdalen? Maria guided me through these early minefields, and taught me that if an invitation said ‘Drinks 6–8’ I didn't actually have to arrive on the dot at six and drink solidly till eight – I was meant to arrive about seven and stay no more than an hour. By my second term, I thought I was familiar with all possible party permutations but was baffled by an invitation to a reading party in Devon at Easter. ‘What do you do at a reading party?’ I asked, puzzled. ‘Mm, you stay in a rented cottage and read books.’ That was one of the few party invitations I refused.
I wasn't particularly alarmed when I received my first invitation to a dinner party because I assumed it just meant dinner at a restaurant – which I was used to from Simon – but with more people. But this one was at the Bear in Woodstock and incredibly grand, with about sixteen guests all in black tie, and place cards round the table. I was invited by Charles Vyvyan, a Balliol man who asked me out occasionally – I never knew why because he never seemed remotely interested in me – and I was wearing my usual tarty-party dress which was far too short and low-cut for this company. I didn't know anyone else there and to my dismay was placed far away from Charles, between two very grand dons. One of them was Maurice Keen, who was later rumoured to have been Oxford's main conduit for recruiting spies, though of course I didn't know that then. Having to talk to a don was frightening enough, but then he persisted in asking me ludicrous questions like did I prefer Elizabeth I or Mary, Queen of Scots? I wouldn't know, I told him, I was reading English, not history. Oh. He fell silent for a while and then came back with which character in Dickens would I most like to be? I haven't done Dickens yet, I told him. Oh. Despairingly, he made his third attempt: ‘How are you getting on with Lady Ogilvie?’ Who is Lady Ogilvie? I asked. Oh, I thought you said you were at St. Anne's? I am. Well I think you'll find that Lady Ogilvie is the Principal of your college. The horror, the horror.
Another horror that first term was finding there were people my own age cleverer than me! This had never happened at Lady Eleanor Holles. There were rumours at school of two science swots and a new girl who was supposed to be a ‘genius’ at mathematics, but they didn't count. I was Lady Eleanor Holles's undisputed English star and it never occurred to me that every other school in the country would have its own English star and that I would encounter many of them at Oxford. But for my very first tutorial I was assigned a partner, Charlotte B, who I realised within minutes was twice as intelligent as me. The subject was Spenser's Faerie Queene and I thought it was pretty heroic of me just to have read a few cantos of the fusty nonsense, but she had evidently read the whole thing and – incredibly – enjoyed it. She and our tutor, Miss Morrison, spent the whole hour enthusiastically exchanging Spenser quotes, while I sulked and panicked.
There was to be a lot of panicking and sulking that first term, especially when it was revealed that we were meant to teach ourselves Anglo-Saxon. We were given a grammar book and dictionary and told to just get on with it till we were ready to translate Beowulf. I knew I would never be ready to translate Beowulf and panicked so hard I actually developed shingles and was sent home with an aegrotat. It meant I avoided the end-of-term exams, and never really learned Anglo-
Saxon. That long Christmas at Twickenham gave me time to digest the fact that, by Oxford standards, I was intellectually second-rate. Up till then, I'd always thought I was brilliant – if I ever failed to excel, it was simply because I hadn't done enough work. But tutorials with Charlotte taught me that some people actually had better brains than mine and that no amount of swotting would enable me to compete. It was a blow to my pride but not to my hopes – I had never particularly set my heart on getting a first.
But it made for yet another shift from my parents. Cleverness, and academic attainment, were almost the only values they had taught me to aspire to and, as far as they were concerned, I had ticked all the boxes by getting into Oxford. But once I got to Oxford I realised that cleverness was not all it was cracked up to be – that there were other qualities, like sensitivity, like kindness, like charm, like tact, that I had never given a moment's thought to, but that were actually far more important. I didn't quite swing round to Charles Kingsley's view – ‘Be good, sweet maid, and let who can be clever’ – but I was beginning to think I should pay less attention to being clever and more to being good.
On top of that, the Simon debacle left me with a strong distrust of book learning, which I still to some extent retain. My feeling was: I've read all these books, I'm supposed to be so clever, and yet I couldn't even spot the most obvious con trick in the world. I felt that what I urgently needed to understand was Real Life and that Milton and Spenser were of no possible help. This was a poor attitude for embarking on three years study of English Literature. It meant that I read the classics impatiently, instead of luxuriating in them as I had at school, because I was dying to learn about the present day. I think it was this attitude that propelled me towards journalism – I still have a somewhat exaggerated hatred of anything to do with the past. I must have done some work because I got a perfectly respectable upper second degree but essentially the Eng Lit course was wasted on me.
