by Mavis Cheek
Contents
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Mavis Cheek
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Acknowledgements
Copyright
About the Book
Nina Porter is living the good life: happily married, well off, a loving mother and daughter. So how come she finds herself alone in Venice with a handsome Italian?
It starts with a marital row about honesty: Nina claims she always tells the truth, her husband says it can’t be done, and the challenge is on. As Nina tries to live without the little white lies that support us all, she finds her life spiralling in directions she never expected.
Mavis Cheek’s sparkling novel is about shaking your life up, striking out and learning to be true to yourself. And, of course, the temptations that lie along the way.
About the Author
Mavis Cheek was born and grew up in Wimbledon. She failed her eleven plus twice and was put in the B stream of a secondary modern school, where she tried, completely unsuccessfully, to learn to become a good and dutiful clerk/typist. She left school at sixteen with no academic qualifications and began her working life as a receptionist for the contemporary art publishers Editions Alecto. London was buzzing in the mid sixties and Mavis graduated to their gallery in Albemarle Street, where she worked with such contemporary artists as David Hockney, Allen Jones, Patrick Caulfield, Gillian Ayres and Bridget Riley.
After twelve years at Editions Alecto, Mavis decided to take a degree. She went to Hillcroft College for Women where she graduated in Arts with distinction. Shortly after this her daughter Bella was born and she began her writing career in earnest. Journalism and travel writing at first, then short stories, and eventually, in 1988, her novel Pause Between Acts was published by Bodley Head and won the She/John Menzies First Novel Prize.
Mavis Cheek now lives and works in Wiltshire.
Also available by Mavis Cheek
Pause Between Acts (Bodley Head)
Parlour Games (Bodley Head)
Dog Days (Macmillan)
Janice Gentle Gets Sexy (Hamish Hamilton)
Aunt Margaret’s Lover (Hamish Hamilton)
Sleeping Beauties (Faber and Faber)
Getting Back Brahms (Faber and Faber)
Three Men on a Plane (Faber and Faber)
Mrs Fytton’s Country Life (Faber and Faber)
The Sex Life of My Aunt (Faber and Faber)
Patrick Parker’s Progress (Faber and Faber)
Yesterday’s Houses (Faber and Faber)
Amenable Women (Faber and Faber)
Truth
To Tell
MAVIS CHEEK
For Vee and our own Venetian passeggiata
So absolutely good is truth, truth never hurts the teller.
Browning
It is not fair to thrust Truth upon people when they don’t expect it. Only the very generous are ready for Truth Impromptu.
Christopher Morley
One
23 May – feast day of St Desiderius who was invoked to guard against perjury.
TIPPING POINTS ARE peculiar things. One minute the thought or the desire is not on your radar, the next it is not only on your radar, it is looming so large it blots out almost everything else. And a tipping point, as Malcolm Gladwell says in his book, helpfully entitled The Tipping Point, is irresistible. I’m not sure if you can strictly have a tipping point for one, and certain it is that I was more or less alone in my conviction that something must be done, but hearts and minds did follow – eventually. Much as some people are quietly trotting down the road towards Damascus, perfectly happy to tell those Christians a thing or two, and they suddenly get God. I got the next best thing. A bomb blast called Truth. When did that go from our lives?
* * *
Robert was fulminating in front of the television. Again. When we first met, of course, both of us wore anti-apartheid badges, got knocked on the head by a passing policeman in Grosvenor Square and some of our best friends were vegans. But marriage, children, a nice house in a nice area and the settled ease of middle-class life reduced the political passions. It didn’t mean we weren’t still committed to good, liberal beliefs, it just meant that we weren’t going to chain ourselves to the railings for them. The ballot box was sufficient. But it was the ballot box that let us down – the ballot box that was, indirectly, to blame for my personal tipping point. And faith in the democratic process would never be the same again. Nor, probably, would I. If you consider marriage, or its unendorsed equivalent, as a microcosm of the world it might help to understand why the application of Truth could be so devastating. Try it. Go on, I dare you. Try being truthful to your nearest and dearest for just one week. It will be what the Chinese so delicately call interesting.
Back to Robert and me. We were both supporters of the Labour Party. As it segued into being New Labour we tacitly accepted the change and went on voting the same way. One day the proper voice would be heard. Then came Blair and Iraq and everything changed. Especially for Robert, who suddenly, in his middle years, re-engaged with his persona of a scarf-flinging, radical Essex student. I didn’t know whether to join in or stand by with an ice pack. And though I felt a certain amount of pride in my beloved husband’s resumed passionate stance, I also felt a certain amount of alarm; politicians and their deceits – his politicians – created a dynamic that was quite enough to give him a coronary. ‘These are the dangerous years,’ my mother told me lugubriously, ‘for blocked arteries.’ For which piece of helpful information I naturally thanked her effusively.
‘Liar, liar, pants on fire …’ Robert shouted at the earnest face of the then prime minister. ‘Smug bastard.’ Then he started stabbing at the air, saying, ‘Tell the truth, tell the truth, tell the truth.’ From what I could make out, this particular rant was with regard to the lying, scheming snake of a twisted politician who had, it seemed, signed up for abortion rights when in power and then converted to Catholicism when out of it. Added to the Bastard’s assertions about weapons of mass destruction and saying children should be educated in state schools while sending his own to a select establishment, this new outrage of political hypocrisy – otherwise known as telling lies – consigned him to further bouts of Robert’s new-found wrath.
This evening Robert’s ear tips were pinker than I had ever seen them. For a moment I stood behind him, fascinated, then I said very loudly, ‘Red or white?’ and he stopped jerking about and said ‘Red. Thanks. What are we having?’ Normal service was resumed and we sat down opposite each other in the kitchen for pasta and salad. We do not have a television in the kitchen. We did, once, have a television in the kitchen but since it reduced both of us to something akin to Bacon’s screaming popes – it was banned. Our children, properly reductive members of the family, in their late and bumptious teens, begged to have the thing restored on the grounds that we now expected them to talk. This seemed symptomatic of the middle-class, well-brought-up child; the idea that they think they are at the centre of the universe. ‘We don’t have the telly because it makes your father and I argue,’ I told them firmly. ‘You certainly don’t have to talk if you
don’t want to.’ And then, with that blinding moment of fear that comes from too many programmes on the radio about child psychology, I scuppered my ascendant position by adding, ‘But of course we’d love it if you did …’ And looking from daughter to son very earnestly. You do wonder how they learn to roll their eyes in that particular way.
Fortunately tonight it was only the ex-prime minister of England who had suggested that when he said black he really meant white, and Robert’s response would be containable. If he had been followed by the outgoing president of the United States, one George Dubya Bush, coming to the screen with one of many pronouncements things might have got nasty in the coronary department. Things having hotted up considerably on both the political and financial home front over the last few months gave Robert a new zest for rage. We survived much of the monetary catastrophe most probably because both our children were finished with university and off to pastures new for a few months. They were expanding their experiences, going peacefully, and travelling where they might learn to be good citizens of the world. In other words, they had been dispatched afar to give their long-suffering, middle-class, never-say-boo-to-a-goose-or-a-son-or-a-daughter parents a break. Educational costs were over. With one bound we were free.
Which nicely left a gap for Robert’s sudden renewed passion for the outing of hypocrisy and the denunciation of lies which had arrived very suddenly and not quite exited stage left and chased by a bear. Thus we were on best behaviour. With each other, with ourselves and our psyches. We did not want to waste a minute of our precious freedom. A row between us would be foolish. So I, naturally enough, shut up. One of us had to. Blessed are the peacemakers. Years of marriage allows you to put yourself somewhere on the baby-slopes of the Mount along with Blessed are the Meek.
But at least, as the pasta and wine went down, Robert’s fascinating ear tips slowly returned to their usual pale hue. This was the cooling-off period, similar to what happens in a gym after a workout. After a quarter of a century of marriage you know about such things. Just as a deep-sea diver needs to reorient his system before returning to life above the waves, so did Robert need a period of gentle relocation before normal service was resumed and this certainly happened much more quickly now that our delightful children were not around. They enjoyed winding their father up mercilessly. When our departing prime minister gave his Sedgefield farewell speech the wind-up register tightened; the very words ‘I did so out of belief’ were enough to bring on a hernia, repeated as they were with lip-smacking gusto, and often, by both Tassie and Johnno. For the next few days, if ever they were party to criticism, they would fold their hands as if in prayer and say, ‘I did so out of belief …’ Given that and its cheering result, what they would now do with the world in financial turmoil and bankers’ words (we can’t be blamed for others’ greed) was best not contemplated. At least now, without them here, I could control the temperature. Though there was – looking back – already at that point a creeping sense of resentment for this service to harmony. Blessed are the peacemakers, for sure, but do they always have to be the women? Yes, according to Robert and a good number of other thinking people, Tony Blair was a liar – I was sure of it – but I couldn’t, really, see the point of allowing it to bring on an aneurism. Politicians lied, was all I thought, and the public pretty well universally put them, along with journalists, at the bottom of the honesty heap. Now bankers and hedge-funders, the Allen Stanfords and Bernard Madoffs, joined them as the lowest of the low. QED. But we all lied, didn’t we? That was the little seed of a pea of a thought that lodged itself in the rational part of my mind during these trying months without my knowing where it would eventually lead me. We lied. We all lied. Didn’t we?
That evening I risked a joke. ‘What do you have to do to make a little fortune nowadays?’ Robert looked at me, and then softened. ‘What?’ I smiled, it was working. ‘Start with a big one,’ I said joyfully. The result was reasonable. He countered with the joke about Blair and Bush and we talked about the bottom of the heapers and their lies in a calm way until the subject gradually moved on to the Griffiths’ new dog. A small, yapping, white thing of which, on the rare occasions the yapping ceased, it was hard to say which end was which. It was always good for a conversation. United, we, in distaste. Lies and liars were forgotten and it would probably have been just another evening in for the Porters of Wimbledon if Hugo Gibson hadn’t rung while I was still feeling slightly raw about blessed are the peacemakers. A fulminating husband who may or may not have blocked arteries is a disturbing presence and I had – in the beautiful fading April light – hoped for an evening of domestic harmony. Quiet and unexpectant I sat on at the table and sipped my wine and thought about the summer ahead and what it would be like for just the two of us. Nice, I thought – it will be nice. Then Robert picked up the phone and mouthed, ‘It’s Hugo …’ And everything changed.
I don’t know why. Maybe the bottle of Chianti was to blame for being strong and delicious. Maybe it was the Zen Moment of Rightness when everything turns. Or maybe – maybe – I was just plain fed up with my husband’s holier-than-them attitude towards honesty. I’d seen him stuff drachmas into slot machines and get off speeding points with the aid of a good solicitor. I knew.
Every year Hugo, the chairman, took his cream of team at International IT Systems (UK division) on a bonding jaunt. This year, despite the apparent total collapse of absolutely everything mercantile, was to be no different. This was, it seems, because ITS (UK) held most of its contracts with governments. Personally, looking at governments, it didn’t feel like they were any safer than any other outfit, but it seemed that they were. Well, not Iceland, obviously, but India and China and some of the EU. So the bonding exercise was still on. And every year the wives went too.
We wives scarcely saw each other apart from this week-long event, so it was, as our friends across the pond would have it (and ITS (UK) was an American subsidiary), a nice chance to meet up and bond, too. For a whole week we stayed in some magical, exotic place while our menfolk did unspeakable things with jet skis and golf balls and the like. Thank heaven the days of Iron John were over – the brief flirtation with the Arizona Desert and the mythopoetical male’s search for modern initiation ritual was appalling, including, as it did, quite a lot of headbutting, little laughter and manly unshaven chins. Now we had reverted to the usual gender pattern. We women starved ourselves before we left home, sank holes in the family finances in order to dress ourselves creatively, and then drank and ate too much while away. We avoided talking about whose husband was earning the most points (oh yes, there were points) and we soaked up the killer sun by the pool lushed out on disgusting drinks. It was hell on earth and I had never, in all ten years of Robert’s being Hugo’s deputy, managed to enjoy it or get out of it. It was just a bright smile, wear that saffron floaty thing and your gold sandals and drink your cocktails for the duration. In the weeks running up to our going I was, like the others, on a strict diet, and in the weeks after our going, just like the others, I was also on a strict diet. Now, as Robert began to talk with false good cheer to Hugo, I looked down at my plate. I had left nothing at all for Miss Manners except a slight covering of sauce – and we were due to fly in twelve days. Yup. I was still eating tagliatelle. Slathered in cream and mushrooms. It was intolerable. But even more intolerable – as I cocked my ear to listen – Robert was lying. He was on the telephone to his immediate superior, and he was telling very, very big porkies. Blair-sized porkies, I thought.
Robert was not what one might call a man’s man – though he did like motor racing, which gave him an honourable status among the true sports-loving blokes without enticing him into the sportier realms of actually knocking a ball around, of whatever size, or, when the back muscles went, spread betting on Indian cricket matches at two in the morning. Thus, although he was by no means a fully subscribing male in terms of team-building machismo, he could dredge up enough of it to convince his peers. Bravely, he always managed to overcome th
is macho-inadequacy and enact the team spirit with considerable aplomb. I both did and did not admire him for this, but mostly I was grateful. His gung-ho enthusiasm for the horrible, team-building experience meant that his job was assured and that our children could afford to go travelling in safety while we continued to live well. The good life based entirely on deceit. ‘You’re a great team player, Robbie,’ Hugo would pronounce as we parted each year at the airport, and Robbie (no one else was allowed to call him this) and he would do a high five (whatever happened to slapping each other heartily on the back?) and walk off proudly with their pumpingly masculine arms around their wives’ expanded waistlines.
It was shameful, really, when you put it alongside the radical Nina and Robert of yesteryear. But this, of course, is what being an adult means. First you sow your wild oats and later they become prunes and All-Bran. To us, the middle classes, growing up and taking your place in the world meant becoming the comfortable bastion against anarchy. I had long come to terms with this. I reckoned that since I had worked in government and paid taxes, worked tirelessly in the home, produced and reared two perfectly decent – pause to consider Johnno, move on quickly – citizens of our nation who would one day be producers of national wealth – pause, consider Johnno again, move on even more quickly – while helping out at the local school and all the other stuff that the middle-class mum is heiress to, I had earned my place in the world. Robert and I remained married largely because – like women through the ages – I had given him the false belief that he ran things, and because – well – better to say it as not – we could afford to be comfortable. And although the world was now in financial and fiscal turmoil, the Porters of Wimbledon were unlikely to find themselves struggling. A little wing-clipping here and there probably, but nothing major. And it would, could, all have continued like that, had that tiny pea of a seed of uncertainty not begun to grow into a tipping point.
