Truth to Tell

by Mavis Cheek

  The Bocca del Leone I wanted Brando to see on the riva degli Schiavoni was connected to a nice combination of those two spheres, domestic and political, by a noblewoman, Eleanora de Monti. She used the box to denounce her husband for plotting against the Doge. This, apparently, came as a surprise to him as, indeed, did his removal to a particularly unpleasant part of the dungeons by the secret police. It came as quite a surprise to Eleanora de Monti, too, when, later, locked in the arms of her young and handsome and impoverished lover, she found that foreplay included being handcuffed a little more roughly than she would have liked and also being hauled off to the Doge’s dungeons. Her young and handsome lover was suddenly no longer impoverished. It seemed that the state felt that the de Monti possessions were really far too abundant and that, without a husband to contain her, Eleanora might well go out of control. Better all round to dispatch both of them and make their considerable fortune a ward of La Serenissima. The lover took a happy trifle for his trouble. Herein, I added as a postscript for Brando, lies the proof that honesty is the best policy and marital infidelity a foolish and dangerous path.

  I suppose it was inevitable that these boxes were remembered more for their iniquity than their useful truthfulness. In principle it seemed an excellent idea to have safe places for people who wished to remain anonymous to post information without fear. But in a city that based its very existence on insecurity and brutal justice, it was hardly likely to be ignored by those with a mendacious agenda of their own. Truth had little place in Venice, I wrote in my notes to Brando, power and money – with virtue as its hostage – held all. Go to it, Brando, go to it, while I stay at home and mourn.

  Brando was enchanted with my text about all this. Probably because, somewhere deep within, he was still the schoolboy from the far-off barbarian days of his minor public school watching another schoolboy being beaten and giving private thanks that he wasn’t the one bending over the chair. I suppose there is just something about Venice that brings you close to decadence, to the sinister within, to the dark side of the soul. But if he wanted more, he would have to wait. Womankind can only take so much evil. There would be more about Bocca del Leone when I was feeling up to it. I had a heavy emotional prospect lined up for tomorrow: a truthful conversation with Toni.

  On the few occasions that Robert is away I always relish having the whole bed to myself. That night was quite the opposite. I felt lonely and I felt stupid. Robert hadn’t rung and I didn’t know where he was. I could have found out but not without putting my hand up and shouting that I was gossip-worthy. In the old days I would just have rung his secretary and said something like: Oh, I must have written the number of the hotel down wrong – can you confirm it? But now that was out of the question. Truth popped out and wagged her finger. I should say here that for anyone having doubts about the good sense of remaining married after a length of time, it is quite a good, if painful, idea to go through something like this. It concentrates the mind perfectly. Suddenly, lying there in the dark, I imagined Robert never returning and myself back in the swim of the world, single. It was a very unpleasant thought – nice little fantasy when you know it isn’t going to happen, nasty little fear when you think it might.

  Nevertheless, I am my father’s daughter in matters of conviction. Some might say stubbornness. He went to his grave (too early) a convinced Conservative who said, most memorably, on seeing John Major with his soapbox, ‘That’s done it. We’ll never win now.’ And when they did, instead of being overjoyed, he remarked, ‘I was wrong. But we don’t deserve the victory.’ Which I thought even then was impressively honest. Truth was important and I wasn’t about to give in. I couldn’t, anyway, as I had no one to give in to. By now Robert was locked in the warmth of Florida with, it was to be hoped a bad case of jet lag, and not – as my closed eyes showed in visions – a leggy blonde or two hanging around him, all cleavage and overstocked white teeth, smiling wetly as he placed his chips on the roulette table. Late at night, alone in bed, and feeling mournful, the image of American women took on extraordinarily desirable proportions. Banish the daytime reality show of the supersize me obesity problem and the sensible understanding that ordinary American women look like ordinary British women. Not at night and alone they don’t. And banished were those terrifying hockey moms from the reality zone, too. At night, in bed, without my husband, American women became Venus personified. At night, with my husband on the loose, American women become sleek, dangerous and very, very sexy.

  Six

  Truphane: a deceiver, apparently from Old French truffant or medieval Latin truffans, a fraud.

  Mairi Robinson’s Concise Scots Dictionary, 1985

  YOU DRESS WITH care when you are preparing for a date that might render you best-friendless. You dress even more carefully when you think you might also look like a wraith from Hell. It had been a very bad night. And as I dressed the next morning I wondered what message I wanted to give with what I wore. This was bad. I’d never in all my life worried about what to wear when meeting up with a woman friend. But then, I’d never met up with a woman friend before having undertaken to speak the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. So, what did I want to say with what I wore? That this was an unremarkable event, two pals having pasta, nothing more, and if the ordure hit the rotational mechanism, I could not be accused of plotting. Such is the convoluted madness the truth part of the brain is heiress to when brought out of retirement. I wore a dark red jumper (the better to hide the blood, perhaps), knee-length black skirt and flat shoes. Less unremarkable than downright boring and nothing to excite the senses. I also wore the vintage garnet and pearl necklace Toni had bought me for my fortieth. Not only would it stand as a bond of friendship but its droplet stone would match my eyeballs. I really had slept very badly. I checked the answerphone, and my mobile, before leaving the house. Nothing.

  One thing I had learned, I thought, as I sat in the restaurant and waited, was that it was not only an uneasy conscience that kept you awake at night – it was the prospect of having an easy one, too. This might be the proof of Hamlet’s acuity about conscience. I was almost ready to admit defeat – and then I saw Toni – all shadows under her eyes, her spare frame even thinner than usual – wearing the daft and vulgar gold necklace that Bob brought her back from Lahore, and which I had to say, in the presence of Arturo (who looked gratifyingly surprised), that I had given her, and dressed in black. This was not my friend any more – well, not in any useful sense – and I prepared myself for the worst. But she spoke first and – despite the circles beneath them – her eyes sparkled with a strange new light.

  ‘Come on,’ she said as she sat down, ‘what are you up to?’

  ‘I’m up to absolutely nothing.’

  ‘Don’t give me that. You refuse to go away with Robert and you haven’t had a row?’

  ‘Not in any accepted sense, no.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘It’s a disagreement about truth, that’s all.’

  ‘Truth? What do you mean, about truth?’

  The waitress hovered. I studied the menu. ‘Shall we order?’ I tried to sound nonchalant but the damnable thing about friends is that you are never nonchalant with them, so when you attempt it, they know something is up. Nonchalance is left for acquaintances and post-embarrassing incidents with strangers (as in I really meant to trip over that step).

  The waitress began tapping her pen. We ordered.

  She was still scrutinising me with that bullshit-detector look. ‘How are things?’ I asked. I had not meant to say anything like that. This was not supposed to be an occasion on which to give her any chance to confront my truth-telling.

  ‘So?’ she said.

  ‘What – so-so or – what?’

  ‘I mean you and Robert.’

  ‘So – nothing. I’ve just asserted myself a little and done what I want to do instead of what other people want me to do – and Robert doesn’t like it. I’m just re-establishing the basis of our marriage. Redrawing
the boundaries.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound like marriage to me,’ she said doubtfully. Pretty rich coming from her. Perhaps we all wear hypocrisy as discreetly as our underclothes. Toni once said that because of her secret life with Bob she was perfectly happy to agree with Arturo on everything – thus making their marriage a very happy one – because it no longer mattered. Only of course, it didn’t make the marriage happy. Once she started saying Yes to everything, Arturo got very, very anxious. It’s the myth of the Stepford Wives – the forever male fantasy of the obedient homemaker, mother and whore – which thus produces boredom. We all need to fight for things a little bit.

  ‘It will pass,’ I said.

  ‘Well, what’s this truth thing all about?’

  That was safe. I told her all about Robert and the politician on television and how I’d just decided to do something about my own petty lies.

  ‘You,’ she said, picking at her pasta, ‘are one of the most truthful people I have ever met.’

  A little prawn, as shocked as I was, slithered back down from my fork to my plate. That was not what I wanted to hear. That was dangerous ground. ‘So you see,’ I said, rushing on as cheerfully as I could, ‘since I really didn’t want to go to Florida and go through all that corporate stuff again, it seemed like the perfect time to attempt a bit of honesty.’

  ‘And what did Robert say?’

  ‘He didn’t. He’s not talking to me. He didn’t even kiss me goodbye at the airport. In fact, he’s furious.’

  She gave a little shudder and put down her fork. ‘Arturo would be like that.’ Then she sighed. I knew what was coming but short of tipping my red wine everywhere there was no way to stop it.

  As I expected, Toni gave me her usual little apologetic look and plunged in. ‘But I’d so like a bit of honesty back in my life. I hate all this pretence. Sometimes I just think I’ll sit him down and tell him the truth and then move in with Bob and that would be that … But of course, Bob couldn’t leave his wife because the business would collapse without her money and …’

  I’d heard this so many times. It was as if by saying it Toni got the guilt off her chest for a while. But then, oh then, it happened. She picked up her fork again and pointed it at me. ‘You don’t think I should tell him, do you, Nina? Not really?’

  ‘Well, yes,’ I said, ‘as a matter of fact, I do.’

  Stasis. Apart from the plop of falling prawns. Then she waved her fork about a bit and said with that false cheeriness I recognised so well, ‘I know – in theory – but in practice it’s impossible, of course. Arturo would be miserable, Bob would be without his home or his business, and how would the children be about it all? I’d feel terrible doing all that.’

  ‘But you’re living one big, fat lie.’

  ‘Don’t,’ she groaned. ‘You know I hate it.’

  It occurred to me that she hated it the way Thomas à Becket hated his hair shirt. With relish.

  ‘I don’t think you could feel any worse. Could you? I mean, it’s been four years and he’s still not committed himself and you’re just living in a day-to-day cocoon of deceit. And you look ill.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘You usually look so fabulous, I mean. This is wearing you out.’

  ‘Well, it’s not easy at the moment because Bob’s away.’

  ‘He should leave his wife – bugger the business – and you should leave Arturo, if it’s what you really want – kinder, eventually, on him and kinder, eventually, on the children. And then you’d feel better about yourself – and be well again. You really do look like shit.’

  Silence ensued. Neither of us was eating but we were looking at our plates. Then she said in a very low voice, ‘So – what do you think I should do to bring about this great change?’

  ‘I think you should sit him down and say that you are not going to go on with the affair and that you want him to come clean with his wife so that you can come clean with Arturo. And if he won’t, you should turn your back on him.’

  ‘I couldn’t do that.’

  ‘You could.’

  ‘But I love him. And he loves me.’

  And then, of course, I flipped. The moment was here and the moment would not remove itself. ‘No he doesn’t,’ I said. ‘Or if he does, it’s a bloody warped version of it. That’s not love. It’s called having your cake – it really, really isn’t –’

  ‘Oh – and you would know?’ She fingered the horrible necklace and gave a horribly sentimental leer. ‘He gives me lovely things and remembers my birthday and – he shows me in a hundred different ways.’

  ‘Except the one that matters. Words aren’t actions, Toni. And why wouldn’t he go on buying you nice things and remembering your birthday and all that stuff – those stolen nights of passion somewhere off the M40, those moments of ecstasy as he fumbles with you in the car, the secret telephone calls? He obviously loves all that intrigue and sex and titillation.’ This, I thought, is pushing it. Bob, to be fair, had never struck me as the kind of man who would recognise titillation if it got up and bonked him. But it suddenly occurred to me that maybe Toni did just that. One of them had to like it. It also, disloyally, occurred to me that I would probably love it as well. Some years ago Edna O’Brien said to the Archbishop of Canterbury that everyone needs a little adultery in their lives now and then … He, being of the Church of England, laughed politely. You have to wonder how the Inquisition would ever have got off the ground if it had been run by the C of E. ‘Warm up the tea urn, Mrs Brown, we’re coming in …’ I’d always thought the excitement of adultery was a truth and something that the less brave of us peek at over the marital stone wall. But loving its thrills – if indeed she did – quite clearly wasn’t keeping my friend from suffering. Putting aside the fleeting irritation I felt that she was, at least, losing weight, and that I, despite everything, was not, I battled on. ‘No, Antonia. What he doesn’t want is commitment – worrying over the gas bills, remembering to put out the rubbish, remembering to wipe the ring off the bath – he just wants the glamour and you get left with the dregs.’

  This was hardly fair on Arturo and the children.

  ‘I mean the dregs of having to live your life in one big lie. Bob has no children, Bob is scarcely ever at home – he doesn’t know what you go through and he doesn’t want to know what you go through, and you don’t tell him. You just pitch up when he’s ready for you and run yourself ragged with pain the rest of the time. He’s not going to change his ways now. And that includes leaving his missus. Why would he? But for you it’s no life and he’s – quite frankly – a shit.’ Another deep breath. In for a penny, in for a pound. ‘In fact, he’s a first-class shit. Don’t shoot the messenger, Toni, but actually, if you want to know the truth, all your friends think that.’

  The very dreadful thing about telling a truth that you have kept hidden for so long is that the guilt of not doing it soon gives it a momentum and it just rolls along once you get going. I should have stopped before this. As the gunsmoke cleared her face was like a piece of stone, staring at me. Suddenly I really, really wished I was in the Venice of five hundred years ago and had a handy Bocca del Leone to fall back on.’

  ‘Oh God,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry. I’ve gone too far.’

  She stood up. Her eyes were amazing, like liquid fire. There was colour in what had been parchment cheeks. She put a twenty-pound note on the table and spoke through her teeth. ‘You,’ she said, ‘and your little, perfect life. One perfect son, one perfect daughter, one perfect husband, one perfect house and your perfectly equable eyes on the low horizon. Whereas I – at least I have lived.’

  And then, inexcusably, I laughed. ‘Toni! How could you say that? Particularly about my house.’

  But even though she looked just a little discomfited by what she had said and realised there was something fundamentally wrong with it – my house had never been perfect and hers, by comparison, was – nor indeed had life always been easy with either Johnno or Tassie – Toni’s chi
ldren were far easier which was not saying a lot – she still took the high ground. ‘Very amusing. So you all think that, do you? All my friends in their little covens, discussing me and my affair and knowing exactly what I should do but not saying anything. Why did you, my very best friend, and never mind all the others, why did you let it continue for all these years without ever saying what you truly thought?’

  ‘Will you sit down?’ I asked, as meekly as I could.

  The waitress came and asked if everything was all right. Toni looked her coldly in the eye, straightened her back and gave a rather wonderfully commanding gesture with her little hand that had the poor waitress scuttling off as fast as she could. Toni was angry. Really angry. Which I suppose was marginally better than her usual twitchy misery. ‘So? What stopped you? Why now?’