Lying. Dissimulating. Misrepresenting. Whatever you call it, I’ve always believed it was one of my virtues - an extension of my ability to make up stories - which is what I do for a living.
I first found myself fibbing when I was at Senior School. I began inventing boyfriends. Disastrous boyfriends who insulted me, invaded my innocence and broke my heart.
And all this to give comfort and succour to my unfortunate girl friends. Sylvia, for example, sobbing away in the toilet between Double Maths and Biology. Five minutes late for Biology actually. But I did not mind risking the wrath of Miss Haemoglobin for friend.
"What’s up, SyIv?" I whispered through the door.
"It’s Harry," she gulped. "He’s ashamed of me. Won’t take me home - just ‘cos his Dad’s on the Council and mine’s down the pit."
"That’s nothing!" I declared with all the vehemence I could muster. "This lad I fancy told the whole choir at St Mark’s that he wouldn’t consider getting engaged to me if I was the last female on earth- ‘cos I was too common."
Sylvia emerged, wet-faced, from her malodorous hiding place.
"Really? Oh poor you. I didn’t know you were going with a choir boy. My Harry’s not as bad as that. He loves me. We’ll probably run away and get married and then his stuffy old parents will have to accept me."
She strutted off to the lab, head held high, and I followed, content to leave her to present the lesser falsehood about the sudden onslaught of her period. Especially as she backed it up with a long discourse on my virtue as a faithful pal, who had
procured pads and pins from Matron. Was my mensongerie catching, I wondered later in Advanced French, watching Sylvie, fully recovered emotionally, clutching her stomach and drooping convincingly over her Irregular Verbs.
Lucy’s problem was rather more serious.
"I think I’m pregnant," she confided, walking up the aisle to receive Communion one Sunday.
"How? Why? Who?"
The questions were spaced out to avoid Father Bartlett’s eyes as he worked his way towards us.
"Billy kissed me with his mouth open six weeks ago and I haven’t - you know - " she told me on the way back to our pew.
Under cover of the next hymn I assured her that my last boyfriend had done things so much more intimate with me than French kissing before he ran away with the Wakes people that he had left me some special pills to stop me having a baby.
"In fact I may never be able to conceive," I added tragically, then saw immediately that though this might serve to emphasise the wickedness of my anonymous lover, thus making Billy seem a comparative saint, it might put Lucy off.
"... but that’s only because I was so heart-broken I took five at once," I assured her; then added "I’ve got one left ..."
I gave her one of Gran’s rhubarb pills but it worked a treat and Lucy asked me to every party at her house for the next five years. She had followed my instructions to the letter: the hot bath and the swig of gin from her Dad’s cocktail cabinet [you can see why I was so chuffed at being asked to parties at their house]. I could have been her bridesmaid but we had moved away long before she married.
With my family’s uprooting and my getting a place at teacher Training College came a new phase in my Untruthfulness. Perhaps still haunted by memories of that cocktail cabinet. I could not help but notice that most of my fellow students came from posher, richer homes than mine - some bordering on the Aristocracy or Obscene Wealth or Celebrity. So I began to fabricate a family history including kinship with the Notorious if not the Famous. I got away with it mainly because when my folks had moved they had in fact emigrated - if only to France. In the wisdom of hindsight I can now see that Audrey and Claire and Shirley-Anne might have enjoyed the experience of spending time at our run-down old farmhouse in the Loire Valley just as much as I enjoyed spending Christmas in Kendrick Hall, Easter in a luxurious London flat and a good part of the Summer on the boat of a talented violinist. But this was before buying and doing up old properties in France became the English obsession and it was not as if my father was some Bohemian holed up in the country to write his book - he was just a simple Salesman, renting a ruin of a house because it was cheap.
In my prevarications about him however he became first a bank robber on the run - a huge secret Claire promised never to divulge, especially to her father, the Merchant Banker. Later I swore Shirley-Anne to secrecy about Dad being a Very Special Agent, working for both [unspecified] sides and in constant danger. She was sure her delicate, musician father would not have mentioned mine in any of the countries he visited on his concert tours but I begged her not to tell. Audrey reluctantly
agreed not to offer help from her recently-knighted surgeon father when I painted a picture of a pathetic invalid in a wheelchair.
At times I was myself in awe of my own inventiveness and was driven to send some of my course-work essays to various magazines. A story was accepted and an article returned with an invitation to reslant it but this was during Finals and, ironically,
right in the middle of a bona fide broken romance I had been having with a nIce chap from London’s East End so I was not as excited as I should have been. This was the point where my falsehoods began to catch up with me. My father did in fact become ill and
he and my mother returned to England where they moved in with a maternal Aunt in Bournemouth. She happened to have a bit of a pull with the Local Authority and managed to swing me a teaching job even though my results were not too brilliant. We all rubbed along well enough together and I made a new set of friends.
Look, it’s not my fault that I seemed to attract such a lot of lame ducks.
Nathalie was French, so naturally veered towards me as I had spent at least seven weeks in her country. She was divorced, with two children and for ever up to her ears in debt. I was always ready to listen to her and advise. Came the day when Nathalie overstepped the mark and asked for a loan. Instead of simply refusing on the valid grounds that I too was broke - I lied. I simply could not bear the boringness of poverty.
"There’s something l’ve never told you, Nat," I said, lighting a cigarette. I rarely smoked but I had to create the right atmosphere for the personality I was about to create.
"I’m secretly married ..."
Nathalie forgot her cheque books and bills and curled up on her shabby sofa, all ears. for this juicy bit of girl talk.
"It was In Paris, when I was - er - nineteen. He was at the Sorbonne and I had no idea his family were so important. We had this Civil wedding - just us and a few of his student friends - and we set up home in an attic on the Left Bank."
I could see I had her full attention and I was getting quite interested in the details myself but then I reminded myself of the practical purpose of this fabrication.
"Alas, the first bliss did not last long - he was on drugs - he could not finish the course -he got job after job and lost them and now ..."
I groped for a paper hankie and sniffled into it for a few seconds.
"He’s sleeping rough under the bridges of the Seine and I have to go over and search for him from time to time and - and - give him any spare cash I manage to scrape together. Never tell a living soul, will you?"
Nathalie was crying. I gave her the rest of the packet of hankies and left.
George was gay. We hit it off straight away and I enjoyed his company. We liked the same films and the same zany style of dancing. He had a long-term, if intermittent, relationship going with a bartender in America. They saw each other three times a year. The trouble came when George received a Dear John letter from the States. He became suicidal. I had to do something drastic. So I lied.
"I don’t know if Nathalie’s said anything ..." I began.
"About your secret marriage - yes," said George. "I wondered when you were going to share it with me," he added, all petulant and feminine.
"I haven’t told anybody this, not even Nathalie." I said. "But Jean-Luc is in the Hôpital Laënec. They don’t think they can save him. I’m going over this weekend to - to say goodbye ."
"Oh, you poor darling."
George flung his arms around me and I waited breathlessly to see if my ploy had worked.
"And here’s me going on and on about my trivial troubles. Mark is just being temperamental I expect. But you, my poor love - I’ll come with you to Paris!"
"Oh no! I - I may stay on - I’m fed up with teaching so I may just - drift."
It may sound as if I was digging a hole too deep but I had that very day received my first contract from the BBC and on the strength of a £90 fee had decided to become a full-time writer. But first I had to deal with a new personal crisis. I haven’t
mentioned my baby brother so far but he had run away to London and was working as a docker. I sought out my ex-lover from Plaistow to help me find David. Together we routed him out, lectured him on the error of his ways and returned him to
Bournemouth. And incidentally my lovely Cockney feller and I renewed our passion for a few heavenly weeks even though he was married and I was engaged to Philip.
I married Philip mainly because he did not mind supporting me while I broke into the literary world. He was an accountant and with him came a new set of Friends in Need.
Like Marge. Whose husband, the most gentlemanly of Phil’s colleagues, beat her up on a regular basis. For Marge I created a past littered with violent men. This did not help with the pain and embarrassment of her blackened eyes and bruised limbs but I did also accompany her to hospital and to a Counsellor - and finally to the police.
Betty suspected her husband of having an affair with his secretary. She told me this as it she was the only woman ever to have been in this situation. I summoned up a cynical snort.
"But, my dear, they’re all at it."
Betty looked up from the onions she was peeling in her neat suburban kitchen, identical to mine next door!
"You mean ..."
"Oh yes, Phil too," I obliged her. "He even stole a day from our honeymoon to go and see his - his floozie."
Betty sat down; drying her tears.
"What - what are you going to do? And what should I do?" she asked and before I could answer added, "Divorce is impossible. There’s never been even a Separation in my family."
"Modern men and women don’t need that!" I declared, changing course in mid- stream. "Phil and I have an Understanding."
"You mean you ...
"Have affairs all over the place. You saw me in the High Street with George, didn’t you? Who did you think that was? An old friend of Phil’s?"
