The Truth About Julia: A Chillingly Timely Psychological Novel (15 page)

‘Can you tell me a little bit more about the ways in which Julia had changed when she returned from her travels? And how was your relationship with her in the past few months?’

Timothy cleared his throat. ‘Well, that’s quite difficult to describe. When Julia finally returned to the UK we were all really excited to have her back. The whole family, with the exception of Jonathan, who was still sore about her wedding speech, went to the airport to welcome her home. Amy was elated by the prospect of regaining her beloved sister. We just couldn’t wait for her to walk through the arrival gates. When she finally did come through, though, I was quite shocked by her appearance. You know, we hadn’t seen her for two years. She’d grown haggard, her face looked thinner and her mouth harder; she was wearing cargo pants, army boots and an old pullover with holes in it, and her once-so-pretty hair was dishevelled and had clearly not been cut for a very long time.

‘We hugged, and I was overjoyed that she was back home safely. She, too, seemed very pleased to see us, and for a few days she talked almost non-stop about her experiences during her trip. But she mainly told us about facts. It was curiously impersonal… Economic, political, ecological questions, that kind of thing, you know? We got a pretty clear sense of where she’d been, what she’d witnessed, and that the abject poverty and working conditions in these places had made a profound and lasting impression on her. She seemed angry and distressed, and very restless – all at the same time.

‘I think Amy was very disappointed that Julia didn’t really appear to be particularly interested in her own news. Amy had just won a scholarship to study for a PhD, and was really excited about her project and all that, and had so much been looking forward to discussing it all with Julia. Julia stayed with us for about two weeks or so, and then moved to a flat in Camden to live on her own. She must have arranged that before her return. It was a rather shabby flat, in a building that looked as though it was about to fall down. I didn’t like what I saw at all when we delivered her things there. We agreed to pay her rent for a while, until she knew what she wanted to do next. But, as I said, after a year or so we decided to stop doing that.

‘Then she began to work in that ghastly vegetable shop near Camden market, and moved in with a friend she’d met there. That shop was a terribly run-down place, utterly unhygienic, populated by smelly mongrels that had never been properly trained and that didn’t follow orders. The people who worked and hung out there were all aggressive, joyless fanatics, not friendly laughter-loving hippies, you know? They always looked at Rose and me as though they thought us the bourgeois enemy incarnate and would like nothing more than to stake us with the meagre organic carrots we bought from them. Instead, they begrudgingly wrapped them in ancient left-wing newspapers and handed them over in the most contemptuous manner possible.’

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?