The Fraud

by Zadie Smith

Even as an adolescent, William fatally overestimated the literary significance of weather.

The strange thing about good people, Eliza had noticed, was the manner in which they saw that same quality everywhere and in everyone, when in truth it is vanishingly rare.

What was all of this, if not grace? A grace that kept happening, extending itself through time, as if The Elms and everyone in it had fallen through an un-darned hole in the pocket of this world. Their little life of domestic contentment. A home of women and girls, at ease with one another. Moral improvement, charitable works, quiet prayer. Grace.

From such worn cloth and stolen truth are novels made. More and more the whole practice wearied her, even to the point of disgust.

There are easy, self-serving truths, after all. And difficult, generous lies.

And real life will ever incline towards chaos.’

It’s only them on the bottom and top know how to live! The ones in the middle are odd ones out, if you ask me. All that reading. They’re curious and no mistake!’

The humiliations of girlhood. The separating of the beautiful from the plain and the ugly. The terror of maidenhood. The trials of marriage or childbirth – or their absence. The loss of that same beauty around which the whole system appears to revolve. The change of life. What strange lives women lead!

She who had worn no masks and was therefore almost impossible to understand.

All three little girls nodded very solemnly. Prayer was the only power they had to modify the world, and they took the responsibility of it as seriously as any monk.

But it is the perverse business of mirrors never to inform women of their beauty in the present moment, preferring instead to operate on a system of cruel delay.

Sometimes envy is so much like a recognition of fundamental similarity that the two emotions prove hard to separate.

‘As long as we speak of an island upon which people can suffer – and can cause pain the one to the other – I do not see that an eternity at either end is necessary to render that island of the utmost importance. Our duties on the island will be many. They will be never-ending, in fact. And that, I should think, is enough of eternity for any man, woman or child.’

What possesses people? Unhappiness, always. Happiness is otherwise occupied. It has an object on which to focus. It has daisies, it has snowdrifts. Unhappiness opens up the void, which then requires filling. With things like angry letters to The Times.

As much as Eliza hated awful people, she also could never resist them

The line between courtroom and theatre was far thinner than she would have supposed.

always remembering that false beliefs are precisely the ones we tend to cling to most strongly.

Not for the first time Mrs Touchet was struck by how much more passion may be aroused by phantom damages done to female ‘honour’ than by anything actually done to a woman herself.

But witchery is patient. That baronet had seven sons.

A pulse of doubt ran through her mind. Wouldn’t a fraud be nervous? Wouldn’t a fraud make more of an effort to convince?

A person is a bottomless thing!

But perhaps, reflected Mrs Touchet, this is always the case. We mistake each other. Our whole social arrangement a series of mistakes and compromises. Shorthand for a mystery too large to be seen. If they knew what I knew they would feel as I do! Yet even once one had glimpsed behind the veil which separates people, as she had – how hard it proves to keep the lives of others in mind! Everything conspires against it. Life itself.

Why did Mrs Touchet – with all her good intentions, her facility with language, her capacious imagination – still struggle to make herself understood?

Public speaking requires the freedom to speak in public, without fear of masculine censure or ridicule, which was never in short supply, even in supposedly enlightened gentlemen.

Was he really so good or did he only want to be seen to be good? Does it matter?

Of all the places the truth may appear, perhaps the least likely is a circus.

In this spirit, she now considered her own tendency to believe what she most needed to be true.

Mrs Touchet drew yet another theory of truth from these melancholy reflections: people lie to themselves. People lie to themselves all the time.

Human error and venality are everywhere, churches are imperfect, cruelty is common, power corrupt, the weak go to the wall! What in this world can be relied on?

It is remarkable, thought Mrs Touchet, how quickly a man of flesh and blood can become mere symbol.

All of our names are only temporary, she reminded herself. Only notations for something beyond imagining. They can give shape to matters too big to be seen, but never can they wholly describe the mystery.

‘I know it is not. And where freedom is concerned, Mrs Touchet, I would advise you not to wait for others to present a false gift of it to you. You will be waiting a long time.