The Fraud

by Zadie Smith

Her impression was of an exceptionally forward, driven boy, with ambitions far outstripping his ability.

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.

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

It was a domestic policy of Mrs Touchet never to encourage morose thinking:

He tried to laugh it off in his old way, but bitterness had a hold of him, and what came out was closer to a strangulated sigh.

What really interested her in it all was the presumption. Of recognition, of respect – of attention itself. Why did he assume such things as his due? Was this what men assumed?

The purpose of life was to keep one’s mind open, never to judge on appearances or bad names, and always to make decisions based on evidence only.

But a church, to Mrs Touchet, had a different connotation: a church was only another form of human error, to be counted with all the others. She could be persuaded aesthetically by many, spiritually by some, but would never be wholly convinced. Not by any temple made by hands.

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?

Mrs Touchet had been a third wheel for so much of her life. This was different. This was a desolate, an almost dizzying feeling of exclusion.

When young, she had never understood why old women dithered so. Why they led conversations down dead ends and almost always overstayed their welcome. She did not know then what it was to have no definition in the world, no role and no reason. To be no longer even decorative. All too easy to lose your footing, to misunderstand everything, get the wrong end of every stick.

Mrs Touchet had always believed possible, an idealized table, around which men and women met as equals, employing only their wits – this was revealed to be a hopelessly naive vision. Beauty trumped all other considerations.

She felt a certain bitterness. But she knew that if she let bitterness overwhelm her, the ‘pleasure of her company’ would then not only be uncontested but actively avoided. Better to adopt a brittle, enforced optimism, with herself and everybody else.

Still, there were limits to such mitigations. Sometimes we don’t want to be chivvied out of our sadness or bitterness or anger. Sometimes all we want is consolation. Who would console Mrs Touchet?

It took her a very long time to understand the obvious: there must be a woman – or women – on the Continent, and whoever she or they were, they could neither be respectably brought back to England nor completely relinquished.

Mrs Touchet had a theory. England was not a real place at all. England was an elaborate alibi. Nothing real happened in England. Only dinner parties and boarding schools and bankruptcies. Everything else, everything the English really did and really wanted, everything they desired and took and used and discarded – all of that they did elsewhere.

A life of silent contemplation didn’t frighten her, no, not any more. What petrified her was the endless twittering chatter you heard everywhere you went.

When she was young, she had wanted to know everyone, touch everyone, be everyone, go everywhere! Now she thought that if you truly loved – and were truly loved by! – two people in your lifetime you had every right to think yourself a Midas.

Mrs Touchet had long believed there was something in coincidence. She could not say what, exactly. Something. The mirroring of feeling or gesture, the echo of one thing in another. Fortuitous crossroads of time and place. The doubling of victories, and collisions of defeat.

William put his head in his hands. Why did she ask so many questions? Why did he ask so few?

Three years of not seeing this man had not succeeded in tempering her loathing of him, and of all men of his kind. There are lawyers who combine the qualities of leech, prude, and hypocrite. Forever guarding and profiting from the borders between things – between people.

And how ridiculous it is, thought Mrs Touchet, that old women should be famed as gossips! The worst gossips she knew on this earth were all men.

Women have euphemisms for their bodies, noted Mrs Touchet, where men reserve such barbarisms for matters of money.

He moved Mrs Touchet to tears, quoting John Ball. When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?

So much of life is delusion. Each attempt to make a crossing, every high-altitude ambition that any person might conceive of in this world – all of it falls eventually, inevitably, at His feet, and comes to nothing.

Some people live for love, or for work, or for their children. Eliza Touchet had lived for an idea: freedom.

How could she have lived so long and thought so hard and yet have understood so little! What was this intolerable feeling? Love? She had been avoiding it for so long she had forgotten how painful it truly is.

Her daughter, Clara Rose, lived till eighty-three, ending up – as melancholy people often do – by the sea, in Torquay, where she died intestate in 1952.