The Fraud

by Zadie Smith

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.

She was not interested in the blood of San Gennaro. What interested her was his freedom of movement. His freedom.

Occam’s razor, Sarah. In the case of a mystery, the simplest solution will tend to be the right one.’

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

‘Well, instead of giving it to the Romans, he gave it to the poor.’ Clara blew a raspberry: ‘The poor! The poor are lazy!’

And what sort of thing does a Lord like? I’ll tell you: fighting, fucking, drinking, and kicking a pigskin about. Now, what does my old man and all my uncles and brothers and cousins like? None different. 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 Change’ marked, in the mind of Mrs Touchet, the final hurdle in the ladies’ steeplechase: 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!

There was a bracketed place in her brain where things were both true and not true simultaneously. In this same space one could love two people. Live two lives. Escape and be at home.

She spotted black maids-of-all-work and black cooks and housekeepers, a black man with deep angular scars on both cheeks, watering a horse outside a pub, and two others sat on the ground, utterly destitute by Waterloo Bridge, and then a brown shop boy in the doorway of a furrier.

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.

‘Lawd! Protek wi fram di wikkid!’

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.

Twitter.

‘Well, as he never knew Sir Roger in the first place, I’m afraid I don’t at all see how—’ ‘No more did I know the bugger, nor any of them snakes, nor any of this lot’ – Sarah gestured at the avid chestnut-eaters all about them – ‘Don’t stop us lot from having a right to our opinions, does it?’

Again: Twitter.