A Curious Career (22 page)

I learned a lot from letting students interview me. But what I mainly learned was that I could never tell during the interview how good they were. Some students seemed really on the ball, asked interesting questions, elicited interesting answers – and then went away and wrote a completely standard piece with no insight at all. I advised such students to head for television or radio – they were good at interviewing, they just weren’t any good at writing it up. It was the other type who interested me, the ones who seemed rather bumbling and inattentive at the time, and then came back with a humdinger of a piece full of sharp observations on my voice, my smoking, my ‘tinkly’ laugh, my way of dealing with awkward questions (‘I can’t remember’ my usual standby), but also noticing their surroundings, my drawing room, my cat. I was often amazed that someone who had seemed half-asleep could have picked up so much good detail.

So, as I say, I was not a complete novice when I started doing publicity for
An Education
in 2009. But I found the whole experience unexpectedly intense because suddenly there were dozens of interviews to do, not just for the UK, but also for Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and then endless ‘down-the-lines’ for regional radio stations. And I was quite nervous about doing them because I was always afraid of letting slip the real name of my conman, which I wanted to keep secret. I’d called him ‘Simon’ in the book and then Nick Hornby, who wrote the screenplay, changed his name to ‘David’ in the film – which was confusing because it was also the name of my husband – so I always did a mental double-take when anyone asked about ‘David’.

There was also the problem of my parents. I knew they wouldn’t see the film (my father being blind, my mother crippled with arthritis, both in their nineties) but I thought that other people in their retirement home might come across my interviews – as indeed they did. Almost every interviewer attacked me for being ‘cruel’ to my parents. I would say unsentimental rather than cruel – or perhaps unsparing would be a better word. With friends and daughters I could defend myself by saying, ‘But look, you
know
what monsters my parents are!’ and anyone who had experienced my father’s shouting and my mother’s wilful obtuseness would warmly agree. But I couldn’t say that to the public at large because I knew there would be a keen audience at Bramble Cottage retirement home. So I really had to just take it on the chin – which is something you learn to do a lot in interviews.

(I remember when interviewing Vanessa Redgrave, I quoted a paragraph from her autobiography where one of her children said wistfully, ‘Can’t you stay with us, Mummy? Do you
have
to go and save all these other people?’ It seemed to me a crucial admission – that Redgrave was so busy saving the world, she neglected her own daughters – and I said accusingly, ‘Don’t you regret that?’ ‘Yes,’ she said simply, ‘I do.’ All my huffy-puffy moral indignation deflated instantly, and I found myself murmuring, ‘Oh well, we’ve all made mistakes.’ It was the honesty and genuine regret that was disarming.)

Anyway I did the first round of interviews for my book in early summer 2009, but knew I had to do another round in the autumn because the book was coming out in Australia and New Zealand, closely followed by the film. My mother fell ill in July and I spent a lot of time visiting her in Brighton Hospital but she seemed to be on the mend so I went for my usual week’s holiday in France. She died the day after I got back. She was ninety-two, she’d been in hospital with breathing difficulties and was told she had a dicky heart – I should not have been as surprised as I was. Nevertheless I was in a fog of disbelief for weeks: My mother
died
– how could that be? I always thought she would outlive me.

I was still puzzling this over when I had to do my next radio interview, a ‘down-the-line’ from a London studio to an Irish station. The interviewer asked something about my parents, and I was chatting about them, getting into a by now familiar groove, when I suddenly thought: Hang on. My mother’s dead. But the interviewer had moved on to ask about something else, and I thought: This is not the moment to say, ‘By the way, my mother died.’ And after that – after that one lie by omission – I decided not to tell any interviewers my mother died because if I told one, then I’d have to tell them all and I didn’t feel ready to talk about it yet. So I went on talking about my parents as if they were both still alive, right through the film premiere and into the New Year. I didn’t finally tackle the subject until my father died a few months later, when I wrote an article about becoming an orphan for the
Sunday Times
. I preferred to write it in my own words, rather than try to explain my very complex mix of feelings (guilt, relief, sorrow) to an interviewer. But it meant that for more than six months I kept up this strange lie.

My father died in May and very soon afterwards I was asked to do
Desert Island Discs
with Kirsty Young. Naturally, I was thrilled and wished my parents could have been alive to hear it. I included a favourite song of my father’s, ‘Abdul Abulbul Amir’, as one of my eight records and was touched afterwards to get dozens of letters from old people saying they hadn’t heard the song for decades and were so glad to hear it again – they thought nobody else remembered it.

I knew that Kirsty Young was a good interviewer (much better than Sue Lawley) because I’d been listening to
Desert Island Discs
for ever, but it was only when she interviewed me that I realised how very, very good she is. I’d thought that all her questions would be pre-planned, and of course many of them were, but she also made impromptu connections that couldn’t have been scripted. For instance, I chose Pulp’s ‘Common People’ as my first record and she asked if I would call myself a friend of Jarvis Cocker’s and I said no, I’d met him a few times and obviously admired him but not enough to count as a friend, and then she used that as a link to ask about my friendship with Tracey Emin. Time and again she made these deft segues, and I was dazzled by her speed of thought.

But she also asked some quite hostile questions. She picked up the admission in my book that I’d been very promiscuous at Oxford (of course I knew she would) and nagged away at it like a terrier with a bone. ‘You say you slept with fifty men! In two terms! And those terms aren’t very long, are they?’ No, I agreed limply, I was rather jamming them in. This unfortunate turn of phrase was of course much relished by the tabloids who quoted it endlessly. Come to think of it, perhaps it was just as well my parents were dead.

Another thought. My daughters were already in their thirties when this publicity blitz happened, and I knew I didn’t have to worry about upsetting them. They had heard all my shocking revelations before and joked about them with their friends. I had taken the precaution, when I wrote
An Education
, of showing them the manuscript before I sent it to the publisher, in case I’d said anything that might upset them, but they gave it the green light. But supposing I’d been doing all these interviews years earlier while my daughters were still at school? I would have had to censor myself – though how well I would have succeeded is doubtful. But it gave me more sympathy with interviewees who have children at home, who must always have to think about how their remarks will go down at their children’s school.

As well as doing interviews about
An Education
, I also started being invited to talk at book festivals, which was a whole new world to me. Of course they were fun, but I am still puzzled by the idea that people will pay to hear writers
talking
, when the whole pleasure of books for me is that they don’t require a captive audience in a hall but just one person reading privately in an armchair. Poets are different of course – I can understand why they would want to read their poetry aloud and other people would want to listen to them. But I couldn’t face reading my own prose out loud and said that, rather than give readings, I would prefer to be interviewed on stage and take questions from the audience.

I said yes almost indiscriminately to all the festivals that asked me. One of them was Richmond, which I happily accepted because Richmond is only a couple of miles from Twickenham where I grew up. The date was in my diary, the arrangements were made, and then they asked me to send an author photo for their programme. I sent my favourite photo, taken by Johnnie Shand Kydd, which showed me wreathed in smoke, enjoying a cigarette. The organisers said they couldn’t use it! They had funding from Richmond Council and health and safety regulations meant they were not allowed to publish anything that promoted smoking. Could I send them another photograph? No, I said. If the good burghers of Richmond were going to be so terrorised by a photograph of me smoking, imagine what my actual presence would do! The organiser was very sweet and kept offering compromises, but I withdrew on principle and Richmond had to struggle along without me.

Publishers like sending you to book festivals because, hopefully, you sell lots of books by signing them afterwards. And it was always gratifying to see a queue of people holding copies of
An Education
, waiting patiently for me to sign them. But one of the curiosities of these book-signings was that, more often than not, I would notice some woman, often about my own age or slightly younger, hanging around the back of the queue because she wanted to talk to me afterwards. One or two of these women had been to Lady Eleanor Holles and wanted to ask if I remembered so-and-so (I never did – I am hopeless on names) but, more interestingly, a few of them had memories of Simon, my conman. One of them had been ‘engaged’ to him and had a daughter by him but of course he did a bunk immediately. Another woman my own age told me that her daughter had gone out with an illegitimate son of Simon’s who went to Israel to look for him when he was eighteen. He found Simon eventually, but it was not a happy meeting, and he came back rather appalled by what he had seen of his father.

Perhaps this is a good opportunity to finish the story of Simon. When
An Education
came out, he rang me a couple of times from Israel but I always slammed the phone down as soon as I heard his voice. The
Daily Mail
offered to fly me out to Israel to meet him – they said they’d tracked him down through various aliases though none of the names meant anything to me – along with a reporter. I can’t think of anything I’d like less. To meet Simon again would be bad enough, but with a
Mail
reporter present! People kept asking, ‘Aren’t you curious to meet him?’ But no, absolutely not. He would tell a pack of lies about his life’s adventures, claiming he had always loved me, and I would look at him and think: How disgusting that I ever imagined I could marry such a lying slimeball.

Anyway, I learned in early 2013 that he was dead. I had an email from a man in Israel who said he believed I knew his late father, and enclosing some photos that were obviously of Simon. He said he wanted to talk to me about his father in order to ‘move on’ with his life. I had no desire to talk to him, but I wanted confirmation that Simon was dead, and I remembered that one of the women I’d met at a book festival had said she knew a son of Simon’s (a different son – he seems to have had zillions of children) who lived in Glasgow. Eventually I tracked her down and she confirmed that yes, Simon had died about a year earlier. Phew! I was amazed at how relieved I was, that I would never hear his creepy voice on the phone again. Everyone tells me I should forgive him, but why? He took advantage of my youth, but much worse was the way he so coolly conned my parents. He knew that he had to get them on side and he set about it in a very calculated manner, flattering my mother about her looks and my father about his intelligence. And they were so ashamed afterwards they wouldn’t even mention Simon’s name until a few months before they died. When my mother said ‘Forgive me’ on her deathbed, I think it was for Simon she meant.

When paedophilia became a hot topic in the early Noughties, I heard the term ‘grooming’ for the first time and recognised immediately that that was what Simon did to my parents. Technically, he was not a paedophile because I was sixteen when I met him, but sixteen-year-olds were more innocent then, and it was essentially a paedophile relationship. My whole appeal to him was that I was a schoolgirl, and his to me was that he was a grown-up, and he relied on the fact that schoolgirls didn’t question what grown-ups did.

But I hadn’t really defined this thought until I went to watch the filming of
An Education
at the old Haberdashers’ Aske’s school in Ealing. Carey Mulligan and the other girls were acting a classroom scene with their teacher, played by Olivia Williams, and when the scene ended Olivia Williams rushed up saying she had lots of questions she wanted to ask me. Most of her questions were about my memories of school, but then she asked, ‘Do you think he was a paedophile?’ And without a second’s thought I answered yes. Amanda Posey, the co-producer of the film, almost fainted. Apparently this had been a huge problem all the time her husband Nick Hornby was writing the script –
on no account
must Simon be seen as a paedophile, because then no good actor would agree to play him and audiences would stay away in droves. So thanks to Nick’s script, and the brilliant casting of Peter Sarsgaard, they managed to fudge the age question in the film, and I’d just airily blown it. Amanda presumably swore Olivia Williams to secrecy and tactfully suggested to me that if ever asked the question again, I should perhaps rethink my answer. But anyway, yes, I believe he was a paedophile and that he groomed my parents to deliver me to him, and that is why I have never felt the slightest desire to forgive him.