The Truth and Nothing But the Truth

Matilda Moresby was strongly against any medical experiments being performed on animals, and that most definitely included an animal of the species Homo Sapiens called Matilda Moresby. If anything she regarded psychological experiments with even more horror though she determinedly mixed in a dollop of disdain for both the experimenters and the participants. She would never fail to notice a gorilla (or at any rate, a man in a gorilla suit) and could never, in any circumstances, be induced to inflict torture on anyone (though of course it turned out that nobody was really being tortured).

But this had been a bad year for her. Her fledgling craft shop had not survived lockdown (she’d never had much sense of timing) and though working at the Call Centre wasn’t as horrible as some people said, it played havoc with her body clock and was mind-numbingly boring. And frankly she just couldn’t care less whether people bought home insurance or a funeral plan or a new conservatory or not. All the same, her money was running low. That bothered her. Matilda – or Tildy, as most people called her, and as the brief-lived craft shop had been called, (she still got emotional thinking of how “Tildy’s Treasures” had been picked out in that funky font above the door) wasn’t money or luxury obsessed. She did not aspire to own a Porsche 911 or to holiday in the Caribbean or have the latest smartphone as soon as it came out. She was happy to get her reading matter in charity shops. But she did like a degree of comfort and a few of life’s pleasures. She liked proper coffee, and Nordic sweaters and having holidays and weekend breaks in decent hotels with nice views, whether of the countryside or a historic market town.

A voracious reader from her childhood she had loved The Railway Children and Little Women, and still did, but thought the “playing at being poor” business in both of them was a bit silly, not that either family struck her as being that poor. Just not as rich as they used to be.

Well, she had never been exactly rich, but she was certainly poorer than she used to be. And she didn’t like it and was glad that with her best friend Lucy she didn’t need to pretend to like it. Lucy didn’t judge. She wasn’t the kind of person who offered you tiresome “life hacks” for dealing with straitened circumstances. So Tildy was surprised and a little disappointed when Lucy, treating her to a coffee in the local posh coffee shop, said, “I have an idea that might interest you.”

“Really?” Tildy asked, not knowing if she sounded too cynical or not cynical enough.

“Hear me out. And I promise you it doesn’t involve a hundred ways with leftovers or making your own bath oil.”

“You know me too well. Go on.”

“I did it myself only a few months back, but didn’t talk about it,” she paused. “Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like Opus Dei or the Freemasons or the recipe for the Women’s Institute Victoria Sponge. It’s not forbidden under threat of dire punishment. It’s just – well, advised against. But then folk hear of it through word of mouth, so obviously people have to be told.”

“Will you please get to the point?”

Lucy chuckled apologetically. “Sorry. And that’s very ironic too. There’s this – well, I don’t know what you’d rightly call it – a course, an experiment – that runs every few months. Just for a couple of weeks, and at a decent hotel. All meals and travel provided – and a nice little participation fee on top. I went to the one at Blantyre Grange, you know, near the Cathedral in Linhampton.”

Tildy knew. It was one of those hotels that somehow had just been out of her price range, even before.

“But the next one is out on the coast, at the Bellavista.”

“The next what, for pity’s sake?”

“Oh yes, I certainly need to go on another course. But you can’t go on more than one. Fair enough, I suppose. Well, all you have to do is to tell the truth for two weeks. And I mean the truth, and nothing but the truth, as they say in court – though I only know it from the TV of course! If you so much as tell one word of a lie or a half truth, well, you get chucked out and don’t get the fee. I don’t know what they do about the travel and catering and accommodation. But nobody on mine was chucked out. But so far as I know that’s the worst thing that could happen to you. So I suppose there’s nothing to lose!”

It had crossed Tildy’s mind that Lucy was winding her up, but Lucy wasn’t that kind of a person. She was aghast and intrigued at the same time. “It all sounds a bit like Big Brother,” she said.

“I thought that. But honestly it isn’t. I mean – there are no silly games, and you can read and watch TV as much as you want, they ask you not to take in your own electronics, but there are always laptops you can use. And there’s not voting in or out, and of course, it’s not public knowledge!”

“But there must be surveillance,” Tildy pointed out.

“Well – yes, of course. But maybe we can get too precious about that. After all, there’s CCTV everywhere and we all know Google knows our search history. Look, here’s the phone number. And yes, you can say I gave it to you. Dr Vernon won’t mind. Not in the circumstances. At least have a chat. At least think about having a chat!”

Lucy was the kind of person who carried post it notes round with her, and wrote the phone number on one of them – a bright yellow one. Tildy had every intention of doing absolutely nothing about it. When she got home, she took out her lighter that was shaped like a little lion. She had given up smoking three years ago and now didn’t have any cravings at all (which was as well, given the state of her finances and the price of cigarettes) but the lighter had been a present from her then boyfriend. They were still on good terms, and she wouldn’t have dreamed of throwing it away. She was going to put it to good use now to apply it to that yellow post it note and get rid of that phone number. But after not being used for so long, the lighter didn’t work. Deprived of her symbolic gesture, Tildy sighed, thinking she’d just have to tear it up. But the trouble was, she already knew the number. That was one skill you learnt working in a call centre – remembering phone numbers and not getting them mixed up.

Okay, she thought. Let’s see what kind of nonsense this is. She dialled the number. She expected it go to voicemail, but a rich, deep voice said, “Hello, this is Dr Adrian Vernon.” Tildy had always been a sucker for voices. That was, she supposed, another reason that the work at the call centre grated on her. So many people had intensely irritating voices. Dr Vernon most definitely did not. He had a voice like creamy toffee seasoned with single malt whisky.

“Dr Vernon, Lucy Elsworth gave me your number…”

“Ah yes, Lucy. She was with us at Blantyre Grange. A joy to work with. And I would trust her judgement entirely. You will be more than welcome to join us.”

Tildy was on the point of saying, “Now hang on a minute…..” but somehow, she didn’t. After all, what did she really have to lose? And Lucy had evidently survived the experience entirely unscathed and just as inclined to go round the houses as she had been before.

Two weeks later, having decided to use up all her holiday entitlement from the Call Centre, she arrived at the Bellavista Hotel and was greeted by Dr Vernon himself. At first Tildy thought that his appearance was a bit of a letdown after his voice – he was middle aged, slightly below average height, and had thinning hair. But then she shook his hand and looked into his eyes, and she knew there was nothing ordinary about him. Blimey, I haven’t felt like that since we got that sexy new French teacher Monsieur Beauchamp when I was 15, she thought, and yet realised at the same time it was not like a long-gone schoolgirl crush, not really. Though she would have been hard-pushed to describe just what she did feel.

She sat down in his office – presumably a temporary one, but it still seemed to have his stamp on it – an air of simplicity and understated elegance. There were a couple of family photos on a highly polished oak table, and a bunch of highly convincing silk roses in a blue and white vase. She might even have been taken in and thought they were real, despite the season, if she hadn’t once toyed with selling the same make in the shop but decided they were too expensive. He poured her a coffee from the machine (which she recognised as a high end model) and said, “Now, Matilda, if I may call you Matilda why are you here?”

Phrases like because it sounds interesting crossed her mind. But they did not reach her tongue. “Because I need the money,” she said.

He was not remotely offended. “Excellent. A perfectly sensible answer. Now I expect you’re wanting to get settled in. Do you mind sharing a room?”

And Tildy did not say “Well, it’s not ideal, but I can put up with it,” or “It’s okay if I have to.” She said, “Yes I do. I hate sharing a room.” It was true. She was, as she always told herself and other people, not anti-social, but drew the line at sharing holiday accommodation (okay, it wasn’t strictly speaking a holiday, but that wasn’t the point) with other people. She had once, long ago, done it with a friend, and though their friendship had survived, it had been sorely tried.

“Excellent,” he said again. “Then we must accommodate – pardon my little pun – your wishes.”

Her wishes were most certainly accommodated. This must be one of the poshest rooms in the hotel, she thought, sinking down appreciatively on the bed that she was sure had one of those hybrid mattresses that featured in commercial breaks even more than funeral plans and Broadband. It had the most luxurious padded headboard she’d ever known, and the room had a proper armchair, too, a TV with satellite channels, and a coffee machine that if not quite as high end as the one in Dr Vernon’s office was certainly an improvement on sachets of Nescafe. The room was tastefully furnished in shades of powder blue and soft mauve, and there was a wonderful view out across the promenade (and it was perfectly placed so you could see the gardens, though it wasn’t their most colourful time of year) to the sea. So is that how you get an upgrade for your room, thought Tildy. I must remember it! But she still felt ever so slightly uneasy. Surely the lies or half truths you weren’t supposed to tell were only the ones you could get found out for. The others were another matter. But she hadn’t been able to tell them.

There was a kind of group session that night, and Tildy didn’t look forward to it, but it wasn’t that bad. She didn’t push herself forward and nobody forced her. In fact she would have been hard pressed to tell whether the atmosphere was relaxed or repressed. To her surprise she recognised one of the other participants – a woman called Elaine who used to live in the same time, and who had been an occasional customer at the shop. She was embarking on a beading project and had bought her supplies during the short life of Tildy’s Treasures. “Elaine, small world and all that!” she exclaimed. “How did the project go?” Elaine gave her an odd look. It wasn’t exactly hostile but it wasn’t exactly friendly, either. “I gave it up,” she said, “Those beads were poor quality – they chipped and tarnished so easily.”

Tildy was about to say that nobody else had complained about them, but she was sorry. But she didn’t. Someone else had complained about them, or at least mildly said that they weren’t up to her usual standard, and she had half forgotten about it. And she wasn’t really that sorry. “The shop went out of business. Lockdown.” She said, tersely.

“Other businesses survived it,” Elaine said, equally tersely. But Tildy realised that Elaine was in much the same position as she was. This is going to be easy, she thought. Money for old rope. Though she had never really seen the point in paying out any money at all for old rope. She and Elaine backed off each other, and she saw, despite the curt conversation, a troubled look in Elaine’s eyes that she was sure was mirrored in her own.

The Bellavista, as it said in its own brochures and website, was famous for its breakfasts. There were several options, but Matilda decided that on her first morning there she would treat herself to a full English, though without the baked beans, which she didn’t much like. “How would you like your egg done, Madam?” the pleasant-faced young waitress asked. “Hard, please,” Tildy replied. And when she said hard, she meant hard. She was the first to admit that she somewhat went to extremes in this matter. Breakfast was, as Dr Vernon would doubtless have said, excellent. The bacon and sausages were crispy and flavoursome, the mushrooms and tomatoes and hash browns done to perfection, and the toast hot and plentiful. But her poached egg was not quite hard enough. And when the pleasant-faced waitress asked her how her breakfast was, she told her that. The minute the words were out she felt terrible. She had meant to say it was absolutely fine, and she’d certainly had far runnier eggs and endured them without complaint. But those words wouldn’t come. The poor girl – and she really was so young, Tildy realised, barely out of her teens, looked as if she were about to burst into tears.

Nobody here would have known how I like my eggs, she thought. There was no need at all to upset her!

She felt nearly as miserable as the waitress and was seriously considering walking out, money or not. He has done something at me, she thought. Something at all of us. Always scornful of conspiracy theories, sudden thoughts of truth drugs smeared through that firm handshake still entered her mind. Or had he performed some sort of hypnosis on them?

After several hours’ indecision (when none of them seemed to be expected to do very much) she went to Dr Vernon’s office. “I can’t go through with this,” she said – and the words “I’m sorry,” just wouldn’t come. “I don’t know what you’ve done, and I know I entered into it voluntarily, and I know I’ll lose quite a lot of money. But I want to leave.”

He did not seem remotely angry or put out. “My dear Matilda, as you rightly say, you are here entirely of your own volition, and nobody would make the slightest effort to restrain you against your will. We could even come to some arrangement about the money. But the thing is this,” his voice took on a confiding, half-apologetic note, “It’s not really that simple. In your own interests I have to tell you this. For the next two weeks – well, not quite two weeks now – you will tell everyone the truth. It will not matter in the slightest whether you are here or not. And I understand you work in a call centre. That could be a tad – awkward. Then what about your friend Abigail?” How the hell did he know that? Not that it mattered. Abigail kept going on about thinking she needed a nose job, even though she was scared of surgery and couldn’t really afford it. Tildy had always reassured her that it was totally unnecessary. But she was bound to ask again. And if it happened in the next two weeks – which it would – then she would tell her that yes, she did need a nose job as it made Cyrano de Bergerac’s hooter look positively retrousse. Well, she could retreat to her room and claim illness. Except of course she couldn’t. Because she wouldn’t be able to tell that lie.

Then I’ll just have to stick it out she thought. And stick it out she did, though it seemed like an eternity. She was half-fearful that things wouldn’t wear off, but they did. She had control over her words and actions again. And she would never dream of advising anyone to do such a horrible thing. She would tell Lucy that in no uncertain terms when she got back from her own holiday. She didn’t want to end their friendship, but didn’t feel well disposed to her. She and Abigail went for a coffee together, and she was very kind about her nose. But then, and she didn’t know why – except she did! – she found herself saying, “But if you do need extra money, for anything then I have an idea that might interest you ….!”