The fraud, p.1
The Fraud, page 1
By the same author
fiction
White Teeth
The Autograph Man
On Beauty
NW
The Embassy of Cambodia
Swing Time
Grand Union: Stories
non-fiction
Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays
Feel Free: Essays
Intimations: Six Essays
plays
The Wife of Willesden
PENGUIN PRESS
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
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Copyright © 2023 by Zadie Smith
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ISBN 9780525558965 (hardcover)
ISBN 9780525558972 (ebook)
Cover design: Gray318
Interior design adapted for ebook by Cora Wigen
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
pid_prh_6.1_144804582_c0_r0
Contents
Cover
By the Same Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Volume One
1. A Very Large Hole
2. A Late Ainsworth
3. A New Spirit of the Age
4. The Lady of the House
5. Liking William
6. The Mystery of Pain
7. The Flitch of Bacon
8. The Ainsworth Sisters
9. ‘I’m a writer’
10. ‘My prime of youth is but a frost of cares’
11. A Hundred Pounds a Year
12. Visiting Elm Lodge, Spring 1830
13. Taking the Waters at Kilburn Wells
14. Grace
15. Nine Months
16. A Queer Reversal
17. Visiting Chesterfield
18. Talking ‘Cant’ in Chesterfield
Volume Two
1. Moving Again
2. Debating Tichborne
3. Still Debating Tichborne
4. Hurstpierpoint, West Sussex
5. Another Package
6. Cuckfield Park
7. ‘I do not advise you to enter upon a literary career’
8. Jamaica, in Fiction
9. Hilary St. Ives, 1869
10. St Lawrence’s Fair
11. ‘These are our riches’
12. Jamaica, in Reality
13. Debating Jamaica
14. Agreeing to Disagree
15. A Tichborne Addendum
16. Chapman Sees a Ghost
17. Visiting Gilbert
18. A Gift for Joy, 1832
19. A Ladies’ Outing, 1830
20. Bow Bridge House
21. A Ladies’ Outing, 1870
22. Horsham
23. ‘Sir Roger’
24. Andrew Bogle
25. The Claimant
Volume Three
1. Kensal Lodge, July 1834
2. The First Insatiable
3. The View from the Stairs
4. The Wages of Sin
5. Compensations
6. Dickens is Dead!
7. Taking the Train
8. The Ethiopians
9. The Lawyer Atkinson Makes His Recommendation
10. Distaff
11. What Can We Know of Other People?
12. Consider Bogle!
13. Visiting the Lady Marguerite Gardiner Blessington, Spring 1836
14. Weightier Matters
15. Conversations of Lord Byron
16. Triangular Arrangements
17. On Cruelty
18. On Mobility
19. Le Monde Bouleversé
Volume Four
1. The Artist & the Author
2. Contemporary Fiction
3. The Court of Common Pleas, 11th May 1871
4. Dramatis Personae
5. The Uses of Improvisation
6. Comedy in the Court
7. Negative Capability
8. Are You Arthur Orton?
9. Not Her Pen
10. What is Real?
11. All is Change
12. A Memory
13. All Souls
14. A Single Soul
15. Adjourned Until November!
16. An Amusing Piece in Punch
Volume Five
1. London Daily News, Friday 10th November 1871
2. Walking to Willesden
3. Jack Sheppard, 1838
4. The ‘Newgate Controversy’
5. Like Two Peas in a Bushel
6. Forgiveness in Stereoscope, 1845
7. At the Dolly Shop
8. No One to Send
9. Believing Bogle
10. All is Lost!
11. A Proposal
12. Andrew & Henry & Eliza
13. A Public Spectacle
14. A History of Bogle
Volume Six
1. On Hope
2. Correction
3. Nonesuch Bogle & Mulatto Roger
4. ‘im who speak sense here nah speak true’
5. A Dinner
6. The Great Storm
7. Inheritance
8. Myra
9. Barren
10. ‘Myra’s Andrew’
11. The Final Return
12. For Love & Profit
13. Mr Edward Tichborne
14. Wild Talk
15. Pragmatism
16. Lineage
17. Staying Overnight at the Brown Hen
18. A Very Big House
19. A Young Negro Archer
20. The Order of Things
21. In the Event of Universal War
22. Bitter Harvests
23. Automaton
24. Cato Street
25. Thistlewood! Wedderburn!
26. The Eternal Return of Johanna
27. The Prophetic Circular Dream of Little Johanna
28. Bahama Grass, 1826
29. Taken Off the Country
30. A European Honeymoon
Volume Seven
1. D is for Doughty
2. Upton Park, Poole
3. The Christmas Uprising, 1831
4. Reform, 1834
5. Miss Elizabeth
6. Black Bogle
7. Who Am I, Really?
8. ‘slavery’
9. Adding Up & Taking Away
10. Tichborne Park
11. Love or Property?
12. Patronage, 1853
13. Surety
14. Jane Fisher
15. Saltwater
16. Johanna’s Warning
17. Lady Mabella de Tichborne’s Warning
18. What is Real?
19. The Door Opens Inward
Volume Eight
1. Appeals to the Public, 1873
2. Freedom!
3. Magnetism
4. A Public Literary Dinner, Manchester Town Hall, 12th January 1838
5. Doubly Blessed
6. Summer 1872
7. Manchester Free Trade Hall
8. The Facade
9. Visiting the Ainsworth Girls, 28th October 1838
10. The World of Sentiment
11. Cotton & Confidence
12. What If?
13. Regina vs Castro, 23rd April 1873
14. A Question of Length
15. The Twelfth Messenger
16. Only Half the Story
17. A Celebratory Party at the Sussex Hotel, Bouverie Street, 12th December 1840
18. The first page of The Tower of London
19. A Theory of Truth
20. The Mysteries of Bogle & Luie
21. Open Land
22. Grace
23. What Can We Know of Other People?
24. An Earlier Bogle Mystery, 1840
25. ‘The great problem is at length solved’, 1844
26. Sink or Swim
27. Offstage
28. Theory
29. Infinity, 1851
30. Fire Sale, 1852
31. The Brighton Years, 1853–67
32. Grand Unions
33. A Trip to Manchester, Pancake Day 1863
34. Kenealy Sums Up, December 1873
35. No Questions
36. A Dark Secret
37. The End
38. Fools & Fanatics
39. The Great Indignation Meeting!
40. After Hackney Downs, 11th December 1875
41. A Pauper’s Burial, 1877
42. A Coincidence on a Train
43. Up & Away
Afterword
Acknowledgements
About the Author
_144804582_
For Darryl and Devorah
Volume One
I’ve seen this great city of London pulled down, and built up again – if that’s anything. I’ve seen it grow, and grow, till it has reached its present size. You’ll scarcely believe me, when I tell you, that I recollect this Rookery of ours – this foul vagabond neighbourhood – an open country field, with hedges round it, and trees. And a lovely spot it was.
william harrison ainsworth
1.
A Very Large Hole
A filthy boy stood on the doorstep. He might be scrubbed of all that dirt, eventually – but not of so many orange freckles. No more than fourteen, with skinny, unstable legs like a marionette, he kept pitching forward, shifting soot into the hall. Still, the woman who’d opened the door – easily amused, susceptible to beauty – found she couldn’t despise him.
‘You’re from Tobin’s?’
‘Yes, missus. Here about the ceiling. Fell in, didn’t it?’
‘But two men were requested!’
‘All up in London, missus. Tiling. Fearsome amount of tiling needs doing in London, madam . . .’
He saw of course that she was an old woman, but she didn’t move or speak like one. A high bosom, handsome, her face had few wrinkles and her hair was black. Above her chin, a half-moon line, turned upside down. Such ambiguities were more than the boy could unravel. He deferred to the paper in his hand, reading slowly:
‘Number One, St James-es Villas, St James-es Road, Tunbridge Wells. The name’s Touch-it, ain’t it?’
From inside the house came a full-throated Ha! The woman didn’t flinch. She struck the boy as both canny and hard, like most Scots.
‘All pronunciations of my late husband’s name are absurd. I choose to err on the side of France.’
Now a bearded, well-padded man emerged behind her in the hall. In a dressing gown and slippers, with grey through his whiskers and a newspaper in hand, he walked with purpose towards a bright conservatory. Two King Charles spaniels followed, barking madly. He spoke over his shoulder – ‘Cousin, I see you are bored and dangerous this morning!’ – and was gone.
The woman addressed her visitor with fresh energy: ‘This is Mr Ainsworth’s house. I am his housekeeper, Mrs Eliza Touchet. We have a very large hole on the second floor – a crater. The structural integrity of the second floor is in question. But it is a job for two men, at the very least, as I explained in my note.’
The boy blinked stupidly. Could it really be on account of so many books?
‘Never you mind what it was on account of. Child, have you recently been up a chimney?’
The visitor took exception to ‘child’. Tobin’s was a respectable firm: he’d done skirting boards in Knightsbridge, if it came to that. ‘We was told it was an emergency, and not to dawdle. Tradesmen’s entrance there is, usually.’
Cheek, but Mrs Touchet was amused. She thought of happier days in grand old Kensal Rise. Then of smaller, charming Brighton. Then of this present situation in which no window quite fit its frame. She thought of decline and the fact that she was tied to it. She stopped smiling.
‘When entering a respectable home,’ she remarked, lifting her skirts from the step to avoid the dirt he had deposited there, ‘it is wise to prepare for all eventualities.’
The boy pulled off his cap. It was a hot September day, hard to think through. Shame to have to move a finger on such a day! But cunts like this were sent to try you, and September meant work, only work.
‘I’ll come in or I won’t come in?’ he muttered, into his cap.
2.
A Late Ainsworth
She walked swiftly across the black and white diamonds of the hall, taking the stairs two at a time without touching the banister.
‘Name?’
‘Joseph, ma’am.’
‘It’s narrow here – mind the pictures.’
Books lined the landing like a second wall. The pictures were of Venice, a place he’d always found hard to credit, but then you saw these dusty old prints in people’s houses so you had to believe. He felt sorry for Italian boys. How do you go about tiling a doorstep with water coming right up to it? What kind of plumbing can be managed if there’s no basement to take the pipes?
They arrived at the library disaster. The little dogs – stupid as they looked – skittered right to the edge but no further. Joseph tried standing as Tobin himself would, legs wide, arms folded, nodding sadly at the sight of this hole, as you might before a fallen woman or an open sewer.
‘So many books. What’s he need with them all?’
‘Mr Ainsworth is a writer.’
‘What – so he writ them all?’
‘A surprising amount of them.’
The boy stepped forward to peer into the crater, as over the lip of a volcano. She joined him. These shelves had held histories three volumes deep: the kings, queens, clothes, foods, castles, plagues and wars of bygone days. But it was the Battle of Culloden that had pushed things over the edge. Anything referring to Bonnie Prince Charlie was now in the downstairs parlour, covered in plaster, or else caught in the embrace of the library’s Persian rug, which sagged through the hole in the floor, creating a huge, suspended, pendulous shape like an upturned hot air balloon.
‘Well, now you see, madam, and if you don’t mind me saying’ – he picked up a dusty book and turned it over in his hand with a prosecutorial look on his face – ‘the sheer weight of literature you’ve got here, well, that will put a terrible strain on a house, Mrs Touchet. Terrible strain.’
‘You are exactly right.’
Was she laughing at him? Perhaps ‘literature’ was the wrong word. Perhaps he had pronounced it wrong. He dropped the book, discouraged, knelt down, and took out his yardstick to measure the hole.
* * *
*
Just as he was straightening up, a young child ran in, slid on what was left of the parquet and overturned an Indian fern. She was pursued by a nice-looking, bosomy sort in an apron, who managed to catch the child moments before she fell through the house. ‘Clara Rose! I told you – you ain’t allowed. Sorry about that, Eliza.’ This was said to the prickly Scot, who replied: ‘That’s quite all right, Sarah, but perhaps it’s time for Clara’s nap . . .’ The little Clara person, in response to being held so tight at the waist, cried: ‘No, Mama, NO!’ – yet seemed to be addressing the maid. The boy from Tobin’s gave up all hope of understanding this peculiar household. He watched the maid grasp the child, too hard, by the wrist, as mothers did round his way. Off they went. ‘A late Ainsworth,’ explained the housekeeper, righting the fern.
3.
A New Spirit of the Age
Downstairs, the Morning Post lay discarded by an uneaten breakfast. William sat brooding, his chair facing the window. There was a brown paper package in his lap. He started at the sound of the door. Was she not meant to see him in his sadness?
‘Eliza! Miladies! There you are. I thought you’d abandoned me . . .’
The dogs arrived panting at his feet. He didn’t look down or stroke them.
‘Well, I’m afraid it’ll be a week at least, William.’
‘Hmmm?’
‘The ceiling. Tobin only sent one boy.’
‘Ah.’ As she reached for his breakfast things he put a hand out to stop her: ‘Leave that. Sarah will take that.’ Then stood up, and seemed to glide away in his slippers, silent as a shade.
Something was wrong. Her first instinct was to check the newspaper. She read the front page and scanned the rest. No friends suddenly dead or disturbingly successful. No unusual or uniquely depressing news. More working men were to be allowed to vote. Criminals were no longer to be transported. The Claimant had been found not to speak a word of French, although the real Roger Tichborne grew up speaking it. She put everything back on the tray. As she understood it, Sarah’s opinion was that breakfast trays were now beneath her dignity. Yet no maid had been hired to replace her, and so it fell to Mrs Touchet.
