grown-up. Aſt er her mother’s death, she sets out to write her memoirs in an attempt to understand the father she never really knew, the mother who wouldn’t leave him, and the devastation they leſt behind. I was infl uenced by Graham
Whole lives can be lived in secret. Gripped by the notion of a hidden family, Lucy Caldwell wrote a novel about living a lie
I’VE LONG BEEN fascinated by secrets: when they’re healthy, and when they’re necessary; when they’re harmless and when they start to fester into something more destructive. When does a tactful silence start to become a lie of omission, and how well can we ever really know those we love? In my new novel I set out to explore a devastating secret: the discovery that your husband or father has been living a whole other life. Patrick Connolly is a charismatic
plastic surgeon from Belfast who is headhunted by a fl edgling cosmetic surgery clinic on Harley Street in the early 1970s. He starts fl ying over twice a month, falls in love with a much younger nurse, and begins an aff air. For the next decade and a half, he leads a double life, housing a wife and two children in Belfast, as well as a mistress and two children in London, until the truth – as the truth oſt en does – emerges. T e novel is narrated by the mistress’ daughter, Lara, now
Greene’s taut, spare masterpiece T e End of the Aff air, and by one of my all-time favourite books, The Weather in the Streets by Rosamond Lehmann. The latter, about an unhappy love affair in 1930s London, has been called “the ultimate love story” by Vogue editor Alexandra Shulman, and Virago editor Carmen Callil declared it her generation’s Bridget Jones’s Diary. Neither of these books are contemporary, but the themes they deal with – love, lies, betrayal and forgiveness – resonate as much today as they must have done then. Few people would imagine – and
almost nobody must want to – ending up in the situation in which Lara’s mother does in my novel, being the ‘second family’ of a married man who can’t, or won’t, leave his wife and legitimate children, a half-life of shame, secrets and social stigma. And yet, as I found, it’s a situation
more common than you might at first think. Fiction is a way of understanding how someone – how you, or I, or our mother, or sister – could end up so far from who or how we thought we would be.
All the Beggars Riding by Lucy Caldwell Faber HB Out February