Would I Lie To You?: a laugh-out-loud romcom

by Francesca Clementis

Genres: General Fiction; Contemporary Romance

Synopsis

A hilarious and heart-warming novel, perfect for fans of Marian Keyes and Ali McNamara Lauren Connor doesn't usually tell lies. But when she meets Chris Fallon at a party hosted by her best friend Stella, somewhere between running out of small talk and agreeing to a date, she ends up telling a few inconsequential fibs to make herself seem more likeable. But now Lauren's going to have to deal with the consequences of her fabrications. And if that wasn't enough, she's about to get caught up in the crossfire of her well-intentioned friends and relatives. But could it be that Lauren isn't the only one telling lies . . . ?

Release date: April 19, 2012

Publisher: Piatkus

Print pages: 424

Sample

Lauren took a deep breath and a deeper swallow of her icy white wine. She hated parties, especially Stella’s parties, best friend or not. But there was one advantage for Lauren. In fact there was only one in the case of Stella’s parties. Lauren would have to focus so hard on not making a complete fool of herself, as was her custom at parties, that she would forget the two questions that were tormenting her, screaming for answers. That was the theory.

Her first lie was surprisingly easy. Hardly a lie at all. Just one of those things somebody says to make somebody else feel comfortable. Careless words uttered without thought for the consequences.

‘Great party, Stella!’ Lauren shouted above the thudding music. (This wasn’t the lie. It was a lie, but not the lie. This was just a good guest’s courtesy. The real lie came ten minutes later.)

Stella raised her glass in thanks, not even bothering to try and compete with the throbbing bass. The party was a triumph by her own criteria. It was a house-warming and the aim of the party was to cram many more people in than during the house-warming at the previous house. It signalled a bigger house, progress, visible evidence that the owners were movers, constantly edging forwards and upwards. Never standing still. It was exhausting to watch. The mere act of receiving the biennial change of address card made Lauren feel tired.

‘It’s a huge house!’ Lauren yelled, knowing that this was exactly what her friend wanted to hear.

Stella rewarded her with a proud grin. ‘Three receptions, five bedrooms, three bathrooms, one en suite, and a conservatory. Of course, it needs masses of work. But it was such a bargain.’

Lauren looked around at the decor. It wasn’t difficult to see why it had been such a bargain. The previous owners had evidently subscribed to the Changing Rooms Guide to Making Your House Completely Unsellable. Every room had been decorated in a different style, with Moroccan dining room leading into Aborigine living room by way of a hallway that had been feng shuied into a crystal apocalypse.

Lauren no longer bothered asking why Stella and Pete insisted on buying bigger and bigger houses when they had no intention of having children. She understood. The houses were their children. Well, Stella’s anyway. Pete never talked about it but he seemed happy enough with Stella’s housebuying obsession.

‘Who are all these people?’ Lauren asked, gesturing over the mass of unfamiliar faces. She’d known both Stella and Pete for eighteen years, since university days, and thought she had met most of their friends and acquaintances.

Stella waved her hand vaguely. ‘I invited everyone from work, and we asked friends of friends, that sort of thing. You know.’

Lauren knew. Stella needed friends by the number. She needed to know that at any time she could fill a room or a pub or a house with people who liked her. Most of all, Stella needed to be liked. By everyone she met. This didn’t diminish the friendship she offered Lauren, which was deep and generous. But she also had to have the reassurance of a fat address book and a noticeboard pinned thick with invitations. She judged the achievements of each year on the increase in numbers of Christmas cards received. She only had to meet someone amenable for them to join her computer database. Pete went along with this placidly. He hated conflict and felt fortunate that the only contribution required to keep Stella happy was to open his home to a constant stream of strangers and play the straight man to Stella’s well-rehearsed banter.

But this party was something else. It was as if Stella and Pete had gone to IKEA, accosted all those attractive couples in their Gap jeans, persuaded them to drop their flatpacks containing entire integrated living environments, herded them into a coach and lured them into this interior-designed Armageddon with a glass of Pouilly-Fumé. All on a Wednesday night. (‘It’s the new Saturday,’ Stella assured everyone.)

Stella’s appearance soared over this frightening buzz of compulsory enjoyment like a firework. She glittered and gleamed from the fresh highlights in her immaculate blond bob right through to her gold eyeshadow, sparkling lipstick, sequinned tunic dress and impossibly high coordinating shoes. Lauren tried not to cover her eyes at this visual onslaught. Only sunglasses would have offered any real protection. But she admired Stella’s gift for transforming her essential ordinariness into a shimmering presence.

Only someone who’d seen Stella wearing no make-up and a tracksuit could recognise the enormity of this achievement. Because Stella was essentially plain: there was no other word for her. There was nothing flawed in her features; they just didn’t add up to prettiness or beauty or character or any other positive descriptives you could think of. But she was fortunate to have identified and accepted her facial failings early in life and learned to maximise the qualities she had.

She was all style, all glitz, all personality, all froth. The complete opposite of Lauren.

Where Stella was all style, Lauren was all substance. To look at Lauren was to know that she was smart. She had clever eyes. Not wise, but clever. And she had the bearing of a confident woman used to getting her own way without having to flirt.

Where Stella was all glitz, Lauren was all understated chic. As her salary had rocketed, so she had developed a taste and a flair for picking expensive clothes that always looked unique and stylish without ever being wacky.

Where Stella was all personality, Lauren was socially unevolved. She was a businesswoman and could handle herself in all situations. She could deal with the contrasting types she encountered in her varied work. She could talk to anyone on any work-related subject. But at parties she was permanently thirteen, gauche, clumsy. Once she got over the initial hurdle of first encounters she was fine. If she got over that hurdle, rather than trip over her mouth as usually happened.

And where Stella was froth, Lauren was a still pond. At least that’s how she appeared at first. As in the calmest of ponds, there were deep waters where all manner of dark life forms threatened to float to the surface. But Lauren was an expert at keeping them down. She was later to discover that it was this continuous effort to suppress her deeper emotions which left her so bereft of the basic social skills.

In this friendship, both Lauren and Stella appreciated the fundamental differences between them. Each found the other amusing, compelling and absolutely incomprehensible. Each waited for the day when the whole point of the other person would reveal itself, when Stella would understand why Lauren took life so seriously and Lauren would find out what Stella was so frightened of.

Lauren also depended on Stella and Pete’s marriage. Its longevity and stability was a rock, a sanctuary, a constant. She loved watching them, always the same, never changing.

‘Have you made up your mind and have you told your mum yet?’ Stella asked over the din.

Whoops. Those were the two questions Lauren had come here to avoid.

She had two weeks to decide. Five years ago, the offer of a job in New York would have had Lauren packing her bags in minutes. There had been nothing to keep her in London, no family, no partner, nothing except a friend who gave terrible parties.

It was the reappearance of her mother that made the situation more tricky. Lauren had only been reconciled with her mother for three years after a long mutually agreed separation. Their relationship had been difficult after the death of Lauren’s father when she was only six.

Lauren’s mum had never been able to forgive her daughter for being born just when her singing career was about to take off. And Lauren couldn’t forgive her mum for not being the one that died instead of her dad. Well, that’s what the shrinks would have said. If you asked the two of them, they would have said that they simply irritated the hell out of each other. They drifted apart as Lauren’s work took off and she began travelling a lot. The trips home became further and further apart, the phone calls became shorter and more strained.

Round about the same time, her mum revived her own career. She began singing in pubs and clubs, performing songs from musicals and ’30s and ’40s Tin Pan Alley classics to young audiences who found her style retro and cool. Ironically, Lauren had done her a great favour by forcing a postponement of her mother’s career. If Maureen Connor had tried to make it as a singer in the ’50s, her lack of genuine talent would have brought her crushing rejection from audiences used to stylish singers like Ella Fitzgerald and Peggy Lee.

But in the new millennium, she was ironic. She was postmodern. She was kitsch. She was practically a star in her limited universe. And as she finally found fulfilment in one area of her life, she felt the need to fill in all the gaps in the other areas. She resolved to make up for thirty years of lacklustre parenting by becoming the earth mother that Lauren had never wanted in the first place.

And as Lauren established her own company and her reputation grew and spread, she too found herself looking at the voids in her personal life. So she and Maureen approached each other tentatively. At least for Lauren it was tentative; Maureen modelled her new mother-persona on Ethel Merman in Gypsy, all booming voice, grand gestures, big hair. She was positively scary in her determination to make Lauren like her, love her, forgive her.

What would happen to her if her only daughter was to move abroad? Lauren asked herself.

Stella was getting impatient for an answer. ‘Not yet,’ Lauren answered. After all, this was Stella. She didn’t want to hear about the grey areas. Never had.

Stella smiled approvingly at this correct answer. ‘Oh well, as long as it’s all sorted out before your birthday. I presume lunch at your mum’s is still on? Pete and I are looking forward to it.’

Lauren nodded glumly at the prospect. Then, in the shorthand that their long acquaintance allowed, Stella touched Lauren’s arm gently as she rushed off to greet a new arrival at the door.

Lauren smiled weakly at a number of faces who smiled weakly back. It was a standard social courtesy, just in case any of them had met before. She turned back to Stella, who’d disappeared into the Raj-style (with just a hint of Amish puritan) kitchen to check on her canapés. Oh, no. That moment. That party moment when you are the only one not ensconced in a chatty pair or small crowd, not even hovering uninvited on the edge, laughing at in-jokes that you couldn’t possibly understand. Alone, standing with a full glass that doesn’t need tactical refilling and no buffet to go and raid very slowly.

Two options: bathroom or garden. Having visited the bathroom once already and been unable to relieve herself on a toilet seat consisting of golden insects preserved in resin (Insect-embossed toilet seats – postmodern or just gross? Discuss), she made her way to the garden.

Opening the back door, she felt her muscles unwind slightly. Not because she liked gardens. On the contrary, she found them puzzling. You broke your back planting bulbs and seeds. They grew, looked lovely for about a fortnight, then they died. Then you did it all over again. No, it wasn’t for her. If she wanted aesthetic pleasure, she watched The Sound of Music or arranged pieces of pineapple on a Hawaiian pizza into a smiley face.

But gardens are useful at parties. Hosts are pleased that you are admiring their handiwork and there is no one to upset or offend, an unfortunate habit with Lauren. So here she was in Stella and Pete’s garden.

At least she thought it was the garden. There wasn’t a blade of grass, not a single bedding plant or shrub. No dying roses or thriving weeds. No sign of a plastic patio dining set. Just bleached decking weaving in and out of some rather scary sculptures surrounding a water feature constructed from dozens of Marmite jars covered in concrete and painted indigo. What sort of garden is that? An award-winning garden, that’s what. One that’s been photographed for House and Garden. One that cost the previous occupants over £5000 before they finally placed the house on the market, having robbed themselves of their last vestige of good taste.

Having taken a few seconds to acclimatise herself to this sensory wasteland, she realised that she was not alone. Another guest had sought the same refuge as her. Decision time: to turn back and loiter in the kitchen hoping there would be plates of snacks she could carry about, or to speak.

The sound of raucous, vacuous laughter honking from the direction of the kitchen helped her to make up her mind. She would talk to the man. How difficult could it be?

He looked nice enough. About her age. Friendly face. But that haircut. It was perilously close to 1970s footballer with those droopy layers edging towards his shoulders. And the clothes completed the look. Jeans about a hundred years old that probably never had fitted properly and certainly didn’t now. And the compulsory black T-shirt. He had to be a social worker or a media studies lecturer in a redbrick university. Something like that. If he was a friend of Stella’s, he would certainly be a professional. At the very least he would know somebody famous. Either way, there should be something uncontroversial they could talk about.

It made no difference to Lauren that he was a man. She was capable of dropping comprehensive clangers in the presence of both women and men. Men as such didn’t make her nervous, any strangers did. And right now, she was not looking for a partner. Not with the prospect of a move abroad.

Although, that aside, she hadn’t been looking for anyone for some time, not since her mother had catapulted herself back into her world. Maureen had not been content with filling the holes left in her daughter’s life by her past absence – she was busy drilling new holes wherever she found space and filling them too. Lauren’s life was being sucked up by her mum like a piece of kitchen towel. She could hardly sniff without Maureen popping up with a hanky, a bottle of Night Nurse and a homemade shepherd’s pie. New York seemed an oasis of privacy and freedom.

No, she didn’t have room for romantic complications. No room and no need. So that took the additional pressure off this encounter.

Chris Fallon was thinking exactly the same thing. He was not looking for romance either. Not because he was coming to terms with a crazy mother who wanted to sing duets from The King and I with him, nor because he was about to emigrate although he expected to be looking for a new job in the near future. He shook the thought out of his mind. The only advantage of this dreadful party was that the awfulness would distract him from the knife poised behind his back. That was the theory.

A new relationship was the last thing he wanted. He was just out of an intense five-year live-in almostmarriage that had left him bruised and unstable. All he wanted to do for the next six months or so was to read a lot of books, watch a lot of videos, eat a lot of microwaveable chicken korma. And he wanted to do it alone.

But he wasn’t rude. So when the girl approached him, he welcomed her with a friendly smile. He would probably have smiled even if he had been rude. People smiled at Lauren. They never knew why. It might have been her boyish crop that only a very beautiful woman could get away with; or the freckles that no amount of industrial-strength foundation could conceal; or the little scar by the corner of her mouth which gave her an attractively lopsided smile. She’d never lost that toddler prettiness that had induced old people in the street to push sixpences into her hand while wiping away an emotional tear. Now they just smiled. Like Chris.

‘Chris Fallon,’ he said, holding out his hand. Lauren shook it firmly. By acting as if this was a professional introduction, she hoped to avoid her customary ineptitude.

‘Lauren Connor.’ Keep it simple, she warned herself. Don’t say anything rash. Not until I’m safely over the first few fences of self-incrimination. I could be out in the garden for a while. I don’t want to scare him off too soon.

Chris had his own fears, his own insecurities. He wasn’t good at reading women’s intentions. He couldn’t tell if Lauren was making pleasant conversation or whether she was thinking that this might be leading somewhere. He didn’t want to give her the wrong impression but he didn’t know how to broach the subject without sounding presumptuous or foolish. Neither wanted to be the one to make the first mistake. So they blundered on painfully.

After a screaming silence, Chris calculated that it was probably his turn to speak. Think of something safe, he thought. ‘So how do you know Pete and Stella?’

‘I went to university with them both,’ Lauren replied, pleased to be asked a question that didn’t require careful consideration. ‘I’ve known them eighteen years now,’ she added. She watched as Chris tried silently to work out the implications this had for her age. ‘That makes me thirty-six,’ she said, laughing.

‘No, I wasn’t, I mean, I didn’t …’ Chris spluttered before he caught sight of Lauren’s amused expression. Then he shrugged. ‘OK. You win. I was wondering.’ His face crumpled into a self-effacing cheeky grin. Lauren allowed her shoulder muscles to unclench. A few more minutes and she’d stop worrying altogether.

She couldn’t help what she said next. She was intoxicated by the ease of the contact. It was a long time since she’d handled an encounter with a new person with such relative ease. She was probably also intoxicated by three glasses of wine in thirty minutes on an empty stomach. That was her excuse when she conducted the post-mortem in the bath later.

‘You’re a Virgo, aren’t you?’ she blurted out. The question had never caused her any problems in the past. It was standard conversational fodder. And Lauren felt sure-footed talking about this. She was good at guessing people’s star signs. Well, she wasn’t really, she just believed she was. When she got it wrong (most of the time), she put it down to wilful misinformation. If someone insists on looking like a dreamy Aquarian when they are really a hard-headed Taurean, it’s nothing less than fraud.

She had a predisposition towards Virgos. They tended to be nicer, kinder, more sensitive. So, although Chris couldn’t know it, she was complimenting him by this assumption.

She didn’t get the result she desired. His quirky grin dissolved into an amused, quizzical expression. He seemed to be considering his answer cautiously, which confused Lauren when the question was not multiple-choice.

‘Am I?’ he answered ambiguously. Lauren interpreted his response as surprise at having his star sign so wrongly guessed. But she wasn’t certain. So she began to laugh. To buy some time. She wasn’t sure what she had done wrong, but she sensed that her innocent question had not been well received. Damn, she thought. I should have gone to the kitchen and joined the honking laughers. I could have just chuckled and giggled and never had to say a word.

‘That’s interesting,’ Chris said vaguely, mystified as to why Lauren was laughing. Even when he told jokes, people tended not to laugh. Besides, he wasn’t aware he’d said anything funny.

Lauren’s laugh had degenerated into a weak smile. She was still trying to come up with a witty pay-off to this improvised skit. She contributed one of those non-committal hissing noises that communicates nothing apart from one’s continued existence on the planet.

Chris, realising that she was waiting for him to say something, carried on. ‘So you’re interested in astrology?’ That’s all he said.

But that’s not all Lauren heard. Astrology, he’d said. With that tone of voice. At least it sounded to her like that tone of voice. She was super-sensitive to everything this man was saying and made the false assumption that he was equally sensitive to everything she was saying. That he was judging her. Without thinking, her hand flew to her necklace and the Pisces pendant that her mother had given her on her twenty-first birthday. So she told a lie. The first lie.

‘Not really!’

That was all she said. She didn’t deliver a ten-minute diatribe on the logical impossibility of astrology peppered by humorous anecdotes. She wasn’t aiming for any higher level of misdirection. She was just trying to edge her way out of a corner she believed had trapped her. That was all.

‘Not really!’ Just the smallest of sentences, as small as a sentence can be, but with an exclamation mark. She consoled herself with the reasoning that maybe an exclamation mark, however convincingly articulated, could be signalling that she was being ironic rather than dishonest. But she didn’t believe that herself and it was her lie.

Chris looked at her curiously. She felt her skin heat up, as if he could see the words I’M LYING imprinted across her forehead. ‘Isn’t that a Pisces fish on your necklace?’ he asked.

And although the first sort-of lie had already slipped out, Lauren still had a chance to scramble back up to a position of truth. I mean, what difference did this man’s opinion make? She’d probably not see him again until Stella’s next house-warming in a couple of years.

But she was flustered. Her face was radiating an alarming red glow. She’d lost her cool and didn’t know how to get it back. This always happened and she’d never learned what to do. There was a line somewhere, specifically for occasions like these, a little throwaway where a woman sounds endearingly fallible for making a minor social gaffe. Sadly, she’d never found out what this line was despite reading women’s magazines all the way from Jackie to Marie Claire.

It was her turn to speak. She couldn’t run away like Cinderella. So she ploughed onwards, nothing to lose, taking no prisoners. She wasn’t a self-possessed businesswoman now, capable of negotiating a competitive contract with the toughest of executives. She was a teenager in a hand-me-down dress at a disco. She wasn’t herself. She literally wasn’t herself. She was person-ata-party, trying to make a good first impression. And the thought that she was failing, yet again, was making her a little bit crazy. Yet again.

‘This?’ she said, fingering the offending pendant casually. ‘It’s nothing to do with Pisces. It’s just a fish design.’ And even this might not have proved disastrous if she’d stopped there. But she didn’t. She couldn’t. Not until she received confirmation that she’d clawed her way back to the level playing field of their kick-off. So she went on, plunging ever deeper into a bottomless pit of mud. ‘I’m not even Pisces, so why would I have a Pisces necklace?’

Yes, of course this was a monumentally stupid thing to say, stupid and utterly pointless. So if you have NEVER said anything so horribly moronic that you instantly wanted to take it back, if you have never wasted hours replaying a particularly imbecilic comment and slapping the side of your head to check that you still have a brain, if you are an absolutely perfect person in complete control of your tongue, then feel free to judge Lauren as harshly as you like. Otherwise just send up a brief, silent prayer that, almost certainly, whatever you said did not set off the catastrophic chain of consequences that Lauren’s lie did.

Minutes later, on her way to the bathroom, she beckoned Stella to one side. ‘Look, I’ve been talking to that Chris Fallon. And please don’t ask me why, but if you come over and if it comes up in conversation, then I’m not Pisces, OK?’

Stella looked at her stupidly. ‘What are you talking about?’

Lauren tutted and waved her hands about. ‘Same old, same old. Me putting my foot in it and following through with the rest of my leg.’ Without waiting for a reply, she was gone. Stella tried to call her back but Lauren had gone into the bathroom. Which was soundproofed. (Pete and Stella had both shuddered as they tried to decide why anyone would have their bathroom soundproofed.) And she didn’t get another chance. So it wasn’t Stella’s fault that she didn’t tell Lauren about the brief conversation she’d had with Chris earlier. That’s what she tried to convince herself of as she thought back an hour.

Stella had been busy with the preparations for the party and Chris was getting in her way. She wasn’t that keen on him, only tolerating him because she liked his ex-girlfriend Beth so much. He was too unkempt for her and he gave off an aura of unpredictability. She didn’t like that. She preferred men like her husband: well groomed, reined in, controlled. To get rid of Chris, she’d been trying to persuade him to go and look at the garden.

‘It’s amazing!’ she’d told him. ‘So grand and desolate and … existential.’

Chris correctly interpreted this as a warning not to expect trailing petunias. As he obediently walked towards the back door, Stella couldn’t stop herself from continuing in her role of perfect hostess.

‘You’ll probably come across Lauren while you’re out there. She always ends up in the garden at my parties. I don’t know why. She hates the outdoors.’

‘Which one is Lauren?’ Chris asked, knowing from experience how Stella liked to categorise her friends. If a serial killer was to gatecrash one of her dinner parties, her first thought would be whether it was best to place him next to a vegetarian or a carnivore.

Without thinking, Stella summed up Lauren as if she was enrolling her in a dating agency. ‘Lauren – telecommunications consultant although I’ve never really understood what she does, very successful, loves old musicals, great cook, Pisces, prefers Virgos, bit strange, very nice.’

She didn’t even bother to check Chris’s reaction to this introduction before he walked away. It hadn’t been important. He and Lauren were completely unsuited. He was so cynical and earthy, she was so … well she was a bit fey and awkward, if Stella had to be honest. That’s why she’d never had Lauren to dinner parties with Chris and Beth.

But now her casual words ricocheted round her mind as she contemplated Lauren’s admission. Should she tell her friend that this man already knew that she was lying? What would be the point? Stella thought. Whatever was going on this evening between Lauren and Chris, a relationship was never going to get off the ground, particularly now that Chris had caught her in a very silly lie. And Lauren would feel such a fool if she knew. Anyone would. Why put her through it? No, she’d leave it.

Pete was refilling two glasses in the kitchen. He spotted Stella standing there wrapped up in herself. It was not like her. Stella rarely took the risk of introspection. He knew that she found it so much more reliable to look outwards for validation. He walked over and put his arm round her. She seldom needed comfort or reassurance from him and he liked being able to provide her with something other than the services of an under-qualified butler.

‘What’s up? Everyone seems to be having a great time.’ He presumed that her only concern could be for the party. He knew her well but this time he was wrong.

Stella cleared her throat. ‘Nothing. It’s just something Lauren said. I think she might be getting on quite well with Chris.’

‘Chris? Which one’s that?’ Pete found it difficult to keep up with the parade of names that Stella frogmarched through his life.

‘Chris Fallon. The Teacher of the Difficult Children.’

‘Oh, you mean Beth’s ex-boyfriend. So what’s the problem?’

Stella looked at him awkwardly. ‘It’s not a problem as such.’

Stella couldn’t tell him what the problem was. Pete hated it when she got involved in other people’s lives. (She called it ‘involved’, he called it ‘interfering’.) And he hated her insistence on seeing complexity where he didn’t feel there was a need for any. He’d be cross with her and tell her to grab Lauren immediately and put her in the picture. He wouldn’t understand. She wasn’t sure she understood herself. She was a bit drunk and all these demands on her decision-making processes were too much. But she had to say something to Pete. He already knew something was wrong. So she said the first thing that came into her mind (apart from a few choice swear words).

‘It’s just that I was talking to Chris earlier and I got the distinct impression that he wants to get back with Beth and I think he might be about to ask Lauren out to make Beth jealous. I simply don’t want Lauren to get hurt. You know how she always ends up getting hurt but I’d hate it if I could have prevented it.’ The whole thing was untrue but perfectly credible to Pete.

Pete had undergone too many of Stella’s autopsies following Lauren’s disastrous relationships. For years, Lauren had presented her friends with a succession of unsuitable men all of whom she had tried to please until they left her for women who pleased themselves. She eventually came to her senses and stopped submerging herself in other people’s expectations.

But the exertions of the years had exhausted her. She bought herself a very expensive one-bedroomed flat which she decorated in a style that almost any other human being would find intolerable. She’d woven a cocoon for herself. It was a subconscious gesture to prevent anyone from t