Virtue (11 page)

When Grace was three months old, Sylvia Waters made herself scarce from the family home, leaving only a note and a collection of embroidered napkins behind. No one knows what the note said. Peter destroyed it the day he found it, and the following day handed in his notice at the Home Office. ‘I have a duty,’ said his letter of resignation, ‘to ensure that my daughter, who now finds herself, through no fault of her own, handicapped in comparison with her peers, has the best start in life I can give her.’

I still don’t know if this letter was disingenuous or not. It’s chicken and egg, isn’t it? Had Sylvia stayed, would Peter have developed such an intense passion for his daughter? Or did she leave because, the incubation period over, her family had no further use for her services?

Whatever, the one-parent unit turned out to be surprisingly well equipped to cope without the attentions of a mother. At forty-four, Peter had over twenty years of index-linked civil-service pension built up, and was able to take retirement on compassionate grounds. Well, possibly a combination of compassion and relief, the pensions department being as vulnerable to cross-examination on the subject of India rubbers as any other. And as he had never been known to spend a penny on frivolities, the Amersham house, bought fifteen years earlier on a mortgage, was as close to paid off as scarcely mattered.

‘I had a choice,’ he writes in
Sowing the Seed
, ‘between my own satisfaction and the future of my daughter. Many parents, too caught up in the here-and-now, choose their own, short-lived gratification. I do not think that I will lay myself open to criticism when I claim that I had a higher calling. Better a childhood dedicated to work and thought, than a lifetime filled with the inevitable mediocrity of play!’

Grace was born in 1938, when the Luftwaffe was still a gleam in Hitler’s eye and property prices in the London hinterland still relatively high. Presciently, and within six months of fatherhood, Peter had sold Amersham and taken his pension to rural Shropshire, where land was cheap and farm cottages were being sold off to make way for combine harvesters.

Peter applied successfully for the right to home-school his daughter – the local council, overwhelmed by the influx of half-starved evacuees, asked fewer questions than they might have done at another time in history – and he and Grace spent the war, through rationing and gas masks and Haw-Haw and put that light out! and scrap drives and Winnie and
For Whom We Serve
and the Queen looking the East End in the face, and
Hitler Has Only Got One Ball
and ‘We shall fight them on the beaches,’ locked in their cottage, scrimping for light money, sending off for cases of books from country-house sales, raiding the libraries, wasting no time. Day by day Grace grew, in stature and mind, never mixing, never exposed to the paucity of expectation the world applied to others her age, never taking her eyes, or her mind, from the deadly serious task at hand. While Hitler’s star waxed, and waned, and eventually went out altogether, Peter Waters ploughed ahead with his own plans for world domination.

‘Get off, Henry.’

‘Naoo,’ says Henry, digs his claws into my T-shirt and buries his face in my neck. Absurdly spoiled by two bossy mummies since we hauled him out from the giant-sized polyfilla drum that someone had shut his blood-covered kitten self into and thrown over our wall, Henry believes that I am actually a cushion rather than a sentient being with a life beyond his well-being, and insists on climbing onto my bosom the moment I settle anywhere. It’s my own fault. If I’d occasionally pushed him off when he was young he might take no for an answer.

‘Muum,’ he sings into my ear and busses me, continental-style, on either cheek with his snotty wet nose. Yawns into my face and I turn away. Harriet’s been feeding him pilchards again.

I’m almost awake, now. You can’t stay asleep while being rubbed with cat snot for all that long. I give up, accord him his dues. ‘Good morning, Your Majesty,’ I say, glance at the clock and correct myself. ‘Good afternoon, Your Majesty.’ It’s after three o’clock. Having worn myself out fretting, I’ve been asleep for almost seven hours. I pinch the acupressure points on Henry’s ears and he responds with a purr like a train going through a tunnel. ‘Thank God for you, my darling,’ I thank him. ‘Thank you.’ Henry has a great talent for dispelling nightmares. He never gives you a chance to carry on obsessing where you left off. Not when you could be obsessing about him instead.

I’ve been sweating in my sleep. There’s no specific clear memory, but since I finally lapsed into unconsciousness some time after dawn, it’s been a morning of vague nightmares: dark, looming shapes, fog-shrouded rocks, uncontrolled flight. And now my mouth is all furred up and my armpits smell like half-ripe brie. Which is funny, because I had a chunk of half-ripe brie for supper between spankings last night. The sort of customers we get only like their brie half-ripe.

Bath. I sit up, deposit Majesty on the bed and peel off my T-shirt. Very definitely not good. The brie has ripened beneath the cotton, has a salty undertone. Bath, coffee, fag, another doze on the sofa and then it’s time for work again. Who said night workers had empty lives?

Henry follows me down to the bathroom. Stares longingly up at me as I pee, pretends to be terrified as I flush, bolting from the room and sticking his head round the door jamb a couple of seconds later to see if I’ve noticed. You’ve no idea how much I love this cat. Sorry.

I put half a bottle of baby bath under the running tap and climb into the tub. Henry jumps up onto the shelf beside it, sits there staring down at the bubbles, occasionally reaching out with a tentative paw to pat at them. Henry loves bubbles. He has fallen into the bath three times, but he’s never learned. And nor have I. You’d have thought that I would have clicked that having a wet cat in the bath with you was a recipe for lifetime scarring, but I never have. He runs away when I turn on the shower nozzle to wash my hair.

Better. Still weary to the bones, but clean is a help.

Harriet’s painting, a pair of surgical plastic gloves protecting her hands so the punters don’t get too frightened when she passes them their bread-and-butter pudding. Her face is screwed up with concentration, a blob of grey-blue decorating the side of her mouth where she’s stuck a brush between her teeth. She has been working for the past week on an unusually cheerful and straightforward piece: two blue and white vases, one containing pristine white lilies swanning gracefully over glossy spear-shaped leaves, the other crammed higgledy-piggledy with a handful of crushed and dying red roses. The two pots lie on a highly polished mahogany table top, either side of an indistinctly handwritten letter and a wedding ring. It may be melodramatic, but it’s rather lovely, and what’s more, you can actually see that Harriet has mastered the skill of transferring an image from the real world onto canvas. You don’t get to see this very often. It was a while before I established that she could do it at all. She spent the whole of her first year at the Ruskin fooling about with expanded polystyrene and bits of battery-heated wire. Mostly, as far as I could see, making a variety of models of her own initials and exposing them to different lighting effects.

‘Hi,’ I say.

‘Hi,’ she replies. ‘I was just wondering if I ought to come and get you up. Bad night?’

‘Yup.’

‘Me, too.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Hardly your fault.’ She dips her paintbrush in a smear of black on her palate, starts to brush in dark edges around the rose petals. Frowns again.

‘It’s lovely,’ I comment.

‘Hmm,’ she says. ‘It’s not finished yet.’

‘Doh. Yes, I know that. I was just saying.’

Harriet smiles.

‘Do you want coffee?’

She nods. ‘That would be nice. What kept you awake?’

‘Coffee. Tiredness. Thinking about stuff.’

Harriet shakes her head reprovingly at me. ‘Stuff. Really, Anna. You should know better than to think about
stuff
. Always a bad idea.’

‘Didn’t you sleep, then? I thought I heard you snoring.’

‘Oh, yes,’ says Harriet. ‘I slept all right. It was the not being able to wake up bit that was the problem.’

Ah. I put the kettle on.

‘Anybody call?’ I ask, and she shakes her head.

Then I remember. ‘Hey! Guess who emailed me last night?’

‘The Pope,’ she says. ‘The President of the United States. Keanu Reeves. Mahatma Ghandi. The man who runs the dog traps at Walthamstow race track. My old maths teacher. Norman Wisdom. Roy’s old auntie in Pinner. Nope. I give up. Who did email you last night?’

‘Ha ha. Nigel.’

‘Who’s Nigel?’ asks Harriet. Then, ‘Oh.’ A little pause. ‘And what did
Nigel
have to say?’ She pronounces the name with exaggerated enthusiasm, a prep-school heavy-handedness I’ve never been able to master.

‘Nothing much. He’s in Ireland.’

‘Yeah,’ says Harriet, ‘I think we know that. And?’

‘And nothing much.’

‘What? No protestations of everlasting devotion? No money orders? No tickets booked for you to join him?’

‘You are so sharp,’ I say, ‘you’ll bleed to death.’

‘So when’s he coming back?’

‘Dunno. Why?’

‘So I can buy some bloody earplugs, that’s why,’ she says. ‘Or leave the country before the tidal wave.’ She smiles and goes back to her painting for a moment, then looks up again. ‘So did you answer him?’ she asks.

I grin. ‘What do you think?’

Harriet sighs. ‘Go on, then. Go and see if he’s written back.’

Of course, I forgot to turn it all off last night. Can’t even remember if I hung up. It’s certainly offline now, but there’ll probably be one of those mysterious five-hour calls on the phone bill again.

I sit in the desk chair, log on and the computer makes a jungle monkey shriek to say that new mail’s arrived. Not Nigel. [email protected]. ‘So grateful you can fit me in to your busy schedule,’ Grace writes. I don’t even bother to respond. No point. Henry plods into the room, jumps up onto my lap, gets onto his back legs and drapes his front half over my shoulder. Purrs, rubs his ear against mine. Wraps his front paws round my neck. ‘Mmm. Waarm.’

What can you do? I pick him up, turn him upside down, shower his noble, battered face with kisses, rub his shredded ear and put him on the floor. ‘Whyyy?’ he cries. ‘Whyyy?’

‘No,’ I say. ‘I have to occasionally do things that don’t involve your comfort.’

‘Awww,’ he says piteously. ‘Haaard.’

‘Can you leave that on?’ Harriet interrupts our chat. ‘I might as well see if I’ve got anything while we’re there.’

‘Sure.’

Henry, bored with looking plaintive, pounces from three feet away and sinks his fangs into my ankle. We think he thinks this is funny. Once he’d got over the horror of being an abused baby he turned into a cat of consummate violence, who would pick a fight with anyone from Rottweilers to toddlers. Which is how he got his name. Harriet’s hands and arms were so covered in bite and scratch marks that he inevitably ended up being called Henry Tudor. Maybe you have to say it in a London accent.

I kick him off and he retires to the sofa and starts to lick his tummy. After a couple of seconds, I log out and go over to join him. He looks up, startled, pretends not to have the foggiest idea who I am.

‘You done?’ Harriet picks up a turpsy rag and starts to dab it over her canvas.

‘Yeah. What are you doing?’

Harriet has finished her painting. Except that she hasn’t. Because now that she’s made this simple if lovely thing, she’s methodically going over it with the rag on which she has wiped her paint and glue brushes for the past three years without a wash.

‘Harriet! That was lovely!’

Harriet says nothing, but suddenly runs her arm, swoosh, across the whole canvas, splodging vases, wood, flowers and paper into each other. Where once there were shades of light and dark, minute gradations in stem and petal, there’s now, well, a lot of dark brownish, lumpy blobs obscuring something that looks like it might have been quite nice. ‘
The Artist
,’ she announces, ‘
Views Love Through the Eyes of The Philosopher
.’

Ah. She’s been to the Saatchi gallery again. ‘Great,’ I say. ‘Perhaps you could diddle around with the title a bit.’

She lays down her rag, comes over to the computer and logs into her hotmail. The keyboard gathers another few smears. Well, it’s her computer. ‘By the way,’ I say, ‘are you ever going to do anything about that popcorn?’

‘What?’ she says vaguely. Then, ‘Oh, yes. I promise I’ll clear it up.’

‘And throw it away?’

‘No. No, I want to do something with it. Definitely. It will make the most wonderful mosaic tiles. Honestly.’

‘Yes, well at the moment it’s just making brilliant ball bearings for people to tread on on the stairs. And Henry’s doing the weirdest things in his poo-box. You know how much he loves sweetcorn.’

‘Okay. Sorry. I’ll empty it.’

There’s little point in pursuing the matter. She’ll clear it up when the muse strikes, and at least she’s not a bloke, strewing underpants everywhere and complaining because no one’s cleared them up. I stretch, get up and go onto the balcony to look at the view while she reads her mail. I love this view. Way below, that mysterious rush-hour traffic you get at weekends even though everyone’s supposed to be at leisure edges along the embankment, parping and booping out the London chorus. A train comes out of Victoria and rattles its way south, heads poking from the windows in the vain quest for air. There’s a dredger on the Thames just emerging from under the bridge, the matte black of its livery standing out like Darth Vader against the glittering flow tide. High, puffy, cotton-ball clouds float over the power station, drifting on towards the Eiffelesque radio mast at Crystal Palace.

I look out and think: yeah, I love this city. It may be full of sharks, but there’s nowhere else I’d rather be.

‘Bugger,’ says Harriet.

I come back in. ‘What gives?’

She pulls a face, nods at the screen. ‘Nutmail.’

‘Oh.’ I look over her shoulder. Someone called [email protected] has been writing to Harriet. Or at least they’re writing to Bitch From Hell hoping that she will both return and rot there.