Virtue (13 page)

Suddenly, I noticed a glint in her eye that I wasn’t really sure what to do with. She was either laughing at me or she was seriously unhinged. Maybe both.

‘You’re not going to stop me, Anna,’ continued Harriet. ‘I’m going to kill them all. Umbrella and yucca and avocado grown from the stone and spider plants and weeping figs and century plants and cacti. Especially cacti. They’re all dead. All of them. This is my mission in life, my ambition, my vocation. I will not rest until every pot-grown cactus in the world has been exterminated. Do you understand? Exterminated.’

And suddenly, the glint was gone as quickly as it had come.

Harriet picked up the riding mac, which was still a light shade of fawn in those days, hung it from her shoulders and smiled sunnily at me. ‘I must get to bed,’ she said. ‘It’s been a long night. Have a nice day and don’t work too hard, will you?’

Like I say, I almost missed her.

Once again, the gates of Belhaven are as familiar to the reading public as the gates of Buck House, and small buses full of American tourists have taken to decanting on the verge outside to pronounce on Godiva’s beauty, her goodness, their sense of kinship with her, how much they miss her. Mrs Violet Bock of Stanton, Missouri, recalls the time when she was brought out of a diabetic coma by being shown a photograph of Godiva. ‘She was an angel,’ she says. ‘It was a miracle. I had been three days in the hospital hooked up to insulin drips, and within a few hours of my daughter putting her photo at my bedside, I woke up.’ ‘I have always wanted to come here and thank her,’ concurs her daughter Wanda. ‘My only regret is that I got here too late to do it in person.’

Gerald performs with his usual charisma, saying, ‘I’m frightfully sorry, but I really don’t have a comment to make for the time being,’ through the window of the Range Rover before locking himself into his flat in the Albany and taking the phone off the hook. Poor George Burge has been forced to move in with his brother for the duration, and speculation is rife that the Burge marriage is probably doomed.

But while the fans have something else to focus on, at least they’re not focusing on Harriet. There have been no more scary emails, but all week Harriet has sat in front of the telly watching the news with bitter astonishment as new strangers appear to testify. And even though she says that if they’re testifying on screen they’ve got less time to testify to her on the Web, I know that it’s affecting her beneath that defiant surface.

I watch her shake her head in disbelief as more middle-aged matrons swear that their bad luck changed for ever when they put a photograph of her mother in their lounge, how a hug from Godiva brought about a remission in their dead sister’s cancer, how they found their lost wedding ring after asking for help from the dead Duchess, and I know that things are not good for her. I even wonder, for a moment, whether to relent and bring her to my mother’s reception, because I don’t like leaving her alone when she’s miserable. But then I think: yeah, but what’s more miserable than an evening alone with the telly? An audience with Grace Waters, that’s what.

I’m always glad if I have a few days’ notice that I’m going to be seeing Grace, because, even with all the practice I’ve had, it takes me a while to get ready. Pathetic, I know, but if you lead a double life to keep the peace, there’s stuff you need to do to get back into the swing of what you’ve been doing in the life you don’t live. So on Monday I have a haircut, toning down my usual black to more of a filing-clerk brown, and get into practice at wearing my specs, which are so thick that they tend to make me a bit queasy for a couple of days after I first put them on. On Tuesday I go to Debenhams and buy a shirtwaister in navy with a pattern of ivy leaves in white upon it (because I feel that Grace would notice if I turned up in the same clothes over and over). On Wednesday I spend the afternoon in front of the mirror practising the meek and birdlike look – the sideways glances, the pecking head movements, the apologetic, self-deprecating responses – that satisfies my mother that my respect is intact. I follow this rehearsal up with an hour’s work every day to be sure. All my spare time on Thursday, Friday and Saturday is given over to reading back copies of the
Librarian
, to which I subscribe, and getting myself up to speed on indexing advances and man-management techniques for those who would rather spend their time communing with books.

I work in the library at King’s College, you see. Grace is a bit disappointed that I work in a library, not, say, on the cutting edge of biotechnology, but she’s just about learned to live with it, and it’s a considerable improvement on the alternative.

Actually, Mel is the one who works in the library at King’s College, but her colleagues feel enough pity for me that they’ve fallen in with the fantasy and are all ready at the drop of a dictionary to say that I’m on holiday/sick leave/at lunch if Grace were ever to call. Not that she ever has; Grace is the kind of person who would always rather not communicate face-to-face if she can help it. We meet maybe three times a year, and otherwise all our contact save dire emergencies is done by fax or email. In fact, I didn’t see my mother’s signature for a full eight years until she started appending a Paintbrush version dropped down from her Series 5 into her desktop; now all her communications are polished off with a neat ‘Grace Waters’ at the bottom.

But here we are, it’s Sunday Week and I’m standing on the edge of one of those rooms you find in every academic establishment whose designers have deliberately robbed it of all features and whose governing body have named it after the least memorable person ever to have worked there. This one is called the Martin Crawley Function Suite and its sixties architect obviously believed that windows were, on the whole, an unnecessary distraction. It does, in fact, have two of the things, running from floor to low-slung, acoustic-tiled ceiling, but neither is more than a foot wide, and both are tucked away behind wide concrete supporting pillars in order that the room needs to be lit at all times by the unshaded strip lights set among the tiles. Someone else has then decided to disguise the lack of glass by hanging plain grey curtains the length of the wall, a grey echoed by the wear-well carpet on which we are standing. The podium-stage at the far end of the room is built in oak-stained pine and sucks any light that might be foolishly generated by the pale faces about me into itself and re-emits it in grey to match the room.

I’m taking a breather. Mother’s lecture was, as usual, way over my head – a switch clicks in my head when I hear the words ‘molecular biology’ and I turn into one of those people whose jaw is perpetually tense with not being seen to yawn publicly. Even the inclusion of slides doesn’t help, and the strain of smiling gamely is beginning to tell. Ditto the strain on my eyes. I ache to pull off the hated glasses – my eyes are so poor that looking through them is like watching the world from inside a goldfish bowl – throw them at the nearest domed forehead and rub hard at the bridge of my nose. I’ve had two and a half glasses of white wine vinegar and the desire for nicotine has never been stronger.

Grace, half a head taller than most of the men who surround her – despite her position as feminist icon, she likes to be surrounded by men – stares at me over the crowd. And for a moment the social face drops. Turns into a mask of displeasure. You’re not mixing, says the look. It is your duty to mix. Then the upper lip raises itself and she tilts her head again to indicate that she is listening. And I find myself wondering spiteful thoughts about whether Peter taught her to do that, or whether it’s what she learned from her readings of Proust.

I hoist my daughter-of-the-genius yoke back onto my shoulders, smile dimly at a man whose swollen dome of a forehead suggests that he is probably either a professor or an encephalitic. He knows, of course, who I am: they all know who I am at these functions, though I doubt that a single one of them would recognise me in the street.

‘Hello,’ he says. And, I think, reaches the end of his conversational skills.

I beam hopefully at him. He beams back. Then after a bit we get embarrassed, make ‘hmm’ ‘haa’ noises and start beaming at the room. Oh boy, academic drinks parties. They’re probably not so bad if you’re an academic yourself, because at least then you have professional sniping to fall back on.

Two men in cardigans – one yellow, one blue – are indulging in a spot of professional sniping beside me at the moment. Yellow cardi says, ‘… hasn’t published since 1994. God knows how the poor thing got tenure.’

‘Well,’ red cardi replies, ‘there was that article in the
New Scientist
.’ And then they both laugh. ‘What did you make of tonight’s little speechie?’ asks red cardi.

‘Well, between you and me,’ says yellow cardi, then suddenly notices that I’m standing there and changes tack. ‘Brilliant as ever,’ he says. ‘She never fails to surprise, does she? Why, aren’t you Anna?’

I make a jerky pigeon-peck of assent, smile my I’m-harmless smile, reply, ‘Yes.’

He sticks a hand out. ‘You haven’t changed a bit,’ he says, which all my mother’s admirers say to me whenever we meet. If only they knew. ‘I haven’t seen you since you were twelve.’

Okay. That narrows it down to a couple of hundred bald men in cardis, then.

‘Hello,’ I reply, shaking the hand. ‘Have I really not changed since I was twelve?’

‘Not a bit,’ he says. ‘This is Barnabas Mitchell. Works for Wellcome. Barnabas, Anna Waters. Daughter of our esteemed hostess.’

‘Ah!’ says Barnabas Mitchell. ‘How do you do?’

‘Very well, thank you.’

‘Good show tonight, I thought. Always a pleasure to hear your mother’s thoughts. Most – um – thought-provoking …’ He trails off.

‘Good,’ I reply. ‘And what do you do for Wellcome?’

‘Research,’ he says.

‘What sort of research?’

‘Pest control.’

‘Yes?’

He nods. Doesn’t elaborate. Sometimes being around scientists is like being at a convention of spies: everyone is so possessive of their intellectual copyright, so scared of industrial espionage, that they practically tap the sides of their noses and say ‘Walls have ears’ if you try to ask them anything in detail.

‘I’m not actually interested!’ I want to scream. ‘I don’t give a toss about your new insecticide recipe! I don’t want to know about your human genomes or your hairy aphid contraceptive programme! I’m a waitress! I like pop music and staying up late and action movies and going on package holidays and getting chatted up in dark corners and dancing and lying around all day reading
OK!
magazine!’ Instead, I say, ‘I hear they’re good to work for.’

‘Oh, yes,’ he says, then continues with something so up its own bottom that I want to smack him. ‘Their remuneration package is quite satisfactory,’ he says.

Aaargh. Get me out of here.

A waiter is suddenly hovering at my elbow. ‘Excuse me, miss,’ he says, and from the expression on his face I can see that he feels a deep, raw pity for me. ‘Your mother wants you.’

‘Ah. Okay—’ I correct myself. ‘Certainly. Thank you.’

‘You’re welcome.’

I take the opportunity to return my half-drunk vinegar to his little electroplated tray and squeeze between knots of people to where my mother stands clutching her glass of plain mineral water. Arrive and stand politely, obediently, awaiting acknowledgement. You don’t interrupt Grace Waters. It would be like hugging the Queen. I swore I wouldn’t do this, but I just have to check my watch. Immediately wish I hadn’t. It confirms to me that what has felt like three hours has actually only been twenty-five minutes.

Even as Grace’s conversations go, this one seems to have reached the apogee of stiltedness. For The Woman Who Expects to Be Listened To seems to have hooked up with The Man Who Listens to Nothing. Grace isn’t a great one for small talk herself, but the man who stands beside her is one of those who assume automatically that anything anyone says to him while he’s standing up must be small talk and must, therefore, instinctively be tuned out. So Grace says, ‘It seems as though the Harvard chair will go to Jenkins, then,’ and he, gazing over her shoulder, sighs and says, ‘Evidently,’ before blinking into space a couple of times. And when, after a silence that suggests that she is hunting for something more to say and he is thinking absolutely nothing at all except that he would like to be somewhere else, she observes that she had been expecting the dean of studies to put in an appearance this evening, it seems like the effort of replying ‘Really?’ might actually kill him.

Look: I have conflicts about my mother. And in situations like this, I feel sorry for her as much as I feel the fear. I mean, look at her. This isn’t like going to a parental cocktail party and trying to behave well in front of their friends. Grace doesn’t
have
friends. She has colleagues, and admirers, and sponsors, but she doesn’t have friends. She doesn’t have people she kicks around with making up stupid puns, she doesn’t have drinking buddies with whom she can shrug off her woes by having a big night out, she doesn’t have anyone to ring up and sob on when the going gets rough. People don’t seek her advice about their love lives or their frustrations, or come to her with that emptiness lurking inside us all that occasionally just needs to be filled with stupidness: if Grace’s phone rings, it’s someone who wants her input on committee structures, or cell structures. And that’s why I keep my end up for her. I know it’s weird, but I know that how I perform matters intensely to her. I’m not here to give her back-up, to save her from dullards or gather stuff to gossip about later: I’m here as another part of her success story. You know how all parents want to show their children off in their best light? With Grace it’s much more than that. Grace wants her daughter to show Grace off in
her
best light.

So after another pause where each of them twiddles their glass and holds an arm folded across their body, she turns to me and says, ‘This is my daughter, Anna.’

‘Richard Jones,’ he says, sticks a hand out behind his back to shake mine.