Virtue (17 page)

As a matter of fact, Godiva being so famous and her public so hungry, the footage she saw on the news was the first intimation she had that her mother was dead. The film was in the can and beamed into newsrooms across the world several hours before protocols could be put into place and a responsible adult sent out to tell the daughter formally. Godiva died at four thirty in the afternoon Middle Eastern time, and the story made the six o’clock news bulletin in Britain, just between tea and prep at Harriet’s third boarding school. This was a school that had some pretensions to producing children with a broader spectrum of knowledge of the world than who was related to whom and how much their fathers owned, and the six o’clock news was mandatory for everyone before prep.

Harriet can still recite every detail of the moment: how she was sitting cross-legged on the floor in the third row among her contemporaries, how she had just mastered the fifth stage of cat’s cradle and was showing it to Marcia Tennent who was sitting next to her. Her voice goes dead as she tells you the details; it’s as though she is telling them under hypnosis, as though her voice is no longer conscious, but coming from somewhere deep inside her, a place that in her waking moments is as obscured from her as it is from the rest of us.

It was a sunny day and she wanted to be out playing at being a horse in the woods behind the school. She had a huge ink stain on her fingers from where her biro had collapsed during history. Farial Prakash-Taylor, sitting in front of her, had a pair of gauzy, iridescent butterflies attached to her hair slides and she wanted to reach out and see if they would change colour when she touched them. She had a hole in her sock, hard on the calf where she had caught it on the corner of the lockers in the changing rooms; it was beginning to ladder and she knew she’d get some sort of black mark for it. The carpet in the television room was a rather attractive Morris willow pattern, faded almost to oblivion.

‘The music came on, and then I don’t remember much,’ she says. ‘There was someone screaming, and I realised it was me.’

I also remember the day Godiva died. Even in my ivory cocoon, it wasn’t possible to miss it. And besides, it was the topic of the day for our evening debating session. The evening debate was a crucial part of my education: Peter had instituted it with my mother when she was five years old, and she’d been doing it with me, on the evenings when she was at home, of course – the demands of a career like Grace’s didn’t allow her, thank the Lord, to give me quite the same amount of quality time as she got from Peter – since I was around seven. By the time I was four, everyone had acknowledged that I wasn’t quite on the same fast track as my mother had been, so everything came a little later in my upbringing than it had in hers.

The evening debate took place after supper, which was always strictly at eight o’clock for optimum digestion. My day was timetabled down to the last ten minutes. When I was eleven, around the time that Godiva died, it went thus: Six thirty a.m. get up. Six forty a.m. ten minutes’ stretching exercises. Six forty-five to five past seven a.m. breakfast (high-bran cereal, fruit, vitamin pills). Five past seven to seven fifteen a.m. dress. Seven fifteen to seven forty-five a.m. piano practice
or
t’ai chi, alternating days. Seven forty-five to eight thirty a.m. prescribed reading (I was, by this stage, on Goethe, Rousseau and – selected – Chaucer: I had, of course, done the entire works of Shakespeare by the age of nine). Eight thirty a.m. travel to school. Eight forty-five to twelve thirty p.m. normal lessons. Twelve thirty to two p.m. lunch (packed, of course: high-energy salad with three types of sprouted beans, lean meat or cheese, wholemeal bread, live yoghurt – how I hated that sour-milk taste, unsweetened even by honey! – fruit, vitamin and mineral supplements, echinacea, royal jelly); special dispensation to miss break and replace it with coaching in: algebra; linguistics; physics; chemistry; piano (a different lesson each weekday). Two to four p.m. normal lessons (obviously, with my special coaching, I attended certain lessons with classes even further above my age group, something which caused endless timetabling grief for my school. Nobody, however, ever complained; I was, after all, a prestige pupil). Four to four fifteen p.m. travel home. Four fifteen to four thirty p.m. free time (to include snack of wholemeal bread, salad, fruit). Four thirty p.m. coaching as above. Five thirty to six p.m. homework. Six to six thirty p.m. watch the news. Choose subject for evening debate. Six thirty to seven p.m. homework. Seven p.m. supper: lean meat, steamed vegetables, carbohydrates. Seven thirty p.m. finish homework and/or hand over to Mother for evaluation while preparing for evening debate. Eight to eight thirty p.m. evening debate. Eight thirty to nine thirty p.m. prescribed reading: fiction, poetry, selected drama. In my twelfth year, I read the works of Jane Austen and Anthony Trollope in their entirety. I’ve never been able to read them again. Nine thirty p.m. bath, tidy bedroom, prepare uniform for following day, finish off any homework left over. Ten p.m. bed.

That was weekdays, of course. Weekends weren’t anything like as much fun.

It was inevitable that I should pick the death of Godiva Fawcett as our debate subject that night. It was the lead story on the news and, aside from anything else, I was deeply moved by what I had seen. And Grace’s reaction to my choice was equally predictable. The Anglo-Irish Agreement was in full swing at the time, after all, and we had only spent three debating periods on the subject so far.

‘Why,’ she asked when I announced my chosen topic, ‘do you believe that this is a subject worthy of discussion?’

Even for Grace, this was a pretty blunt way of opening a debate. The purpose, after all, was that I should learn to conduct discourse fluently and in full sentences on any given topic. ‘I – I thought it was very upsetting,’ I replied. ‘The only moment of death I have seen before on film was the footage of the Kennedy assassination, and I found it both distressing and moving.’

‘Both distressing
and
moving?’ asked my mother. ‘Can you give me an example of something that is distressing
without
being moving?’

Had I been older, I think I would probably have been able to reply that the sight of Margaret Thatcher’s wholesale dismissal of the miners’ distress of the year before was distressing without being moving, but at eleven I wasn’t endowed with the courage to disagree. ‘I’m sorry,’ I mumbled. I got marks out of twenty for my evening debate; it was evident that I was down to nineteen-and-a-half after a single sentence.

She waited. I continued. ‘I feel that the manner of her death will have a considerable impact on our society. According to the news reports, people are already conducting a vigil outside her house in London.’

‘And besides a group of silly people indulging in hysteria,’ said Grace, ‘what impact will this have?’

‘Godiva Fawcett,’ I said, ‘was a popular figure with many people across the world. She was a prominent spokesperson for many charitable causes, and the organisations involved will have difficulty in replacing her with as charismatic or as energetic a figurehead.’

Believe me, this really was how I talked back then. Compressing words, non-sentences – anything more than the mildest deviation from grammatical laws was rarely tolerated under the Waters roof.

Grace folded her arms, stared grimly at me across the table.

‘And what is the function of a charitable figurehead?’

I thought. ‘To bring the public’s attention to an issue. To promote an emotional involvement that might not otherwise exist.’

‘And why does the public
need
to have an emotional involvement with issues that affect strangers? What purpose does this serve?’

‘Well, obviously—’ I started, then winced. That’ll be another point off the total. ‘Sorry. I believe that the purpose is to emphasise the importance of charitable giving. I believe that it has been established that those who feel they have an understanding of an issue are more likely to donate funds to its solution.’

‘Feel they have an understanding, or have an understanding?’

‘Feel – have – either …’ Whoops. Not a full sentence. Seventeen and a half.

‘And how do you feel that this benefitted Godiva Fawcett?’

‘Gosh. I don’t. I was under the impression that charity figureheads take on their roles in an attempt to give something back to the world.’

This didn’t please her at all. ‘Give something back? What, precisely are they
giving back
? Are they donating funds? Are they donating skills? Does a single individual benefit directly from their actions?’

By now I was close to tears. I knew what I had seen on the television, and it had upset me as much as it upset everyone else who saw it. Grace excepted, of course.

‘Yes!’ I snapped, losing two points for direct contradiction. ‘Didn’t you
see
it? She saved
five
children! Didn’t you see?’

‘What I saw,’ said Grace, ‘was a silly and egotistical woman taking an unnecessary and ill-advised risk and losing her life as a consequence.’

Sort of true. But what are acts of courage other than unnecessary and ill-advised risks? If a man charges a machine-gun post, would he do it if he stopped to weigh up the risks first? Do we refuse injured firemen their disability allowances? I found myself, not for the first time in my life, speechless. Lost a point. Fourteen and a half.

‘And what I also saw,’ continued Grace, ‘was a fading actress, who had been exploiting other people’s misfortunes to bolster her own popularity for years, take advantage of a situation to ensure that she would maintain her popularity in perpetuity.’

‘Mother!’ I cried. Lost half a point for raising my voice. ‘You can’t say that!’ Fourteen.

‘Direct contradiction,’ she said. Thirteen and a half.

‘But—’ Thirteen. You don’t start a sentence on a conjunction. ‘I know what I saw. I saw an act of extreme courage and self-sacrifice. I saw someone who didn’t care about the consequences to her own life as long as other people were in danger. I saw something I will never forget, and I don’t think anyone else will either.’

Sadly, no one ever deducted points from Grace’s score. ‘Oh, very reasoned,’ she said. ‘Such an impressive argument. Have you listened to nothing I have taught you? Or are you simply obtuse?’

I stopped mid-flow, apologised. ‘Sorry, Mother.’

‘And the reason for your apology?’

‘I allowed emotion to dictate my reasoning.’

‘Exactly. And why is this particularly appropriate to the debate in hand?’

Good Lord, I’m only eleven. ‘I’m not sure.’

‘Because,’ she explained, ‘Godiva Fawcett represented the emotion-over-reason brigade. All of her public work consisted of direct appeals to the emotions. She never asked her audience to think, merely to feel and act accordingly.’

‘But—’ I began. Stopped. Too late. Twelve. ‘If the outcome is desirable, should the means of bringing it about matter?’

‘What,’ she replied, ‘makes you believe that the outcome was desirable?’

‘She raised huge sums of money. People made charitable donations as a direct result of her appeals. Of course the outcome was desirable.’

Definitive statement based on generalisation. Eleven out of twenty.

‘Were I less controlled,’ said Grace, ‘I would be angry about this idea that the world is made better by charitable donations.’

‘
What?
’ Ten and a half.

‘The world is made better by action,’ said my mother.

‘Surely—’

She interrupted. I lost half a point.

‘It is not people like Godiva Fawcett who change the world,’ she said. ‘It is not people who give themselves a glow of self-satisfaction because they’ve given something away. It is the thinkers. It is people such as myself who set themselves goals and work to attain them. Those of us who work exhaustively and without asking for thanks or affirmations. These emotional gestures are meaningless. They are a waste of time. They are an insult to those of us who are
really
changing the world.’

Suddenly I noticed that there were little spots of colour on the point of each of her cheekbones, and I realised something I had never seen before. The great Grace Waters, icon of reason, is driven by emotion after all, and it’s one of the basest emotions imaginable. My God, I thought, you’re jealous. Despite all her prizes, and accolades and affirmations, the votes of thanks, the standing ovations, she was eaten up with jealousy of a dead woman.

Of course, I didn’t say anything. By then I had learned which thoughts to share and which to hug to myself, which would keep things simple and which would bring cold and unreasonable punishments down upon my head.

‘You’re right,’ I admitted. ‘You win.’

And by conceding, which I always did, I brought my points down below the halfway mark, so I would be assigned another essay to write on the subject at the weekend. It would have happened one way or another, whatever I did; might as well get it over with.

But you see, even I owe something to Godiva Fawcett, even though time and acquaintance have taught me that the manner of her death was little reflection of the manner of her life. She meant many things to many people. To some she was a role model, a figure of admiration, someone to emulate. To some she was a miracle worker, the figure who came to them in a dream and cured them of their sciatica. To some she was a joke, a B-lister who came to surprise us all. To Harriet she was the mother who, though she was scarcely there, left a gaping void by her departure. Some see her as a saint, some as a sinner, some as an expert manipulator and queen of spin.

And me? The day Godiva died was the day that the small seed of doubt within me that my famous mother might not be infallible after all finally felt the blissful touch of rain.

A recently uncovered A++ essay from 1952, found among a bundle of others in the basement storerooms of Warrington Primary School (formerly Warrington Church of England First School) and currently on display as part of the lottery-funded ‘Warrington Education: Past Successes, Future Principles’ exhibition at Warrington Central Library. The exhibition has been a remarkable success, attracting some thirty visitors over a six-week period
.