Virtue (24 page)

‘So what are you up to these days, then?’

Aird doesn’t read much. To be honest, I’m not entirely convinced that he can read at all.

‘I work in a restaurant, Aird.’

‘… deer provençale, roast deer, braised deer, deer olives, smoked deer, deer salad, deer sandwiches …’ drones Gerald.

‘Restaurant, eh?’ Aird almost perks up. ‘So you must know Bob Portsmouth, then.’

Um. ‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘I don’t think I do.’

‘But you must,’ insists Aird. ‘Went to school with me. Nice chap, bit dim, good at rugger. Owns a restaurant. In London.’

I shake my head. ‘Sorry. I’ve not come across him.’

Aird looks deeply suspicious. ‘But you must have come across him. You did say you worked in a restaurant, did you?’

I nod.

‘In London?’

‘In London.’

‘But so does he. You’ve got to know him.’

‘… deer quiche, deer risotto, deer in red wine, deer in Guinness, deer chops, deer steak, deer chasseur, deer burgers, deer à la king, deer … Oh, God, what are those things, Sofe, you know, long thin things made out of venison offcuts …’

As Aird turns to Sofe and says, plaintively, ‘I don’t understand. Harriet’s friend says she works in a restaurant in London, but she doesn’t know Bob Portsmouth …’, I notice that the woman who has been serving the peas, and is currently leaning over Harriet’s shoulder, is Margaret Burge. So noblesse oblige has won out over droit de seigneur, after all. Either that, or there’s no one else in the village who knows how to carry a serving dish without dropping it.

Harriet looks up, smiles. ‘Hello, Margaret,’ she says, ‘how are you?’

‘Thank you, Lady Harriet,’ mutters Margaret, and shuffles back to the door as fast as her stubby little legs will carry her. Margaret has put on a couple of stone since I last met her, and the low hairline and duck-hipped waddle you see a lot in the villages around Belhaven are becoming more pronounced in her as middle age approaches. Honestly, the more I see of rural communities unaffected by immigration, the more firmly I believe that miscegenation will save the world.

Aird turns back to me. ‘But everybody knows Bob Portsmouth,’ he announces.

‘Sorry, Aird, but I honestly don’t.’ I look up to see Harriet’s eye, and we both catch a cackle before it breaks for the hills.

‘Well,’ he concludes, ‘I don’t believe you really work in a restaurant, then.’ And with that, he turns back to Sofe and I turn to my food.

Gerald is still going on. ‘No, he says, don’t tell me … something loud … come with herbs in most of the time … herbs and breadcrumbs …’

‘So,’ Cair shouts over to Harriet, ‘have you sold any paintings?’

Harriet looks up. ‘Not lately, Cair, no.’

‘Oh.’ Cair chews a mouthful of venison, chomps and slurps it down with a swig of claret. Then she says, ‘How old are you now, Hairier?’

‘I’ll be twenty-nine next March,’ replies Harriet.

‘Twenty-nine? Aren’t you getting a bit long in the tooth for this sort of thing?’

Harriet rolls her eyes. ‘What on earth do you mean?’

‘Well,’ Cair continues, ‘everyone has to grow up at some point, Hairier.’

‘And what,’ Harriet enquires, ‘do you mean by growing up?’

‘Well, I don’t know,’ Cair replies, then adds, proudly, ‘I’m not clever like you. But I must say, you’re a bit old to be playing at Bloomsbury Group.’

‘What are you on about?’ asks Harriet.

‘Well, you know,’ Cair nods and giggles. ‘Like this afternoon.’ She raises her voice and projects it in the direction of Gerald. All dinner parties at Belhaven seem to be conducted at megaphone levels. ‘You’ll never guess where we found them this afternoon, Jair!’ she shouts, though it sounds more like ‘yerlnare gaswur wefarndum sarfnoon’.

‘That’s it!’ cries Gerald ‘Venison bangers! Where?’

Aird and shooting man have now put their elbows on the table and leaned their heads on their hands so that their entire shoulders are presented to me, and my plate is thrown into shadow as they block out the paltry light from the two candelabra that have been lit for the evening.

‘In that old pond in the woods,’ says Cair. ‘Stark bollock naked. Tits to the wind. Bouncing around like a couple of jelly babies.’

There’s a small silence, then the MFH says, ‘Really?’ in that voice that would have gone along with a good deal of moustache twiddling a couple of generations ago. Then Mrs MFH says, ‘Really?’ in a voice that still goes along with folded arms today.

‘Really, Hairier,’ says Sofe, in a voice that she learned at nanny’s knee forty years ago, ‘you must try to be a bit more discreet. The whole park’s open to the public, you know. You’ll end up all over the papers again.’

Harriet says, ‘No one’s ever gone into the woods in my memory. They always stick to the gardens and the lake.’

Gerald takes a great slurp of claret. ‘Don’t see that she could do any more damage, anyway. Might as well go into glamour modelling and have done with it.’

Suddenly, everybody loses interest in their conversations, looks over at Gerald, then at my friend. Harriet stares down at her empty plate and says nothing. Many families revert to their old power structures the minute they get together, and the fact that the Moresbys have thirty bedrooms doesn’t make them any different.

‘Do you know,’ Gerald continues, ‘that not one Moresby had been in the press for anything other than being born or dying, or the occasional speech in the House, for nearly two hundred years, until her mother came along?’

This is an old, old speech. And it’s always conducted as though Harriet were not even present in the room. Harriet makes no effort to respond though the whole table has turned to take notice.

Roof speaks up. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘like breeds like, I suppose.’

Harriet shifts in her seat, throws him a gimlet look, bites her lip.

‘She’s still a Moresby, though.’ Vif is obviously under the impression that saying this will make us all feel better.

Gerald waits a couple of beats for maximum effect, then says something I’ve never heard him say before. I mean, I know he hated Godiva for busting up his parents’ marriage and then busting up his father’s reputation, but I’ve never heard him take this tack. ‘Ah, but do you really think she is?’

A perceptible intake of breath. Then Cair, who despite having the hide of a rhino, still sounds a bit shocked, says, ‘What on earth do you mean, Gerald?’

‘Well,’ says Gerald, ‘if she were a Moresby, she would behave like a Moresby, wouldn’t she?’

Harriet lays down her cutlery, pushes her plate very slightly away from her body.

‘And how does a Moresby behave, Gerald?’

Gerald nods at an armorial shield on the wall to the right of the fireplace. ‘You know how a Moresby behaves. It’s not just a motto. It’s a description. It’s how we’ve always behaved. “Constancy, Discretion, Valour”. It’s not just a matter of training, and God knows she’s had enough of that; it’s innate. It’s so deep in the make-up of a Moresby that they could never betray those values. Whoever we’ve married, the children have always held those qualities most dear, acted with dignity, acted with pride, acted correctly. And now we have this cuckoo in the nest who has none of those qualities. What conclusion do you expect me to come to?’

Another perceptible breath.

Then Harriet says, quietly, ‘But maybe, Gerald, I don’t want to be all Moresby. Maybe I want to be the mongrel I am.’

Cair actually lets out a cackle of laughter – part nervous, part genuinely entertained – at this outlandish concept. ‘Don’t be silly! Everybody in the
world
wants to be a Moresby! Of course you’re a Moresby!’

‘Yes. I’m a Moresby. As far as I know, I’m half Moresby. And half Pigg. And I’m my own stupid self. I am the sum of my thoughts and experiences, and if I’m different from the rest of you, it’s because I’ve had a different life.’

‘Oh, dear. She’s been reading self-help books again,’ scoffs Sofe. ‘You don’t really believe that nonsense, do you?’

‘Of course I bloody do!’ cries Harriet.

Sofe does a little sneer. ‘Grow up, Harriet. If you want the privileges and position of being a Moresby, you have to start behaving like one. How can anyone believe you really are a Moresby when you behave like a guttersnipe?’

‘But
you’re
not one,’ I say. ‘You only became one by marriage.’

She turns her sneer on me. ‘I think it’s probably time you grew up as well,’ she says. ‘You didn’t get your brains from nowhere, did you? No. People marry the right people, and that’s how everything is passed down. Moresbys marry people from families with similar qualities, a similar understanding of what’s appropriate and what’s not. It’s in the blood. Gerald’s father had a brainstorm and married Harriet’s mother, and see how it’s turned out? I don’t think you need any more proof than that.’

‘So what you’re saying,’ says Harriet, ‘is that I’ll never fit in.’

‘No, Hairier.’ Sofe turns a face of kindly reason on her half-sister-in-law. ‘I’m not saying that at all. But you have a natural disadvantage, and you have to pay attention and fight it. Gerald didn’t mean what he said, he’s just upset. We all know you’re one of us. But it’s up to you to do what you can to let your good side come through and keep an eye on your unhealthy impulses. We’re only saying it for your own good, for heaven’s sake. You don’t want to live like this for ever, do you?’

Harriet drains her glass. ‘To be honest, I hadn’t thought about it,’ she says.

‘Well, do think,’ Sofe says kindly. ‘You’ve got such a lot to live up to, but I’m sure you could do it if you tried.’

I pull the kitchen door to, and Harriet immediately lets out a yell.

‘Aaaargh!’ she shouts. ‘Aaaargh!’

And I join in as we run past the stableyard and down the wooded track to the Kennels. ‘Aaaargh!’ I shriek. ‘Urgh, ugh,
aaaargh
!’

We pound through the warm night air, letting out the bellows of laughter that have been aching to get out all night, throwing our arms out and back to relieve the cramps in our chests and diaphragms. ‘Aaargh!’

Harriet kicks open the door to the cottage and we tumble inside, propping each other up and bashing each other in our hilarity. A furious Henry is sitting just inside the door, glaring out his what-sort-of-time-do-you-call-this? message. Poor old chap’s been shut in while we were out; we wanted to make sure the retrievers were put to bed before we let him roam.

‘Aaargh!’ says Harriet again. ‘Do you know, I forget every time. It’s like childbirth. I am simply unable to comprehend that anything can be as awful as a night with my relations until I’m in the middle of another one and it’s too late to do anything about it.’

‘Your relations,’ I say, ‘give a whole new meaning to the phrase “blood is thicker than water”.’

‘My relations,’ she replies, ‘are like the plagues of Egypt. Spotty, bloody, obsessed with the first-born, constantly killing cattle, benighted, swarming over food and drink like there’s no tomorrow …’

‘Your relations,’ I say, because we’ve been playing this game for years and each make up analogies between times to make it look like they’ve just fallen from our witty lips, ‘are like steam trains. Slow, inefficient, chuntering across the countryside and only really attractive to bores.’

‘A night with my relations,’ declares Harriet, ‘is like an entire night of modern opera without the interval. And you can’t even boo at the end.’

‘A night with your relations,’ I rejoin, ‘is like eating sago wrapped in shortcrust pastry.’

‘Drink?’

‘What have we got?’

Harriet reaches into the magic bag and brings out an entire decanter of port that she has contrived to carry all the way home without the stopper coming out. I’m lavish with my praise. ‘Top dolly. I name you Dido, queen of thieves.’

‘You want a drink, then?’

‘Got, got,
got
to have a pee.’

Harriet shrugs and goes into the kitchen to set up some glasses. Henry follows me into the bathroom, sits down to watch me as I hike down my knickers and sit.

‘Prowl,’ he says, politely but firmly, once he’s sure I’m settled.

‘Now?’ I ask.

He blinks, gives me that are-you-totally-stupid? look and says back, ‘Now.’

‘I’m on the loo, Henry. One minute.’

Another blink. ‘Now. Out
noowww
.’

Oh, bloody hell. I get off the loo, throw open the window.

‘Go on, then. Bugger off.’

He takes himself up onto the sill, pushes his chin forward and sups the damp night air for signs of life. Thinks for a while, sniffs again, then, with a cursory ‘Mwanks’ over his shoulder, drops softly down onto the concrete.

There are few things more satisfying than a good horse-piss when you’ve been holding it back for a couple of hours. Something about the big house leaves me totally inhibited when it comes to bodily functions; I’m always happier when I can go to the loo elsewhere. With a sigh of utter bliss, I hunker down on the chunky wooden seat and let thunderously rip. Aaaaah. Victorian plumbing: adorable. So luxurious, so energetic, so gloriously echoey.

The Kennels are furnished with what used to be the nursery furniture when Harriet was growing up. When I emerge, she is lying full-out on a two-seater sofa, head up on one arm, legs dangling over the other. On a plate on her stomach are the remainder of Shahin’s chocolate treats. ‘We have pudding,’ she announces. Pudding up at the house was some manky old stilton and a slice of chalky brie, then before the port arrived to cheer it up, we were sent off to the white drawing room to drink Nescafé poured from a silver jug in tiny eggshell porcelain cups and discuss the latest medical news on GMTV with Sofe and Mrs MFH. Harriet must have sneaked back to the dining room after the men came through and graced us with their presence an hour later, flushed with port and important talk.

‘And you’ll never guess who just called me at this hour,’ Harriet continues. ‘Only Leeza Hayman.’

‘What? It’s after midnight, for God’s sake!’

Harriet huffs. ‘She said some bollocks about not wanting to disturb me in the middle of my shift.’

‘What did she want?’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she says dismissively. ‘Something about a march for Mummy that the Fawcett Society seems to be organising in a couple of weeks and wanting a quote. I told her to piss off and ring me at a decent hour.’