Virtue (4 page)

I look at her, shrug. Then I have to laugh, because I’d been hoping I’d get away with it, and you never get away with anything with Harriet.

Harriet makes a disgusted face. ‘I’m so glad,’ she says, ‘to see your sense of responsibility growing with age.’

‘Yeah, but Harriet, have you seen the size of his feet? I couldn’t resist.’

Harriet’s eyes roll upwards until the pupils disappear beneath her eyelids. She wags her head from side to side and goes, ‘Gaah! Filthy manky old slag.’

I wave the bottle at her. ‘Glass of wine?’

‘What will I catch?’

Henry turns a somersault on the rug, stretches his legs out in front of him, lets go the gentlest, most subtle of farts and looks painfully smug. Harriet picks up an old coffee mug with green paint stains around the middle and says, ‘All right, then.’

I cross the room, give her a share. She grunts, drinks, says, ‘Disgusting’ and turns up the sound on the telly as the ads come to an end and the music for the news headlines begins.

‘See you later.’ I walk back towards the door with my bottle, rub Henry’s tummy as I go and am rewarded by a slash of teeth and a couple of rabbit-kicks. Then, behind me, ‘Fuck!’

I turn. Harriet has many different levels of ‘fuck’, and this one sounds alarmingly like a force nine. It’s been a while since the word cracked over the air like splitting timber. ‘What’s up?’

‘Motherfucking bitch,’ snarls Harriet. ‘Bloody sodding hellfire. Who the fuck does she think she is? What the—’

I bound back into the room, heart pumping. On the screen, though I can’t hear anything over Harriet’s cusswords, flash pictures of Godiva, a lingering helicopter shot of the park at Belhaven and a set of archive pictures of the hysteria at the funeral. ‘What is it?’ I raise my voice over her cussing. ‘What’s happened? Harriet, shut up, I can’t hear!’

Harriet turns round, face like a radish and the sort of snarl I haven’t seen for six, seven years ripping her upper lip back from her teeth, throws her mug of wine at the wall. ‘Damn her. Damn her bloody eyes. Goddamn it and fuck it all to hell.’

‘Harriet!’ I’ve jumped over Henry and made it back to her side, but the picture has changed now to shots of the little black pepperpots that pass for women in Afghanistan. ‘What is it?’

‘Damn her,’ shouts Harriet. ‘The bitch has been dead for fifteen years, and she still can’t keep out of the limelight!’

His name, it turns out after all that speculation, is – wait for it – Nigel. Obviously, he stays the night, sleeping like a baby until after ten o’clock in my bed while the chickfest goes on upstairs, and I take the opportunity, while Harriet is in the lav at around five o’clock, to sneak a look, with a sinking stomach, at the passport in the front pocket of his rucksack. Nigel. And there was me thinking he was a child of the outback, his name formed in the red dust of Alice. Actually, he’s just finished his teacher training in Canberra and is fitting in a few months’ life experience before he commits himself to the geographical enlightenment of the youth of East Perth. That’s what he was doing at the RGS: trying to make contacts he could get to come and give talks if ever they were on the south-western edge of the world.

He tells us this as he slurps coffee with alarmingly lavatorial sounds and fries up a couple of kilograms of bacon he’s found in his backpack. He’s a wonderfully normal object in the midst of our controlled hysteria. He acts like there’s nothing unusual about the situation, though I guess he must have heard
something
when he came up looking for me after I’d been gone forty minutes last night. He’s normal enough that we can afford not to be that attentive, having been up all night with Harriet pacing the floor and me removing breakable objects from her path, but we nod and uh-huh at the right places, and Harriet says something damning every five minutes, so I don’t think he notices anything much.

Eventually, around eleven o’clock, with the sun streaming onto the balcony and Henry throwing him don’t-you-have-any-manners? looks from the top of the dresser where he likes to settle among the odd pieces of Sèvres that we brought up from Belhaven and have never actually had the occasion to use, Harriet lights a cigarette, picks up her glue pot and says, ‘Listen, Nigel, I’d love to stay and chat all day, but Anna and I both have work to get on with.’

‘Aouh yeah?’ responds Nigel. ‘Whadda yer working on?’

‘I,’ says Harriet grandly, ‘am making an eco-mosaic.’

‘Right.’ Nigel peers at the accumulation of feathers, bits of old sardine tin, wine-bottle labels, chunks of pavement, skeletal leaves and dessicated rabbit turds that she’s built up on her corner table (the rabbit turds having been drying on a sheet of reflective aluminium out on the other side of balcony from where we sit) and smiles. ‘So that’s what the popcorn was for, yeah? Going to use it to fill in the bits in-between, like—’

‘A gravel pathway,’ Harriet finishes. ‘Well, yes, I suppose you could express it in simple terms like that. But it’s actually a metaphor for—’

‘I get it.’ Nigel nods thoughtfully. ‘A metaphor for the waste and decay in modern society. Sort of, we think we’ve tamed nature with our cities and our infrastructures, but actually it’s rotting all around us, right?’

‘Right,’ says Harriet, looking pissed off.

He grins. ‘Trustafarian, are you?’

Harriet’s voice goes dangerously quiet. ‘What makes you think that?’

‘Well,’ – he scratches the back of his neck, narrows his eyes as he looks about him – ‘sort of stands to reason. You live in a huge industrial space in the centre of a prime real-estate area, you dabble with minimum wage jobs to be out there with the people, you haven’t seen a hairbrush this side of graduation, you stay up all night obsessing about your mother and you make pictures out of animal droppings. You’ve either got a rich dad or you’re care in the community.’

I stay stumm. I hardly know the guy, for God’s sake, and I’m not going to get in to the subject of the employment prospects of the daughters of saints with just any old geography teacher. I think he’s expecting her to get riled and show her teeth; Nigel, it turns out, is a serious wind-up merchant despite the love beads and the multicoloured cotton plait round his wrist. He leans his bum against the cooker, folds his arms loosely and smiles at her. Looks faintly disappointed when she suddenly smiles back.

‘Yes. Maybe both, even. D’you want another cup of coffee before you fuck off?’

Nigel grins, reaches over and presses the tit on the kettle. ‘Sure. Don’t mind if I do.’

Which is when the phone rings. Harriet looks at it. I look at it. Neither of us makes a move towards it. Nigel snorts.

‘Christ,’ he says. ‘You two really are the ticket, aren’t you?’

Harriet gestures him to be quiet as, after two rings, the answerphone clicks in. I check my watch: eleven thirty-five; just enough time for a coffee, a briefing and a couple of phone calls while the features editor is in morning conference. Our number’s not that hard to come by; the phone will be ringing off the hook all day now with Glendas wanting to know the inside track on Harriet’s emotional state.

Harriet’s voice. ‘This is a machine. If you leave a message, it will not steal your soul. If you’re lucky.’

The hum of a dead line. Always works with journalists. The machine resets and the phone starts ringing again. Nigel looks from me to Harriet and back again, shrugs, and goes back to filling the coffee pot.

‘This is a machine,’ says Harriet again. ‘If you leave a message, it will not steal your soul. If you’re lucky.’

After a couple of seconds’ thought, a voice says, ‘Hello. This is a message for Lady Harriet Moresby. This is Leeza Hayman calling from the
Daily Sparkle
. I’m writing a piece about your mother for tomorrow’s paper and I need to speak …’

Harriet slides the volume control over to zero, claps the glue pot down on the kitchen table and picks up the coffee pot. ‘I remember Leeza “Godiva would be turning in her grave” Hayman. A hypocritical alcoholic who drank three bottles of wine on expenses and wrote them down to me.’ Nigel raises an eyebrow, puts four spoons of sugar in his mug and stirs.

I quietly move the glue pot onto a newspaper, say, ‘Ignore them. You know that’s what you have to do.’

‘Oh, well, that’s all very well for you to say—’ she starts, remembers that it actually is all very well for me and shuts up.

‘Why do I know that name, Moresby?’ asks Nigel, pouring me a cup.

The phone rings again, almost immediately clicks off.

‘Because it was my mother’s married name,’ snaps Harriet.

‘And what was her original name?’

‘Pigg.’ Harriet says the word with the contempt of a good Imam. ‘But you wouldn’t have heard of that. She had a few names before she settled on Fawcett. And then she married my father and turned Moresby for a few years.’

I can see the grey cells heating up as he makes the connections. Clunk. Fawcett. Clunk. Moresby. Clunk. Important enough to be getting phone calls from journalists. Clunk. Harriet. Clunk. Around twenty-eight years old, hair so blonde it’s almost white, slender, cute little button nose, emerald eyes, dark brows, cupid’s bow lips; she may be covered in paint, nails bitten to the quick, hair tied back with a bulldog clip and cunningly disguised as a tramp, but the resemblance is unmistakeable. A huge neon exclamation mark lights up above his head.

‘Christ!’ he cries. ‘You’re Godiva Fawcett’s daughter!’

‘No shit, Sherlock,’ she says.

‘You really do swear a lot, don’t you?’

‘Too fucking right. I went to a convent school. Well, several, actually, in a row. It’s a classical part of the education. Any other questions?’

‘Well, yeah, only about a million. But—’

‘Yeah, yeah. I know. First you want to say how much you loved her and though you never knew her you felt that she touched your heart and made you a better person. Spare me.’

Nigel bursts into a gale of raucous laughter. ‘Touched my heart? I wasn’t but six when she died and it was on the other side of the world, for God’s sake. I was more touched by Skippy the Bush Kangaroo. Oh, sorry.’ He suddenly remembers that this is someone’s dead mother he’s talking about, looks guilty like a schoolboy caught behind the bike sheds, then puzzled by the look on Harriet’s face.

‘No, no,’ she says, ‘it’s fine.’

An awkward silence. Nigel slurps his coffee, then says, ‘If you don’t mind me asking, why are you ignoring the answerphone? Has something happened?’

We glance at each other.

‘Yes.’ I decide it’s my turn to do the talking. ‘You could say that.’

‘What?’

Harriet hauls Henry down from his eyrie, tucks him rebelliously under her chin and starts planting kisses on the top of his head as I talk. He wriggles for a bit, says ‘Naao’ a couple of times then gives up, straddles his front feet either side of her neck and submits grumpily to her caresses. Henry is wonderfully, moggily yellow with eyes the same colour as Moresby mother and daughter. The contrast with her hair is like gold set among diamonds; they glitter together as though they had been made that way.

‘You know,’ I say, ‘that Godiva was buried in a special mausoleum at the family house in East Anglia after she died?’

Nigel nods. ‘Bellevue? Something like that?’

‘—
haven
. Well, it didn’t actually happen entirely like that. The fact was that Gerald – that’s Harriet’s half-brother, who inherited after their father died, he’s about fifteen years older than us and sort of stood guardian for Harriet most of the time, even while Godiva was still alive, she was always so busy doing good works, you see, and fighting the estate for a share of the will – anyway, he decided that it probably wasn’t such a good idea to actually bury her on the spot because of the way the crowds were going on in the first few years.’

Nigel nods again. I’m going to have to do something about his name. ‘I heard about that,’ he said. ‘I heard it got pretty ugly now and again.’

‘That’s putting it mildly. There were a couple of times when someone got in there with a crowbar, and another time when some eighteen-carat nutter turned up with dynamite to blow the whole shebang sky-high. Well, you can imagine …’

There’s a moment there where I can see a tasteless joke hovering on his lips, but he suppresses it.

‘Anyway,’ I continue, raising my voice while Harriet drops Henry onto the top and shows a sudden and noisy interest in washing up. ‘He decided a week or so ago that it was probably safe to move her out of the family crypt and into her real one. He’s never liked having her buried with the rest of the family. There’s bad blood there, still, after all these years, and if it hadn’t been for the press coverage, he’d never have let her be buried at Belhaven at all. So he couldn’t wait to get her up and out of the church. But there was some sort of accident. I’m not sure what, but her coffin was broken open—’

‘The whole bloody place is run like some sodding Laurel and Hardy movie,’ interjects Harriet, slams a handful of cutlery undried into the drawer.

‘And it turns out,’ I continue, ‘that her body’s pretty much perfectly preserved.’

Nigel thinks about this for a moment. ‘Christ,’ he says. ‘And—’

I nod. The phone rings once again, cuts off.

‘Some bird called Margaret Burge called the
Mail
. She’s married to one of the guys who – Hey, Harriet, I thought the Burges were meant to be, like, dumb?’

She waggles her head. ‘Margaret’s not a Burge, is she? Seems she’s been a frustrated blabbermouth for the last two decades. She was Godiva’s number one fan. Along with everyone else in the world.’

‘And that’s roughly it. So now it’s business as usual: Godiva back in the limelight, us having to keep the answerphone on and stay indoors as much as possible for the next week and read quotes that someone at the
Sun
made up and everyone else repeats the next day because they couldn’t get one either. Look. There’s half a dozen of them out there already.’

‘Mmm.’ Nigel opens the balcony door, steps out to have a gander. Milling about down by the gates (we disconnected the buzzer at six this morning) is a knot of people: two twelve-year-olds in power suits, two middle-aged men in the sort of anorak that the owners believe to be endowed with magical self-cleaning properties and a chap with short hair in what looks like a pinstriped suit. On the far side of the road, a couple of mid-market saloons sit by the river, sheltering working teams whose photography allowance runs to a car. One of them presses on the buzzer as we watch, as though they believe that we are as likely to pick up after a hundred rings as after one.