Virtue (42 page)

I am ok pls b ok 2
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‘So is there anywhere you could go?’ Mike asks again.

I sigh, stare through the windscreen at the passing street lights. ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Yes, I think there’s somewhere.’

I’ve been in Poole four days when Carolyn and I finally have The Talk. For four days she leaves me pretty well alone, finds a bowl for Henry, who I found sulking by the boarded-up front door when I went back to look for him and put in a cardboard box, and took him, complaining loudly, first into a taxi, then onto the tube and then onto a train at Waterloo, as Mike instructed me, so that no one could trail us by the car number-plate.

The British holiday season has already virtually finished its short flowering, so we get the front bedroom at Sunny-View, the B&B she semi-retired to when it became evident that only hubris had justified her wage packet from my family in the previous ten years.

SunnyView is on the edge of the shallow, muddy part of Poole Harbour, a thirties-built villa with swirly carpets, frilled curtains, and a lean-to sun lounge running the length of the sea-facing wall. Every available surface is covered with pink and white china knick-knacks, all of which seem to have a function that belies their decorative appearance: vases shaped like boots, clocks shaped like milkmaids, pen holders shaped like tulips, letter-openers shaped like fish, ring trees shaped like grasping hands, nail-brushes shaped like Scottie dogs. Whenever I’ve been here, I’ve always found it hard to believe that Carolyn could ever have shared a life with my spartan forebears. Where did she keep all this stuff in the old days? In a suitcase under her bed? In a lock-up garage surreptitiously visited in the wee small hours? Or is it a reaction to all those years of function and restraint, a late flowering like the reds and purples and lush velvets that characterise my bedroom?

We’re in the sun lounge on a Thursday afternoon when she finally brings up the subject of my mother. I’ve told her about the stuff that’s been happening to Harriet and me, and she’s tutted sympathetically and shown no sign of nervousness. Henry, much recovered apart from a tendency to talk loudly and persistently at inopportune moments, has found a sunny spot on a pink and blue rag rug that probably came from a Women’s Institute bring and buy, and is basking with all four feet up in the air and a ridiculous smile of self-satisfaction on his face. And Carolyn says, ‘So have you spoken to your mother?’

‘No,’ I reply, rather hoping that this will be the last of it but knowing that it won’t be. ‘The last I saw of her was projected on a back wall at the Brit Awards. Looking as sour as limes, as usual.’

Carolyn, who seems to have taken up knitting in her dotage as well as alarming quantities of shocking-pink lipstick, clickety-clacks a couple of times, casts off or something that requires her to stick her tongue out of the corner of her mouth and frown, then says, ‘Why not?’

‘Why? Have
you
?’ I ask suspiciously.

‘Ooh, no, dear,’ says Carolyn. ‘Her assistant sends me a card at Christmas. That’s about it with me and Grace these days.’

‘Well, then,’ I say triumphantly.

‘Yes.’ Another go with the tongue. ‘But then again, she’s not
my
mother.’

‘I was rather under the impression,’ I inform her huffily, ‘that she wasn’t mine, either.’

‘Well, like it or not,’ says Carolyn, ‘she’s all the mother you’re ever going to get. You’ll have to get used to it one day.’

‘No I don’t. She was a terrible mother. She was never motherly to me once.’

Carolyn throws me a small, sympathetic smile. ‘She wasn’t as bad as all that,’ she says. ‘You’ve got to remember, she did what she thought was best with the equipment she was given.’

Funny. A sentimental bit of me believed for a long time that most of what I in my deprived way thought of as mothering – the occasional cuddle, the smuggled treats, the comforting words – came from Carolyn. Maybe she was more of a godmother: the person who could spoil you and walk away, whose job was to show you that there were other lives outside that of your family. Grace, shut away in Shropshire, never saw anyone like that.

I give her a bit of a glare. And she has the temerity to laugh in my face. ‘Besides,’ she says, ‘you’ve got most of your personality from her.’

‘I have not!’ I protest. ‘That’s so unfair!’

She gives me that look that southerners find so irritating in Yorkshire publicans: that sort of ‘Tha knows th’art fooling thyself’ look that plays around the mouth and makes you want to punch it.

‘You,’ she says, ‘are far more like your mother than you know.’

‘I am not! Look at me! I’m entirely self-invented!’

‘Ah!’ responds Carolyn. ‘And where do you think you got the strength of character to do that? You’re like a terrier once you’ve got the bit between your teeth.’

Carolyn has always specialised in mixing metaphors in a way that somehow works nonetheless. It used to drive my grandfather potty.

‘Most people with your upbringing would have found it very difficult to do what you’ve done,’ she says. ‘Of course, most people with your upbringing weren’t also brought up to think that they could do whatever they wanted if they put their minds to it. I know your mother’s disappointed by the results, but you’ve done exactly what she trained you to do, and you’ve done it brilliantly.’

‘Oh, Carolyn, that’s such – ’ I’m about to say bullshit, but remember that, though she’s always coped very well with the eccentricities of our situation, she’s still of the older generation, and of the knitting, china-collecting older generation at that – ‘poppycock,’ I finish.

‘And that’s another thing,’ she continues. ‘You’re just like your mother in that. Anything that doesn’t suit you, you just deny it altogether. Flat contradiction. No manners, they would have called it in my family, but I suppose it has its uses.’

I think for a bit. Say! ‘Well, whatever the truth in that may be, she’s done some stuff that’s pretty unforgivable.’

‘I know, dear.’ She lays down her knitting, folds her hands in her lap. ‘But you’re going to have to find a way of putting out the olive branch.’

‘Carolyn, no!’

She nods.

‘Why should
I
make the first move? It’s not
me
that’s in the wrong.’

‘Well, as you see it.’

‘As I
know
it.’

‘And that’s another way you’re alike,’ she says. ‘So you’d rather never have anything to do with her again than go halfway?’

I’m firm on this point. I’ve had plenty of time to mull it over in the past few weeks.

‘Yes.’

‘You know you’ll never see her again, don’t you?’

I make a ‘don’t care’ face.

She sighs. ‘You’re
so
alike.’

‘Now what?’

‘Both of you. Sometimes I could bang your heads together. If she wasn’t six inches taller than me and twelve years younger … Listen to yourself. Can’t you
hear
your mother when you talk, sometimes? You’d rather die than admit you might be wrong. You’ve always been like this. Someone does something, or something doesn’t suit you, and you just slam the door and throw away the key. Sometimes I think you’d actually commit murder rather than be wrong-footed.’

I say nothing.

She continues. ‘Of course, she was always exactly the same. But she’s had no chance at all, really. At least you’ve seen some examples of how adults behave. You could always have a go at leading by example.’

‘No,’ I say. ‘Look, she’s the mother and I’m the daughter. I know I’m grown up, but in the case of mothers and daughters, she’ll always be the adult and I’ll always be the child. That’s how it is.’

She sighs again. ‘Anna. Just try for once to see things outside your own point of view. Think about your mother. You were the lucky one. You may have had a miserable time of it, but at least you got to mix outside the bubble. Think about what life’s been like for your mother. Trapped with that
awfu
l man and no one else. Bred up for her life like a suckling pig …’

‘No more than I was.’

‘Much more,’ says Carolyn.

‘What exactly do you mean?’

‘Oh, dear,’ she says. ‘You really don’t know anything about your family, do you?’

I stare.

‘Did it ever once occur to you to ask questions, Anna? Or were you so busy hiding everything you didn’t have any room for anything else?’

‘What are you on about, Carolyn?’

‘If I tell you, you’ve got to promise that you’re not going to blow up like you did last time. I really couldn’t bear to have another scene like last time.’

‘Yes, yes,’ I bark impatiently. ‘I promise. Now what are you on about?’

‘Your mother,’ says Carolyn, ‘was an early experiment in this genetic thing they’re all going on about.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well.’ She thinks for a bit, then begins. ‘I don’t think it started that way, mind. I mean, obviously he’d always had the ambition to produce a genius. I don’t think it would have occurred to your grandfather for a minute that any child of his could have been anything else. And I don’t think he ever intended to share the limelight either. From what I’ve picked up about your grandmother, the whole thing was fairly much a temporary arrangement, anyway. It certainly wasn’t a love match. He wanted a child and she wanted a good lump sum to emigrate with. She went to South Africa when they split up, you know. That’s why she never put in any inconvenient reappearances. I don’t suppose the Afrikaaner farmer she married would have been too chuffed to find out that his children weren’t alone in the world, if you know what I mean.

‘But then there was a spoke in the works.’

I suppress a smile, carry on listening.

‘I don’t know exactly what happened, but the baby didn’t materialise. They thought it would be an eighteen-month, two-year process – bang, as it were and you’re out – but nothing happened. I’m not sure if it was that Peter was firing blanks, but between you and me’ – she puts a finger to her lips and looks around her as though we are surrounded by spies rather than sitting on wicker furniture in an empty conservatory on the south coast – ‘I don’t think he was a very
sexual
man, if you see what I mean. And as it turned out, there certainly wasn’t anything wrong with
her
waterworks.’

By now, I’m riveted. This doesn’t feel like my family history at all, more like one of those Channel Four documentaries where nonogenarians reminisce about bunk-ups behind the glue-works.

‘Anyway. After two and a bit years, they realised that it just wasn’t going to happen. So she said come on then, give me my money and I’ll be off. And he said no, love, the deal’s not completed. No kid, no cash. So she said you can’t do that! and he said just try suing me in a court of law. I don’t think a judge would take a very kindly view of an arrangement like ours. As a matter of fact, I think in those days a judge could have refused to give them a divorce altogether and they’d have been shackled together in perpetuity. So she said well, what do you want me to do about it? And he said well, if we can’t get a baby this way, we’ll have to go about it another. Obviously, they didn’t have that artificial inspermination in those days. You used turkey basters for basting turkeys when I was young. And he didn’t want just any old donor.

‘So they cooked up this plan. There was a conference going on in London that summer – I can’t remember which college, but it was something to do with science – and there were going to be all these Nobel prizewinners there. So he agreed to bung her an extra thousand, which was a lot of money in those days, believe me. You could have bought a whole street in Salford for that.’

She pauses. ‘Still could, mind you. And she agreed to go along and hang around at all the social events and see what she could pick up, if you see what I mean. Conferences then were exactly the same as they are now. Knocking shops. Anyone who hasn’t brought his secretary is looking to see what he can find among the delegates. Only difference was that there weren’t so many female delegates to choose from in those days.’

‘Good God,’ I say.

Carolyn nods. ‘Well might you say it. So anyway, Sylvia buys a new wardrobe of low-cut dresses and small hats and sets off to London to do some fishing. She targeted only Nobel prizewinners or men who’d got more than one doctorate.’

‘How many?’

Carolyn shrugs. ‘The conference lasted a week,’ she replies. ‘And bingo-bango, nine months later your mother pops out. Peter gets what he wanted, Sylvia gets a heavy handbag and everyone’s happy.’

‘So Grace is the first Nobel baby.’

‘I suppose you could put it that way.’

‘Good God.’

‘So you see,’ she says, ‘you weren’t the only experiment in your family.’

‘Good God,’ I say again, because it’s taking me a while to think of anything else to say. ‘No wonder she’s so obsessed with the heredity thing.’

‘Exactly,’ says Carolyn. ‘You would be too if you’d been bought off the shelf like that. And don’t think he didn’t throw it in her face every time he didn’t think he was getting value for money. Poor little thing. Never learned anything apart from disapproval and implacable hatred.’

I light a cigarette to give me time to think. Can’t think of anything much to say, so stay silent.

‘The stupid thing is,’ says Carolyn, ‘I look at your mum and, despite everything, I think she’s done pretty well for herself. I mean, obviously not with you, but if you consider the start she had, you’d have expected much worse. It’s just that Peter never thought about the fact that people need social skills as well as qualifications if they’re going to get on in the world. Your mum’s won prizes galore and everyone says they admire her, but no one’s exactly going to be crying at her funeral, are they?’

I shake my head.

‘It’s all a question of presentation, isn’t it? Your friend Harriet’s mum, for instance, she was all presentation, but dying was marvellous for her public standing. You probably don’t remember, but the public was getting pretty sick of her and her “poor me” this and her “admire me” that. I don’t think we’d really even remember who she was today if she hadn’t died like that. Your mum has had the misfortune to keep on living, and her reward is that she’s got no friends and a daughter who can’t even bring herself to hold out an olive branch.’