Virtue (48 page)

François sits back, arm along the back of the sofa, and watches in silence as I perform the ritual. Shoulder-length black hair, sleek and glossy like a raven’s wing, angular, squared-off bones to his face like the rock Gods of Rapa Nui, arched, defined eyebrows, slightly slanted eyes that in the light are an intriguing shade of khaki and by candlelight are a vivid gold. They are slightly narrowed, speculative, as he watches me perform my task. He may be French by birth, but the blood is pure – well, part – Pacific.

I finish, sit back and smile. Am pleased to see him slightly adjust his posture on the seat. I lean forward again, pick up my brandy glass, lick a finger and run it round the rim to make it sing. Which in the language of seduction is roughly tantamount to saying, ‘Make
me
sing, big boy, why don’t you?’ François’s eyes narrow a little more and a smile plays around the corners of his lips.

‘So your flatmate,’ he says in that smooth and fluid voice, ‘she’s not here tonight?’

I smile back over the rim of my glass, stop the singing and dip my finger in my Armagnac. Bring it to my slightly parted lips, place the tip between them, close and suck. Even the most basic learner doesn’t need a lot of help in translating
that
gesture.

‘No,’ I reply slowly. ‘She’s staying at her boyfriend’s.’

He nods with a hint of satisfaction. ‘And the artist? That’s her? Or you?’

‘Her,’ I tell him.

‘Ah, of course,’ he says. ‘And you work in a restaurant.’

‘Very good,’ I tease. ‘You’re obviously a spy.’

He reaches out a hand, runs the backs of his fingers along the hairline on my neck. I shiver. ‘You like?’ he asks.

‘Yes,’ I reply, ‘yes, I do. And next year I’m going to open one of my own.’ You see, because I’m twenty-nine, I can make plans for what to do with Peter’s money now. It’s not just a pie floating far off in the clouds.

François sits forward. ‘Aha. Your own restaurant. And what will it be like?’

‘It will be lovely,’ I announce, taking a lump of ice from my drink and rubbing it over my lips. ‘It will be the perfect restaurant. Huge sofas and dark corners and candlelight, and food you eat with your fingers. Terracotta and azure and gold, and velvet curtains.’

‘Beautiful,’ he says, and this time I know he’s not talking about the restaurant. He reaches out again, closes his hand over the hand in which I’m holding the ice cube and gently prises it from my fingers. ‘Now close your eyes,’ he orders. At last. I comply, fingers pressed together in my lap. Sensation: cold and kind, running down my upper arm, first on the outside, and then on the tender skin on the inside of my elbow.

‘You like?’ he asks again.

‘Oh, yes,’ I tell him, ‘I like.’

The ice runs back up my arm, over my collarbone, works a line up my neck to the pulse point just below my ear. And then, after pausing a moment, it moves on, fingers replacing it with a gentle caress on my throat that brings an involuntary moan of pleasure from my lips. And with the ice, he runs on down the back of my neck, traces the line of my spine so that my whole body is suddenly tingling with anticipation. Oh, oh, ohhh.

‘You like?’ he whispers again, so close to my ear that I can feel his hot breath against the frozen skin. And all I can do in return is turn my mouth towards him, breathe in and swooningly press flesh to flesh.

The sixth rule of promiscuity: Get over it. Move on.

There are secrets that women never share, and Harriet and I have ours. Mike never knew – never will know, I think, at least until we are all so old and gnarled and used to each other that we can treat it as a family joke – the whole story behind Harriet and my estrangement. He knows, of course, that it was to do with him, but he believes that my anger was about being exiled while they developed their bliss.

Neither of us has felt it necessary to tell him more.

And bliss it is, I can see that. Not a bliss I want for myself just yet, but I can appreciate how sweet it is for them. They’re crazy, mad, love-bubble people, riding the surf, plunging down the waterfall, diving through the water. They need nothing, right now: not food, not drink, not books or music: all they need to do for sustenance is look at each other and they’re full again.

And besides, having a Plod around is proving to have its uses. It’s been six weeks since the fire and nothing untowards has happened aside from Henry bringing in a dog-collar one night. And I don’t mean the collar from a dog; I mean a dog-collar. Go figure. But Anthony Figgis has evidently had his fill, or the truth about Godiva has worked wonders, and we’re almost back to normal.

Harriet, having vanquished the foe, seems finally free to talk. ‘The thing I don’t get,’ she says, ‘is how a little guy like that could get himself so worked up in the first place. I mean, I can understand the sneaky things, but it’s the other ones. The restaurant and the march. He just didn’t seem that confrontational a type.’

Harriet is putting on make-up because she is going to the CID summer party with her beloved. This particular shindig is known as the Secret Policeman’s Ball in the trade, because they try to keep quiet about the fact that it happens in case they come in for flak about taxpayers’ money and lose even more Plod off the streets. I’ll tell you what, there are some sacrifices I’d
never
make to be in the love-bubble. The bubblers even offered to take me along if I wanted, but somehow the prospect of a night listening to a load of blokes in bomber jackets share perpetrator stories over a pint of bitter is less enticing than a night in painting my toenails and watching old Take That videos. But Harriet is making an effort; she wants PC Mike to be proud, and proud he will be. She has on a fifties-style dress with a low neckline and full skirt in a red and gold brocade I’m sure I last saw dressing the Chinese drawing-room windows at Belhaven; she even has a matching fichu, starched and tied about the shoulders to frame her swan neck and Audrey Hepburn beehive. She looks beautiful.

‘Well, yeah,’ I say, ‘but he obviously hired people for the march. Believe me, none of them were weaselly blokes with moustaches and anoraks. God, Figgis is much more like the kind of person Grace attracts than a man of action.’

The mention of Grace makes her change the subject, but this time it’s not one of those clunking subject-changes that characterised the topic of her stalker a couple of months ago. ‘I don’t suppose that Grace has lived up to her name and got in touch with you after your letter?’ she asks, though she must know the answer because she knows I would have told her.

‘Uh-uh.’ I shake my head. Look in the mirror and see a little pixie staring back at me beside the Titania that is my friend. ‘I don’t think she will either.’

Harriet draws lines in crimson around the outside of her lips. ‘How do you feel about that?’

I pull a wry face. Because even though I know what Grace is like, I still have regrets that we can’t get along.

Harriet stops painting, looks at me in the mirror. ‘Strikes me,’ she says, ‘that maybe you ought to give up on Grace now.’

‘God. I’ve got Carolyn on one side telling me I ought to persist and you on the other telling me to give up. It’s not easy, you know.’

‘No, look,’ she says, ‘you’ve tried the persisting bit. But in the end there has to come a cut-off point. Maybe it’s now. If she’s not been in touch, the chances are that she won’t be.’

‘Maybe …’

‘Look,’ she says again. ‘The ball’s in her court now. And she’s made it clear what she thinks. She’s had you over a barrel all your life and now she can’t any more, she’s taking her revenge.’

‘Hardly revenge, Harriet.’

‘Yes, it is. It’s revenge. She knows what she’s doing, and she’s doing it to hurt you. Let it go, Anna. Let her get on with it. Grace Waters is obviously one of those people who never forgive anything. I think she’ll carry her grudge with her until one or the other of you dies. There’s no point torturing yourself about it any more. I’ve met her, remember. She’s implacable. That’s the only word I can think of for her.’

I sigh. ‘Maybe you’re right.’

‘What would you do if she walked in right now?’

‘I don’t know. I think maybe I’d be glad.’

‘Glad?
Glad?
You’ve only just got rid of the bitch.’

‘Yes, but if she walked in now, it might mean that there was some chance …’

Harriet finishes off her lips, turns to me. ‘It would be more likely that she’d come back for another go, Anna. You’re better off without her.’

Mike looks like a copper. He’s wearing a numbered baseball jacket over a checked shirt. God, they look odd together: the princess and the frog, the duchess and the bodyguard. Now that my own love-bubble has burst, I can’t see what filled it in the first place. But Harriet can. She stands by him in the doorway, looks up at him with an expression of such soppy adoration that I think I might need to get her on a course of Prozac.

‘You’re sure you don’t want to come?’ he offers once more. ‘We’ve still got a spare ticket.’

Like a hole in the head I want to come, I think. But I say, ‘It’s really sweet of you, darling, but I’m totally washed out.’

‘You’re sure you’re going to be okay?’ asks Harriet.

‘Of course. I’m looking forward to a quiet night,’ I lie. Actually, I’m beginning to think about maybe calling the lovely François and seeing what we could do with the set of handcuffs that Mike hasn’t noticed I’ve swiped from his overnight bag and secreted in my bedroom. I wouldn’t mind a rematch. François’s body was made for climbing up cliffs and diving off them again. Lots of upper-body musculature.

‘Well, if you’re sure …’ she says.

‘Have fun,’ I say. ‘If your stalker calls, I’ll be sure to say hello.’

They laugh. Come over and kiss me goodnight. And then they leave.

For a couple of minutes I just stand there, listening to the sound of their receding footsteps and adjusting to the silence. Henry’s out rollicking somewhere; I have the house entirely to myself. I draw my feet up onto the sofa, wrap my arms round myself and have a little drum of the fingers. A whole night to myself. Funny. There was a time when that was all I had, and it drove me to attempt suicide. Now it’s such a rare occurrence that I’m not sure if I want to bust up the tranquillity with activity. God, it’s so quiet I can hear the drip-drip-drip from the leaky washer at the kitchen sink.

It’s so quiet, I can hear my own thoughts.

And they’re going: maybe Harriet’s right. Maybe it’s time just to let go of the past altogether now, move on as an effective orphan. Because, really, if I look at it, that’s what I’ve been all along: the foster child, the changeling, tolerated only so long as I toed the line. All my life, I’ve had this fantasy that somehow my family would revolutionise itself, turn into a place of safety. Maybe it’s time to let go of the fantasy and face reality. My mother is not like other mothers. So I don’t need to persist in trying to be like other daughters.

Bad train of thought. Now I definitely don’t feel like calling the lovely François. Thinking too hard about Grace Waters is like being doused with a bucket of cold water laced with bromide.

In my bag, I find a bottle of gorgeous green nail varnish I’d forgotten I had. That wonderful acidic, almost phosphorescent green that could never, ever occur in nature. I paint my left big toe, sit and look at it, smiling smugly. Yes. Lovely. Definitely not the sort of colour a hothouse genius would pick. I start to fill in the other toes, wiggling them against the bottle green of the sofa throw and feeling pleased with myself.

The phone rings somewhere over by Harriet’s art stuff. She’s gone and taken it off the charger and dropped it wherever she hung up again. Gingerly, I uncurl my legs, hobble on my heels over to the vague area where the sound is coming from. There’s a certain amount of hurry necessary to the operation, because if the answerphone kicks in before I locate it, the chances are that it will stay hidden.

It continues to ring as I sift through the huge pile of assorted detritus on the table. Bills, more bills, Dom’s press releases, loan offers, flyers from art shops, instruction leaflets on how to use glue (‘Do not put in plastic bag and hold to face, as this could result in chemical alterations to the brain. Avoid smearing palms with adhesive and gripping hard objects, as this could result in unwelcome adhesion’), polystyrene packing chips, plastic wrappers, crisp packets, no phone. It rings again as I get on hands and knees and look under the table. Fluff, an empty wastebasket, no phone. Head for the chair and the answerphone kicks in. Damn.

The machine plays its message as I start to throw the pile of clothes on the chair seat onto the floor in a race against time. Harriet, in an unaccustomed bout of nerves, has spent an hour trying on outfits and chucking them away before settling on what she’s wearing tonight.

Mel’s voice. ‘Hello, loves. It’s me. Nothing important, just calling to say hi, really …’

Clunk. The phone slips from the pocket of a swing coat and hits the floor. I dive on it, hit the on button.

‘So, er, yeah, hi,’ Mel continues.

‘Hi, honey,’ I say.

‘Oh, hi. Were you screening?’

‘No. Harriet hid the phone.’

‘Ah,’ says Mel, not even slightly surprised. ‘How you doing?’

‘Yeah. I’m doing good. Having a lovely evening all alone with my toiletries.’

‘Lovely,’ she says. ‘Love-bubble out for the night, are they?’

‘Yes. They’ve gone to a Plod party.’

‘Oh, blimey. Harriet’s getting to all the glamour gigs these days. What’s a Plod party like?’

‘Plodding,’ I reply. ‘How are you?’

‘Good. Well, fine. I just had to tell you about Dom.’

I go back to the sofa, settle down for a good chat. Mel is always ringing up with more evidence of Dom’s masculine ineptitude. She collects examples like other people collect stamps.

‘So what did he do this time?’

‘I was in the bath, right?’

‘Mmm?’

‘And he came in looking all pious and going, “Mel, where does the dustpan and brush live?” So I said, “Darling, where it always lives.” And he went, “Oh.” Then he thinks for a bit and says, “And where’s that?”.’