Virtue (5 page)

‘I see what you mean. Still. They don’t look too threatening. I’d have thought the two of you could take them on.’

The phone goes again, clicks over to answerphone, clicks over to fax. Chirrups and starts to buzz. ‘Christ,’ says Harriet, ‘can’t they get the message?’

I glance at the cover sheet as it emerges. ‘’S okay. It’s from my mother.’

‘Tell you what,’ says Nigel, ‘I could throw them off the scent a bit on my way out, if you like.’

‘Oh, leaving now, are you?
Thanks
,’ says Harriet.

‘Well, you did want me out of here ten minutes ago, didn’t you?’

‘I can change my mind if I want to.’

‘I’ve got to catch a plane at two thirty. Much as I’d love to stay here and shoot the breeze with you two lovely ladies –’ Harriet pulls a face at the mention of ladies. She doesn’t much like being reminded that she is one for real ‘ – I’m supposed to be in Dublin tonight.’

‘Oh, well then. Off you go,’ she says like a schoolmarm dismissing an eight-year-old from detention.

‘I’ll see you later.’ He heads for his rucksack, brushes past me and says, ‘And I really hope I see
you
.’

Actually, I hope he means it. He may be called Nigel, but his forearms are covered with shiny golden hairs and I can just feel them brushing the small of my back. Damn. I can’t afford to get worked up about someone who’s just leaving.

As he passes the fax machine, he rips off the paper, scans it and begins to hand it over. ‘She says she knows you’re screening and to call her—’ he begins, then stops. Looks back at the cover sheet and over at me.

‘Christ. You mean I almost got my hands on some Nobel totty?’

I sort of wriggle and gesture uncomfortably. If there’s one thing that can be guaranteed to turn a guy off, it’s the thought of my mother.

He looks me over, and he seems to be pouting. ‘You don’t look like her.’

‘No. I, um, don’t.’

Nigel lays down the fax paper, rubs his arms, where all the hairs are suddenly standing up on end. ‘What the hell have I walked into?’

He regards the two of us with a combination of fascination and horror. Shakes his head and says to Harriet, ‘And to think I was feeling sorry for
you
a second ago. Bloody hell.’

And then he addresses me. ‘What the hell’s it like having someone like Grace Waters for a mother?’

I’ll tell you what it’s like having Grace Waters for a mother. Imagine, for a moment, that you’re back at school. Imagine that you wake up one day, and you’re seven years old, and confined within the walls of a school where you were placed at birth. Only, it’s not your common-or-garden school with start times and end times, with break times and lunchtimes: it’s a 24-hour-a-day, seven days a week, 365 days a year hothouse where no failure is brooked, no slacking permitted. And imagine that this school is not just a school, but a country in its own right, a country established on a windswept island in the Atlantic that has, by mutual consent of all governments worldwide, been declared both independent and a site of special cultural interest to be defended at all costs.

And imagine this: however hard you try, however diligently you apply yourself to meeting the exacting standards of this school, however late you stay up frowning over your homework, however you strive to show enthusiasm for your subjects, however enthusiastically you pant up and down the hockey field, you still remain the class lummox, still the unpopular one, still the one that everyone takes last, and unwillingly, onto their teams, still the one whose report cards read, monotonously, Could Do Better. You suspect, because you have stumbled, on the beach, across a short-wave radio that occasionally crackles into life to tell a joke or describe an activity you’ve never encountered, that some dreadful error is afoot and that you’ve been mistaken for some other, higher being. But you know that the expression of such thoughts is forbidden and punishable by detention, or being sent into coventry by classmates and teachers alike.

And imagine this: this country has been thriving for a whole generation before you were born. The laws have been tested and no one in the previous generation has found them to be bad laws. The original legislator is, in fact, venerated close to godhead; statues of him are scattered about the place and his collected quotations are brought out to support every decision, quell any signs of rebellion. And as you know nothing else, you have to believe what you are told: that your silent world of work and diligence and trying always to please the legislators is the only possible way to live, that all other options are inferior ones, that you, and your fellow citizens, have achieved the pinnacle of what human life has to offer. What would you do? What would you think?

I’m talking metaphorically, of course. My real life was far duller than that. But just as crushing.

When I met Harriet, I had been dying, bit by bit, for seventeen years. Harriet Moresby saved my life. And I don’t just mean the time she did it literally.

I’ll tell you what it’s like to have Grace Waters for a mother: it’s like growing up in purgatory with none of the entertainment value. Yes, I know. The great Grace Waters. Feminist heroine, saviour of humanity, Nobel laureate, role model to millions, leader of civilisation. The Grace Waters whose medical work transformed your life, whose musical works enrich it, whose feats are more than merely legendary.

You probably read those colour supplement interviews where celebrities are asked to choose their fantasy dinner party guests. Have you noticed that my mother is always among them? All the usual suspects: Marilyn Monroe, William Shakespeare, Diana Vreeland, Mick Jagger, Godiva Fawcett, Henry Kissinger, the Dalai Lama, Steven Spielberg, the Prince of Wales, Groucho Marx, Jackie Kennedy-Onassis, Elvis Presley, their current partner, Rupert Murdoch, their interior designer, Gianni Versace, Socrates, Dorothy Parker, Charles Darwin, Richard Dawkins, Oscar Wilde, my mother. They always crease me up, those articles: silly people attempting to add gravitas to their personality by listing people they’ve heard of.

I mean, you don’t think they really mean it, do you? You wouldn’t really want my mother at your dinner table, would you? Sitting there in her high-necked Laura Ashley flower prints (as she always says, there is no reason why a woman cannot display intellect and also look feminine), her hair with its white streak in the centre parting swept up into two batwings on either side of her head, looking for all the world like a paint-free, bespectacled, floral Cruella de Vil and curdling the cream in your vichyssoise.

Let me tell you about my mother, the great Grace Waters. My mother has been famous practically all her life. She first became famous when she won a scholarship to Cambridge at the age of twelve to read physics and philosophy, and the papers divided themselves into separate camps, often within the same publication, filling the comment pages with congratulations for effort rewarded and hysterical defences of the sanctity of childhood. Ask your mother about her. She will tell you about the clips of Grace’s serious little face above her serious little crushed-strawberry tweed coat, the sight of her lost among giants, tiny little body wrapped in a gown that had had to be custom-made in order not to trip her up. The chances are that she will also mention Grace’s father. He was always there by her side, Peter Waters, the child staring silently into the camera lens as he spoke of his pride, his dedication and the sacrifices he had had to make to get her to this point so young.

But that’s not all. Unlike many child prodigies, my mother came true to her promise. At fourteen, she graduated and embarked on her doctorate. At sixteen-and-a-half she completed her first thesis, and began teaching people years older than herself. And it’s not as if she has one of those narrow, focused minds that can see only one subject. She may have gained her original distinction for counting particles in stellar nebulae, but her second doctorate was awarded for her discursive way with the meaning of life. The Nobel Prize in medicine she won for two things: the cancer immunisation discovery that showed millions the possibility of a life free from fear, and the world’s first foolproof, pope-proof, side-effect-free contraceptive, which she developed to cope with the consequent population boom. Boy, how you loved her for that, and rightly so. Thirty thousand bunny rabbits might disagree, but the end always justifies the means.

And then there’s the rounded character; my mother is Renaissance Woman and no one can forget it. An entire evening was dedicated to her musical works, knocked out as relaxation after a hard day’s thinking – you can fit a lot into your day if you only sleep four hours a night – at the Proms last year. The premiere of her Fantasia for xylophone, harp and tabla received the usual ten-minute standing ovation, Grace nodding modestly in her stalls seat.

Nobel prizes are like swimming badges in our house; win one, you win them all.

There are things, though, that my mother won’t be winning any prizes for. She won’t be winning any popularity contests, for a start. To quote the woman herself, in one of her rare interviews, in
New Scientist
: ‘The desire to be liked is one of the most destructive urges where original thought is concerned. Popularity is, in its very essence, the antonym of excellence.’ She won’t be winning many prizes for her sense of humour, either: one of the phrases that still echoes from my childhood, applied to other people as well as to me, is: ‘Oh, I see. You’re trying to be funny.’

Grace Waters won’t be walking away with gongs for hospitality, warmth, empathy or even elementary psychology in the near future. She won’t be tearfully accepting accolades from the Best-Dressed Boffin Society, the Good Neighbour Trust or the Friends of the Stiletto. The National Humility Co-operative won’t be beating a path to her door, nor will the Society for Cordial Relations. And she certainly won’t be polishing any cups or shields from the Tea and Sympathy Brigade. Actually, this saviour of human life is one of the heroines of the capital punishment movement. She once referred to recidivist offenders as ‘a cancer in our society which, like all cancers, must be excised to save the body’.

Let me tell you about my mother. She may be brilliant, she may have helped the world, she may be the person you all admire the most, but she is also the coldest person I have ever met. Cold, rational and full of contempt for anyone who fails to live up to her standards.

My mother spent two decades trying to replicate her father’s own success. For two decades, her pet project was to create me in her own image. And to my shame, she almost succeeded.

Harriet always gets into these states when her mother comes back into the public eye. I know she talks like a bitch about her mother, dismisses her with a snarl, but it’s not really as simple as that. I mean, yeah, in some ways it is. Godiva was, all told, pretty dodgy on the mothering front: absent where mine was all too present, mercurial in her affections, throwing her arms around her daughter in the presence of cameras and forgetting to come back for access visits for months on end when they weren’t there, but you know, despite everything, Harriet loved her. Godiva had a way with her, a way of opening her eyes wide and confessing her weakness that could bring any child back into the fold. It’s the other people who claim that they felt the same that set Harriet off: the strangers who elbowed their way into the limelight, wept crocodile tears, claimed kinship and friendship and stole Harriet’s tragedy for their own. Harriet’s hatred of hypocrisy comes from that time, and she never really had anyone around to teach her how to hide it.

And off he goes, my unused lover, slouching through the early summer sunshine down the path and over the lock, backpack hanging casually from one shoulder. We take turns to watch through the periscope I won in a raffle five years ago – we hardly want to go out onto the balcony and wave – as he presses the exit button and steps through the gate and is surrounded, in two seconds, by a dozen gannets with their notebooks and cameras and boxy tape recorders.

Nigel recoils, pantomimes surprise, then he throws his long arms wide in an exaggerated shrug. Flings his head back in laughter, shakes it vigorously.

‘He’s talking to them,’ says Harriet in tones of horror. ‘The bugger’s
talking
to them!’

I pat her arm. ‘He did say that was what he was going to do,’ I remind her.

‘Yes,’ she replies, ‘but there’s no need to get so pally.’

My mate. She won’t be reasoned with.

Then her pursed lips soften, her jaw drops ever so slightly. ‘Well, I’ll be buggered,’ she says.

I grab the periscope. Nigel is loping off up the embankment, and, to my amazement, the gents and ladies of the press are scattering, some following him, some getting back into their cars, some hailing taxis, some heading in the direction of the tube. Well, I’ll be blowed.

‘You have to marry that man,’ says Harriet, ‘and have his kids.’

Which makes me smile. Because I’m still living out my adolescence and have no intention of marrying anyone until I’ve tested a lot more of the available options. But you never know: maybe he’ll come back and at least give me some chance to practise.

My mobile rings. I check the display before I pick up. You never know, after all. But it’s Mel. Phew. ‘Hi, honey.’

‘Where are you?’ she asks.

‘At home.’

‘Oh. Did you know your phone’s switched off? I’ve tried about five times and it always goes to answerphone.’

‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘We’ve switched the volume down.’

‘I’m not surprised.’ Mel is neither fazed nor curious. That’s the great thing about old friends. Mel met me when I was still in my chrysalis phase, helped us move into the tower, went through the tenth anniversary commemoration celebrations with us; she hardly needs telling about what’s going on.

‘That’s why I was ringing,’ she continues. ‘Are you two okay?’

‘Oh, I’m fine,’ I say. ‘Lovely’s in a bit of a state.’

Harriet snatches the phone from my hand. ‘I am
not
in a state,’ she announces. Oh yeah, I think, that’s why I’ve been sitting on the sofa hugging you half the night and watching you smoke your head off the rest of it.