Virtue (12 page)

Whore. I hope you catch the plague you so richly deserve. Who do you think you are, that you believe you’re above the morals of ordinary, decent people? You were given everything and I was given nothing, but at least I don’t cavort naked for my personal gratification. Get some self-respect, or get off the planet
.

‘Ah. Fan club’s back, then.’

‘Yeah.’ She goes into admin, cuts the standard text and pastes it into a reply.

Dear A. Friend, I thought you ought to know that someone showing obvious signs of instability is using your email address to send abusive messages on the Internet. If you are at all worried, I would suggest you contact your service provider immediately
.

Yours sincerely, Harriet Moresby
.

[email protected] writes:

It used to be that the sins of the fathers were visited on the children. In your situation, the rule seems to be reversed. Remember where you came from, and the debt you owe!

‘Hmm,’ says Harriet. ‘Could be spam, I suppose.’ Replies anyway. Last week we had three faxes from the Bible Decoding Society inviting us to join them for an evening’s cipher-breaking at the Cumberland Hotel. Eventually, Harriet faxed them back with a note saying, ‘The Bible wasn’t written in code, it was written in Hebrew,’ and the faxes stopped. What was a bit worrying, though, is that they must have bought their fax list from the people who send us weekly offers of cut-price pornography. God and Mammon walk hand in hand in this world.

‘Well, at least somebody remembers who I am,’ she says. ‘If I didn’t have the Godiva club, I might as well close down the account, for all the good it does me.’

She’s laughing as she opens a missive from [email protected], and it takes a few moments to kill the giggle, though the message itself takes no more than a second to read.

‘Oh, shit,’ she says.

Asfiggis has one thing to say, and it’s the sort of thing you don’t want to read. I know where you live, he says.

I was sixteen when my stomach ulcer and I went up to university. Sixteen and absolutely ignorant of all the things ‘normal’ people take for granted, like friendship, or late-night singing sessions, or microwaves, trainers and oven chips, or
EastEnders
, or the difference between a flare and an Aline, or
Catcher in the Rye
, or vodka and orange, or full-day lie-ins, or the vital importance of the offside rule, or why everybody loves Jimmy Stewart, or backpacking, or horoscopes, or washing ’n’ going, or how to balance on heels, or how to make a water bomb from a condom, or agadoo-doo-doo, or crisp sandwiches, or riding bikes without hands, or copping a feel, or lesbianism, or parents who dance embarrassingly at parties, or crying yourself to sleep over someone who’s dumped you, or sibling rivalry, or chocolate in bed, or
Smash Hits
, or Purple Ronnie, or detention, or food fights, or afternoons in the movies, or homework excuses, or Valentines, or lipsalve, or fuck-me shoes, or Narnia books, or pot noodle, or charter flights, or Saturday jobs, or any of the myriad subjects with which our generation breaks the ice and finds things in common with each other.

Instead, I knew about maths and physics and chemistry and biology and geology and art history and musical theory and magical realism and philosophy and economics and geography and algebra and trigonometry and the
Lives of the Masters
and Shakespeare’s symbolism and political history and ancient history and astrology and law and engineering and the poetry of Ezra Pound. I knew about tutors and summer schools and tests and S-levels and evening classes and extended essays. I knew about prizes and plaudits and wouldn’t you all like to be like Anna while my contemporaries stared at me with those blank stares that said no more effectively than any words could do. ‘No,’ said their unmoving faces, ‘we don’t want to be like Anna. We don’t want to be picked last for the teams, overlooked for the plays, left off the party lists. We don’t want to be the one who sits in the single seat behind the coach driver, gets her essays read out in class, gets moved up a year, has special dispensation to spend breaktimes in the library. We want to be young, free, popular. Why should we want to be transformed into the dumpy one just because it’s what teachers like?’

Dumpiness isn’t a physical thing, it’s an emotional one. Do you think that someone like my mother would have let me be unfit for even a minute? I had no concept of the point of team sports, but daily calisthenics and tri-weekly aerobic workouts made sure that under the plain navy jumper and the shapeless polyester skirt was a body well-suited to survival, pumped with enough blood to maximise the brain but not so much as to tip it over into Beckhamhood. But all the same, I was the dumpy one: dumpy of appearance, dumpy of personality. The one who paused slightly when someone tried to engage her in conversation and replied, ‘I don’t listen to pop music.’ The one who looked on at experimental make-up sessions with the bemusement of a biologist encountering a new and slightly revolting aspect of arachnid group behaviour. Come on, you had one of me in your class: the silent one whose hand went up dutifully whenever the teacher asked a question; the one with the smooth-brushed ponytail and the on-the-knee skirt; the one you used to go home and tell your mum about how awful she was.

Well, just be glad you weren’t her. Just be glad you didn’t lie awake after your ten o’clock optimum-sleep bedtime, watching the lights move across the ceiling, hearing the neighbouring kids at play and wondering what was wrong with you. Be grateful that you could yell at your mother, tell her she hated you, didn’t understand you, was ruining your life, and be able to expect her to yell back until you were both in tears.

Just be glad you weren’t brought up by the book, and be particularly glad that your grandfather didn’t write it. It always entertains me when I hear a certain type of pushy parent talk of hothousing as though it will inevitably produce some rare and beautiful blossom: do they not know that cacti grow in hothouses? And that the largest orchid in the world gives off the stench of rotting cadavers?

And because of my unspeakable training, I nearly missed Harriet altogether as she wafted past on a cloud of saddle soap and
eau de Givenchy
. I was so well trained in disapproval and standing back that had it not been for Harriet’s temper I’d have been another statistic by now. Harriet, raised in privilege by people whose basic idea of education was learning how to get out of a sports car properly, represented everything that I’d been taught to despise: the old world of contacts and consanguinity, a world where familiarity with the uses of a running martingale was far more important than familiarity with the works of Goethe.

And besides, she was up to something pretty outrageous when I first spoke to her. It was around our fourth or fifth day in halls, and I was up at my usual six o’clock, heading down the corridor in a terry bathrobe for a good stimulating lukewarm bath in preparation for another long day at the library. I was worn out, not from a routine that I’d known since I could remember, but from lying awake at night listening to the shrieks and giggles of my contemporaries as they discovered the joys of student life till two, three and four in the morning. I was so tired, I was even beginning to contemplate trying coffee. Shampoo clutched to bosom, I toddled down the silent parquet, turned the corner and very nearly went A over T as I tripped over the crouching form of Harriet Moresby.

I recognised her, of course; she lived next door, after all. I’d even, once or twice, muttered a half-hearted greeting to her as I slipped past her ever-open door on the way to a lecture. I’d watched in astonishment as a stream of absurdly unpractical objects were carried into her room on the first day by a pair of glumly silent countrymen whose wellingtons shrieked agonisingly on the parquet of the corridor: oil portraits, ball dresses, heavy tapestry curtains three times the length of our windows, Turkey rugs, champagne bowls, what looked like a huge sword, or at the very least its handle and scabbard, saris, cherubs that held aloft candle sconces, a stuffed trout in a glass case, sixteen pairs of scuffed stilettos, an ice bucket shaped like a top hat, three cocktail shakers, an urn full of ostrich feathers. I know that someone like me should have found all this impossibly glamorous, but the truth is that I just found it confusing. I mean, what on earth does one do with an urn full of ostrich feathers?

Swathed in strapless gold satin, high-piled hair beginning to come down at the edges, riding mac dropped carelessly on the floor beside her, Harriet squatted, bag open, by a giant Benares ware planter that held a rather manky-looking umbrella tree. As I appeared, and swerved violently to avoid somersaulting over her shoulder, she looked up guiltily, dropped a small brown bottle down to her side and said, ‘Oh, it’s you. You’re up late.’

Up late. What on earth was I supposed to make of that? A lot of the time, through my youth, I’d felt that I was trying to make contact with aliens from another planet when I tried to engage someone else in conversation. It was only just beginning to occur to me that it might be
me
that had landed from Saturn. ‘I’ve just got up. What are you doing?’

‘Just got up?’ She made a valiant attempt at changing the subject. ‘What are you, a rower? You can’t be. You’re far too small. Oh, of course, you must be a cox. How brilliant. I wish I could work up enthusiasm for team sports. I’m sure I’d have got a better UCCA report—’

‘I don’t row,’ I replied. ‘I need to get up at this time to be ready to go to the library for nine.’

And then Harriet burst out laughing, which was the last reaction I had expected.

‘LIBRARY?’ She howled. ‘NINE?’

‘What’s so funny about that?’

‘You’re a student, for God’s sake. You’re not supposed to go to the
library
. What are you reading that you have to be in the library for?’

She was trying, as she spoke, to slip the brown bottle into her bag without my noticing. ‘Physics and philosophy,’ I said, stretching my neck to catch sight of the label.

‘Christ!’ she cried. ‘Kant for Cunts! You’re kidding! I never thought I’d meet anyone reading that.’

Believe it or not, I’d never in my life heard anyone employ the C-word in conversation, though of course my full and rounded education had apprised me of what it meant. So I tried my mother’s line on cussing, which had always seemed to work before.

‘Swearing,’ I announced imperiously, ‘is the last resort of the inarticulate.’ I wasn’t sure what to do with this glittering creature who seemed unable to take anything seriously.

She responded with another peal of laughter. ‘Yeah, right. Which is why I was president of my fucking debating society.’

The bottle, which had dribbled a bit while she was pouring, slipped from her fingers and landed at my feet. The label, face up at last, revealed it to be a small flask of Roundup.

Our eyes met. ‘What are you doing? You’re poisoning that plant?’

‘Well, yes, of course I am,’ she replied airily, as though it was the most normal thing in the world.

I hadn’t expected her to reply with such honesty. For a moment, I was lost for words. Then, ‘That’s college property,’ I said.

Still down on her haunches, Harriet attempted to engage my look with a naughty, complicit one of her own. Suddenly I was horribly aware of my stodgy dressing gown, my hairy legs, my tortoiseshell hair clips.

‘It is,’ I insisted.

‘Well, it may be, but it’s also an abomination,’ she replied.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Look at it.’ Harriet pinched a leaf with spiteful intensity. ‘You can’t have something like this in a house. It doesn’t flower. It doesn’t do
anything
. It just sits there being ugly and every now and again the kind of person who likes polishing houseplants comes along and polishes it. I mean, have you ever stood there in Homebase and watched the kind of people who buy houseplant polishing equipment?’

I thought for a moment, thought about the houseplant in my room and the fact that I’d only the previous morning spent ten minutes buffing up its leaves with a spray gun and a soft cloth. I coloured slightly. Even I could see that there was something a bit – well – not right about polishing houseplants.

‘People who polish houseplants,’ announced Harriet, ‘are the kind of people who say “Shoes
off
the carpet” when you go round their houses. They have little notebooks in which they write down every last penny they spend. They buy greatest hits compilations because they’re better value. They get in panics if they eat more than three eggs in a week. They never go to bed when there’s a dirty cup in the house. And they say “Pardon” when they mean “What”.’

She sat back, obviously expecting some sort of reaction from me. And I, fairly certain that what I was meant to do was disapprove, but unable to find the words, simply gawped at her from behind my specs.

‘Never mind,’ she said, and I knew that I had in some way failed a test that had been set me. ‘The point is, they shouldn’t be encouraged.’

‘It’s still college property,’ I said obdurately. ‘You shouldn’t be destroying other people’s property like that.’

‘Chill, Anna.’ She got to her feet and I realised that she had a good nine inches on me. I also realised that, although she knew my name, I had not managed to master that of a single one of the people on my landing.

‘No one’s going to miss an umbrella plant,’ announced Harriet. ‘Trust me. No one’s ever missed an umbrella plant. Good Lord, it was probably
left
here by a student who saw the light in the seventies. And the poor old scouts have been cursing having to maintain the sodding thing all these years, going, “Why won’t it just
die
, Beryl?” and never getting their wish. I’m doing everyone a favour.’

Once again, I gawped. I was in way over my depth, and I knew it.

‘You can’t claim it’s a thing of beauty, can you?’ she asked quite kindly.

‘It’s still a living thing.’

‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘It’s a living thing when it’s in the jungle. In a corridor, it’s a stick with some green stuff stuck on that takes up space without contributing to form. It’s an abomination, Anna, and it should not be allowed to live.’