Virtue (16 page)

‘Oh, no one less than Papa himself, of course,’ says Dom. ‘After all, if she’s going to be a saint …’

‘Saint, hah!’ Lindsey leans forward, shakes her hair about, embarks on another round of Godiva-bashing. ‘I mean, if I ever heard a joke, that’s got to be it. I mean, if you two qualify as sluts, then I can hardly see Godiva getting through the Virtue test. The woman had more pricks than your average rose grower.’ Mel and Dom and Lindsey, having known the two of us for years, are not subscribers to the ‘criticism is sour grapes’ society of Godiva admirers. Of course, it was the fact that they never were that let them through Harriet’s barriers in the first place but I try to kick Linds under the table anyway, because I can see that Harriet is going through one of her don’t-knock-my-mother moods.

‘Well, there
was
Mary Magdalene …’ Dom says doubtfully.

‘Yeah, but Mary Magdalene had at least repented. All Godiva ever did was blame other people. And anyway, what would we call her? Our Lady of the Make-up Counter?’

‘Saint Godiva of Silicone Valley, patron saint of nude scenes,’ says Mel.

‘Godiva Polygamous / pray for me / let me get my / alimony,’ chants Dom. ‘Perhaps she should get a special dispensation for excellence in motherhood.’

And this one is enough for Harriet. She tips over her last sidecar, gets to her feet, and finally everyone takes a moment to look at her.

‘Please stop talking about my mother like that,’ she says. She says it calmly, but her face is white. ‘I know what you all think of her. I know what most of the world thinks of her apart from the nutters who want to believe she had some sort of direct line to God. Christ, I know what
I
think of her. But she was still my mother. She was still my mum and she still used to tuck me up in bed when she was home, and she still bought me birthday presents and told me about periods and rang me to say goodnight. I know she was crap. I know everything about her faults. I was the one who had to live with them. And no one’s ever let me forget them. Why do you think I don’t tell people who she was? For God’s sake, for every person that tells me she should be a saint, there’s someone else who tells me she should have been burned at the stake. I don’t want to hear any more. You may think she was a saint, you may think she was a witch, but some people actually knew her as a human being. She may have been a silly bitch, but she was still my mum, and I still loved her. Please don’t forget that. She may be a joke to you, but she was still my mum.’

We call it a night relatively early. The after-pub crowds haven’t even hit the streets by the time we start our silent walk home, just the occasional couple locked into each other’s arms, tired travellers trundling suitcases from airport train to Pimlico flophouse, fourteen-year-olds with nowhere to go since they closed down the youth clubs. Harriet is monosyllabic through most of the journey, and I don’t push her. If you push Harriet, you get nowhere. She always has to work through her rage before the truth comes out.

And eventually, halfway down Buckingham Palace Road, she speaks. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I sort of put a downer on the atmosphere tonight.’

Which is true, but not in the way she feels. Harriet has that brittle upper-class dislike of emotional behaviour, feels that it should be kept away from the social arena, and is always annoyed with herself if she lets the side down. But the others, overcome by guilt, fell over themselves to change the subject and make up to her, which of course meant that everyone immediately stopped behaving naturally.

Normally, Godiva doesn’t even come up in conversation that often, and normally, a couple of jokes are fine. Because despite her outburst tonight, Harriet manages, on the whole, to tread the fine line between her mother’s iconic status and the reality of her life with remarkable equilibrium. It’s just that life isn’t very normal at the moment.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ I reply, ‘I don’t think anyone’s going to hold it against you.’

‘Yes,’ she says, ‘but they’re going to think I’m completely mad. I mean, what was I doing? Mummy wasn’t like that at all. Where on earth did all that bollocks come from?’

‘Sometimes she was like that,’ I remind her reasonably. ‘She was really sweet to you some of the time.’

‘When it suited her,’ adds Harriet gloomily.

I don’t know, but I’ve sort of got the impression over the years that this is true, to a greater or lesser extent, of quite a lot of parents. That image of self-sacrificing selfless devotion as the median of motherhood is, as far as I’ve seen, as much of a myth as Godiva’s sainthood. It’s one of those myths that keeps society going, but the only people who have ever lived up to it to the letter have probably produced some seriously fucked-up children. I mean, it’s bad enough carrying Grace’s expectations around on my shoulders, but imagine the burden of guilt if someone had sacrificed
everything
for your well-being.

Then Harriet says, in a small voice, ‘Why can’t they just leave it alone? Why can’t they just—’ She pulls up by an empty coach stop and puts her hands over her face. ‘I don’t understand,’ she moans through her fingers. ‘I don’t understand what I’m meant to do. What am I meant to do?’

I put a hand on her shoulder. ‘I don’t know, sweetheart.’

‘I—’ says Harriet, and then she goes quiet. Even after all these years, she still hates people to see her cry. She finds it difficult to deal even with me seeing her, despite the countless times I’ve sobbed and railed in her presence and she’s loved me none the less. So we have a tacit pact, which is that she lets me see, and I pretend not to have noticed. I move the arm from her shoulder and put it round her waist, rock her against my side until the long, slow breaths she’s been taking die down. Then, standing on tiptoe, I smooth a stray lock of hair from her forehead and plant a kiss where it has been.

‘Harriet, there is nothing you can be doing.’

‘I can’t win either way,’ says Harriet. ‘Someone’s going to be offended whatever I do. I’m not going to lie. Why should I?’

‘You don’t have to. Harriet, the people who matter know. It doesn’t matter about the rest.’

‘But it does,’ says Harriet, hands still over her face. ‘It does when they think they can tell me about it. Every single bloody day I get a dozen emails, or letters forwarded by the estate, or someone says something to me in the street. I’ve changed my email address three times and they just find it out again. I can’t stand it. I never asked to be a public person. No one ever asked me. Why can’t they leave me alone?’

And once more, her breathing gets long and heavy and she falls silent. God, Harriet, I wish you were better at this sort of stuff. You’re so damn good at doing it for other people, but you just won’t let go yourself.

I put my other arm round her. She stiffens, then relaxes and allows a tiny sob to get out round the palms of her hands.

‘Oh, darling,’ I say. ‘I wish I could make it all go away, but it won’t. You’ve just got to tough it out and remember how much we all love you.’

A louder sob, a judder in the shoulders.

I make the sounds I’ve heard people make to small children in the street. ‘There,’ I say soothingly, hug her closer. ‘There.’ And I say, ‘It’s okay, sweetie, I’m here. Don’t worry. I’m here.’

And she does what she always does. After five minutes, she straightens up, wipes her hands upward over her face to clean the tears away and says, ‘God, what bollocks. Sorry.’

‘’S okay.’

‘Total loss of dignity there. Sorry.’ She starts to walk homeward, hands sunk in the pockets of the riding mac, heels scraping on the pavement.

‘I’ll be holding it against you,’ I reply.

She throws me a watery grin and we walk on in silence until she thinks of something to talk about. And eventually she does. ‘Tell you what. I’ve got to think of something to do to that bastard Roy.’

‘What were you thinking of?’

‘Well, I’m not sure,’ she says. ‘I’ve already poisoned his bloody plants. I was wondering if we could maybe do something to his wardrobe.’

Roy is temporarily living in the flat above the restaurant while builders fit an all-gold bathroom in his newly built loft apartment. ‘It’s a possibility,’ I say. ‘But we’d have to be careful. We really can’t afford to lose our jobs right now, even if he is a bastard. What were you thinking about?’

Harriet laughs. ‘You know what I think?’

‘No, darling, I don’t. That’s why I’m asking.’

‘Do you remember the time Henry left that vole on that fun-fur you left on the stairs?’

Hard to forget. He did it in a warm snap in the winter. It was two weeks before I felt a need to pick the coat up again, and by then the only possible course of action was to throw up a couple of times and then stuff it in a bin liner. You would never believe that something so small could give off so large a smell.

‘Well, he left a large mouse on the doormat about a week ago. I’ve been saving it in a plastic bag by the boiler.’

I laugh. ‘You are an evil genius, Dr Moriarty.’

She laughs back. ‘There is no evil, Mr Holmes,’ she replies, ‘only genius. And Iranian chefs with spare keys.’

‘When’re you going to do it?’

‘Ooh.’ Harriet is amazingly good at swinging her mood back when she wants to. ‘I thought as soon as would probably be best.’

We swing into the home strait, discussing the details of our revenge: how I can keep him talking while she sneaks upstairs, best ways to hide the thing in a wardrobe so it won’t be discovered until the damage is done. Direct action is Harriet’s forte. She long ago gave up bothering to reason with people; gets quite Old Testament when she thinks that someone will never see the error of their ways.

Under the street light outside our gate, a figure that’s been squatting up against the wall uncurls, stretches and stands, hands on hips, watching our approach.

‘Oh, bugger,’ hisses Harriet. ‘Who the hell is that?’

‘I don’t know. Journalist?’

‘At this hour? Christ. It must be a fan. Oh, God. Do you think he
really
knew where I lived?’

‘I don’t know. Oh, God. What should we do?’

‘Well, there’s nothing we
can
do. We’re not going to get into the house without going past him.’

He waves. Oh, bloody hell. What do we do? Wave back?

Then he starts to walk towards us, back to the light so we can’t even see if his face is friendly or otherwise. We slow our pace to a crawl, tensely waiting to see what his next move is going to be.

Then a broad Australian tenor booms out across the night air. ‘Chroist!’ it calls. ‘I thought youse goys were
niver
gaingda come home!’ and, with a yell of delight, I throw myself on top of him.

That’s the difference between Harriet and me. I, cosseted, hothoused, watched over, guarded and given more attention than any child has the right to expect, have never been able to love my mother, dearly though I have wished that I did. Harriet, neglected, deprived, exploited, shoved from pillar to post and often treated more as accessory than dependent, loves her mother dearly, desperately, however much she wishes she didn’t. Fifteen years on, Harriet mourns Godiva with the immediacy of yesterday, hungers for her with the ferocity of wolves.

Harriet has never forgiven Godiva for dying as she did, rails against her and spits on her memory with an orphan’s fury, and in the night, when she thinks no one can hear, the sound of her sobs drifts down the tower stairs and fills me with pain. Me, I’ve pretty much forgiven my mother for living as she has lived; pity her as the victim of my grandfather’s zealotry. The tears I used to cry for lovelessness dried the day I decided to live, and though sometimes other people’s stories of shared intimacies at kitchen worktops fill me with a false nostalgia for an experience I never had, at least I never have to live with those shrieks of frustration, the howls of mother–daughter provocation, the rage of closeness.

But imagine Harriet’s childhood. Only child of a third marriage that had imploded by the time she was six, boarding at seven, half the holidays in a great cavern of a place avoiding a half-brother who resented her and a father who had never really got over the fool he’d made of himself over her mother, the other half in hotel rooms and rented flats waiting for the moment when the photo-op would begin. If you’re our age, you probably remember Harriet from the background of many of Godiva’s public exploits: Harriet in a baseball cap, Harriet shyly and solemnly attempting to converse with a Namibian starvation victim, Harriet in a miniaturised version of her mother’s scarlet ball dress at some charity occasion, Harriet receiving a cuddle from the loving mother. Because that’s part of the deal for a child of the Famous: the offspring of the prominent aren’t just there to be a drain on finances and pass on their genes, they are there to emphasise their fecundity, highlight their affections, illustrate their humanity. Well, obviously, I wasn’t; I was there to illustrate my family’s superiority, but as such I at least had the good fortune to be kept away from the scrutiny of the camera.

And here’s another thing: when Harriet lost her mother, her tragedy was never her own. She became a thing to be pawed, confessed to, someone to share the pain of people who never knew her mother. Wherever she went, women would approach with pictures, mementos, stories, as though sharing them with her would somehow confer Godiva’s benediction upon them, make their grief real and justifiable. She was discussed on television, hounded from school to school, given advice on problem pages, hugged in the street by strangers. And none of these strangers, these people who wanted a piece of her, ever started a sentence with any word other than ‘I’. ‘I was so devastated at the loss of your mother.’ ‘I don’t know if I can go on now she’s not here.’ ‘I got so much inspiration from her.’ And as she got older, it was ‘I just have to touch you; you look so much like her,’ and later ‘I can’t believe someone so dainty could have a child as big as you,’ or ‘I just had to tell you about the time when …’

It wasn’t hers, but it was. Godiva left no one else behind to mourn her. Husbands, family, friends: all the others had been shed, one by one, bit by bit, as she scaled the heights of virtue and the memories of intimates became increasingly inconvenient. So there was only Harriet, among the crocodile weepers at the empty graveside; only Harriet and a million bereaved admirers.