Virtue (21 page)

‘Are you all right? Are you all right, Anna? God, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m such a fucking bitch. I didn’t mean it. Tell me you’re all right!’

My throat hurts so much that I can scarcely make a noise, but I grunt and nod into her neck. Which hurts as well. My entire upper body is on fire.

‘What were you
doing
? What were you doing? You can’t – you can’t—’ and then she simply sobs, and I sob too.

I doubt that I will ever get to the point of wanting to be dead again. It hardly seems possible to me that I am the same person now, the girl on the floor, crying for the first time in someone else’s arms. Too long alone, too long a prospect of being alone, too tired, too weak: you take a child and you raise her apart from that which is gentle and that which is kind, and you tell her every day that life cannot get better than this, and one day, she will know that if life will never get better, then she wants no life at all.

Ten years ago, give or take a few months, the day my life almost ended, the day it began.

Harriet, on the carpet, pulls back, wipes her face with her sleeve, wipes mine, says, ‘I’m sorry I hit you. Did I hurt you?’

I shake my head.

‘Is it because of what I said earlier? I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it.’

Ah but you did, I think, but as it wasn’t that, or was only partly that, I shake my head again. Many words are spoken in anger. Suicide is a dirty revenge.

‘Why?’

I don’t know. How do you explain?

‘I can’t,’ I rasp. ‘I can’t do it any longer.’

And instead of asking me what I mean, or telling me I must, she just puts her arms back round me and rocks. Harriet Moresby, superbitch, embraces the world’s dullest woman and saves her life.

‘Stupid thing is,’ she says, ‘now I’m responsible for you. One minute I’m telling you I wished you’d fuck off and die, and the next minute I’ve got to keep you alive.’

I don’t know what she’s going on about.

She tuts, tucks my hair behind my ear and continues, ‘The Chinese say that if you save someone’s life, you’re responsible for everything that happens to them after that because they wouldn’t have a life if it weren’t for you.’

I snuffle, wipe my nose. ‘The Arabs say that if someone saves your life you have to dedicate your own to them in return.’

‘Christ,’ says Harriet. ‘If I ever get caught in a house fire, remind me to do it in Jordan.’

Extract from a lecture given by Grace Waters to the
University of Michigan to mark the award of her
second Nobel Prize, 3 April 1973.

… Throughout my life I have been aware of the lively and, frankly, often rather silly discussion of the circumstances of my upbringing. I have been variously described as an automaton, a role model for my generation, a stunted shadow of a teenager, a shining genius, a victim, a saint and even a monster. As you can no doubt see, what I am is a fully-formed human being. No machinery under this skin, I can assure you! (Pause for laughter.)

However, those who felt they had a right to dissect my early life were to some extent correct in doing so, though no one person has really managed to touch upon the full truth. But being the one who knows best about it, I can tell you that I have emerged with an understanding of the human potential for achievement and a vision of how this potential may be tapped. Intelligence, as we understand it, is not a simple question of who your father and mother happen to be. To believe so is to capitulate to the same erroneous beliefs to which those religious groups who believe in predestination cling. To believe so is to condemn vast swathes of humanity to a future as second-class citizens. To believe so is to dispense altogether with the concept of free will
.

I believe that, with the obvious exception of genuine handicap or injury, the vast majority of us are failing even to scratch the surface of our potential. I believe that any child, given the optimum help and encouragement, can do what I have done. And I believe that, three generations from now, the intellect of which I am master, and that you perceive to be so unusual, could actually be the norm. All we have to do is ensure that our children are exposed to the optimum diet, the optimum exercise, the optimum stimulation, the optimum educational aids, the optimum attention, the optimum teaching, and combine this with isolating them from bad influences and frivolous distractions, tell them that we expect them to succeed and chastise them – not physically, but by depriving them of company and attention – when they fail us, and they will all emerge significantly more accomplished than their contemporaries or, indeed, the generation that precedes them. I don’t just believe this, as a convert to Catholicism swallows wholesale the concept of transubstantiation, I know it to be true. I am, after all, empirical evidence that it is so
.

I believe that any child, from any background, however dissolute, however unpromising, can not only benefit from the upbringing I myself received, but actually flourish. I do not believe as others do that I am some sort of anomaly, a sport in the pack. I am the product of hard work, dedication and the will to succeed. And I intend, over the next twenty years, to prove this to be the case …

‘Did you know about this?’ My fingers are aching from gripping the headset so tightly. The pain joins the ache in my eyes, my sinuses, the back of my neck, my brain, my back and my stomach muscles to form a generalised ache that just goes to emphasise the savagery of my emotions.

Carolyn doesn’t say anything apart from ‘Um, er—’

I scream down the telephone. ‘DID YOU KNOW ABOUT THIS?’

She continues to stumble over her words: Carolyn, the only person in my entire childhood whose vocabulary occasionally failed her.

‘You did, didn’t you?’

‘Oh, Anna,’ she says lamely.

‘You fucking knew, didn’t you?’ My voice rises again. I don’t seem to have any control over it at all; I’ve been going from rag doll to howling banshee over and over again all night, Harriet and Mel and Dom trying to feed me tranquillisers and tea and vodka, following me round the tower surreptitiously pocketing breakables and things I might hurt myself with. Now they’re sitting in a row on stools at the kitchen counter, drinking strong coffee and watching me with grey-edged eyes.

Even Henry, usually the kindest of friends when one of us is upset, usually the first one to come and put his paws round your neck and press his face against yours, has realised that there’s not a lot he can do given the circs, and has retired to the safety of the cushion on Harriet’s painting chair and curled up in a tight ball, one eye watching balefully over his chicken thighs to check that I’m not coming in his direction.

‘YOU KNEW, DIDN’T YOU, YOU BITCH! YOU KNEW AND YOU NEVER TOLD ME!’

I can hear Carolyn scrabbling around for her cigarettes. At nearly seventy, she has still never managed to give up, and cites the fact that she was never allowed to smoke at work as her justification for carrying on now. ‘It’s not as simple as that, Anna. You must know it’s not that straightforward. It wasn’t my—’

I interrupt. ‘I trusted you,’ I say, and another huge sob comes out as I say it. My intercostal muscles are aching from the stretching I’ve been subjecting my chest to. ‘You were the only person I trusted, and now look.’

The click of a lighter. I can imagine her now, still in her dressing gown as it’s only seven o’clock in the morning – I would have called her earlier but the others physically stopped me – face grey with no eyebrows as she’s had no time for make-up, hand trembling as she fumbles the cigarette from the packet and lights up. ‘Oh, Anna,’ she says, ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘Oh, yes. I bet you are. I bet you thought you’d never have to face me, didn’t you? I bet you’re sorry I found out and now I can see you for the lying fucking bitch you are.’

‘Please—’ she says. ‘Please don’t think so harshly of me. I tried, really I did. I tried to tell them that it was wrong, but what was I supposed to do? I was only a secretary. They could have got rid of me at any time. At least this way I got to stay and do what I could to help you.’

‘Oh, help
me
, is that what you call it? Help
them
, more like. Help them steal my name, help them steal my identity and my personality. Help them steal my fucking
soul
.’

‘I was
frightened
, all right?’ she cries back. ‘I’m not clever like all of you. I didn’t know what to do! You don’t understand. I knew what they were doing was illegal and I didn’t know what to do! It wasn’t like now when you can just go out and buy a child, it was illegal and I’d known Grace since she was only a kiddie herself, and she would have ended up in prison if anyone had found out. And once I’d let it happen, I would have ended up in prison myself. I didn’t know what to do!’

I’m so tired. ‘Tell me about my mother,’ I say.

‘Anna, it’s seven o’clock in the morning. I’ve only just woken up. Can’t we talk about this later?’

‘No. No. I don’t want you thinking up a cover story. You’ve already had twenty-seven years to think up a story. Tell me now. Who was she?’

‘She didn’t want you, if that’s what you want to know. You weren’t kidnapped. She handed you over in exchange for money and registered you in your mother’s name.’

‘My mother’s?’ I ask sharply. There’s no way I’m going to let that woman be called my mother now. The very suggestion makes me sick to my stomach.

‘Well, Grace’s. Your grandfather paid for her to fly out to Argentina and live there until you were born, then Grace put you on her passport and brought you home. And everyone thought she was some kind of feminist heroine having a child without a husband to support it. That was what the climate was like at the time; Germaine Greer, burning bras, a woman needs a man like—’

I cut through this monologue; the last thing I need right now is a lecture on social history. ‘So who was she?’

‘Just a girl,’ says Carolyn. ‘A tart. Catholic, so she couldn’t have an abortion, though her religious scruples didn’t seem to stop her selling herself in cars down by the canal. She was eighteen and had been working the streets of Doncaster since she was fifteen. I only met her once, just before they flew off to Argentina. Tiny, like you, and stick thin; little arms poking out of a tank top, bare legs, platforms, acne, lank hair. She drank. It’s a miracle you didn’t have foetal alcohol syndrome. And when Grace came along it was obviously an answer to a prayer. Didn’t have to dump you on the authorities, able to drink herself through the recovery period with some cash in her pocket.’

‘How did you find her?’

‘Your grandfather.’

‘Not my grandfather.’ I’m going hot, and cold, and hot again by turns.

‘Mr Waters.’ After twenty-five years in my grandfather’s employ, Carolyn had never progressed to first-name terms with him, even in the democratic seventies.

‘What?’

‘He went looking. Found her working a back street, her belly out to here, approached her. She didn’t take much persuading. I don’t think she’d ever even heard of him and your mother. Sorry, Grace. They were just punters, as far as she was concerned. Punters with ready cash.’

‘Approached her’. An image of my grandfather, with his big beard and his solemn, patronising expression, leaning out of the window of his Hillman Imp and striking up a conversation with this street child flashes across my vision. The sick old fuck. Wonder if he tried the goods before he paid for them.

‘And my father?’

Carolyn pauses. ‘Anna, she was a prostitute.’

‘And what would they have done if I’d been – black, or something, or there had been something wrong with me?’

She doesn’t answer. Stupid question, really. If a supplier sends you shoddy goods, you send them straight back.

After a while, she says again, ‘I’m sorry, Anna. I did what I could. I tried to make things better for you, but it wasn’t easy.’

To some extent, this is true. Carolyn was the one who used to slip me pieces of chocolate, loosened the floorboard in my bedroom so I could have at least some small place to hide things from prying eyes, would occasionally smuggle reading matter outside my grandfather’s prescribed curriculum in for me to hide there. I remember Carolyn for the warmth she brought with her: the smell of talcum powder, the smear of lipstick, the odd soft, fluffy hug in the bosom of her bright pink mohair sweater. Not a lot, but beggars don’t have a lot of choices.

‘Well, thanks for that,’ I respond eventually.

‘I am sorry.’

‘I know you are.’

‘Will you forgive me?’

What do you do? I shake my head.

I don’t know what she takes a silent response to mean. ‘Anna, I think I should come and see you. I can get on a train this morning, be there at lunchtime.’

I can feel another rag-doll phase coming on. In a few minutes I will be lying full-length on the sofa, crying silently again. God, let me be angry. If I’m not angry, that means I’ve accepted it.

‘No,’ I say, though my voice sounds a long way away. ‘No, I don’t think that’s a good idea.’

‘Anna,
please
.’

‘No.’

Her voice, of all things, is wheedling. She sounds like a child begging forgiveness, asking for sweets.

‘It’s not up to me to forgive you,’ I say. ‘You’ll have to work out how to do that for yourself.’

‘Anna, won’t you—’

‘Goodbye,’ I say, and replace the receiver.

Screaming round the byways of East Anglia towards Belhaven, one hand on the wheel, Harriet shouts, ‘Okay, Mrs Humphreys, thanks. You’re a star. We’ll see you in an hour or so,’ into her phone, hangs up the phone and drops it into the drinks holder behind the gear stick. Says, ‘Oh, Christ. I hadn’t thought of that.’

I wriggle in my seat, sniff and say, ‘What?’

‘I should have realised this would happen. They always turn up when something happens. Any chance to blag a few nights’ freebie.’

‘What?’

She shakes her head, lights her twentieth red Marlboro since we left London and says, ‘Mrs H says that the Inbreeds have descended.’