Virtue (34 page)

I can’t stop a smirk. ‘Ah.’

‘Which,’ she continues, ‘I suppose is some Wagga-Wagga euphemism I’m not familiar with.’

The smirk creeps a bit further over my face. ‘He comes from Perth.’

‘Oh, good …’ she says.

‘’Night,’ I say.

‘… because I wouldn’t like to think you were involved in something kinky with your uniform.’

‘’Night.’

‘’Night,’ she says.

As I reach the door, she says, ‘Oh, and Anna?’

‘Mmm?’

‘He was a very cute policeman.’

I give her a grin, head down the stairs.

Her voice follows me. ‘As policemen go,’ it says.

And the first person, as always, that I want to tell is Harriet. At eight in the morning I cycle like the wind back through the early Saturday streets, take a punt on riding down the pedestrianised Cornmarket and get away with it – everything seems to be on my side at the moment – dump my bike in the bike rack inside the side gate without even bothering to lock it and pound up the stairs to her room. Bang on the door and, scarcely waiting for the sleepy invitation to enter, fling myself through it and onto her bed.

‘Omigod!’ I cry. ‘Omiguurd!’

A green eye stares at me from a gap between tapestry cover and pillow. Harriet and I both have a habit of sleeping with the bedclothes pulled up to cover every part of our bodies, like retreating into a warm, fuggy cave. I bounce up and down on the bed: nineteen years old and behaving like a six-year-old. Feeling like a six-year-old. I’ve felt increasingly like a six-year-old over the past two years, only having never felt like a six-year-old when I actually
was
six, it’s taken me almost as long to realise that that was what I was feeling.

Finally the cover is pulled down to reveal the squashy bed-face of my saviour. ‘You’re a student,’ she opines. ‘You aren’t supposed to get up for at least another three hours. Have I taught you nothing?’

I bounce some more, fling myself down so that I am crammed, full-length, between her and the wall. Nuzzle furrily into her shoulder. ‘But I haven’t gone to bed yet!’ I cry. ‘Well, I have, but …’

A flurry of bedclothes, and Harriet, tossing me aside like a fallen leaf, sits bolt upright, pink Victorian bosom barely covered by a clutch of sheet and blanket. She stares down at me, takes in the black velvet minidress, the bobbling earrings, the ruffled hair, the make-up down to there, the livid red of the lovebite on my neck … Her eyes pass on for a moment, then flick, sharply, back to the neck. An expression of wonderment dawns on her face. ‘Anna,’ she says, ‘you aren’t wearing any tights.’

And I can’t stop myself grinning because I’ve been grinning from ear to ear for the past eight hours.

‘Omigod.’ She echoes my earlier announcement. ‘Omiguurd! You haven’t! You have! Omiguurd!’

Harriet pounces upon me, clamps my head between surprisingly powerful palms and plants three ceremonial kisses, French style, on my cheeks. ‘Omiguurd!’ she cries, leaps from her pit and tiptoes naked between the piles of clothes on the floor to the mini-fridge under the table under the window. I remember my first sight of this fridge as one of the first moments in my life when I was really impressed. I mean – imagine, a student having the foresight to instal an object of such sybaritic luxury in their grotshack rather than spending everything on booze in their first week and grumbling about stolen milk thereafter. I, of course, didn’t come from a background that encompassed frivolities like fridges in bedrooms; any extra left lying around after the purchase of high-potency vitamins tended to be spent on extra RAM for our computers.

‘Oh, darling, darling, congratulations!’ says Harriet from behind the door. ‘Welcome to the land of the fallen. Ah.’ There’s a rustle and a clank, and from the depths she produces a bottle of Perrier Jouet, brandishes it like an Olympic torch. ‘How does it feel? How was it? Was it agony? Was it bliss?’

I roll onto my back as she busies herself washing out a couple of toothmugs with the aid of a squirt of shampoo. Stretch and wriggle and say, ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘Tell you what, my little sinner?’

‘I knew it was meant to be fun, but no one ever told me – oh, I don’t know—’ I am handicapped by my vocabulary. I am totally equipped to describe the shape of something, its every nuance of colour, its density, its absorption of light, but how do you describe the total, utter, squashy, sweet and sweaty blissiness of good sex? How do you say it? How do you describe that moment when you bite for the first time into a perfect watermelon? That crack of a shell ripe to bursting, the caressing stickiness of honeyed juice running over your wrists, the texture, that sigh of stunned pleasure as you sink your face into the firm but generous flesh? Because despite all the indications to the contrary, I have taken to sex like a cat to sunlight and I know that nothing, now, will turn me back.

She comes back to the bed, pulls the covers back over her lap and tells me, as she pops the cork, ‘No one in the history of the world has been able to describe it in the same way that anyone else experiences it, oh adorable one. Was it wonderful? Was it luscious? Was it nectarines?’

I take my valedictory champagne. ‘It was a dinner of nectarines and oysters and foie gras in a jacuzzi filled with cream,’ I tell her.

‘Was it diving into a tropical lagoon?’

I nod. ‘From a cliff. Naked.’

She clinks her mug against mine. ‘Oh, darling, I’m so pleased. You’ve finally popped your cherry.’

I sip. Oh, Grace, if you could only see me now. Everything you raised me to avoid, all the fripperies of the world, the joys that make other lives brimful, one by one I have fallen to their lure. Alcohol, drugs, staying up all night for no other reason than the hell of it, the cosseting friendship of women, vanity, the deep, deep pleasure of the unnecessary, lying abed watching the shadows creep across the ceiling, the heat and ecstasy of arms around my body. Oh, yes, I am a sinner, but if God didn’t want us to enjoy our lives, every aspect of them – not only the development of intellect, but everything, the whole shebang, the physical and the emotional, then why did he give us bodies in the first place? I have fallen from Grace, but today my soul is full. ‘I didn’t know,’ I repeat.

‘You do now,’ she says, yawns. ‘I’m proud of you, my chick. Were you scared?’

Not so scared that a bottle of wine and three martinis couldn’t sort out. ‘No,’ I say. ‘Were you?’

Harriet yawns again. ‘I scarcely remember.’

‘How old were you?’

‘Goodness.’ Harriet does that looking up and over thing, says, ‘Fourteen, I think.’

‘No!’

‘You forget,’ she informs me, ‘I was at a convent school. He’s cute, Robert Saxby.’

‘Ooh,’ I reply, ‘he’s laaarvly.’

‘I did wonder,’ she says, ‘if last night might be the night. It was the way he was gazing into your eyes, and instead of reacting like a startled lemur you were gazing right back.’

I’m high on luurve. Laugh, drink my nourishing breakfast drink. ‘Men are lovely,’ I declare. ‘Sex is lovely. Why don’t you do sex any more, Harriet?’

‘Oh, darling, you don’t want to know,’ she replies, ‘this is your morning.’

‘Yes I do! I do! I mean, I didn’t know what it was like before, and now I don’t understand why you aren’t doing it all the time! I mean, you have men buzzing around you like bees round a honey pot, and all you do is wave them away!’

‘Swat them like flies on shit, more like,’ says Harriet. ‘Darling, it’s good for you, but it’s not for me.’

‘But how can it be good for me and not for you? I don’t understand.’

‘Because we’re different people,’ she says, with an air of finality. I push it.

‘And?’

‘I don’t trust men much,’ says Harriet, tries once again to sound as though the statement has brought the conversation to an end, but I won’t let it go. ‘Why? Why not? You just said that they were good for me. Why can’t they be for you too?’

Harriet drains her mug, pours us both generous top-ups. Then she says, ‘I said, Anna. We’re different people. You’ve got to stop believing that I know everything, that everything I know is good and everything you know is bad. I’m trying, myself, you know. I’m trying to unlearn things just like you are, and men is the most important.’

‘How do you mean?’ I can’t imagine that anyone could want to unlearn the things I learned last night. That stuff about mouths and hands and the way human bodies were designed to fit together so perfectly, so slippy and hard and soft all at the same time. I know I’ve discovered a pastime that will stand me in good stead for ever: how could anyone turn something so delicious down once they’ve tasted it?

Harriet says, ‘You and me, we were taught opposite things when we were young, and both of them were wrong. Grace wanted you to think of men as totally unnecessary, and that’s so wrong. I mean, obviously not if you’re a lezzie, but a life lived without ever knowing what it’s like to be totally consumed by lust, totally mad for someone, totally into playing, is only half a life.

‘But you see, Godiva – no, not just Godiva, all the men around me as well – taught me something just as bad, and that’s that men are the only thing. That they’re how you get what you want, that the way they see your body is your best route to success. I did so much of that when I was at school. Being the most invited, the most chatted-up, the most wanted, and it wasn’t until I was seventeen that I woke up one day and realised that they didn’t want me at all. They wanted what I represented. They wanted my body, they wanted my connections, they wanted the fact that everyone else wanted me, but the one thing they weren’t thinking about was what was inside here.’

Harriet jabs resentfully at her head with a long, elegant finger.

‘And I thought,’ she continues, ‘yeah, I could carry on with this. I could be like my mother, or Sofe, or Gerald’s mother even, and use them for what they could give me in return, or I could stop and try to be the first woman in my family in God knows how many generations who tried to do something for herself. So I stopped.’

‘But surely,’ I cry, ‘you could do both?’

She shakes her head. ‘I don’t think so,’ she says, and there’s a twinge of sadness in her voice. ‘I think the training’s gone too deep. I don’t think I can do men until I’ve done my own life.’

‘But if— You’d turn him down if he came along? The perfect man?’

‘What’s a perfect man? I don’t know where you’d find him. I want someone who wants me for myself. Someone who will look at me and say, yes, I see the faults, I see the scary bits and the messy bits and I don’t give a damn about the family and the hair and the eyes and the fact that she looks like her mother, I’ll just take her on and let her be, but no one will ever, ever do that. They know who I am from the moment they see me, and that’s what they want. I don’t believe I’ll ever find someone who will see anything else. So it’s better if I steer clear altogether.’

I am heartbroken for her. So I tell her. ‘That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard. You can’t mean that. But what about sex? What about love?’

She smiles. A wry, sad little smile. ‘Sex isn’t all it’s cracked up to be,’ she says.

No. It’s far, far more. ‘I never want to go without sex again as long as I live,’ I tell her. And I mean it too.

‘I’m so glad,’ she replies.

‘But you. How can you—’

‘Good God,’ says Harriet, ‘I’m not planning to actually regrow my virginity.’

‘So, what?’

‘I think I’m going to hold out for love,’ says Harriet. ‘I’m going to hold out for something that matters. I just don’t want to give myself away for approval, or power, or popularity or vanity any more.’

‘But that’s not what I’m planning to do either,’ I stutter lamely. ‘Surely …’

‘You,’ she says, ‘have a whole lot of catching up to do. It’s not the same. You’ve got to have the hell-raising, wild living, crazy time you never got. But it’s not a loss to me. Doing that will be part of your achievement. And not doing it will be part of mine. It’s okay, lovely. It’s life.’

I think about last night, about the shudder of absolute astonishment and delight when I discovered how it feels when he enters, when he sighs with pleasure and begins to move inside you, and I can’t suppress a shiver of recollection. Oh, God, let this be just the beginning. Let me feel this excitement, this languor, this strength, again and again and again.

Harriet, over her mug of champagne, sees what I am thinking and begins to laugh. ‘Oh, boy,’ she says. ‘You’re really hooked, aren’t you?’

‘Oh, darling, it’s the best. The best.’

‘So are you seeing him again?’

Blimey. In all the excitement, I forgot about these pieties of good behaviour. ‘I don’t know,’ I say, ‘I didn’t ask. He was asleep when I left, anyway.’

‘Would you like to?’

‘Do you think he was good at it?’

Harriet considers, delivers her verdict. ‘Yes. I think he probably was.’

‘And how many are, do you think?’

‘Some. Quite a few, probably.’

‘How do you tell?’

‘Experimentation.’

And I think: oh whoopee, I know all about experiments. I’ve been doing them all my life, gathering empirical evidence and jotting it down for future reference. ‘Then I shall just have to experiment some more,’ I declare, ‘until I get it right.’

I’ve had three bangs on the head in my short life: once falling off a table when my heels gave out from under me, once standing up carelessly in the loo built in the coal cellar under the all-you-can-eat Chinese banquet by South Ken station and once being rescued from skinheads, and apart from the blinding headache and the three-day nausea, the really familiar side effect is wild and stimulating dreams. After the Chinese loo, I spent some time in the Underworld, only the main problem was less the uncrossability of the Styx than the fact that it had turned into an open sewer and I didn’t want to try swimming it in a satin ball dress. After the table incident, I spent hours looking for a sky-blue minidress in a huge town-square market where the clothes were beautifully cut and wonderfully finished in soft, light, drapey cloth that came only in camel, charcoal and cream.