Virtue (43 page)

She’s an effective persuader, Carolyn. I’m beginning to crumble. She’s watching my face and sees that she’s winning.

‘So do you see now,’ she starts again, ‘why you need to try being a bit more forgiving?’

‘Yes,’ I reply slowly. ‘Yes, I do. I understand. But it’s not as straightforward as all that, is it?’

Once more, Carolyn lets out a sigh. ‘Anna. I watched your mum go through her teens without any niceness at all. And I watched something similar happen to you. But believe me, you had more chance than she did. You’re much better equipped than she was, even if it was tough. You really could try doing the adult thing. You’re nearly thirty, after all.’

‘Twenty-seven,’ I correct her.

‘Twenty-ni—’ she starts, then colours slightly and shuts up.

‘WHAT?’

‘Silly me, I’m getting old. Memory like a sieve,’ she stammers.

‘DON’T EVEN TRY THAT! WHAT DID YOU SAY?’

‘Oh, bugger,’ says Carolyn. Funny how ‘bugger’ is a totally acceptable swearword to the older generation where practically every other is not. ‘I’ve done it again, haven’t I?’

‘Are you telling me I’m twenty-nine? How the hell did
that
happen?’

‘Forget it, Anna. It was a slip of the tongue.’

‘Uh-uh. You don’t make slips of the tongue. Tell me.’

‘Just a silly—’

‘TELL ME!’

‘Oh, dear.’ Carolyn picks up her knitting and starts, stitch by stitch, to unravel it.

‘You were a small baby, you see …’

If there’s one thing that makes me sick to my stomach, it’s the sight of a celebrity crying over spilt milk. So the sight of our own Lady of the Airwaves, Godiva Fawcett, aka the Duchess of Ditchwater, Bleeding Heart of Belhaven, weeping and beating her suspiciously perky breast this week had me on my knees by the nearest toilet. I mean, here we are, our boys are off in the Falklands, wives and mothers everywhere are waiting with hushed breath to hear whether their loved ones are going to come back alive, and this spoiled madam wants us to spare our sympathy for her misfortunes? Give me a break. There’s no misfortune you haven’t brought upon yourself, Godiva, so don’t even think about trying it on.

In case you’ve been living on the planet Venus for the past week, Godiva Fawcett has been found out. And boy, has she been found out. Our sister paper, the
Sunday Sparkle
, did a bit of digging and discovered that practically everything this self-styled angel of mercy has said about herself is untrue. And her response is a classic example of the way the famous try to pull the wool over our eyes, the way that, whenever the proverbial hits the fan, they will come out weeping and claiming that it was all someone else’s fault. Well, boohoo, Godiva: you’ve been found out. And because you’re so transparent, I’m able to deliver the Boohoo Guide to celebrity excuses:

Found Out:
you’re not a poor liddle Orphan Annie after all. Your aged parents are alive and ailing in a council old folks’ home in Rotherham, where you grew up over a butcher’s shop. And your name is plain old Geraldine Pigg.

Boohoo:
You didn’t want to tell anyone, but you had to cut off all contact and change your name because they were so cruel to you when you were growing up. It was only loyalty that kept you from ever revealing your injuries to the teachers, social workers, etc. who came into contact with you throughout your childhood and never remarked anything untoward, but once you reached adulthood, you had no choice but to never, ever have anything to do with them again.

Found Out:
You weren’t a poor but honest waitress, but coworkers remember that you were an enthusiastic ‘dancer’ under the name of Geneva West in a Soho nightclub in the late fifties.

Boohoo:
How could you have ever told anyone? You were so ashamed. You were only very young – fifteen when you started – and you were exploited by older, ruthless men who seduced you into the lifestyle before you were old enough to know better. And anyway, you were desperate.

Found Out:
Papers left to be opened after the death of his wife show that your so-called mentor, the late Leonard Wildenstein, didn’t discover you and promote you out of admiration for your talents at all. In fact, he hated you and only gave you parts because you were blackmailing him.

Boohoo:
I can’t believe he could say things like that about me. I loved that man with all my heart, even though he subjected me over the years to the vilest practices. I only went along with it in the name of love. I feel so
soiled
.

Found out:
Your separation from your husband, the Duke of Ditchworth, wasn’t amicable at all. He kicked you out, and won custody of the daughter you had together.

Boohoo:
I’ve kept quiet about this for too long to protect the innocent, but now I have to speak out to protect my own reputation. When I met Gerald Moresby, he seemed like the perfect gentleman, but once I married him I discovered a whole other, darker side to his character. He drank and often closeted himself away with his guns for days on end. Our marriage was a loveless sham from day one, and it was only from the great love I had for my daughter that I stayed as long as I did. And the custody hearing was a conspiracy: what chance does a poor, powerless commoner like me have against the combined might of the British aristocracy? They say that abused children often marry into similar situations, and that’s as much as I am going to say. I want my daughter still to have a chance of loving her father, in spite of all the things he’s done to me. Why does everyone have to concentrate on the negatives? Why can’t people look at all the good things I’ve done? I’ve thrown myself into charity work since I discovered the emptiness of my married life, and I think I should be given credit for all the love and affection I have lavished on the suffering.

Yes, yes, I know she does a lot of work for charity, but don’t let that blind you to the facts. This isn’t the Slothful Seventies any more: it’s the Help Yourself Eighties, and there’s a lot of evidence that suggests that charity is a waste of time, just props up people who should be learning to stand on their own two feet. I know it’s upsetting to watch Bangladeshi flood victims, but you’ve got to remember: if you choose to live in a flood zone, what do you expect? And why, just because Godiva-better-than-us-Fawcett says so, should we be giving money to people we’ve never met, and who are as unlikely to thank us as Galtieri is to organise a Polo friendly with the Royal Windsor, when we’ve got a lot on our plates at home.

We’ve got enough demands onour good nature what with whingeing miners and whining steelworkers without some over-privileged biddy in designer combats coming along and telling us to dig even deeper in our already overburdened pockets. Maybe once we’ve had a few tax cuts, Godiva, but lay off for now. And don’t think that just because you’ve been seen playing kiss-chase with a few Africans that we’re going to forget about your exploits closer to home.

© Daily Sparkle, 1982

I’m not a wimp, but it’s all quite a lot to take in in one go. Harriet and I keep in constant touch by text message, but it’s not the same thing.

After The Talk, I sent her the following:

BIG NEWS. MOTHER BASTARD CHILD OF ANON NOBEL PROF,
GRFTHR PIMP. I AM 29!! LIARS BASTARDS LOVE AXXX

and she sent, by return of receiver:

!**!?F**!! wot do u mean yr 29 yr older thn me &
how come u sa anon didnt she no who shagging? Hxxx

to which I replied:

SHAGGED 5 IN 1 WK DIDNT GET THEIR NOS PETER PAID
HER THEY PRET I WS 2 YRS YNGR 2 PRET I WS CLEVER XX

and she replied:

u r clever stupid but now I no why wrinkles. ruok?
how is henry gvng u xxxxs I hope. miss him & uxxx

Which isn’t quite the same thing as caning a bottle of rum and cussing out the world.

I’m still not allowed to know where she is. A representative of her Madge’s Constab came down to take a statement from me and spent the whole time eyeing me balefully over his teacup. So word’s got round, then. I think we’re not meant to be talking, even: the couple of times we manage to get through on our mobiles, there’s an odd constraint between us, as though someone’s listening.

So I go for walks. I walk along the pine-lined avenues of suburban Poole, marvelling at the way rhododendrons can look dank even at the end of a hot, dry spell, fantasising about the terrible revenges I will wreak with my walking frame when I’m old.

I walk past fish and chip shops and shops selling little plastic buckets and tinfoil windmills. I pass grocers that stock pasties, crisps and fizzy drinks, past bait shops and newsagents and row upon row of insurance HQs. Beats me why all these insurance companies would want to site their headquarters in the very heartland of those most likely to claim, but there you go. I sit on seafront benches and watch middle-aged couples argue over windlasses and outboards, and I think: I wonder if I’ll ever be like this, halfway to paying off my mortgage on the semi in Bournemouth and spending every weekend squabbling over mastery of ten square feet of boat.

I’m twenty-nine. Not such a big difference, is it? It bears no comparison with the eight years Godiva got away with knocking off her age, but I guess the effect an age difference has on you is directly related to whether you knew about it or not. And which direction it takes you in. If you’ve shaved a couple of years off here and there yourself, it’s like you’ve clawed back a few more years’ life; made your past more action-packed, your present more hopeful, your future more dynamic. Right now, I feel as though I’ve been robbed.

Because I have. All those years when I thought my early memories – learning to read, catching an aeroplane to the States, blushing as the owl eyes of my grandfather bored into me as I stumbled over my seven-times table – were from the phenomenal perspective of eighteen months old. Now I find they’re a bog standard three-year-old’s memories, with family weirdness tacked on top. And the worst thing is this: the barrier that stood between me and my classmates never really existed. I wasn’t two years younger than them, condemned to the cold zone of Not Fitting by my age at an age when two years mattered a whole lot. All that wasted time, girls looking down on me as the freak, the little kid who had somehow infiltrated the hallowed sanctum of their maturity, and every bit of it was based on a lie. I wasn’t two years younger: I was the scrawny midget I am today, ill-fed on beans and leaves to keep me small, puberty delayed by diet and stress, started off with a lineage where children have always been small, always been underweight, because poverty either makes you fat or makes you tiny.

And that’s not all. Another piety I’ve held dear has been swept away, the one thing that kept my head held high all those years when conversation consisted of teachers going, ‘Let’s give someone else a chance for a change, shall we?’ I was always at least able to blame the whole thing on my fabled superior intelligence. And now I don’t even have that. I wasn’t a phenomenon at all. I was the class swot.

And things have begun to change in my head about my mother. I don’t see her any more as the omnipotent, the omniscient, the omnipresent Grace Waters. I know now that there’s a chink in her armour, that she’s as flawed as the rest of us. Because despite her famous rectitude, the straight back and the perfect grammar and the insistence on empiricism in everything, her scientific contempt for cheating and cutting corners and slipshod thinking, Grace Waters couldn’t quite resist cooking the books when push came to shove. When it came down to the biggest experiment of her life, she couldn’t stop herself from telling a couple of fibs to make certain that the results were as she wanted them.

It fills me with anger and sadness, but after a while I realise that there’s another, strange emotion bouncing around shouting, ‘Look at me! Look at me!’ So I look, and I discover, to my astonishment, that it’s a tiny nugget of glee. And once the glee finds the daylight, it grows and grows, and before I know it, it’s towering over all the other feelings and making me jump for joy. Grace Waters, I’ve found you out. And now I know your dirty little secret, I will never be scared of you again.

Imagine. It mattered so much to you that you be right that you had to tell a whopping great lie to prove it.

And once I’ve thought my way this far, my attitude begins to soften. I start to see Grace in a new light, and I don’t think it’s a light she’d like me to see her in. I find myself thinking: poor thing. Poor lonely creature, trapped in a bubble, your whole life from the moment of your conception manipulated to fulfil the ambition of one inadequate man who couldn’t even get it up enough to father you. I’ve spent my whole life pitying myself, and now I see that I was the lucky one. I was the one who escaped.

So I go back to SunnyView and, with Henry making a pest of himself because he’s sensed the change in my mood, walking all over the paper and butting his nose against mine until I think I’m going to come out with bruises, I write her a letter. It’s not a long one, but it takes almost four hours to complete.

Dear Mother,

I don’t know if you were expecting to hear from me, but I’ve been thinking a lot over the last couple of months and feel that, whatever passed between us the last time we met, it’s worse for us to be estranged like this than anything else. Things have been difficult for both of us, but I want you to know that, however disappointed you are in me, I am grateful for the things you have done for me. I know I’m not the daughter you wanted, but I am the daughter you’ve got, and if we took time to get to know each other, I think you might find that, although I’ve not taken the path you would have chosen, I am still an okay human being. I must be. Your values are values you have given me, and I wear them with pride. I am sorry that at the moment you can’t see that any good has come from the time and the effort you put into my life, but I hope, one day, that you might be able to.

Please, the next time you’re in Europe, can we meet up? Please? And start again, as adults. It would mean so much to me. Please think about it.