Virtue (49 page)

I laugh. Mel and Dom have been living together for four years now, in a flat they bought together in Bethnal Green.

‘So,’ she continues, ‘I said, “On the hook on the wall over the cat litter. Where I take it down and sweep up once a day,” and he went, “Right. Well, I just thought I’d tell you, I’m sweeping up the floor around the fridge. It’s got all bits of onion skin on it and it’s disgusting.”’

‘What did you say?’

‘What do you think I said?’

‘Silly question. How is the little lamb?’

‘Oh, he’s fine,’ she says. ‘Gone out with the lads. Got me out of the bath to find his blue T-shirt in the airing cupboard. Swore blind it wasn’t there.’

‘Oh, they are sweet.’

‘Blind, more like,’ says Mel.

‘It’s not really blindness. It’s a sort of helplessness, isn’t it?’

‘No it isn’t. It’s deliberate. They know that if they allowed us to think they were competent at anything then they might have to do it themselves.’

I’ve got beeps. Irritating beeps that cut Mel’s every seventh word off.

‘I’ve got beeps,’ I say.

‘I know. Want to take them?’

‘Think I’d better. They’re obviously not going to go away.’

‘Sure.’

I hit the star key, say, ‘Hello?’ in that ‘You’re interrupting me’ voice, which is funny, because you’d hardly subscribe to call waiting if you
didn’t
want to be interrupted, would you?

A cold, formal voice that I thought I’d never hear again says, ‘Is Anna Waters there?’

It’s so unexpected, I take a couple of seconds to recognise who it is. ‘Mother?’

‘Yes,’ she says.

Wow. ‘Gosh, hi.’ I allow an Americanism to slip out before I can stop myself. ‘Sorry. Hello.’

‘Are you still on the other line?’

‘Yes. Hold on. I’ll get rid of them.’

I click back to Mel. ‘Darling, got to go. I’ll call you tomorrow.’

‘Okay,’ she says.

‘Bye.’

‘Bye.’

I wait for her to hang up, and my mother is on the line again.

‘Hello,’ I repeat. ‘How are you?’ Stupid, stupid, stupid. Here I am, playing right back into her hands again, throwing my innocence down as a carpet for her to tread on.

‘Are you alone?’ she asks.

A slightly odd question, but I go along with it. ‘Yes. Did you get my letter?’

‘Oh, yes,’ she says. ‘I got your letter.’

A silence as I wait for her to say something more. ‘Where are you?’ I ask, eventually.

‘London.’

Christ. And here was me thinking we could rebuild gradually by transatlantic phone call. ‘Oh, right,’ I say doubtfully. Then, ‘Where?’

She names a hotel on Park Lane. Very discreet, very plush, very not my mother. And while she’s telling me, I’m thinking: okay, this is an olive branch. She wouldn’t be calling if she didn’t want to see me. ‘Would you like to meet up?’

‘I was thinking,’ she replies, and there’s no warmth in her voice. Was there ever? ‘Of coming to see you. I want to discuss your letter.’

I’m surprised. Grace has never wanted to come to the tower. It’s too much of a symbol of her loss of power. ‘Well, of course. Of course. Do you want to come now?’

‘Not unless you’re alone,’ she says. Then, ‘I don’t want to be interrupted.’

Well, well. The great Grace Waters afraid of other people’s judgements. ‘It’s fine,’ I tell her, ‘we won’t be disturbed.’

‘I’ll be there in fifteen minutes,’ she says and, in her customary manner, hangs up before we can get into the pleasantries of disconnection.

Fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes. No time to make myself presentable, but she knows now. Trackie bottoms and a big jumper will have to do. But the flat’s its usual mess and I don’t want to give her ammunition. I don’t even know where to start. Run around from pile of crap to pile of crap like a headless chicken for a minute, stop, take a deep breath and try to get methodical.

The method is this: no time to both wash up
and
clear the rest up. I have to clear now, sort it out later. I fling open the doors to the kitchen cupboards, push the contents backwards and stack as hard as I can to make room. Sweep my arm across Harriet’s pile of papers and carry them, in two batches, to stuff into one cupboard. Kick scattered videos and CDs under the sofa, take a moment to straighten the throw so that it hangs to the floor and hides them. Bolt round the room collecting glasses, mugs, toast plates, pizza boxes from our night in with Mel and Lindsey two days ago, empty wine bottles, brimming ashtrays. Jump up and down on the pizza boxes to crumple them into quarters so they will fit in the kitchen bin. Follow them up with fag butts and wine bottles. Recycling is a luxury for those who have time. Reserve two mugs and two glasses on the draining board, pile the rest, like jackstraws, in the cupboard under the sink where the cleaning products live. Grab the Flash spray, gallop round the tops scraping off jam stains, crumbs, spilled salt, coffee marks, rinse the sponge and leave the spray out by the taps to make it look like it’s used all the time. Run the hot water and speed-wash the mugs and glasses, polish them dry with the hem of my jumper – there’s nothing like waitress training to teach you to get a glass dry in two seconds – and place them in the glass cupboard to make it look like they live there all the time. Scrub out the ashtrays and cast them casually about the room to look as though they are decorative, not functional. Why am I doing this? Why do I care what she thinks? No time to wonder. Just get on with it.

I’m running round the room scooping discarded clothes into the empty wastebasket from under Harriet’s table when the buzzer goes. Throw the bin back into its proper place, take a moment to compose myself and answer.

‘Grace Waters,’ she says. Not ‘me’ or ‘your mother’, but the full monicker.

‘Come on up.’ I clunk open the gates, put the front door on the latch, check myself for smuts and start down the stairs to greet her.

Of course, the great Grace Waters doesn’t get puffed. She’s wearing a green wool loden and gloves, though it’s not really cold enough to merit them, and for once she’s not wearing her specs. ‘Hello!’ I say, go to kiss her, and she turns her face, as always, to present me with a cold cheek on which to place an obeisance rather than a mark of affection. But I’m different now. I’m thinking: she can’t help it, poor creature. It’s up to me to make the change.

So I say, ‘You’re the last person I was expecting.’

‘I daresay,’ she replies. Never one to waste words, Grace Waters.

‘Come up.’

She follows me up. Enters the room and says, ‘Well. It doesn’t look as bad as I expected.’

‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘We had a fire, so a lot of stuff’s up here while we sort things out.’

‘I know.’

Oh. So she’s been keeping closer tabs than I assumed, then.

I say, ‘I’m so glad to see you,’ and she says nothing, just stands with her hands in her pockets drinking in the chaos around her. ‘Sorry,’ I repeat, and find it necessary to tell another whopper to cover my embarrassment. ‘It’s even worse than usual because I’ve got all my stuff scattered around.’

She still says nothing. I offer her coffee. ‘You know I don’t drink coffee,’ she replies. Tea? Camomile? Water? She merely shakes her head, and I realise that things are not all right, that Grace and I aren’t about to open a new chapter in our lives together. She’s looking at me in that old, old way, like I’ve crawled out from the back of a cupboard.

So I think: grasp the bull by the horns. ‘You wanted to talk to me?’

‘Yes,’ says Grace.

‘Was it about my letter? Did you read it?’

‘Yes,’ she says again.

‘Oh, good.’

A long, ominous silence. Then she begins, in a voice filled with poison, the voice of the wicked stepmother, the voice of the evil headmistress, the voice of a cornered serpent.

‘Oh, good?’ She mimics. ‘Oh, good? What’s so good about it?’

Taken aback, I start to answer. ‘I thought maybe we – maybe we could talk. Maybe we could see the differences between us—’

She cuts in, steps forward so suddenly, like a prey creature pouncing, that I find myself recoiling in response. From her pocket, she produces the offending article, waves it, crushed between her fingers, in my face, her teeth bared in a snarl, eyes slits of malevolence.

‘Oh, I think you’ve made your differences very well known,’ she hisses. ‘Oh, yes. We all know about
your
opinions.’

‘Mother, I—’

‘Disappointed in you? Disappointed?’

‘I—’

‘Grateful, are you? Do me a favour. What do I want with your version of gratitude? What would someone like me do with your gratitude? You wouldn’t know gratitude if you were tied down and spoonfed it.’

I don’t know what to say. I’d thought I was throwing oil on troubled waters, and it seems, instead, that I’ve thrown a lighted match into the tanker.

‘Not the daughter I wanted? My God, what an understatement. You’re no daughter. Anybody would be ashamed to have a whore, a pert, ungrateful little whore like you for a daughter. Your values my values? What values have you ever taken from me?’

Lost for words, I stare at her. Her eyes are blank, like sharks’ eyes, her mouth a white line of tension and rage. Oh, God, it’s not going to be all right. It’s not going to be all right at all. It’s going to be another night like the last one we spent together, only this time I don’t have the option of standing up from the table and leaving. The phone rings. Grace’s head snaps round like a lizard’s, myopic eyes searching for the source of the sound. The answerphone comes on almost immediately; I didn’t erase Mel’s message after she called.

Harriet’s voice. From a mobile, traffic noise in the background. ‘Darling, I’ve just realised. Christ, Anna. I’m coming home right now. It’s not Anthony Figgis. I can’t believe I didn’t see it before. I’m coming home, Anna. Wait for me. And for Christ’s sake don’t let anyone in.’

She hangs up. Grace, all sinew and tension, turns back from the room to look at me. An air of calm has descended upon her, an air I know of old. A small, white smile plays about her lips, and, as though a curtain’s been pulled back to reveal a tableau vivant, I see with blinding clarity what all that reason, all that logic, all that prizewinning self-control has hidden from me all these years. My God, I think. You’re quite, quite mad.

The smile widens slightly, teeth bared. She speaks, quietly, those clipped accents chilling me to the bone.

‘It seems we haven’t much time,’ she says.

‘What do you mean?’

I know what she means. But you think, don’t you: maybe if I can keep her talking, maybe if I can reason with her, maybe then I can turn this away.

‘In the end, delegation is always a waste of time,’ she says. ‘In the end, I always have to do everything myself.’

What do I do now? What do I do now? She’s standing between me and the door; the only way out of here is over the balcony.

‘It’s the same in the laboratory,’ she continues, speaking to the air as though addressing an audience. ‘You would have thought that someone with the privilege to work for me would at least make an effort to be conscientious, but no. In the end, it’s always my responsibility. I have to set up the experiments, I have to oversee them, I have to double-check the facts and I have to dispose of the failures. One can’t trust anyone else. One can pay them, one can think one’s organised them, but when action needs to be taken, the only person one can rely on is oneself.’

‘Mother, I—’

Her head snaps round and she is looking me full in the face. ‘I thought I had made it clear,’ she barks, ‘that I am not your mother. I am not your mother. I am your creator. To be a mother, one needs some affection. I never felt affection for
you
. You were an experiment. Nothing more.’

‘I AM A HUMAN BEING!’ I scream, slap my hand down on the counter, trying to bring her to her senses.

She shakes her head. ‘And when an experiment is over,’ she says, ‘it is one’s duty to tidy up. Remove the residues. Make certain that they are safely disposed of. Especially if an experiment has gone as badly awry as this one has. We don’t want contaminants infecting the others, after all.’

She smiles again, and I realise that the coat and the gloves and the lack of glasses are a form of disguise. No one will know she was ever here.

Yes, but she’s a creature of reason. Creatures of reason don’t—

I don’t even see the blow coming. She’s across the room and upon me before I even have time to raise my hands to cover my face. Her bunched fist cracks down on my nose, and my mouth and my throat are instantly filled with blood. I gasp, choke, bend over double; the fight for breath consumes so much of my being that I don’t see the second blow that explodes from above. Blood from my forehead, streaming into a ballooning eye. Two punches and I’m down.

I’m backed up against the kitchen cabinets, to get away from her. And all this time, her voice hasn’t changed a bit. Even, emotionless tones, perfect pronunciation: if she answered the phone right now, the caller would never know that anything was unusual.

‘I should never,’ she enunciates, ‘have allowed it to go on so long. I should have drowned you like a kitten. The first requirement for success is admitting when you have failed.’

She jerks forward as I strain backward to avoid her, so that her face is almost pressed against my own; I can feel her ‘Ss’ and ‘Ts’ as she spits them out, misting against my skin. Her hand shoots past me. Picks something up from the counter. Something hard and shiny.

Another blow, a heavy metallic blow behind the ear. An eruption in my head. I am instantly giddy, can see nothing but star-studded black, slip, as she steps back, to my knees, drop down onto my hands.

‘But it’s over now,’ she declares. ‘We’ll put an end to it.’

She draws back a foot and kicks me at the junction of the ribs and stomach, knocking the wind out of me. I curl up like a hedgehog; spine out, stomach in, blood and tears and snot and coughing. And she kicks again, twice, at the small of my back so that I spring open instantly, howl with pain.

The foot comes round and takes me in the face, something crunching and loosening in my mouth, blood pouring between my lips. I’m screaming now, full-on shouting, trying to hold onto the ankle, throw her off her balance, stop her, but she shakes me free, kicks again.