Virtue (6 page)

Harriet listens while Mel talks. ‘No,’ she replies, ‘I’m just furious.’

Another silence. ‘Well, of course it’s a shock …’ she says a bit less certainly. That’s one of Mel’s talents. Being one of those people with a regular job, paid holidays, time to read, she’s done so much self-actualisation she never has compunction about asking the direct question that needs to be asked. ‘No, well, what do you think?’ asks Harriet. Then, ‘Yeah. They were camped outside the gates first thing this morning, but they’ve gone now. For the moment, anyway.’ She listens again. ‘Well, I’d love to, darling, but we’ve got to work tonight.’ Another pause. ‘No. Roy will totally lose it if we both don’t turn up at five hours’ notice.’

Harriet laughs. First actual laugh all morning. ‘You have no idea how much I’d like to do that,’ she says. ‘And I’ll tell you what. When I do, I’ll shove the ping-pong bat right up there after it. But not when we’re both totally skint and we’re getting better tips than we ever have in our lives.’

She looks at her watch. ‘Sure. Are you sure? Why aren’t you at work? Well, okay, then. That would be nice.’

Laughs again. ‘Totally shitfaced. But I can’t really afford to, not if we’re on duty tonight. Tea any good?’

While this is going on, I’m keeping an ear on the conversation and an eye on my mother’s fax. Boy, my mother doesn’t bother to waste words. Under the address, the string of letters after her name and the five phone numbers, in her scrupulous handwriting, each t crossed firmly with a tiny bar that never strays into another letter, all curlicues and flourishes cut down for waste of time, Grace has written:

As you do not see fit to answer your emails, and as I am unable to access you by telephone, I am sending you this to inform you that you are expected at the Blackburn Lecture, on Sunday week at 18.45 prompt, Arlosh Hall, University College. Please confirm this with me at your earliest convenience
.

Blimey. Nigel softened
that
one up a bit.

I’d forgotten, actually, that The Dragon was back in the country next weekend. Thank God, at least she doesn’t seem to want to have one of our dinners. Lindsey calls them Trials by Food, and she’s not far wrong.

Harriet hangs up. ‘Mel’s coming over, and Dom,’ she announces. Dom and Mel live together. As a couple. As one of those couply couples who not only look alike – masses of chestnut curls, wide, honest eyes – but seem to know, most of the time, what the other is thinking.

I love them, but my heart sinks. Oh, God. Does this woman never sleep? We’ve been up for well over twenty-four hours and I feel that every bit of me is flaking off. I twist a smile onto my face.

Suddenly, Harriet looks concerned.

‘Oh, God, sorry, Annie. I thought it would be okay if it was those two. I’m sorry. I didn’t think. I’ll call her back …’

I shake my head. ‘Don’t be silly. I’m just tired.’

She cons my face. ‘You look awful.’

‘Thanks.’ I boot the computer up.

‘What are you up to?’ she asks.

I hand her the fax. ‘I thought I’d better answer this before she comes round in person.’

Harriet reads it properly for the first time. Perches on the edge of the table, frowning. ‘Does she
have
any other tone than commanding, your mother?’

‘Not to me, no. I’ve sometimes seen her talking to people as though they were almost her equal, but that’s only other Nobel winners and profs and things. And I think most people are quite grateful never to have to see her social face again once they’ve seen it the first time.’

‘No!’ Harriet lifts her eyes from the paper. ‘All these years I’ve known you and you never told me she had a social face! I’ve never seen it!’

Harriet has met my mother three times in the ten years we’ve been friends. On the first meeting, my mother treated her to the bug-under-microscope thing. Since then, it’s been strictly Immigration Officer. Grace isn’t stupid, after all; she knew almost immediately – probably before I did – that her grip had weakened when Harriet came on the scene. I don’t think, though, that she knows just how much.

I demonstrate. Open my eyes as wide as they can go, draw my upper lip up towards my nose so that my front teeth are exposed, tilt my head slightly to one side and, in a tone both bored and patronising, I say, ‘
Really
?’.

‘Jesus Christ!’ Harriet actually starts back for a second and lets out a little shriek.

I’ve practised my mother’s social face in the mirror, so I know that I look like the bastard progeny of a mechanical midnight coupling between Margaret Thatcher and Nosferatu, but even I am unprepared for the strength of her reaction. Then she bursts into a laugh. ‘Your mother,’ she declares, ‘is the scariest woman in the world. Holy cow, I thought you were going to eat me.’

I return the smile, turn back to the screen and click ‘compose message’ with the mouse. Begin to type my mother’s address until the address book clicks in and completes it for me. There are eight messages from Grace in the inbox, all sent in the past twelve hours, with a noticeable gap between 1 a.m. and 5 a.m. her time. She’s not changed her sleeping habits, then. It was only after I had the fifth twelve-hour lie-in of my life, at the age of eighteen, that I discovered that my perpetual tiredness was actually related to chronic sleep deprivation. Before then, I had never woken without an alarm or a shaking in my life.

‘So how often does she do that, then?’ asks Harriet.

I type ‘Sunday week’ in the subject box. ‘Not often. But we’ll probably be seeing a bit of it after the lecture. There’s a reception.’

‘Ooh,’ says Harriet. ‘Ooh. Can I come? Let me come!
Please
let me come. Please! You didn’t tell me there was going to be a party.’

‘No.’

I type:

Sorry. Didn’t log on for twelve hours. Thank you for the invitation for Sunday week at University College. I will be there at 18.45 prompt
.

There’s no point in holding back on the irony when writing to Grace, as it all goes straight over her head anyway.

‘Oh,
pleeease
,’ says Harriet again. ‘You know how I love eating cheese on sticks with a load of academics. Go on. I promise I’ll be good.’

‘No, Harriet,’ I repeat firmly.

‘Sometimes,’ she says, ‘I think you’re ashamed of me.’

She knows this isn’t true. But we have to go through this ritual every time there’s a Waters evening. I’m not ashamed of Harriet. I’m prouder of Harriet than anything else in my life apart from Henry, who we both burst with pride about whenever he speaks his mind, but I can’t afford to have my cover blown. If Grace is ever going to find out the truth about me, I need to have done something with my life first. Wait for Sunday week and you’ll see what I mean.

‘Yes,’ I reply. ‘I am ashamed of you.’

‘Fair enough,’ says Harriet, and I click on send.

The buzzer goes. We thought it was probably safe to reconnect it now that the press had left but, just in case, I make my voice gruff and answer in the guttural accents of Mitteleurop. ‘Vat do you vant?’

‘Hi, Annie,’ says Dom. ‘It’s me.’

I buzz him in. Henry plops down off the sofa where he’s shown all the signs of being stuffed for the past hour, and goes down the stairs to greet him. That’s another reason we’re so proud of Henry. Whenever the door goes, he always assumes that the visitor is there for
him
. What a dude.

They arrive together five minutes later, Henry hanging over Dom’s shoulder like a big fur stole, Dom perspiring lightly from the climb wearing a knock-off designer suit as befits his position on the lower rungs of his chosen career. ‘I brought some white wine,’ he declares. Dom enjoys a sweeping generalisation as much as the next man, ‘because girls like white wine. Mel’s not here yet?’

‘No.’ Harriet, unprompted, crosses the room and actually gives him a hug. Dom is one of a very few men that Harriet actually has strong affection for. Him and Shahin, and a gay guy called Stuart who used to be a trolly dolly on British Airways until he went off to Barcelona to set up a beach bar with a boyfriend he met in a hotel in Thailand. Harriet used to spend hours at a time watching tapes of
Baywatch
with Stuie. We both miss him. Harriet is comfortable with Dom because she met him as Mel’s main squeeze and he’s never shown a flicker of interest in her other than as a boy with tits. Which, come to think of it, is why she likes Shahin and Stuie too. You know, you get like that when you look like Harriet.

Harriet relieves Dom of his plastic bag, and sets to with the corkscrew. ‘Harriet,’ I warn, ‘work.’

She just pulls a face and pours the plonk. And somehow I find myself accepting a glass.

‘So,’ begins Dom, ‘Mel says you’ve been besieged.’ He sits down, and Henry readjusts himself to fit the new posture.

‘Eugh,’ says Harriet. ‘Do you know who had the nerve to call? That Leeza Hayman thing. She was clogging up our answerphone at eleven thirty this morning.’

‘Agh, God,’ says Dom.

‘I’m surprised,’ continues Harriet, ‘that she was able to do anything at eleven thirty in the morning, the amount she drinks.’

‘I think,’ says Dom, ‘that Leeza Hayman probably stopped having hangovers some time in 1978.’

‘Oozy bitch,’ says Harriet. ‘Doing the old best-friends routine. I’ll give her best friends.’ Harriet hates Leeza Hayman. Hates her with poison, with bile, with a vengeance.

Dom, who’s been working in PR for a while now, says, ‘You know, it mightn’t be such a bad idea to bury the hatchet with la Hayman, Haz. Or, at least, let her think she’s not got to you. You know what it’s like with the press. They’ll always have the last word if it kills them.’

‘Balderdash,’ Harriet replies. ‘Poppycock and hogwash. It won’t be the last word that kills that bitch if I ever get my hands on her.’

Dom gives her that reproving-but-indulgent look that always drives her on to greater extremes.

‘I will be mortal enemies with that woman until the day I die,’ says Harriet, with magnificent exaggeration. ‘She needs to know that not everything she does is going to be forgotten. She needs to know that wherever she goes, however she disguises herself, however long she lives, I will be there, hunting her down and waiting for the kill.

‘And besides,’ she finishes, ‘I like having enemies. It’s good practice, and it stops me killing my friends.’

Dom, her friend, laughs and reaches out to snake his arm round the back of her neck. ‘You,’ he says, ‘are all mouth and no trousers.’

Harriet flashes wicked green eyes at him, says, ‘Just you try me, sonny.’

‘You’re okay, then,’ says Mel from behind us. Mel is our keyholder, poor lamb, which is a more onerous job than you would think as we’re both pretty good at leaving things on the bus. But at least she doesn’t have to wait to be let in like everyone else.

Harriet is breezy now. You get new people in the room and, even when they’re people she knows as well as these two, Harriet always has to turn breezy. ‘Laughing,’ she replies. ‘Wine in the fridge. Wash yourself a glass.’

Mel looks at me. ‘You okay?’

I nod because, essentially, I am, though three sips of wine have turned me into a sleep monster. I check my watch. Four hours till we have to be at work.

‘You look like shit,’ says Dom.

I do wish people would stop saying that.

‘She hasn’t had any sleep,’ says Harriet. ‘And I interrupted her in the middle of her favourite hobby.’

‘Oh, no!’ cries Mel. ‘You mean that little Aussie cutie went to waste?’

Less of the little, I think. But blinking, I nod again.

‘Lindsey said she’d never seen anybody work that fast,’ says Mel. ‘She said it was a record even for you. She said one minute you were talking to some bloke with a beard about sustainable teak production and the next you’d legged it out of the door with some boy with love beads.’

‘Well, she introduced us,’ I protest. ‘And anyway, I gave it at least half an hour.’ Okay, so that was a bit fast, but you tend to know, don’t you, in the first five minutes?

‘Are you ever going to settle down?’ asks Dom from the lofty height of a seven-year involvement. Mel and Dom met, in the Proper Manner, at an interview weekend for a traineeship in the City (which neither of them won), and have been a Couple, no vacillation, no humming and hawing, since precisely ten days later.

Harriet and I catch each other’s eye. And then we start to laugh. We laugh till tears begin to squeeze from our eyes, until Henry raises his head from Dom’s shoulder and treats us to a sleepy glare. And then Mel starts to laugh too, and finally, after a minute’s ‘No, but seriously’s’, Dom’s shoulders start to shake and he joins in. ‘Sorry.’ He giggles. ‘Sorry. Silly me. That’s about as likely as Harriet taking up housework.’

Harriet pats him, pulls herself off the sofa and finds another bottle of wine in the fridge. Opens it, tops the others up, comes in my direction, but I wave her away. She looks concerned. ‘Are you okay?’

‘Yeah. But I think I’m going to keel over, hon. Honestly. I don’t think I’m going to make it through tonight.’

Mel sits forward. ‘She’s kept you up all night again, hasn’t she?’

‘It’s fine.’

‘Well, Anna, why don’t you go and have a rest?’

‘I’m fine.’

‘No,’ Mel says. ‘You’re not fine. You’ve gone green. Go to bed.’

The pull of my lovely deep bed is getting stronger as she speaks. Suddenly, the thought of being anywhere other than wrapped in my chenille bedspread, buried among my velvet cushions, cosseted by my azure walls, is enough to bring on a tantrum. I find myself agreeing. Stumble to my feet, saying, ‘You won’t let Lovely get too pissed, will you?’

‘No,’ says Mel.

‘And someone will wake me at five?’

‘Yes,’ says Dom.

‘Okay,’ I say. ‘I think I have to if I’m going to make it through tonight. I’ll see you later.’

‘Look at me! Look at me! Look at me!’

Geraldine Pigg, seven years old, balances on the breakwater as the wind whips her hair across her face and into her mouth. Geraldine’s white-blonde colouring is set off by a pink tutu, navy sandshoes and, perched on the top of her head, a sequinned cardboard tiara. She raises her hands, touches the tips of her fingers together above her head and repeats the cry, ‘Look! Look at me!’