And because of my unspeakable training, I nearly missed Harriet altogether as she wafted past on a cloud of saddle soap and eau de Givenchy. I was so well trained in disapproval and standing back that had it not been for Harriet’s temper I’d have been another statistic by now. Harriet, raised in privilege by people whose basic idea of education was learning how to get out of a sports car properly, represented everything that I’d been taught to despise: the old world of contacts and consanguinity, a world where familiarity with the uses of a running martingale was far more important than familiarity with the works of Goethe.
And besides, she was up to something pretty outrageous when I first spoke to her. It was around our fourth or fifth day in halls, and I was up at my usual six o’clock, heading down the corridor in a terry bathrobe for a good stimulating lukewarm bath in preparation for another long day at the library. I was worn out, not from a routine that I’d known since I could remember, but from lying awake at night listening to the shrieks and giggles of my contemporaries as they discovered the joys of student life till two, three and four in the morning. I was so tired, I was even beginning to contemplate trying coffee. Shampoo clutched to bosom, I toddled down the silent parquet, turned the corner and very nearly went A over T as I tripped over the crouching form of Harriet Moresby.
I recognised her, of course; she lived next door, after all. I’d even, once or twice, muttered a half-hearted greeting to her as I slipped past her ever-open door on the way to a lecture. I’d watched in astonishment as a stream of absurdly unpractical objects were carried into her room on the first day by a pair of glumly silent countrymen whose wellingtons shrieked agonisingly on the parquet of the corridor: oil portraits, ball dresses, heavy tapestry curtains three times the length of our windows, Turkey rugs, champagne bowls, what looked like a huge sword, or at the very least its handle and scabbard, saris, cherubs that held aloft candle sconces, a stuffed trout in a glass case, sixteen pairs of scuffed stilettos, an ice bucket shaped like a top hat, three cocktail shakers, an urn full of ostrich feathers. I know that someone like me should have found all this impossibly glamorous, but the truth is that I just found it confusing. I mean, what on earth does one do with an urn full of ostrich feathers?
Swathed in strapless gold satin, high-piled hair beginning to come down at the edges, riding mac dropped carelessly on the floor beside her, Harriet squatted, bag open, by a giant Benares ware planter that held a rather manky-looking umbrella tree. As I appeared, and swerved violently to avoid somersaulting over her shoulder, she looked up guiltily, dropped a small brown bottle down to her side and said, ‘Oh, it’s you. You’re up late.’
Up late. What on earth was I supposed to make of that? A lot of the time, through my youth, I’d felt that I was trying to make contact with aliens from another planet when I tried to engage someone else in conversation. It was only just beginning to occur to me that it might be me that had landed from Saturn. ‘I’ve just got up. What are you doing?’
‘Just got up?’ She made a valiant attempt at changing the subject. ‘What are you, a rower? You can’t be. You’re far too small. Oh, of course, you must be a cox. How brilliant. I wish I could work up enthusiasm for team sports. I’m sure I’d have got a better UCCA report—’
‘I don’t row,’ I replied. ‘I need to get up at this time to be ready to go to the library for nine.’
And then Harriet burst out laughing, which was the last reaction I had expected.
‘LIBRARY?’ She howled. ‘NINE?’
‘What’s so funny about that?’
‘You’re a student, for God’s sake. You’re not supposed to go to the library. What are you reading that you have to be in the library for?’
She was trying, as she spoke, to slip the brown bottle into her bag without my noticing. ‘Physics and philosophy,’ I said, stretching my neck to catch sight of the label.
‘Christ!’ she cried. ‘Kant for Cunts! You’re kidding! I never thought I’d meet anyone reading that.’
Believe it or not, I’d never in my life heard anyone employ the C-word in conversation, though of course my full and rounded education had apprised me of what it meant. So I tried my mother’s line on cussing, which had always seemed to work before.
‘Swearing,’ I announced imperiously, ‘is the last resort of the inarticulate.’ I wasn’t sure what to do with this glittering creature who seemed unable to take anything seriously.
She responded with another peal of laughter. ‘Yeah, right. Which is why I was president of my fucking debating society.’
The bottle, which had dribbled a bit while she was pouring, slipped from her fingers and landed at my feet. The label, face up at last, revealed it to be a small flask of Roundup.
Our eyes met. ‘What are you doing? You’re poisoning that plant?’
‘Well, yes, of course I am,’ she replied airily, as though it was the most normal thing in the world.
I hadn’t expected her to reply with such honesty. For a moment, I was lost for words. Then, ‘That’s college property,’ I said.
Still down on her haunches, Harriet attempted to engage my look with a naughty, complicit one of her own. Suddenly I was horribly aware of my stodgy dressing gown, my hairy legs, my tortoiseshell hair clips.
‘It is,’ I insisted.
‘Well, it may be, but it’s also an abomination,’ she replied.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Look at it.’ Harriet pinched a leaf with spiteful intensity. ‘You can’t have something like this in a house. It doesn’t flower. It doesn’t do anything. It just sits there being ugly and every now and again the kind of person who likes polishing houseplants comes along and polishes it. I mean, have you ever stood there in Homebase and watched the kind of people who buy houseplant polishing equipment?’
I thought for a moment, thought about the houseplant in my room and the fact that I’d only the previous morning spent ten minutes buffing up its leaves with a spray gun and a soft cloth. I coloured slightly. Even I could see that there was something a bit – well – not right about polishing houseplants.
‘People who polish houseplants,’ announced Harriet, ‘are the kind of people who say “Shoes off the carpet” when you go round their houses. They have little notebooks in which they write down every last penny they spend. They buy greatest hits compilations because they’re better value. They get in panics if they eat more than three eggs in a week. They never go to bed when there’s a dirty cup in the house. And they say “Pardon” when they mean “What”.’
She sat back, obviously expecting some sort of reaction from me. And I, fairly certain that what I was meant to do was disapprove, but unable to find the words, simply gawped at her from behind my specs.
‘Never mind,’ she said, and I knew that I had in some way failed a test that had been set me. ‘The point is, they shouldn’t be encouraged.’
‘It’s still college property,’ I said obdurately. ‘You shouldn’t be destroying other people’s property like that.’
‘Chill, Anna.’ She got to her feet and I realised that she had a good nine inches on me. I also realised that, although she knew my name, I had not managed to master that of a single one of the people on my landing.
‘No one’s going to miss an umbrella plant,’ announced Harriet. ‘Trust me. No one’s ever missed an umbrella plant. Good Lord, it was probably left here by a student who saw the light in the seventies. And the poor old scouts have been cursing having to maintain the sodding thing all these years, going, “Why won’t it just die, Beryl?” and never getting their wish. I’m doing everyone a favour.’
Once again, I gawped. I was in way over my depth, and I knew it.
‘You can’t claim it’s a thing of beauty, can you?’ she asked quite kindly.
‘It’s still a living thing.’
‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘It’s a living thing when it’s in the jungle. In a corridor, it’s a stick with some green stuff stuck on that takes up space without co
ntributing to form. It’s an abomination, Anna, and it should not be allowed to live.’
Suddenly, I noticed a glint in her eye that I wasn’t really sure what to do with. She was either laughing at me or she was seriously unhinged. Maybe both.
‘You’re not going to stop me, Anna,’ continued Harriet. ‘I’m going to kill them all. Umbrella and yucca and avocado grown from the stone and spider plants and weeping figs and century plants and cacti. Especially cacti. They’re all dead. All of them. This is my mission in life, my ambition, my vocation. I will not rest until every pot-grown cactus in the world has been exterminated. Do you understand? Exterminated.’
And suddenly, the glint was gone as quickly as it had come.
Harriet picked up the riding mac, which was still a light shade of fawn in those days, hung it from her shoulders and smiled sunnily at me. ‘I must get to bed,’ she said. ‘It’s been a long night. Have a nice day and don’t work too hard, will you?’
Like I say, I almost missed her.
Chapter Fourteen
Sunday Week
Once again, the gates of Belhaven are as familiar to the reading public as the gates of Buck House, and small buses full of American tourists have taken to decanting on the verge outside to pronounce on Godiva’s beauty, her goodness, their sense of kinship with her, how much they miss her. Mrs Violet Bock of Stanton, Missouri, recalls the time when she was brought out of a diabetic coma by being shown a photograph of Godiva. ‘She was an angel,’ she says. ‘It was a miracle. I had been three days in the hospital hooked up to insulin drips, and within a few hours of my daughter putting her photo at my bedside, I woke up.’ ‘I have always wanted to come here and thank her,’ concurs her daughter Wanda. ‘My only regret is that I got here too late to do it in person.’
Gerald performs with his usual charisma, saying, ‘I’m frightfully sorry, but I really don’t have a comment to make for the time being,’ through the window of the Range Rover before locking himself into his flat in the Albany and taking the phone off the hook. Poor George Burge has been forced to move in with his brother for the duration, and speculation is rife that the Burge marriage is probably doomed.
But while the fans have something else to focus on, at least they’re not focusing on Harriet. There have been no more scary emails, but all week Harriet has sat in front of the telly watching the news with bitter astonishment as new strangers appear to testify. And even though she says that if they’re testifying on screen they’ve got less time to testify to her on the Web, I know that it’s affecting her beneath that defiant surface.
I watch her shake her head in disbelief as more middle-aged matrons swear that their bad luck changed for ever when they put a photograph of her mother in their lounge, how a hug from Godiva brought about a remission in their dead sister’s cancer, how they found their lost wedding ring after asking for help from the dead Duchess, and I know that things are not good for her. I even wonder, for a moment, whether to relent and bring her to my mother’s reception, because I don’t like leaving her alone when she’s miserable. But then I think: yeah, but what’s more miserable than an evening alone with the telly? An audience with Grace Waters, that’s what.
I’m always glad if I have a few days’ notice that I’m going to be seeing Grace, because, even with all the practice I’ve had, it takes me a while to get ready. Pathetic, I know, but if you lead a double life to keep the peace, there’s stuff you need to do to get back into the swing of what you’ve been doing in the life you don’t live. So on Monday I have a haircut, toning down my usual black to more of a filing-clerk brown, and get into practice at wearing my specs, which are so thick that they tend to make me a bit queasy for a couple of days after I first put them on. On Tuesday I go to Debenhams and buy a shirtwaister in navy with a pattern of ivy leaves in white upon it (because I feel that Grace would notice if I turned up in the same clothes over and over). On Wednesday I spend the afternoon in front of the mirror practising the meek and birdlike look – the sideways glances, the pecking head movements, the apologetic, self-deprecating responses – that satisfies my mother that my respect is intact. I follow this rehearsal up with an hour’s work every day to be sure. All my spare time on Thursday, Friday and Saturday is given over to reading back copies of the Librarian, to which I subscribe, and getting myself up to speed on indexing advances and man-management techniques for those who would rather spend their time communing with books.
I work in the library at King’s College, you see. Grace is a bit disappointed that I work in a library, not, say, on the cutting edge of biotechnology, but she’s just about learned to live with it, and it’s a considerable improvement on the alternative.
Actually, Mel is the one who works in the library at King’s College, but her colleagues feel enough pity for me that they’ve fallen in with the fantasy and are all ready at the drop of a dictionary to say that I’m on holiday/sick leave/at lunch if Grace were ever to call. Not that she ever has; Grace is the kind of person who would always rather not communicate face-to-face if she can help it. We meet maybe three times a year, and otherwise all our contact save dire emergencies is done by fax or email. In fact, I didn’t see my mother’s signature for a full eight years until she started appending a Paintbrush version dropped down from her Series 5 into her desktop; now all her communications are polished off with a neat ‘Grace Waters’ at the bottom.
But here we are, it’s Sunday Week and I’m standing on the edge of one of those rooms you find in every academic establishment whose designers have deliberately robbed it of all features and whose governing body have named it after the least memorable person ever to have worked there. This one is called the Martin Crawley Function Suite and its sixties architect obviously believed that windows were, on the whole, an unnecessary distraction. It does, in fact, have two of the things, running from floor to low-slung, acoustic-tiled ceiling, but neither is more than a foot wide, and both are tucked away behind wide concrete supporting pillars in order that the room needs to be lit at all times by the unshaded strip lights set among the tiles. Someone else has then decided to disguise the lack of glass by hanging plain grey curtains the length of the wall, a grey echoed by the wear-well carpet on which we are standing. The podium-stage at the far end of the room is built in oak-stained pine and sucks any light that might be foolishly generated by the pale faces about me into itself and re-emits it in grey to match the room.
I’m taking a breather. Mother’s lecture was, as usual, way over my head – a switch clicks in my head when I hear the words ‘molecular biology’ and I turn into one of those people whose jaw is perpetually tense with not being seen to yawn publicly. Even the inclusion of slides doesn’t help, and the strain of smiling gamely is beginning to tell. Ditto the strain on my eyes. I ache to pull off the hated glasses – my eyes are so poor that looking through them is like watching the world from inside a goldfish bowl – throw them at the nearest domed forehead and rub hard at the bridge of my nose. I’ve had two and a half glasses of white wine vinegar and the desire for nicotine has never been stronger.
Grace, half a head taller than most of the men who surround her – despite her position as feminist icon, she likes to be surrounded by men – stares at me over the crowd. And for a moment the social face drops. Turns into a mask of displeasure. You’re not mixing, says the look. It is your duty to mix. Then the upper lip raises itself and she tilts her head again to indicate that she is listening. And I find myself wondering spiteful thoughts about whether Peter taught her to do that, or whether it’s what she learned from her readings of Proust.
I hoist my daughter-of-the-genius yoke back onto my shoulders, smile dimly at a man whose swollen dome of a forehead suggests that he is probably either a professor or an encephalitic. He knows, of course, who I am: they all know who I am at these functions, though I doubt that a single one of them would recognise me in the street.
‘Hello,’ he says. And, I think, reaches the end of his conversational skills.
>
I beam hopefully at him. He beams back. Then after a bit we get embarrassed, make ‘hmm’ ‘haa’ noises and start beaming at the room. Oh boy, academic drinks parties. They’re probably not so bad if you’re an academic yourself, because at least then you have professional sniping to fall back on.
Two men in cardigans – one yellow, one blue – are indulging in a spot of professional sniping beside me at the moment. Yellow cardi says, ‘… hasn’t published since 1994. God knows how the poor thing got tenure.’
‘Well,’ red cardi replies, ‘there was that article in the New Scientist.’ And then they both laugh. ‘What did you make of tonight’s little speechie?’ asks red cardi.
‘Well, between you and me,’ says yellow cardi, then suddenly notices that I’m standing there and changes tack. ‘Brilliant as ever,’ he says. ‘She never fails to surprise, does she? Why, aren’t you Anna?’
I make a jerky pigeon-peck of assent, smile my I’m-harmless smile, reply, ‘Yes.’
He sticks a hand out. ‘You haven’t changed a bit,’ he says, which all my mother’s admirers say to me whenever we meet. If only they knew. ‘I haven’t seen you since you were twelve.’
Okay. That narrows it down to a couple of hundred bald men in cardis, then.
‘Hello,’ I reply, shaking the hand. ‘Have I really not changed since I was twelve?’
‘Not a bit,’ he says. ‘This is Barnabas Mitchell. Works for Wellcome. Barnabas, Anna Waters. Daughter of our esteemed hostess.’
‘Ah!’ says Barnabas Mitchell. ‘How do you do?’
‘Very well, thank you.’
‘Good show tonight, I thought. Always a pleasure to hear your mother’s thoughts. Most – um – thought-provoking …’ He trails off.
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