And eventually, halfway down Buckingham Palace Road, she speaks. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I sort of put a downer on the atmosphere tonight.’
Which is true, but not in the way she feels. Harriet has that brittle upper-class dislike of emotional behaviour, feels that it should be kept away from the social arena, and is always annoyed with herself if she lets the side down. But the others, overcome by guilt, fell over themselves to change the subject and make up to her, which of course meant that everyone immediately stopped behaving naturally.
Normally, Godiva doesn’t even come up in conversation that often, and normally, a couple of jokes are fine. Because despite her outburst tonight, Harriet manages, on the whole, to tread the fine line between her mother’s iconic status and the reality of her life with remarkable equilibrium. It’s just that life isn’t very normal at the moment.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ I reply, ‘I don’t think anyone’s going to hold it against you.’
‘Yes,’ she says, ‘but they’re going to think I’m completely mad. I mean, what was I doing? Mummy wasn’t like that at all. Where on earth did all that bollocks come from?’
‘Sometimes she was like that,’ I remind her reasonably. ‘She was really sweet to you some of the time.’
‘When it suited her,’ adds Harriet gloomily.
I don’t know, but I’ve sort of got the impression over the years that this is true, to a greater or lesser extent, of quite a lot of parents. That image of self-sacrificing selfless devotion as the median of motherhood is, as far as I’ve seen, as much of a myth as Godiva’s sainthood. It’s one of those myths that keeps society going, but the only people who have ever lived up to it to the letter have probably produced some seriously fucked-up children. I mean, it’s bad enough carrying Grace’s expectations around on my shoulders, but imagine the burden of guilt if someone had sacrificed everything for your well-being.
Then Harriet says, in a small voice, ‘Why can’t they just leave it alone? Why can’t they just—’ She pulls up by an empty coach stop and puts her hands over her face. ‘I don’t understand,’ she moans through her fingers. ‘I don’t understand what I’m meant to do. What am I meant to do?’
I put a hand on her shoulder. ‘I don’t know, sweetheart.’
‘I—’ says Harriet, and then she goes quiet. Even after all these years, she still hates people to see her cry. She finds it difficult to deal even with me seeing her, despite the countless times I’ve sobbed and railed in her presence and she’s loved me none the less. So we have a tacit pact, which is that she lets me see, and I pretend not to have noticed. I move the arm from her shoulder and put it round her waist, rock her against my side until the long, slow breaths she’s been taking die down. Then, standing on tiptoe, I smooth a stray lock of hair from her forehead and plant a kiss where it has been.
‘Harriet, there is nothing you can be doing.’
‘I can’t win either way,’ says Harriet. ‘Someone’s going to be offended whatever I do. I’m not going to lie. Why should I?’
‘You don’t have to. Harriet, the people who matter know. It doesn’t matter about the rest.’
‘But it does,’ says Harriet, hands still over her face. ‘It does when they think they can tell me about it. Every single bloody day I get a dozen emails, or letters forwarded by the estate, or someone says something to me in the street. I’ve changed my email address three times and they just find it out again. I can’t stand it. I never asked to be a public person. No one ever asked me. Why can’t they leave me alone?’
And once more, her breathing gets long and heavy and she falls silent. God, Harriet, I wish you were better at this sort of stuff. You’re so damn good at doing it for other people, but you just won’t let go yourself.
I put my other arm round her. She stiffens, then relaxes and allows a tiny sob to get out round the palms of her hands.
‘Oh, darling,’ I say. ‘I wish I could make it all go away, but it won’t. You’ve just got to tough it out and remember how much we all love you.’
A louder sob, a judder in the shoulders.
I make the sounds I’ve heard people make to small children in the street. ‘There,’ I say soothingly, hug her closer. ‘There.’ And I say, ‘It’s okay, sweetie, I’m here. Don’t worry. I’m here.’
And she does what she always does. After five minutes, she straightens up, wipes her hands upward over her face to clean the tears away and says, ‘God, what bollocks. Sorry.’
‘’S okay.’
‘Total loss of dignity there. Sorry.’ She starts to walk homeward, hands sunk in the pockets of the riding mac, heels scraping on the pavement.
‘I’ll be holding it against you,’ I reply.
She throws me a watery grin and we walk on in silence until she thinks of something to talk about. And eventually she does. ‘Tell you what. I’ve got to think of something to do to that bastard Roy.’
‘What were you thinking of?’
‘Well, I’m not sure,’ she says. ‘I’ve already poisoned his bloody plants. I was wondering if we could maybe do something to his wardrobe.’
Roy is temporarily living in the flat above the restaurant while builders fit an all-gold bathroom in his newly built loft apartment. ‘It’s a possibility,’ I say. ‘But we’d have to be careful. We really can’t afford to lose our jobs right now, even if he is a bastard. What were you thinking about?’
Harriet laughs. ‘You know what I think?’
‘No, darling, I don’t. That’s why I’m asking.’
‘Do you remember the time Henry left that vole on that fun-fur you left on the stairs?’
Hard to forget. He did it in a warm snap in the winter. It was two weeks before I felt a need to pick the coat up again, and by then the only possible course of action was to throw up a couple of times and then stuff it in a bin liner. You would never believe that something so small could give off so large a smell.
‘Well, he left a large mouse on the doormat about a week ago. I’ve been saving it in a plastic bag by the boiler.’
I laugh. ‘You are an evil genius, Dr Moriarty.’
She laughs back. ‘There is no evil, Mr Holmes,’ she replies, ‘only genius. And Iranian chefs with spare keys.’
‘When’re you going to do it?’
‘Ooh.’ Harriet is amazingly good at swinging her mood back when she wants to. ‘I thought as soon as would probably be best.’
We swing into the home strait, discussing the details of our revenge: how I can keep him talking while she sneaks upstairs, best ways to hide the thing in a wardrobe so it won’t be discovered until the damage is done. Direct action is Harriet’s forte. She long ago gave up bothering to reason with people; gets quite Old Testament when she thinks that someone will never see the error of their ways.
Under the street light outside our gate, a figure that’s been squatting up against the wall uncurls, stretches and stands, hands on hips, watching our approach.
‘Oh, bugger,’ hisses Harriet. ‘Who the hell is that?’
‘I don’t know. Journalist?’
‘At this hour? Christ. It must be a fan. Oh, God. Do you think he really knew where I lived?’
‘I don’t know. Oh, God. What should we do?’
‘Well, there’s nothing we can do. We’re not going to get into the house without going past him.’
He waves. Oh, bloody hell. What do we do? Wave back?
Then he starts to walk towards us, back to the light so we can’t even see if his face is friendly or otherwise. We slow our pace to a crawl, tensely waiting to see what his next move is going to be.
Then a broad Australian tenor booms out across the night air. ‘Chroist!’ it calls. ‘I thought youse goys were niver gaingda come home!’ and, with a yell of delight, I throw myself on top of him.
Chapter Eighteen
Love You to Death
That’s the difference between Harriet and me. I, cosseted, hothoused, watched over, guarded and given mor
e attention than any child has the right to expect, have never been able to love my mother, dearly though I have wished that I did. Harriet, neglected, deprived, exploited, shoved from pillar to post and often treated more as accessory than dependent, loves her mother dearly, desperately, however much she wishes she didn’t. Fifteen years on, Harriet mourns Godiva with the immediacy of yesterday, hungers for her with the ferocity of wolves.
Harriet has never forgiven Godiva for dying as she did, rails against her and spits on her memory with an orphan’s fury, and in the night, when she thinks no one can hear, the sound of her sobs drifts down the tower stairs and fills me with pain. Me, I’ve pretty much forgiven my mother for living as she has lived; pity her as the victim of my grandfather’s zealotry. The tears I used to cry for lovelessness dried the day I decided to live, and though sometimes other people’s stories of shared intimacies at kitchen worktops fill me with a false nostalgia for an experience I never had, at least I never have to live with those shrieks of frustration, the howls of mother–daughter provocation, the rage of closeness.
But imagine Harriet’s childhood. Only child of a third marriage that had imploded by the time she was six, boarding at seven, half the holidays in a great cavern of a place avoiding a half-brother who resented her and a father who had never really got over the fool he’d made of himself over her mother, the other half in hotel rooms and rented flats waiting for the moment when the photo-op would begin. If you’re our age, you probably remember Harriet from the background of many of Godiva’s public exploits: Harriet in a baseball cap, Harriet shyly and solemnly attempting to converse with a Namibian starvation victim, Harriet in a miniaturised version of her mother’s scarlet ball dress at some charity occasion, Harriet receiving a cuddle from the loving mother. Because that’s part of the deal for a child of the Famous: the offspring of the prominent aren’t just there to be a drain on finances and pass on their genes, they are there to emphasise their fecundity, highlight their affections, illustrate their humanity. Well, obviously, I wasn’t; I was there to illustrate my family’s superiority, but as such I at least had the good fortune to be kept away from the scrutiny of the camera.
And here’s another thing: when Harriet lost her mother, her tragedy was never her own. She became a thing to be pawed, confessed to, someone to share the pain of people who never knew her mother. Wherever she went, women would approach with pictures, mementos, stories, as though sharing them with her would somehow confer Godiva’s benediction upon them, make their grief real and justifiable. She was discussed on television, hounded from school to school, given advice on problem pages, hugged in the street by strangers. And none of these strangers, these people who wanted a piece of her, ever started a sentence with any word other than ‘I’. ‘I was so devastated at the loss of your mother.’ ‘I don’t know if I can go on now she’s not here.’ ‘I got so much inspiration from her.’ And as she got older, it was ‘I just have to touch you; you look so much like her,’ and later ‘I can’t believe someone so dainty could have a child as big as you,’ or ‘I just had to tell you about the time when …’
It wasn’t hers, but it was. Godiva left no one else behind to mourn her. Husbands, family, friends: all the others had been shed, one by one, bit by bit, as she scaled the heights of virtue and the memories of intimates became increasingly inconvenient. So there was only Harriet, among the crocodile weepers at the empty graveside; only Harriet and a million bereaved admirers.
As a matter of fact, Godiva being so famous and her public so hungry, the footage she saw on the news was the first intimation she had that her mother was dead. The film was in the can and beamed into newsrooms across the world several hours before protocols could be put into place and a responsible adult sent out to tell the daughter formally. Godiva died at four thirty in the afternoon Middle Eastern time, and the story made the six o’clock news bulletin in Britain, just between tea and prep at Harriet’s third boarding school. This was a school that had some pretensions to producing children with a broader spectrum of knowledge of the world than who was related to whom and how much their fathers owned, and the six o’clock news was mandatory for everyone before prep.
Harriet can still recite every detail of the moment: how she was sitting cross-legged on the floor in the third row among her contemporaries, how she had just mastered the fifth stage of cat’s cradle and was showing it to Marcia Tennent who was sitting next to her. Her voice goes dead as she tells you the details; it’s as though she is telling them under hypnosis, as though her voice is no longer conscious, but coming from somewhere deep inside her, a place that in her waking moments is as obscured from her as it is from the rest of us.
It was a sunny day and she wanted to be out playing at being a horse in the woods behind the school. She had a huge ink stain on her fingers from where her biro had collapsed during history. Farial Prakash-Taylor, sitting in front of her, had a pair of gauzy, iridescent butterflies attached to her hair slides and she wanted to reach out and see if they would change colour when she touched them. She had a hole in her sock, hard on the calf where she had caught it on the corner of the lockers in the changing rooms; it was beginning to ladder and she knew she’d get some sort of black mark for it. The carpet in the television room was a rather attractive Morris willow pattern, faded almost to oblivion.
‘The music came on, and then I don’t remember much,’ she says. ‘There was someone screaming, and I realised it was me.’
I also remember the day Godiva died. Even in my ivory cocoon, it wasn’t possible to miss it. And besides, it was the topic of the day for our evening debating session. The evening debate was a crucial part of my education: Peter had instituted it with my mother when she was five years old, and she’d been doing it with me, on the evenings when she was at home, of course – the demands of a career like Grace’s didn’t allow her, thank the Lord, to give me quite the same amount of quality time as she got from Peter – since I was around seven. By the time I was four, everyone had acknowledged that I wasn’t quite on the same fast track as my mother had been, so everything came a little later in my upbringing than it had in hers.
The evening debate took place after supper, which was always strictly at eight o’clock for optimum digestion. My day was timetabled down to the last ten minutes. When I was eleven, around the time that Godiva died, it went thus: Six thirty a.m. get up. Six forty a.m. ten minutes’ stretching exercises. Six forty-five to five past seven a.m. breakfast (high-bran cereal, fruit, vitamin pills). Five past seven to seven fifteen a.m. dress. Seven fifteen to seven forty-five a.m. piano practice or t’ai chi, alternating days. Seven forty-five to eight thirty a.m. prescribed reading (I was, by this stage, on Goethe, Rousseau and – selected – Chaucer: I had, of course, done the entire works of Shakespeare by the age of nine). Eight thirty a.m. travel to school. Eight forty-five to twelve thirty p.m. normal lessons. Twelve thirty to two p.m. lunch (packed, of course: high-energy salad with three types of sprouted beans, lean meat or cheese, wholemeal bread, live yoghurt – how I hated that sour-milk taste, unsweetened even by honey! – fruit, vitamin and mineral supplements, echinacea, royal jelly); special dispensation to miss break and replace it with coaching in: algebra; linguistics; physics; chemistry; piano (a different lesson each weekday). Two to four p.m. normal lessons (obviously, with my special coaching, I attended certain lessons with classes even further above my age group, something which caused endless timetabling grief for my school. Nobody, however, ever complained; I was, after all, a prestige pupil). Four to four fifteen p.m. travel home. Four fifteen to four thirty p.m. free time (to include snack of wholemeal bread, salad, fruit). Four thirty p.m. coaching as above. Five thirty to six p.m. homework. Six to six thirty p.m. watch the news. Choose subject for evening debate. Six thirty to seven p.m. homework. Seven p.m. supper: lean meat, steamed vegetables, carbohydrates. Seven thirty p.m. finish homework and/or hand over to Mother for evaluation while preparing for evening debate. Eight to eight thirty p.m. evening debate
. Eight thirty to nine thirty p.m. prescribed reading: fiction, poetry, selected drama. In my twelfth year, I read the works of Jane Austen and Anthony Trollope in their entirety. I’ve never been able to read them again. Nine thirty p.m. bath, tidy bedroom, prepare uniform for following day, finish off any homework left over. Ten p.m. bed.
That was weekdays, of course. Weekends weren’t anything like as much fun.
It was inevitable that I should pick the death of Godiva Fawcett as our debate subject that night. It was the lead story on the news and, aside from anything else, I was deeply moved by what I had seen. And Grace’s reaction to my choice was equally predictable. The Anglo-Irish Agreement was in full swing at the time, after all, and we had only spent three debating periods on the subject so far.
‘Why,’ she asked when I announced my chosen topic, ‘do you believe that this is a subject worthy of discussion?’
Even for Grace, this was a pretty blunt way of opening a debate. The purpose, after all, was that I should learn to conduct discourse fluently and in full sentences on any given topic. ‘I – I thought it was very upsetting,’ I replied. ‘The only moment of death I have seen before on film was the footage of the Kennedy assassination, and I found it both distressing and moving.’
‘Both distressing and moving?’ asked my mother. ‘Can you give me an example of something that is distressing without being moving?’
Had I been older, I think I would probably have been able to reply that the sight of Margaret Thatcher’s wholesale dismissal of the miners’ distress of the year before was distressing without being moving, but at eleven I wasn’t endowed with the courage to disagree. ‘I’m sorry,’ I mumbled. I got marks out of twenty for my evening debate; it was evident that I was down to nineteen-and-a-half after a single sentence.
She waited. I continued. ‘I feel that the manner of her death will have a considerable impact on our society. According to the news reports, people are already conducting a vigil outside her house in London.’
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