Virtue by Serena Mackesy Read Free Book Online

Grace nodding modestly in her stalls seat.
    Nobel prizes are like swimming badges in our house; win one, you win them all.
    There are things, though, that my mother won’t be winning any prizes for. She won’t be winning any popularity contests, for a start. To quote the woman herself, in one of her rare interviews, in New Scientist : ‘The desire to be liked is one of the most destructive urges where original thought is concerned. Popularity is, in its very essence, the antonym of excellence.’ She won’t be winning many prizes for her sense of humour, either: one of the phrases that still echoes from my childhood, applied to other people as well as to me, is: ‘Oh, I see. You’re trying to be funny.’
    Grace Waters won’t be walking away with gongs for hospitality, warmth, empathy or even elementary psychology in the near future. She won’t be tearfully accepting accolades from the Best-Dressed Boffin Society, the Good Neighbour Trust or the Friends of the Stiletto. The National Humility Co-operative won’t be beating a path to her door, nor will the Society for Cordial Relations. And she certainly won’t be polishing any cups or shields from the Tea and Sympathy Brigade. Actually, this saviour of human life is one of the heroines of the capital punishment movement. She once referred to recidivist offenders as ‘a cancer in our society which, like all cancers, must be excised to save the body’.
    Let me tell you about my mother. She may be brilliant, she may have helped the world, she may be the person you all admire the most, but she is also the coldest person I have ever met. Cold, rational and full of contempt for anyone who fails to live up to her standards.
    My mother spent two decades trying to replicate her father’s own success. For two decades, her pet project was to create me in her own image. And to my shame, she almost succeeded.

Chapter Four
Tea and Sympathy
    Harriet always gets into these states when her mother comes back into the public eye. I know she talks like a bitch about her mother, dismisses her with a snarl, but it’s not really as simple as that. I mean, yeah, in some ways it is. Godiva was, all told, pretty dodgy on the mothering front: absent where mine was all too present, mercurial in her affections, throwing her arms around her daughter in the presence of cameras and forgetting to come back for access visits for months on end when they weren’t there, but you know, despite everything, Harriet loved her. Godiva had a way with her, a way of opening her eyes wide and confessing her weakness that could bring any child back into the fold. It’s the other people who claim that they felt the same that set Harriet off: the strangers who elbowed their way into the limelight, wept crocodile tears, claimed kinship and friendship and stole Harriet’s tragedy for their own. Harriet’s hatred of hypocrisy comes from that time, and she never really had anyone around to teach her how to hide it.
    And off he goes, my unused lover, slouching through the early summer sunshine down the path and over the lock, backpack hanging casually from one shoulder. We take turns to watch through the periscope I won in a raffle five years ago – we hardly want to go out onto the balcony and wave – as he presses the exit button and steps through the gate and is surrounded, in two seconds, by a dozen gannets with their notebooks and cameras and boxy tape recorders.
    Nigel recoils, pantomimes surprise, then he throws his long arms wide in an exaggerated shrug. Flings his head back in laughter, shakes it vigorously.
    ‘He’s talking to them,’ says Harriet in tones of horror. ‘The bugger’s talking to them!’
    I pat her arm. ‘He did say that was what he was going to do,’ I remind her.
    ‘Yes,’ she replies, ‘but there’s no need to get so pally.’
    My mate. She won’t be reasoned with.
    Then her pursed lips soften, her jaw drops ever so slightly. ‘Well, I’ll be buggered,’ she says.
    I