Free Virtue by Serena Mackesy Page A

‘And damp. It’s below sea level, you know. The kind of cold that gets right through your skin into your bones.’
    She gives me a smile of consent under her eyelashes. ‘Godiva wouldn’t go there at all in the winter,’ says Harriet. ‘And I spent my entire childhood dodging from radiator to Aga. The minute you aren’t actually sitting on a radiator, clothes start to rot on your body and your fingers start to drop off.’
    Shahin looks up from the bain-marie . ‘Sitting on radiators? Isn’t that meant to be bad for you?’
    Harriet clucks. ‘Of course it is. Why do you think they call them stately piles?’
    Shahin pours a gallon canister of milk into a cannibal-sized saucepan, turns on the heat beneath it. ‘So, tell me. If you grown up somewhere like that, why you need to be working here?’
    ‘Oh, darling,’ she replies, ‘it doesn’t work like that. People like me never have any money. It’s all tied up in land, which you’re not allowed to sell because you’re supposed to be a guardian for the next generation or some bollocks like that.’
    He chucks five vanilla pods into the warming milk. Shahin can never quite get his head around the less-is-more philosophy. ‘No,’ he declares. ‘I doane bliv you. English peoples always saying “I got no money, I got no money,” but is not true. Is cultural thing, like when taxi driver in Egypt say “as you like” so he can see how much money you got and double it. You must have money.’
    Shahin has a directness that’s difficult to resist. Harriet never can. ‘Of course I’ve got money, doughbag,’ she replies. ‘It’s just that it’s tied up in a trust and I don’t get my hands on any of it until I’m thirty, and that’s only if the trustees approve. It’s quite a common thing, that. No one in Britain thinks their children are capable of handling money before they’re thirty.’
    He’s ripping the top of a huge bag of sugar open with a knife better suited to chopping up recalcitrant children. ‘Is no way you can get before?’
    ‘No,’ she replies. Then, ‘Well, I could get married.’
    Then we all laugh.
    ‘Maybe,’ says Shahin, ‘you need to like men a bit before you get married.’
    ‘I don’t not like men,’ she protests, ‘it’s just that I’ve never met a man who wasn’t an arsehole.’
    Shahin turns and throws her one of his specialist ‘my eyes are velvet cushions, rest on them’ soppy looks, says, ‘You are saying you doan like your Shahi’?’
    ‘Well, I’m not bloody marrying you ,’ she replies, and he gives her a flash of gold-capped horse-teeth, laughs.
    ‘Crazy chicky,’ he says, which is about the highest compliment in his vocabulary, after sonoffabeetch.
    Roy puts his head round the swing door, clears his nose. ‘Oi! Any chance of someone doing some work around here?’
    We turn. ‘What?’
    ‘Table eight are ready for their spanking,’ he barks, disappears.
    Harriet unpeels herself from the oven doors where she still naturally comes to rest despite ten years away from Belhaven, picks up her cane and her table-tennis bat and stalks towards the ‘Out’ door on her dominatrix’s heels. ‘You ready?’
    I nod, collect the blancmanges on their paper plates from the counter and fall into line ahead of her. I always go first; coming up to Harriet’s shoulder, I would never be noticed at all if I went last. We wiggle to work ourselves up to maximum velocity in our Wonderbras, check each other for inappropriate hairs, say our grace. ‘Spanking builds character,’ I tell her.
    The response comes, ‘It never did me any harm.’
    I turn as Roy drops the volume on the sound system and hits the dimmer switch, I kick the door open, and, clomping forward on my big black Caterpillar boots, shout, ‘Right! Is there a Roger Herriot in the house?’
    Harriet raises herself up and inhales until the buttons on her blouse groan under the stress.
    ‘Have you been a very naughty boy?’ she asks.
    ‘Yes.’