Chapter 13 Serena #2
Ben nudges her shoulder and points to a glass cabinet containing a carved wooden Indonesian goddess, open-mouthed and wide-eyed, painted red and snarling fearsomely.
‘Looks like Jarvis,’ he says, sniggering at his own joke. She shrugs him off.
She really needs to deal with the Jarvis issue. He’s texting her multiple times a day. The texts are decidedly crude in nature, which disturbs her.
‘When can we next fuck?’ he’d messaged at nine-thirty this morning. She hadn’t replied, then at midday he’d followed up with ‘Don’t tease me’ and her least favourite emoji – the asymmetric winking face with a sticking-out tongue. Then, at 5 p.m., just as she was getting ready: ‘I’m hard. Help me.’
She had been buttoning up her silk blouse at the time, so snapped a quick picture of her boobs in a lacy blue bra to keep him quiet. There was silence over text for several minutes, which Serena didn’t want to think about. Then – ping! – ‘Take the bra off.’
She slid off the bra, snapped another photo.
Her boobs were tiny. Even when she was pregnant, she’d only gone up to a B-cup.
She used to hate her flat chest but was now grateful for the fact her breasts hadn’t sagged with age.
With a bit of artful lighting, she made it look like she had cleavage and pressed send.
‘Good girl,’ Jarvis typed back.
She relaxed as the beast slunk away.
The next room is filled with religious iconography – Virgin Marys on ancient diptychs holding green-faced babies in lapis lazuli robes – and leaves her cold.
She attempts to keep her mind focused enough to read some of the information panels.
Heat engulfs her lower back and her cheeks.
She stands very still to allow the hot flash to pass.
Her GP has inserted a coil and given her oestrogen gel but she can’t yet get the dosage right.
The sweat presses against her face, moistening her hairline.
She breathes in to the count of four, then out again until the heat recedes.
It is as Serena is looking at a fifteenth-century etching of witches that it happens.
A splintering, crashing sound. She jumps.
Her first thought is that the museum’s vaulted glass ceilings have smashed.
Ben grabs her hand. The room fills with people wearing balaclavas.
They are shouting. She can’t make out the words.
She thinks they must be terrorists and braces herself for a suicide bomb.
I am going to die, she thinks. And then, with total clarity: is this what Fliss felt like when she drowned?
An urgent need to empty her bladder. She ignores it. Ben pulls at her hand but she finds she cannot move. She is frozen to the spot, clamped to the concrete just like Lilith.
Suddenly, she’s pushed into with such force that she drops Ben’s hand and stumbles, catching her hip on the corner of a picture frame. A man glares at her through the holes in his balaclava with blazing disgust.
‘Get out of the way!’ he shouts. He is followed by the rest of the group – there must be a dozen of them at least – chanting a repetitive phrase.
‘End fossil fuel!’ they shout. ‘End fossil fuel!’
Two of them have their fists held high. So they’re not Islamic terrorists, she thinks.
It’s the eco-protest group she’s been reading about on her phone: a group of them recently superglued themselves to a portrait of Winston Churchill in the Houses of Parliament.
Another set erected tents at the Oxford Circus intersection and then lay down across the tarmac so that the traffic stalled for several days.
Next to her, Ben is agitated.
‘Jesus Christ,’ he says, his face grim. Despite his time in the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, Ben has never had much patience for what he calls ‘the hippy dippy brigade’.
He thinks reports of global warming are exaggerated and insists that climate change is simply part of human history, frequently citing facts about the Ice Age gleaned from one of his favourite right-wing podcasts.
It drives Cosima mad, Serena knows. Their eldest daughter used to have a picture of Greta Thunberg as her screensaver.
For her last birthday, Cosima had refused presents, asking them instead to donate money to victims of a mudslide in India.
Serena had dutifully arranged the PayPal transfer.
She wishes Cosima could enjoy herself more.
Serena’s own teenage years were full of posh boys and society balls and the heavy scent of Body Shop White Musk.
She longs for her daughter to be more normal, less troubled.
She worries about her. Life would be easier for Cosima if she were more able to compromise.
The protesters are still chanting, still holding their clenched fists aloft. It has now tipped into the farcical and has the feel of an amateur dramatics production.
One of the figures – slighter in stature than Serena’s assailant – stands in front of the statue of Lilith.
‘We call upon every principled and peaceful citizen to rise with us,’ he says. ‘Our government has to tell the truth by declaring a climate and ecological emergency and has to act now to halt biodiversity loss and reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2028.’
‘Oh for goodness’ sake,’ an elderly man wearing a three-piece suit is saying. ‘This isn’t going to help.’
‘Do go home,’ says another guest.
The curator is ineffectually trying to usher the guests through to the next room and asking the protesters to talk ‘like reasonable adults’. Serena, finally able to move again, follows Ben towards the exit. As they turn to leave, one of the protesters takes out a fire extinguisher.
Where’s the fire, Serena thinks automatically, as the protester removes the pin and sets off the extinguisher.
There is a hissing sound but instead of white foam, a flume of orange arcs over their heads, splattering the clothes of the guests and the walls and the cabinets and the Indonesian goddesses and then, with the nozzle pointed even higher, it reaches spider-like Lilith on the wall above.
Within seconds, her dark bronze muscles are coated in orange paint.
The curator shrieks and rushes to press a red button that sets off a security alarm. Serena, rooted to the spot, watches as a woman tries to wipe orange rivulets off her white Chanel jacket.
‘Come on,’ Ben says. ‘We need to get out of here.’
He manhandles her through the melee. In the confusion, an abandoned canapé tray is knocked over.
Automatically, Serena stoops to pick it up.
As she does so, she catches sight of a pair of Doc Marten boots.
She wouldn’t have noticed them otherwise, would never have thought to look down, but there, amid the broken glass and the messy smatter of paint, she sees them.
A pair of scuffed Doc Marten boots. Orange laces.
She knows these boots. She knows these laces.
‘Cosima?’ she says, her voice shaking.
A balaclava-ed head turns. Her daughter’s coal-black eyes stare back at her and blink.
Her stomach twists in on itself.
She senses her spine grow rigid with fear. She is so scared for her child in this moment that the terror engulfs her, sticking to her like tar.
Her daughter.
Unmistakably Cosima.
Her child.
The one she has known the longest – or thought she has.
The fear trickles through her, shape-shifting into anger.
Because now Serena understands that she doesn’t know Cosima – not at all, not even a little bit – and that this not knowing is Cosima’s betrayal.
It is Cosima’s lies. It is Cosima choosing to turn her back on her family and burn their certainties down.
How dare she? Serena thinks. How dare she do this to us?
The affront she feels is complicated. It has its roots in a muscle memory of order, of how things should be, of the structure and systems Serena has spent her life in service of.
This chaotic protest, with its ugly self-importance and its naive belief that the world can be changed simply if one shouts loudly enough, stands in direct contradiction to everything she has been raised to believe.
And hovering above Serena’s disgust like a mutating cloud of flies is a twisting, turning anger directed at Cosima for believing she knows better.
You have no idea, Serena wants to tell her. You have to play the game. You can’t just smash everything apart like this. It doesn’t work that way.
Because Cosima can’t be right. If she is, it means Serena is wrong. And then her whole existence is a sham. She won’t allow it.
Serena feels a hand grab her shoulder.
‘Come on,’ Ben is saying, pulling her roughly away.
‘It’s Cosima,’ she tells him.
‘I know. It’s why we have to get the fuck out of here.’
‘She lied to us,’ Serena says. Her fury seeds itself as she speaks the words. ‘She must have lied to us so many times.’
‘Not now,’ Ben says.
‘She’s making a mockery of us. What are we going to do?’
‘We’ll sort it.’
She looks at him then, in the midst of the rush of people scrambling to make sense of what has happened, and she notices that although he is aggravated, there is a conspicuous absence of surprise.
‘Did you know?’ she asks. ‘Did you know she was doing this?’
‘Yes,’ he replies. ‘I was briefed about it last week. We need to go, Serena! Before it sinks the entire campaign.’
‘But …’ She grasps for words that seem strangely elusive. ‘Ben. She could have been killed.’
He scoffs. ‘Hardly.’
Serena feels a febrile lightness in her body, as though she is falling through space.
Ben knew about Cosima and didn’t tell her.
The treachery stings. If the situation had been reversed, she knows she would have told him.
Clearly they have some secret alliance and Serena isn’t trusted by either of them.
Are they intent on laughing at her? What other secrets do they nurture?
How many other lies have they told to keep her quiet?
They must think she’s a fool. An untrustworthy, stupid fool who no longer deserves their intimacy or their respect, even after these long decades of effort, squeezing herself dry of maternal and wifely love.
Serena has tried. She has tried to save face, and all they have done is throw it back in hers.
Without beauty, without family, without the Fitzmaurice belonging that guards itself against the outside world, what, now, is the point of her? Do they even care?
Ben bundles her out of the museum. The reason he needs to leave is not some chivalrous desire to protect his wife but because he knows that if the press get hold of this, it will be the endgame.
If people find out his daughter is an eco-activist who vandalises national treasures and causes upheaval and disruption for the everyday Brit, he’ll never get to be prime minister.
That is more important to him than anything else.
Fliss once told Serena that Ben’s childhood ambition was to become ‘emperor of the universe’.
He’s probably been watching too much Star Wars, Fliss had said, and at the time, Serena had laughed along with her.
She had thought she was in on the joke, that she and Ben were a team.
But now she sees it was never a joke, not really.
Now she sees that he didn’t – doesn’t – consider her his confidante or his equal.
She follows Ben out onto the street, where he hails a cab and shoves her in it. She catches her ankle on the door. The cut starts to bleed, but he doesn’t notice.
‘Tufton Street please, mate,’ Ben says.
In the taxi, she scans through her recent memories of his half-truths and obfuscations.
The affair with Violet. The row he had with Cosima at the funeral, which he told her point-blank she was imagining.
The fact he hadn’t even informed her he was running for leader but had confided everything in Jarvis.
The way he didn’t want her to look at his phone – what incriminating things would she find there?
All her previous certainties collapse like dominoes.
Whatever and whoever else he lied about and to, she had always laboured under the misapprehension that he never lied to her.
Not about the important stuff. Not about their family.
Because the Fitzmaurices stuck together, didn’t they?
She understands now the extent of her delusion. He doesn’t care about protecting her. He cares only about his own advancement. And she can never be Lilith. She is fated always to be Eve.