Despite her general indifference to a life of philanthropy, Elizabeth had spent a lot of time doing Good Works recently, and at least it filled her days, stopping her parents from asking when she would get a real job, for since graduating with what she called ‘a strong third’ in sociology, she’d been living under George and Beverley’s roof and was showing no interest whatsoever in pursuing a career of her own.
‘When I was your age,’ Beverley pointed out later that evening as they sat around the kitchen island eating dinner, ‘I was working for the Department of Education.’
‘And I was a rookie journalist,’ added George.
‘Yes, we know the story of your terrible, early struggles,’ said Elizabeth, pushing her bouillabaisse around her bowl with a spoon. ‘You don’t have to repeat it for the zillionth time.’ Wilkes had recently been discussing the idea of both of them going vegan, and she wondered whether she should stockpile meat in the freezer in case that day ever arrived. Although there was a McDonald’s near by that she could always slip out to in case of emergencies.
‘I’m just saying that we were both gainfully employed,’ said Beverley. ‘No one handed us anything on a platter.’
‘Your father left you an inheritance of about five million pounds,’ said Elizabeth, looking at her mother. ‘And you, Dad, went to Eton and Oxford and immediately got a job at the BBC. So let’s not pretend that you’re a couple of working-class kids made good.’
‘Be that as it may,’ said George, ‘your mother is right. With or without her inheritance or my father’s insistence that I be educated at an actual university rather than, I don’t know, a polytechnic with notions, we still would have made a success of our lives. And I, for one, did not bring up my children never to do a day’s work, live off family money and generally be parasites on society. I’m not Prince Andrew.’
‘It’s not that I don’t want to work,’ said Elizabeth, ‘I just don’t think that it’s the right thing for me. I can’t be stifled, you know? I’m not the kind of person who can just take the Tube into some office every morning. Like, I’m really creative and individual and spiritual. I need time just to do me.’
‘To do you?’ asked George, frowning. ‘I don’t understand what that means.’
‘To do me,’ she repeated. ‘You know, you do you, and I’ll do me.’
‘Does any of this make sense to you?’ asked George, turning to his wife.
‘No, but what I want to say is this.’ Beverley folded her arms and gave her daughter the outraged stare she’d perfected over many years of feeling disparaged. ‘I find it a little offensive that you have the audacity to call yourself a creative. You don’t create anything. As a novelist, I’m the creative one in the family.’
‘You’re not a novelist. You have a ghost.’
‘I come up with the stories!’ snapped Beverley, who was highly sensitive to any accusation that her work wasn’t entirely her own.
‘Actually, now that you mention it, I’ve thought about doing some writing,’ said Elizabeth. ‘But I’m just not sure that anyone would really understand my work. I have this, you know, like, this depth?’ She paused and looked at both her parents in turn, waiting for them to agree.
‘Was that a question or a statement?’ asked George. ‘Your voice rose at the end of it and yet it didn’t seem as if you were asking us anything. Hence my confusion.’
‘I think I might make a brilliant poet,’ she said. ‘I live like a poet, don’t you think?’
‘Only in the sense that you contribute nothing to society,’ replied George.
‘Speaking as a mother,’ said Beverley, a phrase she liked to employ whenever possible, even if it had no direct connection to what she was saying, ‘there’s no money in poetry. I mean, when was the last time a poem was made into a film?’
‘It’s just … poetry really speaks to me,’ said Elizabeth.
‘I have never seen you read a book of poems in your life,’ said George. ‘I’d be less surprised if I came home to find you saying you wanted to be a kangaroo.’
‘That’s so unfair, Dad,’ said Elizabeth, banging both fists on the table, something she’d been doing since her earliest years and which had, for a long time, brought some terrific results. ‘I don’t identify as a kangaroo. But I do live for poetry. I really do. It has soul. And I’m a very soulful person. I’m really in touch with my inner child. Wilkes told me that.’
‘Yes, but Wilkes is a moron.’
‘He’s not a moron! He’s a humanitarian!’
‘Of course he is, dear,’ said Beverley. ‘But you might tell the humanitarian that there are plenty of Fairtrade deodorants on the market if he’d like to give one a try.’
‘You say that you live for poetry,’ said George. ‘Fine. Then tell me this. Who’s your favourite poet?’
Elizabeth thought about it for quite some time. The kitchen clock’s second hand could be heard moving around the dial, sounding almost embarrassed to be the focus of so much attention. ‘Emily Dickinson,’ she said eventually. ‘Oh my God, I love Emily Dickinson.’
‘Every sixth-former throwing up her lunch and cutting her arms with a compass says she loves Emily Dickinson,’ said Beverley with a sigh. ‘So unoriginal.’
‘Quote for me one of her poems, any of her poems,’ said George. ‘Do that and I will write you out a cheque for a thousand pounds right now.’
‘Oh, it’s all about memory, is it?’ she asked. ‘It’s all about forcing beautiful words into my head and then reciting them back to you like a parrot?’
‘Ten thousand pounds,’ said George, upping the ante. ‘A hundred thousand. But my offer expires in three minutes, so it’s up to you.’
‘Fine,’ she said. ‘I’ll do it.’ She paused for a moment, then stood up, closed her eyes, and adopted a tragic voice while extending both her palms out to her parents in the manner of a statue of the Virgin Mary, or perhaps the Little Matchgirl, while saying the following:
‘When Death arrived – I was not home –
I’d gone to town – to buy some socks –
He rang the bell – He called my name –
But that’s just Death – He never knocks –’
‘That’s not Emily Dickinson,’ said George, rolling his eyes. ‘That’s just something you made up on the spur of the moment. You’re not getting a penny out of me for that.’
‘Yes, but at least it proves that I’m a poet,’ she said. ‘And you can keep your money, I don’t want it. God, I hate capitalists!’
‘Says the girl who lives in a multimillion-pound house in Belgravia,’ remarked Beverley. ‘Speaking as a mother, I wonder that you can bear to stay here at all with such high principles. If you really wanted to show us, I suppose you could always move out and find a place of your own, like most other girls your age do.’
‘If you want me to move out, you only have to say so.’