Next to her, Ben stands with a champagne flute in one hand, checking his phone with the other. Ever since he launched his campaign, his phone has become like an extension of his arm: a mechanical adjunct that enables him to monitor the erratic sway of public opinion and private promises. He has an official Instagram account now. His younger staff are trying to entice him onto TikTok but so far, thankfully, he’s resisted. She watches out of the corner of her eye as he opens WhatsApp and texts a photograph of the two of them taken on the steps outside to his social media manager, a young but thankfully unattractive (the relief, when she met her!) girl called – of all things – Kennedy. Ben hasn’t asked Serena whether she minds this picture being used. If he had, Serena would have told him to pick another one where her hips don’t look as wide and insisted he slap a Paris filter on there. Ben doesn’t understand filters or judicious editing of exposure and contrast. Men don’t need to bother. When Ben goes grey, he’ll be a silver fox. Serena’s grey hairs, by contrast, are assiduously dyed back to blonde at considerable expense. If she goes grey, she’ll be a witch.
‘Actually,’ she says, ‘do you mind if I just send that picture to Cressy? Get her to work her magic?’
‘Sure,’ Ben says and she can tell he thinks she’s being unnecessarily demanding.
Her younger daughter has turned out to be a whizz at photo editing and has recently introduced her mother to the joys of FaceTune. She can shrink a bloated stomach, remove crow’s feet and make unflattering shadows disappear.
Serena takes Ben’s phone to forward the image to Cressida.
‘What are you doing?’ he whispers, grabbing it back. ‘I’ll send it to her.’
Curious that he doesn’t let her look at his phone. She imagines what incriminating messages she might find there but decides not to care.She watches the woman in purple come to the end of her speech. There is polite applause and then a rush to abandon glasses. The crowd begins to walk up the curving staircase and into the exhibition.
The entrance is lined with a large canvas graffitied with a giant word cloud. ‘Empowerment’ is slashed in magenta across the right-hand corner. ‘Bitch’ is splattered across the centre, right next to ‘Strong’ and, in vivid red, ‘Warrior’.
The curator, dressed in a black skirt and waistcoat, stands beside the canvas and starts to tell them it was commissioned by the British Museum. Participants from around the country were asked what words they associated with the term ‘woman’ and these were then painted onto the canvas by a transgender artist known simply as ‘Ghost’.
‘As you can see,’ the curator says, gesturing towards the virulent mish-mash of colour, ‘our perceptions of womanhood are multi-faceted and complex.’
‘Give me strength,’ Ben mutters.
‘Shh.’
It’s not that Serena wants to listen but, at the same time, she finds herself unsettled by the art piece. Her eyes focus on a single word in block capitals in the bottom left-hand corner: ‘SLUT’. Odd, isn’t it, that there is no comparable word for a man?
‘And now, if you’d like to follow me into the exhibition itself,’ the curator says, ‘it’s just this way. The first thing you’ll see is a sculpture of Lilith, believed to be the first wife of Adam – before Eve. She was banished from the Garden of Eden for not obeying him. Adam took another wife in revenge – Eve – who, according to Genesis, was made from Adam’s rib to be his subservient companion.’
The curator gives a thin smile.
‘Jewish folklore views Lilith as a demonic presence and amulets and incantations were once used to counter her sinister powers. She was said to prey on pregnant women and infants. The Irish novelist James Joyce called her “the patron of abortions”.’
Ben murmurs in Serena’s ear, ‘She sounds like a right laugh.’
‘And yet,’ the curator says, ‘her only crime seems to have been disobedience to a man.’
She gestures upwards towards the ceiling and halfway up the wall, Serena sees it: a crouching sculpture of a sinewy female form, hunkered down as if ready to launch herself into space. From this angle, Lilith looks as if she might jump right onto them, wreaking vengeance against all who have wronged her.
Serena is impressed by the physicality of the bronze. She imagines being brave enough to flee the Garden of Eden, screaming with great righteousness into the night sky. She imagines what it might be like to refuse to surrender to what is expected of you. She thinks of Cosima, her brave, brilliant daughter, who cares much less than Serena does about what everyone else thinks. She’d like the story of Lilith.
When Cosima was ten, they had taken a family trip to Egypt. There had been long days of guided tours to ancient temples and tombs, the starkness of yellow sandstone pressed against a sky of startling blue. They’d brought nannies for the younger three and stayed in a pink villa on the outskirts of Luxor where the swimming pool was edged with palm trees. Serena had thought Cosima would want to spend her days tanning on a sun-lounger, but she had insisted on coming on all the tours.
‘I like it, Mummy,’ she had said. ‘It’s so different.’
Serena had watched Cosima as she wandered through the monolithic grandeur of Karnak Temple, neck craned so that she didn’t miss a single detail of the hieroglyphic representations of divine entities, and had been amazed that this was her daughter. Cosima was engrossed: capable of asking polite and perceptive questions of their guide at an age when Serena’s attention would have been scattered and unfocused. Back at the villa each evening, Cosima would describe what they had seen to her siblings. She remembered every element: the winged falcon, denoting protection; the sun god Amun-Ra with his double-feathered crown; the horned cow Hathor, who represented motherhood and kindness and who was shown suckling babies from her udder. Cosima was particularly taken with the female pharaoh, Queen Hatshepsut,who had insisted on representing herself as a man in statues in order to emphasise her dominance after stealing power from her stepson. Hatshepsut, born of common blood, had claimed to be the daughter of Amun-Ra in order to convince Egyptians of her right to take the throne.
‘So you can just invent yourself?’ Cosima had asked, taking her mother’s hand as they walked through Queen Hatshepsut’s temple.
‘What do you mean, darling?’
‘If you don’t like who you are, or people don’t accept you for who you are, you just tell a story about who you want to be.’
‘I suppose so,’ Serena said, but she hadn’t really taken it in. She had been distracted in those days, still getting used to the idea that her role as a mother now seemed to supersede anything else she might have been. Her identity was no longer her own.
So she had ignored Cosima’s upturned face and the constellation of pale brown freckles forming across the bridge of her nose, and she had ignored the pleading in her daughter’s eyes for parental approval and she had carried on walking through the temple, hugging her bag closer to her chest, protecting it against imagined thieves.
Now, remembering that moment, Serena wonders if Cosima is writing her own version of Hatshepsut’s story: creating a different life for herself, outside the confines of her own family. Perhaps Serena has pushed her away? Perhaps it is her fault Cosima is now so sad and angry?
I must speak to her, Serena thinks. I must try. She makes a promise to herself that she’ll call Cosima tomorrow. She’ll stop being so critical and listen, as Fliss would have done. Listening does not come naturally to Serena, who is more frequently caught up in self-reflection, but she will attempt to get better at it. With this decision made, Serena feels calmer – brighter, somehow – and walks on to the next museum display.
