The Seven Sisters (10 page)

I made her some coffee – real coffee, not instant, though I didn’t use my antique wooden grinder. I have never used my antique wooden grinder. It is useless. Then I sent her on her way. I was glad to see the back of her.

It was getting dark before Sally left. It’s that time of year. The evenings are getting a little lighter now, but not very rapidly.

I think I got the better of the encounter. Sally was obliged to thank me for lunch, and when I told her to admire the view, she was obliged to admire the view. And she’d kept off the subject of sex, for most of the day, except for that Pompeian excursion, and that had been classical rather than personal. Overall, I’d given nothing away. When she had asked after my mother’s health, I had stonewalled her completely. No change there, I said. I know Andrew hopes my mother will die shortly and leave me some kind of inheritance, and Sally probably senses this. He may even have mentioned it to her. I don’t know what Andrew might tell Sally. I have no such expectations of my mother. I know more about my mother’s finances than Andrew does. Like her, they are not healthy. Nursing homes are very expensive. They devour our estates.

Sally will be able to report back to Suffolk that I live in a shabby area full of drunks and psychopaths, but if she’s any honesty in her she’ll also have to say that I seem fine, gave her a nice lunch, and have made some interesting new friends. Thank you, Anaïs.

She remembers her hysteria and fretfulness and she regrets them

Re-reading my account of Sally’s visit, I see that much of it is dictated by bravado. In truth, looking back over my behaviour in Suffolk, I have much to be ashamed about. I did not conduct myself like a lady in those last few years in Suffolk. I had small tantrums over small things and slept much in the afternoons. I behaved in a mildly
deranged and menopausal manner. I refused to help in the School and I shouted at the groundsman when he mowed down the fritillaries. I withdrew my wifely support from my husband and gazed at my handsome daughter Isobel with envy and distrust. I should not have shouted at the refuse collector, even though I think he should not have thrown the dustbin lids on the flowerbeds. I moved out of my husband’s bed and said that I preferred to sleep alone. I made the excuse that this was because I slept so badly.
Exsomnis noctesque diesque
. It is true that I slept badly. I still sleep badly. Things got worse when I stopped taking Hormone Replacement Therapy. I still have night sweats, though they should have stopped long ago. I no longer sweat during the day, but I do feel hot at night. Nobody warned me of this. Actually, it’s not really a night sweat, it’s more a night fever. I burn with heat, yet my skin is dry. I don’t know what this means.

What would have happened to me and my marriage, if Jane Richards had not drowned herself in the Lady Pond? From that death, Andrew and Anthea took life, and now they are man and wife and one flesh. I think much about drowning. My man in Wormwood Scrubs drowned his victim. He says he didn’t mean to, but I suspect he did. I know the very place. Anthea’s daughter drowned herself. I know the very place. I wade in, but only up to my knees.

The coroner had said Jane’s balance of mind was disturbed, which I guess it may well have been. I hadn’t known Jane well, although – or perhaps I mean because – she was a friend of my daughter Martha. But I had liked her, or liked what I had seen of her, poor thing. Her name was Jane, plain Jane. She wasn’t plain, she was not unattractive, but she did have an unfortunate problem. She was partially sighted, and she had a very severe squint. One of her eyes seemed to roll sideways, and it stared, as it were, right out of the side of her head. It was very disconcerting. I think an operation had gone badly wrong when she was a little girl. The School, of course, got some of its funding from the Hamilcar Henson Trust for the Blind, which made special provision for the partially sighted. That was why Jane had been sent to Holling House School in the first place. Some suggestion was made that it was Jane’s poor vision that had led her to stumble into the water. But poor vision doesn’t fill the pockets of
your school blazer with stones, does it? Poor Jane. She was quite a bright little thing. She was in my class in 3C when Andrew bullied me into teaching French Conversation, that year when Mlle Fournier went back to France in something of a hurry. I remember hearing Jane recite a fable by La Fontaine. It was the one about the timid hare, ‘
Le Lièvre et les Grenouilles
’.

That’s a long time ago now. Poor hare.

Jane’s death was hushed up, as much as was possible, and nobody blamed the School administration, or Andrew, or Anthea, or Jane’s dead father, or the School groundsman, or the pond for not having any railings around it. As far as I can remember nobody blamed anybody or anything. I think Andrew got off lightly, though of course I myself was not at all anxious for him to attract any bad publicity to himself or the School. There was a great deal of speculation about why she’d done it, but I tried not to pay too much attention to it. I didn’t listen to gossip. I think I assumed that she’d simply suffered from an aggravated bout of teenage depression. There had been talk of a love affair that went wrong, but there is always talk of a love affair that has gone wrong. Once Sally tried to hint that Jane might have thought she was pregnant, but I didn’t let her enlarge on this.

Jane drowned herself on my birthday. This was a meaningless coincidence, but the consequence of it is that I can never forget the date of her death. The fourth – or is it the fifth? – anniversary of it approaches. I remember Martha running up the lawn screaming, as Andrew and I were having breakfast. I was opening my birthday cards. I don’t get many. There was one from my daughter Ellen in Finland, which had arrived a few days earlier: I’d saved it to open on the day. And there was a card from Julia Jordan, which had arrived that very morning. I was reading her message when I heard the screams.

Julia, as I have already noted, always remembers my birthday. I’ve
never made much of a fuss about my birthday, although I’m so superstitious about numbers and always feel something significant might one year happen upon it. The only person who remembers it regularly, apart from family, is Julia, and that’s because of some kind of flashback school memory. We used to mark birthdays at St Anne’s. Cards, little presents, and an iced sponge cake with candles.

For my fourteenth birthday Julia gave me a tiny little bottle of perfume. It was of royal-blue glass, with a silver stopper. Oddly enough, I seem to have forgotten its name. It was called something like Eau de Paris, and it had a little picture of the Eiffel Tower on its label. I loved it. We weren’t allowed perfume at school but I used to keep it under my pillow at night and sniff at it secretly.

I did behave badly and sadly in Suffolk. But I don’t think Jane Richards drowned herself on my birthday to punish me. I don’t think she was thinking about me at all, or about the strange consequences her death would have for me.

Julia is coming to see me next week. She rang to fix the date. Julia is a wicked woman. I am a wicked woman. Her sins are of commission, mine of omission. Both are grave.

I wonder what numbers I shall choose when I buy my Lottery ticket, the ticket that is going to bring me untold wealth. I believe a lot of people go by their own birthdays, or by the birthdays of their children. I’ll have to think about that. Or maybe it’s better to do it on impulse. I don’t know how it works, at all. I don’t even know how many numbers there are on a ticket, or what a ticket costs. Will I dare to ask? My heart beats faster at the prospect, even as I sit here alone in my tower, and I cannot tell whether it beats faster with pleasure or with fear.

She thinks of the new things in her life

I’ve done so many things for the first time in the last year or two. Like eating a vegetable samosa in the street on the way back from the Tube station. We were taught that eating in the street was a crime. We weren’t warned specifically against eating vegetable samosas, because they hadn’t been introduced into England at that date, but we were warned against street eating. And I broke the rules.

I have also been into a pub on my own. I suppose I have been into
country pubs on my own, in the past, but always to meet somebody, or to use the Ladies’ Room, or to buy a sandwich. London pubs are very different from those Suffolk village pubs with pink walls and thatched roofs and hanging baskets of flowers and Meals of the Day and Pensioners’ Lunches. Ladbroke Grove pubs are not at all the same. I don’t know why I went in – to test myself, perhaps? Ostensibly, I went in for shelter, after getting off the bus. This was a year or so ago, now. It was pouring with rain, and I hadn’t got an umbrella. It seemed stupid to walk home getting soaked to the skin. So I went into this pub, on the corner. It’s called the Frog and Firkin, God knows why. It was horrible. The smell, the murk, and the people. A desolate conglomeration of desperate folk. I was one of them. This pub was more like a place of refuge than a place of refreshment. Aimless young men with small thin beards, a person of indeterminate sex wearing a baseball cap, a couple of old drunks, a crazed fat girl with a loud laugh. Jelly beans in a plastic container. A message saying
Have a Firkin Good Day
. Cigarette smoke. A man standing by himself at one end of the bar, talking to himself, and occasionally jerking his arm upwards in a meaningless gesture.

I smelt of wet wool. I ordered myself a tomato juice and boldly asked for some Worcester Sauce. I was offered ice. I declined it.

If I’d risked another hundred yards or two in the downpour I could have reached my Health Club and civilization. They do a good coffee in the Health Club. They know who I am in my Health Club, or at least they pretend to know who I am. They read my name off my swipe card and then wish me a good evening. It’s a world away from the Frog and Firkin. I wonder if there are any Health Club members who also frequent the Frog and Firkin?

She thinks of the many peoples of the earth

I realize now that all my life I’ve been an unthinking racist, and that I am one still. I simply cannot get used to all these foreigners in London pubs and on London streets. I don’t expect to see black people buying mineral water in supermarkets, or pints of beer in a public house. (Actually, there was only one black man in the Frog and Firkin – I think the black men drink in the pub on the opposite corner – but
you know what I mean.) Where do they get the money from? They don’t look as though they’ve got jobs. But then I haven’t got a job myself, have I? I’ve never had any money of my own, or I didn’t have until Andrew bought me off. Come to think of it (and I don’t know why I’ve never thought of this before) I never got paid when I stood in or sat in to take classes for members of staff who were off sick. It was just assumed that I would help out. I wasn’t really qualified to do anything but teach fairly basic French, but I used to fill in for Religious Knowledge sometimes, and I often used to invigilate for examinations or superintend evening prep. I even took a PE class once, and I umpired a hockey match or two. But I was never paid. I was like an old-fashioned doctor’s wife, or a vicar’s wife. I was there when needed. And now I am not needed and I am not there.

I wouldn’t teach Latin. I remember that Andrew was quite cross with me one term when Miss Phillips was off for weeks with pleurisy, and I said no, I wouldn’t take her class. I said my Latin wasn’t good enough. And it wasn’t. Latin is a serious subject. You can’t play around with Latin. I have a respect for Latin.

The lumpen boys in big boots walk the streets. The ugly, heavy-footed spotted youths, in their gashed jeans. Two of them followed me last night as I walked back from the Club. They were singing some kind of stupid jingle, and I think they were singing it at me. It went something like this:

Then they overtook me, leering back at me, to see if they’d scored a goal. Or so I fancied. Maybe I imagined the whole thing. Maybe they didn’t even notice me. I’m not very noticeable.

I sometimes think that my kind of washed-out genteel look – a look which I could not shed even if I tried – attracts a particular kind of aggression these days. The white lumpen boy ones are worse than the indifferent black boys, who do not notice me at all.

‘Lumpen’ means ragged. I read that in a book last week. I thought it meant something different. I think most of us think it means something different.

I am beginning to realize that black people come from many different kinds of social background, as well as from many different countries. I must always have known that, but in Suffolk I didn’t see enough of them to be able to begin to make distinctions. There are very smart young black people on reception at the health Club – a young woman called Tamsin who wears smartly tailored suits in strong plain dark colours, a good-looking young man called Chelsea who wears a white jacket and a red tie. They have a very pleasant manner, which I think of as faintly American, though they are not American. They come from another world from the man with dreadlocks who lives under the bridge by the howling monsters rattling their chains. They would not recognize the holy black man with the crucifix. I wonder what they would make of the elderly black woman I saw on the Tube this morning. She was sitting opposite me, tidily but cheaply dressed, reading a paperback book with a heavily laminated cover. Her boldly framed spectacles were held around her neck by a golden chain. She was elderly but not old, and she was dry and withered. It was her legs that attracted my attention. They were slim, and hideously scarred. I wondered if she had had varicose vein operations that had gone wrong. But far from hiding these once handsome legs, she was flaunting them. She was wearing a pair of semi-transparent toffee-tinted plastic shoes with high heels, of a curious elegance. The set of her ankles was superb. Now who was she, and whence had she come, and whither was she so proudly going?