The Seven Sisters (16 page)

That’s Dryden.

Day Lewis has ‘their wide mouths only whimpered’, and Jackson Knight has ‘others raised a whispering voice; but their attempt at a battle-cry left their mouths idly gaping’. David West’s new prose version says that they ‘lifted up their voice and raised a tiny cry, which started as a shout from mouth wide open, but no shout came’.

I remember that we all found that phrase ‘a tiny cry’ very telling. We talked about it for some time. We spoke of nightmares, and trying to cry out in our sleep. We talked about sleep-talking and sleepwalking, and what the ancients believed about dreams and prophecies and the gates of ivory and the gates of horn.

‘I talk in my sleep a lot,’ said Mrs Barclay. ‘Apparently I cry out the
strangest things. Mr Barclay says I sometimes shout out things like “Earth, roll on!” or “Mother, sleep on!” Once I yelled out, “Death in the tower! Death in the tower!” I think that’s why I was so interested in those poor Greeks and their gaping jaws. Though mine isn’t a tiny cry, he says. He says it’s sometimes quite loud. It wakes him up. And the funny thing is that I can never remember what it is that I’ve been dreaming about.’

We were both laughing a lot by this point, and in my excitement I rashly bit on a pistachio nut. I felt yet another sliver of that risky tooth splinter and let out not a tiny cry but quite a loud one.

Cynthia has recommended a dentist. She says he is divine. He’s expensive, she says, but divine. She’s given me his number. I wonder if I can afford him?

I was feeling quite high as I walked home, despite my broken tooth. I’ve promised to suggest to Anaïs that we include Cynthia in our next Queensway outing. Perhaps Cynthia will be my third London friend. That would make my life more complete and more symmetrical.

She meets a divine stranger in the terrible shop and ponders on his question

The man in the Eurogroceries Minimarket will not become my friend, but he did speak to me. In London people do not speak to one another much. He spoke to me as I waited at the checkout with my meagre old-lady purchases of two bananas and a grapefruit and some kitchen roll. He spoke to me in French. This is very unusual. How did he know that I would understand French?

‘
Madame
,’ he said to me, very formally, as I rummaged in the bottom of my bag, with clumsy fingers, like an old lady, for an elusive five-penny piece. ‘
Madame, pensez-vous souvent au passé?
’

I turned to look at him. He was tall, dark and dark-skinned, with a weather-beaten, pocked and furrowed face. He had once been handsome. He looked like an ageing
nouvelle vague
star of the ’60s – the unkempt Belmondo roué look. We do not see many people of this style in our neighbourhood. He was unkempt but not ill-dressed. He was not a street person. Though I would have replied to him anyway, even if he had been a street person.

‘
Oui, de temps en temps
,’ I said.

Then he said something that I did not catch – I think he may have said that he thought of the past more and more frequently, but I am not sure, and I would not like to misrepresent his important message by putting the wrong words in his mouth. I replied, saying something vague and indistinct, as I abandoned my search for the silver fivepence and handed over a five-pound note. Then, looking at me with a Gallic curiosity which in my youth I would have taken for gallantry, he said, ‘
Madame, j’ai cinquante-neuf ans
.’

I smiled, faintly, and told him my own age. It seemed a fair exchange. He nodded, as though that were the end of the conversation. And I pocketed my change, and my receipt, and nodded in return, and went on my way.

Since I got home, I have been thinking deeply about this strange incident. Who was he, and why did he speak to me? In my youth, I would have thought that he was making a sexual overture, and I feel it is possible that there was something in my appearance that called forth his address. I was better dressed than usual: I had dressed up for Cynthia and Holland Park. And an afterglow of our conversation and our cocktail may have hung around me.

I think he told me his age because he wanted to say that if he had been younger and I had been younger, he would have made a pass at me. He was remembering his own past, when he did such things. He was wondering if I remembered such a past too. He was regretting, for both of us, that we were no longer young.

I read in the newspaper last week an article about threatened species of flora. There was an account of the ghost orchid, which, the newspaper claimed, is so rare that it is seen only once in every fifteen years. (I suspect this is an exaggeration, but that is what the article claimed. Newspapers are not very reliable sources of information.) It is shy, and flowers only after a wet spring, and it grows deep in the beech woods. You must search for it in the undergrowth by torchlight. It is a pale yellow-mauve and it is solitary and nobody knows where it will be seen next, so you may search for it for years, indeed for a lifetime, without success. It disappears and reappears without warning or reason. Its ghostly pallor glimmers in the depths. I will
not see it flower amidst the urban garbage by the towpath of the Grand Union Canal.

Perhaps the French gentleman saw a blossoming of my ghostly self. And I, in my turn, saw his ghostly spirit in flower.

I have been looking at my Virgil, and re-reading the passage where Aeneas thinks he sees Dido in the Underworld, but is not sure, in the moonlight, if it is she. She flees him, as once he fled her. The Dryden translation is the best. It is sublime.
Stay, stay your Steps, and listen to my Vows: ’Tis the last Interview that Fate allows!
But she will not stay. She shuns him, and hides in the forest and the shades of night.

And I have been remembering those evenings at St Anne’s when we did what we called our ‘prep’. I used to enjoy doing French translation. There was a pleasure in unravelling the grammar, in finding the right word. There was a deep pleasure in the correspondences. Cynthia Barclay is right. There is a lasting pleasure in the exercise of the mind. How strange that she should have discovered that, through all her vicissitudes. She does not look at all like an intellectual.

One cannot blame Jane Richards for being terminally bored by La Fontaine. I would have preferred to have been allowed to teach Verlaine or Baudelaire.

I look out of the window. It is a clear night. There is a three-quarter moon lying drunkenly on its side. The glowing and luminous city calls from its dark heart. Tomorrow afternoon I will take my walk by the canal. I will not see the rare ghost orchid, but at this time of year the undergrowth has already begun to sprout over the polystyrene, and I if I walk far enough westwards I may see coltsfoot or even celandine. Perhaps there will be groundsel. Across the canal, in the trees that grow in the great grounds of the Victorian cemetery, I have fancied that I have seen great clumps of mistletoe hanging. Suspended, like the Sibyl in her wicker basket.

The mistletoe, like the ghost orchid, is magical, although it is not rare. It does not grow from the ground. It takes its green blood from a strange host. It is a humble plant with a mystic glamour. It protects against witchcraft and the Evil Eye. It is green in the cold midwinter. Its berries are yellow-white and succulent and fleshly, and its pallor is
of the other world. When its sap dries, its dry leaves turn bright gold in death. The doves of Venus perched upon the mistletoe. It is the Golden Bough that leads us safely to the Underworld. These strange plants are plants, and no plants, and they live between the species. They are life, and they are death. I neither live nor die.

She seeks salvation in a plastic bag

So I went for a walk by the Grand Union Canal this afternoon, as I said I would. I set off from Sainsbury’s, and walked westwards, past the gasworks and the cemetery and the slumbering trains of Eurostar. It seems to be too early in the year for groundsel, but the coltsfoot is in flower. The herons watch the water. I heard on the radio that many of them are suffering from some new kind of bone disease. It is not known what causes this disease.

I was a little cast down on my walk, although I like to be by the water’s edge. I was feeling well yesterday, cheered by my rediscovery of Mrs Jerrold and Mrs Barclay, and now I am feeling not so well. The sight of the shopping trolleys piled in the water of the canal beneath the bridge depressed me. And all the rubbish floating in the water reminded me of that afternoon I have tried to forget. I was really depressed then. I admit I was depressed. I will write it down, as it was.

It was a few months after I first arrived in London, when I was at my lowest ebb. The excitement of arrival had worn off, my brave and falsely high spirits had sustained several assaults, and I had not yet learnt how to cope with the length of the day. And the weather was appalling. It was June, but every day it rained. You may remember that year of rain. The afternoons were dark like winter. Water lay in puddles on the pavements, and in the gutters flowed. The sky was grey. From my high room I watched the grey clouds trudge and dredge across the high grey sky. I felt like a prisoner, up there in my tower. So I forced myself to go out. It was not easy. It took some courage to go out at all. It is easier to give up. Though that is not easy, either.

I must congratulate myself upon my courage, for no one else will.

It was raining steadily, on that afternoon nearly two years ago, but I thought it might clear up. I took the Tube, to Great Portland Street – it is a direct line, the purple-pink line again – and then I crossed the Euston Road and walked northwards towards the Rose Garden in Regents Park. I was wearing trousers, and the hems of them got wet. They soaked up the water, up to the knees, as I splashed my way through the standing puddles. The silky artificial fabric of my trousers seemed to have some kind of unfortunate capillary action. I must have looked ridiculous. The trousers were of a pale blue shade and the dark wet blue crept upwards, to the knees. My shame was visible. Only the mad walk in such weather, beneath such skies. The rest of my body was dry, as I was wearing an old green long lightweight country jacket. I must have looked a fright, but there was nobody there to see me. The English do walk in the rain, but not in London. It continued to rain, unremittingly. It lightened, then it strengthened, then it lightened again, but it did not go away.

I was feeling desperate. What was it to me that the roses bloomed and the herbaceous borders blossomed? I plodded on, as the wet crept upwards. From time to time I looked at my watch, but the hands did not move. They had stuck. Time had come to an end. I walked through the dark underwater depths. Eventually I reached the large formal round pond at the end of the avenue leading from the Rose Garden. There was nobody on any of the benches. Rain fell on the wet statuary. A white plastic bag was floating in the shallow water of the fountain.

The plastic bag offended me. It seemed to sum up my despair. It floated, half submerged, yet not sinking, in miserable suspension.

I decided to try to remove it. My natural recoil from dirty street objects was mediated by the sense that this watery bag must have been washed clean by its immersion. Whatever filth it might have contained must have been washed away into or at least been diluted by the fountain waters. So I resolved to fish it out. I perched on the low parapet of the fountain’s rim, and tried to stretch for it, but it was just beyond my reach. I looked for a stick, but I could not see anything suitable in that trim, well-tended public garden. I reached
again, but in vain. Great drops fell on me, on the bag, on the pool’s surface. I did not want to abandon my small project. I looked around me, but could see nobody. I was wet anyway, so what did it matter? I took off my sandals, and rolled up my wet trousers, and waded in. The water was shallow, and within two steps I had the bag in my grasp. I returned with it to the stone lip of the fountain, and clambered out. As I clambered out, I looked around again, guiltily, and saw that by now somebody was watching me. An elderly black man, muffled up in raincoat and hood, had arrived upon the scene, and was standing, hunched, as a witness. The expression upon his face was of unutterable dejection. It was not for this that he had come to the Mother Country. He had not been born here. I don’t know how I knew that, but I knew it. I felt that we were kindred spirits, but I could neither speak nor smile. Solemnly, clutching the bag, I thrust my feet back into my wet slippery sandals, and then made my way across the gravel path to an elaborate black and gold ornamental dustbin, where I deposited the bag.

I felt better for this pointless act. I can recall it, now, without desperation.

But, looking back, this was a low point.

Things are better now. Aren’t they?

She sees the girl with the lipoma crying and offers her succour

Things may be better for me, but not for that poor girl with what I hoped was only a lipoma. When I went to the Club this evening, I saw her again for the first time since I overheard that sad interchange about the lump in her back. She looked less plump than she had, but she didn’t look as though she had lost weight through exercise. She looked poorly.

‘Poorly.’ That was a word my mother used to use. I don’t know if it’s a regional word, or a word still in common usage. Spellchecker doesn’t mind it, so I guess it still exists.

The young woman was struggling to take off her tracksuit bottoms and sighing heavily as she did so, as though everything she did was too much of an effort for her. Getting dressed or undressed shouldn’t be an effort, at her age, though I confess at my age I sometimes find
it so. I looked the other way, because it is rude to stare, and continued with my own toilette, which consisted at this stage of stripping down to my bathing suit in order to set off for a swim. She was sitting down by her locker when I left her, groping in her tote bag.

I didn’t swim for long because the pool was uncomfortably full. I did just six lengths, trying not to bump into people, then a couple of minutes in the whirlpool. I didn’t stay long in the whirlpool either, because I was joined in it by an amazingly fat man who seemed to displace a lot of water. I have nothing against sitting in a whirlpool with a strange man but I think anyone would have agreed he was rather an extreme case. He looked like a Native American chief, but I don’t suppose he can have been. We don’t have many Native Americans around us, in our neighbourhood. He was wrapped up in a sort of sarong. I don’t suppose that’s any more unhygienic than bathing trunks. I hope he wasn’t offended when I got out almost as soon as he got in. I wouldn’t like to cause offence.