The Seven Sisters (2 page)

I’ve just read what I wrote yesterday, about the Health Club. I am quite interested in the bleating, whining, resentful, martyred tone I seem to have adopted. I don’t remember choosing it, and I don’t much like it. I wonder if it will stick. I will try to shake it off. I will try to disown it.

I didn’t go to the Health Club this evening. I don’t go every evening. Tonight was my Wormwood Scrubs evening. My man complained about the meatballs. My Wormwood Scrubs man is a murderer. He and a gang of his friends raped a woman and drowned her in the Grand Union Canal. He complains a lot about the food in Wormwood Scrubs. He says he’s thinking of pretending to become a vegetarian. I suppose pretending to become a vegetarian and becoming a
vegetarian come to the same thing, don’t they? He is a lost soul. And so, perhaps, am I.

I never thought I would join a Health Club. I never thought I would find myself living alone in a flat in West London.

The Health Club wasn’t a Health Club when I joined it. It was a College of Further Education during the daytime, and in the evenings it held adult evening classes in subjects like German Conversation and Caribbean Cookery and Information Technology and Poetry of the First World War and Modernism in the Visual Arts. But you could tell the demand for that kind of programme was falling. We were an ageing group of students. Even the computer students were old – I guess the course was for slow elderly beginners, inevitably a dying breed. I was one of the younger students in my class. Now that the building has been transformed into a Health Club, to care for the body rather than the mind, the age ratio has been reversed. I’m at the upper age limit now. When I go there, young shameless naked female bodies assault my eyes. I can’t remember when I last saw young naked female bodies. I haven’t seen the bodies of my daughters for years, not since they reached the modest age of puberty, and in later years I avoided the school boarders and their bedtime rituals. I wasn’t paid to be a school matron, was I? And I wasn’t very good at being motherly. I sometimes think of poor little Jinny Freeman, and her superfluous hair. Her legs were covered in fur. I ought to have made a helpful suggestion, but I couldn’t bring myself to speak. I wasn’t
in loco parentis
, was I? Her mother should have said something to her about it.

I want to make it clear that I haven’t joined the Health Club in order to consort with the young. I don’t expect their youth to rub off on me and to prolong my life. I don’t plunge into that blue pool as into a fountain of eternal youth. The evening classes were more up my street, but they closed down on me. The building was sold from under our feet. Learning was taken over, bought out, and dispossessed.

I didn’t choose to do German Conversation or Computer Skills. I’d already done some word processing at the IT College in Ipswich. I’d already learnt about laptops and playing solitaire. The class that I attended in that tall late Victorian building was on Virgil’s
Aeneid
.
You wouldn’t think you could go to an evening class on Virgil’s
Aeneid
in West London at the end of the twentieth century, would you? And in fact you can’t any more, as it’s closed. But you could, then, two years ago, when I joined it. It was a real lifeline to me in those first solitary months of my new London life. It was an excellent class. I enjoyed it, and I was a conscientious student. Why did I join it? Because its very existence seemed so anachronistic and so improbable. Because I thought it would keep my mind in good shape. Because I thought it might find me a friend. Because I thought it might find me the kind of friend that I would not have known in my former life.

Already I was wary about making friends with the kind of person who would want to be friends with a person like me. You even get some of them in my youth-oriented Health Club. On my second visit, in the changing room, a woman said to me, ‘You’ve got your bathing costume on inside out.’ I was mortified and embarrassed. I’d already made a fool of myself on my first visit by being unable to work out how to use the locker padlock, and then forgetting the number of my locker. I’d been given – well, I’d
chosen
– a combination number for the padlock – but I couldn’t see how to make the padlock fit the lock. I asked a young woman, who then showed me, and she said she’d also been unable to work it out the first time, so that was all right. We laughed and parted, no offence or obligation. But then I forgot the locker number, and when I got back from the pool it took me ages to work out where it must have been. I found it in the end – I’d remembered it was at the end of a row, at the mirror and hairdryer end, not the corridor end, but there seemed to be lots of mirrors and hairdryers, an endlessly multiplying refraction of alleys of them, and I dreaded to be appearing to be interfering with other people’s combination numbers.

I found my own locker and padlock in the end, without being spotted in my uncertainty, but it was a bewildering moment. I’d used the first three numbers of my birth year, 194. At least I wasn’t likely to forget those. I’ve been more careful since then. Sometimes I leave a thread of the fringe of my red woolly scarf peeping through the door when I lock up. As a clue. Like Hansel and Gretel lost in
the dark wood. But mine isn’t a dark wood, it’s a bright and glassy corridor.

That woman who told me on my second visit that I’d got my costume on inside out was lying. I hadn’t. It was a ploy. She wanted to engage me in conversation. She wanted to latch on to me and use me and be my friend. I had stared down at myself, fearing to see exposed stitching, perhaps even that horrible white sanitary-towel-effect strip of lining that covers my plain black swimsuit’s crotch, but could see, after a moment’s self-doubt, that there was nothing amiss. I said, coldly, something like, ‘No, I haven’t’, and pulled one of my towels around myself before striding off towards the stairs to the pool. To be honest, I probably also said, ‘Thank you.’ I’m not very good at being very rude. But I am quite good, for better or for worse, at avoiding people, and I’ve made sure that I never change in the same section as her again.

She was an older woman, like myself. She had hoped she had spotted a weakling in need of protection. I avoided her. In fact, come to think of it, I haven’t seen her for months. Maybe she’s moved away, or died.

I’m wary about making new friends because I’m so bad at shaking off old ones. One of the reasons why I moved to London was to avoid the demands and the pity of those people I used to know in Suffolk when I was married to Andrew. I couldn’t face them. I ran away. I still can’t decide whether courage or cowardice prevailed in me when I made that choice.

The man in Wormwood Scrubs makes few demands on me. He is safely locked up, and he can’t get out. That’s the kind of friendship one can control, on one’s own terms. A satisfactorily uneven relationship, in which I wield the power. I wield the power because at least I am free to come and to go.

She remembers the building years and the oxhide of Dido

My Health Club hasn’t been open very long. It was a blow to me when the takeover bid was announced and the Virgil class closed, because I knew I would lose my new Thursday-evening friends. We were all promised concessionary membership rates if we chose to join the
Club, but it wasn’t going to be the same, was it? We Virgilians hadn’t got to know one another well enough to stay in touch naturally. We hadn’t had time to build up an easy extra-mural social life. And some of us just weren’t Health Club types. We were made homeless, and turned out to wander our ways.

Nevertheless, there was a fascination in watching the transformation of the old building into the new. They kept the red-brick façade of the old college and gutted it inside. It was interesting to watch the scaffolding go up, and the internal structures crumble and vanish. The dark blue night sky was brilliantly illuminated by security lighting, and from my eyrie I could see the new building rise up, floor after floor, shining like a cruise ship afloat in the city. There were rumours that the top floor was being made into a swimming pool. I didn’t believe them, but they turned out to be true, and that’s where I now swim, six floors up, beneath the high clouds. But for many months the site was a little city of builders in hard yellow hats. Monstrous chutes and tubes depended from the roof, and temporary structures filled the forecourt. There were little buildings encamped within bigger buildings. False panelling with large graphics portraying athletic future clients fronted the street. I walked past the site daily, past the skips full of broken masonry that lined the pavements, and by night I watched from my window.

I thought of Dido and the building of the city of Carthage. Like seething bees in early summer the Phoenicians built their new hive on the African shore. (That’s an Epic Simile.) They claimed the land from the indigenous shepherds, enclosing it in a boundary of strips of a stretched oxhide, and they dug and quarried and excavated, and on the citadel rose a vast temple to Juno, a temple of rich bronze. Even so rose up my Health Club, lofty and proud.

I would like to see the ruins of Carthage. But of course I haven’t got the money for that kind of thing nowadays. Andrew has, but I haven’t. I’m told there’s not much left of Carthage, but I’d like to see it just the same. And I’d like to see the cave of the Sibyl at Cumae. That’s probably not very nice either. But I’d like to see it, with my own eyes. They say that the wizened remains of the deathless Sibyl hung there for centuries in a basket, and the only thing that she
would say, when questioned, was, ‘I wish to die.’ In a hollow voice like an echo she would utter these words. When the village children asked her what she wished, she said, ‘I wish to die.’ Or so they say. I’d like to hear her say that to me.

Andrew and I went to Delphi once. On a coach trip from Athens. That’s a long time ago. We were on reasonably good terms in those days, or so I thought. The oracle there didn’t warn me of Andrew’s intentions. Or, if it did, I wasn’t paying attention.

The Health Club opened before it was quite ready. The lifts hadn’t been installed, and we had to use a bare concrete stairway. There was builders’ rubble everywhere, the showers were temperamental, and the whirlpool kept going wrong. But the staff were very friendly. They welcomed me in. It was a new world in there, an amazing new world. I would never have dared to enter it had I not had a passport from the old world of Virgil. I would not have felt that I had the right. I am not very bold.

She tells the sad story of her marriage

I see I have mentioned Andrew three times already in this diary. I think that means that I should try to give some account of him and of my marriage to him. I am not sure that I will be able to tell the truth. I am not sure if I know the truth. I will try not to whine and bleat too much.

Let me try to describe him. He is a very good-looking Englishman. He is correct in every way. He is six feet tall, and he has neat, regular Anglo-Saxon features, and clear blue eyes – a little faded now, but still a vivid blue – and a fair if crinkled northern skin. His hair was once a strikingly rich yellow. It is now a bright silver white, but it is still thick and springing, and it still catches the eye. He shows no sign of growing bald. His hair does not recede. He is very clean, indeed almost ostentatiously clean. He is a very visible man, though he is not what one would call showy. He is in good taste. His face is lined now, but attractively, with little laugh-lines around the eyes. His skin is pleasantly weathered, for he likes his outdoor pursuits. He looks wholesome and healthy. He has a quizzical, friendly and entirely reliable expression. He is neither solemn nor dull, but he is known to be a good man. He sits on many committees and he does
good works. He is good with both men and women. Most children like him, and the parents doted upon him and on public occasions vied for his attention. He exudes reliability, good nature, good humour, common sense, kindness. He is good, good, good. I have come to hate him. I think it is hate that I feel for him now. I hate him, of course, because he betrayed me. That is what other people think. They think it is as simple as that. I doubt it, but I suppose it may be so. I would not be a good judge of that, would I?

We were a happy couple when we were young. People probably thought I was lucky to catch him, though I too was pretty enough when I was a girl.
I
thought I was lucky, but that’s because I was lacking in self-esteem. Also, in those days I loved him, and one tends to overestimate the value of a loved object.

I haven’t aged well. People say women don’t. That’s not always true, but it has been true in my case. I too was fair, and blue-eyed, and I had a delicate English complexion and as good a figure as any girl in our year at St Anne’s. I wouldn’t say I was one of the belles of the school, because that would imply a certain art of presentation which I have always been anxious to avoid. I was brought up in a religious family, and we did not believe in improving on nature. But I was reasonably attractive, and I did not lack admirers. I suppose you might say I was an English rose. Now I look faded and washed out. My skin is weathered, and wrinkles and crowsfeet don’t look as good on a woman as they do on a man. I’m not overweight, but I droop and I sag. I don’t know what colours to wear. I used to look good in pastel shades, but they don’t suit me any more. So I wear navy and grey and brown. They don’t suit me well either, but at least I don’t look as though I have been trying too hard. At least they look appropriate.

I see I am writing about myself, and not about Andrew. I don’t think of myself as self-centred, but maybe I am.

I can’t go back into all that old history. I’ll begin with the story of our marriage in Suffolk. We’d already been married for nearly ten years when we moved to Suffolk. It wasn’t a part of the country that either of us knew well, but we were willing to like it there. (I was born in the East Midlands, and Andrew in North Yorkshire.) It was a
new start, for both of us. It meant promotion for Andrew, and security for me and the children, and it was something of an adventure. Andrew’s post was tailor-made for him, and the small Georgian house that went with the job was beautiful. It wouldn’t be ours, but it would be as good as ours, and I liked the idea of refurbishing it and making it look pretty. And the girls liked it. They liked the idea of living in the Big House. They were already fearsome little snobs, our three daughters.