The Seven Sisters (21 page)

I don’t care if I never see that ring again.

I have divorced myself from Andrew and married the blue water.

A strange memory came back to me, as I peered into the shallow depths to see if I could still see the ring. When we were girls, at St Anne’s, we used to practise swimming underwater for bricks. The bricks were wrapped in cloth. They were drowned bricks, corpse bricks, bagged in wet canvas. Julia hated swimming, but I enjoyed it then, as I do now. I was quite good at brick retrieval and at life-saving exercises.

I wonder if we shall have a chance to swim in Tunisia and Italy. Cynthia Barclay says she loves to swim. And I have packed my bathing suit. I meant to buy a new one, as the elastic of mine is perishing through overuse, but I have not yet done so. Maybe I will buy a new one on my travels.

So my ring lies drowned in the shallow deep.

They assemble for their departure

You know that land. You have an image of that land. All the cold and bitter children of the cold north have an image of the warm welcome of that southern land. There the palm and the cypress cut themselves out in antique shapes for your delight against the blue sky and the noonday sun. Those are the very shapes and patterns that are carved upon the antique heart, and you know them as your birthright. From generation to generation, they imprint their shapes upon the human heart. It is the land where the pale jasmine blossoms in the sweet night air, and bright lemons hang like dim and secret lamps amidst the glittering and the gloss of the ever-green. It is the sunny clime where you breathe more freely both by day and by night, where your fearful lungs fill gently with the soft air, where you no longer huddle and shiver and wrap yourself into your own arms and clench yourself back into your own self. There you no longer need to dread the threshold between the body and the world, for all is mild, all flows easily, all is lightness. Your shoulders are without burden, your eyes are clear, your skin is soft, and your feet in their sandals are free. You stretch out your arms, you can see your toes. The sky is vast and blue, the sand is golden, and the horizon shimmers with pledge and with promise. You know that land.

That magical land awaits them now. Its dunes and its citrus and its oils and its jasmine await them. Their as yet unknown guide Valeria awaits them faithfully like a tall sentinel on the far shore. Queen Dido gazes from her battlements across the centuries for their approach, for she knows that they remember her. Remember me, she cried, and, against so many odds, through so much forgetfulness,
through the death of so many empires, they do remember her. They keep their tryst.

The weather swirls and pulses in rapid coloured garish modern swathes around the turning globe, and around the globe we try to catch its passing, on screens, on charts, with laser lights. But it will not stay for us. It moves on.

A light northern English rain is now falling over the railtrack and the desolate brick arches of the Stansted Express, over the tender striped sowings of the spring green fields of Essex, over the busy bands of the carriageways of the M25 and the M11, and over Stansted airport, but nothing can dampen the spirits of our little band of travellers. They know that they are to fly southwards to that promised southern land, towards the sun. They do not know that the storm clouds are gathering over the Alps, and were they to know this, they would not care. The lightning may flash and the thunder may crash, but beyond those snowy peaks and that vicious howling in the heights, the sun’s assurance awaits them.

So now they cluster, surrounded by their hand baggage, perched brightly, a little flock, about their cups of cappuccino and latte and espresso in the Costa Café.
Costa, Cuore D’Italia.
They are migratory birds, our friends, in their new spring plumage. They have travelled here separately, by car and by train, and they have checked in, and passed through security, and now they are waiting for the arrival of the last of their party. They are waiting for their wild card, Sally Hepburn. She has the shortest journey to make, and yet she is the last. Where is she? She is not yet late, exactly, for the Departures Display Panel still instructs the Tunis Flight TP1082 passengers to wait for the gate number to be announced, but Sally has a reputation, even amongst those who have never met her, for being zealously overprompt. Is she waiting somewhere else, in the wrong place? The instructions to gather in this coffee corner have surely been unambiguous, and Stansted is not a large airport. Unlike Heathrow and Gatwick, Stansted is not a vast confusing maze of identical and identically repeating facilities. It ought to be easy enough to find one’s way about at Stansted. It is, as they all agree, a well-organized architectural space, easy to negotiate, pleasing to the eye. Its light and
airy cages remind Candida Wilton of the pale sky-green geometry of her Health Club.

So where is Sally Hepburn? Has she got cold feet? Has jealous husband Andrew detained her? Has her train been derailed? Who will spot her first? Will her weight upset the apple cart? Will she prove an irritant?

This little group is already well bonded. The Virgil class has accepted Julia Jordan into its fold, and she sits amongst it, queenly, calm, a little detached, but apparently content. The Virgil class thinks it has understood why Julia had been invited. But it is still mystified by the inclusion of Sally Hepburn. Even Sally’s friend Candida, the friend who asked her to join them, does not seem to know why she has done so. There is some strange unnatural compulsion binding the two women from Suffolk, connecting the spinster, Sally, and Candida, the abandoned wife.

Will the class be ready to take in Sally Hepburn? It is not sure. Will she be as tiresome and cantankerous as old Mr Wormald? Or will she play the game?

And here she comes, bustling, hot and bothered, lugging on squeaking wheels a suitcase which, although it has passed through check-in, looks far too big to be admitted as hand baggage. She is puffing and panting and talking, all at the same time, as she bears down upon her group. She is unseasonally and pessimistically clad in a stout tweed skirt and a short thick padded waterproof jacket. She is full of excuses. Her taxi did not arrive on time, the ticket machine at the station was not working, and her train was late. Her rail network is notoriously unreliable, so she had left herself plenty of time, but nevertheless it managed to delay her. She will write yet again to the manager.

Nobody listens to these tedious details, as they urge her to calm down, cool down, relax. She continues to breathe forth panic and heat and flurry as she is introduced, one by one, to her travelling companions. With her benefactor Candida, at whom she glowers rather accusingly, she is already long familiar, and Anaïs Al-Sayyab she has briefly encountered, in Candida’s curiously anonymous London apartment off Ladbroke Grove. She grasps the hand of Anaïs, but is too flustered to register the effrontery of the long
scarlet jacket of Anaïs, and the extremity of her grey peaked felt Mongolian cap. She is presented, a little calmer now, to the diminutive Mrs Jerrold, who is robed more discreetly in purple and black, although her bell-shaped silver earrings strike an eccentric and dissident note. (They tinkle and jangle faintly as Mrs Jerrold nods her head, and she nods her head frequently, possibly for the reaffirming pleasure of their music.) Cynthia Barclay, to Sally’s eyes, seems at first glance to be a perfectly regular middle-class matron, dressed comfortably in a nice classic beige trouser suit, with a geometrically patterned silk scarf around her throat. (It is only on closer inspection that one notices the bold champagne-pink streak in her restored golden-grey locks, and the brazen interrogative tilt of her head.)

Julia Jordan is a writer, therefore one might expect her to look odd, but Julia Jordan is as respectably dressed as Cynthia Barclay, in a checked yellow-and-brown cotton dress, largely covered by an unassuming lightweight Burberry raincoat. Sally cannot yet see the large amount of monogrammed luggage that accompanies Julia, for it is being loaded into the bowels of the aeroplane, along with the more modest bags of the other women. Sally had been nervous about meeting Julia Jordan, for she knows she is famous, and famous people make her talk too much. But Julia looks reassuringly ordinary. She looks less like a writer than Cynthia Barclay does, in Sally Hepburn’s view.

Over the Alps, the electric lightning flashes. Deep below the airy pathways, squalls flurry the bruised purple waters of the Mediterranean. Far south, on the far African shore, the pale warm waves lap. Ruined temples, desert sands, dead languages, foreign tongues. These women keep faith with the past, they keep faith with myth and history.

All except Sally. Sally, unlike the rest of the party, has not been doing her homework. She is vague about their destination, vague about their route. She is here for the ride, wherever it may take her. She is a fellow traveller.

Her old friend and protégée Candida seems to have turned in the past few weeks into somebody else, somebody much less docile. Sally has, until this moment, been confident of her ability to ‘get the better’ of Candida Wilton, although she would not have described her
confidence so brutally. She has long seen Candida as somebody whom she can manipulate, towards whom she can condescend, and whom she can embarrass or torment at will. And now here is Candida, sitting quite unruffled, and paying Sally Hepburn very little attention, despite the loud huffing and puffing of her advent. Candida seems to have disconnected herself. Moreover, her hair is a different shape, and much less wispy. It is a more solid shape, and she seems to have got herself a new set of teeth. Sally, who wears partial dentures, has been watching the deterioration of Candida’s teeth with interest and pleasure, but it seems that Candida has miraculously arrested their decay. How has she managed that? Can money work such wonders? How much money has Candida got? She had described her bonus to Sally as a ‘small windfall’, but that could mean anything, couldn’t it? Had she come into a fortune or won the Lottery? The sight of her friend looking so undowntrodden is very irritating to Sally Hepburn. It goes against all the rules of age and entropy. It is not right.

Candida herself, freed from her own whining monologue, is also aware that she has turned into another person, a multiple, polyphonic person, who need not pretend to be stupid, who can use long words or make classical allusions if she wishes, without fear of being called a pedant or a swat or a semi-educated fool or somebody trying to be too-clever-by-half. Yet she is not so utterly transformed as to expect to evade the duty of sitting next to Sally Hepburn on the aeroplane. That she must do, although in other ways she has renounced her victim role. It may be, who knows, her last duty. It would not be fair to expect a stranger in this group to sit next to Sally. Sally is too large for an economy aeroplane seat. She will overflow, and therefore she must overflow on to Candida.

The group whiles away its waiting time at Stansted by looking at the brochure of the hotel where they are to stay in Tunis. It is called ‘The Hotel Diana, the Hotel with a Difference’. The photographs display extensive beaches, colonnades and swimming pools, but all these travellers are cynical about brochures. It cannot be as nice as it looks, but never mind, they are determined to enjoy themselves, even if there are cockroaches and mosquitoes. Mrs Jerrold confesses that on her earlier trip to North Africa, with Eugene, in the 1950s,
there had been many cockroaches and mosquitoes. But they had been younger then, and Morocco and Tunisia had had many other charms. Tangiers also they had visited. Eugene had known people in Tangiers – novelists, poets, dealers. Eugene had known such people even in the empty quarters of the world. It was said that if two literature-loving English-speaking people met in a bar in Eastern Europe or under a palm tree in Africa or at an oasis in the Near East, one of them would be Eugene Jerrold. He had been insatiably gregarious, greatly trusting, ever optimistic, and only rarely betrayed. I had to hide our money, nodded Mrs Jerrold, musically. I sewed it into my underwear and into the lining of my bags. He gave it away. He gave to beggars, and he always wanted to foot the bill. He liked the expansive gesture. He liked to play the host.

Cynthia Barclay has been appointed treasurer of the trip. She will settle the accounts and divide the expenses. She is good at that kind of thing. She has always been a spendthrift with her own money, but she is professional about organizing that of other people. She keeps Mr Barclay well in the black. And she assures them that her mathematics have been greatly improved by her new evening class. They can trust her to divide and subtract and keep a correct tally. They believe her. So far, her arrangements have been impeccable. Their allocation of pre-booked seats was waiting for them at check-in, just as she had said it would be. Sally Hepburn was in danger of losing her seat, but even she has found her correct place. They have great confidence in Mrs Barclay.

Mrs Jerrold recalls that on her earlier trip, she had been made very ill by a bottled mineral water called Ain Oktor, a chalky medicinal water of repulsive taste and a disastrous effect upon the bowels. She wonders if Ain Oktor is still to be purchased in Tunisia. If so, she warns them all to avoid it.

They fly onwards through the thunderbolts of Jove

Their disposition upon the aircraft is as follows:

Julia Jordan has a window seat. Next to her sits her admirer, Cynthia Barclay. Anaïs Al-Sayyab, on this row, takes the aisle.

In the row behind, Sally Hepburn takes the window
seat. Next to her, in the middle, sits Candida Wilton. Next to Candida, Mrs Jerrold takes the aisle.

The aeroplane is named
Salammbô
, which Mrs Jerrold and Candida Wilton find disconcerting, though they do not say so. But despite the misgivings of some of her passengers, the
Salammbô
takes off smoothly, and gains height smoothly, as she should. As she soars through the calm skies above France, Cynthia and Julia converse with animation about television series they have seen or, in Julia’s case, written, and actors they have liked or disliked. This conversation is mutually satisfactory. Their falsely golden heads bend together in the womanly gossiping intimacy of old friends. Occasionally Anaïs volunteers to add a remark, but most of her attention is given to embroidering a piece of fine canvas with a design consisting of a cross-section of a segment of a red cabbage. It is a convoluted design and requires a great deal of concentration. Occasionally she makes a mistake and has to unpick a thread. She deploys for this task a darling little pair of silver scissors with long golden crane-bird handles. They sparkle. The air hostess had looked at these scissors suspiciously, as though they might be construed as a dangerous weapon, but has decided to let them pass.