The Seven Sisters (27 page)

The rest of the group thinks, if it thinks anything, that Turku is in Turkey. Turku is nothing and nowhere to them. Only Candida knows that Turku is a serious Finnish port, on the Baltic, to the west of Helsinki. Only Candida can read and interpret these photographs correctly. But she has never been to see her daughter in Finland, because she has never been invited. A pang goes through her, as she sees the photographs of the snow and the pine trees. Her daughter does not live in Turku: she lives inland, in a village near the university town of Jyväskylä, in a region known as the Land of the Lakes. Candida knows this because she has wasted some time looking at the map of Finland. There is much water surrounding her daughter Ellen, but she does not live by the sea.

The meal is not good, as Valeria had warned them, but they are in too mild a mood to be cast down by lukewarm penne and dry escalopes. They are looking forward to their arrival in Italy, the land promised to the Trojans, and promised in turn, centuries later, to them. They sit up late, because the cabins, although agreed to be quite adequate, cannot be called commodious, and, anyway, it is fun watching their fellow passengers and plotting the sequence of their travels on shore. (Their first night will be spent at happy Arco Felice, to the west of Naples, and it is hoped that the next day will encompass Baia, Lake Avernus, and a visit to the Sibyl.) Their fellow passengers are amusing themselves in diverse ways. Many are chatting into their mobile phones, but some are actually reading books. Some are playing cards, and one young couple is playing dominoes, a game so old-fashioned that the seven sisters speculate that perhaps
it is about to spring back into vogue. The group that they have labelled the Mayoral Quartet is enjoying itself immensely. It has dined à la carte in the restaurant, and now it orders round after round of drinks, and laughs, and talks with incessant animation, in a beautifully orchestrated manner – man to man and woman to woman, then brother-in-law to sister-in-law and sister-in-law to brother-in-law, then husband to wife and wife to husband, and then, beginning again at the beginning, man to man and woman to woman, and so on, throughout the long evening. Brandy follows wine and amaretto follows brandy. One of the women is now wearing her emerald-green silk scarf playfully in reverse, like a collar round her throat, its points flowing downwards over her back: she had placed it thus to avoid the spaghetti, and is clearly pleased with the effect. The seven sisters take note of this enterprising fashion tip. The darker brother has a silver hip flask, from which he occasionally offers a small additional infusion. The group is a pleasure to watch, and it is highly satisfied with its own satisfaction.

Anna Palumbo has not yet revealed herself. There are not many single women in evidence. Could she be that thin dark girl quietly reading a detective story? Or that stout older woman shouting angrily into her mobile? Or has she already shyly climbed up into her top bunk, to hide herself out of their way?

Yes, there she is, discovered, as they repair to bed. She has already tucked herself up in her thin pale blue nautical anchor-embroidered sheets, and is sitting up and reading a book. She is small and does not take up much space. Valeria, Anaïs and Candida enter, rather noisily, and fall into a respectful silence. Anna Palumbo, in possession of their bedchamber, smiles. She is small and white of skin, and her hair is very short and very dark. She is wearing a scarlet shirt with large pearl buttons. Is it a day shirt, or a night shirt? It is primly and discreetly buttoned up to her white neck and her pointed chin.

Shall they fall into conversation, or is it not necessary? What is the bedtime cabin etiquette on board the
Arethusa
? Anna Palumbo takes the initiative. She addresses them first, tentatively, in Italian, then switches to English. She expresses the hope she will not be in their way. She has already made use of the shower room, she assures them.
The space is restricted, but she will not disturb them, although she is a light sleeper.

Valeria, Anaïs and Candida mutter civilities. She makes them feel large and loud and gross. She is perched up there like a flat nun on a high ledge. Candida is to take the top bunk opposite, so she disappears into the triangular closet first, to wash her face and brush her teeth. (She does not need to use the lavatory: with forethought, she has visited the Ladies’ Room on A Deck, in order to avoid this intimate necessity.) Through the flimsy door, she can hear Anaïs pursuing a conversation with their guest, and when she emerges in her black cotton kimono a friendly rapport has already been established.

It is like a girls’ dormitory in Cabin 34. They regress rapidly and effortlessly, and they talk for hours. Anna Palumbo is an art historian, and she is writing about Paul Klee’s sojourn in Kairouan. She has been travelling in his footsteps. She is on this ferry because she is afraid of flying. She dislikes flying because her little brother and her grandmother were killed in an air crash when she was a child. She used to fly, but suddenly lost her nerve during an electric thunderstorm over the Atlantic when the plane’s hydraulic system failed. She flies when she has to, but she prefers other forms of transport. She quite likes this ferry. She has been on it several times. It is beautiful, she says, to arrive in Naples from the sea, to depart from Naples on the sea. Paul Klee, she says, writes memorably of this experience. She lives in Rome but is going to stay with her sister in Sorrento for a few days on her way home. She had spotted their Virgil Tour luggage labels at once, and had seen their copies of Virgil on their beds. How unusual, she had thought, and how lucky to have such agreeable cabin-mates. Sometimes, says Anna, one can be very unlucky, with grumpy people who snore, or rude people who encroach, or small children who scream. Once, says Anna, she shared a cabin with a woman with a wooden leg. She had unstrapped it and hung it from the end of her bed where it had swayed around thumping and bumping all night long. This had been a little unnerving, although of course one feels sorry for a person with a missing leg.

Anna is very curious about their travels. She and Valeria exchange inside-information about ferries and hotels in Tunisia and Campania.
Candida tells her about the Virgil class and Mrs Jerrold. Anna tells them a little about Paul Klee, who believed that the world was a large and fragile piece of clockwork, a giant and delicate toy. She says she wishes she could accompany them on their trip to see the Cumean Sibyl, for she has a big question to ask about her fiancé. Shall she marry him, or shall they remain unwed? They are happy apart, but maybe they are being cowardly. Maybe they should marry and have a baby? What do her new friends Valeria, Anaïs and Candida think? Anna Palumbo thinks her fiancé is not faithful to her, but this does not worry her if they are not married. It relieves her of the obligation to be faithful to him. She still has her freedom. Of mind, and of body. For married couples, fidelity becomes a more serious matter. What do they think about this? Do they have children? Are children a good idea?

Candida admits to her three daughters, but says that she is not the right person to ask about the virtues of maternity, as she is estranged from all of them. (She thinks of excepting Ellen here, but has not the courage to do so.) Anaïs says she is happily childless. She comes, she says, from a family of eight, and had spent much time avoiding efforts to make her look after her smaller siblings. That had been enough of that, for her. Valeria, also, denies progeny, but owns up to her years as a perpetual student at Cornell. It is the first that Anaïs and Candida have heard of this phase of their guide’s life, and they cross-question her eagerly about the other Ithaca. She tries to explain to them about Mediterranean trade routes and revisionist thinking about geographical penetration of the hinterland, but it is getting late by now and they are too ignorant to follow her along these winding ancient ways.

Valeria and Anaïs are both too big for their beds. Their feet stick out. As Candida finally begins to doze, to the gentle rocking of the waves and the murmur of voices, she remembers Julia’s contempt for those who make of marriage a Procrustean bed, and chop off their limbs to fit into it more neatly. They make marriage, said Julia, into a bed of blood. Instead, said Julia, of buying a new and bigger bed, or getting a different husband.

It had been easy enough to find a new husband, in those early days. And Anna Palumbo is young yet.

Infelix thalamus.
Unhappy bed.

Candida and Anna fit neatly and trimly into their shipshape bunks, but those two big women below overflow and protrude. Nevertheless, they sleep soundly, as they make their slow way through the shoals and past the rocks and across the sea to Italy. They sleep as soundly as Palinurus, charmed by a vengeful god. Only Candida keeps the night watch, and even she dozes fitfully.

They reach Naples and the promised land of Italy

There is no other coastline like it upon earth. The golden islands and the volcanic mountains rise as though newborn from the turquoise waters. These mountains are young, and still in their springtime. The
Arethusa
, fashioned on the cold and distant Baltic, is now at home in these smiling southern seas, and she makes her way unerringly to shore across the friendly sparkling waves. Naples approaches, as Candida had dreamed she would. She sees her for the first time. She sees the citadel of the nymph Parthenope, and, rising above the city, the classic slopes of violent Vesuvius, her guardian and her betrayer. Candida leans upon the rail, sick with delight. If it were now to die, says Candida to herself, ’twere now to be most happy. Mrs Jerrold, who believes that she is seeing Naples for the last time, not the first, is in similarly lofty mood in the bright dawn. On the horizon, to the west, she sees a yacht in full sail, a sight to break the heart. She follows its course towards the horizon and out of sight. To see a beloved person sail away like that would surely make one die of longing. She thinks of Portunus, the god of harbours, the god of opportunities, who has given to herself and to Candida this unexpected voyage, and she considers herself to be blessed.

This elevation of mood cannot last. It is soon to be fractured by the confusion of disembarkation and landing cards. Julia is wondering how much to tip the steward, and Valeria is covertly studying an updated computer-generated map of Neapolitan one-way systems and roadworks. Anna Palumbo and Anaïs are exchanging addresses, and Sally thinks that she has lost her reading glasses. Cynthia is wrestling with the broken zip of her shoulder bag and the exchange rate of the lira. She is not happy with all those millions, and hopes
Valeria has a better grasp of them than she has. Cynthia longs for the Euro.

It is easy enough to drive out of the exhaust-fumed gullet of the
Arethusa
, but it is not so easy to find one’s way out of the docks. Valeria tells them all to look out for the motorway signposted westwards to Pozzuoli, as they weave round stretches of Ring Road and find themselves back almost where they started, on a parallel quay, by a basin full of the most rusted, unseaworthy, abandoned-looking ships that any of them have ever seen. They pause to admire their dereliction, and the indecipherable oriental hieroglyphs that adorn their rearing peeling metal flanks. Surely this ruined armada of junk will never sail again. The
Arethusa
has been a fine trim vessel, they tell themselves. They will remember her with pleasure.

Valeria consults her map once more, and sets off once more. She does not tell them that she herself has never been to Pozzuoli and Arco Felice and is very likely to get lost on the way there. She has done her homework and has good recommendations, but there are many things that could go wrong. Tunis and Carthage she knows well, and with Naples itself she is familiar, but the Phlegrean Fields, so particularly requested by her clients, are known to her, as to them, only through the literature. She does not betray her ignorance or uncertainty, because she knows that clients like to believe that their guides and drivers are infallible, but she will be happier when she knows she is on the right road.

She never finds the right road, the modern highway to the west, because none of them casts an eye high enough to find its super-signs. Instead, they find themselves following the signs of the old low road westwards through the shabby working-class suburbs of the burning fields. This road is clearly going in the right direction, so Valeria settles down at the wheel. It is an interesting though not a conventionally scenic route. It takes them past decaying high-rise apartment blocks, past gaping craters and building sites and gasometers and oil refineries and bus depots. Some of the rubbish reminds Candida of Ladbroke Grove. There is a pleasantly sulphurous stink, which reassures them that they are on their way. They seem to be travelling beneath the route of an abandoned attempt at a viaduct:
they pause at red lights beneath a huge forgotten giant, hundreds of feet tall, reaching its pitiful empty arms up into the sky, its bald blind nub of a head staring sightlessly up at Vesuvius. Its arms are swathed in grey fabric that flaps in the morning light. It is a monster, but it is a tame monster. It lets them pass.

From time to time they stop at level crossings, to wait for the little local Solfatara train to pass. It is going to Pozzuoli too. They are getting near. Valeria cheers up. There is said to be a good lunch waiting on the birdless shores of Lake Avernus. And here at last is the sign to Arco Felice, and its welcoming hotels. They will soon be checking in.

The Hotel Santa Clara at Arco Felice proves to be a glorified motel, modern and of marble. What it lacks in character it makes up for in comfort and space. The Santa Clara is not quite the glamorous destination Julia Jordan had envisaged, but even she is pleased with it. The rooms are dark and large and cool and clean, the wardrobes are vast, and the bathrooms are fancy and full of pleasing gadgets and gold taps. Driving through those grim outskirts Julia had feared the worst. Julia is relieved. But Julia is not allowed to waste the morning hanging up her dresses. Already it is nearly noon, and the lake beckons them. She will have plenty of time to preen herself in the evening.