The Seven Sisters (32 page)

It’s not really wholly a coincidence, that we are based in Finland. Finnish is a very strange language. Strange historically, strange etymologically, strange on the page. It clusters, it hesitates, it rattles and spatters. I can speak only a few phrases. Clyde speaks it much better than I do, but that’s because he’s a native Welsh-speaker, and other languages come to him more easily.

Ours is a pioneering and yet a well-respected clinic. My mother may not have known much about us, but others do. If you look up any periodical connected with the field, you will find us quoted. I have even published a short paper myself, in association with Gunnar Tikkanen. It was called ‘The Serpent of Zarathustra’. I sent a copy of it to my mother but she never even acknowledged receipt of it.

I admit that I am not very well paid. Speech therapists and research workers are not well paid. My partner and colleague Clyde Hughes and I are not rich. But we do well enough. The cost of living in Finland is extremely high, but benefits are good, and Clyde and I live comfortably, and are respected in our community. We like the landscape and the outdoor life. And, anyway, who is she to criticize? She never did a day’s work in her life.

I don’t have a mechanical speech problem myself, of the sort I work on, but I did find communication very difficult when I was
little. I still do. And I was disturbed and haunted by the quota of blind and partially sighted children who were growing up around us. I suppose I have always been attracted by the deficient and the difficult. Maybe my mother was too. But, unlike my mother, I decided to try to do something about it.

Virgil was said to have a speech impediment. I wonder if the Virgilians knew that. And I wonder how it manifested itself. There is no detailed account of it in the record. So it can’t have been very bad. The Romans used to cage speech defectives along the Appian Way, and torment them, for fun. There is also a story that the US Immigration and Naturalization Services used to classify people with speech problems as mental defectives, and ban them from entering the country, but I’ve never seen the evidence for that. It seems unlikely, to me.

It is quite untrue, incidentally, to say, as she does, that I was a fearful little snob. Isobel is a snob and a name-dropper, I grant her that, and she got sucked into county ways in a mysterious manner. Her ghastly husband is worse. He is always talking tediously about genealogy. He is very good on other people’s great-grandfathers and second cousins. I blame England. It encourages that kind of rubbish, and once you’ve let it take hold, it grips you like bindweed. Isobel simply can’t resist anyone with grand relations or a title. Martha is not a snob, though she is interested in all things smart and trendy. That’s a bit different. Perhaps it’s a more modern form of the same disease. But she’s very young still. I don’t blame her for that. She’s still finding her way. I get on better with Martha than I do with Isobel. I wonder how she’s reacting to this new drama. She does love a drama, but this one may be a bit too squalid for her. The Grand Union Canal isn’t quite as nice or as select as the Lady Pond. On the other hand, it’s topical. Notting Hill and Ladbroke Grove are fashionable places to live in, so they may also be fashionable places to die in, I suppose.

How can you not be a snob, when you’re being brought up in an expensive boarding school with a father who spends half his time sucking up to the high and mighty?

I’ll tell you another thing, there’s plagiarism in that document.
When she says her tears were ‘as hot as tea’, that’s plagiarism. She lifted that phrase out of Robert Louis Stevenson’s
Treasure Island
. I happen to know that only because we did it as an example of a simile in an English lesson with Miss Gibson. Stevenson says something like ‘the blood came over my hands as hot as tea’, and we were all told to admire it as a vivid example of comparing the unusual with the commonplace, or something along those lines. I’ve remembered it all these years.

I suppose my mother needn’t have known that, though. It’s a pure fluke that I do. I’m not well up in similes and metaphors and metonyms. In fact I don’t really know what a metonym is because we never got on to them with Miss Gibson. And although I agree that it is a striking simile, it’s perfectly possible that she hit on it independently. That’s not beyond the bounds of possibility, is it? Somehow, though, the coincidence, if it is a coincidence, makes me distrust everything she says. There are bits of Goethe and Virgil in there that I can check on, but there may well be other bits of Goethe and Virgil hidden away, unacknowledged. I suppose they are well out of copyright, so in theory she has a right to do what she likes with them. It makes me feel a bit uneasy, though.

That reference to Hegel threw me. I know for a fact that my mother has never read Hegel. Had never read Hegel, I mean. I’ve never read Hegel, and she never read Hegel. She wasn’t clever enough to read Hegel. She wasn’t well enough educated to read Hegel. Hegel is heavy going. So what was she doing, slipping him in there? Was she trying to impress herself? And if so, to what end?

Or was she hoping that someone – someone like me – would come along and get the impression that she had actually read Hegel? When she hadn’t?

I can’t imagine what she was up to.

But I think I’ve worked out what she was trying to do with those first- and third-person voices. She kind of hints at it, though she doesn’t spell it out. When she started trying to write the
Italian Journey
, she was trying to escape from the prison of her own voice. She didn’t date the saving of her entries – she probably didn’t know how to – so I’ve no way of knowing in what order or sequence she
composed them, though logically I suppose she must have written the whole of the
Italian Journey
after her return. The two sections appear simply as two consecutive continuous texts. You can check on Windows Explorer that each was updated the day before her death, the day when she didn’t manage to get in touch with Mrs Jerrold. (We know she tried to ring Mrs Jerrold because she left a short message on Mrs Jerrold’s answerphone – her last spoken words, as far as we know.) I suppose there may be some clever way of working out the time scale of her composition in more detail, but if so, I don’t know of it. It’s no good my pretending I’m a genius with the word processor. I’m always getting into trouble, but when I do, I can run screaming to Zachary in the IT Department and he sorts me out. My mother didn’t have anyone like Zachary. She wasn’t part of an institution. She was all on her own. She didn’t do too badly, for a loner.

She did learn to use colour, though. That last cryptic sentence in bold, the last of her bold sentences, she’d written it in bold red. Maybe it was the first line she ever wrote, not the last. How am I to know? And how am I to know if she ever saw him? Her lover, or her God.

She didn’t seem to have a printer.

I don’t think I ever forgot her birthday. I always sent her a card. Perhaps that year it got lost in the post.

I don’t believe her story about the pet rat at Ladbroke Grove station, either. I don’t think her account is very reliable. And that faux-naïf tone she adopts is very irritating. She knows more than she lets on. Or does she pretend to know more than she really does know? Either way, something odd happens to her tone. That Hegel business is really puzzling. Why would one lie in one’s diary?

I’ve met all her friends now, all except Valeria. They all came to the funeral. All except Valeria, who is somewhere in the wastes of Anatolia with a group of archaeologists from Poitiers. I did wonder for a moment whether Valeria was a real person, but the others confirm my mother’s account. She’s not six feet tall, but she is taller than any of the rest of them. Five foot ten, perhaps, says Cynthia, and statuesque. More Juno than Venus, says Cynthia. Juno, the guardian goddess of Carthage.

Of course, I remember Julia Jordan from my childhood. She was one of the few friends who visited my mother in her own right. She came to see us once or twice in Manchester, and she came once to Holling House. I didn’t much like her. She wasn’t good with children. She ignored us, and talked above our heads. She wasn’t interested in us at all. No reason why she should be, I suppose. I enjoyed her books, when I was young. They were an easy read. At times I see moments where I think my mother is trying to copy her style. Julia was very pleasant to me, at the funeral. She spoke well of my mother. Things really are looking up for Julia. It seems it’s never too late. Her film is really going to happen. And she seems to have struck up a friendship with a Neapolitan politician, Salvatore Masolino. Good for Julia.

Sally Hepburn I know quite well. I don’t think Mum is at all fair to Sally Hepburn, though I agree that their mutual friend Henrietta Parks is a pain in the neck. Henrietta is the worst type of well-meaning amateur. I don’t think she has any professional qualifications at all. Whereas Sally has a good track-record, and was very encouraging to me when I told her I wanted to train in London. From Mum’s account, you’d think it was a crime to be fat. I think it’s just self-loathing that makes her write like that about Sally. I mean, it all adds up, doesn’t it? Low-fat milk and low-fat yoghurt and the Health Club, then a binge on chips and gin and curry sauce.

Sally’s a good-humoured and broad-minded woman, interested in everybody and everything. She’s fun. She told me some amazing stories about the goings-on of her clients in Ipswich. I suppose she shouldn’t have done, but she did. She seemed to me to have a lot of common sense. I always thought it was very decent of her to be so nice to Mum. She had plenty of other friends. She didn’t have to bother with Mum.

If anybody was kinky about sex, it wasn’t Sally, it was my mother. At the very end of my mother’s text, I found a couple of weird disconnected jottings. I think they may have been remarks she’d lifted out of the newspaper or heard on the news, and found offensive enough to record. One of them was, ‘He’s about as attractive as genital warts.’ The second was, ‘That, in a scrotum sac, is the
message of Picasso.’ Clearly the male sexual organ didn’t appeal to my mother. She was an emasculating woman. It’s not the fashion these days to call women emasculating. But I truly think that’s what she was.

She has frozen up my sex life, that’s for sure. I’m fond of Clyde, and I think he is fond of me, but nobody can pretend that what goes on between us is normal. It isn’t abnormal, but it isn’t normal. It’s just, I suppose, inadequate. Perhaps I mean it’s subnormal. Well, I suppose there are worse things than that. She neutered me. And I don’t think Isobel has much fun in bed.

Anaïs and Mrs Barclay are ambiguous figures. Maybe they are having an affair. Good luck to them, that’s what I say.

Mr Barclay is recovering. I didn’t meet him, because he was confined to his quarters. But Cynthia did mix me a drink. Candida Wilton, alias my mother, was right about the cocktails. Mrs Barclay is a dab hand at them. In Finland, in a stereotypical sort of way, we do tend to veer towards the beer or the vodka. Mrs B made me a White Lady. I’ve never had one before, though I’ve heard tell of them. She says I can have a Red Queen if ever I call again. It’s a powerful invitation. I think Cynthia may even have liked me. I know my mother thinks I’m the least favoured of her daughters, and Anaïs called me a frump, but I’m not a complete disaster. I’m still functional.

My mother fell amongst friends. I can’t work out whether this was luck or whether, sociologically, the odds were in her favour. There are a lot of nice middle-aged and elderly women about, at a loose end, and they are good at setting up little support groups for themselves. Not many of them end up in the canal.

Candida did try to be happy. She tried hard to describe happiness. I suppose I’m grateful for that. Perhaps she was happy, during that autumnal spring in Carthage and in Naples. It’s just that she wasn’t really up to writing about it. When she goes into the third person, it’s uncomfortable. It’s no good, trying to dress up your banal responses by classical allusions and references to Goethe, by using long words and broken-off bits of forgotten mythology. The Seven Sisters: Alcyone, Celaeno, Electra, Maia, Merope, Sterope, Taygete.
The Seven Daughters of Atlas. A beneficent constellation, I gather. I looked them up in a Classical Dictionary. So what? Anyone could do that. What’s that got to do with anything? I suppose I was most embarrassed by the bits when she tried to see herself as some kind of tragic heroine. But maybe, again, that’s me being unfair. Most of the time she runs herself down, in a masochistic sort of way, and that’s just as irritating. In fact, if one can be objective about her, she was really quite good-looking, for her age. Anyway, not bad-looking. She’s right to say that she looked, at times, quite distinguished.

I keep on writing about her in the present tense. She seems still to be alive, in this machine. I wonder if it can tell the difference between us. Or does it think it’s still her, tapping away here? Machines can be taught to remember frequently used words and phrases. Some machines can learn them spontaneously. This machine can spell the names of Valeria, Cynthia, Julia, Ida Jerrold, Sally Hepburn and Anaïs Al-Sayyab without any assistance from me. It even knows about the diaeresis on the name of Anaïs.

She retraces her mother’s fatal footsteps

I went to see the place where she died. I thought I owed it to her.

I bought some flowers for her in Sainsbury’s. I think she spent quite a lot of time wandering pointlessly around the aisles of that Sainsbury’s, so it seemed fitting. As I bought them, I thought, how naff. But I did it. I bought a blue bunch, mainly irises, nothing portentous or funereal. I felt a bit of a fool as I plodded along the towpath with this pre-packaged supermarket bouquet. It was quite a hot evening. The police had told me it happened just beyond the Canal Gasworks Conservation Area, and of course I’d heard all about it in the Coroner’s Court. Unlike anyone else in the family, I sat through the whole grim show.

I’d forgotten that her Sainsbury’s was also the scene of the Ladbroke Grove rail crash. There were some withered little tributes in cellophane with messages hanging on the wall, on the strands of barbed wire, over the railway tracks, on the left as you go in. I guess there are some there almost all the year round. It’s always somebody’s birthday or somebody’s wedding anniversary. There was a
cheap bunch of dead carnations, so dead you couldn’t even tell what colour they had once been, and a fancier arrangement of ivy and ghostly faded large-petalled blue flowers of a more exclusive variety. I don’t know what they can have been. I didn’t recognize them. These dedicated bouquets were accompanied by many accidental tattered scraps and ribbons of plastic, also hanging from the wire, blown there by the wind – the relics of shredded plastic bags, I suppose. They looked from a distance like votive offerings, but really they were just scraps of airborne rubbish. We don’t have so much rubbish in Finland. And there were two black and gold commemorative plaques on the wall, one from the staff of Sainsbury’s, one with an inscribed prayer. If I remember rightly, the prayer said something about God holding the dead in the hollow of his hand. I don’t know why such banal lies should bring tears to the eyes.