The Seven Sisters (34 page)

He has a strange, earnest, white-eyed look, and he likes to stare at me, eyeball to eyeball. I think he tries to make me look away, and often he succeeds. He is thirty-two years old. The whites of his eyes are larger than normal, and dazzlingly clear. His black hair is thick and glossy, and his eyebrows are proud and well defined. The whites of my eyes are bloodshot, and even my eyebrows now straggle strangely. I suppose I could pencil them in, but why bother? He has a life sentence but he will one day be released. He will have a chance
to remake himself, one day. I wonder if I have had that chance, and wasted it.

Italy now seems like a dream. I think I was happy there, but the pseudo-Ellen is right, I can’t describe happiness, either in the first person or in the third. I may have been happy there, but happiness is not for me. Happiness is for those who can live in a warm climate. And, anyway, it was a regressive happiness. It was a schoolgirl happiness, as dreams of drowning are schoolgirl fantasies. It is something different that draws me onwards. I must learn to grow old before I die. That, I think, is what the Sibyl tried to say, on her blank tapes and her withered leaves.

That dead Christmas tree is still lying under the motorway.

Ellen has pointed out that she has invited me several times to visit her in Finland, and that I have never taken her up on the suggestion. She doesn’t acknowledge that I realize that she doesn’t really want me to go. I can read the subtext. I’m not a fool. And I don’t like her calling my style and attitudes ‘faux-naïf’. I think that’s offensive. Though she’s right, of course, about the Ladbroke Grove rat. I only saw it twice. It’s not really my friend. It probably wasn’t even the same rat.

I’ve been looking for her paper on ‘The Serpent and Zarathustra’. (I think I’ve reconstructed that title correctly.) I think I did receive it, but I am ashamed to say I never read it. I never even looked at it. I probably left it in Suffolk. I wonder how I could get hold of a copy? I can’t ask her where it was published, because it seems so rude to have forgotten. I thought it might be too technical for me, but that’s no excuse. I do know quite a lot about speech problems, actually, because I always read articles about them whenever I see them in the press – though that’s not very often, because unlike autism or dyslexia or bulimia or other eating disorders they’re not a fashionable subject. Not a ‘sexy’ subject, as one might say these days.

The pseudo-Ellen says she hasn’t got a stammer. But she has. I don’t know if the real Ellen would admit to it or not. We don’t speak about it. My version of her version suggests that she’s in denial. I think that may be unfair. I think it’s me that’s in denial. I was very upset by her speech problems when she was little and I probably did all the wrong things – interrupted her, listened to her too patiently,
ignored it, looked anxious about it, sent her to the wrong kind of elocution classes. Let’s face it, whatever I did was wrong. Who would have thought that at my age I could suffer such torments of remorse and of regret? I am in torment. I hope I make this clear.

I wonder if I do have an eating disorder, as Ellen suggests. Most women have one, so why not me?

Not all is bad. Julia, as Ellen correctly reports, is thriving. It was a happy trip for her, and I can take some credit, for without me she would never have gone to Naples and met her Masolino – well, she might have gone to Naples, but not at that precise moment, and timing is crucial in these matters. Julia has not much time to waste, and she did not waste it. She thrived rapidly in Naples. She met the mayor, and the dashingly bearded British Consul, and she went to Capri on a yacht and to Caserta in a Ferrari. She is back in luck, back in the money, and she says she is in love with the gallant Masolino, and he with her. I wish them well. It is a good story, and she deserves some luck. She is a brave woman.

Mr Barclay recovers, slowly. Nobody has been arrested for the attack. Cynthia says he does not care about this. She says she thinks he is conscious of having been looking for trouble, and he promises to take more care in the future.

Anaïs and Cynthia see a good deal of each other these days. They go to the cinema together quite frequently. Sometimes I go with them, but when I am in low spirits, as I seem to be these days, I am conscious that I am not good company. I do not like to impose myself upon them.

I see Mrs Jerrold about once a week. She always seems pleased to see me. Since my prisoner said he was going to the Isle of Wight, I have not signed on for a new prisoner to visit. I think he’s probably there by now. I don’t think I was much use as a prison visitor.

I haven’t heard a word from Sally since we got back. I’m a bit surprised. I don’t much want to hear from her, but I’m surprised that I haven’t. It will be a sad day, when even Sally Hepburn abandons me.

Valeria will have forgotten that we ever existed. She has so many groups.

The dreadlocked man has gone from under the bridge. He sleeps there no more. His bedroll, which he always folded and stowed with
military precision, has vanished, so I think he will not return. The man with the crucifix still pursues his own path. I depend on him for continuity.

Last week a petrol bomb was thrown through the first-floor window of one of the flats just past the bridge. It is now sealed up with hardboard. And the plate-glass window of Mr Gordano Black’s has been shattered in three places. Not broken, just shattered. It must be bullet-proof. Well, around here, in a smart place like that, it would have to be. There are three little crazy splintered stars in the smooth surface of the streetwise window. Bricks, gun shots, who knows?

Yesterday I saw the handsome ruined Frenchman again, walking along St Marks Road, by the hospital. Our eyes met. Our eyes meet always. I was surprised to see him, as I have not seen him for some time, and I was beginning to think he had been an hallucination. He might as well have been an hallucination. He is the glamour and the glitter of the dead city. He is the past that walks and stalks. He is the lure to the canal bank. He is not a real person. I know what he wants of me. He wants the coupling of the dead in the Underworld. We are both dead, and we walk through our afterlife.

I will go to my Health Club and swim my eight lengths and die a little in the sauna.

Perhaps I should speak to him, next time our paths cross.

She receives an unexpected summons

Several surprising things have happened. So it is not quite the end.

I had a postcard from Valeria. The seventh sister has not forgotten us yet. I was beginning to think I might have invented her. The card is very attractive. It came from Venice, and it pictures a geometric mosaic tile from the floor of Saint Mark’s. So she may even have remembered how much I liked the Roman mosaics in the Musée du Bardo in Tunis. She asked me to give her love to all the group, and said how much she had enjoyed our company. Why don’t we come with her to Venice next time, she said. I found this strangely touching. I don’t suppose it means very much, but it is cheering.

Even more curiously, my engagement ring seems to have turned up at the Health Club. There is a Found Notice, describing what can
only be my ring. I don’t want to claim it, but I am astonished to discover that somebody actually handed it in instead of pocketing it. It’s quite valuable.

And, strangest of all, I have had an invitation to visit Ellen in Finland. Not a mumbled, diffident, half-hearted suggestion, but a real invitation, in writing – well, in print, which in this case is more serious than writing. She and Clyde are to be married, and I am invited to the wedding party. It is a proper printed card – not expensively embossed or anything like that, but printed, nevertheless. On the back of it she has written:

This is a very small private Finnish affair, but I do hope you will come. I haven’t invited Andrew and Anthea, nor Isobel, so don’t mention it to them (why would you?) but I’ve asked Martha. I don’t know if she’ll come or not. Come and stay a few days and we’ll show you around.

Love,

Ellen.

I wonder why she is getting married. I wonder why she asked me to go to the party. I wonder if I shall go.

I’ve found her paper on ‘The Serpent and Zarathustra’. I tracked it down in the Colindale newspaper library, and felt proud of myself for having done so, though I am still ashamed of myself for having ignored it in the first place. It is not easy to work the catalogue in Colindale, but I did it. The title is taken from an episode in Nietzsche’s
Thus Spake Zarathustra
, which she uses as an epigraph. In this, the narrator has a hideous vision of a shepherd with ‘a black and heavy’ serpent dangling from his mouth. The shepherd is shaking and quivering as though in a trance of horror. The narrator tries in vain to tear away the serpent, and then, inspired, ‘the voice of his horror’ cries out, ‘Bite! Bite! Bite off its head! Bite!’ And the shepherd bites off the head of the serpent, and as he does so he is transfigured, into ‘one that was bright, and one that laughed’.

Ellen analyses this and other metaphors for dumbness and speechlessness. She describes the phenomena of speaking in tongues, and considers epileptic fits and prophetic incomprehensibility – there is even a mention of my old friend the Cumean Sibyl. She explores
violent solutions and pacific solutions to speech difficulties – solutions of the murderous will and solutions of surrender. Nietzsche in this episode went for the will and for the biting off of the head of the problem, but she says that others prefer to coax and tame the serpent. The pacific approach, the relaxation approach, is much more in favour now. But many still seem to respond to the command to ‘Bite! Bite off its head!’ Is it a question of individual psychology? This also she discusses.

Her paper is interesting. It is scholarly and I think it is original, though how would I know? I did not know she could write so well. I did not know that she could write at all.

I never liked Sports Day, at school. I always pitied the losers. I pitied them too much. All three of my daughters were good strong swimmers, but I did not like to go to the Swimming Gala, for fear my presence would make them sink like stones. I was not there to applaud them when they reached the finishing line.

She accepts the role of wedding guest

Candida Wilton decides that she will be brave. She will accept her daughter Ellen’s invitation to go to Finland, even if that acceptance involves a meeting with her angry daughter Martha. She is learning, in her latter years, a bitter humility.

She sits on the aeroplane above the grey Baltic Sea, dumb with apprehension. There cannot be a happy ending. There is nothing but the next effort, and then, after that, the next. She cannot decide whether the effort is admirable or contemptible. It is the effort that is all, not the readiness.

Like a coward, she has allowed herself to become frightened of her own daughters. She attempts to confront the fear. She is not sure that she has the strength. She is too old for fighting and for confrontation, and yet what else shall she do? She is afraid to die, and she is afraid to live. She has lost her nerve.

Finland beneath her is bright in the sunshine with tawny autumn forests and pale green lakes.

She stays in a small hotel of Spartan simplicity. The slatted wood of her hard bed is a glossy varnished yellow, and the white linen blinds are decorated with bright and simple nursery flowers of red
and yellow and blue. Poppies, cornflowers, sunflowers, marigolds. She lies in her stockinged feet on her hard bed, on top of the white duvet, and stares at the white ceiling. She lies very still, inert, like an effigy. She knows nothing about this northern country, where the
Arethusa
had been fashioned. The
Arethusa
gaily sails the southern seas with her cargo of cars and merrymakers, but Candida is out of time, out of place, alone. This hotel is like a sanatorium. She is a patient in a sanatorium.

With a great effort, she summons her strength. She arises from her bed and she dresses herself in her ladylike long dark blue wool skirt with its paler blue silk shirt. She pins a silver brooch to her bosom, and she attends the wedding party. Martha is there, her dark curls exuberant and her lips red, and she greets her mother with a false parade of affection. Judas-Martha kisses her mother’s cheek with those red lips. Candida is white and drawn and dried with effort. Her mouth is dry. She can hardly speak. This occasion is very painful and distressing to her. She is not sure if she can rise to it. She feels near the point of death.

Ellen greets her mother with a more convincing gaucherie. Ellen has never been smooth of manner. Her limp is still quite noticeable at times. Nor is her new husband Clyde Hughes a man of much grace, though he manages to squeeze his new mother-in-law’s hand quite warmly, and forces a smile at her, though she suspects he does not meet her eyes. (She cannot be sure that he does not meet her eyes, for she does not dare to meet his.) He is a tall, shy, ungainly, untidy, haggard-looking person, with a straggling beard. He is not wearing a tie. But he looks kind, and seems to mean well, which is a relief to Candida.

The whole occasion is lacking in grace and fluency. The wedding party takes place in an austere glass-walled function room in the clinic, with aluminium-grey venetian blinds. There is one cold crystal vase of tall blue flowers. Neither the hosts nor the guests are good at making introductions. Conversation is stilted, and punctuated by long silences. Some of those present, hazards Candida, are the serpent’s victims and Ellen’s patients, and cannot speak much anyway. Everything is blocked, everything is hesitant. Why has Ellen bothered with this ceremony? Is it important to her?

But despite the bleakness of the furnishings, there is a good supply of liquor, and the snacks are more than adequate. Candida takes refuge in an open salmon sandwich lavishly garnished with capers and some unknown dark red berries. She munches bravely on their resinous bitterness to allay her suffering. Eventually she finds herself talking about the berries and the mushrooms of the Land of the Lakes to a good-looking well-tanned expensively suited neurosurgeon whose manner is improving rapidly under the fiery influence of vodka. He is knocking back shot after shot of the cold clear liquor with ritual rigour. Candida allows him to refill her glass, and feels that the splinters of ice in her heart might perhaps one day begin to thaw. He tells her that the mushroom hunt is the sport of the season and of the region. Will she be here long enough to embark on a mushroom expedition? There is nothing, he assures her, more exciting than tracking down the little creatures as they try to hide away in their lairs in the depths of the woodland.