The Seven Sisters (4 page)

It’s hard to believe that Janet, Julia and I were ever a threesome. But we were.

Julia once suggested that it was Janet, rather than agricultural subsidies and bad harvests and foot-and-mouth and the motorway bypass that drove Dick to the bottle. I wouldn’t know about that. Maybe Julia goes around telling people that it was me that drove Andrew into the waiting arms of Anthea Richards. And who knows, maybe I did.

Julia Jordan is another matter altogether. Julia is rich, and Julia is famous, and Julia is a wicked woman. Julia lives in Paris, and she threatens to visit me soon. Julia is free. She is free to come and free to go. She is as free as a bird. She too was delighted by my divorce, though she was able to be much more open about her delight than Janet, being several times divorced herself. She approves of divorce. She never liked Andrew. She always saw through Andrew. She danced with him once when she was fifteen, and although she was flattered to be singled out by him, she didn’t succumb to his slick vain well-mannered celebrated charm. She was cool about Andrew. We thought then that she was pretending to be cool, but now I think that she knew what she knew.

Julia was always a shocker, even at school, though I don’t think any of us expected that she’d ever go quite so far as she eventually went. We were easily shocked, in those days. ‘Juicy Julia’ we called her, with admiration. How ugly and inappropriate schoolgirl slang is. I’m sure girls don’t call one another ‘juicy’ now. I don’t think it is a word my daughters have ever used. But, then, sex has become so commonplace these days. They call everything ‘sexy’ now, even quite inappropriate things like investment portfolios and computer software and electrical egg whisks. (At first I thought the thing about the egg whisk I heard on the radio on a food programme was some louche double entendre, but no. It was just Stupid Speak.) Sex was rare, when we were young. Julia was our pioneer. She went out, into all those dangerous places, and came back and told us about them. All the ‘juicy’ bits. She would entertain us with them, at night, after Lights Out. Julia seemed to lack some kind of moral sense. She simply didn’t think that what she was doing was wrong. Kissing,
petting, heavy petting, letting the hands rove over her body, letting the fingers enter her body. We were all so timid and priggish and frightened. We listened spellbound to her stories.

There wasn’t much scope for sex at school, as we were closely supervised during term time. Our parents paid good money for that supervision. Those formal school dances came but twice a year, one just before the Christmas break – ‘The Winter Assembly’, it was called, for some forgotten reason connected with the old days of the old town’s social history – and one at the end of the summer term, which was known as ‘The Leavers’ Ball’. Serious impropriety at these time-honoured, public and carefully orchestrated events was almost unthinkable. We were all very well brought up. All our sex was in the head and in the pages of our diaries, and even there it was heavily monitored and edited.

Julia made up for the stringencies and deprivations of the school year with her activities during the holidays. When we were sixteen, and in the first year of the Sixth Form, she came back at the beginning of the summer term with the news that she had been what we called ‘the whole way’. We were fascinated by this. Our knowledge of the sexual act was restricted to descriptions in the pages of the novels of Mazo de la Roche, Nicholas Monsarrat and D. H. Lawrence, and to hypothetical extrapolations from the discreet on-screen activities of actors like Gregory Peck, Victor Mature and Alan Ladd. (The clean-cut, well-shaven Gregory Peck was a great favourite.) We were very old-fashioned, and knew little of Elvis Presley and Rock and Roll. These things were kept from us, at St Anne’s. So Julia’s revelation that she was no longer a virgin amazed, intrigued and appalled us. We were full of admiration. We looked at her as though she had left the realms of the real and entered a fictional space. What did it feel like, we wanted to know, and how had it happened, and who was the boy, and had she enjoyed it, and when was she going to do it again, and how did she know she hadn’t got herself pregnant? People just didn’t
do
that kind of thing in those days.

Julia was proud and unperturbed. She dispensed rationed portions of her story night after night, in the dormitory. Julia and I were at that time sleeping with four others in the same room (it was called
the Lilac Room) but those in adjacent chambers crept in to listen. From Magnolia and Rose and Myrtle and Hyacinth they came, bringing their eager ears and their pompon slippers and their candlewick dressing gowns. (Some even brought their teddy bears to listen. There were some pretty retarded people at St Anne’s.) And night after night, Julia narrated. Even Janet Milgram listened, although she was by now a prospective head girl and ought to have tried to stop us. We were sick and green with curiosity. If Julia had asked us to pay to listen to her, we would have paid. We curried favour, and hung around, waiting for more crumbs. We had never known anyone our own age who wasn’t a virgin.

I used to sit in Julia’s narrow bed with her during these sinful episodes, with my arm around her and my feet tucked up under her thin tartan rug. We were close. I held on to the very flesh of her sinfulness. I was one of Julia’s best friends, though I was never quite sure why. I don’t know if we really liked one another. We used to walk to church together on Sunday mornings. We had paired off, as girls were obliged to do. In earlier years I had been Janet’s pair, but by the Sixth Form Janet had splintered off and taken up with a hockey player called Smuts (I’ve forgotten her real name), partly because I was getting so thick with Julia. Janet, Julia and I were still considered a threesome for activities that didn’t require pairs. I can’t account for that. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that we were the only three doing Latin S level. We were three, in our fashion.

As we walked to church, two by two, innocent and proper in our school uniforms and school hats, Julia would tell me about the boys she knew at home, and about the forbidden books she had been reading. She had read bits of
Ulysses
(she said her father had a secret copy he’d brought home from the war) and a lot of Colette. I’m trying to think of the other ‘naughty’ books she spoke of, but I can’t remember any. This was before the days of the
Lady Chatterley
trial and even of the exotic revelations of Lawrence Durrell. We all read
The Rainbow
and
Sons and Lovers
, of course. But they were so high-minded that they didn’t count as naughty. We were allowed to read them because they were English Literature. Our school, though prim, was not wholly unenlightened.

Julia said she was going to be a writer. Most of us weren’t very ambitious, but Julia was.

I don’t know where she got her confidence or her ideas. The environment was hardly very supportive of her kind of interest or experimentation. And it wasn’t as though she was a striking beauty. In fact, she was rather odd-looking. She was of average height, about five foot four, and of average build, if anything slightly on the skinny side. Her breasts were small and high and far from voluptuous, and her belly was very flat, almost concave. (This we did envy: ‘fat tummies’, as we called them, filled us with an adolescent anorexic disgust. And this was before anorexia was widely diagnosed.) Her hair was a pale light mousy brown and slightly wavy: in later years she has taken to dyeing it in many different shades. Last time I saw her it was a rich dark chestnut, just a little too red to be real. She had a pale dun smooth skin, a sinisterly smooth skin, and a large black mole on her left shoulder. She was made up of tones of yellow and brown and pale pink. Her lips were pale pink, like the underside of a mushroom. Her most striking feature then was her very large, slightly protuberant eyes. They were uncanny. They were a light grey-blue and they had a strange, piercing, salacious expression, as though she could always read the worst of what you were thinking. Her eyes weren’t very attractive, but they were compelling. Hypnotic, almost. She painted her eyelashes dark brown and she used blue eyeshadow. We weren’t allowed to use cosmetics at St Anne’s, but she did.

There was something voracious about Julia. She ate a lot, but she never put on weight, despite the heaviness of the school diet. She burned up the porridge and the shepherd’s pie and the mashed potatoes and the syrup puddings and the piles of bread and margarine and jam. She was restless, and always on the move. She wasn’t very good at sitting still. In church, she was perpetually fidgeting and leafing through her hymn book looking for traces of sublimated spiritual eroticism (she found plenty) and pulling at her gloves. (Yes, we wore gloves to church, in that lost era of good behaviour.) She had too much energy. But she hated sports. Alone of our year, she let it be known that she despised sports. This wasn’t a fashionable attitude, but she got away with it.

She was also clever. She sailed through exams without too much effort, and took quiet satisfaction in her triumphs. Ours was a serious, old-fashioned, disciplined, ladylike school, and it should have been proud of Julia’s successes – her A and S grades, her State Scholarship, and her place at Bristol, where she was to read English Literature. But Julia made our headmistress and even our broadminded English teacher uneasy. There was something not quite right about her, and they knew it. They were too nice to be openly snobbish about Julia, but they could sniff something in her and her background that they didn’t like. I don’t think they knew about her sexual escapades – she would have been expelled as a corrupting influence had the truth been known – but they suspected them. She made them feel uncomfortable.

I knew all and possibly more than all about Julia’s escapades, and I also met her background. She invited me to stay with her for a long weekend at a half-term break – I think it must have been Whitsuntide – in the family home at Sevenoaks. I was pleased to be asked, and pleased to accept. I couldn’t go home that weekend, as my father was ill, and my mother reluctant to have me in the house, and I was loath to linger at school, exposed as homeless, with all the other miserable unwanted girls who had nowhere to go. I grasped eagerly at Julia’s face-saving invitation, and we set off together to Kent as on a spree.

It was very odd. Well,
en effect
, it wasn’t
very
odd. It was just slightly off-key, in a way that I couldn’t have defined then and don’t think I can define now. Julia’s home base was very suburban – her parents lived in an undistinguished 1930s bow-windowed semi-detached house in a crescent, with a lot of pleated curtaining and pelmets and wall-to-wall carpeting. It was deep-piled and a little lavish, in a way that seemed unfamiliar. I think a lot of us at St Anne’s, including myself, came from middle-class families living in comfortable but modest circumstances – if we’d been better off, we’d probably have been sent to more celebrated schools. St Anne’s was respectable, but it wasn’t smart. Julia’s family had the wrong kind of smartness. It sounds terribly snobbish to say that, but that’s what I thought at the time, and I must try to be honest. Her father was a bank manager, and her mother talked a lot about the theatre. I think she may
once have worked in the theatre in some backstage capacity. They both played golf and drank a lot of gin and tonic. We girls ate mostly in the kitchen, perched at a kind of American-style breakfast bar, though one evening during the weekend we had a more ceremonial meal
en famille
in the dining room with all the silverware and the napkins and the glasses. I helped to lay the table and Mrs Jordan teased me about the way I distributed the cutlery. I didn’t like that. I did something wrong with the soup spoons, but I can’t remember what.

Julia’s parents made no attempt to control Julia. She did exactly what she wanted. Like myself, Julia was an only child (that was another bond between us) and (unlike me) she had clearly got the upper hand at home. She went to the cinema in the afternoon with local boys. She went to the pub, and stayed out late. Nice girls just didn’t do that kind of thing in those days. She took me on these social excursions with her, and introduced me to her friends. One of them was the boy with whom she claimed to have had sexual intercourse. I couldn’t help staring at him. He looked quite ordinary and, if I have to be honest, not all that attractive – he was not nearly as handsome as Andrew – but he clearly had hidden qualities.

I was out of my depth in Sevenoaks. It was a foreign country to me. I could see that Julia came from somewhere else. And she was already set on travelling elsewhere.

Julia published her first novel when she was only twenty, when she was still a student. I believe the authorities at Bristol threatened to expel her, or suspend her, or rusticate her, though in the event they failed to do so. Hers was not the kind of literary debut of which a university could then feel proud, though of course nobody would raise an eyebrow now. Things have changed. Her novel was a
succès de scandale
. I read it with some alarm, as I guess we all did. Janet Milgram pretended that she never even looked at it, but I didn’t believe her. I think we all read it, avidly, surreptitiously, as we used to read the over-heated romances of Mazo de la Roche and Georgette Heyer and Dorothy Sayers by torchlight under the bedclothes.

We were all afraid that Julia would tell our secrets. I had told her some of mine. ‘Don’t tell anyone,’ I had said to her, but I knew that
she would tell. Writers have to tell. It’s what they do. It’s what they are for.

One day in gym, Mittie Bowling wet her bottle-green school knickers as she was doing some stupid split-leg exercise over the horizontal bar. ‘Don’t tell,’ she whispered to Julia, who was standing next in line and who had seen the cloudy pale yellow urine drip. But of course Julia told. As I am telling now, forty-odd years later.

We of St Anne’s needn’t have worried too much, as it happened, about the contents of Julia’s first novel. Our little secrets were spared. She had moved on from the confines of boarding school to a wider stage. She wrote about student sex, and her tone was worldly and authoritative. She had an uncanny mimicry of adult poise. She seemed so knowing. Perhaps she was knowing, though I was surprised she had had time to find out how to know so much in so short a space. My own discoveries were made so much more slowly. (I was a virgin when I married.)