The Seven Sisters (9 page)

Sally drank three-quarters of the bottle.

Sally had come by Tube, from Liverpool Street, and she’d had a good introduction to my neighbourhood. It reminded me of my own first impressions and made me feel, in comparison, a seasoned Londoner. First of all, she had witnessed an unpleasant incident on Ladbroke Grove. There are many unpleasant incidents on Ladbroke Grove, though they take place more often in the dark than in the light of morning or the noonday sun. This one involved an elderly white man vomiting into the gutter by the bus stop. She didn’t describe it very well, as vivid narration is not her forte, but I got the picture. Then she had had the added benediction of witnessing the man with the crucifix. I know that man well, by sight, and I watch him often. He is black, of short to medium height and of indeterminate age, with wisps of grey-black hair wandering over his balding
scalp, and he walks the streets carrying a vast plain white wooden crucifix. It is hinged, so presumably he folds it away at night. His cross is taller than himself, and he carries it on his shoulder, as though he were climbing Calvary. He looks neither to right nor to left and he speaks to nobody. He does not rant, nor pray, nor proselytize. He simply walks the streets in silent dignity. He is a figure of penance. I think maybe he is saying penance for us all, for I cannot believe that he himself can have done anything bad enough to warrant so long an expiation. Anyway, Sally saw him, and reported her sighting, and I was able to lay claim to my long knowledge of him.

I think she was suitably impressed by my colourful neighbourhood.

She was certainly impressed by the unexpected apparition of Anaïs Al-Sayyab. I hadn’t arranged for Anaïs to drop by in order to impress her, but that’s how it turned out. I’d just wrested the cork out of the bottle when Anaïs rang to ask if she could pop round to borrow my radiator bleed key as she couldn’t find hers and her central heating was full of airlocks. (She lives very near.) Of course I said of course. I think we’d had some kind of discussion about plumbing and radiators a week or two ago, which had included a reference to airlocks. We don’t always talk about such dull things but on this occasion it was lucky that we had. Anaïs didn’t know I had company for lunch, and I didn’t warn her over the phone. I wasn’t quite sure how to put it. I could hardly say, ‘For some reason I’ve got this embarrassingly enormous woman from Suffolk here in my flat’, could I?

I hadn’t seen Anaïs for a week or two. I know her from my Virgil class, and I sometimes bump into her at the Health Club. Not very often, for we keep different hours and she goes to classes, whereas I prefer to go alone. I do not like to impose on Anaïs Al-Sayyab, for she is a busy woman with a large circle of acquaintances, but I am always pleased to see her, and I am pleased that she bothers to keep up with me. I seem to play some role in her life. I am not sure what it is, but I am happy to play it.

We are not very close friends, but Sally Hepburn must have thought, from this somewhat unrepresentative meeting, that we pop in on one another all the time. I did nothing to correct this impression. I
am not the kind of person to have close friends who pop in, but I think I wish I were that kind of person, and the illusion of being it is better than nothing.

I could see that Sally was much struck by Anaïs. Anaïs is striking. She is more than striking. She is spectacular. She ran up the stairs noisily, faster than Sally or I could have managed, and burst in dramatically, exaggerating her breathlessness. ‘Wow, what stairs!’ she cried, as she burst in, puffing and panting and blowing from her carmine lips. I could see Sally looking at her in wonder. For Anaïs is lustrous, and as exotic as her name. She is dark-haired and brown-complexioned, and she dresses in the gaudiest of garments. Even her bathing suit is striped and starred in splashes of mango and canary. Yesterday she was wearing a woollen coat of many colours, banded with green and red and blue and yellow, and cut in a surprising way that managed simultaneously to suggest a nomadic blanket and an expensive item of Japanese haute couture. She was also wearing a scarlet hat with a silver tassel, perched on top of her thick black curls. And her make-up was thick and lush and shameless.

Yet Anaïs is a lady. You can see at a glance that she is a lady. She’s a different sort of lady from the refined and thoroughbred sort they tried to breed at St Anne’s, but she is a lady.

I offered her a glass of wine, but she declined. No, she said, too busy, another day, she had to dash. So this was Sally from Suffolk? Heard a lot about
you
, cooed Anaïs in her slightly menacing way, which could have meant anything or nothing. Bless you, my darling, she said to me, as she put the bleed key into her bag. I’ll give you a ring, she threatened, and she kissed me loudly and extravagantly, and then away she flew, clopping vigorously down the stairs and out of our hearing.

Anaïs wears short skirts and astonishing shoes. They are heavy, thick-soled and clumpy, and they add inches to her already considerable height. They are very smart and come from some designer shop in Knightsbridge of which I can never remember the name.

I don’t mind it when Anaïs calls me darling. She calls everybody darling, and that’s just fine by me. I don’t think Anthea Richards ever dared to call me darling – it would hardly be proper, as a form of
address to her lover’s first wife – and I certainly wouldn’t have liked it if she had.

Anaïs, early in our Virgilian acquaintance, decided to decide I was amusing company. And therefore, with her, I can be amusing. She summons up another self for me. She has that power.

This intervention from ‘my friend Anaïs’ (how proudly I write that phrase) gave a kick-start to my little luncheon party, and I found myself almost boastful about the contentment of my London life. Maybe it was my unsuitable air of self-satisfaction that made Sally drink so much and become so overbearing and, eventually, indiscreet. First of all, she displayed a brutally direct curiosity about Anaïs – who was she, what did she do, where had I met her, what nationality was she, did she always wear such outrageous clothes? Did I know many people like her? And why, when she wore such short skirts, didn’t she bother to shave her legs? I never ask people direct questions because it’s rude. And that last question of Sally’s, about Anaïs’s legs, was rude by any standards. I muffled my replies, but I did unwisely reveal that Anaïs worked in television. I suppose I was pleased to be able to claim to know somebody who works in television, but I should have kept quiet. It was none of Sally’s business. (In fact, I don’t think Anaïs does work in television any more, and I’ve never been quite clear what it was that she did when she did it, but she certainly used to have some professional connection with whatever it is that goes on or used to go on down the road at White City and Wood Lane.) And it was unwise to mention television anyway, on other grounds, because it gave Sally an opening for a speech about a TV programme she’d seen recently about prostitution in Pompeii.

She wasn’t complaining that this Pompeii programme was pornographic. On the contrary. I might well have thought it was, had I seen it, which I hadn’t, but Sally had thoroughly enjoyed it. Far from being shocked by it, she was praising it for its frankness and for the explicit nature of the erotic paintings of
hetairai
, priapic figures and bizarre sexual couplings which it had displayed. Sally claims never to have seen a naked man, in the flesh, though she seems to have seen many more on film than I ever have. I do not like talking about this kind of
thing. I am squeamish and anyway I think these matters are private. But Sally has no shame. She became so excited about some of the depictions she had seen that she proposed that she and I should go on a coach tour to Naples and Pompeii. There are, she says, some excellent Art Tours with distinguished lecturers serving as guides, and handsome couriers who handle all the baggage and who probably, according to Sally, double up as gigolos. The word ‘gigolo’ amused her. She said it several times over, to make sure I got the point.

I could tell that Sally thought this was a very kind proposal, and one that would suit me well in my divorced and outcast state. I am supposed to be humbled, and grateful now for any overture. She said we could share a room and then we wouldn’t have to pay the Single-Room Supplement and that it would be much cheaper that way.

I couldn’t tell how serious she was. It’s not the first time she’s tried suggesting that we go on holiday together, and when I lived in Suffolk I did once let her drag me away for a short weekend to a rather low-key literary festival in Cromer. We stayed a night but we did not share a room. It rained all the time and we attended a very poor lecture by a man who writes about birds. Some of his slides were upside down.

I don’t want to go to Naples with Sally. I would like to see Naples before I die, but I don’t want to see it with her. I know more about Naples than Sally does. I would like to see the birdless realms of Avernus and the dark pit of Acheron. I would like to visit the Sibyl at Cumae and hear my endless fate. But not with Sally Hepburn.

I eventually diverted Sally from the subject of phallic symbols by leading her on to Suffolk gossip. She was by now well through the wine, and although it was only a light white cheap Italian table wine (not from PriceCutter, but cheap enough nonetheless) it was turning her large face red and making her shout and spit. First she told me about Henrietta Parks and her new-born granddaughter, who, to Sally’s ill-concealed satisfaction, seems to have a serious problem connected with her digestive system and is noticeably failing to thrive. A surgical operation may be necessary. I said that I was sorry to hear this. And so I was and so I am, I hope. I wish no harm to the innocents.

I sometimes think that
Schadenfreude
becomes a serious affliction
for many of us as we grow older. We long for the illnesses and deaths of others. This is not pleasant, but I fear it may be so.

I have no grandchildren. Isobel, my married daughter, has not yet reproduced. I suppose I ought to wonder why not, but I never think about it, except when Sally obliquely raises the subject. It’s no affair of mine. Is it?

Then Sally couldn’t resist bringing me up to date with the latest news of Andrew and Anthea, and I couldn’t resist listening. She had met them both at Ixham House at a lecture on penal reform and youth custody by the governor of Coveney Hall. (I managed not to tell her about my man in Wormwood Scrubs. I was tempted to tell her, but I kept him a secret.) Lady Westbury had laid on a reception with very nice nibbles. Everyone has to provide nibbles these days, said Sally, digging heartily into her macaroni.

I don’t much like the word ‘nibbles’. It reduces us to mice or hamsters. Sally seems very fond of it. Once Sally gets hold of a word, she does it to death. That day it was all gigolos and nibbles.

That woman doesn’t nibble. She eats like a pig. She shovels it in. And she messes it around on her plate, too. We were always told not to play with our food at St Anne’s. She mushes and mashes hers with her fork, and makes little piles of it, and then eats it very noisily. I think she has dentures. Maybe that’s why she mashes it all up so much. But it’s no excuse.

Sally told me that at first she’d thought the Westbury nibbles were Marks and Spencer canapés, but they weren’t, they were hand-crafted nibbles. Not hand-crafted by Lady Westbury herself, of course, but by some more personalized slavey than those employed by Marks and Spencer. (At this point I nearly told Sally about the carton soup, but again, I restrained myself. Why do I feel so powerful a need to betray myself to her? What hold does Sally Hepburn have on me? What are these games we play? And why, come to that, should a lecture on youth custody be so inappropriately accompanied by wine and canapés?)

Andrew and Anthea had been tucking into the nibbles too, according to Sally. They had even asked My Lady Westbury for the name of the caterer. They seemed to be thinking of having a party,
says Sally, to celebrate their first wedding anniversary. They have been married nearly a year. It has all been very rapid.

How has Andrew got away with it? How has he managed to attract such sympathy and tolerance, in that gossipy, petty, backbiting little world? He and Anthea are invited everywhere. Nobody cuts them or gives them the cold shoulder. They were adulterers, and in the eyes of some churches they still are, but they go to parties and they give parties. Am I forgotten? Is my name forbidden? Is it a relief to all that I have left the county? Was I always a pariah, without my knowing it? Was this lofty solitude foreordained to be my destiny? A destiny stacked, laid, unalterably dealt?

Anthea, said Sally, was wearing a long woollen dress of a deep cherry red. Anthea is buxom and vivacious and elegant. I admit it. People smile when she enters a room. Whereas my Suffolk self was faded and wan, and the passivity of my self-pity made an ugly martyr of me. People turned away at my approach.

I must have been very bad, for them to have been forgiven so quickly for their transgression.

The binman at Farlingham once called me a tight-arsed bitch, because I asked him not to throw the bin lids on the flowerbed. Perhaps I am a tight-arsed bitch.

Sally says Anthea can’t cook. Can’t cook, or won’t cook. Rumour has it, says Sally, that Andrew, Anthea and Martha eat out most of the time, or live on what’s left over from the school kitchen. He’ll be missing your good plain cooking, said Sally, scooping another great forkful into her wide mouth, and munching away.

She devours and insults my food simultaneously. She has always done so. I assume she must sometimes cook for herself, but she has never cooked for me. I wonder how she got to be quite so large. Those microwave meals aren’t very substantial, are they? She probably eats double quantities of them.

I mean, literally, that she devours and insults simultaneously. She talks while eating. With her mouth full.

She couldn’t think of anything else to say about Anthea. I thought, at one point, that she was about to raise the forbidden name of Anthea’s dead daughter, Jane, but she didn’t. She skirted the topic,
with some reference to an article she’d read on the rising suicide rate for young males, and a client of hers whose son had taken an overdose, but then she ostentatiously drew back from it. I should try to be charitable and to remember that Sally probably behaves quite professionally with her clients. She does good, but I do nothing, and that is worse. Do Good, do Bad, do Nothing. I do nothing. Fainéant.