The Seven Sisters (12 page)

Julia’s mother is still alive and well, and living with her widowed sister in Hove. Her father, like mine, died some years ago. Women have a long afterlife, though not always a happy one.

Julia asked if I’d thought of getting a job, and I said yes, I’d thought about it a lot, but not to any great effect. What, I asked her, was I qualified to do?

When I was a girl, I wanted to get a job, to earn some pocket money, to learn about the world. Some of my school-friends did. They worked in bookshops and in cafés. Some of them even had holiday jobs at Butlins. But my mother wouldn’t let me. She thought shop work wasn’t ladylike. She had never worked. She didn’t expect to work. I was an obedient child, and I did not resist her prohibition.

Julia liked Mr Gordano Black’s restaurant. She ordered a salad of asparagus and artichoke, and then some kind of fish. It arrived upside-down, skin upwards, resting lightly on a little pillow of orange purée. I had a rocket and parmesan salad, and then a small light green risotto. We had a bottle of pale yellow wine and a bottle of dark blue water. It was a pleasantly coloured meal.

(I favour risotto and macaroni because of my teeth. I must do something about that upper left section. I still haven’t found a London dentist. I’ve been secretly visiting Mr Chinnery in Ipswich, but I’ve begun to lose faith in him.)

I think we’d reached the second course when Julia suddenly got on to the subject of Naples and Pompeii. I was a little taken aback by the geographical coincidence, so soon after my conversation with Sally. I wouldn’t have expected Julia to be interested in Naples and Pompeii. But she was, she was very interested, and she wanted to know if I’d ever been there, and if not, would I like to go. Now this did seem somewhat strange.

Julia’s interest, unlike Sally Hepburn’s, had not been attracted by the recent television programme about Pompeian pornography. It was, it seems, of somewhat longer standing. Julia has a project to write a novel set partly in Naples, and she says she needs to do a reconnaissance trip. She has been there before, but not, as she put it, for yonks. (For a writer, she does use some very vulgar expressions.) The novel hasn’t been commissioned, but she’s already had interest for a TV tie-in. (I think that was the phrase she used.) It involves an affair between an Italian newspaper tycoon and the expensive wife of an English libel lawyer. Or something along those lines. All Julia’s novels are about adultery, sexual triangles, sexual foursomes, and other erotic and carnal permutations. I thought the milieu sounded a little high-pitched for Julia, who usually specializes in more suburban antics, but maybe she knows more about that kind of high-powered moneyed world than she used to.

Tuscany, apparently, is out of fashion these days. Tuscany has been done to death. Tuscany is old hat and overrun by yesterday’s people. In other words, says Julia, the media are tired of Tuscany. They gave birth to it and now like Saturn they wish to devour it. Julia thinks Naples must be the coming place. It has a handsome new mayor called Antonio Bassolino whom all adore, says Julia. He has transformed the city. He has banished its beggars and adorned it with art. He is the herald of a new Renaissance. She says he has cleared all the traffic from the Piazza del Plebiscito and returned the square to its ancient architectural glory and dignity. He commissioned a pyramid of salt from an artist called Mimmo Paladino to fill the piazza as a celebration of its renewal. This sculpture is called
La Montagna del Sale
, and great black metal horses rear and ride up its crystalline slopes. Julia longs to see the pyramid, though she fears it may have melted by now. Salt wards off the Evil Eye, according to the Neapolitans. Julia believes that her television people will think Naples original and smart as a setting. She thinks they will buy Naples. She needs to visit Naples.

Naples, Amalfi, Sorrento. In and out of fashion they drift, over the centuries, over the millennia. Baia, Posillipo, Cumae, Avernus. The wheel of fortune has turned once more and the time of Naples
has returned again, says Julia. She has read a book about Caravaggio and the Counter-Reformation that has given her some good ideas for locations. The ancient and the modern. The grandeur, the misery, the glistening pyramid of salt.

I might have assumed, from this scenario, that Julia’s career was prospering, but I could tell, from the manner of her narration, that it wasn’t. This project represents not an advance but a retreat. She is not happy about it, just as she is not happy about the big black Achilles. A last shot in the dark. The Evil Eye threatens her. The salt is melting.

She mentioned, very much in passing, the news that a young writer less than half her age – which is also my age, though Julia is four months older than I – has just been offered £500,000 for three chapters of an unfinished novel. I can see that she might find that worrying.

Over coffee, she got on to the subject of the loneliness of fame. I’ve had a very lonely life, said Julia. Oh, nonsense, I said, and pointed out to her that she had been married several times and never seemed short of a gentleman admirer. This gave her an opportunity to tell me that there is nothing lonelier than an unhappy marriage, as I ought to know, and that in her case
all
her marriages had been unhappy. The problem is, said Julia, I’ve had the
wrong kind
of fame. I’ve never been taken seriously. I never get invited to literary events or festivals or anything artistic. Nobody thinks of me as a literary writer. People just
use
me. They don’t respect me. I changed publishers, because I didn’t feel I was getting a good deal, and I don’t like the people I’m with now. They are trash. I’m getting a new agent. I’m sick of being treated without respect. People don’t respect women like me, who stand up for themselves. They treat me like shit.

She seemed in deadly earnest about all of this, and said she needed a brandy. Over the brandy, she became more and more confessional in mode. She told me about the neglectful and hurtful way in which various men had maltreated her over the years – how they had spent her money, and abused her body and her patience and her property. She had been obliged to resort to lawyers and injunctions. I sighed and sympathized, but in truth I was shocked, as I have been
shocked over the years, by the lack of anything like normal human affection in her relations with men. They used her, but surely she also used them? I find Julia confusing. And of course I am myself confused, because I am no longer fond of Andrew, nor do I feel as much affection as I should for my three daughters, so I am as bad as she is. If bad it be. I
do
think I think it
is
bad, but she doesn’t seem to have a sense of good and bad. And maybe there is no good or bad. It was all indoctrination.

We came back to my place for a last cup of coffee – I didn’t see how I could avoid this, and had decided to go with it, as I couldn’t reasonably resist it. We were followed, for a few yards, by an elderly drunken man weaving about on the pavement, but Julia didn’t seem to mind that. She told him to piss off, and he fell back, muttering.

Julia paid the restaurant bill. She insisted. I was relieved, as I can’t really afford to eat at Mr Gordano Black’s. I’ve only been there twice, and on both occasions Anaïs paid. I don’t understand a world in which black men buy fizzy water in Sainsbury’s without hesitating about the cost, while I think I can’t afford it. I suppose I could afford it, but I think I can’t. Tap water is good enough for me. Nobody has died of it yet, as far as I know. Are they all B-movie actors, like Achilles, these mineral-water-drinking black men?

When we got back here, Julia returned to the theme of a trip to Naples and Amalfi. Surely I was free to go with her? She would pay. She was sick, she said, of battling around the world on her own. We could have fun together, she insisted. She had in her time endured some truly terrible holidays, she said. Once, when she was younger, exhausted by a long hard stretch on a TV series, and rolling, positively
rolling
in ready money, she had booked herself an exotic holiday in Jamaica – and those, she reminded me, were the days before every Tom, Dick and Harry flew off to Jamaica every year for a second holiday. And she’d hated it. She’d simply hated it. She’d been in this Luxury Complex by the sea, with palm trees, and there was no Room Service, and at night the dogs barked, and crabs scuttled under her door, and frogs invaded her de luxe bathroom, and insects devoured her, and all she did was sit and cry. Amidst the crabs and mosquitoes. It was hell, said Julia Jordan.

So she wants me to go along with her, as a sort of companion. To share her dining table and defend her from the eyes of strangers. I think she means it. It’s very odd. I wonder if she really has no other women friends? I suppose it’s possible.
En effet
, she’s always been a man’s woman. I am her only female friend.

I humoured her, I played along with her. I said I’d think about it. There was something desperate about her, and I felt forced to respond to it. I gave away more than I needed. I asked her if she remembered doing Book Six of the
Aeneid
, all those years ago, with Mrs Pearson, for our A levels. She looked blank at first, and I don’t blame her for that – I’d have forgotten it all myself if I hadn’t brushed it up recently with Mrs Jerrold. She remembered Mrs Pearson well enough, but she’d forgotten the text. I reminded her that Aeneas asks the Cumean Sibyl about his destiny, and asks her to allow him to visit the Underworld, and she tells him to pluck the Golden Bough and descend with it. And the Underworld, I said, that’s just near Naples. Lake Avernus, the Burning Fields, the Sibyl’s Cave. Good Lord, said Julia, are those real places? They certainly are, said I. Well, let’s go and see them for ourselves, said Julia. I might be able to work them into the plot. OK, said I.

And then I rang for a minicab to take her back to her hotel.

I don’t suppose she means it. I can’t make her out, although I’ve known her on and off for most of my life. This poor-little-rich-woman pose of hers is a new one to me, but I have to admit it has a certain pathos. Poor Julia, she has outlived her looks, her popularity, and her fame. And it seems she never had the sort of fame and recognition that she coveted. And it’s too late now. How can one sing the siren’s song at sixty?

She says she will ring me about this Neapolitan project.

I can see that I could be a comforting companion. Shadowy, faded, yet entirely respectable. I can see us both, sitting on our little terrace overlooking the sea. I’d give her a touch of class, which is what she knows she needs. She’d probably be more fun as a companion than Sally Hepburn. Perhaps we could make up a threesome? Perhaps we should all three book ourselves on an art tour? God preserve me.

She wonders whether she should pluck the Golden Bough

I’ve been re-reading Book Six. It’s an invitation.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Mrs Jerrold. And about whether she needed the money from teaching that evening class. And about why I haven’t tried harder to get a job. Julia is right to be proud of her earnings. I ought to have tried harder to support myself. Part of me thinks that I ought not to be taking any money from Andrew at all, let alone thousands of pounds a year. I know the law doesn’t see it that way, nor do my so-called friends, but I feel diminished by living on his money. I wonder if that’s a feminist feeling. I never thought much about feminism, while I was married to Andrew. He, of course, was a fellow traveller on the subject of feminism. As soon as it became fashionable, so he adopted it. At least, he adopted it in all his public statements. But I don’t think he ever thought about it very much.

I’m not really qualified to do anything except teach basic French, and I’m so out of practice with my French that I don’t think I could do even that competently. The methods are so different now. I feel a bit like poor Miss Matty in
Cranford
, when she lost most of her money in the joint stock bank. Like her, I have only a lady’s accomplishments, and not many of those. Not much progress in more than a century. What was it that Miss Matty Jenkyns could do? She was good at making spills from coloured paper, and at knitting garters, and at covering babies’ balls with rainbow stripes of worsted – not much money in any of that. But didn’t she then go into business and start to sell little packets of tea? If she did, she was braver than I am. I couldn’t. I couldn’t work in a shop. It’s not that I’d be ashamed to do so. It’s just that I wouldn’t know how to begin to set about it.

There’s an unfortunate character in
Persuasion
– a lady, a fallen
faded sick lady – who makes her living from some kind of handiwork. I don’t even seem to be able to do that. I suppose I could babysit. I wonder if there’s any call for that, in this neighbourhood? There are advertisements from babysitters on the Members’ Board in the Club.
Non-smoker, clean driving licence, fond of children
, that kind of offer. I wonder what the rates are.

Sometimes I think I could do an unladylike job, a truly debasing and menial job. As I was sitting on the top of the number-seven bus the other day in one of those interminable traffic jams on Oxford Street, I saw an old man with a primitive wooden rake, scratching persistently away at the pavement. At first I couldn’t think what he was doing, but eventually I worked out that he was engaged in trying to remove the blobs of chewing gum that bespatter the streets of our city. The stones of London are impregnated with dark blotches of gum. They lie thick like tears. And he was trying to remove them. He scrapes up the gum, and he deposits it in his plastic sack. The stains remain. I suppose somebody must pay him to do this.

I think his is an honourable calling. For some reason he made me think of Simone Weil. She was wedded to filth and lowliness. I don’t know much about Simone Weil, but I do know something. I had to swat up on her once, when I was standing in for Betty Foy in the Religious Knowledge class. I did Simone Weil with the Sixth Form one week, and definitions of teleology and ontology with the Lower Sixth. I remember those lessons I gave rather clearly. I learnt something, even if the girls didn’t. Betty Foy had made up a very odd syllabus. She went off to become a nun. She may have been given the sack, but her ostensible reason for leaving was that she was going off to be a nun. Andrew said she wasn’t a good influence on growing minds. I don’t know about that. I don’t think a bit of Simone Weil can have hurt them.