The Seven Sisters (15 page)

It was a crisp day, with the low golden blue of autumn and a faint smell of leaf and fire in the clear air, and I admired other people’s gardens as I walked along. Some of them are very beautiful, and they are beautifully maintained. They give pleasure to the public. Some have little spiralling trees of evergreen topiary, and well-trained espalier trees with bright berries. I saw a pure-white rose, and a red dahlia looked at me in an inquiring manner through ornamental railings.

There was quite a queue at the butcher’s, as there often is, but I joined it, still wondering what I would choose for myself. I didn’t mind waiting. Why would I? The staff wear old-fashioned straw boaters and uniforms. The shelves on the right are full of bright rich jams and chutneys and preserves and oils. There are ducks’ eggs and quails’ eggs and cheeses of every description. And the meat is
prepared in a variety of tempting cuts and marinades. It is an almost irresistible display. It is a far cry from PriceCutter.

The clientele is very different, too. There are expensive young people in designer jeans showing stretches of slim midriff, and there are distinguished-looking older gentlemen with grey hair who could be concert pianists. It is a cosmopolitan clientele, with accents from New England and France and Sweden and the Home Counties. These are not the tongues of the Goldborne Road. These high-grade carnivores make even the affluent young clientele of the Health Club look plebeian.

People were buying for large dinner parties. Free-range chickens, sirloins, legs of lamb, barbecue ribs, great pies of
boeuf en croûte
, wild boar and venison sausages. I was ashamed, to be shopping for myself alone. Once I too shopped for a family. If I had been a man, if I had been a concert pianist, I could have asked for a quail or a cooked chicken leg or a small pie. But I am a woman, and I was ashamed. And when my turn came, I found myself asking for a crown of lamb. A dish for a proud dinner table, adorned with its festive little paper frills and caps. I have never cooked a crown of lamb. I have always wanted to cook a crown of lamb. So I pretended I was giving a dinner party. I made the small talk of a woman who is about to give a dinner party. The man in the straw boater took me seriously, in this role, and served me with respect.

I walked home with my heavy crown, with its little paper thorns. I cooked it, and I ate some of it, but I was ashamed.

Now I’m going to play Mrs Jerrold’s tape. I wonder what she’s given me?

She does not understand the message

Mrs Jerrold’s tape is playing. But it doesn’t make any sense. All I can hear is a sort of watery wailing, an underwater echoing sound. A wailing sound, against a watery bubbling and gushing. Am I playing it at the wrong speed or frequency? Has the tape perished? Is it a joke? Is it some very modern kind of music? Or is it a recording of whales or dolphins? Or of someone drowning in a well or a canal? Is it a recording of the death of Jane Richards in the Lady Pond?

Now it is beginning to squeak at a higher pitch, more like a bat in the upper air, or more what I imagine a bat might sound like.

Perhaps she has lent me a recording of the squeaking souls of the dead in the Underworld. It isn’t a very interesting sound, but it’s curiously distinctive.

We had a very good class discussion about the voices of the dead in Hades.

I’m going to switch this thing off. I think the tape is corrupted. And there’s the phone. Perhaps it’s Anaïs.

The comrades begin to gather for their journey

That wasn’t Anaïs, it was Mrs Barclay on the phone. Quite a coincidence, when I’d just been talking about her so recently to Mrs Jerrold. Mrs Barclay said she’d been meaning to ring me for a long time but had lost my number, then found it again – guess where – in her Day Lewis Virgil translation. She’d written it in, with all our addresses and numbers, on the end papers. ‘Well, it is
my own book
,’ she commented, defending this small act of vandalism, but I hadn’t said anything in reproach. I often write in books myself. She said she’d been thinking of me because she’d thought she’d seen Anaïs going into the Coronet Cinema at Notting Hill and had shouted after her but had been too late to stop her. ‘And I didn’t want to pursue her into the cinema without a ticket, did I?’ said Mrs Barclay. ‘Specially not a seedy old cinema like that!’

A pang of unreasonable jealousy shot through me at the thought of Anaïs going to the Coronet without telling me. Had she been accompanied by another friend? I could hardly ask, it would have sounded mad. I know Anaïs has lots of other friends, and that I am nothing special to her. I am lucky that she bothers with me at all. Anaïs and I don’t often go to the Coronet. In fact, we’ve only been there once, to see that box-office-blockbuster romantic weepie,
The Springs of Dove
.

The cinema is, as Mrs Barclay said, seedy. It is vast and usually nearly empty, and is built like an old-fashioned music hall. It probably once was a music hall. The red velvet seats have broken springs, the clientele smokes heavily, and the staff are confusingly multi-ethnic
and have a curiously intimate, offhand, joshing attitude towards their hard-boiled customers. The Coronet customers, including myself and Anaïs, laughed heartily at all the saddest moments of
The Springs of Dove
. (Incidentally, it was while we were queuing for our tickets in the shabby foyer that Anaïs burst out with one of her extraordinary anecdotes. She really has a vast repertoire of these, culled from Lord knows where – maybe her days in television. Darling, she said exuberantly, did I realize that this was the very spot where, in Edwardian days, no less than Bernard Shaw’s sister Lucy learnt that her husband had been having a lengthy affair with the wife of the Coronet’s manager, Eade Montefiore? The rest of the queue was much impressed by this, though perhaps not all of them knew who Bernard Shaw was.)

I wonder why Mrs Jerrold and Anaïs and I all call Mrs Barclay ‘Mrs Barclay’, and not Cynthia, which is her given name. She is no older than me, and considerably younger than Mrs Jerrold. Is it because of the air of eccentric and emphatic propriety which she carries with her, so at odds with the occasional impropriety of her utterances? Is it because the name of Cynthia does not suit her? Mrs Barclay has a theatrical manner, and has chosen Mrs Barclay as a kind of nickname.

Mrs Barclay then said, on the phone, that although she hadn’t taken up the cut-price offer at the Health Club, as Anaïs and I had, she had maintained contact with the immediate area through AIDS and the London Lighthouse. What’s the London Lighthouse, I asked, naively, as one might as a child naively ask, ‘What is death?’ I am much wiser now than I was when I picked up the phone half an hour ago. I cannot believe I walked past that other building so often, so unknowingly, on the way to my swimming pool in the sky.

Mrs Barclay – or Cynthia, as I shall now try to call her – lives way up in the smart part, beyond Mrs Jerrold. Near Holland Park. I have never been to her house, though I shall go there soon, now that I have been invited.

We often wondered if there was a Mr Barclay. Now I know. Mr Barclay does indeed exist, he is not just an alibi. I wonder if I shall meet Mr Barclay too. I rather doubt it.

Cynthia was interested to hear that I had been to see Mrs Jerrold earlier this week. She too had been thinking about her, and about our Virgil class, after that glimpse of the person who might or might not have been Anaïs.

‘Do you remember’, said Cynthia, ‘that plan that we had to get Mrs Jerrold to sail with us from Carthage to Naples and guide us round the ancient sites? I think we were half-serious until old Mr Wormald started to get excited about it. Imagine, a cruise with Mr Wormald!’

And then we chatted on for a while about the unhygienic Mr Wormald, and the romance of the idea of sailing from Carthage to Italy, in the wake of Aeneas. Cynthia Barclay seemed to have nothing better to do than to chat to me. And she has invited me to visit her on Thursday at six.

Her horizons begin to expand

Mrs Barclay’s house is very grand and very exciting. I know a lot more now about Mrs Barclay and why she calls herself Mrs Barclay. I shall describe her first, and then I shall describe the man whom I met on the way home in the shop that isn’t PriceCutter. I don’t think he would have spoken to me as he did if I hadn’t been energized by Mrs Barclay. He must have seen something new in my face. A ghost of my other self. I won’t say my former self, because that’s not what I mean. My other self. That’s what I mean.

Cynthia Barclay used to be Mr Barclay’s housekeeper. After a manner of speaking. And then he married her.

It’s not quite a Jane Eyre and Mr Rochester story, I gather. But it’s interesting.

She told me this story over a Bloody Mary in her vast tall first-floor drawing room which overlooks one of those private London squares. A
piano nobile
. This seems to me to be the height of dignified town living. Those houses must be worth a fortune. Perhaps not even Mr Barclay could afford to buy it now. I wonder if he owns it, or whether he has a lease? The outside of the house is painted a strong ochre, and the drawing room is decorated in lavish style. I’ve decided to call it Victorian Ottoman. It consists of lots of tapestry
and cushions and patterns and huge chairs and deep low settees that seem to fit into the space quite easily. I think there was a chandelier but I was so dazzled by everything that I didn’t take it in. Could it have been Venetian glass? I must remember to look up more boldly next time.

I’d never have asked for a Bloody Mary, because as a rule I’m not very keen on vodka, but she seemed very keen on mixing me one, so I let her. And I must say it was delicious. She gave me the works, as she put it. Lemon, ice, celery, Lea and Perrins, Tabasco, black pepper. It had quite a kick to it. Mrs Barclay says that one of the many things she did in her former life was to work as a barmaid. She says she loves mixing drinks.

I’ve never really had a job in my real adult life, but Mrs Barclay seems to have had dozens. She’s been a waitress, a barmaid, a cook, a minicab driver, and a housekeeper. She’s worked in a theatre and an auction house and a fashion house, and she’s been paid to collect money for charity on railway stations. (I thought those people with collecting boxes were always volunteers, but she says not.) She’s worked on a switchboard for a firm that sells fake handmade reclaimed bricks. She knows a lot about bricks: she says that was one of her more stimulating placements. She has a restless energy that might explain some of this strange pattern of employment. Also, as she points out, she has no skills, and isn’t good with money. She plays life as it comes, and learns as she goes. She’s tall and bold and firm and mannered. She says she was kicked out of school at sixteen because of some escapade – we didn’t go into that – and has never regretted it because she’s enjoyed living by her wits. ‘I’m a very resourceful woman,’ boasted Cynthia Barclay, as she crunched loudly on her gory stick of celery.

But, says Cynthia, she’s sometimes regretted her lack of formal education. ‘I do like to use my brains,’ said Cynthia. Hence, she says, the Virgil class. She took that up after she sailed into the calm rich harbour of Mr Barclay’s protection.

‘I was getting tired,’ she said. ‘And Mr Barclay doted on me. I came here as a temporary, through an agency, but I stayed on. He didn’t want to lose me. He said that if I married him I could have anything
I wanted. I could go out to as many evening classes and nightclubs as I liked, provided I always left him a nice meal ready for the microwave. He’s not very demanding. He positively encourages me to spend my money and he approves of the time I spend at the Lighthouse. He’s got lots of friends in the AIDS sector. But he did want to make sure of me. He didn’t want me giving in my notice.’

Mr Barclay, she says, is seventy next year. He’s a semi-retired art dealer and writes about art history. Hence, I suppose, the casual elegant opulence.

Cynthia says she is a spendthrift. That, she says, has always been her problem. Whatever she earns, she spends. She’s been married once before, and had two children by her first marriage, but it had ended years ago. One of the children is in America, the other in Edinburgh. She didn’t say anything much about her first husband, but I gathered he hadn’t been very good with the money either. Mr Barclay, it seems, has enough money to cushion Cynthia from the ill effects of her own bad habits.

‘Guess what I’ve taken up instead of Virgil?’ said Cynthia, when she had sketched out this rapid map of her past history. ‘I’ve taken up mathematics. I go to a class in Westminster. It’s delightful. I went back to where I left off, when I was fifteen, and I’m catching up with things. They teach it much better now than they did when I was a girl. It’s
much
more exciting. Mr Barclay is very impressed by my mathematics.’

I too was impressed. I do not think my brain could cope with mathematics now.
En effet
, to speak truth, I found the Virgil very difficult, even with Mrs Jerrold as our interpreter and guide. It stretched my brain to cracking point. I think Mrs Barclay’s brains are in better trim than mine. She has given them more exercise.

Mrs Barclay didn’t do all the talking. She asked me what I was doing, and I told her more about my visit to Mrs Jerrold, and the little books of poetry she had published when she was someone else called Ida Kemp. I told her that Anaïs and I sometimes went to the cinema together, and she asked if she might be allowed to come too one day. I don’t know if I’d ever told her about my leaving Andrew and we didn’t get on to the subject now, though I did admit to three
daughters that I don’t often see. Then I told her about the Health Club, and I said that I was surprised she hadn’t joined. But she said she didn’t need any more bodily exercise, she was always rushing around, it was mental exercise that she needed. Mathematics, algebra. She was thinking of taking up Japanese, as Mr Barclay was planning a trip to Japan to sell some paintings, and had suggested that she should go with him.

We had a long, nostalgic talk about our forcibly truncated Virgil class. Cynthia said the best evening ever was the evening when we did lines 490–94 of the Sixth Book. She remembered it so clearly. I had to look it all up again when I got home, though when I found it, it did all come back to me too. It’s the bit where Aeneas in the Underworld meets the Greek generals and the followers of Agamemnon, and they flee from him in terror even though they are dead. They see his armour glittering in the gloom and they flee again to their ships to escape him. It’s not a particularly interesting passage but I remember that we all became engrossed by the way the Greeks try to cry out but can produce no sound.
Pars tollere vocem exiguam: inceptus clamor frustratur hiantis
. That’s the Latin.