The Seven Sisters (17 page)

The urge to drop my sapphire and diamond engagement ring down the grating that runs around the edge of the pool is getting stronger. The blue water laps there so quietly and so enticingly. Maybe one day I will succumb to it.

When I got back to my locker after my shower and my three minutes in the sauna, the not-so-plump girl was still sitting there on the wooden bench. She had her head in her hands, and had replaced her tracksuit bottoms by a long purple skirt, but apart from that she hadn’t moved. She didn’t look up as I proceeded to towel myself and to begin to get dressed. There was a mobile phone lying on the bench beside her.

I felt I ought to say something. What if she was feeling ill? I blew my hair dry on full power and top heat with the blaring hot nozzle, and made a lot of disturbing noise as I pulled on my little black boots and packed up my training shoes. (Training for what, I sometimes wonder. It’s a bit late for me to train for anything. I laughed when my ‘personal trainer’ asked me what my ‘fitness aims’ were. At my age, you don’t have aims. You run in order to stand still.)

I made so much noise that she must have known I was there, and that I was observing her, and that the noise was directed at her. So
she can’t have been very surprised when I daringly said, ‘Are you all right?’ And she wasn’t. She gave a kind of whimper, and muttered, ‘No, not really.’ I think that was brave of her. It was brave of me to speak, and brave of her to answer.

So I sat down by her and asked her if there was anything I could do to help. She said, again, ‘No, not really’, but she didn’t say it with hostility, so I just continued to sit there in what I hoped was a companionable way. After a while she reached into her bag for a tissue, and blew her nose, and looked over at me.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m just feeling really rotten. That’s all. I’ll pick up soon.’

‘Come and have a coffee with me downstairs,’ I suggested. I thought she ought to move. It wasn’t good for her to go on sitting there. I know what it feels like, to feel that you’ve just got to go on sitting there. Wherever ‘there’ may happen to be. It’s not a good feeling.

She seemed to agree with me because, somewhat to my surprise, she said yes, she would. I must have looked very harmless.

So we went downstairs together, down the exposed and glittering glass catwalk of the turquoise and aquamarine spiral staircase, and in the healthy café I bought two cups of coffee.

‘It’ll do you good,’ I said, vacuously.

She didn’t say anything, so I filled in the gaps. I said I’d joined the Club when it first opened, indeed before it opened, because I used to go to the evening classes. I told her how I’d watched it being built. I told her about the gutting of the temple that had housed the Virgil class, the preserving of the Victorian red-brick façade, the bulldozers, the blasting, the hard-hatted workmen, the security lights. They’d done a good job, and in record time, I said. There must be a lot of money in Health Clubs, I said. The chain must be making a fortune. There was nothing like this around when I was young, I said. I nearly said that all this health faddism had gone too far, but luckily I stopped myself in time.

She was sipping her coffee while I chatted on like a social worker or a health visitor or a prison visitor or a Samaritan. She was a pale-faced, dark-haired, rather plain young woman. Her hair was cut straight and short and held back by little plastic clips. It was a
fashionable style but it didn’t look quite right on her. Her face was too round.

When she spoke, she said, ‘You must live quite near, then’, and I agreed that I did. A few minutes’ walk away, I said.

She was like a poor fledgling, too young to be exposed. A child, really.

‘Do you live near too?’ I asked, risking a question that she might not answer.

‘Not very far,’ she said. Then she sighed, heavily, and said, ‘Well, I’d better be getting back.’

‘Will there be someone there?’ I asked.

‘I share a flat with some friends,’ she said. ‘It’s all right, I’m not alone.’

‘That’s good,’ I said.

‘I suppose so,’ she said. Then she made an effort, and smiled at me, quite convincingly, and said, ‘You’ve been very kind. I’d better be going now. Thanks for the coffee.’

‘It was nothing,’ I said.

‘No,’ she said, ‘it was kind.’

And she got up, and made a little sad waving gesture with her hand, low down and unconfident, from somewhere near her waist, and shouldered her tote bag, and set off into the evening.

Poor girl. I’m glad I spoke to her. I hope she isn’t really ill. Maybe it’s all in my imagination, and she’s just had a row with her boyfriend. Rows can hurt, but they don’t kill you.

We are surrounded by these miseries. London is suffused with grief.

There can be a luxury in grief. Sometimes I remember those great tides of self-pity that used to wash over me when I was a girl. I don’t think there was anything very unusual about them. I used to hide in the attic at home, in that big dumped armchair that came from Grandma Green’s old house, and I would cover my head with a towel, and cry. I thought everybody hated me. I used to see myself as an outcast, which I suppose, in a way, I was. But there was a kind of satisfaction in it. I relished the feeling of being rejected. The tears would pour down my cheeks, as hot as tea, and although I was
utterly miserable, I was proud of being
so very
miserable. I used to go and look at myself in the mirror, all red-eyed and ugly and blotchy, and feel strangely satisfied.

And now I seem to be tempted to revert to a similar kind of adolescent behaviour pattern. I’m surprised by myself. I thought I’d grown out of feeling sorry for myself. I thought I’d become more of a stoic. What have I got to be miserable about, compared with so many?

I look at the London Lighthouse with a new eye, now that Cynthia has told me its history. How astonishing that in all these months I never knew that it was there. Well, I knew it was there, but I didn’t know what it was, did I?

Cynthia has been a volunteer there for years, she says. She fundraises, and chauffeurs, and fills in occasionally on reception. She used to visit there when it was residential. She has seen death in that building. She says I ought to go and see the garden. She says it is delightful. She says it is a nice place to sit. You can have lunch there in the summer, she says. I will, one day soon. If I dare to ring the bell.

Cynthia has so much energy. She looks after Mr Barclay, and the AIDS people, and she is learning mathematics. My life is so useless. I am redundant. Life has made me redundant. I am retired from it, though I have never had a job from which to retire.

I wonder if Cynthia and Mr Barclay share a bed. I could not tell from her account whether sex was or had been part of the bargain. I felt at one point that she was suggesting that Mr Barclay’s sympathy with the AIDS cause was related to his own sexual orientation. I know that AIDS is not gender-specific, and I know that not all art dealers with a taste for Ottoman Victorian are homosexuals, but it would not surprise me to learn that Mr Barclay was gay. Mrs Barclay’s manner is what I think is called ‘camp’, but I do not think she is gay. She said that he could hear her talking in her sleep, which might imply a shared bed. On the other hand, she did make it clear that she talked very loudly, not to say
shouted
, in her sleep. So he could easily hear her from an adjoining room. Perhaps she sleeps in a connecting room, with the door open between them in case he panics or is taken ill in the night. Why I should think this is likely I do not know. But I have a picture of this scene in my head.

The London Lighthouse is built of red brick but they seem to be adding on some yellowish extensions. I think that’s a pity. Cynthia is right, brick is interesting. Since she told me about her brick job, I have been studying the brickwork of London more closely. It repays study. Roman bricks, yellow stock bricks, red string courses, creamy-bluish bricks, moss-covered bricks, kiln-dried bricks, painted bricks, bricks set in herring-bone patterns. Coping stones, corner stones, arches, crenellations.

People used to die in that building. It had a morgue and a chapel. Now the patients are out-housed. It is nearly all Outreach now, says Cynthia. People survive on massive amounts of medication. Some of them have to take forty pills a day, says Cynthia.

I can’t remember now whether Cynthia and I reverted during our Bloody Mary tête-à-tête to the subject of Mrs Jerrold’s guided cruise from Carthage. I know we mentioned it on the phone, when she rang out of the blue to report on her sighting of Anaïs at the Coronet. We had so much else to talk about. I know I didn’t mention Julia Jordan to her. I’ve slightly lost faith in Julia, ever since Anaïs said she’s never heard of her. I’ve been to check on her in the bookshop, and she is still in print, though only marginally. There are a couple of paperbacks with lurid TV tie-in covers, but those once-so-famous early titles seem to have disappeared.

Julia hasn’t rung about our trip to Naples. I don’t know whether I’m sorry or not. In a minor way I had begun to fantasize quite pleasantly about a week or two in Italy with Julia, acting as her unpaid companion. We would divide our time between the classical antiquities and modern Naples with its pyramids of salt, between the beauties and horrors of the past and the world of newspaper tycoons, handsome mayors, Mafiosi and tax exiles. She would indulge me, I would indulge her, and she would pick up the bills. It’s rather a shameful fantasy. Going on a cheap coach tour to Pompeii with Sally Hepburn is more within my range. And I won’t even be able to afford that if I get my teeth fixed.

It would be good to travel in the footsteps of Aeneas. He stepped whole and unharmed out of the flames of Troy and abandoned the dead and the enslaved and went on his ruthless glittering way.
(
Creusa, O Creusa
.) Some of us disapproved of Aeneas, but there’s a ruthlessness about him that appeals. Virgil calls him Pius/Pious, but you can’t really translate the word. He was pious, perhaps, but he was also a shit. (That was Mrs Barclay’s word for him: it’s not a word I’ve ever used, in conversation.) He was a shit and he followed his destiny.

We liked that bit when he arrives at Cumae and the priestess tells him to stop gaping at monuments like a tourist, and to get on with his mission.

Anaïs and Cynthia would be more fun as travelling companions than Sally Hepburn, wouldn’t they?

She chances her luck for the first time and fails

When I win the Lottery, I can go to Italy on my own terms, and choose my own company. I found one of those things called Scratch Cards on my seat on the Tube on my way back from a National Gallery lecture last week and I have to admit that I took it home and scratched it. It said
Scratch and Win
, so I scratched. All it said to me then was
Better Luck Next Time
. I didn’t think much of that as a message. It was clearer than Mrs Jerrold’s tape, but even less encouraging. So perhaps I won’t win the Lottery after all. Perhaps I’ll never get to the Mourning Plains and the Sibyl’s Cave.

I have, however, managed to get to the dentist. And Mr Wentworth is, as Cynthia promised, divine. He dwells in a deep basement very near Cavendish Square, in one of those rather pompous high-bourgeois Queen Anne-style red-brick side streets leading off Wimpole Street. I rang his bell nervously, and entered fearfully, and sat down anxiously in the communal country-house-style waiting room on the ground floor, amongst the copies of
Country Life
and
Vogue
, until he came up himself from his lair to usher me downwards. Oh, he is so charming. He is young and fair and beautiful and his eyes are of the most astonishing light greenish-blue. He wears a white coat and he looks as though he lives in the future. He comes from some brighter planet. It is surprising that he works away so far below the surface, but he has made his surgery cellar into a cavern of light. The walls are adorned with Hockney swimming pool prints – at least
I imagine that is what they are, though they may be derivative imitations – and his musical tapes play the electronic music of the spheres. He was so sweet to me, so very sweet. No man has spoken to me with such kindness in months. I had filled in a form for him, while waiting upstairs, and he looked at it, and looked up from it, and looked into my eyes, and spoke to me with courtesy by my own name.

My clouded eyes were once clear and blue, but they were never as magical and as piercing as his are. He has a delicate, finely drawn face, girlish but not effeminate. He should be called Hyacinth or Narcissus, but his name appears to be Charles. Walter Pater or Burne-Jones would have loved him. I love him, and Cynthia loves him. His skin is very pale, as though he lives too much away from the natural light. He is bathed in a bright white neon glow. His hair curls, gently, and his lips curve, gently. He is, as Cynthia says, divine.

We spoke of Cynthia. Mrs Barclay, he said, was one of his most loyal clients. Mrs Barclay, he said, was very brave, and never flinched.
I
could flinch, he assured me, as much as I liked. Not everybody was made of the same strong stuff as Mrs Barclay.

I opened my mouth to him most trustingly and let him peer down my deep throat. He tapped and probed and gestured to his female accomplice to enter information about my teeth into a computer. He cupped my jaw in his hand so warmly and so softly. His was the soft touch of a lover, not the harsh grip of a technician. I lay back and thought of my sexual life with Andrew, of my fantasy sexual life with that raffish English teacher from Bury St Edmunds. Mr Wentworth tinkered and searched and explored my mouth. I lay back and willingly submitted. It is many years since any man has touched my face.

When he gently levered me back up to a sitting posture, he gave me a hand mirror and told me to look at myself. At first I did not wish to do so, for I was ashamed in his bright presence, but he cajoled me, and I opened my eyes and stared at my ageing face. He said it was no great matter to restore my broken tooth, and he pointed to what he would do, and where. He would extract the root, on my next visit, and create a bridge. He made this sound like a treat and an adventure.