The Seven Sisters (19 page)

I had been so taken with Mrs Barclay’s first Bloody Mary that I requested another, but Anaïs, from the wide selection of cocktails and mixed drinks that was on offer, selected a Manhattan, straight up. It glowed with amber and ruby in its slim glass. Cynthia even managed to provide a pink translucent cherry to decorate it. Mrs Jerrold stuck to her usual gin and water, though she consented to an additional dash of Angostura Bitters. A pink gin and water, for Mrs Jerrold, over clashing rocks of ice. This was the life, I told myself. This was the way to do it.

I told my friends that I had set my heart on sailing across the Mediterranean, from Tunis to Italy. I needed to cross the waters on a ship. My heart and my soul demanded a sea voyage. We could fly to Tunis, I was happy to do that, but I wanted to sail homewards across the sea. I’d done some research into ferries, and we could sail from Tunis to Sicily, as Aeneas had done, or we could sail direct from Tunis to Naples.

Or, said Anaïs, we could hire a yacht.

Cynthia said that yachts were expensive. You needed more passengers, she said, to make it worth hiring a yacht. Cynthia said that people who hired yachts were in another league. Mr Barclay had known some of them, and they were different.

Mrs Jerrold said that the seas were uncertain.

Anaïs said that we ought to contact the whole of Mrs Jerrold’s Virgil class and charter an aeroplane as well as a yacht, and while we were at it, why didn’t we do a bit of recruiting at the Health Club? Or at the London Lighthouse, added Cynthia. We could go into business as Classical Tourists, and make a profit and pay Mrs Jerrold handsomely.

That’s the way the conversation went.

Cynthia had provided some delicious snacks to accompany her fierce potions. She offered us little rolls of brown bread with asparagus and salmon and soft cheese in them, and tiny pastries filled with
garlic cream cheese and chives. Cynthia’s curved hair was gleaming with a new amber rinse, and Mrs Jerrold’s spiky hair was encased in a special magenta bandeau embroidered with golden stars. I hadn’t yet bought my new wardrobe, so I was still looking mousy and mumsy in Liberty print. Anaïs, as usual, was in many colours, and her stockings were green.

intoned Mrs Jerrold, as she dusted crumbs of pastry from her bosom.

One can make anything happen, if one has the nerve. It has occurred to me, over the past weeks, that if I’d been a different kind of person, a person with initiative instead of the kind of person who always waits for things to happen, then I could have organized this trip without coming into £120,000 of unexpected and unmerited lucky money. I could have asked Cynthia and Anaïs and Mrs Jerrold round to my place, and we could have planned a trip over a bottle of Californian Chardonnay from PriceCutter, and done it all on the cheap. But the truth is that this project, without the unexpected wealth bonus, would never have occurred to me.

I suppose some people might soon have got used to the idea of this moderate sum of money and might have begun to find it inadequate for their needs or imaginings. After all, compared with some Lottery winnings, £120,000 isn’t much. But I haven’t reached that stage of dissatisfaction yet. It still seems a lot of money to me, although I’ve spent some of it already.

By the time we parted on that first evening, we had got as far as selecting some possible dates. This seemed like a semi-real commitment. We all of us seemed to be remarkably free and had various dates to choose from. I suppose that’s not very surprising, at our age. We are of the third age. Our dependants have died or matured. For good and ill, we are free.

More surprisingly, I had also brought up the subject of Julia Jordan. I didn’t mean to, but she just popped out of my mouth. I
wonder if I am becoming as brazen as she is. She came up, if I remember rightly, while we were talking about Naples. Mrs Jerrold said that she had contacts from the old days on Capri and in Naples. One of Eugene’s friends had been the British Consul there, and he was still alive, and retired, and living above Amalfi. He would give good advice about where to stay, she said. And I remembered what Julia had said about the handsome new mayor of Naples and the pyramid of salt, so I told them about it, and found myself in consequence describing Julia Jordan, her life and works. As I’ve recorded, I’d already tried her name and fame out on Anaïs, but with little success. Mrs Jerrold politely said she seemed to have heard of her, but with Cynthia Barclay she scored a big hit. Ten out of ten for Julia, from Mrs Barclay. She had read all her books, watched all her TV series, adored her work, and had even worked briefly for the film company that had made Julia’s first big commercial success,
Charity Child
. She was too, too thrilled, she said, to hear that I knew her well. Why, she demanded, had I kept her so dark?

So, high on the shining recognition-factor of my old school-friend, I think I blurted out that I would like to ask Julia if she would like to come too. I was waiting for a call from her anyway, I said. Why not, why not, they all most readily agreed. That was the mood of the evening. It didn’t commit us to anything, but we all said, why not? Julia, I rashly and disingenuously claimed, remembered Book Six of the
Aeneid
well from her schooldays and was as keen as I was to see the Sibyl’s Cave and hear her destiny pronounced.

Mrs Barclay rightly expressed astonishment at this revelation of Julia’s classical leanings, but she was too excited by the idea of meeting her heroine to cross-question me further about this matter. And Anaïs and Mrs Jerrold seemed happy to go along with us. The more the merrier, said Anaïs, lying back and smoking a thin brown cigarette amongst the opulent cushions, with her feet propped up on what my mother used to call a pouffe. The smoke of the cigarette was aromatic and illicit, but I think it was just a North African cigarette from the Goldborne Road. I imagined that we would smell more of that North African aroma in Carthage.

We were like schoolgirls, all of us, looking forward to a treat.
And the treat was of my creation. I had thought of it. I had taken a lead. I was no longer a passive victim of my fate.

I felt I had done the right thing by bringing up the subject of Julia. After all, if she hadn’t put the idea of Naples and Pompeii into my head, I’d never have become obsessed by it, would I? And I was amused by the thought of what they would all make of one another, if ever they were all to meet. I was childishly excited at the power I could exercise in bringing this disparate crew together. I would be the magician.

Julia is quite a character, I said to myself, as I set off on my walk home. They’ll find Julia interesting, I reassured myself. Julia is quite wealthy, I said to myself, and won’t mind buying a few rounds of propitiatory drinks.

It was only when I reached the bridge under the railway that I remembered that it hadn’t been Julia who first put the idea of Naples into my head. It had been Fat Sally from Suffolk.

I stopped, literally, in my tracks. I stood there, under the bridge, under the railway tracks, arrested, like Saul on the road to Damascus. It’s very odd that I hadn’t thought of Sally before this moment, but I swear that I hadn’t.

I couldn’t invite Sally, could I? Sally just wasn’t possible. Julia was, but Sally wasn’t.

Yet I knew, even as I stood there beneath the rumbling arch, that I would have to give it a try.

I thought of Sally and that Literary Festival in Cromer, as I continued my walk home. She hadn’t behaved too badly there, had she? She had an irritating way of button-holing strangers and asking them odd and unanswerable questions, usually about newspaper items about unusual illnesses, allergies, phobias and the like. This was the period at which she was particularly exercised by peanuts, and she had done a lot of survey work on this topic amongst the literary audiences. But she hadn’t done or said anything really intolerable. And if she were to come along with me and Anaïs and Cynthia Barclay and Mrs Jerrold and Julia Jordan, she would be well diluted. We wouldn’t have to pay her too much attention.

I’m not sure why I knew it was so important to me to try to include Sally Hepburn in our plans, why the necessity of including
her struck me with the force of revelation. Was it something to do with the balance of power, or with some concept of revenge? It can’t have been simply because I wanted to give her a good time, can it? There is a curious symbiotic relationship between Sally Hepburn and me. Or do I mean a parasitic relationship? A parasite, the dictionary tells me, is one who eats at another’s table. (We did parasites and saprophytes for O level Biology, Julia Jordan and Janet Milgram and me.) I think saprophytes feed upon the dead. And neither Sally Hepburn nor I are dead yet.

Maybe I wanted to patronize her. She has always thought she was patronizing me. I wanted to turn the tables. To make her eat at my table.

Or did I want to be kind? That seems unlikely. The human heart is black, so kindness cannot have been the explanation for my deeds.

I have no idea how it will all work out, but for better or worse, I knew at that point that I would have to contact not only Julia, but also Sally Hepburn. If both accepted, I knew that we would make a motley crew.

I rang Julia, that very evening. I don’t often ring anyone abroad, though I do, very occasionally, speak to Ellen in Finland, despite Ellen’s understandable fear and dislike of the telephone. But I braced myself, and rang Julia, and she was in, and she answered my call. She had the good grace to sound delighted by my good fortune. Her response was not as noisily spontaneous as the response of Anaïs had been, but it seemed sincere. I floated the idea of the expedition, which could so conveniently be combined with her desire to see Naples and meet its charismatic mayor, and I told her how pleased and honoured Cynthia and Anaïs and Mrs Jerrold would be if she were to join our group. She would add lustre to our gathering, I assured her. I told her, truthfully, that Cynthia was a great admirer of her work, and I described Anaïs in glowing terms, while trying not to make her sound too important. I reminded her that at school, on Sunday evenings, we had been allowed to listen to the radio dramas produced on the Third Programme by Eugene Jerrold. She said that she had some faint memory of these quiet sessions around the Bakelite Box in the Sixth Form Common Room. It came back to me,
as we spoke, that Julia used to knit as we listened. Surprising, really. I bet she doesn’t knit now. Not many people do.

So Julia agreed, provisionally, to come on board, and to come to London for a planning meeting. I realized that I ought not to broach the subject with Sally without consulting the others, so I waited until this second gathering to introduce her name.

We met, again, and again we met at Mrs Barclay’s. I was a little nervous presenting Julia to my newer friends, but Cynthia did not let me down. Nothing could have been more respectfully rapturous than her welcoming of Julia, nothing more flattering than the ardour with which she offered her a bowl of cashew nuts and squeezed the lemon into her gin and tonic. Julia loves flattery. All writers love flattery, I believe, and Julia loves it more than most, because she doesn’t get enough of it.

I could see Julia’s eyes darting with approval around Mr Barclay’s vast ornate spaces, and flickering appreciatively from the exotic and oriental Anaïs Al-Sayyab to the bird-like bardic Mrs Jerrold. I had told Julia that Mrs Jerrold was the Cumean Sibyl in disguise, and Mrs Jerrold, at this first encounter with Julia, was living up to her trailed foreshadowing by being even more gnomic than usual. I could see Julia thinking, Here is copy. Here are riches, and here is copy. Julia’s diamonds sparkled, through the thin blue smoke of Anaïs’s cheroot.

Julia has a professional novelist-and-screenwriter’s agenda. Anaïs also has some concealed and possibly quasi-professional agenda of her own. I do not yet know what it is, though I trust it will reveal itself en route. I think it may be something to do with the purchasing of embroidered fabrics, but I may have got that wrong. Anaïs has a friend who is a traveller and dealer in fabrics. He has a small shop on Kensington Church Street and he sells at trade fairs and on the Internet. Anaïs was inspecting Mr Barclay’s decor very closely, I noted.

Mr Barclay himself put his head round the door, during this last pre-departure gathering, and surveyed us all with a quizzical air. Mr Barclay is tall, thin, bald, formally dressed, and at once both clerical and dissipated of manner. ‘Hello, girls,’ said Mr Barclay, gazing at the gaggle of old ladies who had set up camp on his
piano nobile
. ‘Can I join the ladies for a moment?’

‘No,’ said Cynthia, firmly, but she was of course overruled, and Mr Barclay settled down with a glass of Perrier water to cross-question us about out plans. He gazed with knowing admiration, I noted, at the jewels of Julia Jordan, and leered jovially at Anaïs. He and Mrs Jerrold treated one another warily. I am not sure what he made of me.

We described our proposed itinerary at his request. We had by this stage decided to fly to Tunis and stay there for a day or two, doing the sights, and then take the ferry, steering a straight course for Naples. We would not loiter in Sicily, as Aeneas and his crew had been forced to do. Mr Barclay listened, and nodded, and told us that he had been to Tangiers and Morocco and Tunisia in the 1950s, in the days before tourism was invented, when Tangiers was still the playground of the wandering rich. Tunis was disappointing, and Carthage was no more, said Mr Barclay. Carthage had been destroyed.
Carthaginem esse delendam.
The Tyrian queen would not be there to greet us, to proclaim a feast for us, to spread the silken towels for us, to entertain us with the purple robes and the golden goblet and the golden lyre. When he was in Tunis, he had bought several Tyrian carpets, he said – and there was one of them, even now, laid on the floor at our feet. Trample upon it, please do, do please feel free, said Mr Barclay, with a flourish. He was very gallant.

Carthage was destroyed, but Naples, after many centuries, had been restored, and thither, he understood, we would, after Tunisia, repair. Would we take in a few of the antiquities of the Ancient Africk Coast before setting sail for Italy with our minibus and our chauffeur on the Transmed ferry? El Djem, the third-largest Roman amphitheatre in the world, was, he said, well worth the visit, and Kairouan also, if we had the stomach for that kind of thing. Was Anaïs, he inquired, of the Muslim faith, and if so, had she done her pilgrimages? Kairouan was a Holy City, was it not?