The Seven Sisters (20 page)

I thought that this line of suggestive interrogation was a little risqué, but Anaïs did not seem to mind it, though she replied to it quite briskly. Anaïs said that she was not a Muslim, she was a respectable postmodern atheist of Maronite Christian descent, but that she wouldn’t mind seeing the Holy City of Kairouan and its blind camel
if there was time. Ah, said Mr Barclay, if you do go to Kairouan, you must visit the man who sells embroidered shawls in the Street of the Weavers. I will write his name down for you and give it to Mrs Barclay before you go.

I think a knowing look may have passed between Mr Barclay and Anaïs at this point – a look, perhaps, of belated recognition.

I think I’m right in remembering that Mr Barclay referred to Cynthia as Mrs Barclay. What a strange couple they are.

Mr Barclay spoke to Anaïs with a form of innuendo that I did not understand. I do not think that it was sexual.

Shortly after this coded message about the Street of the Weavers, Mr Barclay rose to take his leave of us. ‘I will leave you girls to your revels,’ was what he said, and that I do remember clearly, word for word, because not many people talk like that these days. Then he shook hands with us all round, with a compliment for each of us. ‘Look after my Cynthia, dear teacher lady,’ he charged Mrs Jerrold, ‘because she means the world to me.’ To Anaïs, he bowed low, and murmured that she would enliven the desert places. After saluting Julia, he held her hand up to the light, and warned her to watch out for her gems in Naples. Or, better still, to leave them at home in the bank. Naples may be restored by the brave Bassolino, he said, but it is not yet transformed, and its old traditions die hard.

These were wise words and I remember thinking that she would be wise to heed them. But I doubt that she will. She seems wedded to those jewels.

I forget what he said to me, although I suppose he must have said something. Did he mention something called Capital Gains Tax? I wonder what that is. Perhaps he thinks I ought to invest all my money instead of spending so much of it on what can only be described as a spree. But I think it is my turn to have a spree.

When he left the room, I knew that the time had come to unleash the subject of Sally Hepburn upon the scene. I had to brace myself, but I did it. I did not flatter her in my introduction of her, but I must have managed to make her sound acceptable, for they all agreed without a murmur that I should be allowed to invite her to join us. As Cynthia pointed out, she would make up the numbers and thus
reduce the price per head. Cynthia, our organizer, had already found us a small air-conditioned minibus and a driver on the Internet. They belong to an Italian-based company called Parnassus that organizes trips to unlikely spots like Eritrea, Libya, Anatolia and French North Africa, as well as more obvious destinations like Greece and Italy. Tours with a Difference, they called themselves in their oddly translated brochure. The terms per person would be reduced, said Cynthia, if we were to make up a party of six plus driver, instead of five. So by all means invite your frightful friend Sally, they urged me merrily. We were all in reckless mood. In for a penny, in for a pound. I have offered to pay for the driver and the minibus. The others told me they were all happy to pay their share, but I was so pleased to be able to make this offer. It makes me feel better about Sally, too.

Sally, of course, leapt at the chance. Although she was the only one of us still in regular gainful employment, she anticipated no problem in getting time off. I uncharitably guessed that her employers would be glad to be rid of her for a bit. She sounded pleased to be asked, but not as surprised as in my view she ought to have been. She asked a lot of questions about her fellow travellers, questions which I parried with an expertise born of years of circumspection.

So it has all come together, and we shall go.

The girl without the lipoma is called Jenny, as I have now discovered. I also, on impulse, asked her to come with us, because seven is a lucky number, and Cynthia said there would have been room for seven. I didn’t expect her to say yes, and she didn’t. But I did ask her. Her face lit up. She said no, but her face lit up, and that was good to see. I see her at the Club now nearly every time I go. We always exchange a few civil words, and she bought me a retaliatory cup of coffee one evening. I think she looks a little better.

We’ll be seven anyway, if you include the driver. The driver is a woman called Valeria. She is due to meet us at Tunis airport, to drive us around the ruins, and then to drive us on to the ferry, and off it again. We will retain the services of Valeria and the minibus to do the Bay of Naples and the Lake of Avernus. I am not sure what her qualifications as a guide are, but we know we need her as a driver, for there is nowhere to park in Italy. I hope that she and Mrs Jerrold get
on well and do not contradict one another. I have no picture of this Valeria person in my mind, but I like her classical name.

It is a strange coincidence, perhaps, that four more of the seven of us have classical names. Julia, Cynthia, Ida, and myself. How long these names have endured.

It has been a busy time of preparation, although Cynthia has been doing most of the hard work. I have not bought cruise gear, despite the urgings of Anaïs, but I have treated myself to a few new clothes and they are not as drab as my usual wear. (I do like my new tie-dyed pink shirt with beige streaks, and I think it suits me quite well.) I have had to get myself a new passport, as mine had expired. A new passport, in my old name of Candida Wilton. I thought of reverting to my maiden name, but it was too complicated. (I was always teased about my maiden name, and Wilton is neutral and unexceptionable, after all.) I don’t like the new maroon passports much. They are very unimposing.

The last time I went abroad was with Andrew, when we were still Mr and Mrs Andrew Wilton, seven years ago. We went to a conference in Chicago, on the subject of visual impairment and cognitive disorders. It was a vast affair, with several hundred delegates, occupying the whole of one of those functional modern hotels on what is known as the Magnificent Mile. Partners were given concessionary rates. It was rather a macabre gathering. The hotel seemed luxurious to me but others complained that it was sub-standard and poor value for money and not as good as the hotel the association had used the year before. (It is true that the elevators were unreliable and unpredictable, and sometimes led one many floors skywards into the wrong part of the building.) I avoided most of the functions and took myself for walks by the lake shore. The weather was atrocious. An icy wind howled round the sharp corners of steep buildings, and the lake was whipped into waves that crashed violently upon large geometric artificial rocks. Andrew was very charming to everybody, as usual, and people kept telling me how much they admired him. He gave a short paper on the history of the Hamilcar Henson Trust and attitudes to and treatment of the blind in the eighteenth century. He does speak well, I grant him that.

I think the weather will be quite different in the Mediterranean. I intend to sun myself. Anaïs warns us that when last she went to the Bay of Naples the whole place was shrouded in mist and remained foggy for the whole of her visit, but I’m sure that won’t happen to us. We shall have fair weather and a calm crossing. It is set in our stars to be so.

We leave in two days’ time. I have wondered whether or not to take this laptop with me and keep a record of our journey, but I don’t think I will. It would be too much of a worry. I can write everything up when I get back.

Andrew rang me last night. He never rings. I have hardly spoken to him in three years, nor have I wished to do so. He rang, ostensibly, to ask if I had heard anything from Ellen, our middle daughter who lives in Finland. He claimed he was worried that she had not replied to his last phone message. He said it needed an early answer. He didn’t tell me what the message was. I said I wasn’t surprised Ellen hadn’t rung back, as he must know how she hesitates to use the telephone.

I don’t believe that his real purpose in ringing me was to talk about Ellen. He’s never shown much interest in Ellen, because, unlike her sisters, she has refused to pay court to him. His real purpose was to pry. Suffolk Sally would, it at once occurred to me as soon as I heard his voice, have told him all about our excursion. I tried, as I spoke to him of little matters as calmly and coldly as I could, to remember what, if anything, I had told Sally about Northam Provident and my unexpected bonus. I wondered if he would dare broach the subject himself, and I gave him no opening, so he was obliged, after a little polite thrust and parry, to say openly, ‘I hear you are off on a holiday?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I am going on an educational outing with my Virgil class to trace the latter part of the voyage of Aeneas.’

This sounded strange but was in a sense true. I enjoyed speaking those words. I think I have remembered them fairly accurately, also. (I admit to having fabricated some bits of conversation in this narrative.)

‘Good heavens,’ said Andrew. A tremor in his voice indicated that Sally had not told him much about the expedition. He sounded gen
uinely surprised. I was glad that I had it in me to cause surprise. Of course, even if Sally had told him or others on the Suffolk gossip network that she was going with me to North Africa and Italy, she would not have been able to give him much detail, for, despite her interest in the pornography of Pompeii, Sally is not a classical scholar.

Anaïs, Cynthia, Julia and I are not classic classical scholars either, but we are more scholarly than Sally Hepburn. Mrs Jerrold is a classical scholar, and also a published poet.

I relented a little, at the end of this conversation, and told Andrew that I was travelling with Parnassus Tours, and that if there was any real worry about Ellen he could contact me through their office in Milan. I gave him the phone number and our personalized tour reference number. I am not inhuman. I do not wish to cut myself off utterly from my family. It is simply that I feel a need to redefine what my relationship to my family should be, in these latter days, in these survival days, after biology has done its best and worst. I think that Andrew sounded relieved to have a contact number, but I may have been imagining that. He has done me such wrong that I don’t know how to read him, how to speak of him, how to remember him, how to think of him any more. He is like a great blank in my memory. He is like a hole cut in my side.

We have arranged to meet at Stansted, Anaïs Al-Sayyab, Mrs Jerrold, Julia Jordan, Cynthia Barclay, Sally Hepburn and me. We all have our own tickets, in case we get lost or are late, but Cynthia has the Master Plan and all the booking details. She has organized us all brilliantly. The others still have not met Sally Hepburn. I know I ought to feel nervous about this, but I don’t. I feel quite irresponsible about it. People of our age ought to be able to look after ourselves.

She makes her last entry before the voyage

Tomorrow we leave. I have done most of my packing, and I have played my last game of solitaire. I shall wrap up this laptop and hide it in the bottom of the wardrobe.

I have just reread the whole of this diary. I am not proud of it. What a mean, self-righteous, self-pitying voice is mine. Shall I learn to speak in other tones and other tongues
when I leave these shores? Do I still have it in me to find some happiness?
Health, wealth, and the pursuit of happiness
. The new declaration of our human rights.

Let me write this down.
I am happy now.
I am full of happy anticipation.

Yesterday afternoon I went for my last walk along the canal bank. I passed the spot where my man in the Scrubs and his gang tormented and drowned that poor woman. He has explained to me that they were all out of their minds when they did it, and I daresay it was so. Drugs, he said. I notice that he doesn’t, technically, express remorse. He expresses some emotion, but I wouldn’t call it remorse. He speaks as though it was somebody else that did it.

There was a light breeze on the surface of the water, and floating plastic bottles were nudging one another and circling one another gently as in some mating ritual.

Darkness, dirt, despair.

The Lady Pond was a pretty place to die. Watercress, yellow irises, and water mint grew round its marges, and there was a rickety little wooden jetty you could walk out on over the water. You could gaze down into the shallows, and sometimes you could see fish below you. I liked it very much. The biology teacher, Miss Crawley, used to collect creatures from it and display them in the lab – caddis grubs, snails, daphnia. There were nesting moorhens at the far end of the pond, in the reeds. There are moorhens on the canal, too, but their nests are not so desirable. They have to build them from plastic garbage, poor things.

I have explained to my man in the Scrubs that I will be away for a while. I admitted I was going on holiday. He has been teasing me about my Lottery efforts and he says he guesses I have won a lot of money but that I won’t tell him because it will make him jealous. I think I will tell him the truth when I get back. If I get back.

Last night I paid my last visit to the Health Club – well, not my last ever, I trust, but my last for a few weeks. I think it was significant that I was greeted by name as I went in. This rarely happens now. They are too busy now for personal names.

I dropped my engagement ring into the pool last night. I had
thought of dropping it through the grid into the lapping sluice that surrounds the pool, but it occurred to me that it might cause an obstruction, and I do not want to be responsible for any damage. So I just pulled it off my finger and let it sink to the bottom of the pool. It drifted downwards rather than dropped, at a slight angle. It didn’t spiral, as I had thought it might – perhaps a lighter ring might have spiralled? I couldn’t resist seeing if I could have fished it up again with my toes. I could, easily. There isn’t a deep end to the pool. It’s all shallow water. Somebody will fish my ring out. It has probably been recovered already. I wonder what will happen to it? Will it be finders-keepers, or will there be an advertisement announcing its recovery? I’ve seen several notices for Lost Objects (usually said to be of Great Sentimental Value) in the Club, but I don’t think I’ve seen any for Found Objects.