The Seven Sisters (5 page)

Julia’s narrator in this novel was a young woman called Celia, who recounted her sexual exploits with remarkable candour and panache. Her tone resembled Julia’s own, but it was more mannered and more confident. Julia had hit on a fluent and distinctive narrative style that suited her, and she was to exploit it over her next few novels to great effect. This first novel must, I assume, have been heavily autobiographical, but to my relief I could not place most of the incidents or any of the characters. As I said, she had moved on from the dormitory. She had transformed St Anne’s into St Bride’s, but her references to it were fleeting. Bristol became Westhaven, and it was in Bristol that most of the action was set. Bristol, at that period, was not yet widely known for its bohemian tendencies, though they must have been already latent. Its reputation for bad behaviour took off in the next few years. Julia’s novel was often, in the 1960s and ’70s, cited as the beginning of something new and, to many, undesirable, both in terms of fiction and of city living. One can’t turn the clock back now.

I don’t think Julia’s novel is cited very often these days as an example of anything. It has lost its power to shock. But it shocked then. It shocked me then.

In the novel, Julia/Celia described lying to her doctor at Westhaven in order to obtain contraceptive advice: clearly it hadn’t proved effective, for the set piece of the work was a description of a back-street abortion. Not so back-street,
en effet
, although strictly illegal. Julia/Celia had herself fixed in a mews just off Portland Place, in London, not too far from Harley Street itself. (Harley Street was just a name to me then. I knew what it represented, but I didn’t know where it was.) Julia/Celia gave many convincing and circumstantial details, about the price (exorbitant), the abortionist’s manner (prurient), the reaction of her boyfriend (fainéant) and the view upwards through the sloping skylight (grey). She described the cramps, and the pain, and the blood. What she omitted to describe was any sense of fear or shame or guilt. The impassive neutrality of her narration was impressive. Reviewers commented with admiration on her calculated sang-froid. But I felt there was more – or less – to it than that. Her sang-froid wasn’t calculated. It was real. She really hadn’t thought an illegal abortion was a big deal.

The story ended with her ditching the student father of the aborted foetus and hitching up with a married university lecturer and his wife. That doesn’t sound very bad these days, but it was pretty risqué then. There was a powerful scene in which the Celia character, at the end of a babysitting session for this married couple, found herself being propositioned, separately, in the space of quarter of an hour, by both husband and wife. She resolved the situation by suggesting that they all three repair to the bedroom together. Which they did. It was an erotic scene. Erotic, but not sensual.

Come to think of it, maybe that scene is still risqué, though in a different way. Lesbianism and troilism are just fine, but students and lecturers aren’t supposed to have any kind of physical contact at all these days, are they?
Autres temps, autres moeurs
.

I don’t think Julia was or is very sensual, although she’s so interested in sex. People used to use the phrase ‘cold sensuality’ of men, which I’ve always taken to describe a sort of detached, uninvolved, impersonal interest in sensation and conquest rather than in emotion. Don Juan, Casanova. But you could use that phrase of Julia.
En effet
, our schoolgirl sobriquet, ‘Juicy Julia’, apart from being childish
and ugly, was not even very appropriate. Julia was a dry person. She did once tell me that she loved the smell of the spermicidal jelly we used to apply to our Dutch caps, and I remember thinking – rather an odd thought for me – that she probably needed lubrication. She never sweated much, at school. Most adolescent girls sweat profusely, but Julia was cool and dry. I used to sweat a lot. I too am dry now. I have dried out. It is a great relief to me. Age has its delicacy.

Julia never had any children. Maybe that abortion damaged her. She has always said that she did not want children. Did I want children? I don’t know. I loved them, when they were little, in a programmed biological maternal manner, and I am hurt now they have rejected me in favour of their father. It is not their fault that he forced them to take sides, but I do feel, in an old-fashioned way, that they should have been more loyal to their mother.

In the Health Club, I look at the unstretched bodies of those young well-paid shallow Cockney-accented middle-class working girls, and I think,
Well, at least my body has been used for its proper purpose. It gave birth, three times over. No wonder it isn’t as tight and firm as it used to be. It has seen some action
.

And then I think to myself, what an absurd, teleological way of thinking about the body. Julia used hers for sex, and bodies are made for sex too, aren’t they?

She digresses to the forbidden subject of solitaire

I’ve just lapsed, and played solitaire solidly for half an hour. I got it to come out in the end. It’s always so unsatisfying, that satisfaction. I quite like the orgasmic multi-coloured shuffle of the deck on the screen, but it doesn’t really
satisfy
, does it? It can’t, can it?

If you play solitaire with real cards, as we used to do at school, you can check on what your choices might have been had you made them, and where they might have led you. If you play on the laptop, you can’t. I’m not talking about cheating on the laptop. I’m talking about checking. The laptop won’t let you cheat, and that’s fair enough, but it won’t let you check either. It won’t let you lift a card to see
what might have been
. It won’t let you follow an alternative, unchosen route, even out of curiosity.

If you lay out a deck of real cards, of real, well-fingered, laminated, canvas, oblong cards, you know that the whole of the deck of the red and of the black is there on the table before you. You can’t see them for what they are – that is the point of the game – but they are there, every one of the fifty-two, upon the table. Every single ace, every club and heart, spade and diamond of every denomination is there, in a particular pattern and permutation. I don’t know how many starting variations there are, with fifty-two cards and a game of solitaire, but I’m sure somebody must. People who like numbers work it out, surely.

Whereas, when you play electronically,
there is nothing on the table at all except what you see
. When you first deal the deck for solitaire, there are the faces of seven cards showing, and the backs of twenty-one other cards, in gradated piles. My laptop version of solitaire actually shows the concealed cards overlapping as separate items, so you can count them, but I know that some versions of the game, less satisfyingly, simply display a face-down, dark, unreadable, undifferentiated mass. But the point is this. In the electronic version, those concealed cards do not exist
as cards
or even as numbers. They are merely notional. It is my belief that they have not yet decided what they are to be. I’m not sure at what point that decision is made, or by what.

There is more future freedom in the electronic version, although you are not free to cheat. But there is less reversibility. You can never rethink a past decision. The machine does not permit. It does not even permit a mistake.

She thinks of the seedless grapes, and of the sour

Enough of card games. They are a temptation to sin. That’s what some people used to believe, and maybe they were right. My maternal grand-parents were brought up in that faith, and I have inherited their sense of guilt.

Playing for high stakes is more dangerous and more sinful than playing alone, but playing alone is not good for the soul.

I wonder how the childless Julia feels about sex nowadays. I wonder whether she wishes that she had had children to shore up her old age. I think she has been married three times now. I’ve lost count. I met the second husband, but not the first. The one I met was some
thing to do with television. I don’t know if she is married at the moment, or whether she has a man in tow, but I think I shall soon discover, for she threatens to visit me. I wonder why she has kept in touch with me, over the years. I cannot think that my dull life can be of much interest to her, yet she is very faithful to me. She never forgets my birthday. These days, she is about the only person who remembers it. I am not sure that I like to be reminded of my birthdays, yet I have to admit that there is something reassuring in her fidelity. She always sends me a card, and on my fiftieth birthday she sent flowers. That was kind of her. I don’t know why she bothers with me. I have nothing to offer. I was still in Suffolk, with Andrew, when I turned fifty. My daughter Ellen forgot my fiftieth birthday. Isobel and Martha remembered, but Ellen forgot. I do not blame her for that. She was living abroad. She has lived abroad for quite a long time now.

I don’t send Julia cards for her birthday. I am very unreciprocal. I don’t even know when her birthday is. I must have known, once, at school, because we all knew about such things. We knew each other’s birthdays, star signs, horoscopes, favourite colours, favourite flowers, favourite names, favourite poems, favourite hymns. But I have long forgotten all these preferences. They don’t print the date of her birthday in the press, or not that I’ve noticed. She’s famous, but not famous in that way. Really, she’s more notorious than famous. And maybe her notoriety is waning, now she is getting old. I wouldn’t be a very good judge of that.

Yellow was her favourite colour when she was a girl, or so she said. Nobody else liked yellow. I think she liked yellow through perversity.

Come to think of it, she hasn’t published a book for some years. No television series or films have appeared either, or not that I’ve noticed. Perhaps she’s not well. Perhaps something has gone wrong. If it had, nobody would tell me.

Julia knows my new address, because I sent it to her, but I haven’t seen her since I moved to London. I had a card from her last month, just before I began writing this journal, saying she was coming over and would like to see me. She said she’d ring as soon as she knew her dates. I expect to hear from her, because she really is, in her own
way, oddly reliable. Dependable, even. She’s a wicked woman, but she would stand by me, if I needed somebody to stand by me. And she would never be shocked. There’s a lot to be said for people who can’t be shocked. She wrote me a very funny letter when she found out about Andrew and Anthea.

There’s the phone. Maybe that’s Julia.

A false alarum

No, it wasn’t Julia, it was Sally Hepburn from Suffolk. My fat Suffolk friend. She was ringing to check up on me. She wants to see me when she is in town next week. I seem to have agreed to see her. I find it very hard to say no to Sally Hepburn. Sally Hepburn is a pain in the neck. That’s a coarse expression, but Sally is not a delicate woman. When she was my neighbour, I didn’t let myself admit even to myself that I found her irritating. After all, she was supposed to be my friend, and she was supposed to be a suitable friend for a person like me. Andrew pretended to like her, too, in his superior, charming kind of way, his ostentatious ‘see-how-nice-I-can-be-to-fat-middle-aged-single-women’ way. And Sally is fat. She is gross. She must weigh twelve stone and more, and she is not tall. I wouldn’t be surprised if she weighed fourteen stone. She is solid, and she has a vast spreading bosom. Is she really a suitable shape for a social worker? Many of her clients are overweight, and perhaps her heaviness and shapelessness make them feel at home with her. Is to be fat to be trustworthy? Somebody in classical antiquity thought so – was it Julius Caesar? I think it was, but I can’t be bothered to check. Though I did bring my old school Shakespeare with me, to London. Anyway, I don’t agree with Julius Caesar. I think fat people tend to be very manipulative. Moreover, I very much dislike the way Sally implies that I too have a weight problem. I am not as slim or as fit as I was, but I am not large. And I have lost weight since I started going to my Club. I take a size 12, occasionally even a size 10. Her clothes must be numbered up in the 20s.

I have my problems, but my weight is not one of them.

Sally has a maddening habit of assuming that I share all her problems and all her weaknesses. She is two years younger than me, yet she seems to go ahead, like a spectre with a corpse lantern, lighting
the way to the tomb. Things can only get worse, says Sally. The hair on the face, the stress incontinence, the pelvic slack, the arthritic joints, the sagging boobs. (I hate that word, ‘boobs’, and could hardly bring myself to write it down, but it is a word she uses quite often, though I can’t at the moment think why she needs to introduce it into our conversations.) I used to find myself inventing maladies of my own to keep her company, in the bad old days when we used to lunch together in Woodbridge. Just as I used to invent sexual misdemeanours in an effort to have something interesting to offer to Julia in exchange for her more sensational confidences. I really don’t have to bother with Sally now, I tell myself. But, like Julia, she has a peculiarly pressing manner and does not easily take no for an answer. I know she wants to get her foot inside the door of this flat. She is so nosy. She wants to know how I live, what I’ve come down to over the past two years since I left Farlingham. The Lady of the Manor, in her pretty if borrowed grace-and-favour Georgian house, reduced to a two-room flat off Ladbroke Grove. She wants to inspect my misfortune. I’ve seen her in London a few times, since I left, but I’ve made sure that we met on neutral territory – lunch in the National Gallery, or at the British Library, or at the clerical Wren café attached to St James’s, just off Piccadilly. Modest ladies’ luncheon places. But keeping her out has only whetted her curiosity and her desire to get in, I can tell.

I am not ashamed of this flat. It satisfies me. And I am proud of my endurance in it, I am proud of the way I have parcelled out my life and controlled the empty spaces and filled up the time. It has not been easy, but I have worked at it, and I have made a shape to my life. I don’t want that obese chatterbox barging in here with her huge chest thrust out in front of her, and her sensible shoes and her layers of woolly jersey and her too-tight mannish jackets and her
yack yack yack nose nose nose sniff sniff sniff
. Her great unused and useless dugs bear all before them. Talk about teleology. What was Sally Hepburn made for? It is not at all obvious.