The Seven Sisters (11 page)

I miss my Virgil evening class at what used to be the College of Further Education, and is now the Health Club. It was an interesting group. We were reading the
Aeneid
, in English, but with access to a Latin text. We compared our various English translations and suggested phrases of our own as improvements. We were an archaic, arcane little group. That’s where I first met Anaïs. I’d like to ring Anaïs this evening, but I don’t want to bother her. I don’t want to become a bore to Anaïs. I’ll wait for her to ring me. Anaïs was the
most exotic and unlikely class member, but most of us were quite bright. We met on Thursday evenings. Our teacher was a fine woman called Mrs Jerrold. She was the widow of a legendary BBC Third Programme drama producer called Eugene Jerrold who had worked with Louis MacNeice and Dylan Thomas and George Orwell and all the great names of the 1940s and 1950s. Even I had heard of these writers. I had heard some of those programmes.
En effet
, I remembered them quite well.

As I’ve just said, I miss my Virgil class. It gave a better shape to the week than the Health Club, though of course I can go to the Health Club whenever I like, and Virgil was only on Thursdays.

Mrs Jerrold didn’t boast about these famous people, or drop their names into our classes, but she had known them well. She was what I think might be called a game old bird, and she looked something like a bird, with a sharp, small, bridged beak of a nose, and dark darting eyes, and dyed boot-black tufty feathery hair sticking out at all angles from the confines of a brightly coloured bandeau. She had a good selection of bandeaux. She wore red lipstick, and green eyeshadow, and magenta earrings shaped like descending drooping flowers, like small hanging baskets. Fuchsia, belladonna, and dangling pagodas of pheasant berry. She was a parrot, a macaw. She was a sprightly old thing, and she knew her Virgil. I wonder how she is now. I wonder if she needed the money. Those classes pay terribly, I know, but they do pay something. (Unlike the supply classes I taught at Farlingham.)

I ought to look her up. But I’m not a social worker. I’m more of a social case than a social worker.

We were a nice class. We were nice even to our own mad member, an old man called Mr Wormald, who had a fixation on poor Mrs Jerrold. He tormented her. We were all very tolerant with him. I wonder what happened to him. I’ve never seen him since the class disbanded, though I suppose he lives locally. I don’t think he’d have been interested in the Health Club offer, or a very welcome member had he tried to take it up. He was short and ill-shaven and yellow-complexioned and he looked as though he hadn’t bathed in years. He was a pedant and an autodidact, and he delighted in correcting
Mrs Jerrold whenever he saw an opportunity. He was sometimes right. He had ill-fitting dentures and a wife called Doris who worked for the Inland Revenue. He was retired, from what I know not. He had taken early retirement. He was a terrible man. He was the only man in the class. But we were kind to him, we made a space for him amongst us. I can’t imagine why he was interested in Virgil. I don’t think he was, really. He was interested in Mrs Jerrold and had latched on to her like a small persistent worrying dog. He asked her questions about Eugene Jerrold which we would have been too polite to formulate. She was very good at evading them.

I think Eugene had been killed in a car crash. I keep meaning to check on this. I could go to Colindale and look in the newspaper library there for the obituaries. But it seems a bit underhand and impertinent. More the kind of thing Sally Hepburn might do. Sally Hepburn has an unnatural and unseemly curiosity about other people.

At school, Julia, Janet and I all studied Latin up to A and then S level standard, only the three of us in the class. We had an excellent teacher. Maybe all Classics teachers are excellent. They sing in the dark and shore up the ruins. They play with tragic brilliance the endgame.

Our teacher at St Anne’s was called Mrs Pearson. She was a sombre, sallow, heavy-browed woman, handsome and charismatic. Come to think of it, she too was a widow, like Mrs Jerrold. We thought Mrs Pearson a romantic figure, for she always dressed in black, quite stylishly, and she spoke frankly about erotic poetry. Maybe that’s why Julia was so attentive in class. Dido and Lesbia. Mrs Pearson wasn’t at all like Sally Hepburn, oh no, I don’t mean that at all. Mrs Pearson was never rude or vulgar. But we knew that she had known and seen and suffered such things.

I don’t want to go to Naples with Sally Hepburn, but I do want to go to Naples. I’d like to visit the Phlegrean Fields before I die.
I Campi Flegrei
, the Burning Fields.
Lugentes Campi
, the Mourning Plains. I love the Sixth Book of the
Aeneid
. I suppose I could afford to go on a modest coach tour by myself. I probably couldn’t afford one of those very expensive ones with very expensive lecturers, but there must be cheaper ones for schoolmistresses and librarians and people like me.
I’d have to have the Single-Room Supplement, because I don’t think that at my age I could bear to share a room with a stranger, but maybe I could afford it. I’ll look into it. I wouldn’t have to tell Sally, would I? Even though it was her idea.

I live very cheaply most of the time, after all. I don’t do much.

I don’t think Sally knows anything about Virgil and the Underworld and the Golden Bough.

I wonder where I should arrange to meet Julia. There are some smart restaurants not far from here. Or I could cook her a little something or other. Some good plain home cooking.

I think that I first began to dislike Andrew when he made that remark about the Hungarian goulash I cooked for dinner for the Millers. Goulash was quite the in-thing in those days, and mine was usually quite nice. It was an economical way of making a stew look and taste a bit more interesting. So I’d done a goulash, with rice and peas and paprika. It was true that the beef wasn’t quite up to Mr Bates’s usual braising quality – it was a bit tough and, although I’d trimmed it carefully, there were residual attachments of a sort of yellowish gelatinous gristle or sinew – but it was perfectly edible, or so I thought. But Andrew played with his, ostentatiously cutting bits off and piling them on the side of his plate, and then he looked at me across the table and gave me that captivating smile and said, ‘Well, sweetie, not quite one of your best, is it?’ Then he took in Mr and Mrs Miller, into the smile, as he looked around and said, ‘Just a wee bit on the disgusting side, I’m afraid’, and pushed all the meat to one side.

Mr and Mrs Miller didn’t say anything – how could they? They smiled back, in an embarrassed way, and went on eating. They made themselves eat all the nasty bits. I think they felt sorry for me. We didn’t know one another very well, and they probably felt, as I did, that Andrew shouldn’t have said what he said. I remember that I blushed. I used to blush, occasionally. Not very often – a blush always took me by surprise, as this one did. I said nothing. I smiled, in a propitiatory way, and bent my head over the orange-red mess, and went on chewing.

At such moments, one dies a little. I died a little, but I was also angry. I felt I had not deserved such treachery.

I won’t cook a goulash for Julia. I’ll ask her round here for a drink,
and get some of those olives from the weird North African shop Anaïs has discovered, and then I’ll take her out for a meal round the corner at Mr Gordano Black’s. It’s very smart there. She’ll be impressed by Mr Gordano Black. I can afford it, for a special occasion. She’ll probably try to pay, to show off about how rich she is, but I’ll try not to let her. I’d better book a table right now. They get very busy.

I’m glad I don’t have a spare room. I haven’t even had to think about asking her to stay the night.

Julia will be here in an hour. I hope I look presentable. I wonder what she looks like, these days? I can’t remember when I last saw her. But I think I’ve remembered the name of that French perfume she gave me all those years ago. It was called Evening in Paris, by Bourjois. I used to think the word was Bourgeois, and I thought that was a funny name for a Parisian product. But it wasn’t. It was Bourjois. I wonder if it still exists. If it does, it must be very out of fashion. I wonder if she remembers that gift as well as I do. We didn’t have so many things in those days. There weren’t so many things to have. There was more to look forward to, but less to possess. It’s the other way round now.

A dark, purple-blue glass bottle. A treasure. The fizzy water at Mr Gordano Black’s comes in dark blue bottles. It’s a good strong clear colour. We didn’t have bottled water, in the old days. We drank water from the tap.

I’m wearing my old Liberty-print wool dress. Martha says it makes me look mumsy. I can’t help that. What am I supposed to look like, at my age?

She tells the story of her reunion with novelist Julia Jordan

So Julia came, and Julia went. What a very strange woman she is. And what strange things she spoke of. I wonder what to make of it. There is some meaning in it, but I do not yet know what it might be.

Let me begin at the beginning. Julia arrived on the dot of our appointed hour. For a wicked woman, she is always surprisingly punctual. And she didn’t seem at all winded by the stairs. The stairs are a kind of test, for people of our years. But she took them in her stride. No puffing or panting or exclaiming, even for show, from Julia Jordan.

But oh dear me she has aged. It’s hard to say how, as it’s not very obvious. She hasn’t put on weight, and her hair is dyed, and her face is well concealed with careful cosmetics. But something has aged, something has withered. Julia has become bitter. She is sour and dry and she sets the teeth on edge.

She hasn’t given up drinking. She made that clear at once, as she knocked back a gin and tonic and asked for more. I made the second one stronger.

I bought the gin for her specially, for the occasion. I don’t drink gin very often. But I remembered that she does.

Her hair is now lion-coloured. It’s wonderful. She has a great tawny many-layered mane, waving and glinting with highlights and bushing around her small head. Can it be all her own? Mine has grown thin now, like my heart.

But she is not happy, despite her honey-coloured locks.

She was wearing what we used to call a little black dress. Not a conspicuous or a pretentious little black dress, but a plain jersey knee-length wool number, the kind, as the lower-middle-class magazines used to tell you, that you could ‘dress up’ or ‘dress down’ for the occasion. She hadn’t dressed hers up much, out of respect, no doubt, for my lowly neighbourhood and poor estate, but she was wearing a lot of rings on her fingers. Julia was always fond of jewels, as I think I’ve already noted. I gazed, impressed, at her dangerous knuckles. She seemed to have graduated in late middle age to some even more serious sparklers than those she used to flash when we were still young. I couldn’t help gazing at them, which pleased her, for she was able to tell me what they were and what they were worth. Diamonds, rubies, and some chunky modern gold craftwork. I’ve forgotten the details, even though I was told them only two days ago. But I did absorb the information that she had bought most of them herself, and was proud of having done so. She is an odd woman. Most women want to be given things, not to buy things. I’ve still got my old Victorian diamond and sapphire engagement ring. I keep meaning to get rid of it, but I’ve still got it. I’m not sure I want it, but I’ve still got it. I was given it, after all. It is mine.

Julia had brought me a present. It’s an antique cameo brooch. She
said she knew it was weeks early for my birthday, but she’d thought it was just Me and so she’d bought it and brought it. She said there was a story attached to it, but I now realize she forgot to tell me what it was. It’s very pretty, in what Martha would no doubt call an old-fashioned mumsy sort of way. A cream-coloured neck-and-shoulder profile of a maiden with her hair in a fillet. Little twinings and twistings of creamy hair, against a pink-brown marble.

Shell pink, now that used to be a colour, when we were girls in the ’50s. Shell-pink twin sets were considered very desirable. When we were in the Fifth Form I was very envious of Priscilla Beddoes’s shell-pink Pringle twin set. I saw on television the other evening that twin sets are back in fashion, but I can’t say I’ve spotted any yet around here in Ladbroke Grove.

Julia’s career isn’t going as well as it was. It hasn’t ground to a halt, but it’s begun to stall. She used to be able to call the tune, she says, but now she says she can’t. She wonders if it’s living in Paris that’s causing the problems. She thinks she might move back to England. In order to be able to network, whatever that means.

She isn’t married, at the moment. She’s been having an affair with a big black American bit-part actor called Achilles. But it’s coming to an end.

She congratulated me again, halfway through the second gin, on getting rid of Andrew. A self-righteous prat, that’s how she described him. She asked about my finances, and I told her they were not too bad, considering. She pressed, and I gave her more details. The lump-sum pay-off from Andrew, the small monthly alimony cheque from Andrew, the pension my father set up for me which will mature when I’m sixty, the state pension I’ll get when I’m sixty, the Freedom of London Bus and Underground Pass which will be mine at the same date. These are my assets. She seemed satisfied that I wasn’t starving, but depressed by how much I’d had to pay for my flat. She says property is cheaper in Paris. She asked after my mother, and I told her she was still alive, though not well, and was still living in the care home.

I’d forgotten Julia had met my mother. My parents had invited her out for a meal with us at the Abbey Hotel at one of those half-term ceremonies, one of the few they had bothered to attend, and
she had tried to flirt with my father, not very successfully. My father was not a flirtatious man. Julia asked me if the nursing home was expensive, and who was paying. She didn’t ask, directly, about whether or not I stood to inherit anything from my mother when she died, but I think she had the impression that I might. I didn’t disillusion her. My family probably had seemed quite well-to-do, to outsiders. Whereas, really, we were a case of genteel poverty.