The Seven Sisters (13 page)

Yes, I think I can remember the teleological and the ontological arguments in favour of the existence of God. ‘It is because thou art, We are driven to the quest …’, as the hymn has it. (We used to sing that hymn at St Anne’s, and I always liked it.) That’s the ontological argument. We wouldn’t seek God if he didn’t exist. I find it more attractive than the teleological, which argues that we must be going
somewhere because everything has a design and a purpose. I don’t see why we must be going anywhere and I don’t think we are. But we
are
driven to the quest. I don’t think that proves that God exists, either, but it does prove that there is something deeply unsatisfactory about the human condition. I was about to say that human beings are badly designed, but that of course would be to fall into the teleological trap. We weren’t designed
for
anything. We happened to become. And this pointless but necessary yearning was part of the becoming.

I’ve just looked Mrs Jerrold up in the phone book, and I’ve found an entry that must be for her. It’s not a common name, and the address sounds right. She appears to live in a mews nearer the Holland Park end of Ladbroke Grove. It’s a better neighbourhood than mine. I wonder if I should give her a ring? Maybe it would be more polite to drop her a note. Shall I ask Anaïs? We could ask her round here for a drink.

I’m going to the cinema with Anaïs tomorrow. I’ll ask her about Mrs Jerrold. And I’ll ask her what she thinks of Julia. I’d be interested in her placing of Julia. Maybe she’s never heard of her. I don’t think Anaïs was in the drama bit of the BBC. I’m not sure what she was in. I think she had something to do with Design and Décor, but I’m not sure what. I think she advised on oriental matters. Though you aren’t allowed to use the word ‘oriental’ now, for some reason, or so Anaïs tells me. It’s gone out of fashion, like Tuscany.

And so has Julia. Twenty years ago, everybody had heard of Julia Jordan. Julia was a big name. But time is passing her by.

I don’t like to think of poor Julia, alone in her Luxury Chalet with the crabs and mosquitoes, and no Room Service. It seems a sadly emblematic fate.

I will drop a line to Mrs Jerrold, saying that I miss the class. She won’t think that intrusive, surely.

Goethe and Chateaubriand both went to the Phlegrean Fields. I wonder if Anaïs would like to come too?

I’ve just got my laptop solitaire game to come out twice running. That’s very unusual. It can happen, but it’s unusual. I suppose the more often I play the more often it will happen? Or not, as the case
may be? I don’t understand probability theory. Anyway, I choose to take it as a good omen. I’m warming up to the big event when I shall buy my first Lottery ticket. I’ve already got my eye on the shop where I’m going to do it. It’s a horrible shop, one I would never normally enter. A dingy little newsagent-off-licence that sells crisps and snacks and very basic foodstuffs. I bought some milk there once. I bought it on the day before its sell-by date, and it went off before I’d finished it. I don’t drink much milk.

It’s the sort of shop that sells deadly wares. Nothing there could do you any good. Would I have to go back there to collect my winnings? Surely not. I must find out how the system works before it’s too late.

She takes heart and revisits her mentor

Anaïs says she’s already been to the Phlegrean Fields. I think she may have told us this in class, but I’d forgotten. She says, moreover, that Pozzuoli is a dump, and that the coastline where Aeneas landed is now an industrial wasteland. The Vale of Acheron. It’s still hell, but it’s a different kind of hell. I wonder if she’s right. Sophia Loren was born in Pozzuoli, she says. And Chateaubriand went there in 1803. I’ve looked it up. ‘All around, burnt lands, naked vineyards, with only a few pines, like sunshades, some aloes among hedges, and no birds sing.’ Goethe thought it sublime. Onwards, stranger, onwards and upwards.
Nach Cuma, nach Cuma
. (Mind you, Goethe hadn’t been to Italy when he wrote that poem about the Wanderer. He just imagined how it would be.) Anaïs and I talked about all of this over our Chinese meal at the Queensway Complex. I am quite good now with the chopsticks. There were many Chinese restaurants in Suffolk, but none of them were anywhere near as good as Queensway Chinese. But I’d never have dared to go without Anaïs.

It’s very good of Anaïs to accompany me to the cinema. But I don’t suppose I’m much trouble, as a companion. I don’t make demands. And I’m very appreciative.

Anaïs hasn’t heard of Julia Jordan. In vain did I recite the list of Julia’s titles, her TV series, her films. They are all as dead as dust. No wonder Julia is down in the mouth. Anaïs is a modern woman, even
though she is no longer young, whereas Julia already belongs to the past. I could see that Anaïs thought I was suffering from an apprehension distortion about Julia. She suspected that I exaggerated her fame because I had been at school with her, because she had been a big fish in a small pond. I didn’t want to protest too much, because protestation never gets one anywhere, but I did want to make it clear that Julia was in a different league from Sally Hepburn – ‘your fat friend Sally’, as Anaïs has dubbed her. I told Anaïs that Julia’s books must be in print and that she could check up on her in any bookshop. But I now begin to have my doubts. It may not be true. I used to buy her novels, as they came out, in hardback, but I left them all in Suffolk. As I’ve said, there isn’t much room for books here.

Mrs Jerrold hasn’t got much room for books either, but that hasn’t prevented her from piling them in. I went to see her yesterday. She rang, as soon as she got my note, and said she’d be very happy to see me, and no time like the present, so round I went. And I had guessed right, which proves I am getting my bearings and learning to decipher postcodes correctly. She lives in a very desirable little cul-de-sac, all high painted wooden carriage doors and hanging baskets and window boxes and potted plants, a far cry from my grim eyrie. It is all bijou and rustic. She says she’s been there a long time. I like these little corners of London, lingering on, expensively abandoned amidst the cataclysmic changes. Though Mrs Jerrold says she’s not sure she likes living on the ground floor any more. She says she worries that people will climb up to her bedroom window at night and steal her jewels. I can’t tell whether she means this seriously or not.

Not that Mrs Jerrold has any jewels, she assured me. She has books, and knick-knacks, and cats. She lives in an overcrowded bohemian little nest. It’s a bit dusty, and might give one asthma or hay fever, if one were given to sneezing. But I’m not so fussy about dust and dirt as I used to be. And I liked her accumulation of treasures. It was good to be in a room with a history. Maybe I’ve overdone the stripping down. Maybe I’ve thrown too much away.

She seemed as bright as ever, as she poured me a glass of red wine. She was drinking gin and water. She said she hadn’t any tonic, and apologized for its absence, but I said I didn’t much like gin. She
said she didn’t like tonic. Gin and water was her tipple, she said. Mother’s ruin, she said, and laughed.

I don’t know if she has children. We didn’t get on to that. I thought we were going to, at one point, but we didn’t.

She asked me how I was, and how I’d been filling my time since the college closed, so I told her about my routine – the Health Club, the cinema visits with Anaïs, the visits to see the murderous rapist in Wormwood Scrubs, the free lectures at the Tate and the National Gallery. (I didn’t tell her about the endless games of solitaire I feel compelled to play. I’m sure she wouldn’t approve of them. I don’t approve of them myself.) She nodded, sagely, and said, ‘Good, good, that’s good.’ She was curious about the Health Club. Who went there, how much did it cost, what did I do there? So I told her about the big reduction in fees that Anaïs and I had enjoyed because of the compulsory closing of the Virgil class, and I described to her the heavy dark women like fruits, the pale white women with cold mauve flesh, the skinny braided girls who wear no underwear, the bouncy girlish girls with bunches and hairclips, the social squawkers on their mobile phones, the bitter blondes and the sad starers. I described to her the brave ones on the brink, the flat ones in the sauna. I told her of the children in the crèche, with names like Xian and Lo and Amber and Mojo. I told her of the lily girls floating in the steam of the bubbling whirlpool, and the lean plodders on the treadmill, and those who stand around on one leg like storks or herons. I told her of the faraway look of those listening to distant music through plugged ears. They are all shapes and sizes, these women, I found myself telling Mrs Jerrold, as though this were a wonder. They are all ages, all shapes, and all sizes. That’s good, that’s good, nodded Mrs Jerrold, and urged me to eat another crisp.

I didn’t tell Mrs Jerrold about the time I thought I had died in the sauna. I thought of telling her, but I didn’t.

Mrs Jerrold’s house is full of treasures, a record of her rich and embroidered past. The walls are covered with paintings – all tiny, all framed in gilt and silver and rosewood and ebony, a tapestry of bright images. Miniature landscapes, small still lives, cats and birds and fishes and children. (My walls are bare.) Photographs are propped
up against her bookshelves and antique wineglasses with spirals in their stems march along her window ledges. (I have no photographs. My poor father lies face down in a drawer.) Cushions heap themselves upon the deep armchairs and the hard-backed couch. The cats have worn deep hairy hollows into the seats of the plump chairs they favour.

I told Mrs Jerrold that although I like my Health Club, I miss her class. I told her that I was still reading Virgil, and that I still saw Anaïs. I owe Anaïs to Mrs Jerrold’s class, and I thanked her for that. She smiled and demurred. Mrs Jerrold says she’s not teaching at the moment, apart from some private tuition to a friend’s granddaughter who is working for university entrance. I think she may need the money. You can’t live on trinkets, and I feel she belongs to a prepension age.

She tells me that she misses the class, too.

Her husband, Eugene Jerrold, died over twenty years ago. She has been a widow for more than twenty years. (It is true that he died in a car crash in France. I checked. I’m a bit ashamed of this. I looked him up, a few days ago, and read the
Times
obituary in the Westminster Reference Library. I couldn’t face going all the way to Colindale.) She spoke of him, a little. They first met, she said, when she was asked to read some of her poems for the BBC Third Programme. Mrs Jerrold, it seems, was once a poet. I hadn’t known this. She said she published two slim volumes, just after the war, when she was very young. She had then been a rising star. She had met Eugene on the publication of her first volume. Those, she said, had been happy days. Comradely, poverty-stricken, post-war beer-drinking days. Though she had never liked beer, said Mrs Jerrold. She always preferred the gin. Gin and water. She got into the habit of drinking gin with water because the tonic was so expensive. ‘We couldn’t afford what you call mixers, in those days,’ said Mrs Jerrold. ‘And then I got a taste for gin with water. I don’t like tonic. I don’t see the point of tonic.’

I rashly asked if I could see her poems. This was forward of me, and if I hadn’t had a glass of wine I wouldn’t have dared. I couldn’t tell if she wanted to show them to me or not, but she did. She clam
bered on to a little wooden stool, and reached up to a high shelf – it wasn’t very high, her ceilings were low, but she really is very short – and pulled out a little volume still in its original dust jacket. She handed it down to me. It was a slim volume, very slim, and it was dusty. The jacket was dark blue, covered with an austere and distinguished pattern of small scattered white stars. Zodiac Press. I held the little book in my hand, as she clambered down again and settled herself once more. It was called
Moon
. That’s all.
Moon
. I opened it, rather nervously. Opening it seemed a very personal, invasive act. It was her second volume, dedicated to Eugene. ‘To Eugene’ was all the dedication said. I shouldn’t have been surprised by the titles of the poems, I suppose. But I was. ‘Dido to Sychaeus’, ‘Dido to Aeneas’, ‘Remember Me’, ‘Dido in the Underworld’, ‘The Birds that Perched upon the Golden Bough’, ‘She Stands on the Sea Shore and Foretells Her Own Death’. These were her titles. I read them to myself, and then I glanced up at her.

She was sitting there, bright and neat, with a distant look on her sharp face. The look of a gypsy or of a sibyl, gazing far away. But she caught my glance, and leaped back into the present. ‘Very derivative stuff,’ she said, and laughed. ‘I was full of fashionable melancholy, in those days. When I didn’t know what sadness was, I could afford to be sad.’

I fingered the dry pages. I couldn’t bring myself to try to read a poem. It didn’t seem right, sitting there, in her presence.

Suddenly she said to me, in a completely different and much more sprightly tone, ‘You don’t see much of your daughters, do you?’

I think I put the volume down, at this point, on the flimsy rickety little round walnut occasional table at my elbow.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t. I don’t much want to.’

‘Why not?’

‘I just don’t want to. I’ve left them behind. I’m living in another world now.’

‘You
may
want to see them again, one day. You shouldn’t exclude that possibility.’

She was looking very gypsy-like, as she said that: so much so that
I retaliated with something like, ‘Do you see a reunion in your crystal ball?’

She laughed. ‘Who knows?’ she said. ‘I just said, don’t exclude it. You can’t tell what the future will bring.’

I was beginning to feel that it was time to take my leave. I didn’t want to listen to any prophecies. I started making preparatory gestures, reaching for my cardigan and that kind of thing – I’d cast it off as it was very warm in her little front room, much warmer than in my flat. It was a heavy, thundery evening. Headache weather. I wondered if I ought to ask to borrow her poems, though I didn’t much want to, but she seemed to have forgotten all about them. She was back with the Virgil class.