The Seven Sisters (18 page)

He flattered my own poor teeth. He said they had served me well, and that I had cared for them well. He complimented me on those poor things that I have. And he said he would make me a new tooth, there, on those very premises. Of gold, and of the finest porcelain. He would make for me, he promised, a jewel of a tooth.

I did not like to murmur about expense. I would have paid anything to this magician, for I was under his spell. I would have paid the price of my voyage from Carthage to Sicily and the Aeolian Isles, from Sicily to Naples and Cumae and Caleta and beyond.

‘I will send you an estimate,’ he said.

I shall wait with interest but without anxiety for this billet-doux.

Why does he choose to work there so humbly in the artificial glow, when he could be glittering like a star on high? It is a mystery.

As I left, I saw along the corridor in other rooms men in blue overalls at work with kilns and furnaces. I saw white skulls and yellow jawbones. He has taken a cast of my jaw and it will join its fellow grinners in his underground gallery.

I wonder how many women fling themselves madly into the arms of Charles Wentworth? Cynthia and I cannot be the only ones among his clients to find him divine. I wonder if he is a married man. He seems too ethereal for such a bond as marriage.

It’s a long time since I thought so fully or so intensely of that English teacher from Bury, whose mild gallantries of speech and subversive glances had once been my amorous refuge. I know that he had liked me, and had found me good company. Some did, some still do. He was disaffected with his wife, and I with my husband, so we had looked at one another at public events and private functions, and had woven dreams about one another. Further we had never ventured. Do I regret that now?

According to Sally Hepburn, rural Suffolk is rife with aberrations and perversions. Adultery, pederasty, group sex, bondage, and every kind of sado-masochistic practice. I never noticed such things. Like
Rousseau, I never said what it was that I wanted. And now it is too late, and Andrew has left me for Anthea Richards. I don’t know about Cynthia and Mr Barclay, but I do know about Anthea and Andrew. I know where they sleep. They sleep entwined in the bed where I used to sleep myself. In that same bed, in that same house. I think that is gross.

Sally Hepburn, of course, is a virgin and a voyeur. Whereas I am neither. I am a mother of three and a divorcée, the kind of person who imagines that she is in love with her dentist, because she has nothing better to occupy her mind.

I wonder when Julia will ring.

She chances her luck a second time and scales down her desires

Well, that was another disappointment. Yesterday I picked up my first Lottery ticket slip from my local newsagent round the back on Cranmer Road, not from that dreadful little sour-milk sour-grapes shop on Ladbroke Grove, and I at once saw how unlikely it was that I would win. I’ve filled it in, experimentally and randomly, without thinking. I won’t pay one pound for this board. (That word ‘board’ is new to me. I don’t think I’ll be using it very often.) I’ll try it out, and see what happens. But I do now see that it’s impossible to guess right. I begin to understand the odds against me. These are the numbers I picked, entirely at random.

3 9 15 21 31 45

I hadn’t realized there were so many numbers and permutations of numbers in the world. Of course I can’t win. Nor does it seem likely that I shall ever get to Naples, even as Julia’s lady companion, or on a coach trip with Fat Sally. I’d better scale down my expectations to something a bit more realistic.

I went to see my man in the Scrubs in the evening, and I told him about my failure of nerve with the Lottery. He laughed at me. He told me I ought to keep on persevering, not just give up at the first go. Feeble, he said I was. Then he tried to press on me a bag full of thousands of Coca-Cola vouchers, saying I could win some prize for
them on the Internet Auction. I refused them. He knows I don’t do the Internet. He knows how to, but he’s not allowed to. Anyway, I don’t think I’d be allowed to take them out of the prison. Nothing in, nothing out, that’s the rule.

Except stories, of course.

I also told him some of the things Mrs Barclay told me about the London Lighthouse. He couldn’t believe I hadn’t known about it before. It’s been there ten years, he says. ‘Oh Miss, you are a nice one,’ he said. ‘Born yesterday, that’s you.’ He didn’t say this scornfully, but with a kind of mild wonder.

It’s a nice evening tonight. I’ll go for a short walk by the canal, and join the other no-hopers, killing time before time kills them. Killing time on their bicycles, with their fishing umbrellas, with their sad dogs, with their trailing grandchildren. Jogging, loitering, plodding. That’s my proper place. That’s my destiny.

She receives good news and finds her luck has changed

It is a long time since I had a chance to look at this diary. I have been too busy. Everything has changed. I have too much to tell, but I must try to put it all down in some kind of order before I go away. I must set the record straight.

The letter arrived on a Tuesday morning, like a bolt from the blue. Jove’s thunderbolt. The gods play games with us, but at least this game is an amusing one. At least it begins well. Maybe I am after all a favoured daughter.

The letter told me that I had come into some money. Not through a Scratch Card or the Lottery, but in a manner that seems to me at least as unlikely and as arbitrary.

I suppose I have my father to thank for this change of fortune. My father, and Northam Provident. I’ve never thought very much about that little pension fund I started with his blessing and his little nest egg all those years ago. I got my yearly statements, and dutifully copied them for Andrew’s income-tax return, and filed the originals in a folder, and thought no more about them. I could never understand them. I never knew what would be coming to me, or when. I suppose I expected that when I was sixty, the pension might
supplement my state pension by a few pounds a week. But as inflation had been so extravagant over the past decades, and as I’d never increased the premium, I assumed any sensible person would have taken the money out and done something more modern with it.

Any sensible person, as it turns out, would have been wrong.

A year or so ago, Northam Provident sent me papers about voting on abandoning its co-operative status and becoming a PLC, whatever that is, but I didn’t bother to vote. I didn’t even think about it. I don’t know anything about money matters. I felt my views were insignificant. Then I read in the paper that members who didn’t feel so insignificant had voted overwhelmingly in favour of a take-over bid by a High Street bank. I had no idea what that might mean.
En effet
, I think I even thought it might compromise what little pension I might have expected. Eventually I got a letter stating that as a long-term pension-fund holder I would be entitled to a bonus, the amount of which had not yet been calculated. This promised bonus didn’t seem to be replacing any pension and annuity I might one day receive. It seemed to be an extra. Did I want to re-invest, it asked, or did I want a cheque? I thought, that’s nice, and wrote back saying I’d like a cheque. I remember wondering if it would cover my next year’s Health Club membership, or my new dentistry with Mr Wentworth. Then I forgot about it again.

Then, about two days after the last entry, above, in which I had resigned myself to the life of the canal bank (something must have depressed me, but I’m not now sure what it was), I got a letter from Northam Provident, with a cheque for £120,000.

I was completely astonished. At first I thought it was a mistake, and like a fool I rang up to query it. No, they told me, there was no mistake. The money was mine. Apparently, on my father’s advice, I had taken out, all those years ago, a special With Profits Extra Bonus Scheme, and this large sum of money was legitimately mine. It had accumulated for me, silently and secretly, and the take-over bid had shaken it into my lap. A very nice homely woman with a Yorkshire accent explained to me that not only had I done very well from the take-over bid, I had also still got tucked away a fairly substantial annual pension, due to me shortly, when it and I matured. So it
turned out that I was rich. Well, rich by my standards. Wealthy beyond the wildest dreams, in the world picture of the dreadlocked man under the bridge. Even Anaïs, I knew, would not sniff at a free gift of £120,000.

My first thought, after this initial shock, was that Andrew would be very cross. I thought that I would try not to let Andrew know of my luck.

My second thought was that I would go to Italy.

My third thought was that if Andrew got to know of my good fortune, he might try to cancel or reduce my alimony.

My fourth thought was: would it be legal for him to cancel or reduce my alimony?

My fifth thought was:
I will go to Italy
.

And so the fun began.

At first I kept the good news to myself. Furtively I collected brochures and bought maps and guidebooks, in a daze of excitement. It was clear that fate had long intended that I should go to Naples, Cumae and the Phlegrean Fields. The markers were all pointing in that direction. My journey, like that of Aeneas before me, was foreordained. My only hesitation was this: should I extend my travels further? Should I follow the wanderings of Aeneas from ruined Troy through the Aegean to Crete, to Sicily, and across the sea to Carthage, before embarking on the final voyage for Cumae and Pompeii and the descent into Avernus? How far could I afford to go? I pored over my Virgil, over Goethe’s
Italian Journey
(I have the Auden translation), over a little school textbook called
The Voyages of Aeneas
. Outdoors, the rain dripped down the brickwork with its crusted city tears of salt and nitrate and lime and droppings: inside, I warmed myself in the glow of the bright horizons of the future.

Unexpected money is intoxicating. As I leafed through my brochures, or swam up and down the blue pool, or padded on my treadmill at the Health Club, I felt powerful. (I think the new word is ‘empowered’. I have heard this word several times on the radio, and this must be what it means.) All sorts of wild notions crowded into my imagination. It was almost immediately obvious to me that I should invite some of my old classmates to accompany me on my
journey. Cynthia and Anaïs, certainly. Not, perhaps, Mr Wormald. But maybe Mrs Jerrold would agree to be our guide? Yes, I could see the four of us, setting off bravely together, as good companions. I am not a very confident person, but I knew that they would like the idea, and would like to be invited to join me on my expedition. Well, who would not?

I did not at first think of my old friend Julia Jordan, for my encounter with her had been overlaid by more recent impressions of my renewed acquaintance with Mrs Barclay. But after a giddy day or two the image of Julia began to present itself more and more forcefully. It did not seem right not to include Julia in my projected party, for it was she who had put the idea in my head. She had even offered to pay my expenses. But would she fit in? Would she spoil the party spirit?

I thought a great deal about this matter.

Julia and I, as I have said, had studied Latin together at school. Julia had dimly remembered Mrs Pearson and Book Six of her Virgil, although she had seemed surprised to learn that one can still visit the cave of the Sibyl. I thought that Julia might find such an outing ‘interesting’. She had boldly confessed herself to be lonely. She might welcome an overture. Who knows, she might even find it good copy for another book? Julia, I felt, would get on well with the robust Mrs Barclay. Anaïs is temperamental, but she in turn might find Julia ‘interesting’. But then, perhaps Julia would resent my altered fortunes?

These were the thoughts that went through my head as I lay in the sauna, timing my remaining minutes, my remaining hours.

The first person I told of my good fortune was Anaïs Al-Sayyab. I rang her, and sprang it on her. Her reaction was more than satisfactory. She was delighted, extravagantly delighted. ‘What a lark, darling,’ she yelled, excited, down the line. And yes, of course she would come to Carthage and Naples with me. Why ever not? How soon could we set off? Should we charter a yacht and a captain and a crew? She would go and buy her cruise gear at once, and I should do the same. Some brighter colours, this time, darling, she instructed.
Go for it. Go for it
, darling. Celebrate.

Anaïs seemed very keen on the idea of contacting Cynthia Barclay and Mrs Jerrold. Why not? What fun! What an adventure!

(I did not at this stage mention Julia Jordan.)

Well, why not? Sudden money makes one reckless. I had nothing to lose. I rang Cynthia and Mrs Jerrold, and I propositioned them.

Did I think at this stage that we would ever set off anywhere? I really don’t know. But all projects begin somewhere, and mine had begun, and it was gathering its own momentum.

The friends meet to plan their voyage

I knew that Cynthia would prove to be a good organizer. She at once suggested that we all meet, at her place, to talk the idea through. I rang Mrs Jerrold, and she seemed cautiously pleased to be included, though understandably, at this stage and at her age, non-committal. I told her that we all three longed for her to be our tour guide, and didn’t she remember that we’d talked about it in class? Yes, she said, but we were joking, weren’t we? It seems not, I said, in the new and challenging voice I’d acquired since my letter from Northam Provident. And she laughed, and agreed to come to Cynthia’s for a planning session. I think the others still thought it was maybe just an excuse for a little reunion, for a drink and a gossip, but perhaps my own intentions were already more serious.

So we convened, in the large room overlooking the large and budding London square. Mr Barclay, Cynthia said, was very jealous, and said he wanted to come to Carthage too, but she had told him he couldn’t. She said this as she mixed the drinks. The atmosphere was playful and festive, and everybody seemed overjoyed by my unexpected good fortune. I felt I was very lucky to have such friends. We were all delighted to see one another again, and we agreed that Mrs Barclay’s salon was a much more congenial meeting place than the dingy little institutional room in the Further Education College where we used to gather on hard wooden chairs for our Thursday evenings. Mrs Barclay was in her element as hostess, we could see. Anaïs seemed particularly charmed by some of the items of the décor, fingering an embroidered silken table runner, and appraising the rugs with what seemed to be an expert eye. Mrs Barclay
disclaimed all knowledge of the provenance of the rugs. She knew nothing about them, she said. Bricks and wallpapers she knew, yes, but fabrics, no. The fabrics were the province of Mr Barclay. He was the expert.