The Seven Sisters (22 page)

Behind Julia, Sally Hepburn is haranguing Candida, as is her wont, on various topics of the day. She begins with DVT (Candida eventually works out that this is an acronym for deep-vein thrombosis), which has been killing air passengers in the economy classes, and then moves on vigorously to her old favourite from Cromer days, nut allergy. She is sure there will be nuts in the vegetarian in-flight meal she has requested. Candida knows better than to say, ‘Wait and see’, because Sally is enjoying her apprehensions so much. Sally eyes with suspicious distaste the roasted peanuts which Candida is popping into her mouth, one by one, between sips from her glass of red wine. Sally sees them as a bad omen. Candida is not very fond of roasted peanuts, but, defiantly, independently, she is relishing these, even though they are a threat to her fine new bridgework.

Next to Candida, Mrs Jerrold seems to be reading a large paperback book called
The Death of Virgil
, which she has said she has been
intending to read for years. It is a famous and famously unread novel by a German writer called Hermann Broch. Its moment, for Mrs Jerrold, has come. (Eugene claimed he had once had a drink with Hermann Broch just after the war in Princeton, and this may even be true, for Eugene was well known to have met some unlikely people in unlikely places.) But, although she appears to be reading, Mrs Jerrold’s eyes are merely resting on the page. She is not listening to the nut rage of Sally Hepburn, for she has acquired over the years a finely tuned capacity for blotting out unnecessary noise. She is thinking about Goethe and Wordsworth. And why should she not?

She is thinking now of Goethe’s love affair with antiquity and the classical south.
Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn
… Yes, she knows that land. She is thinking of Goethe’s southward Italian journey in 1786, and of his rapture as he encountered vineyards, maize, mulberry trees, apples, pears and quinces. How he loved the darting lizards and the noisy chirping of the cicadas. She is remembering that he wrote that forked lightning flashed around them and above them. The snowy peaks and dark creased mineral clefts and ridges of the sharp Alps are ranged inhospitably below them. The plane shakes and shudders like a thin tin can, and other bottles of wine tip over on to other trays and on to other breasts of other chickens. Julia and Cynthia exchange worldly glances of comically exaggerated alarm, Anaïs shuts her eyes, and Mrs Jerrold placidly butters her bread roll. Sally Hepburn stares, transfixed, out of the window, at the galvanic display of heavenly fireworks, and at the white mountain summits, as though expecting to see the long-legged monster of Frankenstein loping over the crevasses beneath. Candida Wilton quietly resigns herself to death. If it be now, so be it, but she really would have liked to have seen Carthage and Cumae and Naples first. It seems a pity to get so far, and not to arrive.

Death does not yet choose to claim her or any of her fellow passengers. Death gives them a warning, but lets them pass through. The tumult abates, and the frail little metal craft sails on into calmer skies. The pilot broadcasts over the loudspeaker system a polite and perhaps faintly sardonic wish that they have not been too discomforted by the slight turbulence. The Seat Belt signs remain illumined,
but the cabin staff begins to move around again, reassuringly, collecting trays, distributing coffee, offering Duty Free. The atmosphere still crackles with electricity. Candida can feel the crackling in her brain. Like some forms of electric-shock therapy, it seems to have done her good. It has burnt up some dust. She feels dazzlingly, radiantly lucid, as
Salammbô
flies her south to Carthage. She ignores the unceasing conversation of Sally, which starts up again as soon as the thunderclaps fall silent. She feels that the rest of her life lies before her on a clear and shining track. Onwards and upwards,
nach Cuma, nach Cuma
. She has left her earthly attachments far behind, and is sailing into the future. It lies before her like a cloth of dreams. All shall be made plain at last, in this bright new light.

The minibus driver and guide, Valeria, is due to meet them at Tunis-Carthage airport, to drive them to the Hotel Diana. They have speculated about what she will look like – will she be tall, small, dark, pale, old, young, foolish, sensible, silent, talkative, classical, romantic? Sally Hepburn has already professed her disappointment that she is not a man. Sally had, she said, been hoping for a gigolo, at last. But as she cannot even cope with a French-speaking Tunisian air hostess, Candida is thinking that she would not have coped too well with a gigolo either. A woman will be more congenial.

They arrive in Africa, and meet their stately guide

Valeria is very tall. Her flock spots her at once at the airport, for she stands head and shoulders above the rest of the mob greeting the passengers from the plane. She is even taller than Anaïs. She must be nearly six feet tall. This is unusual for an Italian woman, but, as she later reveals, she has Ethiopian blood in her ancestry. She is holding aloft a placard saying WELCOME VIRGIL TOUR in large bold black letters. The undiscussed but latent problem of whether she is guide or courier, and whether or not she will expect to be treated as a social equal, is solved at once, on first sight. For here is a lady if ever there was one. She is noble, and she inspires instant confidence.

Her appearance is in every way striking. Her skin is smooth and dark and unblemished. It is brown with mauve shadows. They all fall instantly in love with the beautiful Valeria. Her hair is twisted into
little black ringlets in a halo around her face and tied into a thick braid at the back. She is dressed, at this their first meeting, in a long bright saffron-yellow tunic, with baggy trousers of a slightly darker orange. She looks a little like a priestess. And she drives, as they are soon to discover, like a charioteer.

Valeria extracts the Virgilian baggage with surprising speed, through some special channel, and leads her group to its waiting minibus. She organizes slaves to load the baggage into the back, and keeps a sharp eye on Julia’s many monogrammed pieces. The late afternoon heat shimmers on the tarmac and the air smells hot. They clamber into the bus’s air-conditioned interior and dispose themselves eagerly upon the banquettes. Candida does not sit next to Sally this time. She takes a seat of her own, with nobody next to her. She has deserved a little space. And the minibus hurtles off, with Valeria at the wheel, towards the Hotel Diana, the Hotel with a Difference.

By the time they reach their destination, the expert Valeria, without taking her eyes off the road, but with some cunning use of the mirror, has correctly identified Sally Hepburn as a troublemaker, Candida Wilton as a peacemaker, Mrs Jerrold as a tough old bird who will never tire and never complain, Cynthia Barclay as an organizing and sociable spirit who will thrive in a crisis, and Julia as a nervous prima donna. Anaïs Al-Sayyab she cannot classify so easily. She does not often have people who look like Anaïs on her desert tours. She likes the look of Anaïs.

And the Virgilians like the look of their hotel. It is neither as grand nor quite as close to the sea as the brochure had indicated, and its colonnades are by no means Roman in proportion, but it is bright and white and friendly. It is set on a hillside, and its sloping terraced garden is pleasantly planted with palms and cacti; great cascades of purple and pink bougainvillea fall lavishly from its parapets and balconies. It is luxury on a small, low-built and independent scale. It is not a Hilton or a Marriott or a Sheraton. It belongs to a second cousin of Valeria, a moustached gentleman about half her size, who is pleased to welcome in person his guests from England. It is just the place for them, he assures them, and happily they agree.

Their only problem seems to be how to spend the evening. There
are too many delights on offer, and some of them sound rather exhausting. It has been a long day, and the aeroplane had been cramped as well as turbulent. Should they settle in quietly, and have a little supper, and so to bed, in order to wake refreshed for an arduous day of sightseeing on the morrow? Perhaps the more energetic could combine this modest plan with a little dip in the hotel pool, which winks at them seductively from its benevolent turquoise eye through a fringe of palm trees? On the other hand, would it not be fun to hit the town, and cruise along the Avenue Bourguiba, and take in a café, and see the night lights and the nightlife? Or Valeria could drive them up to the pines and eucalyptus and orange trees of the Belvedere Park, or around the lagoon or the bay? She is at their disposal, she assures them, and their wish is her command.

Cynthia longs to plunge at once into the sea. Julia and Anaïs want to hit the town – Julia likes the notion of a café, and Anaïs says she wants to go shopping. Sally wants her supper. Mrs Jerrold wants to retire to her room to read her book, although she is too polite to say so. Candida does not know what she wants. She wants everything. She wants it all.

It is Candida, however, who eventually suggests that they should celebrate their first evening together by holding a short seminar under the direction of Ida Jerrold. They will stay in the hotel, and take supper there, and then foregather with their Virgil texts for half an hour. This suggestion is accepted by all, for, though they do not like to admit it, even the more adventurous of them are tired, and not quite up to tackling a foreign city. None of them are quite as young as they were, though some of them do not like to admit that either. Valeria asks if she may attend the seminar, and is warmly invited to do so. Naturally, all the original Virgilians have brought their texts with them, and they offer to share them round with those who do not have them. Candida is highly satisfied with this eccentric arrangement. They will dine together at eight, and then do a little Latin.

None of the other guests in Valeria’s second cousin’s hotel with a difference seem to be Latin scholars. They are more outdoor sporting types, bronzed, lean-kneed, and muscular. They speak in French and Italian. Our group watches them, over dinner, and preens itself
upon its refined classical credentials as it tucks into a copious meal of small pickled fishes, red-pepper salad, roasted chickens, oiled rice and fried flowers. Sally complains quite a lot about the piquancy of the peppers (and it is true that one or two of them are unforeseeably and randomly ferocious) but nobody listens to her. She calms down when a platter of pastries arrives. The pastries are excellent. Even those who never eat pastries are tempted by them. The wine is cheap and good. Mrs Jerrold is pleased to note that Ain Oktor is still on offer, all these decades later, so she can continue knowingly to avoid it. Her expertise has not been wasted.

The evening is so pleasant that they agree to meet outdoors, by the poolside, with their texts. An open fire with scented logs is flickering in a large brick oven, and insects gather around the living flames. The travellers make a little circle on white wooden chairs around Mrs Jerrold. To Candida’s astonishment, she discovers that Julia has brought her old St Anne’s school copy of Book Six. Julia clutches it, as a testimonial. Its stained blue and grey canvas cover is worn and marked, and its text is heavily annotated in several childish hands. Julia has remembered the innocence of her schooldays better than Candida would have expected. She has preserved its relics. Candida lost her school Virgil many moons ago.

Mrs Jerrold, however, does not wish to do Book Six and the Underworld yet. They should save that for its proper place in Naples. She thinks they should look at a few lines from Book Four – lines 259–78, to be precise – which describe Mercury’s visit to Aeneas in the new city of Carthage. Aeneas, gloriously robed in a rich cloak of purple woven with thin threads of gold, a gift from Queen Dido, is busy laying the foundations of the citadel when Mercury descends upon him and tells him to remember his destiny as founder of Rome and Italy. Aeneas must not idle around here in the luxurious oriental land of Libya. He is chosen for a higher fate.

Earnestly they bend their heads over the Latin and attempt to disentangle the grammar. Their brains are rusty and dusty, despite the purging of the electric storm, and they find it is difficult to focus on the text. They can see the scene clearly enough – there is Aeneas, busily helping to construct (though not, presumably, with his own
hands) the citadel stronghold of his mistress. He is suddenly recalled (as, in a later age, would be Mark Antony from the thrall of Cleopatra) to a recollection of his greater duties, and is struck, as by a thunderbolt, by the horror of the knowledge that it is his duty to betray and abandon Dido. Unlike Mark Antony, he will obey his destiny and sacrifice love for glory. He will become one of the great betrayers of history, and Dido one of the greatly betrayed. The group knows this story well, and has already spent much time considering the piety and propriety of the behaviour of Pius Aeneas. But the text itself is puzzling. They are glad they do not have an exam ahead of them in the morning.

They do not have too much difficulty with vocabulary.
Pulchram urbem
is ‘beautiful city’ in the accusative, and
magalia
(n., plural) they can well understand to mean ‘humble Carthaginian huts’, though this is not a very useful noun to learn by heart.
In tenuem auram
means, literally, ‘into thin air’, which is where Mercury vanishes when his mission is accomplished. Vocabulary is not difficult. Anyone can learn words. But as for the grammar – now that is another matter. Mrs Jerrold tells them that
oblite
, which means ‘forgetful’, is the vocative singular masculine of the perfect participle of the verb
obliviscor, –i, oblitus sum
, to forget, a verb which takes the genitive. This is double Dutch to them, at this time of night, after a three-hour flight through a thunderstorm, after a large meal and a few glasses of wine. They cannot get their old heads round it at all. Yes, they understand that Aeneas is being accused of being forgetful of his destiny and his kingdom, but they cannot understand how the words
fit together
. Patiently, Mrs Jerrold pursues the meaning, and teases out the golden thread, and suddenly, for a moment, they have it.
Heu, regni rerumque oblite tuarum!
‘Alas, you, of your kingdoms and fortunes forgetful!’ Yes, the words fall into place, connect, and glow into transitory meaning. The students smile at one another, triumphant.