The Seven Sisters (24 page)

So it would make sense for her to sell her little house to the photographer next door, whose wife has just had a second baby. They want to expand into her territory. She understands that. She has no idea of whether or not he has offered her a just price, but that is hardly the point. If he has offered, so would others. But then where would she actually
live
? She likes her house. If she had a million pounds, what would she spend it on? She does not starve, and she can afford to feed her cats, and she can drink gin when she wants to. She can still offer a glass of wine to a friend. She eats like a bird, and she feeds the birds. Her amusements are simple. She reads, and goes to lectures, most of which are free, and occasionally she goes to stay with a diminishing band of friends scattered around the country. She plays bridge, once a fortnight, with friends in South Kensington.
She would in theory like to be able to afford to travel abroad more, but travel is exhausting, and at her age she is probably better off at home. She has had her travels. There is nothing that could give her as much pleasure as being in her little house, and drawing down the blinds in the evenings, and battening down the hatches, and stroking a cat upon her knee as she listens to the Third Programme. Her house is a jewel. It is beyond price. I will stay put, says Ida Jerrold to herself. I will ask Cynthia about house prices, for she is sure to know about such things, but whatever it is worth on the market I will not move. What is the market to me? My home is my treasure, and it is beyond price.

Ida Jerrold picks up
The Death of Virgil
in order to read herself to sleep. It is heavy going, but she will finish it or die.

Quietly, secretly, Cynthia Barclay tiptoes barefoot along the corridor and out through the open side door near the restaurant and across the patio and through the shrubbery. She is wearing her bikini and she is wrapped in a large fluffy yellow towelling bathrobe. She discards the robe, revealing her hard, firm, London-sunbed-tanned body, and silently, making scarcely a ripple, she slips into the silky water, and breasts its smoothness. It is at once cool and warm, mild and refreshing, milky and soft. Weightless, she swims through its embrace. Godlike, it takes her.

The seven sisters see the sights

Sally Hepburn is not feeling too good the next day, and complains that the piquant peppers have poisoned her. (Is it, Candida wonders, the purloined tap water that has upset her stomach?) But Sally refuses to stay behind as the others determine to set off valiantly to see the sights.

Sally does not take calmly to the beggars of Tunis. They flummox her. Candida and Julia and Cynthia and Ida Jerrold do not like them either, but they do not respond to them with panic and hysterical distress. In vain do Valeria and Anaïs insist that, compared with many cities of the world, modern Tunis is relatively beggar-free. In vain does Candida remind her that London itself was well provided these days with its own complement of indigenous beggars. Sally continues to panic, even when surrounded by her Virgilian
bodyguard. She begins to stumble, and twice she actually falls over, like a clumsy doll. When she falls, beggar children laugh and point. Candida continues to wonder whether it has been wise to bring Sally so far afield from Suffolk. But she helps her up, and dusts her down, and wanders eagerly onwards. She cannot afford to be dragged down or pulled over by Sally. She is too full of a naive and happy wonder.

Candida is enchanted by Tunis, and by its surroundings. Some of its streets smell divinely of the Goldborne Road. She sees now that this is how it should be. How can the denizens of the Goldborne Road bear to live in exile? How can anyone bear to live in the dark damp streets of London, beneath an evil sky?

For their allotted three days they gaze, wander, and pursue the new travelogue of their third age, of their free gift of after-time. The hours are crowded with glorious life. They chatter like parrots, they even sing in their minibus, as they had sung as children, on those rare school outings. They browse in museums, they are both charmed and alarmed by snake charmers, they wonder at scorpion swallowers, they decline to view the belly dancers. Mrs Barclay wonders whether or not to buy Mr Barclay a beautiful red fez.

Valeria watches her troop with an expert weather eye. She is accustomed to the little squalls that from time to time ruffle a group, and she is familiar also with the calms and the doldrums. So far, all are behaving well within the bounds of the reasonable. Even Sally Hepburn has confined her complaints to such matters as the noise of the air conditioning and the persistence of the mendicants and the uncertain prices in the souk. And Sally is much cheered when Valeria persuades her that in her purchase of an engraved agate ring set in silver she has acquired a veritable bargain. It had cost only the equivalent of a tenner, but Valeria assures her it is the real thing, and compliments Sally upon her sharp eye. Sally is flattered, placated, thinks better of the souk and the mendicants and the children who try to sell her scraps of embroidery. What does the Arabic inscription on her ring mean, she wants to know? Valeria inspects it, gravely, and says that she thinks it is probably something about the gardens of the just. Valeria, as she invents this rubric, glances anxiously after
Julia, and wonders yet again whether or not she ought to warn her about wearing so many expensive rings so conspicuously. She does not want to spread alarm through her group, or to cast aspersions on the safety of the streets of North Africa, but, really, it is not wise. She assumes they are properly insured, but, even so, she would not risk it herself. It is an invitation to crime. She resolves that she will say something to Julia before they set off for Naples, if she can find the right moment.

They divide their time between the pleasures of the mind and of the body. Anaïs, who is at home in Africa, reveals herself to be curiously keen on shopping, and disappears on her own up side streets from time to time, returning occasionally seemingly empty-handed, occasionally with small packages. Valeria decides not to worry about her absences, for clearly Anaïs can look after herself, and knows her way back. Valeria thinks she can guess the contents of some of the packages, and suspects that Anaïs may be pursuing some private trade route of her own. Julia also enjoys shopping, but hers is of a more conventional variety: she acquires, under Valeria’s supervision, a golden necklace and a silver brooch. Mrs Jerrold does not shop: she says she has too many objects in her life already. She takes herself off to sit in cafés, sipping mint tea from a tiny brown glass in a brass-filigree holder as she watches from afar the bargaining, and dips from time to time into the heavy works of Hermann Broch. She carries him everywhere with her in her bag. He is not going to escape her now.

Cynthia and Candida are the swimmers, seduced by the sea. Oh yes, they are interested in the ruins, and in the stories of Tanit and Salammbô and Hannibal and Dido, and they bend earnestly over their Virgil lessons and their bridge lessons of an evening, but they also wish to strike out from land. The pool cannot contain them, pleasant though it is. So Valeria is commissioned to find them beaches.

She is worth her weight in gold, they assure her, as they cast their eyes upon the little private cove she has selected for their delight. It is perfection. There is a small sandy stretch, where the non-swimming members of the party may sit and laze in the shade of Valeria’s parasols,
and there are rocks, over which Cynthia and Candida may clamber, and from which Cynthia may dive. Candida does not dive, she is too old and too timid and she is afraid of hitting her head on some hidden underwater danger, so she launches herself from the water’s edge into the warm and waiting sea. And she stays near the shore, swimming, floating, thinking of her Health Club, and blessing it for keeping her in the habit of staying afloat. It is good that she has kept up the practice of swimming, and of revealing her ageing body to the gaze of others. She blesses Tamsin and Chelsea and Jenny and all her unknown and nameless friends at the Club.

Cynthia Barclay is not afraid of the sharp Alps of the underwater. She can see through the clear transparent brine that they are no threat. She climbs upwards, stands erect in the sun against the sky on a rock six feet above the Mediterranean, and gazes commandingly about her. Her figure is fine, and she flaunts it. The sun and sky acknowledge it, and the beach party acknowledges it. Then she plunges in, and strikes out to sea. She is a strong swimmer, and she ploughs her way forward freestyle and headdown through the water. No wonder the hotel pool could not hold her. She is like a dolphin in the wake of a fleeing sail. On and on she goes, northwards, in a straight line out from land, towards the far horizon and the invisibilities of Europe. Her dipping bronzed head grows smaller and smaller as she recedes from sight. Will she ever return? Valeria, hitherto confident, begins to wonder, for she is in theory in charge of this outing. She has never lost a client yet, unless you count old Mr Oliphant from Lincoln who died peacefully and gratefully in his sleep on the Nile. Candida, splashing in the shallows, has from her low water-level perspective lost all sight of Cynthia, and knows it would be vain for her to attempt to pursue her. Skilled though she may once have been in the long-unpractised arts of life-saving, now will not be her opportunity to display them. She would never be able to overtake the drowning Cynthia and to drag her back to shore. She knows she has not the strength.

It is late afternoon on their last day in North Africa, and the sun is sinking to the west. Candida swims her last ladylike breaststrokes, and turns to the shore. As she rises to her feet and emerges from the
water in her perishing old black one-piece Speedo costume, she glances back out to sea, and there, far out, she spies Cynthia, who has turned, and is at last heading back to the beach. A murmur of relief rises from her companions, as Candida towels herself dry, and they all watch as the golden helmet heaves powerfully back towards their little assembly of parasols. How strongly Cynthia Barclay swims, and with what confidence! She had been so far out that she seems to arrive upon them from another continent. Larger and larger she grows upon their vision, until she is there before them in all her fleshliness, standing knee deep in the wavelets, shaking the glowing drops from her hair and from her body. ‘More Juno than Venus, perhaps,’ comments Mrs Jerrold, a little dryly, breaking the spell of their admiration.

Valeria emboldens herself to upbraid Cynthia with mock severity: what had she been thinking of, to frighten them all by swimming out so far from land? Sally Hepburn joins in the chorus of disapprobation, though without much conviction: she is somewhat overawed by such reckless boldness. Julia Jordan is silent, wondering if it is possible that those mighty brown breasts are reinforced with silicon, and, if so, whether Cynthia will divulge the name of her surgeon. Anaïs, who cannot swim, puffs enigmatically on her small brown cheroot, and keeps her own counsel. Mrs Jerrold, as Cynthia and Candida dress themselves, returns furtively to the pages of Hermann Broch. It is left to the two swimmers to praise the divine warmth and glorious clarity of the water. ‘I thought that people said the Mediterranean was a dead sea,’ says Candida, as they gather their bags for the short stroll back to the minibus. ‘But it’s as pure as the day of creation.’

Its purity is attested, it would seem, by a group of skinny barefoot boys who have spotted a sales opportunity and set up their stall by the waiting chariot. They have laid out upon a rock a display of riches of the deep which they claim to have caught for the beach party’s delectation. Valeria is at first inclined to wave them away, but she sees that her charges are intrigued by the offerings before them, and allows the scene to develop. The boys have displayed live urchins, shellfish of various shapes and sizes, a dazzling scarlet starfish, and a
small octopus. The octopus is a dead loss: nobody wants to gaze at its unattractive bluish suckers and its poor flabby grey corpse, so it is bundled unceremoniously out of sight. The starfish is wondered at, then replaced gently in a rock pool. The shellfish are named, in various languages, but the English ladies say they have no use for them: they are not here to indulge in home cooking, even of exotica such as these, and do not think the chef of the Hotel Diana will want an addition to his day’s expert selections from the market.

The sea urchins present another proposition, and one with which Valeria has long been familiar. It will be a test of her Virgilians, and she does not know how they will respond to it. Some of the English are so squeamish, but some are so daring: one cannot always tell. The French on the whole are more adventurous than the English when it comes to eating strange meats and strange fishes, but sometimes the English surprise one by their enterprise. And this group, as she now begins to see, is ready for the challenge. One of the brown boy urchins has produced a pocket knife, with which he proceeds to attack one of the long-spiked bristling black sea urchins. He slices into it, and reveals its quivering soft bright persimmon-orange innards. He scoops them out, with his fingers, and devours them, to the accompaniment of much ostentatious smacking of the lips. Far from recoiling from this exhibition (which the boy is sometimes paid to repeat, sometimes to desist from repeating), the Virgilians surge forward curiously. Even Sally Hepburn, who faints in the presence of a peanut, does not avert her eyes. And Cynthia, fresh and still salty from the sea herself, is clearly keen to devour an urchin of her own.

Valeria assures them that it is quite safe to do so, and watches as, one after another, they sample this strange fruit. In the end, all but Anaïs partake. Anaïs excuses herself on the grounds that she thinks she has caught a touch of the sun, but in truth she is horrified and disgusted by the spiky little monsters. And it is Anaïs who is the first to notice the appalling behaviour of the sucked shells of the monsters.
They climb up on to their spikes, and they walk away from the scene of their own destruction.
Across the rock they stagger, although they are no longer alive, although their bodies and brains have been eaten up by the English ladies. Their skeletons walk. Anaïs catches Vale
ria’s eye, and notes that she is already well versed in this striking natural phenomenon. The others do not yet notice, for they are too busy guzzling live flesh and wiping their dripping lips and necks with paper tissues and sandy towels, and laughing at their own temerity. Anaïs, austerely, believes that they should not be allowed to miss this astounding sight, and after restraining herself for a minute or two she cannot help but cry out, ‘But look, darlings, do look, they’re
still alive
!’