The Seven Sisters (3 page)

Andrew was not only appointed headmaster of Holling House School, he was also now the Executive Director of the Trust. The Trust was a philanthropic institution with a not inconsiderable amount of money behind it, invested in the eighteenth century by a Nonconformist banker, principally for the care and education of the blind. (Its terms have been substantially bent during recent years, but there is still a residuary charitable link to visual impairment.) Under Andrew’s management, the Trust prospered and the School flourished. Andrew’s father was a lawyer and Andrew has a good legal mind: he saw ingenious ways of attracting new investment and new pupils without breaching old blind Hamilcar Henson’s original intentions. Andrew was very good at marrying philanthropy and money. He and Hamilcar Henson would probably have got on well, had they inhabited the same time-frame. Andrew was very popular with the Henson descendants. And there wasn’t anything remotely suspect about his management of the Trust, or of the School. So I don’t know why I’m sounding so sour. So suspicious, and so sour. Andrew is an honest man.

I never really grasped the relationship between the School and the Trust and the Hamilcar Henson estate, in the grounds of which the School stood. Unlike Andrew, I haven’t got a good legal brain.

Andrew and I met at school. He went to St Barnaby’s, which was the brother school of St Anne’s. He was everybody’s heart-throb, in those days. He was a year older than us, as was correct, and we all swooned for him. We eyed him in church and at school dances. He was head boy, of course. We all wrote about him in our diaries. And I pulled the short straw and married him.

She counts her friends upon her fingers

I did like Suffolk, to begin with. It was so clean and airy, after our grubby years in Manchester. I liked the large skies, and the yellow fields, and the spacious school grounds. I liked playing Lady of the Manor, and arranging flowers, and ordering curtains. I had been so tired and so busy, in Manchester, with the two little girls in hot squabbling heaps in a small suburban house, and now they were growing up and the efficient machinery of the school contained and embraced them and took them from under my feet. I didn’t have to worry about domestic matters much. The School provided its own ready-made system – cleaners, cooks, gardeners, a matron, a secretary. I felt less housebound because the house was not mine. I walked the dog along the riverbank. I have always liked walking by water. Occasionally I helped out in the School, in one way and another, but I did not involve myself deeply in School affairs. It was not an arduous life. I was able to be gracious at public events, when called upon to be so. I was quite good at that. I went to concerts and I presided over wine-and-cheese parties. It was all rather unreal but not unpleasant.

I allowed two women to befriend me. I had two friends in Suffolk. They were – indeed they still are – called Henrietta and Sally. I use this passive construction to describe our relationship because I cannot remember any moment at which I made any friendly step towards them. They co-opted me, and I failed to prevent them from doing so. That is how it happened. I have always been a passive person.

Yes, I had two friends in Suffolk. I suppose they still call themselves my friends, although I have left them and Suffolk and moved to this foreign land of urban barbarians. Henrietta is the wife of a solicitor in Bury St Edmunds. She works as a volunteer with the partially sighted. We still had a few of those at the School, though the supply of suitable blind paupers has begun to dry up of late. (That is one of the reasons why Andrew has been so busy rewriting the terms of the Trust.) Sally is a social worker employed by the County Council. Henrietta Parks is bossy, querulous, lank and longfaced. Sally Hepburn is fat and noisy. They are both do-gooders. I used to have a respect for do-gooders, but I do not like having good done
unto me, and I became very suspicious of the motives of Sally and Henrietta.

Sally and Henrietta overwhelmed me with their sympathy when Andrew played me false and left me. Well, Andrew didn’t actually leave me – he couldn’t leave his post, could he? – but he certainly betrayed me. I was the one who had to leave. I was driven out of what had seemed to be my own home. I went further afield than I was expected to go. I was expected to stay around in Suffolk, in pitiable condition, being comforted by Job’s comforters. By fat Sally and bony Henrietta.

There was always a large sky above me in Suffolk, and space around me. There were green and yellow fields, and bathing huts, and striped canvas chairs, and blue sky-reflecting estuaries flooding and spreading towards the silver main. I became an expert in cloud formations. I liked the large mauve and ochre and white cumulus clouds that sailed high over the ripe corn, and the long low yellowy-white clouds that lay parallel above the horizon like Magritte baguettes. It was a picturesque landscape, and it composed itself in oil-colour tints and formations. There were pink houses and thatched roofs and windmills and riverbanks and shingle beaches and spiked purple flowers growing in the sand dunes. There were sheep and horses and herons. An innocent, rural, backward, open land.

Now I live trapped beneath an enclosing grey gloomy London canopy. It is better so. In this trap is my freedom. Here I shall remake my body and my soul.

Everyone felt very sorry for me when Andrew’s dalliance became common knowledge, when it became clear to the world that our marriage was over. I became an object of gossip and pity and contempt. Everyone loved and admired Andrew, or so the rubric went, and it was assumed that I above all others must love and admire Andrew. Nobody could guess at the relief I might be feeling. Nobody knew of the exhilaration I felt when I realized that I would not have to live with Andrew for the rest of my life. Nobody knew of my secret delight in his public guilt.

It is terrible, living with a man who is admired by all, when love has perished. Andrew had come to seem to me to be the vainest, the
most self-satisfied, the most self-serving hypocrite in England. That kindly twinkle in his eyes had driven me to the shores of madness. The prospect of release, through the agency of Anthea Richards, was a delirious excitement to me. I embraced it and all its accompanying humiliations.

There, I have written down Anthea’s name as well as Andrew’s. I am making good progress with this account.

Henrietta and Sally, as I have said, are my Suffolk friends. I have two friends still from my schooldays at St Anne’s. Janet and Julia are the names of my schoolfriends from St Anne’s. They knew Andrew in his guise as head boy, all those years ago. He featured in their girlish dreams and in their girlish diaries. Though it has to be said that Julia always saw through Andrew. Julia was a wicked girl and now she is a wicked woman, and she is well placed to judge Andrew for what he is.

Two Suffolk friends. And myself makes three.

Two friends from St Anne’s. And myself makes three.

Three daughters.

Three and three and three.

I am superstitious about numbers, although I know they are meaningless. It is almost an illness with me. I wonder if it is an illness with a name. Most things have names, if you inquire after them. I am lucky with numbers. One day I intend to win the Lottery, with lucky numbers. I haven’t bought a ticket yet, but when I do, I shall win. Just you wait and see. It is written that I shall win. If ever I bother to play. (I bet that form of belief has a name, too. I might look it up one day. There must be a reference book called
Common Delusions
.)

The three girls sided with Andrew. Isobel, Ellen and Martha. Andrew alienated my three daughters. He seduced them and stole their hearts away.

I have written enough for today. Tomorrow I will write about my friends from St Anne’s. The prospect fills me with a slightly unhealthy excitement.

It is raining heavily, but I will brave the streets and go to my Club today. I haven’t been for days. I must try to stick to some kind of
routine, whatever the weather. If I break my routine I will die. I must measure out my days correctly, as I promised myself I would, or liberation will never be mine. Virgil has deserted me, but I shall remain faithful to his successor and his substitute and worship in his temple. Virgil’s successor is the new god of Health.

Actually, I think Health must be a goddess rather than a god, but I don’t know her name. Hygeia, perhaps? I must look her up when I go to the library.

I miss the reference books. I don’t have much shelf space here. Life has become sparse. I like it, in a way, this thinness. But occasionally I miss something. Like a reference book.

She prefaces the stories of Janet and of Julia with more tales of the streets and of the Club

Well, here I am. I’m back. I didn’t mean to go on writing tonight, but I don’t see why I shouldn’t. Nobody will know. I feel the need to continue. Though it wasn’t a very eventful evening, nothing untoward. There was a moment as I walked under the motorway, when I felt nervous. A tall black man was walking towards me, straight at me, as though he meant to collide with me. I’ve been nervous ever since I had my bag snatched. Now I don’t carry anything in my bag, except my bathing suit, and my trainers, and my Club Pass, and a fiver in case I think of something I need for supper on the way home. But he wouldn’t know I hadn’t got anything in it worth having, would he? Anyway, half the people around here look psychotic. You can’t tell the muggers from the mad. I know I shouldn’t say that, even to myself, but it’s true.

When we were within a yard of one another, I veered to one side, trying to look as though I wasn’t doing it deliberately. I didn’t want him to think I was
avoiding
him. He might have found that provocative. But he didn’t even seem to notice. He just ploughed on in his own lone furrow, without looking, staring straight ahead. He was probably out of his mind, or high, or drunk. No, not drunk. He was walking too straight to be drunk. Mad, probably.

No, I don’t like walking under the railway, nor under the motorway. It’s a double gauntlet. I don’t like the pigeon mess, and the old mattresses, and the broken bottles, and the people who lurk near the
bottle bank. My heart beats a little faster as I walk under those two bridges.

There was a black girl standing on the corner at the bus stop. She was wearing a black leather jacket and a short black skirt and high boots, and her hair was dyed that unnatural tawny colour that you see a lot around here. And her shoulder bag was like a grenade. I’m not joking. It was circular, and covered with long plastic or rubber spikes about three inches long. Like a mine or a grenade. Street warfare. Battle dress. And standing in the overgrown privet-hedge bottom was a pallid-faced, overweight child of about six years old, smoking the stub of a cigarette. He didn’t seem to be with anyone. He certainly didn’t belong to the black girl.

Indoors, in the Club, it’s another world. It’s all lightness and brightness and politeness. Hello, they say, using my name. Sometimes it’s the only time I hear my name all day, the only time I speak to another person all day. I know they know my name only because it’s written on my Club Pass, which they have to swipe every time I go in, but hearing it does remind me of who I am. It reminds me that I have a name. Sometimes they pronounce my name a little oddly, making me sound more like an illness than a woman, but I can’t blame them for that. It’s not a very common name. Or not in these parts. It may have been popular once.

They use – or try to use – my full name, not my nickname. They treat me as a grown woman. To them, I am an old woman. They do not know that I was once a child. The receptionists are very Smart Casual. They are well dressed and polite.

There are some beautiful women in the Club. Tonight there was one I don’t think I’ve seen before. She looked like a painting by Gauguin, or a statue. A solid woman. A wide face, carved wide lips, like a wood sculpture, large breasts with large dark nipples and aureoles, and broad fertility hips. They’re not all skinny, or even trying to be skinny.

I haven’t seen that girl with the lipoma-lump for a week or two. Not since I first tried to describe her, in fact. I hope she’s not in hospital.

I can’t get used to all these nationalities. In Suffolk, we were all very white. We had some coloured people at the School, because all
schools with very high fees take coloured people now, particularly schools like Andrew’s that can dress exploitation up as multicultural philanthropy. But you don’t see many coloured people in the streets of Woodbridge and Martlesham and Aldeburgh. There are Chinese and Indian restaurants, of course, and plenty of them, but there isn’t what I’d call a community. Or if there is, I haven’t seen it. It may be different in Ipswich. We didn’t go to Ipswich all that often. Sally Hepburn knows Ipswich much better than I do.

Now I am going to write about my old friends Janet and Julia. I will begin with Janet because she is less interesting and easier to name.

Janet Milgram was a nice girl.

Yes, Janet was a nice girl. When she was twelve she had thick brown plaits and a centre parting and freckles. She was good at netball, and became team captain. I can’t think of much more to say about Janet. She became a prefect. So did I. Julia did not become a prefect.

But a strange fate overtook Janet Milgram. She married a farmer who took to the bottle and died of drink. She became, for a while, a battered wife. She still lives in Lincolnshire, with her daughter and her son-in-law, on the very same farm where her husband worked, failed, beat her up and died. This is not what any of us would have expected. She had seemed set for a completely steady, unsurprising happy married life of sober industry. Her husband, Dick Parry, on the few occasions when I met him, seemed a regular, hardworking, sober kind of man. It just shows you can’t tell what the cards hold.

(I haven’t played solitaire for two days now. I congratulate myself. Writing is a good substitute.)

Janet has been cloyingly sympathetic about my divorce, which all too clearly delighted her, and asks me from time to time to go to stay with her. I do not go. But she does occasionally visit my mother in her care home near Lincoln. This I suppose is good of her, as my mother has become very difficult and talks a great deal about Jesus. But you can’t expect me to be grateful to Janet, as I am sure she has her own selfish reasons for going to see my mother. Janet is now a big, plain, jolly woman, square and stocky, with a double chin and a round face and a head of bouncing grey curls and a belly which
sticks out like a kitchen shelf. She still calls me by my school nickname, which annoys me. I am grown up now.