The Seven Sisters (30 page)

‘She couldn’t hear me,’ says Candida, flushed and excited. ‘How do I switch this thing off? She was only having her leg fixed. She sounded fine. Her Achilles tendon. In a Dutch hospital. She sounded just fine.’

‘There, aren’t you glad you rang?’ says Mrs Jerrold.

‘Yes,’ says Candida.

They take this successful phone call to be a good omen for Mr Barclay’s recovery. They decide to take their supper in the Restaurant of Serapis, which had attracted their attention on the drive into town. Cynthia and Valeria agree that although they will have to get up early, there is no point in going to bed early, as they will not sleep anyway. Over supper, they make more plans. Clearly, everything is
different now. The Virgilians, like Aeneas before them, have been washed off course, and will have to plot another route. They are booked for one more night into the Santa Clara Motel at Arco Felice, and they will keep that booking, but they will have to think again about their onward journey. They had been intending to do Naples and Vesuvius and possibly the islands, while staying in a hotel in Naples that belongs to another of Valeria’s second cousins. Then they had planned to recover quietly for a couple of days in Amalfi in a celebrated hotel, highly recommended and rather expensive, which had been patronized in earlier years by Goethe, Wagner, Ibsen and Mussolini. But, without Cynthia, do they still want to pursue this ambitious itinerary? And are they not also at risk of losing Julia to a movie mogul? They will be a diminished, possibly a dispirited band.

The meal is a last supper, but nobody has betrayed anybody. Everybody has behaved well. Even Sally Hepburn, so given to making a fuss about nothing, has proved remarkably adaptable and supportive now that there is something to make a fuss about. She has refrained from making any rude remarks about Andrew or Ellen, and has shown a shrewdly sympathetic insight into Mr Barclay’s dangerous penchant for late-night roaming. Suffolk spinster though she be, she shows that she is neither ignorant nor judgemental about the ways of the world, and provides some interesting anecdotes about a couple of elderly and disreputable friends of the late Francis Bacon whom she knows in Suffolk. They are old now, and their wandering days are over, but they love to talk about them, and, in the absence of passing rough trade, they continue to persecute one another violently within their own small domain, regularly pushing one another downstairs, and locking one another out of the house in the snow. They hurl plates and carving knives at one another, and ring up the police and the social services to report one another’s crimes. That was how Sally got to meet them in the first place, but now they have become friends, of a sort. They too are survivors. They like a drama. Sally serves from time to time as audience. They get bored when life is too calm.

Mr Barclay is not like that, says Cynthia. He is an angel to her, a domestic paragon of placid generosity. An angel in the house. But he goes out for the action. She had always thought that was fine, but
look what’s happened to him now, says Cynthia, with a darkening change of tone. Mugged, stabbed, robbed, and left bleeding under the motorway. The elegant Mr Barclay has been reduced to one of those yellow Police Serious Assault Witness Appeals that stand on every street corner in Candida’s neighbourhood. It is too bad.

They encourage Cynthia not to be morbid. All may yet be well. At least he hadn’t been murdered in his own home, says Mrs Jerrold, like that poor Pope-Hennessy. ‘Like who?’ asks Julia, and Mrs Jerrold relates the cautionary tale of the death of the notorious risk-taker James Pope-Hennessy, who had been murdered at his maisonette at Number Nine Ladbroke Grove by the ‘ruffianly associates of the unscrupulous youths with whom he chose to consort’. (This quaint old phrase, she says, comes from his entry in the
Dictionary of National Biography
, which she seems to know by heart: it had been written, she says, by an acquaintance of Eugene’s.) James Pope-Hennessy was killed, according to Ida Jerrold, for boasting. He’d been telling the wrong kind of people that he’d been advanced a lot of money to write a biography of Noël Coward, and the stupid ruffians had wrongly thought he must have the cash stashed away under the cushions in Number Nine. They didn’t know much about the ways of publishers, says Mrs Jerrold. This is a tale, says Mrs Jerrold, from the era before gay rights and AIDS – a tale of the bad old days, to which some of Mr Barclay’s generation sometimes look back with foolish nostalgia. Eugene, she says, had known the pale, raven-haired and glamorous Pope-Hennessy quite well, and had adapted some of his travel writings for the BBC Third Programme. Pope-Hennessy, she says, was a very amusing man, and was much missed. He was, like Eugene, a great spendthrift.

Has Mr Barclay made a will, and if so, has he left anything or everything to Cynthia? They do not speak of this, for they are nice ladies. Some of them do not even think of it.

If Julia is full of selfish secret career happiness, she conceals it well.

If Candida is thinking angrily of her husband, or sadly of her daughter, she conceals it well.

If Valeria is worried about her minibus battery and about cancelling hotel bookings and claiming refunds, she conceals it well.

If Anaïs wishes she had never embarked with this ill-assorted crew, she conceals it well.

If Mrs Jerrold is longing to get to bed with Hermann Broch, she conceals it well.

As they call for their bill, Mrs Jerrold drains her glass of
acqua minerale
, and says, brightly, ‘Did you know that Goethe believed that the Neapolitans invented lemonade?’

She seeks for the Sibyl and waits for her dismissal

Weeds grow tall in the quiet tracks of the Ferrovia Cumana at the bottom of the hill. Candida Wilton sits on a semi-derelict station on an old broken-down wooden bench in the sun and waits for a little train that does not come. She has bought a ticket, and punched it in the ticket machine, but the train does not come. She shuts her eyes and the sun beats down on her tired warm thin lids. It beats through them, from a clear blue morning sky, in a golden-red wash. She can no longer fully shut her eyes against the sun. The brightness invades. A waft of warm breeze lifts her thin hair from her skull. The sun shines into the bone.

Valeria and Cynthia left long ago for the airport. Julia has stayed in the hotel, still busy wheeling and dealing on the telephone, in her prima donna mode. The others have gone down to Pozzuoli in a cab.

Candida is thinking about her daughter Ellen, and about the considerable difficulty she had found in forcing herself to make that simple telephone call. No, difficulty is too mild a word. It had been anguish. Without the support of her sisterhood, she would never have taken the risk. It had been far, far easier to ring and probe at St Mary’s on Cynthia’s behalf than to ring her own daughter. And yet, when she had got through to the hospital in Amsterdam, so unexpectedly easily, so quickly, Ellen had not sounded angry or estranged. Surprised, perhaps, but not angry. Why was Candida afraid of her own daughter? Was she afraid of rejection? Surely she had already been rejected, and therefore had nothing more to fear. What was this terror? What did it mean?

Candida has attempted to send flowers to her daughter in the hospital in Amsterdam, but has little confidence that her peace offering
will arrive. She does not trust international credit-card transactions. Unless Ellen thanks her, she will never know if they reached her safely. And Ellen is not given to thanking people. Ellen is given to absenting herself.

Candida thinks she cannot take any more disappointment. She will humble herself, and ask the Sibyl what to do. If the little train ever comes. She almost hopes it will not come. She sits, and waits, and lets her mind drift, and thinks of Goethe and his natural pleasure in the natural world.
Starfishes, sea urchins, serpentine, jasper, obsidian, quartz, granites, porphyries, types of marble, glass of green or blue. Indian figs, narcissus, adonis, pomegranate, myrtle, olive.
He had been fond of lists and multiplicity.

But here, at last, is the little local train, bedaubed with richly massed graffiti. It stops for her on the poor hot neglected track. She is the only seeker to board it. She clutches her punched ticket.

Candida walks on sandalled feet up the Via Sacra towards the Sibyl’s cave. Flowers grow by the wayside, the flowers that Virgil and Goethe and Chateaubriand saw and described. She is unworthy to follow in their august footsteps. Her guidebook tells her that the cave is not truly a cave, it is a galleried tomb, or possibly a defensive outpost. In the Middle Ages, it had become, says her guidebook, ‘the fixed abode of robbers’. That is a pleasing phrase, and reminds her, momentarily, of the Ladbroke Grove ‘ruffians’ who set upon that poor old double-barrelled scribbler, may he rest in peace.

An antique headless statue and a fallen marble torso flank the path. Flakes of mica glitter like snow from the stone in the brightness, and red veins thread through the marble. At the top of the path, a great red earthenware pot is perched perilously upon a tripod. It leans towards the west.

Candida sits down upon a stone capital, and shuts her eyes once more. Chunks of fallen masonry lie about her, and tough-stemmed purple and yellow flowers clamber through them. She sits patiently, as if in prayer. There is a scent of thyme and lavender and juniper, and she hears the low sounds of bees and hover-flies moving monotonously, acquisitively, amidst the flowers and foliage. A lizard basks beside her upon a slab of limestone. She feels both the lightness and
the weight of her own body in the sunshine. She is heavier than she was in her youth and in her young womanhood and in her middle age, and yet she is also lighter, for she feels herself to be nearer to the dryness of the sun and to the purifying of the fire. The fluids are drying out of her skin and her limbs and her entrails. She is turning into a dry husk, a weightless vessel. She feels with a new pleasure the ageing of her flesh.

She beseeches the Sibyl. She waits, patiently, for the message. The lizard rustles away into the pale dry grey-green sage bushes, over the yellow sulphur-loving lichen. She hears small twigs crackle and whisper, she hears the murmuring and the humming of the air, and she feels the turning of the earth. The sun is a blessing upon her tired eyelids.

Submit, whispers the wizened Sibyl, who lost her frenzy a thousand years ago. Be still, whispers the dry and witless Sibyl from her wicker basket. Be still. Submit. You can climb no higher. This is the last height. Submit.

But it is not the last height. And she cannot submit.

Who is that waiting on the far shore? Is it her lover or her God?

What you and I have read so far is the story that I found on my mother’s laptop, after her mysterious and unexpected death.

Her story was divided into two parts, as it is here – a first part called
Diary
, written in the first person, and a second part called
Italian Journey
, written in the third person. It was easy to find, because that’s all there was in the machine, apart from a few miscellaneous jottings at the end of the
Diary
section, which I have not included in the text. There were no other documents. There were no other messages from the dead. My mother’s laptop contents were very chaste. Like the contents of her refrigerator, which contained half a pint of sour low-fat milk, a carton of plain yoghurt three weeks past the sell-by date, some dried-up old pasta twirls, two canned plum tomatoes in a bowl, some olives and a few rashers of streaky bacon. The olives were those hard grey-green oval ones, a sort I particularly dislike, and they were covered with a thin white exuded crust of cold dried salt tears. Salt tears of bitter brine.

I am writing this on the same laptop machine. On my mother’s machine.

She must have written the Italian section pretty damn quick, because I’d only just got my leg out of plaster when the news of her death came. She seems to have been meaning to continue the diary entries, and I suppose she may have deleted some material. But death intervened.

I still don’t know whether or not it was suicide. I’ve been through what she wrote quite carefully, looking for clues, and I still can’t decide. She was depressed, yes, from time to time, and with good reason, but she seems to have had a fair capacity for recovery. The
coroner returned an open verdict, which was polite of him. He suggested that after the amount she’d drunk, she probably just fell in. I don’t find that very convincing, though, do you? I think he was trying to be kind and to save us trouble. That’s what coroners do.

The contents of her stomach had been less chaste than the contents of her laptop and her refrigerator. She’d drunk nearly half a bottle of gin, on top of several glasses of white wine, a couple of vegetable samosas, an onion bhaji, and a load of chips with curry sauce. I didn’t know she went in for that sort of thing. Reading her diary, one wouldn’t get that impression either. But maybe she lied in her diary. Maybe she edited out most of the samosas. Maybe she was ashamed of her weakness for samosas. It
is
rather shameful. The gin surprised me, too, as I know she didn’t much care for gin. Mrs Jerrold thinks my mother may have bought this bottle of gin to entertain Mrs Jerrold. Mrs Jerrold says, if only she had been at home, on that last evening, when my mother rang, all this might never have happened. Mrs Jerrold reproaches herself, which is unnecessary of her.

Mrs Jerrold wasn’t there to answer my mother’s last phone call because she had gone to see her daughter, in Birmingham. She says she doesn’t see much of her daughter. I think she was provoked into paying this rare visit to her daughter by the public exposure in Pozzuoli of the difficult relationship that my mother has with me and my sisters. She didn’t exactly tell me this, but she hinted at it. So that’s an irony.

It was a great shock to me, as you can well imagine. I wasn’t expecting anything like this, though maybe I should have been. She’d sounded perfectly reasonable on the phone when she rang me in Amsterdam. She’s never been exactly warm-hearted or cosy in her manner – I needn’t bother to spell that out, need I – but she didn’t sound any worse than usual, in fact if anything slightly better. I was surprised to hear from her at all, that’s for sure, and I may have made that a bit too obvious to her, but I didn’t give her the cold shoulder. I was pleased to hear from her. In my own fashion. Which is not unlike her fashion, when all is said. For, when all is said, I am, alas, her daughter.