The Seven Sisters (35 page)

He is, she discovers, a very entertaining man, this elderly middle-aged young neurosurgeon. He fantasizes bravely, he embarks on flights of invention, he pours her another glass and drinks her health, he invites her to a mushroom hunt if she is able to stay on to the next weekend. He is small and neat and puckish. She hears herself laughing at his jokes, to her own astonishment. He speaks warmly and with respect of Ellen and Clyde, and she finds herself filling with unexpected pride. Ellen and Clyde love the woodland, as she must know, says this winning man with his winning ways, as he bends the full power of his high-octane attention upon Candida Wilton. Every year, he says, they all join forces for outings, with one or two other keen fungus-hunters. My wife was a botanist, says the neurosurgeon, and she taught Clyde and Ellen the secret places. I have a summerhouse in the woods. You must come to see me there, he urges.

He is a widower. He lives alone.

The subdued, dull and decorous party grows noisier and more and more lively as the evening wears on. First there is laughter, then there is dancing. Candida and neurosurgeon Jan sit it out together, on an institutional plastic-backed settee, and watch the young people throw themselves about. Martha is dancing with a very tall Dutch
man, and Ellen and Clyde are dancing together, surprisingly well. Ellen’s limp seems to have been miraculously healed for the occasion. She has suddenly shed all her awkwardness. Candida has never seen either of her daughters on the dance floor before. Maybe they will find some happiness after all. Maybe they will be transfigured into those that are bright and those that laugh.

Jan Gunarsson continues to speak of the spell of the woodland and of the mystery of the long dark winters. Recklessly she tells him of the ghost orchid, and asks him if it is to be found in Finland. He gazes at her intently, eyeball to eyeball, and he tells her that he himself has seen it bloom, this very week, deep in the beech wood. With his own blue eyes he has seen this rare creature. Shall he take her to see it? Will she come with him? He stares into her timid soul.

He is a magician who needs someone to mesmerize. Tonight he has selected Candida as his subject. She submits. They make a pact to go together to visit the ghost orchid. She tells herself that he will have forgotten all about it by the morning. She is not nearly as drunk as this handsome wealthy healthy Finnish widower.

The wedding party lasts well into the early hours of the morning. It is years since Candida stayed up so late. Not even with her Virgilian friends has she seen so much of the night hours. She and Jan rise together to dance the last dance. It is years since Candida trod the dance floor. It is years since a man held her in his arms. They dance slowly, to the slow music of the last waltz. He holds her firmly and she does not stumble. She had been taught to dance the waltz correctly, all those years ago, at St Anne’s, with Julia Jordan as her partner. (Julia had always taken the lead.) She had not thought to exercise this not very useful skill again, but it comes into its own at last. She finds that she has not forgotten the steps. It may be her imagination, but she thinks that Jan smells pleasantly of woodsmoke. He presses his smooth dry well-shaven cheek against hers. They are of the same height, and they fit together neatly. Nobody save the neon-lit dentist has touched the skin of her face for years.

It is long past midnight when she regains her narrow wooden bed. She is lonely in her body.

She meets the serpent’s spoil

Jan didn’t forget the woodland invitation, to my surprise. He’d left a message for me in the hotel before I even woke up. He must be an insomniac with a strong head and an iron constitution. But Ellen has more or less advised me not to accept it. He is, she says, a well-known philanderer. Well, I had guessed that. I wasn’t born yesterday. Both Ellen and Clyde, however, like him very much, despite his philandering, and were much attached to his late wife. They were all good friends. But they say he is a wild card, and has been on the rampage since Valda’s death.

‘Of course, I know you can look after yourself, at your age, Mum,’ said Ellen. ‘I mean, he isn’t a
rapist
. But he is notorious. For his woodland trips.’

At this, we both laughed.

Clyde has got a hangover.

‘I just don’t want you getting hurt, Mum, by his idle attentions,’ said Ellen. ‘I’d feel responsible.’

‘I imagine he’s been through all the local talent several times,’ said Martha, who I think was rather jealous of the superficial and arbitrary interest I happened to have aroused.

‘Of course,’ said Ellen. ‘He’s run out of options here. This is a small community. But he also operates in Stockholm, Copenhagen, London and Paris. The world’s his oyster on his neurosurgical tours. He’s always been a bit of a rover. And since Valda died, he’s been wicked. I think he’s lonely, really, poor chap.’

We were having lunch, in Ellen’s apartment. Scrambled eggs on toast, with, of course, wild mushrooms. They were strange and delicious, those little flutes and trumpets of orange and black. Martha and I savoured and admired. For a moment, it felt as though we were a family.

‘Perhaps a notorious philanderer would be good for Mum,’ said Martha. ‘As a variation.’

At this, they both laughed. I think they were laughing, without malice, at their father, not at me.

‘Jan’s very rich,’ said Ellen. ‘Very, very rich.’

They began to tease me, and to tell me that perhaps after all I should go into the woods with Jan. I didn’t mind their teasing me. I don’t think there was any harm in it.

I didn’t tell them about the ghost orchid.

I didn’t go to the woods with Jan, but I did go to meet one or two of Clyde’s clients at the speech clinic. He invited me. I didn’t push my way in. He wanted me to see some of the kind of work they do there.

Clyde does not go in for the head-biting technique. He does not endorse the struggle. Nevertheless, there is struggle. However one approaches it, there is struggle. Clyde leads groups, and also has one-to-one sessions with individual clients. I sat in on one of the groups.

Afterwards, over strong coffee, in the clinical canteen, I talked to a man called Stuart Courage. He had been one of the group. He says it is his second visit to the clinic, and that he will be there for a fortnight. He describes himself as a successful entrepreneur, a product of the Thatcher revolution, who has made his money from fibre optics, copper wire, and the privatization of the telephone system. I couldn’t follow the technicalities of all this and he didn’t expect me to do so. He explained that he had suffered all his remembered life from a severe stammer (I did know, because of Ellen, because of my interest in the subject through Ellen, that boys tend to stammer much more than girls do) and as a consequence had always had a deep fear of the telephone, which he regarded as an instrument of torture. It was an irony, but not in his view a wholly accidental irony, that drew him to fibre optics, and, eventually, to the new world of emails and text-messaging, in which speech could be altogether avoided.

‘It was then I realized,’ he said, ‘that although my name was courage, I was a coward. I realized that my real aim in life was to live a life without speech, but in such a manner that nobody would ever notice that I wasn’t speaking. I was so deeply into avoidance and denial that I was about to disappear for ever into the shadows. And then I came to Finland – well, as you know, everyone in telecommunications has to pay homage to Finland – and it was while I was over here that I got to hear about the clinic. And I thought, it’s now or never. And I made myself known to them. So that was last year. So here I am.’

Stuart Courage says that the admission of the severity of his problem was in itself part of the cure. ‘I was like an alcoholic, at an AA meeting. The relief! The relief of confession, of not having to pretend any more! And now I’ve come back, as a volunteer guinea
pig. I go to the meetings, and I confess my difficulties. And they wire me up with electrodes and give me passages to read aloud and they simulate social and professional speech situations, and then they record me to see what happens. In the brain. In my brain. They watch how my hemispheres confuse and double-cross themselves. I love it. This is my Health Club, my holiday resort, my working vacation, my dating agency. It’s a wonderful place. They are wonderful people here. They are helping to change my life.’

Actually, that’s not quite how he talks. Yet again I seem, relentlessly, inescapably, to have given the other person my own syntax and vocabulary. Though I don’t talk quite like that, either, do I? But that’s the gist of what he said. I think I’ve got most of the content right.

I probably shouldn’t attempt dialogue. I can’t mimic his style, and I wouldn’t dream of trying to reproduce the struggles and hesitations of his speech upon the page. It would be rude to try. But they were there. He has a particular difficulty with the letters B, V and M. He told me this, but I had already observed it. (He made a joke about the Blessed Virgin Mary.) He struggles with the serpent. It is at times quite difficult to listen to him, but he assures me that it is less difficult when the problem is out in the open, and I am sure he is right about that. He says he is far more fluent in Finland than he is in England.

He is a very nice man. He is thin and wiry, and full of nervous energy. His eyes are grey, and so is his hair. His hair is crinkled and close-cropped, and it looks as though it is charged with electricity. I am full of admiration for his brave persistence. I don’t suppose that we shall ever meet again, but I am glad to have had the chance to speak to him. I am glad that we have had the chance to speak together.

He did use the words ‘dating agency’. I didn’t make that up. I didn’t put those words into his mouth.

He has never been married, he says. He lives in Southwark, in a modern development, overlooking the river. He says he likes to watch the life of the river. He asked me if I enjoyed the theatre. I said yes, though I don’t, very much. I find the theatre rather boring. He said he would like to take me to the Globe. ‘It’s nice to have someone to go with,’ he said.

Actually, I don’t mind Shakespeare. He’s less boring than most
playwrights. But I don’t suppose he will remember to ask me, though we did exchange addresses.

So I met two eligible and wealthy men during my Finnish visit, one a widower and one a bachelor, one drunk and one sober, one fluent and one tongue-tied. I accused Ellen of trying to be a matchmaker, and asked her when she was going to produce the Third Man, as things in my life tend to go in threesomes. I was only joking, of course, and she laughed, and said she’d run out of introductions.

She sits alone, high on a dark evening, in the fourth year of her sojourn

Candida Wilton has finally taken up knitting. She bought the wool in Finland. There she sits, with her expensively, her sensuously handcrafted, her smooth ebony spears of needles, and her plain and her purl, and she listens to the radio as she knits. She has decided that she prefers knitting to playing solitaire, though she is not very good at knitting. The glowingly, boastfully natural colours and the extravagantly wild textures of the hanks of hand-dyed Finnish wools had seduced her as she wandered round the town on the last day of her visit. The wool shop had been filled with a cornucopia of colours, with lavish festoons of indigo, mauve, rust, grape, teal, rose madder, umber, amber and sap green yarn, in smooth and shaggy and rubbed and slubbed and silken strands. A lot of knitting still goes on in Finland. Candida had learnt to knit at school, and the knack returns to her, slowly. Like the steps of the waltz, the click of the needles returns. Knitting is better than sex, at her age. It wards off encroaching arthritis, and avoids social embarrassment. There is a lot to be said for knitting. Anaïs says it is a form of masturbation, but, says Candida to her friend Anaïs, so what? Anaïs is in no position to criticize. She embroiders cabbages. That’s just as bad as knitting, surely. Anaïs claims that embroidery, unlike knitting, is art, but Candida does not accept this distinction.

Candida does not think she is a prude, exactly, and words like masturbation do not rattle her. But, as she has repeatedly made plain, she is faintly and at times more than faintly disgusted by the way in which sex now permeates the culture in which she lives. Is this the sour grapes of an old maid? But she is not an old maid, she
is the mother of three children. Is it the bitterness of an abandoned wife? No, she thinks not. She thinks it is a reaction against the triviality and the childishness of the world she lives in, which uses the word ‘bonking’ instead of the word ‘fucking’. Really, says the reproving and censorious Candida to herself, each time she hears this silly word on the air waves. She sides with D. H. Lawrence on the use of the word ‘fucking’.

Candida is listening to a radio programme where neither word is likely to appear. It is a gala performance of
The Trojans
, an opera, as she now knows, by Berlioz, broadcast live from the recently refurbished Royal Opera House. Some of the Virgilians had thought of trying to get together to go to see this opera, for old time’s sake, but they hadn’t managed to book tickets: the seats had been spectacularly expensive, the performances few. So, instead of taking part in a group outing, she is listening to it by herself, for free.

Candida is glad to have an evening to herself. She has been far too busy of late. Her social calendar is full. There is bridge in South Kensington with Mrs Jerrold, on alternate Tuesday evenings: Candida is even worse at bridge than she is at knitting, but she is learning, slowly, and her presence on the sidelines is tolerated, because she is young, and brings new blood and new gossip to the ageing gathering. Then there are the weekly cinema outings with Cynthia and Anaïs. Mr Barclay sometimes joins them these days, for he has wisely given up his solitary forays into the night, or so he says: they politely tease him when he makes deliberately ignorant remarks about film, or drops bits of what he insists on calling Feng Shui from his chopsticks. Mr Barclay has decided to dress for these occasions as an honorary lady: he has acquired a priest’s cassock, in which he thinks he looks very fetching. He has always wanted to wear skirts. After all, why not? is his line. If not now, when? The skirt suits him. His ankles are bony.