The Seven Sisters (36 page)

Mr Barclay’s first name is John. Candida had hoped he would prove to be called something more exotic. She will never be able to bring herself to address him as John.

Last night Candida went to the National Theatre with Stuart Courage, and sat silently and patiently through an interminable production of
Peer Gynt
. They had dinner afterwards in the theatre restaurant and
tried to make sense of Ibsen as they ate their smooth little ramekins of spinach soufflé and their dog-bowls of fisherman’s pie. Stuart Courage has been very pressing with his invitations, and says he is looking forward to taking her to the Globe when it opens again for its next season. One day soon she will have to ask him back to her side of town, for a pot of rillettes and a quail from the smart Holland Park butcher, but not, she thinks, just yet. If he wants to spend his money on her, why not? They had both been baffled by
Peer Gynt
: was this great classic really as rambling and ill-constructed as it seemed to them to be? What was it all
about
? Stuart is quite interesting on the subject, and his speech, with her, is almost normal. He is not exactly transfigured by light in her presence, but he does laugh, and he can make her laugh. A witty man has been living inside him for years, trying to get out.

Candida suspects that Stuart Courage is more keen on her, or her company, than he is able or at this point willing to show. She does not know what she thinks about this. She has a hunch that he will pluck up the courage to propose marriage to her before the following year is out. She likes him, and she likes his fine view of the Thames, but the idea of marriage is unappealing. There would have to be strict ground rules and bed rules before she committed herself to any association of that sort. But if Cynthia and Mr Barclay can rub along together, why not she and Stuart Courage?

Occasionally she feels a wish to pass her hands over the magnetic field of Stuart Courage’s hair. She has not yet indulged it. She wonders if this is a sign of incipient sexual attraction. Stuart Courage, so far, has not made any physical overtures towards her. He has not even pecked at her cheek in greeting. But she senses that he has an interest in her.

So last evening had been more than fully occupied by Stuart Courage and the National Theatre, and today Candida has had a healthy lunch in the AIDS restaurant at the London Lighthouse with Martha and Martha’s new boyfriend from the LSE: baked potato with tuna for Candida, green spaghetti for Martha, and curried parsnip soup for the boyfriend. It had been a bright, crisp, sunny day, warm enough to sit and rock backwards and forwards for a few minutes in the swing-seat in the scented garden by the fountain. Martha and Timothy had liked that, they said. And tomorrow
morning she has to see an accountant about her Capital Gains Tax, a subject that fills her with disbelieving but detached hysteria.

On top of all of this, she is trying to plan a trip next spring to Petra with some of the old crowd, under the shining aegis of the shining and faithfully eager Valeria.
Rose-red Petra, half as old as time.
Candida had always thought Petra was in Syria, but according to Valeria it is in Jordan, and Valeria must know. Valeria is urging the rival claims of Leptis Magna in Libya, but Candida has still to be persuaded. She is enjoying the luxury of indecision. She doesn’t care what the taxman says. There’s sure to be enough money left over for at least one more trip, and she’d like to fit it in, before old age or world terror overtake her. Anaïs and Cynthia and Mrs Jerrold are all keen on the plan, on any plan, but Sally seems to want to opt out, and Julia seems to be far too busy to plan ahead. Shall they recruit, and if so, whom? Anaïs thinks Anna Palumbo might like to join them. It seems that Anaïs and Anna Palumbo email one another constantly. Candida still hasn’t got to grips with email, but she’s thinking about it.

Candida tries not to be jealous of Anaïs’s friendship with Anna Palumbo. Jealousy is childish. She is not at school now, playing the game of ‘best friends’. She is slightly ashamed of the fact that she has secretly looked into Anna’s field of study, Paul Klee, and discovered to her astonishment that he had spent only fourteen days in Tunisia. He had been there in April 1914, with fellow artists Louis Moilliet and August Macke. She had imagined, from the way Anna had been speaking of its effect on him, that he had been there for years. But no, he had rattled through Tunis, Sidi-Bou-Said, Hammamet and Kairouan, as rapidly as any package tourist. How can Anna justify spending so much time and money on this brief incident, even if it was very formative? Candida is not sure if she likes Paul Klee very much, as a person, although she likes his paintings, and can see that North African cities are, as he suggested, built on cubist principles. Better not to read too much biography, better not to read other people’s diaries, thinks Candida. Though Anna was right: his description of arriving in Naples from Africa was as good as Goethe’s. And she likes it when he says that the African moon will rise within him for ever, and that each pale and muted Northern moonrise will recall
it to him. ‘I am myself the moonrise of the South,’ he wrote. In Swiss-German, presumably. She can’t be bothered to check the original. She knows a little French, yes, but she does not pretend to know German. Or to read Hegel, come to that. Ellen is right. She has not read Hegel, and would not understand him if she tried.

Candida does not know why she feels ashamed of her curiosity about Anna. Is it because she fears she is becoming a second-hand person, like Sally Hepburn, with an obsessive displaced interest in the private lives of strangers?

Sally Hepburn has remained very quiet of late. It almost seems as though she has dropped Candida. Candida wonders what she has done right, or wrong, to receive the brush-off. She is slightly disconcerted by Sally’s neglect, though she does not like to admit it to herself. The admission would be too problematic.

Then there is the Health Club, and the Yoga class at the Health Club. Candida seems to have joined a Yoga class, though she is not sure how this happened: she has temporarily suspended her attendance, because of her leg, but she thinks that it remains a commitment. And she has, despite her own misgivings, taken on a new prisoner, at a different and less convenient prison. He is a sanctimonious and religious old ruffian who tries to convert her to his own brand of Born Again Christianity. She suspects he is a double-dyed hypocrite, but is not yet quite sure. She quite enjoys seeing him, and speculating about his motivation.

She has had a postcard from her man on the Isle of Wight.

Ellen is expecting a baby. Whether this is the cause or the result of her marriage to Clyde Hughes is not clear. Even Martha does not know. So Candida will become a grandmother, at last. She thinks she is very pleased about this, and she is relieved by this evidence that her fears about Ellen and Clyde’s relationship have been unfounded. She does not intend to be an intrusive grandmother, but she does intend to try to be attentive. She will not lose touch again. She looks forward to her visits to Finland, where she will be able to replenish her stocks of wool.

How nice Candida Wilton looks, as she sits there, quietly, calmly, complacently, knitting away and thinking in a humble and attentive
spirit about her plans for the future. The music swells triumphantly around her, and her spirit expands in its vastness. She is slightly surprised by its note of overpowering joy, for surely this act is intended to represent the fall of Troy? Or has she somehow been transported to join unknowing Dido, as yet resplendent in Carthage? Can the chorus be singing so gloriously about impending death?

Candida’s face is serene in the dim evening light.

You can’t see, from here, can you, that she has a vicious and newly stitched gash along her right leg? It is nicely covered by her nice wool skirt. But if she were to lift that skirt, you would see that she has acquired a three-inch scar on her right thigh, a scar almost deep enough to rival the scars of Cynthia Barclay and the Tunisian urchin, and a great deal fresher. Where did she get this wound? Has somebody attacked her with a knife? She has always said that the neighbourhood was colourful: has she, like Mr Barclay, been courting danger? Has she too met her destiny? Who would want to carve up the aged right thigh of a nice lady like Candida Wilton?

She climbs over the fence in search of salvation

It was all my own fault. I think it was connected with Jenny’s disappearance. You remember Jenny, the girl who had that lump in her lower back? I’d noticed when I got back from Italy and the Parnassus tour that she wasn’t around, and I’d sort of mildly missed her. I wouldn’t say I’d
positively
missed her, because I was always worried about her, and she wasn’t all that much fun to be with, but I had missed her. I’d missed her presence. But then I’d got depressed myself, and went through that bad period when I felt like throwing myself into the canal, and had all those really bad dreams about lying in the gutter on Ladbroke Grove with the pigeons and the sparrows, and I sort of forgot about her. (In the dream, I lie there, on the pavement, and I cannot move, but I can watch the birds pecking in the gutter, and I tell myself, in the dream, that this at least is a small mercy. It is a very low and lowering dream. Maybe it is about my mother.) Then I went to Finland, and slowly stuck myself together, and when I got back I began to think about Jenny again, and to register that she wasn’t around. I’d got used to seeing her at the Health Club – we always
used to have a pleasant and pointless little chat. And I found that I couldn’t remember when I’d last seen her.

I was nervous about asking after her. I didn’t want to seem to be prying. After all, we weren’t close friends. And I couldn’t remember her last name. I knew she was called Jenny, and I was almost sure that her second name began with an A. Agutter, Asher, Arditti? Various famous names beginning with a J and an A kept getting in the way. It was stupid of me, but I was afraid to ask. So I did a typically surreptitious and cowardly and devious thing. I started to look discreetly through the Workout Sheets, those stiff green record sheets that they keep in a sort of filing system next to the gym. I found mine – it was too tragic.
Wilton, C.
, attended twice for instruction two years ago. After that, nothing. No record of any further activity at all. It was clear that Wilton, C., had abdicated, gone off, done her own thing. Who cared? Nobody. I paid my annual sub. That was OK by them, and that was OK by me. It wasn’t like school, where they chased you and bullied you and made you play netball in the rain. I love my Health Club. Though I have to say that my Health Club, like me, is showing signs of wear and tear, although it’s so much younger than I am. It is no longer pristine. The swimwear spinner keeps going wrong, and the other evening one of the large oval mirrors fell off the wall and crashed to the floor. It splintered into many small shining silver shards. It seemed a bad omen.

I couldn’t find a
Jenny A
. in the Workout file that might have been my friend. I decided that her card had been removed.

After three searches, I decided to ask. I asked so politely, so tentatively, that the good nature of Chelsea and Tamsin overcame their respect for the Data Protection Act, and I learnt that Jenny Argent was no longer a member.

Jenny Argent.
Of course that was her name. As soon as I heard it, it came back to me.

Jenny Argent, I discovered, was no longer a member because she was dead. This took a little longer to ascertain. It was kind-hearted Tamsin who told me. Jenny’s subscription had lapsed, and they’d sent her a reminder, and the envelope had come back with one large red hand-written word on it. DECEASED, it had said. They’d checked
with her Notting Hill Barclay’s bank account, and found that it was true. In principle, she might have been due for a two-month refund of unused membership, but she wouldn’t want it, would she, being dead? So young, said Tamsin, looking at me from her great startled brown healthy eyes. She was so young, wanner she? Tamsin was shocked.

I said yes, she was young.

As I walked home, I wondered how many Health Club members die
per annum
, on average, and whether the Health Club, if alerted in time, sends wreaths to their funerals. They send you a card and a free gift on your birthday, so why not a wreath? The free gifts, when you look at the small print on the accompanying birthday card, are rather disappointing – all you get is a free guest visit, or a free roast on the sunbed. I can’t think of any of my friends who would like a free visit, except Anaïs, and she’s a member already. And I don’t fancy the sunbed. I think sunbeds can give you cancer, even though Cynthia swears by them and says they are completely harmless.

I suppose that’s what Jenny Argent had. She had some kind of malignant tumour. I knew it from the very first. I knew it wasn’t a lipoma.

It was while I was walking home, taking in this revelation about my sad, dead and lonely comrade, that my eye fell on that small brown Christmas tree. Three whole years that dead tree had been lying there under the motorway bridge. I don’t know why, but suddenly, as I walked past, this really really pissed me off. I went home, and I poured myself a glass of wine, and I switched on the telly, but I couldn’t get that stupid tree out of my mind. I made myself some supper, and I had another glass of wine, but I still felt angry about that tree. You can’t just let things lie.

It was about eleven when I went out to rescue it. That’s late for me. I’m usually in bed by then. It was dark, of course, and damp, though it wasn’t actually raining. There was a light veneer of slippery dampness on the surface of the street. A dark sweat of city water.

The solid spiked metal railing that runs along the side of the pavement under the high arch of the motorway is about four feet high. But that wasn’t the only hazard. Behind the railing is a barrier of broad-gauged wire mesh, festooned by various random coils of barbed wire. These nasty bits of dangerous hardware aren’t doing
anything in particular. They don’t connect with or protect anything. They’re just there. Somebody just dumped them there, long ago. All they are defending is this two-foot-high dead tree in a cheap broken terracotta-coloured plastic pot, and some beer cans and plastic bags and sweet wrappings. These are the priceless treasures of my celestial city. The tree was lying beyond one layer of wire mesh. But I thought that if I could just get over the spikes, I could get at it.