The Seven Sisters (23 page)

A light breeze rattles through the dry date palms, and a firefly dances in the shrubbery. Moths swoon into the flames. The air is scented with jasmine and aromatic wood. The lesson is over. They yawn and stretch. A thin moon rides high in the midnight blue above them, and vast Orion strides the calm sky with his shining belt.
Cynthia is still eager for a swim, but acknowledges that it is now too late. Tomorrow they will do everything – the ruins, the city, the shopping for carpets and fabrics, the pilgrimage.

As they are about to depart to their separate rooms for the night, Mrs Jerrold, who has packed away her texts into her capacious bag, suddenly asks, ‘Does anyone here play bridge?’ Most shake their heads, but Cynthia Barclay and Valeria nod eagerly and hopefully. ‘Would the rest of you like to learn?’ asks Mrs Jerrold. High on their pride in having mastered the vocative singular masculine of the perfect participle of the verb
obliviscor
,
–i, oblitus sum
, they agree that it would be delightful to learn to play bridge. Even Candida Wilton, who was brought up to think card games wicked, says she would like to learn. They agree that it is too late now to take in anything new, but the next evening, after the Latin lesson, they will have a bridge lesson. Mrs Jerrold produces from her bag two packs of playing cards. ‘You see,’ she says, ‘I came prepared. I can do card tricks, and I can tell fortunes, and I can play bridge.’

They congratulate her upon her foresight. Tired and happy, they take themselves to their rooms. None of them are sharing. All have paid for single-room supplements. Though they have not paid much extra, for Valeria’s cousin has made them all a very good price.

Valeria, their custodian, is pleased with the way the day has gone. Her tour group has considerable potential. She lies flat upon her bed, doing her relaxation exercises, and remembers the tour on which she first learnt to play bridge. She had been in charge of a gaggle of lords and ladies from the House of Lords of Great Britain, gathered together to tour the ruins of Libya by day and to play bridge by night. Some of them were so much keener on bridge than on ruins that they played by day as well. They played in their bus as they rode through the desert, they played in cafés and hotel rooms and restaurants and at airports and railway stations, they played amidst the ruins of the amphitheatre of the emperor. And Valeria had been initiated into the mysteries of bridge. One weathered and pickled old peer, Lord Filey of Foley, had been gallantly eager to teach Valeria, and she had picked up the rules with what to him seemed surprising speed – he had never discovered that she had for
a decade in an earlier manifestation been a postgraduate student attached to Cornell in the other Ithaca. She looks back, now, as she wiggles her toes in the air and flexes her ankles, upon the small sums of money she had wagered and won and lost in the Sahara, and she thinks of the endlessly fascinating cut of the cards, and she smiles to herself. Bridge is an amusing game, and these women would be right to add it to their repertoire. One can never have too many holds on happiness. Card games are the proper reward of the veterans of old campaigns. Lord Filey had played a tight hand.

Dutifully, her relaxation exercises completed, Valeria reads another chapter of her preceptor’s revolutionary new work on the trade routes and silver coinage of the Etruscans. She likes to keep up with the past, and is sure Mrs Jerrold will be interested in the latest news of the Etruscans. Then she looks at her recently acquired photograph of the baroque monument to Doge Giovanni Pesaro in the Frari in Venice. It shows a massive sarcophagus, supported by four blackamoor caryatids burdened everlastingly by its overwhelming weight. She wonders whether they will so serve for ever, with their trousers so fashionably ragged at the knees, and their expressive and animated faces so hard to read. Ruskin hated this theatrical monument, with its ‘grinning and horrible’ figures, and milder critics still condemn it as bizarre. Valeria was entranced by these vigorous Titans supporting so much dead marble on their shoulders: does she have an Ethiopian chip on hers? She thinks she might never have noticed these black men, had it not been for her preceptor at Cornell, who is a white Englishman. What does that mean, she wonders? He taught her to use her eyes, and with them she has seen strange sights. Is the travel industry ready for a Black Athena Art Tour? Is there enough black money to support such a concept?

She is exhausted by her thoughts, and so she decides against trying to add another stanza to her epic poem on the theme of the Lioness of Judah, an elaborate and anachronistic work which she knows she will never complete. She shuts her eyes, and decides to drift into sleep. As she lies quietly, she hears a tapping at the door of the room next to hers. She guesses that it will be Sally Hepburn, popping in to borrow something from somebody. Sally, Valeria
knows by instinct, is not good at demarcations. She is a born intruder.

Our heroine is threatened by an invasion

Candida has regained the peace and solitude of her room with an unprecedented sense of inner calm. Never in her life has she felt such delight. She is so happy with her room and with her journey. She has behaved so well throughout the day, she tells herself – she has humoured Sally, and calmed the flight attendant, and made a friendly contact with the handsome Valeria, and enthroned Mrs Jerrold in her rightful place as tutor. She has watched the flickering of the flames, and breathed in the sweetness of the night air. And now she stands at her open window, in her thin long white nightgown, gazing out across the sparkling waters of the Mediterranean, which spread below her and shimmer darkly northwards into the moonlit distance. The watery sheen delights and lightens her. She has always been drawn towards the water. She had had moments of peace even in Suffolk, walking the dog along the riverbank. She remembers them, and she remembers the urban gleam of the Grand Union Canal, and the place where the woman drowned, the woman whose rapist and murderer she has befriended. She has escaped both from that dullness, and from that dark destiny. She breathes deeply, and feels herself dying into life.

And then Sally Hepburn knocks upon the door.

Sally cannot resist it. Her pretext is aspirin. She will say she cannot find her packet of aspirins. She will say she has a headache from the thunderous Alps, and needs a tablet to settle her for sleep.

Candida hears the tapping, and turns away from the window and into the room, and crosses barefoot to the door across the wooden floor strewn with woven rugs, and cautiously opens the door a crack. A crack is enough for Sally, who heaves her way through, crying out, ‘It’s only me!’ Candida backs away, towards her bed, and reaches for her black cotton kimono, and rapidly conceals her body from her friend’s prying gaze.

Sally invades, examines, appropriates. She is not content with the proffered bottle of pills, which she snatches eagerly (but criticizes in
passing for being insoluble) as she trips her way towards the window and the view. Candida is loath to let Sally see her view, although she cannot prevent her from gazing at it. Sally says that it is a better view than her own, and that Candida should draw the blinds to keep out the bugs, and that those loose rugs lying on the floor will surely be the death of somebody. The icy moon looks down disdainfully, the water blackens. Candida holds her wrap tightly round her small ageing drooping breasts. The whole bay changes colour under Sally’s threatening eye. Then Sally bustles back into Candida’s bathroom, and noisily pours herself a glass of water from the tap, and throatily swallows down her aspirins, and critically inspects Candida’s modest array of cosmetics and toiletries. Candida thinks of pointing out that it would have been wiser to take the pills with bottled water, but refrains from this comment, because it is too like the kind of comment that Sally herself would have made.

Sally sits herself down, heavily, upon the end of Candida’s bed, ready for a midnight gossip. As her eyes dart around the room, they alight, inevitably, upon the little basket of fruits that have been presented to Mrs Candida Wilton with the Best Wishes of the Manager and the hopes that she will Enjoy a Happy Visit. Sally is envious and indignant. She has not got fruits. Why has Candida got fruits? Eat my fruits, please take them, says Candida, wearily. But Sally does not want fruit, at this time of night. She wants to chat. She wants to discuss her fellow travellers. She wants to criticize Julia for her embarrassment of baggage, and Cynthia Barclay for the dyed pink streak in her hair. Sally, who had sat with such deceptive docility through the Latin lesson, has now summoned her resources, and is full of opinions about the pointlessness of teaching dead languages, and the parallel and distinct iniquity of the contemporary school curriculum, and the lack of grasp of successive Secretaries of State for Education. She wants to know more about Ida and Eugene Jerrold. Who
is
Mrs Jerrold? Why had she been teaching a class in
W
10? Where does she live? What does she live on?

Candida, out of weariness, finds herself describing Mrs Jerrold’s little mews house. She wonders if this is treacherous, but despite her doubts she hears her voice speak on. Her voice tells of the potted
shrubs and plants in the dead-end alley, and of the high-arched and smartly painted wooden doors where once the horses and carriages came and went, and of the cobblestones and ingenious stairways and balconies. It tells of Mrs Jerrold’s crowded walls with their many little paintings, and her sagging shelves of books, and her plump cats, and her wineglasses with their spiral stems. The voice does not speak of Mrs Jerrold’s volumes of verse: Candida forbids it to do so, and it obeys her order.

Sally listens, greedily, and comments that Mrs Jerrold’s little house must be worth a small fortune. A mews house, in Notting Hill. It’s the kind of place where popstars live, says Sally.

I suppose it is, says Candida, who knows nothing of popstars and who had not thought of it in those terms. It’s not really Notting Hill, says Candida. It’s more Ladbroke Grove.

She almost says that Mr Barclay’s house is really grand, but manages not to. What business would that be of Sally’s?

Sally tries to move the conversation to Anaïs Al-Sayyab and her career in television, but this time Candida succeeds in giving nothing away at all. She remains silent, sitting defensively upright on the little stool by the dressing table. She wishes Sally would get up off her bed. She is making a great dent in it.

Candida yawns.

‘It is time for bed,’ says Candida, at last. She is beginning to fear that Sally will never budge. And indeed Sally seems remarkably reluctant to do so. But eventually she takes the hint, and takes herself off, although she produces many a threatening delay and manoeuvre as she goes. But go she does, at last, and the door shuts behind her, and Candida is again alone at last, in the blissful solitude of Africa.

Candida does not get straight into her bed. She pulls the covers straight, and smooths them down, so there is no longer any trace of Sally’s bodily presence. Then she goes back to the window, and gazes out once more, for a while, at Orion and the night sea and the night sky.

In her room, which is next to Candida’s, Julia Jordan is not wasting time gazing at the view. She is still unpacking her suitcases. This activity reassures her. She has always enjoyed packing and unpacking. She is thinking about the plot of her Neapolitan novel, and wondering how on earth she has found herself here in Tunisia, when Naples is what she needs. Is there some twist to the plot that is waiting for her here? She has wandered here by mistake, but it doesn’t seem to matter much. She shakes out her long silvery and gold evening skirt, and her black and gold silk shirt, and hangs them on a hanger from a hook on the back of the door. Then she adds her necklaces and a long printed silk scarf. Her shadow party-going self glimmers back at her, festively. She continues to arrange her underwear neatly in her drawers. She is a tidy person. She likes her things to be neatly arranged about her.

Anaïs Al-Sayyab is sitting up in bed, reading her Guide Book to Tunisia. She has a tumbler of duty-free whisky at her elbow, from which, from time to time, she takes a sip. This is a rum crew she has found herself with, she is thinking, but she is enjoying the spree. She is very taken with the look of Valeria. She has high hopes of the dusky Valeria, who will surely help her to find a more health-giving and mind-enhancing bedtime treat than duty-free whisky. The musky and dusky Valeria is a fine counterblast to the pallid English. Though, reflects Anaïs, as she pours just a wee drop more into her tumbler, it is the pallor of her friend Candida that appeals to her. That washed-out, faded, luminous look of hers is in its own way so distinguished. Anaïs likes Candida. Anaïs feels Candida is on the verge of doing something really surprising – well, in a sense, she has already done it, by suddenly acquiring unexpected money, and inspiring this unexpected trip.

Ida Jerrold is also sitting up in bed, watching television with the sound off. She appears to be watching a religious ceremony of some unfamiliar denomination, presumably Islamic. On and on it goes. It is quite soothing. Robed men silently kneel and rise and chant and abase themselves before their Maker. It goes on and on.

Ida Jerrold is thinking about health and wealth and the pursuit of happiness. Her health is not bad, for her age, though during the
thunderstorm she had experienced a strange wave of palpitations and had momentarily wondered if she were about to die, up there in the sky. She suffers from an irregular heartbeat, but she has suffered from this for so many years that she thinks little of it. Her heart is beating more calmly now, and so she stops thinking about it and moves on to the problem of money. Like Sally Hepburn, she is wondering how much her little mews house is really worth. She has been offered what seems to her to be a vast fortune for it. She has been offered, by a neighbour, more than £1 million for the little house that she and Eugene had bought just after the war for £3,500. Frankly, she could do with the money. She lives on a very small pension. Eugene had put nothing away. He had taken early retirement from his regular job at the BBC in order to do more freelance work, and then he had died, suddenly, in that stupid accident, before he had had time to take out any private pension. He and she had not thought much about pensions. People didn’t, in those days. The BBC pension was pitiful. Candida Wilton had done much better from Northam Provident in one windfall than the widowed Mrs Jerrold would do in the whole of her lifetime from the BBC. So Ida Jerrold has to watch her pennies and shop carefully in Portobello market for cheap vegetables. And now she is too old to teach, and even if she were not too old, nobody wants to study the Classics any more, except for the odd bunch of eccentrics like her present companions.