The Seven Sisters (25 page)

This produces consternation, but the consternation is mixed with mirth. The criminals are too deep in their crime to extricate themselves now. They watch in amazement as the empty shells of their impromptu feast stagger about in a vain and brave display of animation, before collapsing into perpetual inertia. Luckily, they do not last too long or walk too far. They will not follow them back to the Hotel with a Difference, in a little trail of prickly footsteps of damp reproach. They are dead and gone, really and truly dead and gone, and the boys demonstrate this by picking them up and pulling them about and turning them inside out and then hurling them back into their native element.

The boys laugh heartlessly, the English ladies laugh heartlessly, and there is great bonhomie amongst the group. Valeria settles the sea-urchin bill with a few small notes, and is ready to head back to the hotel for the last African supper, and the last African section of Virgil (the death of the pilot Palinurus, at the end of Book Five) and the last African game of bridge – Candida is hopeless but keen, Julia is keen and good and can’t think why she’s never played before, Sally is not very keen but better than Candida at remembering her cards, and Anaïs is keeping her cards close to her chest, as usual – but she is delayed by a sudden display of independent activity by one of the boy urchins. Activated by some kind query from Cynthia as to the dangers of his trade, he is displaying a scar on his knee. It is a wide, jagged, white-blue slash, frilled around the edges – an unstitched wound, sustained, as he now explains in many tongues, during a diving expedition for an octopus off the Rocks of Hercules. He is not complaining about it or begging for alms for it, he is proud of it, and Cynthia is in immediate sympathy: she rolls up her trouser leg in
order to display to him a similar badge of honour on her shin, sustained, as she explains, during a rash attempt to climb over a broken-glass-bristled wall on her way out of some ladylike convent confinement of her youth. They compare wounds, with mutual satisfaction.

This moment of international communion is recalled with pleasure over supper, as they tuck into their sweet stewed lamb with apricots and couscous. They had been nice friendly boys, the urchin boys, and they had skipped away over the fierce sharp-edged foot-lacerating rocks like nimble goats. Valeria tells her flock about the Pillars of Hercules at Tangiers – had they been doing a tour of North Africa, instead of setting sail for Italy in the morning, they could have travelled westwards and visited the Pillars of Hercules. They could have seen the very point whence Ulysses set sail for eternity. And are the myths remembered, Mrs Jerrold wondered, by this generation reared on a mixed diet of Islam, Manchester United, and Madonna? (These last two alliterative items, they have discovered, are part of the
lingua franca
of initiatory small talk addressed to all tourists from the English-speaking world, though they achieve only a low recognition factor with this particular group.)

Valeria pauses, ponders her reply. Yes, she thinks some of the myths and stories are remembered, because they are preserved in place names, and, as they have seen, in the names of hotels and restaurants, of aeroplanes and ferries and trains and battleships – yes, memories of Diana and Dido, Hannibal and Salammbô, Ishtar and Tanit live on. Even Marius and Regulus are not quite forgotten, though they are somewhat out of fashion. The British Victorians loved Hannibal and Marius, says Valeria, who knows a surprising amount about these things. They appropriated them and remade them in their own imperial image and painted historical paintings of them and wrote school-prize poems in Latin about them. And people trade still on these old names, and so they live on. We live in a palimpsest of memories, says Valeria. But if you were to ask the street boys who was Hercules, who was Hannibal – well, who knows what answer you might get? You should have asked them, says Valeria. There is no harm in asking.

Candida is remembering her many trips to the National Gallery, in the early months of her loneliness. She is thinking of Turner and wondering if he had ever been to Carthage. Just left of centre, in the foreground of Turner’s painting of
Dido building Carthage
, a small toy boat floats on the wide shining path of water. A group of brown boys watch it, as they perch on the brink of the river. The classical columns and great façades soar above them and beyond them, and bare-shouldered, majestic Dido stands behind them, but they are intent upon their play. Candida tries to recall this image, but its details elude her. She thinks she sees boys dangling their legs in a river in a classical landscape, but she cannot see the little boat. But it is there, this image, in the palimpsest of her memory, and if she lives, she will revisit it.

She frequented galleries in her loneliness, but now she is no longer alone. She is one of a company. She is with her friends.

That evening, the seven sisters read, in Latin and in English, of the death of the pilot Palinurus, who fell asleep at the wheel. Candida Wilton and Ida Jerrold think of the death of Eugene Jerrold, though they do not betray this consciousness to one another. They all discuss their forthcoming voyage – will it be a calm crossing? Or will a malicious god stir up trouble and seasickness for them? They will, on this occasion, be obliged to share cabins, as the ferry offers no single berths, but the prospect affords less alarm than it might have done three days earlier, for they know one another better now. Candida has thought it her duty to offer to share with Sally, but it has been decided to draw lots, in classical style. They agree that they will do this in the morning, at breakfast.

Julia and Candida do not take part in the last game of bridge: they watch for a while as Valeria-and-Cynthia battle it out with Ida-and-Sally, and then drift off to the bar, for a final
digestif
. (Anaïs has disappeared, as she does, to do whatever it is that she does when she disappears.) In the bar, they find themselves talking about their schooldays, and about Biology O level. It is the sea urchins that have stimulated these memories, for they vividly recall studying primitive life-forms with the aptly named Miss Moss – spirogyrae, amoebae, tadpoles, the difference between parasites and saprophytes, the
structure and nature of the endoderm and the ectoderm. The sight of those walking husks haunts them. Life after death, the afterlife. They talk about chickens that walk after their heads have been chopped off, and remember tales of speaking heads that survive the guillotine and denounce the executioner. Miss Moss had been an animating teacher, in her way, and they have good memories of her tuition. She had managed to interest her girls in the mysteries of cellular life.

Candida finds that she is very much enjoying her conversation with Julia Jordan. She is enjoying it more than she would ever have expected she could. They are very old friends, and they have a long, shared past. Is it her imagination, or is Julia becoming more human, less odd, in her late middle age? Candida is reminded of the long, intense, after-lights conversations they had enjoyed, all those years ago, when they were young. Not all these interchanges had turned on Julia’s sexual exploits, though those are the ones that Candida has, perhaps unfairly, tended to remember most vividly. No, they had talked of many other matters – of whether or not there was a God, of good and evil and right and wrong, of art and music and literature, of talent and privilege, and even, ignorantly, of politics. (Most, though by no means all, of the girls at St Anne’s came from Tory-voting families, as did Julia herself; Candida’s parents were distinguished by a religious objection to all political parties, a fact which had fascinated her schoolfellows, and a theme on which she was obliged, on many occasions, to expound and elaborate. Julia, in those days, had veered sharply to the left.)

It is good, surprisingly good, to be sitting here in a hotel bar in North Africa, peacefully, comfortably, with her old friend Julia Jordan. It is much better here than it had been sitting watching television alone of an evening in Holling House, while Andrew delivered a secular sermon about the visually impaired and disability allowances, or went through his papers in his study. Andrew’s activities had always made her feel so unimportant, and here it does not matter if she is unimportant. And sitting here idly gossiping makes a pleasing change from watching the London skyline alone from her third-floor window through a flaw in the glass, though that had been
satisfying, in its own strange dull aching way. This is what Candida is thinking to herself, so she is a little taken aback when her friend Julia suddenly remarks, into a companionable lull, ‘Don’t you think we’re a bit like those poor creatures? Scuttling around after we’re dead?’ And Julia laughs her dry, bright, mirthless little laugh, and looks at Candida boldly and directly from her staring, protuberant grey eyes. Julia follows her intervention with a smiling, deprecating pout which says that she means exactly what she says, and realizes the implications of what she asks.

Candida does not answer at once: even in her head, she prevaricates. But she owes Julia an answer, for she, Candida Wilton, has instigated this journey, and it is on her account therefore that they scuttle and drift, if that is what they do. So, after a moment or two of reflection, and after glancing sideways at the card table where their compatriots are still intent upon their game, she says, ‘No, I don’t think it is like that. I don’t feel that it is like that.’

‘We can’t pretend that we are young, any more,’ pursues Julia. ‘So what are we, after all?’

‘Youth is not everything,’ says Candida, sententiously.

‘So what is the point of us?’ insists Julia.

A long silence ensues, broken by a triumphant cry from Cynthia, and a ‘Well done! That’s the spirit!’ from Mrs Jerrold.

Candida sips delicately from her tiny glass.

‘The point is,’ continues Julia, ‘that human beings weren’t really meant to live so long. We weren’t designed to age as we do. We ought to have been killed off long ago, by predators, or scarcities, or natural calamities. That’s what happens to other species. Other animals don’t age as we do.’

‘Is that true?’ inquires Candida, gently, playing for time. It is a new concept to her, and a shocking one.

‘Yes, I’m sure it’s true. I read an article about it in one of the weeklies. And there was that television series, about the ageing process. I didn’t see it, but I read about it in the
Sunday Times
.’

‘I didn’t watch it,’ says Candida, faintly.

‘Nor did I, I can’t get the BBC, but I got the hang of it without watching.’

‘Miss Moss didn’t teach us about the ageing process,’ concedes Candida.

‘They didn’t know so much about it then. Life expectancy has seriously increased in the last forty years. People are living for longer and longer. They are testing the mechanism to its limits. And beyond its limits. It wasn’t expected.’

‘Cats age,’ suggests Candida, in a propitiatory way. ‘You meet quite a lot of old cats.’ She is thinking of Ida Jerrold’s cats, which are being cared for in her absence by the wife of the territorially ambitious photographer who lives next door.

‘Cats age,’ says Julia, ‘because human beings have domesticated them and artificially prolonged their lives with all sorts of unnatural creature comforts.’

‘Like Smoked Salmon Sheba and Felix Crunchies,’ says Candida.

‘Exactly so. We keep them going to keep us company in the dark. Like grave goods in the ancient world. Like all those bronzes and tripods and fibulae and what not that we saw in that exhausting museum yesterday.’

This is such a satisfactory conceit that both women suddenly feel very much more cheerful, and Candida finds the strength to declare that she herself, speaking strictly for herself, does not feel at all like the discarded shell of a sea urchin. In fact, she says, she hasn’t felt so cheerful for years. It may well be true that the human body wasn’t designed to live as long as it now does, but the ingenuity of the human mind and spirit are the cause of this longevity, and they will find their own solution to its problems. As Hegel would have argued, says Candida.

‘As
who
would have argued?’ asks Julia, understandably.

‘Oh, nothing,’ says Candida, hurriedly. ‘I don’t know what I’m talking about. But I
do
know that I’m feeling just fine, and I’m very glad you agreed to come on this trip.’

‘It’s all a bit
spinsterly
and
grandmotherly
and
third ageist
,’ says Julia, but her tone indicates that she is no longer in the dumps, and that she is glad that Candida is glad she is there. She proves this, a moment later, by reaching forward and impulsively squeezing Candida’s hand. She squeezes it rather hard, and her splendid rings bite into
her friend’s flesh. ‘Ow,’ protests Candida, pleased by this gesture, yet affecting more pain than she has felt, and shaking her fingers vigorously when they are released.

‘My hands’, says Candida, insincerely woe-struck, ‘are
terrible
. Look how wrinkled they are!’

And it is true that for some reason her hands have worn much less well than Julia’s. They compare their knuckles and their fingers, spreading them out on the glass table before them. Is the deterioration of Candida’s hands connected with childbirth or the washing of small garments? Surely not. Candida and Julia speak of gloves and hand creams (there was something called a Barrier Cream, in their mothers’ day) and face creams and facelifts and arthritis. Julia demonstrates some anti-arthritis finger exercises which she occasionally practises in moments of boredom, and she claims that they work, though how would she know if they didn’t? Candida, watching these exercises, which resemble the finger games about churches and steeples that one plays with small children, tells Julia that Valeria is worried that Julia will lose her rings in Naples, but is too polite to say so because she doesn’t want to fuss. Julia says that Valeria is an admirably tactful person, and she promises not to blame her or anybody else if she loses her jewels – ‘But I feel naked without them, quite naked,’ she says, and Candida can see that this, though improbable, is true. Then Julia tells Candida about an elderly actress friend of hers who had delighted in dating her colleagues by the manner in which their hands appeared in press photographs – they touch up the face, but always forget the hands, or so this actress had always maintained. ‘You can always tell by the hands!’ had been her lugubrious, morbid, death-defying cry, as her own talons grew more and more claw-like, as the airbrush was obliged to work harder and harder on each wrinkled millimetre of her public image.