The Seven Sisters (6 page)

She never stops talking. How she ever manages to elicit any information from her clients – her victims,
I
call them – God alone knows. Yet she does. And she elicits information from me too. Because every now and then I have to break in, to stop the remorseless flow of
gossip and ignorant opinion and innuendo. That’s how she tricks me into confessions. Maybe she has the same effect on those single mothers and battering stepfathers. The reverse of the psychoanalytic approach – not silence, but a battery of words. People tell her their secrets in order to shut her up.

I am so mean about Sally. But she has subjected and subdued me and I must fight back somehow. I fight back on this silent scroll of outrage, because I am bound to Sally for ever. I will never shake myself free.

Women’s lives. How they entwine about one another and strangle one another.

Sally, like Julia, likes talking about sex, although, by her own account, she had no experience of it. She thinks nothing of discussing pornography, and words like ‘orgasm’ and ‘clitoris’ are frequently upon her lips. Unlike Julia, she is a virgin. There is not much to be said in favour of Janet Milgram Parry and Henrietta Parks but at least they do not talk about sex. They are ladies. What a relief it is to be able to write that sentence, that sentence that no one but myself will ever see. ‘Janet and Henrietta are ladies.’ I wonder how many people still know what that means? I wonder if I know what it means. I’ll think about it.

She looks back on her arrival in this strange place

I was frightened when I first moved into this flat, alone. It is my own. I bought it, with the handout that Andrew gave me as the price of our divorce. Why did I choose this dark, dirty, menacing area, this street so unlike any street I have ever inhabited before, even in my imagination? Was it perversity? Was I setting myself a survival test? Was I punishing myself?

I knew I couldn’t stay in Suffolk, although most people expected that I would. They didn’t think I’d have the initiative to clear off so completely. (I don’t think ‘clear off’ is a very ladylike phrase either – maybe I am losing caste by living here?) But I couldn’t face the prospect of hanging around in a county where I might still bump into Andrew and my replacement. His new partner, Anthea Richards, now his bride. However careful I was not to bump into them,
I’d still have to hear gossip about them, because Suffolk is a small (or perhaps I mean a thinly populated) county, and people in what was our world did talk about one another all the time. Andrew’s second marriage has been newsworthy. I’m sure I would have talked about it myself, had I not been one of the parties. (That’s an odd phrase too – ‘parties’. Odd how writing things down makes all the phrases I take for granted look slightly off-key.)

Nobody expected Andrew to embark on an affair with the mother of one of his pupils. It wasn’t as though she herself was
in statu pupillari
, but the connection nevertheless seemed more than vaguely unprofessional and improper – as though one or the other of them had taken advantage of the very thing that should have kept them apart.

People’s sympathies were divided. I was an honourably loyal and washed-up wife, stranded, useless, ageing, as on a high and dusty kitchen shelf, so people felt sorry for me. But Anthea had twice been tragically bereaved. She had lost her husband, and then her daughter. Tragedy and compassion had brought Andrew and Anthea together. He had been too caring, too kind, and his own goodness had forged the bond between them. So it was seen. I know that’s what people saw, and thought, and possibly said – though maybe they weren’t quite crude enough, quite ungentlemanly and unladylike enough to
say
it. The circumstances of their affair were thought to be romantic rather than squalid or opportunist.

(Now isn’t it interesting that my spellchecker on this wonderful laptop machine accepts the word ‘unladylike’ without protest, but doesn’t like the word ‘ungentlemanly’? Shall I try ‘ungentlemanlike’? No, it doesn’t like that either. A small triumph, or a small defeat, for the ladies. But which? I love my spellchecker. It is my friend and my companion. It speaks to me, and I answer.)

So I didn’t want to hang around in Suffolk overhearing scraps of conversation about Andrew and Anthea, worrying about whether I would bump into them at parties or in the high-street shops, listening to speculation about how they were getting on. I didn’t want to put my friends and neighbours to the trouble of trying to make sure they didn’t ask us to the same events. I decided to remove myself and start a new life.

I did think, at one point, in those early days of shock, of moving back to the Midlands, but I didn’t think about it for very long. There was nothing to attract me back. And after Father’s death, I did not want to be too near my mother, for fear she would suck me in. A failing mother and a daughter shamed. This was not a scenario I fancied. Once the notion of moving to London occurred to me, I became increasingly fascinated by it. It started to glow at me in the darkness, with the dangerous nocturnal brightness of a new love. There was something erotic in my imaginings of London. I had never lived in the heart of a big city, and London is one of the biggest cities in the world.

I was warned about the expense, but I was not deterred. I pursued my fancy with more energy than I had felt in years. I signed on with estate agents, I read the property columns. My means would be restricted but I was not destitute. Andrew, as the guilty party, was moved to be generous, a movement made easier for him by the fact that Anthea was a fairly wealthy woman and brought new money with her rather than new financial demands. Two of the girls – our girls – were no longer dependent; only Martha was still living at home. The Trust was very forgiving and forbearing with Andrew, as it knew it couldn’t do without him and couldn’t afford the consequences of a posture of outrage. I, of course, was considered blameless, by all but my three alienated and disaffected daughters, so there was nobody to quarrel with what seemed, on Andrew’s part, like generosity. But everybody thought I was mad to want to move to London. And the more they told me I was mad, the more stubborn I became in my resolve. I knew something exciting would happen to me in London. I still know it. It will. It will come. It will come soon.

She wonders if true change can still happen at her age

I couldn’t afford anything grand, or anything in a nice district, so I explored grey areas, in Stamford Hill and Seven Sisters and Finsbury Park and Clissold Park and Camberwell and Brondesbury and Brockwell Park and Neasden. I looked at dozens of studios, bedsitters and maisonettes and flats in areas of London that I had never visited. I had never even known of their existence. Most of these places seemed
profoundly alien and depressing to me, and I couldn’t begin to think of myself living in them. I found this apartment by accident, through a conversation with the owner of one of the nicer flats I looked at. Her flat was in Crouch End, which is now very fashionable. I knew I couldn’t afford it, and I told her so. This was a relief, after my life as Andrew’s wife, in which I masqueraded as a lady who had no money worries. (We always had to try to appear to be better off than we were – I was never sure why.) This person was a very nice woman, and I could tell from the reading matter on her shelves that she was probably a social worker. I don’t dislike all social workers. (I don’t really dislike Sally. Sally is my friend. Well, sort of my friend, a sort of friend. Can I do better, for friends, at my age?)

This vendor-woman made me a cup of coffee, and asked me what brought me to London, and I said, ‘Adventurous despair!’, and she laughed. She said if I was really adventurous, I might try Ladbroke Grove.

(Now that’s weird. My new friend spellchecker won’t accept the words Ladbroke Grove, but it suggests as an alternative ‘Ladbrokes’. I think that’s a betting shop. Well, come off it, I
know
it’s a betting shop, I wasn’t born yesterday.)

This woman said she had a colleague whose daughter was moving in with her partner and was trying to sell something that might just suit me. Tell me about the neighbourhood, I said, and she did – very central, she said, compared with Stamford Hill and Brockwell Park. Central, and lively, and colourful. Of course, you may not want to be central, and lively, and colourful, she said. But I cried out that yes, I did. Suddenly the idea of being central and colourful rather than marginal and marginalized seemed to me to be infinitely luminous and numinous.

Also, said my new worldly wise adviser and go-between, if you buy direct from my friend’s daughter Karen, you won’t have to pay estate agent’s fees. You’ll both of you save thousands of pounds.

And so it proved to be, and here I am.

It’s a strange little flat. It’s high up on the third floor in a tall, not very well-maintained, late nineteenth-century end-of-terrace building, which adjoins and overlooks a dense low-built development of
slightly kitsch red-brick Notting Hill Housing Trust in-fill. I look down on a network of new little flatlets and maisonettes and dolls’ houses and terraces, separated by patches of communal garden. My solicitor made a great fuss about the neighbours and other tenants in this building, and who was responsible for what, but I didn’t even listen. I don’t care about that kind of thing. I told him I wanted it. I told him to get on with it. When he said that all those flights of stairs might prove tiring in years to come, I said that, on the contrary, they would keep me fit. As I trust they will. They and my Health Club. My Health Club and my stairs. (I don’t use the step machines at the Health Club. I prefer the bicycle. I can go up and down stairs more purposefully on my way up to and down from what is now my home.)

I have two rooms and a bathroom here. It’s enough. And I have a spectacular cityscape view of motorway and railway and distant council high-rise and night sky and morning sky. The sky is very different from the innocent Suffolk sky, but it is not always a deadly grey. At times it is awash with a lurid glow, with doomed and polluted sunrises and sunsets of orange and yellow and purple and bloody red. Although the stars are often obscured, I can watch the months and the seasons, and sometimes I can see the constellations. The Great Bear, Cassiopeia, the Seven Sisters, the Swan. All these I have seen, or fancied I have seen. The new moon even now hangs near me in the darkest of blues. And I can look down at the street life, of which there is much.

My daughter Ellen was the first of my daughters to visit, and she was, to begin with, disapproving. She pointed out all my apartment’s conspicuous ill features – the damp in the bathroom, the cracks in the badly fitted double-glazing, the smell in the corridor, the irregular thumping reggae noise of the people in the top flat above. And, of course, the stairs. But Ellen is, in fact, the most reasonable of the girls, and when she saw that I was determined to stick here, she agreed that it had its points. Ellen, I feel, doesn’t dislike me. Nor is she in love with her father. She sees through both of us. She has wisely decided to remove herself. She lives in a small town in Finland. So she’s not likely to be popping in very often. I believe she has a lover. Or a partner, which, I gather, is the modern word for lover. I
don’t know what sex or what nationality this person may claim, and I don’t ask.

Ellen is the most eccentric, as well as the most reasonable of my daughters. She plays the violin. I picture her living alone in a wooden house on the edge of a lake on the edge of a forest, and dipping into a sauna from time to time, but it probably isn’t like that at all. I’ve never been to Finland to see her, and I haven’t been invited. I don’t really know her very well, these days. She doesn’t intend to let me get to know her very well. She doesn’t speak about her father and Anthea at all, and I honour her restraint. She is wise to keep her distance.

Isobel and Martha are more censorious towards me and more obsequious towards their father. My oldest daughter Isobel, and I am sorry to have to say this, is a very self-centred and avaricious young woman. She expressed the view that I was wasting family money by insisting on living alone in London, when I could have lived much more cheaply in some hovel in East Anglia. She implied that I had got what was coming to me, and did not deserve what she actually had the audacity to describe as a golden handshake. She implied that I had been an inadequate wife. I had been frigid, remote, and unsupportive, both to her father and to the School. I think I once heard myself say that I hadn’t married the School, and that she hadn’t been very supportive of it herself. Isobel is one of those women who expect to be supported. She thinks she is the centre of every circle. It was her father that gave her this high opinion of herself. She was his first-born, and he spoiled her. She was very pretty, and is now very vain, although she is no longer as pretty as she was. Like her father, she glances at herself in every mirror. Nothing has ever been quite good enough for her. She is perpetually disappointed. She now has a tight, disapproving, contemptuous expression on her even-featured face for most of the time, though, like Andrew, she can turn on the charm when she wants to.

My daughter
Isobel
, my haughty first-born, thinks that I drove Andrew into adultery and into the arms of the wounded Anthea. In her eyes, her father can do no wrong, and I can do no right.

Ellen
, the second-born and the least favoured, has removed
herself from the blood-soaked family arena. She has denied her kith and kin and her inheritance. She is cool and dry and far away.

Martha
, the youngest, the afterthought, the little baby of the family, is as thick as thieves with her stepmother, Anthea, and she endeavours day and night to steal the favours that were once awarded to her hard and grasping sister Isobel.

I wonder if they would recognize themselves from this harsh description. They were little children once, and all these plots and conflicts and vices were hidden in futurity. They need never have come to be. Yet now they are manifest, and now they cannot be undone. There is no way back to the shapeless tumble of the small nest of hopeful and unfinished people that they once were. Their soft limbs, their soft faces, their tender skin, their wounded tears. The reel cannot be wound back. The cards cannot be put back in the pack. The hidden is revealed. And yet it need not have been, surely? Sometimes I think that it could all have been quite different. I find it hard to believe that this is the bleak set pattern that I must live and die within.