Cleopatra's Sister

by Penelope Lively

  The basement was precisely that – the bottom level of a nineteenth-century terrace house, reached by an iron staircase down into the concrete area with drain-hole and brick facing wall on to which the front room looked. The rooms at the back peered upwards into the ersatz garden, a further concrete space edged by a flower-bed filled with black cindery earth and brickbats in which grew a sickly but determined lilac. The lilac managed a few faded flowers each spring and was to afford Howard a curious kind of comfort on several occasions over the next few years.

  The two floors above the basement comprised a maisonette, while the top of the house had become a penthouse. One had to concede a sort of respect for this expedient recycling of a building constructed with an entirely different sort of occupancy in mind. At least it was doing something to solve the problem of inner-city housing needs by cramming as many people as possible into the available space, though at the cost of considerable discomfort and chronic financial crisis for the inhabitants. The flats changed hands frequently, which for Howard had the advantage that the overhead noises also changed in character. The staccato sound of argument between the couple on the verge of splitting up would give way to the rhythmic thump of someone’s stereo which would in turn be superseded by the gentle thunder of a two-year-old at play.

  Within a couple of years the building began to disintegrate. The roof sprang a leak, cracks appeared in the exterior walls, dry rot was diagnosed above the front door. A soft tidemark of damp crept up the wall of Howard’s sitting-room. The leaseholders of the three flats appealed to the freeholder, to whom they had been paying substantial service charges. The freeholder failed to answer letters and was never available on the telephone. The leaseholders consulted solicitors, whose services they could not afford, who wrote more letters to which the freeholder did not reply, and made more fruitless phone calls.

  All this created a certain sense of community within the house. Howard formed a Residents’ Association and invited his neighbours to a spaghetti supper to discuss tactics. The maisonette was at this time occupied by a gay couple, a secondhand book dealer and his friend, while the top floor belonged to a flautist called Celia. She was a pale thin girl with long fair hair confined by an Alice band, who gave an impression of extreme fragility. Three days after the spaghetti supper Celia knocked on Howard’s door to ask if he could come up and help her fix a curtain rail which was giving trouble. He found himself gazing fondly at the childish flaxen strands that lay across her neck, and a week later he went to a concert in which she was playing. Within a short while he was looking up to see if her lights were on when he came back in the evening, or listening for the slam of the front door. He monitored his feelings with intensity, and when he found himself thinking of her in the middle of giving a lecture, or during the precious periods he was able to devote to his own research, he wondered with excitement if this was love.

  Celia had the delicate appeal of a porcelain figurine, with blue eyes and rose-petal skin. She was also, Howard soon learned, deceptively resilient and somewhat withdrawn. She earned a living picking up freelance work where she could, vanishing sometimes for two or three days at a time on assignments about which she was vague when Howard made inquiries. She was the most reticent girl he had ever known, which added considerably to her attraction. She did not subject him to psychological scrutiny, and much of the early part of their association was spent in silence, while Celia gazed dreamily at the floor, or walked passively at his side. Up in her room, they listened to music, or Howard read a book or newspaper, a tranquillity disturbed only by Howard’s state of sexual agitation and concern lest this combination of uxoriousness and celibacy was to be permanent. He had decided by now that this most definitely was love. He thought of her constantly, had great difficulty keeping his hands off her, and was in a state of deprivation each time she went away. It was not clear what she felt about him. She evidently liked his company and she did not reject his advances, but it seemed to be taking an awfully long time for them to get to bed together. Each time they were on the verge, as Howard felt, the kiss would come to an end, or Celia would gently imply by some look or movement that this wasn’t the moment. Quite often she would be out for hours on end without explanation, returning with a look on her face which combined complacency with a curious and uncharacteristic excitement. He wondered jealously if there could be another man.

  And then suddenly one evening, while Howard was fondling her hand on the couch in her attic room, to a background of Monteverdi and the remains of a bottle of Soave, Celia suddenly sat up, looked at him, and took off her sweater. She had nothing on underneath. The sight of her breasts reduced Howard to a state of tremulous frenzy; he thought that he had never seen anything so exquisite – small, creamy, and topped with perfectly shaped warm pink nipples. Celia gazed expectantly at him; he put his glass down and set to.

  She was not, as he had also wondered, a virgin. Not so at all. Indeed she was surprisingly adept and responsive. It was a rather different Celia with whom he writhed and panted in the twilight of her room and alongside whom he eventually fell asleep. She was both businesslike and enthusiastic. Howard had a wonderful time, and woke up the next morning with a sense of complacent fulfilment. This was it, at last. This was love – sexual, spiritual, the lot.

  They began to spend most nights together, in either her bed or his. Now that the relationship was on this sort of footing, Howard expected to find himself taken rather more into Celia’s confidence, and to accompany her beyond the confines of the house. This did not happen. Celia’s attitude towards him had indeed undergone a subtle change, but not quite in the direction that Howard anticipated. She became more matter-of-fact, and indeed slightly proprietorial, but she was no more forthcoming, and she continued to vanish for hours, or days, about business of her own on which she did not expand. ‘I had to go somewhere,’ she would say, or ‘I had to see some people.’ Howard was consumed with jealous doubts but learned not to press the point; on the one occasion when he did, Celia became petulant and ejected him from her bed.

  She, on the other hand, expected his attention whenever she required it. He would find terse little notes dropped through his door: ‘Came down but you were out for some reason – please let me know when you’re back.’ He did not mind this, taking it for evidence of love. She showed only a perfunctory interest in his life, or in his work, which hurt him a little, and when on one occasion he asked her to come with him to an end-of-term departmental party she said she would rather not: ‘If you don’t mind, Howard, I just don’t think they’d be my sort of people.’ ‘But I’m your sort of person,’ Howard protested. ‘Or at least I hope I am. They’re all scientists and academics too.’ Celia smiled enigmatically and shook her head.

  Howard perceived that all was not absolutely as it should be, but he was too inexperienced in alliances of this kind to be able to put his finger on what was wrong. He simply knew that he and Celia, as a couple, were not as other couples appeared to be. On the other hand, how much did one really know of the intimate lives of others? There was no question but that sex was going very well indeed, and so far as he was concerned all he knew for certain was that he hungered after Celia, wanted to be with her and fretted when this was impossible. He wasn’t exactly happy, he realized, but then love was supposed to be an unsettling condition, was it not? He assumed that they would shake down somehow, and began to think vaguely about marriage.

  And then, one Sunday morning, Celia sat up in bed, looked at her watch and said, ‘I want you to come to church with me this morning, I’ve told them I’m bringing you. They’re expecting you.’

  Howard felt himself go rigid. Then he thought he could not have heard aright.

  He said cautiously, ‘Church …?’

  ‘Yes, church,’ said Celia briskly. ‘We have a special Sunday service in Finchley.’

  Howard was silent. The room seemed to have gone extremely cold. Celia had got out of bed and was brushing her hair, an activity he usually enjoyed w
atching.

  At last he said, ‘I didn’t know you were religious.’

  ‘I thought you would have realized. We don’t make a point of going on about it to people who aren’t born again, but I’ve told them about you, and they want you to come.’

  ‘Is that where you go,’ said Howard slowly, ‘when you … go off?’

  ‘Well, of course,’ said Celia. ‘What did you think?’

  ‘I thought perhaps you were seeing another man,’ said Howard bleakly.

  Celia laughed. She was not a girl who laughed often, and the sound contributed to Howard’s sense of disorientation.

  ‘You’d better get up. We have to be there by ten.’

  ‘I can’t come,’ said Howard. ‘I’m not a Christian.’

  Celia turned to look at him with a sort of patronizing tolerance. ‘It doesn’t matter. Nor was I, once. That’ll come.’

  ‘You don’t understand, Celia,’ said Howard. ‘I could never be a Christian. I’m an agnostic. It’s something I’ve thought about for most of my life.’

  ‘You’ll feel quite differently when you’ve heard our pastor,’ said Celia comfortably. ‘He’s the most wonderful person I’ve ever met.’ She had finished her hair now and was putting on her bra, another process Howard found aesthetically satisfying in normal circumstances. He lay there looking at her. His stomach felt as though someone had sunk a lead weight into the middle of it. Celia seemed very remote, and entirely alien, as though she were someone he knew slightly, glimpsed across a crowded street.

  She continued to talk with fervour about this pastor, and his acolytes. They were members of a fundamentalist sect, it appeared, though a somewhat idiosyncratic one which renounced overt evangelical activities in favour of an intense and exclusive group life.

  ‘But the thing is,’ said Celia, ‘if any of us gets involved in a meaningful relationship, then we’re welcome to bring the person along to meet the group. The pastor usually has a quiet personal exchange with them after the service. It’s a wonderful experience. That’s how I joined the group originally. I was going out with this fiddle-player, and he was a member and he took me along.’ It was one of the longest and most revealing speeches she had ever made.

  ‘Is he still?’ said Howard.

  ‘Is he still what?’

  ‘A member of it. This man.’

  ‘Of course not. He went away. That’s not important. The point is that if it hadn’t been for that I’d never have been born again, never known the pastor, never anything.’ She shuddered delicately. ‘Do get up, Howard. They don’t like people to be late.’

  He tried to analyse this unnerving process of the death of love. It was not so much a death, he decided, as a hideous mutilation, a fatal infection. He still lusted after her; he still wanted to be with her; he still listened for her to come in and go out. He also knew that there was absolutely no point in them spending any more time together.

  In the end it was Celia who sold her flat and moved out. Not because she was tormented by Howard’s proximity but because she had heard of a place for sale nearer to the sect’s centre of operations. She said goodbye gracefully and affectionately, hoped they might come across each other again some time, and left him her pot plants. The gay couple in the maisonette, who had observed Howard’s comings and goings on the stairs with interest, closed in with sympathetic invitations to Sunday lunch, an unappealing air hostess moved into Celia’s flat, and Howard commenced his slow and painful recuperation. He applied himself to work with an even greater intensity than usual. His students found themselves in receipt of his concentrated attention to a degree that was positively disconcerting. He spent long hours in the lab, but when the image of Celia persistently floated above the specimen at which he stared he realized that something more active was required. He harassed every source available until he had secured funding for a field trip, and as soon as the term was over he left London.

  During the ensuing weeks Celia faded. Each day Howard found that he had left her further behind, caught up as he was in a healing and demanding ritual of physical exertion and mental exhilaration. He got wet and sunburnt and tired; he saw nothing but the rocks over which he clambered and their elusive treasure. He felt nothing but the wind and the rain and the sun. On every day that he secured a significant fossil, the excitement and the satisfaction eclipsed everything and Celia would fall so far away that when he made a deliberate effort to recover her he could see her face but could no longer retrieve the sensations it used to induce. He could remember sex – oh, yes, indeed – but he could not remember love, or what he had taken to be love. Occasionally there would be a twinge, he would be grabbed by loss as he sat on a hillside, and then he would deliberately apply himself to what he was doing, and would find himself distracted and soothed by the mute presence of the distant worlds he sought. He became nothing but a probing intellect, identifying gills and guts and eyes, in voracious pursuit of those teasing hints of life. After several weeks of this he returned to London feeling thinner, wiser and briskly determined to get on with life, however diminished it might be. And he had enough material for several years’ work.

  There was also the outstanding matter of the repairs to the building, which had been somewhat neglected during his obsession with Celia. Howard now flung himself into the management of the leaseholders’ case as a form of therapy. He subjected the invisible freeholder to a blitzkrieg of letters and telephone calls. Eventually he ran him to ground and found him to be not a single individual but an extended family, each member disclaiming either ownership or responsibility. Howard became obsessed with the whole business. The family, he discovered, owned ramshackle conversions all over London, in each of which distraught leaseholders were festering amid damp, rot and falling slates. He embarked on legal action. In the meantime the gay couple had moved out and were replaced by newly-wed systems analysts, who had to be convinced of the seriousness of the situation. The air hostess sold her flat to an accountant, a tenacious and combative fellow who was to become an invaluable ally to Howard in the pursuit of litigation. Howard found himself locked into his relationship with these arbitrarily acquired associates and enemies. His time away from Tavistock College was spent writing letters about the case, talking to people about the case, pondering the case. He studied the operations and tortuous relationships of the freeholding family with nearly the same intensity of interest that he directed upon extinct fauna. At the end of it Howard had spent a great deal of money, owned a freehold instead of a leasehold, and had vastly extended his range of acquaintance and his perception of human nature. He had lost his innocence, in various ways, and all because, on a particular morning, he walked down one street rather than another.

  When he thought about this, it surprised him that we accept the knowledge with such equanimity. The course of an individual life has to be seen as a dizzying maze through which wanders this thread of actuality, an uncertain purpose picking its way up this path and eschewing that one, directed by nothing except the existence of a set of choices. Of course, there is the matter of absence of choices, too, and the intervention of exterior factors, but even so, it is a prospect which should make it almost impossible to face each day with reasonably steady nerves, which most people manage to do.

  ‘Actually, I very nearly took a flight last week. I was just booking it and then I remembered about Mum’s birthday, and needing to be back in time.’

  ‘Thank goodness for your mother, then.’

  And there is no end to it, this perilous concatenation of circumstance and precarious intent. Howard knew by now what he wanted in life. He wanted to do useful and possibly innovative work in his chosen field and also to be happy. He was not entirely sure what constituted happiness, except that it presumably married satisfaction in both work and the life of the emotions. Well, he had a reasonable measure of the first already, but his emotional life appeared to be grounded. He had recovered from the Celia episode at least to the extent that he could think of her without regret,
and mourned only the loss of something which, he now realized, he had never actually had anyway. He saw that it is a great deal easier to achieve some sort of direction in the life of the mind than in that of the spirit. His thoughts about Opabinia, Wiwaxia and Hallucigenia proceeded without impediment; he knew what he was trying to do and the only wayward factor was the performance of his own intellect. But the rest was another matter. He saw human association as a sequence of frantic and feckless conjunctions, and decided gloomily that the wisest course, and the best means of self-preservation, was probably to discipline oneself to solitude and celibacy. He doubted that he was naturally disposed to either.

  To cheer himself up, he decided to redecorate the basement. With this in view, he bought paint and brushes, and borrowed a step-ladder from the systems analysts upstairs. The step-ladder had a rotten step, which the couple failed to point out, and which Howard did not notice until he had already trodden upon it.

  6

  A Brief History of Callimbia

  So Cleopatra’s sister becomes a myth, a statue, an image for alternative history. And of course for most Callimbians she was neither here nor there anyway. Rulers seldom are, unless they start to violate their subjects – chop their heads off, string them up, bludgeon them into the armed forces or tax them into the ground. No doubt Berenice did a fair amount of this – standard practices of the day, and not likely to raise too many eyebrows. But most of her subjects would never have set eyes on her and were far too busy keeping their heads above water to give her more than a passing thought. No doubt there were some who saw the reception of Antony as a disgraceful squandering of public funds, but there would have been plenty more for whom the distant sound of warbling eunuchs, the whiff of honey-baked gazelle, the glimpse of a leopard or a dancing girl were a welcome diversion at a time when the entertainment industry had not really got going.