Cleopatra's Sister

by Penelope Lively

  ‘There’s this feeling of unreality. Half of me doesn’t really think this is happening, but the other half knows it damn well is.’

  She lived in a welter of newsprint, a babble of information. She would seize upon a subject when it was in mint condition, untarnished by discussion, before people knew that they were concerned about methods of sewage disposal, that they did indeed feel strongly about the absurd sums earned by a twenty-year-old footballer, that they shared Lucy’s indignation at revelations of financial irregularity in the affairs of a leading charity. But by the time the letters of support or of condemnation reached her, those matters had already been eclipsed, swept aside by something newer, more compelling, more urgent. And most of it unpredictable, a continuous unfurling of surprise – the developments you could not have allowed for, the smashes and crashes, the reckless moves, the triumphs and the humiliations. And behind it all some invisible unstoppable force, charging ahead.

  She was invigorated by what she had to do, and occasionally unnerved. She would glance at the mounting pile of her pieces and see nothing but obsolete opinion. Nothing ever finished; a sequence of interrupted testimony.

  ‘Well, I think you’re very clever,’ said Maureen. ‘Finding three new things to get cross about every week.’

  ‘Hmmn … Maybe. But it’s as though you were a character in a novel, living it out without any idea how it was going to end.’

  ‘I’ll be in a Catherine Cookson,’ said Maureen. ‘One of the historicals. No – her in Gone with the Wind, what’s her name?’

  Bruce remarked that there is only one way it can end, for any of us. Lucy looked at him with surprise – he was a superficially bland man, capable of occasional pungent accuracies.

  ‘Don’t be morbid,’ said Maureen. ‘Speaking personally, I’m going backwards from now on – getting younger and younger.’

  This did indeed appear to be the case. She had bloomed in this undreamed-of climate of love and prosperity, though clearly it was the love that mattered a great deal more than the prosperity. Maureen moved gingerly amid the lavish furnishings, the sound-system, the microwave and the marble-effect bathroom suite, but Bruce she treated with the uncomplicated ease of pure affection. She had lost a good deal of weight and looked extremely pretty.

  ‘Do you know,’ she confided to Lucy, ‘I had no idea there could be men like that. And another thing, I know now why I used to eat chocolate all the time. It was instead of you know what, if you see what I mean.’

  And Lucy, now, was thirty. When she looked at herself in the mirror she saw the faint imprint of another face imposed upon the familiar contours of her own. She observed this without the squeamishness of vanity, but with a certain perplexity; it was as though you cohabited with a mysterious stranger, and conducted a subdued and secret struggle for house-room. She was not so much perturbed by the prospect of ageing as by this involuntary metamorphosis. What would one turn into? She remembered the same bewilderment tinged with alarm when she was a child, trapped in that bizarre and inescapable process of lengthening limbs and an inconstant external world, in which trees and buildings appeared to shrink as you yourself so confusingly expanded.

  Her sister Susie, stalwartly upholding the family tradition, had become a mother at twenty-one. She was living with her two offspring and their father (a cheerful fellow her own age who worked on a building site and played the saxophone with a jazz group at the weekends) in conditions which Lucy grimly saw as a nostalgic re-creation of her own childhood. Maureen either ignored this resonance or was not aware of it. From time to time she made oblique references to Lucy’s own status.

  Lucy would retort, crisply, ‘Mum, children are not on the agenda.’

  She thought that she probably meant this. She found Susie’s infants engaging, but did not detect any powerful maternal yearning in herself.

  Besides, she had not the leisure in which to sit around examining her state of mind. A busy life is the enemy of introspection, and Lucy, whipping about the place, thought less about herself than about the world on which she commented. She would pass within a day from exhilaration to shock, from amusement to dismay. She saw the extraordinary conjunction of distress and prosperity, of vice and valour, of rationality and mayhem, and wondered how it could be that people come to terms with this. She could talk, within hours, to people whose assumptions, expectations and wisdoms were as far apart as if they inhabited different centuries. And all this within a small country in which the large majority enjoys a fair standard of living and reasonable educational standards. What of the rest of the globe? Thinking this, she would become restive. Work came flowing in, now. She took on more assignments, found that she could even pick and choose – spend several days on something that attracted her, say no if she pleased. Sometimes she would get so involved in some piece of freelance writing that the deadline for the column would loom and she would find herself guiltily scrabbling for material. She took stock one day and saw that she had been writing it now for nearly two years. How could this be? How had so many weeks peeled off and slid away? Riffling through old copy, she was astonished by that vehement language and those extinguished issues. How could she have thought this, or been so demonstrably wrong about that? Above all, she detected here and there a note of frenetic insincerity. And no wonder. Nowadays, she applied herself grimly to the papers, the radio and the television screen in pursuit of this week’s quarry. What had once been uplifting was becoming mechanical. She was indeed writing frequently of seminal matters – she was no longer tethered to fringe concerns, but she did so in such a spasmodic way that any real commitment became impossible. She was in danger of losing her capacity for indignation, for incredulity and even for surprise. She made cold-blooded calculations, and came to a decision. She could survive now, probably, as a freelance. It was time to stop.

  ‘Why?’ said the editor.

  ‘I’m getting stale.’

  ‘That’s for me to say, not you.’

  ‘I think I’m slightly shell-shocked,’ said Lucy.

  To which the editor pointed out coolly that this was London, not Belfast or Beirut. What Lucy had meant to say, but could not, was that she feared she might cease to believe in reality, or to take it seriously. A somewhat histrionic response perhaps for a woman required to supply a weekly column of topical comment, but Lucy’s feelings were genuine enough. It was not that she doubted her choice of profession, but that she no longer wanted to play the part of a sibyl or a soothsayer.

  ‘Well,’ said the editor, ‘it’s up to you. We shall miss you. The best of luck. Keep in touch.’

  Maureen was dismayed. ‘But what about that nice regular income? And you won’t have your picture in the paper any more.’

  Bruce, who was inwardly rejoicing that he could now revert to the Daily Express, asked what she had in mind.

  ‘I want to travel,’ said Lucy, who had not until that moment realized that this was her intention. ‘I am a bad case of insularity and cultural complacency.’

  All my life, she thought, I have lived in a small country perched near the top of the northern hemisphere. I speak only one language with any efficiency, and properly understand only my own society – if that. But we live in global times, or so we are told. Out there, down there, are other worlds and other actions, as alien to me as another century.

  ‘You’re a bad case of itchy feet if you ask me,’ said Maureen. ‘But I suppose there’s no harm in it at your age and seeing you’ve no one but yourself to think of.’ Bruce commented that the buzz these days was about going into Europe. Maybe Lucy should be thinking along those lines. They were doing French and Italian recipe dishes in Tesco’s now, and a special Greek wine promotion.

  And so she embarked upon the next stage, a free spirit, accountable to no one but herself. Absolutely independent, and also entirely dependent – upon her own energies, upon a supply of work. She set about a systematic round of visits and phone calls. She drew up a list of potential subjects in which she hoped to in
terest her various contacts. But she was prepared to go anywhere and write on anything. And she could trade now upon a modest reputation. She was known for eclecticism and astringency, as someone who could turn out a brisk, informative and thoughtful piece, who combined reliability with a certain maverick approach. She felt reasonably confident, and occasionally terrified.

  She got off to a slow start. A magazine commission to do a piece on vineyards in Alsace. A profile of an Italian novelist. Gradually, things picked up. Sometimes she was alarmed by the state of her bank balance. At other times a rush of work had her feeling heady with achievement. And after eighteen months or so she was able to make a sober assessment and to decide that it was working out, that her stock was pretty high and getting higher, that she could carry on.

  She wrote about Chinese refugees in Hong Kong and Mormons in Salt Lake City and aborigines in Alice Springs. She climbed in and out of aeroplanes, skipped from continent to continent, and began to wonder if her sense of time and space had been corrupted. She passed from today into tomorrow while sitting in the sky eating a meal, and back into yesterday while watching a movie. She leaped across oceans and over mountains, careless and accepting, indignant at minor delays. Her unconsidered bounds from one hemisphere to another made a mockery of those other laborious and anguished voyages, of the long slow conquest of the globe. She would step down the aircraft’s gangway, five thousand miles from home, into steam-heat and exotic scenery, with the complaisance of a fictional time-traveller. When she found herself grumbling with a fellow-passenger that it should take so long as twenty-four hours to reach Australia, she knew that her disorientation was complete.

  We do indeed live in global times, she thought. That is the problem. The globe has lost its mystery and its terrors. It no longer has oceans, deserts and forests, it is reduced to time-zones, flight numbers and the logo of an airline. We are all travellers now. In airport departure lounges she contemplated the boredom and the composure of those who circumnavigate the world today, in tracksuits and anoraks, slung about with electronic goods and cheap liquor, surprised by nothing, lords of the universe. It has come to this. Once upon a time a stranger was to be wondered at, questioned, attacked maybe, but never, for heaven’s sake, accepted with indifference and a yawn. In the linguistic babel of arrivals and departures the itinerant hordes are barely aware of one another, moving between destinations as impervious as the baggage trundling round the carousels. Only language survives, and the cast of an eye, the colour of skin.

  In Los Angeles, she fell in love with a Swede. He was a documentary film-maker who roved the world, living out of suitcases in hotels, and while the passion raged Lucy shared with him a private capsule floating free of time and place, waking with a thrill to the sound of her phone in the small hours, and Lennart’s voice in Bangkok, or Sydney, or Rio. They talked to each other for weeks and months with the private intensity of obsession, fuelled by this majestic overriding of natural laws. Love conquers everything. It became more exciting to live in expectation of Lennart’s calls, and to hear that voice, loaded with erotic significance, than to be with him fleetingly when he touched down in London, or when they could contrive a meeting somewhere else. And eventually she realized that the pleasures of expectation had long outstripped the reality, and that she quite liked Lennart, but that all passion was spent and she didn’t like him enough to keep readjusting her life in order to snatch a night in Paris, or to gaze into his eyes across a restaurant table in Milan. They drifted asunder, but Lucy would long mourn those heightened conversations, those magical transmissions of desire around the globe.

  She had met Lennart because they fetched up checking in at the same hotel reception desk, had exchanged glances, met up later for a drink … An arrival in the same place at the same moment so capricious and so improbable that it seemed appropriate to Lucy, with the wisdom of reflection, that in the end the whole appeal of the affair should lie in the triumph over distance and the dictation of the clock. She began to forget Lennart’s face, but the sound of the telephone ringing in the night would for ever cause her heart to leap.

  Things were going well. She felt sufficiently secure to put down her savings on the deposit for a flat, and take out a mortgage. The sums of money involved appalled her. What possible connection could she have with £64,000? She who had grown up in rented rooms and council flats, who had carefully stacked the loose change from her mother’s purse on the kitchen table? She who had learned to add and subtract by labouring to balance the Family Allowance and the Social Security and the Supplementary Benefit against the rent money and what Maureen owed the Indian family who kept the corner shop. She had run a tight ship, back then, aged nine. Now, so far as she could see, she owed astronomical sums to faceless men in charge of financial empires. And this was called the security of home ownership. Every month you relinquished a large proportion of what you had earned. If a shortfall threatened, you were in trouble.

  Thus it was that a £60 increase in her monthly mortgage repayment was to direct Lucy on board CAP 500. She read the building society’s letter, bemoaned the economic climate and did some rapid calculations. Not good. Not good at all. A thin couple of months on account of a commission falling through, and a whacking great plumbing repair bill and now this.

  And so Lucy was all ears when, later that day, the features editor of a Sunday magazine telephoned. Well, yes, she might indeed be interested in doing a travel piece. Love to, she said. I could fit it in pretty soon, as it happens. Sunday magazines pay well. With the mortgage demand smouldering in front of her, Lucy scrapped every arrangement for the immediate future, picked up the phone and rang the travel agent to make inquiries about flights to Nairobi.

  12

  A Brief History of Callimbia

  The extent to which an individual can manipulate the course of history is a matter of intense debate. The Cleopatra’s nose theory of history refers to the operation of contingency, but it also implies that personality is everything. Well, maybe. It is impossible to deny that the mad ruler – and indeed the occasional sane ruler – is a real determinant, and moreover one which has achieved new heights in the twentieth century. Callimbia now becomes a case history, and it is necessary to home in upon the life of Doreen Winterton, born in Bexhill in 1918.

  Shortly before the Second World War, Doreen, then twenty-one, went out to Egypt as nurserymaid to a British diplomatic family. While the Libyan campaign raged, Doreen knitted and gossiped with the other nannies on the emerald turf of Gezira Sporting Club. She had a good war, and during the course of it she left the diplomatic family and went to work for a wealthy Lebanese couple whose lifestyle was more exotic and who offered better wages. Moreover the mother never interfered; Doreen ruled supreme in the nursery and was waited on by a posse of attendants. She was an adaptable and congenial young woman, and more cosmopolitan by inclination than most of her kind. She learned to speak some Arabic, along with a smattering of French and Italian. England began to seem very remote and unappealing. When in 1945 the Lebanese family moved from Cairo to Marsopolis, where they had extensive trading interests, Doreen went along, willingly.

  Marsopolis was picking itself up and putting itself together again after the depredations of the desert campaign, when it had been in the hands of the Italians, the Germans and the British alternately, shelled by three navies and under siege twice. It had not had a good war, and most of the inhabitants had conceived a hearty and entirely understandable dislike for Europeans. On the other hand, many of them had made a good living catering for the requirements of the armed forces of three nations. There was plenty of money around, and every prospect of prosperity in the post-war period. The harbour was repaired and enlarged; the debris was cleared away and concrete apartment blocks began to replace the nineteenth-century façades and the Edwardian villas.

  Doreen loved Marsopolis. Within a year she had met and married Yussuf, a Callimbian army officer. She parted from the Lebanese family with expressions of mutual affection a
nd settled down to a life of contented domesticity and maternity. She bore Yussuf three daughters and at last the essential son, Omar, at which point her parents-in-law, who had been getting restive, forgave her the daughters and lavished her with presents and attention. Her own parents had disowned her at the time of the marriage – a breach which, as the years passed, disturbed Doreen less and less. She lived in a great deal more style than she ever would have done in Bexhill. She had a comfortable villa, plenty of servants, and nothing much to do except keep everybody in order, a task for which she had been perfectly equipped by her Norland Nanny training. Her Arabic was now fluent. She spoke English to the children when they were small, but as they grew older she became irritated by their inadequate grasp of the language and ceased to do so. The reticence and decorum required of Muslim women appealed to a certain prudishness in her own disposition. She wore the chador with enthusiasm and took happily to a shuttered life of gossip and intrigue with the female members of Yussuf’s extended family. This was not so very different in kind from the life she had been accustomed to among her cronies at Gezira, but with the added advantage that there were minions to take the children from under your feet and you only had to clap your hands if you wanted a cup of coffee or a tray of sweetmeats.