Cleopatra's Sister Read online

  PENELOPE LIVELY

  Cleopatra’s Sister

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  Part One

  1 Howard

  2 A Brief History of Callimbia

  3 Lucy

  4 A Brief History of Callimbia

  5 Howard

  6 A Brief History of Callimbia

  7 Lucy

  8 A Brief History of Callimbia

  9 Howard

  10 A Brief History of Callimbia

  11 Lucy

  12 A Brief History of Callimbia

  Part Two

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  CLEOPATRA’S SISTER

  Penelope Lively grew up in Egypt but settled in England after the war and took a degree in history at St Anne’s College, Oxford. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and a member of PEN and the Society of Authors. She was married to the late Professor Jack Lively, has a daughter, a son and four grandchildren, and lives in Oxfordshire and London.

  Penelope Lively is the author of many prize-winning novels and short-story collections for both adults and children. She has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, once in 1977 for her first novel, The Road to Lichfield, and again in 1984 for According to Mark. She later won the 1987 Booker Prize for her highly acclaimed novel Moon Tiger. Her novels include Passing On, shortlisted for the 1989 Sunday Express Book of the Year Award, City of the Mind, Cleopatra’s Sister and Heat Wave. Many of her books are available in Penguin, including Going Back, which first appeared as a children’s book, Oleander, Jacaranda, an autobiographical memoir of her childhood days in Egypt, Beyond the Blue Mountains, a collection of short stories, and Spiderweb, a novel.

  Penelope Lively has also written radio and television scripts and has acted as presenter for a BBC Radio 4 programme on children’s literature. She is a popular writer for children and has won both the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Award.

  TITLES BY PENELOPE LIVELY IN PENGUIN

  FICTION

  Going Back

  The Road to Lichfield

  Treasures of Time

  Judgement Day

  Next to Nature, Art

  Perfect Happiness

  Corruption and Other Stories

  According to Mark

  Pack of Cards: Stories 1978-1986

  Moon Tiger

  Passing On

  City of the Mind

  Cleopatra’s Sister

  Heat Wave

  Beyond the Blue Mountains

  Spiderweb

  The Photograph

  Making It Up

  Consequences

  Family Album

  How It All Began

  NON-FICTION

  The Presence of the Past: An Introduction to Landscape History

  Oleander Jacaranda: A Childhood Perceived

  A House Unlocked

  For Jack

  Part One

  1

  Howard

  Howard Beamish became a palaeontologist because of a rise in the interest rate when he was six years old. His father, a cautious man with a large mortgage, announced that the projected family holiday to the Costa Brava was no longer feasible. A chalet was rented on the north Somerset coast instead and thus, on a dank August afternoon, Howard picked up an ammonite on Blue Anchor Beach.

  He presented it to his parents. ‘What’s this?’

  ‘It’s a stone,’ said his father, who was listening to the test match.

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ retorted Howard, an observant child.

  ‘It’s a fossil, dear,’ said his mother. ‘That’s a very old sort of stone.’

  ‘Why?’ persisted Howard, after a few moments. The single word embraced in fact a vast range of query, for which he did not have the language.

  His mother, too, paused to consider and was also defeated, though for different reasons. She evaded the issue by offering Howard a tomato sandwich, which he accepted with enthusiasm while continuing to pore over the ammonite. During the rest of the afternoon, he collected five more fossil fragments, including one embedded in a slab of rock weighing several pounds.

  His parents expostulated. There were already the picnic basket, the folding chairs, the radio, the beach bag, the ball, the cricket stumps. ‘Any of those stones you want to take back you’re carrying yourself, do you understand?’ instructed his father.

  ‘They’re not stones,’ the child protested. And staggered up the cliff path with the fruits of his first field trip wrapped in his jersey and slung over his shoulder. Thirty years later, the large chunk displaying Psiloceras planorbis was to do duty as a doorstop in his office in the Department of Biology at Tavistock College.

  There were of course a number of other children on Blue Anchor Beach that August afternoon, several of whom picked up fossils, but not one of whom was to become a palaeontologist. And Howard, during the hours spent there, had also enjoyed a game of beach cricket with his father and listened with interest to a young man strumming on a guitar, but he never showed the slightest inclination to become a sportsman or to play a musical instrument. Choice and contingency form a delicate partnership. Howard became a palaeontologist because he was endowed with a particular intellect and a particular direction of interest. Nevertheless, the economic climate of the time and the action of the Chancellor of the Exchequer must be given their due.

  Howard did not revisit Blue Anchor Beach until he was thirty-eight, and the trip was indeed intended as some kind of pilgrimage and nostalgic celebration. He had just been made a Senior Lecturer, and had recently published a book which had been received with some acclaim. But he was now accompanied by the woman with whom he was rapidly falling out of love and the whole afternoon went sour. Vivien complained about the steep and slippery path down to the beach and when she got to the bottom she looked around her with distaste. ‘There’s no sand. And the sea’s the colour of mud. I don’t see anywhere we can sit, either – the whole place is nothing but pebbles.’

  ‘It’s not the sort of beach you sit on,’ said Howard. ‘It’s the sort of beach you wander about on, looking for things. And there is sand when the tide goes out. I have played cricket on that very sand.’

  Vivien cheered up a little when he found her a chunk of rose-coloured alabaster. She decided to take it home for the sitting-room mantelpiece. This inspired Howard to talk about the Psiloceras doorstop, a fatal move since it led with awful inevitability to a mention of the departmental secretary, a jolly girl with whom Vivien suspected Howard of carrying on some sort of liaison. Vivien was pathologically jealous.

  ‘And why precisely were you moving the filing cabinet for Carol? Surely she could have got one of the students to do that?’

  ‘There wasn’t anyone else around at that moment. The point of the story is that I thought I’d lost the thing, but it turned up again, not the whys and wherefores of the moving of the filing cabinet, for God’s sake. I’m fond of that ammonite and I was sad it had gone missing, Vivien.’

  But by now the scene was set. Vivien fell silent; her face took on that familiar pinched look indicating a combination of pain and anger and which was designed to make Howard feel guilty and uncomfortable. She dropped behind him. He could hear the stones grinding under her feet, the sound becoming fainter as he drew further ahead of her. He strode along the beach. When he turned to look back he saw that Vivien was now seated on an outcrop of rock, glaring at the wastes of the Bristol Channel. Howard too sat, and began an automatic survey of the surrounding sectio
n of beach. He saw layer upon layer of pebbles worn into eggs, spheres and ovals by time and tide, softly grey and darkly blue, seamed and banded. Behind him, the cliffs too were seamed with alabaster and the sea in front rose in delicate strata of dun and grey to melt imperceptibly into the great pewter dome of the sky. It was a sombre landscape, entirely appropriate to his mood.

  He turned over a pebble with his foot, and exposed another in which hung the neat curl of a small ammonite. He considered offering this to Vivien as a reconciliation present, and decided not to. Instead, he covered it up again and sat thinking not of her but of that other afternoon whose imprint hung here also, imbued with the anarchic and inquiring spirit of his own six-year-old self and the rejuvenated presences of his mother and father, setting out chairs and picnic things, no longer diminished and slightly querulous in retirement at Deal but with all the vigour and authority of young parenthood, omniscient and omnipotent.

  Except that they had failed him over the matter of the ammonite. Perhaps the further significance of that day had been his own perception that adults do not know everything and that an interpretation of the world cannot be had from any single person. No wonder this place was so filled with resonances. And these, at that precise moment, interested him rather more than the matter of the tiff with Vivien, which would have to be resolved, or not, as the case might be. He sat there, in melancholy contemplation, while two hundred yards away Vivien rehearsed the acid speech she would later make in the car on the way home and which would accelerate the disintegration of their relationship.

  Howard rehearsed no speech – that would not have been in character – but homed in upon that other August day. He saw in it the seed of his present self, subsumed within that small boy, and saw suddenly, alarmingly, a whole sequence of tendencies and likelihoods, lurking there like a mirage around the innocent and unknowing family group. His mother’s arthritic hip; his father’s deteriorating temper. His own hay fever, his objectivity, his agnosticism. Even Vivien shimmered there; he had been doomed to Vivien from the start, or someone very like her.

  But he was already embarked upon the process of detaching himself from Vivien, and knew this, though he shrank from the thought of the travails yet to come. Vivien was receding even now, just as she had appropriately receded to a threatening blob of royal blue anorak further along the beach. What occupied him most at this moment was the vision of the entire direction of a life latent at any single moment, implicit in the scheme of things, as though a silent refrain from the future were woven into the narrative, if only you knew how to pick up the frequency.

  Mercifully, it is impossible. The wisdoms of foresight are given only to fortune tellers and writers of fiction. Howard, who had little patience with either activity, rose abruptly to his feet, turned to his left and waved to Vivien, who did not wave back, though the set of her shoulders made it quite clear that she had noticed. He sighed, and set off along the beach towards her.

  That childhood holiday in the chalet on the cliff-top campsite was not repeated, there or elsewhere. It had been a success, as these things go, but Howard’s parents had a mild taste for travel and when the interest rate recovered, and his father was promoted to branch manager of the bank for which he worked, they headed for Europe once more. The afternoon at Blue Anchor was overlaid by many other afternoons in France, Italy, Spain, Greece – encamped upon other beaches, or staring from a car window at the cinematic scenery, or slumped upon a bed in the package hotel or the low-rent apartment, reading or making lists.

  He had developed, by then, a passion for classification. He barely noticed the wonders of Corfu, or the Algarve, or the Côte-d’Or, locked as he was in the identification and description of species. Plants, birds, shells, whatever offered itself. It was the orderliness he liked, the symmetries. The fact that everything belongs somewhere, that nothing is unidentifiable. Surprising that he had not become a taxonomist. In the last resort, though, it was not so much the process of classification that entranced him, as the perceived elegance of design that lay beyond it. There was an aesthetic pleasure, repeated in the patterns and structures of mathematics, which also fascinated him. He loved equations, and would cover sheets of paper with those inverted cones which diminished so satisfactorily to a pair of single complementary figures. He led the frenetic interior life of the only child, which both worried and gratified his parents. They saw that he was intelligent but feared for his social skills. They urged him to fraternize with other children, pointing out likely targets: ‘Now there’s a boy just your age, I’d say’ and ‘Look, Howard, that’s an English family’. In Brittany, they deposited him for a morning at a Club des Enfants, a large mesh enclosure in which a milling throng of children was herded into forms of competitive sport by a few hearty students in red shorts, hired for the purpose. Howard spent the time cowering against the perimeter fence. The experiment was not repeated.

  In fact, Howard had no particular objection to other children, and was quite gregarious by disposition. It was simply that he had other uses for his time. It was difficult for him to explain this satisfactorily to his parents – he usually ended up being seen as uncooperative or unappreciative. He was to run up against the problem years later with Vivien; it is always perceived as offensive to prefer to read a book than to talk to someone.

  Moreover, he never read stories. He read Junior Encyclo-paedias and glossily illustrated Wonder Books of this and that, progressing from these to textbooks, car manuals and closely worded instructions for the installation of cookers or washing machines. He liked language to be technical, complex and (to his ears) innovative. He liked words he didn’t understand but whose meaning he could eventually deduce from a context. His parents watched with respect verging on awe, and a tinge of concern.

  ‘Howard, you’ve never even looked at The Book of Legends Grandma gave you for Christmas. And it’s got the most beautiful illustrations.’

  ‘I did look at it. I just didn’t like it all that much.’

  ‘But why not, dear? Some of the stories are very exciting.’

  ‘They couldn’t happen, could they?’ said Howard after a moment.

  ‘Well … no. But that’s not supposed to matter.’

  His mother, valiantly, tried a new approach, thinking she had put her finger on the problem. She visited the local library and brought back an armful of good red-blooded realism – adventure, crime and derring-do. Howard dutifully had a go, and was unimpressed.

  ‘Somebody made it up, didn’t they? It’s not true, so what’s the point of it?’

  In the fullness of time Howard would come to mitigate this harsh judgement, and to read novels, though never with great relish. He recognized the significance of allegory and the power of narrative but would always prefer accuracies of a different kind. From time to time he read poetry and looked at paintings, because he saw reflections there of transcendent moments in his own experience, and was duly enriched. He may appear a tiresomely literal-minded child, but should be seen rather as one whose intense engagement with the world forced him to subject it to rigorous scrutiny. He could not, at that point, cope with the further dimension of fantasy.

  He came early to scepticism. His parents were not overtly religious. His father, if pressed, would probably have come clean and said he didn’t believe in anything very much. His mother liked to go to church at Christmas and Easter and, more furtively, at moments of stress. She had no difficulty about putting ‘C. of E.’ in reply to that nagging query on forms, and would probably have agreed that she was a Christian, albeit a somewhat passive one. She was surprised when Howard, at the age of ten, said that he would rather not go with her to the Christmas service in the church down the road.

  ‘But there’ll be carols, dear. And the crib and all the decorations.’

  Howard loved his mother and liked to please her. He could not explain that he had come up against a matter of principle for the first time in his life, because he had no way of identifying the combination of embarrassment
and resentment which a church service induced in him. He was experiencing the same trouble with the daily prayer at school assembly, and with any references to God, heaven and such matters as the Resurrection and eternal life. He had voiced none of this; the objections and the doubts took place inside his own head. And the surprising thing was that while he realized that his position was that of a heretic – though without having any conception of the nature of heresy – he felt a calm confidence in his own misgivings. He saw that his doubts were renegade, and was surprised at his own temerity, but at the same time he knew they were well founded. And the matter of the Christmas carol service brought the whole thing to a head. It was a moment of resonance, like that afternoon on Blue Anchor Beach, when he seemed to be directed by some echo of his own future self, when he recognized his own nature, and saw that it would send him in directions that were already suggested.

  ‘Do you believe in God?’ Lucy asked.

  ‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘Do you?’

  His mother ducked the issue of belief, at first. She harped on the crib, the carols and the merits of social conformity.

  ‘The Richardsons are going. Tim will be there, and Kevin.’

  The Richardsons were the next door neighbours; Tim and Kevin were Howard’s most intimate cronies at school.

  Howard squirmed, wanting to step aside from the whole wretched business. ‘I just don’t want to go.’

  ‘But why on earth not, Howard?’

  ‘Because you can’t prove it,’ he burst out, at last.

  ‘Prove what?’

  ‘What they say about God and Jesus and that if you pray for things it comes out all right. All that.’

  His mother saw that they were in far deeper water than questions of seasonal rejoicing and sociability. She backed off, wisely, not wanting to provoke discord on the third day of the school holidays and with Christmas bearing down upon them. She said very well, then, they’d give the carol service a miss this year but she did think it was a pity. Howard felt much relieved and slightly guilty. And in the event the issue of church attendance was never raised again, while the wider problem was tacitly ignored, until such time as the adolescent Howard was able to make his position clear, and neither of his parents by then wanted to quarrel with it anyway.