Cleopatra's Sister Read online

  ‘There’s a fantastic new job waiting for you just round the corner, only you don’t know it. It’ll happen when it’s going to happen, and nothing you can do’s going to speed things up.’

  This was at a point when Lucy was becoming increasingly disenchanted with the pharmaceutical house journal.

  ‘Or, alternatively it isn’t,’ snapped Lucy. ‘According to your theory.’

  ‘Or maybe it isn’t,’ Maureen agreed. ‘In which case it’s even less use getting your knickers in a twist and going squinty-eyed over the job ads and rushing around knocking on doors.’

  ‘I see,’ said Lucy. ‘So if we take the optimistic view, then at some unspecified moment a total stranger is going to ring me up and say, Lucy Faulkner, we can’t do without you a moment longer – can you please come and edit the paper, starting Monday.’

  ‘Not quite like that,’ said Maureen comfortably. ‘But that sort of thing.’

  Lucy thought her mother’s view simplistic. Or credulous. Or both. You were granted a degree of control over your own destiny and if you failed to exercise it through apathy or indecision or fear – well, that was your own look-out. For her part, she intended to negotiate to the hilt. Or so she said. But in private she might have admitted that sometimes the whole inexorable narrative seemed as though it had you by the nose, as if it led you relentlessly towards the people and the places waiting for you out there, invisible, unthinkable and inevitable.

  ‘I’ve been trying to remember what I know about this country, and it amounts to not very much. Something to do with Cleopatra’s sister and that’s about it.’

  In the event, Lucy got a new job because one day she leapt too precipitately off a bus, fell and grazed her leg, and was obliged to go into the nearest branch of Boots for a plaster and a fresh pair of tights. There she met up with a friend who suggested a reviving drink, over which she mentioned that a mutual acquaintance was about to leave a sub-editing job on one of the quality weeklies, thus creating a vacancy. Lucy rushed home, drafted a letter of application and a month later was installed in a seedy but pulsating office where the talk was of contemporary issues rather than of veterinary techniques and developments in flu vaccines – richer by £5 a week and heady with achievement.

  ‘There you are!’ said Maureen. ‘See!’

  Lucy sniffed, and was silent. There was not much to be said. It was in fact difficult to claim a grazed leg and a chance encounter as a victory for calculated and purposeful job-seeking. Let alone the interaction of someone else’s life – the sudden decision of that significant acquaintance to chuck up what she was doing and go off to New York.

  ‘You should be thanking your lucky stars,’ continued Maureen. ‘That’s what.’

  ‘Up to a point,’ said Lucy coldly. Sixteen years of diligent attention at school and university cannot be called luck.

  Maureen saw her mistake and made hasty amendment. ‘I don’t mean you don’t deserve it. What I mean was it was going to happen sooner or later because you deserve it. You’ve worked ever so hard and you deserve some luck, don’t you? What did you say the magazine’s called?’

  Lucy groaned. Her mother’s assessment of the relation between life as it is lived and life as it ought to be lived sometimes seemed to her as unrealistic as the moral message of fairy tales. Those who toil shall be rewarded; the virtuous shall be blessed; the wicked shall perish. And there was Maureen’s entire life, a testimony to the contrary.

  ‘If you’re not careful I shall bring you a copy every week and make you read it,’ she said.

  Nevertheless, that unwary leap from a 73 bus had indeed been a climactic moment. The chaotic offices of the quality weekly were rich with possibilities. Lucy blossomed. She met a great many people – a process known as making contacts, she learned. She graduated to writing the occasional piece for the paper, and, more importantly, began to spend her spare time on endeavours of her own. She had articles accepted, here and there, on subjects as diverse as acupuncture, bee-keeping and the prospect of a Channel Tunnel. Her mother read them with reverence.

  ‘I didn’t know you knew about things like that.’

  ‘I went and found out, Mum. That’s what you have to do.’

  ‘Mind,’ continued Maureen thoughtfully, ‘once you realize how things in the papers get written, and who writes them, if you see what I mean, you aren’t quite so inclined to think it’s gospel truth.’

  She was not writing exactly what she wanted. She was writing around the edges of things, and not of the more seminal matters to which she aspired. It is a lot easier for a young unknown to place a piece based on something esoteric and entertaining than to find a market for a polemic on a central issue of the day. But this would have to do to be going on with.

  It was the best of times, though it should have been the worst of times. Lucy perceived with satisfaction that she was quite out of tune with the prevailing climate of the decade. For she was a natural dissident, and this was the 1980s – the age of the entrepreneur and the opportunist, when the very young could become very rich and the social icons were restaurateurs and commercial emperors. She found it entirely satisfying to go about in a perpetual state of contemptuous outrage – and failed to see the irony of the truth that she herself, in her own way, was no mean entrepreneur and opportunist. Though she could have argued with justification that her own opportunism was never going to lead to wealth, or was unlikely to – merely to a way of life in which there is a satisfying fusion between what you want to be doing and the way in which you earn your keep.

  The journal on which she worked was in much the same plight. Trading in radical comment and investigation of the ills of society, it staggered from crisis to crisis as its readership declined, seduced by the spirit of the age. There would be gloomy forecasts of collapse and unemployment, and then somehow rescue would come from somewhere, and everything would go on much as it had before. This was unsettling, but gave everyone a grimly satisfactory sense of embattled virtue. The country was going to the dogs, but at least there remained a few enclaves of sanity and integrity. It was the nearest you could get to the barricades, in the circumstances available.

  For Lucy, her student years had been the age of enlightenment. This now became the time of exuberance, the years when she found herself frequently amazed and uplifted by the world, by life, by the simple fact of being. She would walk down a street and experience a sudden uprush, a thrill of excitement at the variety of it all, the vibrancy, the resonances: the myriad faces of strangers, a glowing pile of oranges on a stall, the buses forging on to Leyton, Highgate, Lambeth. She would wake early and lie in bed watching the shafts of light that fanned across the ceiling, hearing the clack of feet on the pavement outside, and feel quite heady at the thought of the inexorable purpose of the place, at the mystery of the day ahead, at her own presence in the midst of it all, hitched to time and change like a surfer poised on a breaking wave. She relished the unfolding of events, the narrative of news which swept ahead regardless, as though history had a momentum of its own quite independent of human agency. And at the same time she was continually surprised by the physical world, brought up short by the sight of silver spears of rain against the tarmac, the glass column of a building floating amid clouds, the sparkling passage of an aircraft against the London sky. You were not supposed to feel like this. You were supposed to decry the squalor of the inner city – and indeed there was plenty to decry, that she could see, but it seemed to her that the place had always this transcendent other quality, that there was always this dimension of unwitting, anarchic wonder – a lovely and mindless alternative universe. She had seen it as a child, she remembered, but differently – now it was newly remarkable, a source not of curiosity but of amazement.

  It was odd to be so happy, she sometimes thought. She was hard up and working for most of her waking hours. The magazine underpaid its employees as a strategy of survival, and her weekly rent left her with little to spare. The occasional freelance earnings were a ch
erished bonus. Nevertheless, she felt rich. She had everything, and not least the daily abundance of expectation. Anything might happen, at any moment.

  When Will Lewkowska hove into her life she was not surprised. She had been expecting him, or someone like him. She looked up from her desk one morning to see this lank man with hair dripping over one eye, staring thoughtfully at her and holding out a packet of cigarettes.

  ‘I don’t smoke, thanks.’

  He lit one for himself. ‘No, people don’t, do they? I hoped you might be unconventional.’

  Will’s real name was something entirely different. ‘It’s some ludicrous Polish name – all c’s and z’s. No one can ever pronounce it.’ It seemed probable that he could not himself, since he had been born in Battersea, the child of immigrants. He earned a precarious living as a freelance arts journalist, and treated the offices of the magazine as a kind of club, dropping by in search of a book to review, a commission to write a piece on some abstruse film director, or simply a cup of coffee and a chat. His courtship of Lucy began with the offer of free theatre and concert tickets, progressed to Indian take-aways in his grimy Kentish Town flat, and moved swiftly to the stance of proprietorial and frequently abrasive lover as soon as Lucy, intrigued and somewhat attracted, had consented to go to bed with him.

  Will was two people. Sometimes he was a louche south Londoner and at others he was intense, gloomy and profoundly central European. He juggled these two personae roughly to suit the circumstances. He was at his most European when making love, discussing art or having rows with people. He was a son of Battersea when he went into a pub, watched football on the telly, and argued with his parents, now in their seventies and still running a small upholstery business south of the river. He claimed that they spoke only broken English and needed to be discouraged from talking their own language. Lucy wondered for months if Will could actually speak Polish until one day she heard him do so, volubly, to a visiting painter at the ICA galleries. She was taken aback; you never did know quite where you were with Will.

  Will’s former wife, Sandra, lived in Camberwell with their ten-year-old son. Their relationship was intense and acrimonious. Lucy would lie in Will’s bed while he and Sandra shouted at each other on the telephone for half an hour on end, exchanges which left Will quivering with rage and muttering invective under his breath. Lucy had a great deal of sympathy with Sandra and would have liked to indicate this to her but there was never any opportunity. Will took good care that they never met, and spent much time telling Lucy how unreasonable and vindictive Sandra was, which Lucy did not believe. It was clear to her that Will must have been wildly unsatisfactory both as husband and father.

  She suspected that she did not really love him, but she enjoyed sex with him and he added to the interest of life. She refused to move into his flat, but found herself restless when he vanished for any length of time, which he quite often did, usually because of an onset of angst that sent him on fatal pilgrimages in search of solace and companionship, from which he returned with a stupendous hangover.

  Will wanted to consolidate his position. He would prop himself up on one elbow in the bed and stare down at her. ‘Do you love me?’

  ‘Well … yes.’

  ‘What do you mean – well?’

  ‘Do you love me?’ Lucy would say, with a touch of irritation, since she didn’t see why she should be the only one to lay her cards on the table.

  Will would fling himself on to his back and groan. ‘My capacity for love has been warped … stunted … maimed.’

  At other times he would gaze intently at her and say, ‘I wonder if we should get married?’

  Lucy would change the subject, since she did not feel that this constituted a proposal. Or, if feeling combative, she would reply challengingly, ‘I wonder … What do you think, Will?’ Which would send Will off into a sombre discourse upon the destructive effects of marriage on the creative spirit and the appalling constrictions of domestic life.

  Will was writing a novel, and had been for many years. It lay in shaggy piles of yellowing typescript on the deal table in his kitchen, ringed with cup-stains and dredged in cigarette ash. From time to time Lucy was invited to read a chunk of it, a task she undertook with some trepidation. She really couldn’t tell if it was any good or not. There was a large and confusing cast of characters, all of whom were given to bouts of introspection which could run on for pages. Will would watch gloomily as she read: ‘Well, Lucy – is this the great central European novel, at last?’ She learned to dread these occasions and to take deft avoiding action when she saw one looming.

  Long after Will had receded into her past, and had shrunk to a sequence of such scenes and to the nostalgic flavour of a particular winter, spring and summer, she saw that – by a whisker – she had escaped a long sentence. She saw how she could well have become a sequel to Sandra, locked into an inescapable condition of indignant recrimination and dependence. Will was essentially intolerable, but he was also solicitous, generous, interesting and attractive. The longer you were with him, the more difficult it became to be without him. She was careful never to let Maureen meet him, knowing instinctively that Maureen would be beguiled by him without spotting the eerie affinity with Lucy’s father that Lucy herself perceived.

  The initial winter with Will gave way to spring, and then to summer. They had reached a plateau, a point of accustomed partnership from which retreat would be difficult. In any case Lucy was not entirely sure that she wanted to retreat, while retaining a certain unease about the situation, and Will was perfectly happy, in so far as he was capable of happiness. It could have gone on thus for a long time, had Lucy not one day accidentally left a crucial notebook in Will’s flat.

  She returned for it the next evening, letting herself in with the key that Will had insisted she should have. The flat should have been empty; Will had said he was going to a film première. Instead of which she opened the door upon a familiar sight of table littered with dirty plates and glasses, and the tumbled bed from which stared Will and, alongside, the appalled countenance of one of Lucy’s best friends. A classic scene, she thought grimly, as she closed the door and hurried down the stairs.

  Later, she was to see the carelessness and mismanagement as typical of Will. He was genuinely distraught; he beseeched forgiveness. Lucy was icily distant, to preserve herself from a change of heart; any concession now, and she could be condemned to Will.

  As it was, she did not see him again for a year, when he came sloping across a crowded room to greet her as though she were some favourite niece he had not set eyes on for a while. And in the meantime the quality weekly had folded, leaving a carnage of debts and redundant employees. Lucy’s thoughts were not on love or remembrance, but on her bread and butter. She greeted him perfunctorily and edged away.

  8

  A Brief History of Callimbia

  The inner harbour at Marsopolis, today, is still embraced by the massive wall and fortification constructed in the early Middle Ages, at the end of which there stands a small but solid fort, complete with ramparts and a single rusting cannon. The fort is largely derelict and occupied only by a nasty little café – Callimbia has never learned how to make the most of its tourist attractions. The café sells Coke, peanuts and crisps, and is called Dragut’s Den, the name being a reference to the famous Turkish pirate (or admiral, depending upon the opinion of the commentator) who marauded and sacked and ravaged in the sixteenth century and indeed annexed Callimbia finally to the Ottoman Empire. Those who swig their Coke on the ramparts today, watching the fishing boats, the coastguard cutter, and maybe the grey silhouette of a US naval vessel perched on the horizon, can reflect that back then those seas meant menace, death and destruction.

  The Middle East has changed colour yet again. The Middle East? East of what? And the Middle Ages? Middle of when? That frozen, egocentric vision of history once more. Everything depends on the point of view. And points of view, right now, have never been more fanatical or more
ferocious. People have been dying by the thousand in the interests of points of view for several centuries. The Crusaders have been, and gone. The Callimbians, like everyone else in the area, have learned that individuals are defined by their doctrinal allegiances, and that it is not only permissable but entirely admirable to set about killing, maiming and tormenting those who do not subscribe to your own superior code of worship. God is reaping a splendid harvest. More will die in his name, in these parts, than ever before or since. By the time the fort at Marsopolis is erected the finest flush is over. The enthusiasm has faded a little, though isolated pockets of devotees, like the Knights of St John, and Dragut himself, are doing their best to keep up a fine tradition. But the spirit of commercialism has muddied the waters, and indeed has always done so, to some extent. It is all very well exhausting national and cultural energies in the exercise of religious fervour, but trade is trade. Christian and Muslim eye one another with suspicion and contempt while tacitly agreeing that a measure of restraint is in everybody’s interests, and that a certain level of tolerance will vastly benefit the import and export business. It would be interesting to know how God feels about this.

  Callimbia by now is Turkish. That is to say, those who govern Callimbia are Turkish, while everyone else remains much what they were before except that they must be careful to make expedient acknowledgement of the superiority of Ottoman culture and mores and to conform to the requirements of the regime. Again, it is a question of choice, but in this instance there is not much choice. Callimbia is a small country – indeed it is barely a country. Such places do not argue with empires. And in any case, there are certain advantages. An occupier is also a protector. The dictation of Turkish beys may be onerous, but preferable in many ways to the threats from various other directions, from those who cast a rapacious eye on Callimbia’s fertile coastline and upon the charms of Marsopolis.